The Sixth Wife
SUZANNAH DUNN
An Imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
Epigraph
Here lyethe Quene Kateryn wife to Kyng Henry the VIII and
last the wife of Thomas Lord of Sudeley high Admirall of
England and onkle to kyng Edward the VI
dyed 5 September MCCCCCXLVIII
Inscription scratched onto Katherine Parr’s coffin
I can say nothing but as my Lady of Suffolk saith,
‘God is a marvellous man’.
Katherine Parr, in a letter to Thomas Seymour
This day died a man with much wit,
and very little judgement
Princess Elizabeth – later Queen Elizabeth I -on hearing of Thomas Seymour’s execution
CONTENTS
Epigraph
Chapter1
Chapter2
Chapter3
Chapter4
Chapter5
Chapter6
Chapter7
Chapter8
Chapter9
Chapter10
Chapter11
Chapter12
Chapter13
Chapter14
Chapter15
Chapter16
Chapter17
Chapter18
Chapter19
Chapter20
Chapter21
Chapter22
Chapter23
Chapter24
Chapter25
Chapter26
Chapter27
Chapter28
Chapter29
Chapter30
Chapter31
Chapter32
Chapter33
Chapter34
Chapter35
Chapter36
Chapter37
Chapter38
Chapter39
Chapter40
Chapter41
Chapter42
Chapter43
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
Copyright
About the Publisher
One
I won’t testify. They’ll get no help from me. Not that they need it, the trial being a formality. It’s over already for him. No need for this investigation, the intimidation and confessions. And anyway they should have left him to it, saved themselves the bother. He’d have ended up doing the job for them. He’d have got nowhere, in the end. Got away with nothing.
It seems they have little better to do, though, than rubbish the memory of a good woman who’s barely cold in the ground. That’s what’s happening: it’s making her look bad, what they’re digging up on her widower. Making her look as if she was beguiled and hapless.
Kate?
Listen: she’d dealt with it; it was all dealt with. She’d dealt with Thomas and the mess he’d made. She’d saved everybody’s skin.
One mistake: that was all Thomas was in her life. Could just as easily not have been a fatal one, that mistake; just the turn of events made it fatal.
I won’t testify, and if they come for anyone in my household, they’ll have me to reckon with.
Which they know.
Which is why they haven’t.
I’ll tell you something about Kate; I’ll tell you what it was about her. She always made everything all right. That’s what she did. That was Kate.
And now she’s gone. And now look.
I didn’t go to her funeral. I arranged it, the day she died, that long, long day of her death. Then, when the next day came around as suddenly as a drawn curtain, I didn’t go. I couldn’t watch her lowered into that vault.
You could say that I didn’t need to go; you could look at it that way. I’d made the arrangements, I already knew that funeral from first moment to last. I’d dressed the chapel, lain drapes over the altar rails and then supervised the men struggling with the black, embroidered hangings. I’d planned the procession, right down to the servants at the rear. Well, someone had to do it. I’d selected the four knights to walk hooded with the pallbearers, and the two torchbearers to walk with them. Then would come Jane, tiny ten-year-old Jane Grey, chief mourner, and I’d coached her maid how to carry her train, forewarned her of steps and loose slabs. The psalms and the sermon: Reverend Coverdale had gone through everything with me.
I’d dressed Kate for her burial, chosen the dress, a
