The Death of Catherine Parr

by TheAstronomer

Summary:

It was a very precise intention that Catherine should be happy, she had worked hard on it these last months of her confinement. Here now was the product - mewling in the swaddling the wet nurse had bound her in - of her and Thomas, of all that love and passion and pleasure. But Catherine felt empty, both mentally and physically - or perhaps blank was a better description. Despite her vow that she would not let what happened spoil anything. Oh, she had railed at him, veered from screaming anger to silent hatred to devastating sadness. Lashed him with her tongue and beat him into the corner of their bedchamber with a pair of his own ridiculous hose.

They say the babe looks like Thomas - or at least the midwife said so. Catherine cannot say she sees it in the crumpled, damp little face of her new daughter. She suspects that even the midwife is in thrall to the charms of her husband. She’d heard Thomas careening about the place after the birth, announcing the child to every member of the household, setting the hounds off to endless barking, even before the silly man had set eyes on the mite. Emotions were not hard to read on him and were generally daubed on the canvas with a primitive hand for all to see. Except, perhaps, deceit. Which trumped them all, as it turns out. She’d underestimated him.

 

It was a very precise intention that Catherine should be happy, she had worked hard on it these last months of her confinement. Here now was the product - mewling in the swaddling the wet nurse had bound her in - of her and Thomas, of all that love and passion and pleasure. But Catherine felt empty, both mentally and physically - or perhaps blank was a better description. Despite her vow that she would not let what happened spoil anything. Oh, she had railed at him, veered from screaming anger to silent hatred to devastating sadness. Lashed him with her tongue and beat him into the corner of their bedchamber with a pair of his own ridiculous hose.

 

If you’d fucking kept these on Thomas, we would not be in this situation!

 

He had always been skilled at a sort of mute, pitiful remorse, admirable for a man who was usually so irritatingly verbose. Catherine wondered if he practiced the look in a mirror, to his best and most handsome angle. Of which there were many, attested to by the trail of admirers: from the girl who cleared out the slops, to the cook who fed him tidbits like a hungry puppy, to Kat Ashley, the guard-dog of Elizabeth. And Elizabeth herself of course. Catherine had observed how Elizabeth's sad eyes followed Thomas as he chucked the kitchen maid's chin or whispered love-notes to his beloved dogs. But thought it nothing more than a girl's passing fancy.

 

Why, Thomas!? Why her, of everyone? If he'd fucked one of the kitchen servants Catherine thought she may even have been able to forgive him. He probably had.

 

And what of Elizabeth herself, the girl she had loved like her own family? What of her betrayal? Ah Catherine could not muster much rage - the girl could be pert, was unusually clever and Catherine had been on more than one hunt with her to witness Elizabeth's relentless and precise pursuits which usually landed her a juicy hart with an arrow through its breast. The girl was reckless and brave in the saddle. But Elizabeth was not the pursuer in this situation. It was she who was the doe pierced by an arrow.

 

There had not been a day since Catherine had witnessed Thomas’ brutal betrayal that rage hadn’t coursed through her like hot lava. And even now, in the joy of her daughter’s birth, Catherine felt the needling pain of it. The truth was Catherine knew why Thomas toyed with Elizabeth - because he always, always had his eye on a greater prize. To marry Thomas in secret, only months after becoming the dowager queen, and without the blessing of her step-children and the young king Edward was something she did with a heavy heart. To Thomas it was another move in his chess game, Catherine now realised.  A step closer to power, be that in Edward or Elizabeth, whatever Tudor he could scramble towards. And the pleasure he took in these secret machinations - he thrived on it, a natural schemer. 

 

Catherine lay back in her childbirth bed, the heavy brocade quilt felt like a layer of hot stone crushing her and she pushed it aside. The baby was as fresh as a new-shelled pea but Catherine felt a hundred years old. She could feel the slow seep of blood from between her legs, her chemise already stained, despite the wad of linen wedged there. Her abdomen felt curiously hollow and vulnerable, even as her breasts hardened painfully with the milk forbidden to her baby. Here another woman must do her job, again - the wet nurse who was whispering in the corner with the midwife. Why must there be a hush in the room, like a death-chamber?! She could smell her own blood like meat, the iron-tang of a raw wound. Her hands travelled over the foreign land of her stomach, the soft flesh giving way like melting snow to her hot fingertips. Only a day ago, taut and domed, it had housed the small blurry creature which was in the cradle near her bed.

 

‘Stop whispering over there and bring me some wine,’ she snapped, her voice more brittle than she intended. She was reminded of those useless murmuring fools who clotted up the royal court, tripping over themselves to be closest in position to Henry. She couldn’t abide people who talked behind their hands.

