As we have seen, William Elderton’s emphasis on the exemplary feminine virtues of his heroine in A proper new balad of my ladie marques, Whose death is bewailed To the tune of new lusty gallant is line with the norms of the Renaissance epitaph.  But in Elizabeth Parr’s case it is especially interesting. It reflects the way in which epitaphs idealised their subjects. William and Elizabeth Parr’s union had had an uncertain start, despite the fact that the Parr family were known to be supporters of the reformed faith and had connexions at the highest level of government. As a pre-eminent evangelical at court, William’s sister, Queen Katherine Parr, had been responsible for appointing the Protestant John Cheke as tutor to the young prince Edward in 1544. Having published her own Prayers and Meditations in 1545, her possession of proscribed, heretical books left the queen open to accusations of treason as Henry VIII’s health declined. William Parr was one of the Protestants whose support enabled Edward Seymour to become duke of Somerset and lord protector on Henry’s death in 1547. But as the political and religious upheavals of the mid-sixteenth century unfolded, the Parrs’ marriage felt the dramatic vicissitudes of fortune.

Elizabeth was not William Parr’s first wife. Remarriage in Tudor England was common, but only when the partnership had been broken by death. Even in the newly-Protestant England of Edward VI, remarriage was difficult and extremely unusual while a first spouse still lived. William Parr was first married to Anne Bouchier, who eloped with a man by the name of Hunt or Huntley in 1541 and later gave birth to her lover’s child. Although Parr was granted a legal separation the following year, he was unable to secure the divorce which would allow him to remarry during Anne’s lifetime. Nevertheless, Parr began his relationship with Elizabeth Brooke in 1543 and undertook a clandestine and bigamous marriage in 1544. Parr petitioned the king, Edward VI, for a divorce in 1547 on the basis of Anne ‘conceiving and bearing of one bastard child begotten by a base vile unworthy adulterer’, but the commission appointed to investigate his case was slow in its deliberations.[1] Although he had been a close supporter of the duke of Somerset, Parr’s secret marriage offended the protector.  Even though the commission agreed to the divorce, Somerset ejected Parr from the Privy Council in 1548 and ordered that he separate from Elizabeth. William and Elizabeth’s union was finally legalised in 1551, during the duke of Northumberland’s lord presidency of the Privy Council, at the same time that William was at last granted a divorce from his first wife.

But the Parrs’ fortunes fell again with the accession of the Catholic Mary I. William Parr’s divorce was invalidated and his titles rescinded. Anne Bouchier was promoted to Mary’s lady-in-waiting and had to beg pardon for her husband’s part in the plot to bring Lady Jane Grey to the throne. Mary was succeeded by Elizabeth I in 1558. Another dramatic turn of events saw William and Anne’s divorce reinstated and, with it, Parr’s second marriage.

Perhaps Elderton alludes to this chequered history with his comment that ‘…she be dead and gone / Whose courting need not be to tolde’, but generally, A proper new balad seems to gloss over the unlikely amorous history of its subject. As Nigel Llewellyn commented, ‘The social body as represented in commemorative art was generally idealized’ and the epitaph ballad was, after all, another form of commemorative art.[2]  Nevertheless, William and Elizabeth’s troubled marital history perhaps provides one reason why it was easier to leave out the marchioness’s name: those that were in the know would understand anyway, and everyone else could identify with the more general themes of the song.

So instead of dwelling on Parr’s relationship with her husband and position as a wife, Elderton emphasises above all the lady marques’s feminine virtues of modesty, cheerfulness and piety:

Me thinkes I see her modeste mood,

Her comlie clothing plainlie clad,

Her face so sweete, her cheere so good,

The courtlie countenance that shee had;

But, chefe of all, mee thinkes I see,

Her vertues deutie daie by daie,

Homblie kneeling one her knee,

As her desire was still to praie.

Parr’s black clothing may have been a symbol of her piety, or simply an acknowledgement that she was a servant of the queen, because according to May-Shine Lin, ‘The combination of black and white gradually became the personal colors of Elizabeth as her reign progressed, and men wore black and white garments at court masques, tiltyard and her progresses, in tribute to the queen’.[3] Similarly, Alison Weir claimed that Elizabeth’s ladies were all ordered to wear black in order to make the queen’s clothing more prominent.[4]  Certainly, Elizabeth Parr wears black in the Cobham family memorial portrait painted in 1567 and now held in the collection of Longleat House.[5]

WilliamBrookeCobham

[1] Petition from William Parr, marquess of Northampton to the king, [January x April] 1547, in State Papers, Domestic Series, of the Reign of Edward VI, 1547-1553,vol. 10/2 fol.106, (State Papers Online, Gale, Cengage Learning, 2013), accessed June 27, 2013,

http://go.galegroup.com/mss/i.do?id=GALE|MC4300180080&v=2.1&u=jrycal5&it=r

&p=SPOL&sw=w&viewtype=Manuscript.

[2] Llewellyn, The Art of Death (Reaktion Books, 1991), 55.

[3] May-Shine Lin, “Queen Elizabeth’s Language of Clothing and the Contradictions in Her Construction of Images,” (2010), accessed June 27, 2013, http://www.his.ncku.edu.tw/chinese/uploadeds/383.pdf.

[4] Alison Weir, Elizabeth the Queen (London: Jonathan Cape, 1998), 259.

[5] Master of the Countess of Warwick, Cobham Family Memorial Portrait, 1567.