Remembering, and Dismembering, a Queen

Some thoughts on Catherine Parr's hair

Where did July go? This month flew, thanks to the disruptions in work-life balance that summer always seems to bring. I spent the first half of the month traveling first to Europe, then to the Adirondacks. I spent the second half of the month in and out of bed, thanks to a bad cold (flu? RSV?) that one of my kids brought home from summer camp. Camp is such a wonderful American intitution but, one way or another, someone has to pay for all that fun.

Days in bed gave me ample time, however, to scroll through social media and and to pursue various historical nuggests down the rabbit hole. I’m not a huge fan of social media, but sometimes Twitter (um, I mean “X”) is revelatory. Thanks to Dr. Owen Emerson, Dr. Linda Porter, and Daniella Novakovic, I learned that, beginning in the late 18^th century, robbers regularly raided the grave of Queen Catherine Parr, Henry VIII’s sixth and final wife. Catherine is the one who survived — she outlived Henry, married her secret love, Thomas Seymour, then died at 36, shortly after giving birth.

Among the many things the grave robbers took were handfuls of Catherine Parr’s hair. Her tresses — or locks of hair purporting to belong to Catherine — are scattered all over Europe, and can still be found in various displays in museums and exhibits. This one below is supposedly genuine, although the hair is a little blonder than what portraits of Catherine normally show. To be fair, Renaissance portraits weren’t always true to life.

A lock of Catherine's hair, currently held at Sudeley Castle. Might Catherine have been more of a brunette? Maybe more auburn? Hard to say.

Possibly, the color of the hair has faded. Or maybe, it never belonged to Catherine in the first place.

The tomb raiders got nasty. The first man to open Queen Catherine’s tomb, in 1782,  broke through the layers of wax and lead enshrouding the corpse to reveal a body still pristine. He extracted one of the queen’s teeth. With the corpse now exposed to air, decay began to set in, but this didn’t stop dozens of well-to-do ladies from clipping sections of her hair as souvenirs. Other raiders reportedly went still further: in addition to the hair, they pulled out more of her teeth, and even took bones from her arms, aiming to sell them as keepsakes.Rabbits began to nest in the detritus of the tomb. Only in the early 19^th century were Catherine’s remains reburied in Saint Mary’s Chapel at Sudeley Castle, where they could remain undisturbed.

“Katharine’s remains had become a commodity,” writes Daniella Novakovic, “a vestige of the glories, and barbarity, of the Tudor age.” In a way, we are still commodifying the trauma endured by Henry VIII’s wives. We may not be mutilating their corpses, but from Anne Boleyn-themed jewlery to the musical SIX, aren’t we still glossing over the suffering of Henry VIII’s wives, dismantling the past and selling it in bits and pieces, for our own pleasure? Is the mutilation of Catherine Parr’s corpse a kind of metaphor for the commercialization of history?

You can read Novakovic’s excellent article on the fate of Catherine’s body here.

What I’m Reading

Armed with tea and tissues, I also spent my sick days happily immersed in two novels and an excellent non-fiction book. At long last, I finally read Maggie O’Farrell’s Marriage Portrait (2022) and was delighted to find a fictional treatment of several topics close to my heart: the Medici, the Renaissance marriage market, the building of dynasty and fortunes on the backs of young girls. Plus, Renée de France! O’Farrell hardly mentions her by name, but she’s an essential figure in the story. Renée is also an extremely important figure in the history of Renaissance France, Italy, and the Reformation, yet is almost never mentioned in either fiction or in narrative histories of the period. It was great to find her in those pages. I whisked through Ann Patchett’s State of Wonder (2011), thinking to get back into Patchett before tackling her newest, Tom Lake. I couldn’t help but see among the many themes in State of Wonder a profound grappling with forms of motherhood — including the rejection of motherhood.

I’m just about to finish Tamara J. Walker’s excellent Beyond the Shores, just out this June. Most of us are familiar with the Great Migration, but Walker explores the stories of Black Americans who left the racisim of the States to start new lives abroad. Although you’ll find Josephine Baker sprinkled in here and there, Walker focuses rather on stories of Americans you’ve likely never heard of. She also weaves in the story of her own family’s journeys from the American South to Europe, from Colorado to Latin America. Part memoir, part history, impressively researched, gorgeously written, Beyond the Shores is an eye-opening and beautiful meditation on the relationship between race and place.

Some truly excellent reads

Let me know what you think!

Young Queens in the News

Young Queens will launch in the US in two weeks! I was thrilled to see it featured in an article in the Washington Post, ‘Beach Bag Refill: 12 Books to Get You to the End of Summer and Beyond.” Yes, indeed, please lug that baby to the beach! Or, download the audiobook while you’re soaking up some end-of- summer rays. The American audiobook, like the UK one, is narrated by Olivia Dowd, and I couldn’t have imagined a better reader. She did a fantastic job.

For those of you in the Washington DC area, please do stop by Politics and Prose (Connecticut Ave. location) on August 15^th at 7:00pm.  I’ll give a talk followed by a Q&A, sign some books, and generally celebrate the queens’ arrival in the New World. If you can’t make it in person, the talk will be live-streamed here.

I hope you enjoy the rest of summer. Late as this newsletter is this month, I will likely take a vacation from it in August, while I start to ponder my next book. See you in September!