I have taken a fictional liberty with Juliana as lector. During those years, the actual position of lector went to clergy-in-training, which meant men. However, the king specifically disallowed women teaching and reading Scripture in public during his 1542 Act, so it seemed to me that it was possibly happening or could possibly happen—Askew proves that to some extent.
I wanted to demonstrate that the real women in Parr’s household were actively using all of their spiritual and intellectual gifts. Parr wrote and taught; Askew reasoned and boldly spoke out, eventually being martyred; Calthorpe had the gift of the word of knowledge and prophecy and was courageous enough to speak when called to; Willoughby used her financial resources to benefit reformed causes. There were steel frames beneath those soft and marvelous gowns.
Spelling was not standardized during the Tudor years; I have chosen to spell Kateryn’s name as such because it is how she signed her own documents and because we know that Henry called her “Kate.” Because Parr was a writer, much of what we know of her, in her own words, comes from her books and her letters. I have quoted some of them as books and letters, but there are other places where I have taken her own words and put them in dialogue, for the sake of getting the reader on the scene. Sometimes I have used her exact words, and sometimes I have retained the concepts but modernized the language to match her dialogue throughout the rest of the book.
I have sometimes made accommodations for titles: for example, I continue to refer to Lady Seymour as Lady Seymour even after her husband is made an earl and a duke simply so the reader will be able to better follow the story line and characters and not confuse her with the Countess of Sussex. Similarly, I refer to Elizabeth Fitzgerald Browne as Lady Fitzgerald Browne rather than simply Lady Browne or Elizabeth, because there are many people named Elizabeth in the book and I wanted to retain her Irish heritage. The genealogy charts are accurate, but I do leave off a few connections because they are placed at the front of the book, before the story. Some readers will not have known, for example, that Kateryn Parr and Thomas Seymour did marry and have a child before reading this book, and all will not know how Jamie and Juliana’s story plays out. I did not want to spoil the surprise.
My deep desire is to add to the effort to rescue Kateryn from the only thing she is popularly known to have done: survived. She did much more than that. She was a warm and loving wife and stepmother, a generous emotional and financial benefactress, a learned and devout woman whose extraordinary books sold tens of thousands of copies and went back for many printings; they still resonate with today’s readers. She was also a beautiful woman who had a blind spot for a bad boy, had a wry sense of humor, and was known to make mistakes and lose her temper a time or two. In short, Kateryn Parr was a woman many of us would have liked as a friend.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Oh, how happy I am to write in the age of the long arm of the Internet, rare-book dealers, and out-of-print books magically reappearing in PDF. I have read parts of dozens, if not hundreds, of these while writing this book and yet one feels that there is always more to be uncovered. I have done my best to be as accurate as possible with the information available, but new information is being found and sifted through every year, so perhaps even more will be discovered about Parr and her household in the years to come.
This book would have been more difficult to write, less accurate, and less period-specific if not for the spectacular talents of Lauren Mackay, historical research assistant. Among other things, she expanded my list of good resources, corrected unlikely speculations and awkward period verbiage, edited the manuscript, helped brainstorm sixteenth-century solutions, and assisted in verifying sources and finding facts. She is an all-around genius.
Thank you, too, to those brilliant and kind author friends who read the book in its earliest stages and offered timely, pointed, and immeasurably helpful advice as well as life-giving encouragement: Liz Curtis Higgs, Debbie Austin, and Ginger Garrett. I truly appreciate Danielle Egan-Miller and Joanna MacKenzie, simply the best and brightest agents in the world; my confidence is bolstered knowing that they are in my corner. Thanks, too, to the team at Howard Books that helps bring these books to life. Sylvia Croft, a humble woman with a gift of prophecy who instructed me and vetted the manuscript, was a God-given resource. Strongest thanks and home-cooked meals are immediately due my wonderful husband and children, who love me through the hand-wringing and late nights each book inevitably brings.
PRINCIPAL WORKS OF REFERENCE
Elaine Beilin, editor. The Examinations of Anne Askew. 1996.
Nicolas Canny. From Reformation to Restoration: Ireland. 1534–1660. 1988.
John Foxe. Foxe’s Book of Martyrs. Various editions.
Christopher Gidlow. Life in a Tudor Palace. 2008.
Maria Hayward. Dress at the Court of King Henry the Eighth. 2007.
Susan E. James. Catherine Parr: Henry the VIII’s Last Love. 2009.
Colm Lennon. Sixteenth-Century Ireland: The Incomplete Conquest. 2005.
John Maclean. The Life of Sir Thomas Seymour, Knight: Lord High Admiral of England and Master of the Ordnance. 1869.
Natasha Narayan. The Timetraveller’s Guide to Tudor London. 2004.
Elizabeth Norton. Catherine Parr. 2010.
Clare Phillips. Jewels and Jewelry. 2008.
Linda Porter. Katherine the Queen: The Remarkable Life of Katherine Parr, the Last Wife of King Henry VIII. 2010.
Evelyn Read. My Lady Suffolk: A Portrait of Catherine Willoughby, Duchess of Suffolk. 1962.
Alison Sim. Masters and Servants in Tudor England. 2006.
Chris Skidmore. Edward VI: Lost King of England. 2009.
David Starkey. Elizabeth: The Struggle for the Throne. 2007.
William Tyndale. Tyndale’s New Testament. Translated by William Tyndale. A Modern-Spelling Edition of the 1534 Translation with an Introduction by David Daniell. 1989.
Brandon G. Withrow. Katherine Parr: A Guided Tour of the Life and Thought of a Reformation Queen. 2009.
Reading Group Guide
The Secret Keeper
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
1. People sometimes say that, with historical fiction, we insert twenty-first-century values like “girl power” into the world of sixteenth-century women. But could that be a bit dismissive? How were women such as Kateryn Parr, Anne Askew, and Juliana St. John empowered in ways similar to and also different from contemporary women?
2. Two of the charges against both Askew and Calthorpe is that they were unnatural and unkind, mainly because they continued to use their given names in some capacity and for their forthright speech, especially where the exercise of their spiritual gifts was involved. Has that changed with, for example, women such as Anne Graham Lotz, or is there still a sense of that today?
3. Juliana felt social pressure to remain quiet about her sexual abuse, as there were messages, both overt and subtle, that she was “damaged goods” after having been assaulted and that those in power could twist the circumstances to harm her reputation as well as bring trouble to those she loved. Are today’s women equally pressured to “keep quiet” due to the shaming of society, with messages that the way they act, dress, or speak encourages rape? Or are young women today likely to speak up?