An Enduring Tudor Mystery
Lady Mary Seymour was the only child of Queen Katherine Parr and her fourth husband, Thomas Seymour. Parr died of childbed fever shortly after giving birth to Mary, and the baby’s father, Thomas Seymour, was executed for treason within six months of her death. But what happened to their child, who seems to have vanished without a trace into history? This is an enduring mystery.
The last known facts about the child include that her father, Thomas Seymour, did ask, as a dying wish, that Mary be entrusted to Katherine Willoughby, Duchess of Suffolk, and that desire was granted. Willoughby, although a great friend of Mary Seymour’s mother, Queen Katherine Parr, viewed this wardship as a burden, as evidenced by her letters. According to Parr’s biographer Linda Porter, “In January 1550, less than a year after her father’s death, application was made in the House of Commons for the restitution of Lady Mary Seymour…she had been made eligible by this act to inherit any remaining property that had not been returned to the Crown at the time of her father’s attainder. But Mary’s prospects were less optimistic than this might suggest. Much of her parents’ lands and goods had already passed onto the hands of others.”
The 500 pounds required for Mary’s household would amount to approximately 140,000 British pounds, or 178,000 US dollars today, so you can see that Willoughby had reason to shrink from such a duty. And yet, the daughter of a Queen must be kept in commensurate style. Many people greatly benefitted from Parr’s generosity. None of them stepped forward to assist Baby Mary.
Biographer Elizabeth Norton says “The council granted money to Mary for household wages, servants’ uniforms, and food on 13 March 1550. This is the last evidence of Mary’s continued survival.” Susan James says Mary is “probably buried somewhere in the parish church at Edenham.”
Most of Parr’s biographers assume that Mary died young of a childhood disease. But this, by necessity, is speculative because there is no record of Mary’s death anywhere: no gravestone, no bill of death, no mention of it in anyone’s extant personal or official correspondence. Parr’s biographer during the Victorian ages, Agnes Strickland (who often made erroneous claims), stated that Mary lived on to marry Edward Bushel and become a member of the household of Queen Anne, King James I of England’s wife.
Various family biographers claimed descent from Mary, including those who came down from the Irish shipping family of Hart. This family also claimed to have had Thomas Seymour’s ring, inscribed, What I Have, I Hold, till early in the twentieth century. I do not know if that is true, but it’s a good detail and certainly possible.
According to an article in History Today by biographer Linda Porter, Katherine Parr’s chaplain, John Parkhurst, published a book 1573 entitled Ludica sive Epigrammata juvenilia. Within it is a poem that speaks of someone with a “queenly mother” who died in childbirth and whose child now lies beneath a marble after a brief life. But there is no mention of the child’s name, and 1573 is twenty-five years after Mary’s birth. It hints at Mary but does not insist.
Fiction is a somewhat more generous mistress than a biography, and I was, therefore, free to wonder. Why would the Queen's daughter and the King's cousin not have warranted even a tiny remark upon her death? In an era when family descent meant everything, it seemed unlikely that Mary’s death would be nowhere definitively noted. Far less important people, even young children, had their deaths documented during these years; my research turned up dozens of them.
Edward Seymour requested a state funeral for his mother, as she was grandmother to the King (which was refused). Would then the death of the cousin of a King and the only child of the most recent Queen not even be mentioned? The differences seem irreconcilable. Then, too, it would have been to Willoughby’s advantage to show that she was no longer responsible for the child if she were dead.
The turmoil of the time, in which Mary’s uncle, the Lord Protector, was about to fall, the fact that her grandmother Lady Seymour died in 1550, and the lack of motivation anyone would have had to seek the child out lest they then be required to then pay for her upkeep, all added up to a potentially different ending for me. The lack of solid facts allowed me to give Mary a happy ending in my novel, The Secret Keeper: A Novel of Katherine Parr, an ending I feel is entirely possible given Mary’s cold trail and one which I think both “Kate” and Mary deserved.
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{ Additional photo credit: See page for author [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons. By Unknown – http://somegreymatter.com/meltonconstableportrait.htm, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=13408812 }