Katherine Parr, sixth wife of Henry VIII

Great Lives

BBC

History, Documentary, Personal Journals, Society & Culture

4.2 • 1.2K Ratings

🗓️ 8 December 2020

⏱️ 28 minutes

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Summary

In her book The Taming of the Queen, Philippa Gregory asks a simple question of her subject, Katherine Parr. Who would marry a serial killer? Katherine Parr has been largely overlooked because she survived the monstrous Henry VIII, but she was a remarkable woman. She married four times, wrote books and successfully navigated the choppy waters of Henry's reign. In popular culture she's written off as matronly or nurselike. In fact she was younger than Anne Boleyn when she married the king, and died tragically in childbirth the year after he expired. She also may have inspired Elizabeth I. Philippa Gregory is the author of the Taming of the Queen and the Other Boleyn Girl. Suzannah Lipscomb is the author of The King is Dead: The Last Will and Testament of Henry VIII. Future guests in the series include David Spiegelhalter, Diane Morgan and Rob Rinder The presenter is Matthew Parris, the producer in Bristol Miles Warde

Transcript

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0:41.2	When Philip Gregory began writing about Catherine Par, the sixth wife of Henry
0:46.6	the 8th, the author had this interesting thought in her head, who would marry a serial killer?
0:54.0	Catherine Par is our great life today, and Henry VIII, the serial killer, so let's plunge
1:00.2	straight into this fascinating period when beheadings and burnings were an almost everyday occurrence, it seems.
1:07.0	Catherine Par, unlike two of Henry's earlier wives, survived the king.
1:12.0	It's about the only thing most of us know about her.
1:14.8	But we should also say that the man she married next, he was beheaded. And Catherine herself
1:21.3	died in childbirth in September 1548 just a year and a half after Henry himself.
1:27.6	Nominating Catherine is Philippa Gregory, who's best known for the other Berlin girl, the King's Curse and the White Queen.
1:36.0	I'm sensing a theme here, Philippa.
1:39.0	Sort of by accident, I wrote my first Tudor novel about a relatively unknown Tudor woman, Mary Berlin's sister to Anne.
	...

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