The First Queen of Ireland

“The Queen is graceful, and of cheerful countenance, and is praised for her virtue.”

- Eustace Chapuys, the Spanish Ambassador to England (1543)

Katherine Parr has several claims to fame. The first is that she was the last of Henry VIII’s half-dozen wives; the second, that she herself was the most-married queen in British history (she was widowed twice before marrying Henry VIII and married again after his death). Thirdly, she was the first truly Protestant member of the British royal families and finally she was also the first woman ever to be styled “Queen of Ireland."

Ireland had, of course, been a feudal fiefdom of England since the reign of King Henry II (1154 – 1189), when the King had conquered it, (allegedly) with the Pope’s blessing and the assistance of a Gaelic princeling, Dermot MacMurrough. In terms of medieval warfare and political practise, the English conquest of Ireland had been nothing unusual or even spectacular and following medieval feudal etiquette, the triumphant King of England thus acquired the subsidiary title of Lord of Ireland, a title which he eventually bestowed on his younger son, John. For the rest of the Middle Ages, from the time of King John until the time of Henry VIII, every King of England thus had as a secondary title Lord of Ireland. However, this all changed in 1542 with the ever-expanding Henry VIII. Just as the title Lord of Ireland had been born out of the political conventions of the Middle Ages, so was the new title of King of Ireland born out of the new political realities of the Renaissance and Reformation.

The English monarchy was becoming an imperial one, or at least it was attempting to, and it was determined to match its dignities with the power of the Hapsburg emperors on the Continent. Henry had already assumed a semi-imperial identity in making himself Supreme Head of the Church of England and to push forward with the monarchy’s new identity, it was decided to elevate the title of Lord of Ireland to that of King of Ireland and this is what finally happened in Dublin in 1542. The Irish Parliament was asked to ratify the Crown of Ireland Act and this they did with apparent enthusiasm (although it understandably took the Vatican another thirteen years to accept the move as legitimate.)

The Irish Parliament’s support for the new title was understandable, since many members of the Irish aristocracy were pleased to see their country honoured with a royal, rather than a feudal, title. It elevated the status of the Irish nobility in relation to their English equivalent, a point which the Ascendancy was to cling to with tenacious enthusiasm in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. However, the concerns of the Irish people – be they earls or commoners – had little to do with the actual decision to turn Henry from a lord into a king. The timing of the move was motivated by Henry VIII’s massive but fragile ego and his famously dangerous temper. 

For the best part of a year, the King had been like an angry, self-pitying bear, licking his wounds and lashing out at those around him after his fifth wife, Queen Catherine Howard, had been executed for her adulterous affair with Sir Thomas Culpepper. Compounding the public humiliation of the Queen’s adultery, the King was also facing economic recession, rising sectarian tensions in London, increasing unpopularity in the north and a vicious, expensive and disastrous war with Scotland. The decision to focus attention of the imperial magnificence of the English (and now the Irish) monarchy was designed to not only impress the splendour of the government upon the people, but it was also a tactic employed by nervous courtiers to distract their master with a new bauble. If all went according to plan, the new title might help lift the King from his dangerous mood of truculent self-pity, when he was traditionally at his most vicious - as many courtiers had learned through bitter experience.

Initially, there was no queen to go alongside Henry, the newly-created King of Ireland. When the Act was passed, it was one of the few times in his life when Henry Tudor was not married. (Apart from the two years it had taken to arrange his fourth marriage with a foreign princess, the only time Henry had been unmarried since the age of seventeen were eleven days in the summer of 1536.) But the sting of Catherine Howard’s infidelity had wounded the King, in a way in which nothing else in his life ever really did. Anne Boleyn might have been accused of adultery, but Catherine Howard had actually done it and the King’s utter devastation in 1542 when compared to his sickening glee in 1536 blows out of the water any recent attempts by historians to suggest that he was tricked into believing Anne had been unfaithful to him. Henry knew in 1536 that Anne was innocent and condemned her to death anyway and, with equal certainty, he knew in 1542 that beautiful, teenage Catherine had indeed cuckolded him by running into the arms of the most handsome man in London. Worse, Henry now had to face the cynical amusement of the international community. The King of France in particular could hardly contain his mirth at the Queen of England’s “most wondrous naughty” behaviour – after all, Henry had married a girl one third his age and one third his width, what had he expected to happen? To describe the situation as "humiliating" seems like an understatement.

But after a year of the Queen’s Apartments standing empty, Henry began to get lonely. Perhaps it was the new Hibernian title which had helped rejuvenate the King's spirits, or maybe it was the defeat of the Scottish armies at the Battle of Solway Moss. Either way, the King had recaptured some of his zest for life and that, as always, meant a new first lady was required.

The problem was that, this time around, nobody wanted to oblige him. Two divorces, two beheadings and a death in childbed didn’t exactly scream “marriage potential” to the young women of the upper-classes. Worse, there was now a law that made it a capital crime to marry the King of England if you lied about your virginity beforehand. With his usual cattiness, the Spanish Ambassador acidly remarked that this meant the number of prospective brides in England had been scythed in half, but what the law really meant was that any amount of gossip - true, untrue or a mixture of both - could torpedo not just the reputation, but also the life, of even the most morally-upstanding woman.

Henry’s attention eventually settled on an unlikely candidate who had nothing to fear from the new law, because she was a widow, the only type of woman who was permitted not to be a virgin on her wedding night. Katherine Parr was 30 years-old and her second husband, Lord Latimer, had recently passed away; she had long ginger hair, a pixie nose and, crucially for 16th century standards of beauty, almost translucently-pale skin. She was gracious, intelligent, dignified, impeccably dressed and very charming – in short, she was a lady. She lacked everything that had been “wrong” with Henry’s previous wives (and in his mind, the failure of five consecutive marriages and been their fault, not his) – she had none of Katherine of Aragon’s great pride, none of Anne Boleyn’s dangerous glamour, she could certainly carry a conversation (unlike Jane Seymour), she had none of Anne of Cleves’s unfortunate hygiene issues and absolutely none of Catherine Howard’s reckless, hedonistic frivolity. She also had none of their ambition and Katherine Parr was the only one of Henry VIII’s six wives who truly did not want to marry him. For weeks she wept and prayed, desperately trying to wriggle out of the proposal without offending a King who did not take hearing the word "No" too well. In the end, of course, she had little – in fact, no – choice in the matter and on 12th July 1543 at Hampton Court Palace, Katherine Parr stood next to her enormous, terrifying bride-groom. With her usual common sense, she was now determined to make the best of a bad situation as the Bishop of Winchester pronounced that she had now become Her Majesty the Queen of England and, in a royal first, Her Majesty the Queen of Ireland.