Earlier this year a portrait at Lambeth Palace, the London residence of the Archbishop of Canterbury, which was thought to be of Catherine Parr, Henry VIII’s sixth and final (and thus luckiest) wife, was identified as actually being of his first Queen, the much-loved Catherine of Aragon, as history calls her. (See the portrait at http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2013/jan/24/henry-viii-catherine-aragon-portrait.)
If one compares the portrait with ones assuredly of Catherine Parr, one can see why there was a mix-up — the two Queens were vary much alike. They were also alike in being kind, pious, intelligent women. Perhaps this is one reason Henry was attracted to the widow Catherine (who had been twice married, and would marry again after Henry’s death). Perhaps he was haunted by the memory of his first wife, whom he had treated so appallingly — although he never lost affection for her — and was unconsciously searching for a kind of reincarnation of her, after his disastrous marriages of lust to Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard, punctuated by his intended marriage of lust to Anne of Cleves. (Henry became betrothed to Anne without having met her, after being persuaded by his chief minister, Thomas Cromwell, that she was eminently lustworthy — a deceit sustained by his being shown “enhanced” portraits of her  — only to discover when she arrived in England to marry him that she was such a mega-antidote to lust that he was never able to consummate the marriage.)
Ironically, it would have been better from a Catholic point of view if Queen Catherine Parr had been the Wicked Witch of the West, because she was not only kind and loving to all her step-children, Mary, Edward and Elizabeth, but she was a convinced Protestant with considerable religious knowledge. She wrote two devotional books, and was a major force behind the translation into English by several excellent scholars of Erasmus’ Latin paraphrases of the New Testament — and she herself did some of the translating. Mary of course stayed firmly Catholic, but had it not been for Catherine’s virtues Elizabeth, who was almost ten when her father and Catherine married, might have drifted to Catholicism. After all, Elizabeth could hardly have had unreserved respect for her father’s artificially concocted, personalised new Church for England when she knew not only that it had originated in his scrotum, as an effect of his lust, but that the arrogance and self-righteousness which led him to make himself Supreme Head of his Church were the same arrogance and self-righteousness as ultimately led to his beheading her mother. Had Elizabeth become Catholic in the religiously tumultous 1540s, how different the history of England and of Europe would have been from 1558, when she became Queen! And how different, too, the history of Ireland, and Ireland’s influence on the world, might have been if, as is imaginable, the Irish become Protestant to differentiate themselves from the Catholic English, and had as much an influence on the world as they have had, except to the advancement of Protestantism rather than Catholicism!