History Today has this great article on Katherine Parr, written by Linda Porter.  Porter has a book coming out in the UK in March.

Excerpt:

“Katherine has been described as the queen who came from nowhere, yet her pedigree was similar to that of Henry’s other English queens and she was well educated. The Parrs were originally a northern Yorkist family, knighted but not ennobled, who had risen during the Wars of the Roses. Both Katherine’s parents were courtiers but marriage took Katherine first to Lincolnshire and then to Yorkshire. Her life had been dramatic even before she became Henry’s wife. Twice widowed and childless, she had learned, while married to Edward Borough, how to manage a domestic tyrant of a father-in-law, Thomas Borough, Baron of Gainsborough, and raised the two motherless children of her second husband, Lord Latimer.

In 1537 she was held hostage by an angry mob in her home, Snape Castle near Ripon, during the Pilgrimage of Grace, the northern protest against Thomas Cromwell’s religious reforms. She feared also for her absent husband. Coerced by the rebels into joining their cause, he was caught between local fury and royal censure. Latimer survived the king’s wrath but, moving south at his wife’s behest, did not fully restore his reputation. In 1543, after a long illness, he died at his London home. With her brother and sister established at court, Katherine was left a comfortably-off widow with good connections. She hoped now to please herself in the choice of a third husband. Fate, however, was to decree otherwise. “

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