Page:The Queens of England.djvu/381

 KATHARINE PARR. 341 private interviews, and at night, too, with her admirer, who plied his suit so perseveringly, that in a little more than four months from the death of Henry she bestowed on him her hand. The imprudence of the secret interviews between Katharine and Seymour, followed by their nuptials so long before etiquette or even decency could tolerate such a step, seems the more unaccountable when the extreme prudence and discretion of Katharine, through all her previous life, is remembered, and that she had now arrived at the mature age of thirty-five, a period at which passion is supposed to have less influence than in youth. Katharine must have been well aware that her marriage so soon after her widowhood would be deemed wrong, for it was kept concealed for some time; and she rendered herself liable to the charge of duplicity by adderssing, after she had wedded Seymour secretly, and dur- ing the early days of her marriage, a letter to the king, filled with expressions of affection to his late father. Conscious of the censures that she had incurred, Katharine is suspected of having advised Seymour to enlist the king's sympathies in their favor, and to induce the unsuspecting Edward to plead for his uncle with her, after that uncle's suit had been rewarded with her hand. Certain it is that Edward wrote to her to advise the marriage, and to promise his protection to the pair. He wished to contract it some weeks after it had been secretly solemnized ; an artifice which, if really planned by her, was not creditable on the part of Katharine, whose previous good conduct could not have prepared the world for this change. These untoward nuptials furnished an excuse to Somerset, of which he readily availed himself, to denounce, with the utmost severity, the ill-assorted marriage of his brother. Fear- ful of the influence which the queen and her husband might acquire over the king, to the injury of his own power, he loudly censured Seymour, and refused to allow Katharine the possession of the valuable jewels bestowed on her by Henry during his lifetime. She was debarred access to the king, and the protector now treated her with an unceremonious want of courtesy, and even of justice, that must have goaded her to anger, by intimating that when she condescended to become his sister-in-law, he ceased to consider her a queen. But it was not the ambition alone of Somerset, although that was a potent motive for his ill-treatment of Katharine and his brother,-