Catherine Parr was born in 1512, the daughter of Sir Thomas Parr – lord of the manor of Kendal in Westmorland (now Cumbria), and a descendant of King Edward III. She first caught Henry's attention in 1543, as a member of the household of his daughter Mary. She had been married twice already; her first husband, Sir Edward Burgh, had died in 1533, and her second – John Neville, 3rd Baron Latimer – in 1543. But she was still only 31. She had begun a romantic friendship with Sir Thomas Seymour, the brother of the late queen Jane Seymour, but she saw it as her duty to accept Henry's proposal over Seymour's. Seymour was given a posting in Brussels to remove him from the king's court.
Henry and Catherine were married on 12 July 1543, at Hampton Court Palace. The marriage appears to have been successful. A reformer at heart, Catherine argued with Henry over religion; ultimately, Henry remained committed to an idiosyncratic mixture of Catholicism and Protestantism. She helped reconcile him with his daughters, Mary and Elizabeth, who, as daughters of Catherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn (respectively) had, by the 1536 Act of Succession, been declared illegitimate and excluded from the succession. In 1543, an Act of Parliament put them back in the line of succession after their younger brother Edward.
But Henry's health was in decline – probably not from syphilis, as has often been claimed; but possibly as a result of a jousting accident that he suffered in 1536. He died on 28 January 1547, aged 55. He made provision for an allowance of £7,000 a year for Catherine to support herself. He further ordered that, after his death, Catherine, though a queen dowager, should be given the respect of a queen of England, as if he were still alive.
Catherine's old love, Thomas Seymour, was now (as the brother of Jane Seymour) the king's uncle. He returned to court, and was soon created 1st Baron Seymour of Sudeley. When he renewed his suit of marriage, Catherine was quick to accept. They married in secret some time in late May 1547 – just four months after Henry's death (which is why the marriage had to be kept secret; Edward was said to be furious when he found out).
On 30 August 1548, Catherine gave birth to a daughter, Mary Seymour. The pregnancy was something of a surprise, as she hadn't conceived in any of her previous three marriages and was now in her mid–thirties. But she died six days later, on 5 September 1548, at Sudeley Castle in Gloucestershire. The cause was probably what was then known as childbed fever but is now termed postpartum infection. She had survived Henry by just 19 months.
Just over six months later, Catherine's widower Thomas Seymour was also dead. His downfall was the result of his rivalry with his elder brother Edward, who had been created 1st Duke of Somerset and appointed as Protector to his nephew (and Thomas's), the nine–year–old King Edward VI. On the night of 16 January 1549, for reasons that are not clear (perhaps to take the young king away into his own custody), Thomas attempted to break into the King's apartments at Hampton Court Palace. He entered the privy garden and awoke one of the King's pet spaniels, which he shot and killed in order to silence its barking. He was arrested the next day, and sent to the Tower of London. He was executed on 20 March 1549.
This left Mary Seymour a penniless orphan, at the age of less than seven months. She was put into the care of Katherine Willoughby, Duchess of Suffolk, who appears to have resented this imposition. After 1550 Mary disappears from historical record completely; no claim was ever made on her father's meagre estate, leading to the conclusion that she did not live past the age of two.
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