Whilst the preparations for war thus went busily forward on all sides, with Chantonnay in England and Thomas Seymour in Germany and Flanders arranging military details of arms, levies, and stores, and the Emperor already clamouring constantly for prompt English subsidies and contingents against his enemies, Henry, full of importance and self-satisfaction at his position, contracted the only one of his marriages which was not promoted by a political intrigue, although at the time it was effected it was doubtless looked upon as favouring the Catholic party. Certainly no lady of the Court enjoyed a more blameless reputation than Katharine Lady Latimer, upon whom the King now cast his eyes. A daughter of the great and wealthy house of Parr of Kendal, allied to the royal blood in no very distant degree, and related to most of the higher nobility of England, she was, so far as descent was concerned, quite as worthy to be the wife of a king as the unfortunate daughters of the house of Howard. Her brother, Lord Parr, soon to be created Earl of Essex and Marquis of Northampton, a favourite courtier of the King and a very splendid magnate,[233] had been one of the chief enemies of Cromwell; who had in his last days usurped the ancient earldom which Parr had claimed in right of his Bourchier wife, whilst Katharine's second husband, Neville Lord Latimer, had been so strong a Catholic as to have risked his great possessions, as well as his head, by joining the rising in the North that had assumed the name of the Pilgrimage of Grace and had been mainly directed against Cromwell's measures. She was, moreover, closely related to the Throckmortons, the stoutly Catholic family whose chief, Sir George, Cromwell had despoiled and imprisoned until the intrigue already related drove the minister from power in June 1540, with the mysterious support, so it is asserted, of Katharine Lady Latimer herself, though the evidence of it is not very convincing.[234]