Clever and compassionate Katherine Parr, Henry V111’s sixth and final wife, survived their four turbulent years of marriage. But when the ambitious and handsome Thomas Seymour won her heart, mere months after the old king’s death, their hasty union undid a lifetime of caution.

Catherine, Duchess of Suffolk, her best friend, is the unwilling witness to the dowager queen’s late-blossoming love. But as she harbours nagging suspicions of Kate’s new husband, it gradually becomes clear that she has her own dark tale to tell. For if Thomas might betray his wife for power, then cool, calculating Cathy might betray her for passion.

In times when the least indiscretion could mean arrest and death, Katherine Parr’s tragedy plays itself out amongst those who loved – and deceived – her most. As events reach their inevitable climax, it becomes clear that Cathy and Kate will risk all in a world where love is a luxury even royalty cannot always afford…

Paperback: 320 pages
Publisher: HarperPress (15 Jan 2007)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 000723242X
ISBN-13: 978-0007232420

'My, what a story… utterly compelling.' — The Times

'Mesmerising and beautifully written.' — Scotsman

'Dunn jettisons all attempts at period language, opting instead for twenty-first-century English. Such a choice is potentially dangerous…but the gamble pays off… This, together with some taut plotting which confines the drama to a small, clearly defined cast, makes the danger and vulnerability on which these Tudor lives were predicated uncomfortably easy to understand.' — TLS

'Dunn is as sharp on historical detail as she is on the workings of the human heart.' — Easy Living

'…a kind of love story that is both moving and believable.' — The Telegraph

The Sixth Wife focuses on the last days (well, year and a half) of Katherine Parr, Henry’s sixth wife, the one who survived him (…by a year and a half). Her story fascinates me, because she was such a clever, sensible woman, so good a judge of character, outstandingly diplomatic, not only surviving difficult (indeed, terrifying) times and circumstances but doing so brilliantly, rescuing and reconciling others along the way …but as soon as Henry died, she fell for a cad and it was her undoing. She married the gorgeous but notorious Thomas Seymour (executed largely for his alleged carryings-on with the teenaged princess Elizabeth, who, as his wife’s step-daughter, was, of course, in a sense, also his own step-daughter), got pregnant, which was a delight for her because it hadn’t happened in her three previous marriages and she was in her mid-thirties (she loved children, was adored by her many step-children), weathered the trouble with Elizabeth (kept it under wraps, kept her cool), but then died as soon as the baby girl was born. After her death, Thomas Seymour misbehaved with Elizabeth again, more publically, and his execution was seven months later. (The orphaned baby, Mary, disappears from all records before the age of two and is assumed to have died as an infant: an awful end to this awful tale.)

Unfortunately, it’s all too familiar when a sensible woman falls for an unsuitable man (in that sense, the story of Katherine’s last marriage is archetypal, just as Anne Boleyn’s story – man leaves middle-aged wife for younger woman and it all goes horribly wrong – can be said to be), but I wanted to look closer at this particular marriage. Katherine wasn’t ‘everywoman’ or just any woman, she was Dowager Queen of England when she made this particular, spectacular misjudgement in belated pursuit of her own happiness. The background to, and circumstances in which these events happened are unique and, to me, fascinating. Oddly, I’ve ended up fictionalising in a way that I didn’t in my novel of Anne. I’m telling Katherine’s tale via her best friend, Catherine, Duchess of Suffolk: another strong woman of the time. In all my reading, for both the Anne Boleyn novel and this one, Catherine crops up time and time again: she seems to have been everywhere, on the sidelines at all the important events during this period of history.

In some respects, I was drawn to Catherine: her passion for her two sons, her zeal for religious reform, her marrying one of her servants, her lack of compromise and outspokenness and no-nonsense demeanour. (There’s an anecdote that I particularly like: she called her lap-dog ‘Gardiner’, after the principal catholic bishop, so that she could make her friends laugh by calling him to heel.) In other respects, though, she puzzled me and even repelled me: her complaints about the costs of looking after Katherine’s orphaned daughter, and her refusal to testify for an old friend even though it wouldn’t have harmed her to do so and even when she knew he was facing execution. In the novel, the one fictional aspect is Catherine’s intensely sexual affair with her pregnant best friend’s new hsuband, whom she doesn’t even really like. This made it hard for me to like her (and, here, ‘her’ means the character in the book, the one I invented). I understood her, I think, in the end, but didn’t much like her. And that was gruelling: spending so much time (the year and a half that it took me to write the book) ‘in her head’. She tells herself a lot of lies.