 

At 35, having this child was a miracle. In all her other marriages, there had never been a hint of a pregnancy - Catherine could not help but put it down to the sheer number of times her and Thomas had rode each other, unable to get enough and starting on the day Henry died. It felt that the very idea of bedsport had been invented for her and Thomas. There were years of thwarted lust to make up for after their nascent relationship had been quashed by Henry’s proposal to Catherine. The memory of labouring over Henry’s flaccid shaft while he roughly thumbed her quim ‘because all my wives have liked it’ had still been too fresh. There had never been a full consummation and soon Henry gave up trying, his ulcerated leg degrading further with each passing week; the great virile king reduced to an exhausted, rotting carcass.

 

Catherine knew her luck in her positioning in the procession of Henry’s wives - playing nursemaid was not so hard. Of course, if Henry chose you as a wife, as a mistress, as a member of his privy chamber, there was no possibility of a refusal, and there was no equity in the decision. Despite this, he was still a weakened man, his legendary rages had diluted with age and were more like childish tantrums which blew over swiftly. Even Catherine’s arrest warrant had been easily rescinded as Henry was only too eager to believe that Catherine would never go against him in matters of faith. Her apparent sympathies with the Protestant faith was only verbal jousting with her King, to entertain him, you see. But the vicious whispering at court was always a background hum like a nest of wasps. And how the hive had buzzed when she married Thomas!

 

But the joy of Thomas, how their bodies fitted together, the loss of herself in him was a kind of fever, a fever which never broke, only deepened each time she twisted her fingers in the dark hair at the nape of his neck. So the sight of him and Elizabeth clinging to each other in the gloom of the girl’s bedchamber had been the bucket of ice-cold water in her face that she needed.  Thus, she woke, shocked and spluttering from Thomas’ disease of lust. She had seen his endless political machinations, and awoke from her dream of herself as a love-struck bride.  She knew herself that successful marriages were rarely love matches. She had just chosen to ignore it. ‘You have something dangerous about you,’ she once said to him, so delighted in that. It had taken marriage to him to realise that forbidden fruit usually turns rotten.

 

The room turned hot, then cold, and hot again in turn, even though the same fire burned steadily in the grate throughout. Catherine felt that days had ticked past like some procession taking place in the distance, only faintly seen and heard. Sometimes someone tried to feed gruel into her mouth but she smacked those hands away. The child disappeared, cradle and all, from Catherine’s side and there was the deep verdant smell of herbs now in the room. It surrounded her like a green cloak. The cloth they laid on her brow she pushed off impatiently; she thought she heard the baby crying somewhere and her breasts leaked milk again. One day she and her daughter will go hunting together, she thought, perhaps rid the estate of one of those troublesome stags which cause discord in a herd, sidling up to irritated does, their tongues flicking obscenely at them. She’ll make sure her daughter can ride as well as she can, or Elizabeth can, and knows how to dispatch a dying animal quickly. 

 

Now Catherine’s favourite lady’s maid was there, sobbing on the bed. ‘My lady,’ she hiccuped, ‘we need you to stay.’ Catherine laughed. ‘Jane, I am here, I am right here.’ But she felt something ebbing away in her all the same, like a tide inexorably drawing out from the shore. What was her daughter called? She wanted to know, no-one had even asked her what she wanted to call her own daughter. ‘My Lord Seymour called her Mary. She is a bonny child.’ The girl’s hands fluttered around Catherine’s hair, smoothing it. ‘Hmm. Oh Mary,’ sighed Catherine, Thomas would go for something so prosaic. Catherine would think up something better, more suited, when she had a moment to think, she just needed a moment to think. But when she next opened her eyes Thomas himself was there, her own duplicitous, beautiful, stupid husband, his face blurred with tears. ‘Do you forgive me Kat,’ he sobbed, but Catherine could still see faint distaste on his face at having to attend her there, in her confinement chamber, where men rarely venture. He was squeamish, like Henry was, at any hint of illness or the inconvenient bleeding of women - and yet, here he was in a place so recently full of the gore of childbirth. Catherine patted his face. ‘You silly man,’ she murmured. ‘You ridiculous bloody man.’ She felt as calm and as vast as the night sky. The smell of rosemary, thyme, marjoram intensified and under it some other essence which she knew signaled her body was fading. Consciousness peeled away from her and her skin grew colder.

Now Catherine is hunting after all, not with her daughter, but alone. There is nothing but the horse moving beneath her and the white flash of the deer’s rump ahead of her in the trees. She feels such joy to be away from that room, that house, those people. It is twilight but enough light remains, she knows there is still yet enough. She is urging her horse on, the hooves rattle beneath her as she inches closer and closer to the darting hind, who gleams like a jewel just out of reach. By some leap and twist, now she is the deer, her eyes roll in her head, her animal breath is sweet and deep, it gulps down life and expels death. She pushes forward and with one last great stretch of muscle and sinew, Catherine leaps and is free.

Notes:

Inspired by the way the writers of 'Becoming Elizabeth' just let Catherine Parr meekly die off-screen. And also inspired by Thomas Seymour's well-filled hose.

Unfortunately, Catherine and Thomas' baby daughter just seemed to disappear from history, presumed dead after records for her stopped when she would have been around 2.