"These two kings, Francis and Henry, are spending a fortune to impress each other. "I'm glad your father didn't live to see this," she remarked to me the following day, after we were settled into our lodging in Guines. I thought the grand display in the Golden Valley quite wondrous, but to my mother, who was a thrifty woman, it was an excuse for waste.
As I watched, all the windows in a nearby stone pavilion began to glow red, reflecting the setting sun, and I thought to myself, this must be the most beautiful sight I have ever seen. It was near sunset and the late afternoon sun struck the golden tent and turned it to fire, its red-gold glow spilling out over the nearby rooftops and gilding the river water. Rows and rows of tents had been erected near each of the towns and a huge tent of gold cloth with a shiny statue atop it loomed over them like a broody mother hen over her chicks. I could see the entire plain spread out before me, with the little town of Ardres beside the river on one side of the valley and the smaller settlement of Guines on the other side. A light rain was falling, I remember, and I put up the hood of my cloak to cover my head.Īs we trundled and rattled down through the hills the rain suddenly ceased and the sun came out. I was seven years old, a blue-eyed, fair-haired child in the retinue of Queen Catherine, and I rode into the valley on the back of a small cart filled with trunks and baskets and cages of squawking chickens and ducks. In The Last Wife of Henry VIII, critically acclaimed author Carolly Erickson brings this dramatic story of survival and redemption to life.My earliest memory is of a windswept plain in flanders called the Golden Valley. Catherine won the contest, but at great cost. Her triumph was shadowed by rivalry with the young Princess Elizabeth, whose lands and influence the lecherous Seymour coveted. She was spared by his death and married the attractive but dangerously unbalanced Seymour. She managed to evade execution, but she knew that the king had his wandering eye fixed on wife number seven. King Henry toyed with her, first ordering her arrested, then granting her clemency. While victims of the king's wrath suffered torture and execution, Catherine persevered-until, at last, she came within the orbit of the royal fury. Catherine Parr attracted the king's lust and, though much in love with the handsome Thomas Seymour, was thrown into the intrigue-filled snake pit of the royal court. Her story, as Carolly Erickson re-creates it, is page-turning drama: from the splendors of the Field of the Cloth of Gold to the gory last years of the outsize King Henry, when heads rolled and England trembled, Catherine bestrode her destiny and survived to marry her true love. Courageous, attractive, romantic, intelligent, Catherine Parr became the sixth wife of Henry VIII.
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