This is a question about Mary Seymour.
There is some information on your site about her. Alison Weir wrote in the Six wives of Henry the Eighth that she more than likely died in infancy. As someone else asked, why wasn't her death officially recorded then? Even if she did reach adulthood, her death wasn't recorded. Why not? Given the friendly relationship between Queen Mary I and Katherine Parr, (hence the namesake of Mary Seymour) it doesn't seem like she would be a target needing to live a secret life as someone had suggested. Queen Mary also enjoyed a warm relationship with Mary Seymour's aunt, and Queen Mary's step-mother, Jane Seymour.
Can you point me in the right direction about where to find more information?
General Curiosity.
Previous related thread:
http://queryblog.tudorhistory.org/2006/09/question-from-hayley-mary-seymour.html
5 comments:
I think we need to make the distinction between 'never recorded' and 'not known'.
We have no proof her death was never recorded. However, we don't know of a recorded death. It's a very different thing. New information is being uncovered all the time.
Mary Seymour is one of the many many women who have disappeared from the historical record. There may be information about her lying in plain sight - just no one has bothered to pay attention to it, yet.
Perhaps the household records of Katherine Parr and the Duchess of Suffolk could shed some light on her whereabouts.
The very fact that there are no recordings of her in adult life seems to suggest that she died in infancy. And deaths among infants were so common then that perhaps it just simply wasn't recorded or written about. Or, as kb says, there are so many new records coming to light all the time, and there are also so many records that have been lost at some point, that perhaps written record WAS made but we simply no longer have the records.
Bearing in mind how Katherine Suffolk moaned about the cost of keeping Mary and her servants I think if she had lived beyond infanthood someone, somewhere would have been moaning loudly about it
Yes, as Leanda has said, the records for her household with the Duchess appear to stop sometime around her 2nd birthday, which strongly suggests that she died. The Duchess' general household notes do continue after this but I suppose you could always go through, if you were desperately curious.
Joanna - Are the records available online?
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