Lady Catherine Willoughby, the only surviving child of Maria de Salinas, Lady Willoughby, and William Willoughby, 11th Baron Willoughby de Eresby, was born 22 March 1519.
Catherine’s father died when she was seven, and King Henry VIII gave wardship over the rich young orphan to his best friend and brother-in-law, Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk. A very rich heiress, the little girl was engaged to marry one of Brandon’s sons, but after the death of duke’s wife Suffolk opted to marry her himself. Brandon was forty-nine years old, while Catherine was only fourteen.
(Marriage between a middle-aged man and a young girl was not uncommon in this era. This is yet another reason why I don’t have a yen to time travel.)
In spite of the disparity in their ages, Catherine and Brandon seemed to have been happy together. She and Suffolk had two sons, Henry and Charles. The duke died in 1545, leaving his duchess a very wealthy widow. Although rich, single women like Catherine were sought-after prizes for men of the Tudor Court, she resisted any attempts to cajole her into matrimony again. Catherine had bigger fish to fry; an intelligent, well-connected, and strong-willed woman, she had become an important supporter of the English Reformation.
One of Catherine’s closest friends was fellow protestant, Henry VIII’s sixth wife, Queen Kateryn Parr. When the widowed and remarried queen died from complications of childbirth on 8 September 1548, her baby, Mary Seymour, was sent to live with the dowager duchess.
Supposedly, the duchess resented the expense of raising the toddler, referring to her coldly as “the late queen’s child”. Catherine apparently tried to foist the poor little girl off on Queen Kateryn’s brother, William Parr, 1st Marquess of Northampton, but claimed that Parr “hath as bad a back for such a burden as I have. He would receive her, but not willingly if he must receive her train.”
This certainly paints an ugly picture of Catherine … but was she grousing in part to try to secure her little ward the heritage that been stripped from Mary Seymour when her father, Thomas Seymour, was executed in 1549? Throwing a fit about how much it cost to keep the daughter of a queen (even the daughter of a dead, dowager queen) was perhaps a way to make sure the government Edward VI actually paid for the child’s upkeep.
Whether Catherine was motivated by greed or subtle altruism, it worked: in January 1550, Parliament passed an act which restored what was left of her father’s estate to Mary. Sadly, Mary Seymour appears to have died when she was less than three years old, because the royal grants for her maintenance were not renewed after March of 1551.
1551 is also the year that Catherine’s life came crashing down around her ears — that summer both of her teenage sons died of the sweating sickness within hours of one another.
This event left her, understandably, emotionally devastated. She did not let her immense grief destroy her, however, but used her Protestant faith to sustain her. In 1553 the dowager duchess wed a fellow Protestant, Richard Bertie . The groom had literally been a groom — he had served the duchess as her Master of the Horse and Gentleman Usher, so their union was kept secret as long as possible due to its scandalous nature.
Catherine and Bertie appeared to have had a happy marriage, even though it was a politically eventful one. The couple had their lands confiscated and were forced to to flee England during the reign of the staunchly Catholic “Bloody” Mary I. Their devout religious beliefs kept them away from England until their fellow Protestant, Elizabeth I, came to the throne.
Catherine and Richard Bertie had two children, a daughter named Susan and a son named Peregrine, both of whom thankfully survived to adulthood. The Bertie’s returned home to England when Queen Elizabeth I came to the throne, and their son was made 13th Baron Willoughby de Eresby by right of his mother.
Both the Bertie children married and were fruitful, and the peerage is chockablock with their descendants to this very day.