Mary Seymour, born at her father’s country seat, Sudeley Castle in Gloucestershire, was the only daughter of Thomas Seymour, Baron Seymour of Sudeley, and Katherine Parr, widow of Henry VIII of England.
Background
Complications from Mary"s birth would claim the life of her mother on 5 September 1548, and her father was executed less than a year later for treason against Edward VI. In 1549, the Parliament of England passed an Acting (3 & 4 Edw 6 C A P XIV) removing the attainder placed on her father from Mary, but his lands remained property of the Crown. As her mother"s wealth was left entirely to her father and later confiscated by the Crown, Mary was left a destitute orphan in the care of Katherine Willoughby, Duchess of Suffolk, who appears to have resented this imposition.
Career
After 1550 Mary disappears from historical record completely, and no claim was ever made on her father"s meagre estate, leading to the conclusion that she did not live past the age of two. The problem with this theory is that Mary would have been aged six at the time. There was reference to "Mary" found in old Elizabethan texts of "The Late Queen"s heir." However, this could be various other women.
Historian South. Joy states that "Mary definitely lived past the age of 10, but after that little is known."
A more modern theory, from Linda Porter, author of a 2010 biography on Katherine Parr, suggests that a 1573 Latin book of poems and epitaphs written by John Parkhurst, Katherine Parr’s chaplain, contains the following reference to Mary:
I whom at the cost
Of her own life
My queenly mother
Bore with the pangs of labour
Sleep under this marble
An unfit traveller.
If Death had given me to live longer
That Heavenly courageous nature
Would have lived again in medical Now, whoever
You are, fare thee well
Because I cannot speak any more, this stone
Is a memorial to my brief life
Porter suggested that this was an epitaph written by Parkhurst on the occasion of Mary"s death, around the age of two.
Porter further speculates that Mary is buried in Lincolnshire, near Grimsthorpe, the estate owned by the Duchess of Suffolk, "where she had lived as an unwelcome burden for most of her short, sad life."
The story The Red Queen"s Daughter by Jacqueline Kolosov centres around Mary Seymour, and speculates a life in which she never marries, and becomes lady-in-waiting to Queen Elizabeth I.
The novel The Stolen One by Suzanne Crowley states that Mary survived and was raised by a "witch" in the English countryside.
Membership
Victorian author Agnes Strickland claimed, in her biography of Katherine Parr, that Mary Seymour did survive to adulthood, and in fact married Sir Edward Bushel, a member of the household of Queen Anne of Denmark, consort to King James VI of Scotland and I of England.