Katherine the Queen: The Remarkable Life of Katherine Parr by Linda Porter Read Free Book Online Page B

bidding. Scrope’s disdain for the match is palpable; Katherine Parr was neither rich enough nor good enough for his son. Still, his response was not one of outright refusal; instead, he stalled and then put forward terms that were unacceptable to Maud Parr. She thought that she had agreed the detail with Lord Dacre, but Scrope did not like what had been proposed. Maud was understandably irritated. ‘Where it pleased you at your last being here,’ she wrote to Dacre in July 1523,

to take pain in the matter in consideration of marriage between Lord Scrope’s son and my daughter Katherine, for the which I heartily thank you; at which time I thought the matter in good furtherance. Howbeit, I perceive that my said Lord Scrope is not agreeable to the consideration, as moreplainly may appear unto you by certain articles sent to me . . . the copy of which articles I send you herein enclosed. 12

    Scrope wanted a full answer to his counter-proposals by the beginning of August, and she needed Dacre’s help.
    She disliked several aspects of Scrope’s proposed articles and made it clear that she wanted to stick to what had been agreed with Lord Dacre. ‘Glad I would be to have the matter go forth if might be conveniently: if it please you to call to remembrance the matter before you at Greenwich was that I should pay at your desire 1,100 marks, whereof 100 marks in hand, and every year after 100 marks, which is as much as I can spare, as you know.’ Scrope wanted his money in too much of a hurry: ‘I am content with the first day, but the residue of his days of payment be too short for me.’ She was also perturbed that, as Scrope’s conditions spelled out, ‘The said Lord Scrope will not agree to repay no money after the marriage is solemnized and executed, nor to enter into no covenant especially for the governance of the children during the nonage of them.’ As the children were not to live together until Henry Scrope was fourteen and Katherine Parr twelve, Maud recognized that she would lose her money if death or disagreement intervened. Meanwhile, she still had to feed, clothe and educate her daughter at her own expense.
    Maud was by no means impoverished; the amount she was willing to offer at her daughter’s marriage is the equivalent of about £ 323,000 today. But she had always been prudent and could not afford to write this off as Lord Scrope was insisting she must if, for any reason, the marriage should be solemnized but nothing more. There is something in her tone that suggests she already suspected nothing would come of her overtures, but she could not bring herself to back down yet. Though she might be a widow, she was not willing to give up without seeing if the application of further pressure would swing matters her way.
    Lord Dacre was in Newcastle when he replied on 30 July. He was disappointed, even slightly harassed, but he promised that he would pursue the question of Katherine Parr’s marriage:

Cousin, since my departure from you I assure you I was not two nights together in mine own house, by reason whereof I never had leisure to labour in these matters. And I do think, seeing my Lord Scrope cannot be content with the communications that was had at my last being with you, which was thought reasonable to me . . . that this matter cannot be brought to no perfect end without mutual communication to be had with my said lord, either by myself, my son or my brother. Wherefore, as soon as conveniently any of us may be spared, this matter shall be laboured.

    He remained confident of a satisfactory outcome for the Parr–Dacre–Scrope connection, having extracted (or so he then believed) a promise from his daughter and son-in-law ‘that they shall not marry their son without my consent, which they shall not have to no person but unto you’. He counselled patience: ‘be not overhasty’, he concluded, ‘but suffer and finally ye shall be well assured that I shall do in this matter, or in any other that