Mary Seymour

born 1548

Mary Seymour was the only child of Catherine Parr and Thomas Seymour, born in August 1548. Her mother died soon after childbirth, and her father was executed for treason the following year. The orphaned infant was placed in the care of Catherine Willoughby, Duchess of Suffolk, who complained about the expense of maintaining her household. Records then fall silent, and Mary probably died in early childhood, although no certain date or burial is known.

Mary appears at the end of novels about Catherine Parr, including Elizabeth Fremantle’s Queen’s Gambit and Alison Weir’s Katharine Parr, The Sixth Wife. Fiction sometimes imagines a secret survival because the documentary trail disappears, but there is no reliable evidence that she reached adulthood. Her brief life gives a sombre conclusion to the ambitions and scandals surrounding her parents.

In Alison Weir’s The Queen’s Child, the Queen's Child by Sunday Times bestselling historian Alison Weir is an e-short and companion piece to the captivating final novel in the Six Tudor Queens series, Katharine Parr: The Sixth Wife.'I look at her, playing happily with not a care in the world. Alison Weir’s In the Shadow of Queens places Mary Seymour within a narrative shaped by court politics and dynastic power and family, marriage and personal loyalty.