She Who Lived

This is one of the gauge swatches for Catherine Parr. I'd show you some of the other gauge swatches, but this yarn -- a deep, heathery pine green Cascade 220 -- tends to photograph as one giant black patch. The above picture is the only one that shows the stitchwork at all, and I had to really monkey with the photo settings to get it to this point.

In real life, this yarn has an almost luminous quality. The green is lush and deep with strong blue undertones. There are hints of deep gold and grey and blue and silvery green in the heathering. Where other knitters may be entranced by the flash and sizzle of a variegated yarn, this yarn exhibits the exact characteristics that make me all swoony over solids. The color is enchanting and subtle and makes me think of standing under the leaf canopy in a dense, quiet summer forest. Maybe I'm just a plain jane, but when a solid is this appealing, I'll take a solid any day.

It seems a fitting yarn for a sweater named after Catherine Parr. Just as the camera treats this yarn as a two-dimensional and textureless, history has dismissed Catherine as "the wife who nursed Henry through his final illness." But there was so much more to her than that. Henry was her third husband, but not her last. My favorite story about her involves her second husband, an aging warrior aristocrat whose lands were in a strategically important stretch of English ground.

As I understand the story, a monk in this neighborhood arranged to have a saint's body exhumed to display the purity of the corpse. At a time when monasteries were being torn down brick by brick to undercut the Catholic church's hold over the people, this bordered on an act of treason. The body was brought out and was described by witnesses to be miraculously preserved and sweet-smelling. People from the area rallied under the saint's banner, and civil war was imminent. Armies were mustered, battles fought. Things looked pretty grim, all because of a saint with a corpse that had not decomposed.

Or had it? Catherine discovered that the body was not that of the saint, but of a village girl who had died quite recently. She found the girl's grieiving mother and brought her to chapel to venerate the "saint." When the mother identified her daughter's body in the saint's place, the rebellion fell apart. Henry later credited Catherine with saving his kingdom. These are not the acts of a mere nursemaid married only to provide fresh bandages during a final illness.

Catherine was a complex woman, beautiful without being dramatic or arrogant, and sometimes overlooked by her peers in favor of ladies with more sparkle or flair. She had a warm and sturdy nature and a quick intellect, and she wasn't afraid to speak up, a fact which almost cost her her life. Yes, that's right, Henry nearly ordered her arrest and death for arguing church doctrine with him. Catherine's enemies used her intellect and her piety against her and accused her of both treason and heresy, but she managed to outwit them and preserve her pretty neck. Smart? Yep. You bet. You have to be pretty smart to outlive a king who thought little of beheading his wives for political gain and who had all but placed the head of his sixth wife on the chopping block.

So, my green yarn may not dazzle, but like Catherine, it's got hidden depths. Look closely, and you might just find that there's more there than you first realized. You might just see the kind of quiet beauty that can outlive a bloodthirsty king.