Love Life
Only the black satin nightgowns purchased by Catherine Parr give any indication of the extent of her romance with Henry VIII. The match is not usually associated with physical desire, and some historians speculate that Henry may even have been impotent at the time. Catherine's known attentions to the king are more tender than passionate. She would reportedly stroke Henry's stinking, wounded leg for hours, holding it in her lap.
No doubt the 30-something queen spent much of that time thinking of the man she had turned away to marry the king. Sir Thomas Seymour was the dashing, handsome uncle to Prince Edward and a man who had won Catherine's heart while she was still nursing her dying second husband, John Neville, Lord Latimer. But two weeks before Latimer's death, King Henry began his own campaign, sending Lady Latimer "pleats and sleeves" and, later, Italian gowns.
Faced with a choice between her own inclinations and what she perceived as duty, Catherine opted for duty. In a letter to Seymour, she wrote, "[M]y mind was fully bent to marry you before any man I knew. Howbeit, God . . made that possible which seemed to me most impossible." It would be four years before Catherine Parr could marry the love of her life.
Catherine's Rivals
By the time of his marriage to Catherine Parr, Henry VIII's sexual appetite had slackened. The new queen had no outright rivals.
Shortly before the king's death, however, a plot was uncovered to replace Queen Catherine with the king's daughter-in-law, Mary, Duchess of Richmond, the wife of his late illegitimate son, Henry Fitzroy. Mary was the daughter of the Duke of Norfolk, a professional schemer who had advanced both Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard into the king's arms. Under interrogation, Mary Richmond implicated both her brother and father in a plot to marry her to Thomas Seymour and hence become the king's mistress, then wife. Both father and son were sent to the Tower and executed on charges of treason.
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