Smart, beautiful and a fine stepmother, Katherine Parr was only 30 when she wed the obese and sickly king. Despite her youth, her intelligence came in handy – she was one of the few women of the time to have her words published – when she came mighty close to joining her two counterparts on the scaffold. "Katherine the Queen: The Remarkable Life of Katherine Parr, the Last Wife of Henry VIII," a lavishly illustrated new biography by Linda Porter, is the first recent biography to give the final queen her full due as yet another kingly wife who made herself a force to be reckoned with.
