Tudor women day 4

The sun shone a little today as we left Kenilworth and headed south to Warwick to see St Mary’s Church. In a magnificent Gothic Chapel lies Robert Dudley Earl of Leicester and favourite of Elizabeth I. The church is huge and Dudley lies with his second wife Lettice Knollys, also here lies Ambrose Roberts’s brother, and the brother of Katherine Parr who we shall see as we head south

Coughton Court, home of the Throckmorton family for over 600 years and will be for at least the next 300. The property is held now by the National Trust but the family had a lease for the next 300 years. The Throckmortons’ are a Catholic family and over the centuries who have been subjected to all sorts of abuse, arrest and ignominies. They have been at the centre of plots against the Sovereign and there is even a Throckmorton plot against Elizabeth I. Bess Throckmorton is perhaps the most well know of the family, she was the court favourite of Elizabeth until she got married to Sir Walter Raleigh and got banished from court. Sir Walter Raleigh got himself executed and Bess was said to have carried his mummified head around with her for the rest of her life in a silk sack another 25 years. His head is in the room of consequences.

Coughton has some beautiful gardens and an ornamental lake, sheep with a curious dark brown mottled fleece graze in the meadows all around the place. Heading further south we come to Sudeley castle the home of Katherine Parr, the last wife of Henry VIII. This year is the 500th birthday of Katherine and they have some special plans for September which we will hope to attend. For now there are some special exhibitions of Katherine and her time. She now resst peacefully in the chapel in the grounds the only Queen of England buried on private property. It wasn’t always thus,she has been disturbed over the centuries and items taken from her person including a tooth and a lock of her hair. These items are on display in the special exhibition in the castle. The castle was destroyed in our civil war and lay derelict for 200 years until the Victorian era when it was restored to something approaching its former glory by Emma Dent. Her descendants own the castle now. We got to stand in the ante rooms that Katherine Parr would have known, there is a costumed figure of Lady Herbert, Katherine’s sister standing in these rooms that looks quite ghostly from the outside. Katherine now lies peacefully in the church amid the well kept gardens.