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1530, that Tunstall would outlive her daughter by eleven years. He was, by then, already over fifty years old.
    Tunstall was illegitimate at birth, although his parents later married and the irregular circumstances of his background were never held against him. The connection with the Parrs was that he and Katherine’s father shared a grandmother (Alice Tunstall), as well as a northern background. Like his cousin, Tunstall was an engaging man who learned to thread his way through unpredictable times, but he rose to far greater prominence. An outstanding scholar and mathematician, he had been educated in England, spending time at both Oxford and Cambridge, before a six-year spell at the University of Padua in Italy, from which he received two degrees. His Church career began in 1505, the year after he returned to England. He was not ordained until four years later, by which time he had come to the attention of the Archbishop of Canterbury, William Warham, who sponsored his early advancement and brought him to court. He was also close to Wolsey, Henry VIII’s chief minister, who recognized in this urbane, polished man the potential to serve his country well in diplomacy. Such confidence was not misplaced, and at the time of Sir Thomas Parr’s death Tunstall had only recently returned from a mission to Burgundy, where he had met the future Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V. The knowledge that this well-connected kinsman could assist his wife and children must have been a comfort to Sir Thomas as he lay dying in the autumn of 1517.
    In both the ecclesiastical and international spheres, Cuthbert Tunstall was already an influential person when Katherine Parr lost her father. But it was his distinction as a humanist, hisreputation for virtue and intellect, and the circle of friends he had known for many years that were even more important to her upbringing. He was close to all the great names of English humanism in the early sixteenth century: to Thomas More, John Colet, William Grocyn and Thomas Linacre and, on the wider European stage, to Erasmus. The Dutch thinker, so greatly revered by his contemporaries, admired Tunstall’s modesty, scholarship and charm – the latter quality apparently one that the Parrs and their relatives possessed to a notable degree. Tunstall helped Erasmus in the preparation of the second edition of his Greek Testament, with its Latin translation and notes. When it appeared in March 1519, he wrote to Erasmus: ‘You have opened the sources of Greek learning to our age, and the splendour of your achievement has for ever thrown into the shade the work of earlier scholars as the rising sun blots out the stars.’ 5
    And there was no shortage of approbation for Tunstall himself, particularly from Thomas More, who wrote of him in the introduction to Utopia : ‘his virtue and learning be greater and of more excellency than I am able to praise them’. Almost twenty years after the publication of what is perhaps the best known of all humanist writings, More composed the inscription for his own tomb. By then, he anticipated the likely outcome of the stand he was taking against Henry VIII and he also knew that his old friend had made the decision to side with the king. Yet he wrote of his association movingly, describing Tunstall as ‘then bishop of London, but soon after of Durham . . . than whom the world contains today scarcely anyone more learned, sagacious or good’. 6
    Tunstall also seems to have had a genuine fondness for children and an interest in their progress. ‘How great is the joy of a father,’ he wrote, ‘when his little ones recognize him and come to him with smiles, when in their first attempts to speak they utter ridiculous sounds in their effort to mimic our words . . .’ Perhaps it was his interest in children, as well as his position in the Church, which caused him to be chosen to deliver the Latin oration, In Praise of Matrimony , at the betrothal of thetwo-and-a-half-year-old