by Deryn Lake
‘A pardon is come. God save the King,’ they shouted, and caps were thrown into the air and arms waved triumphantly.
‘By God’s passion,’ said Browne, ‘there will be a riot in a moment. What shall we do?’
He never forgot Somerset’s smile at that moment; it haunted him the rest of his days. ‘I will calm them,’ said the Duke and raising one hand he took a step forward. There was an instant hush as a thousand voices stopped simultaneously.
‘Citizens,’ called Ned, ‘be at peace, I pray you. There will be no pardon, but I am content to die as I am, in the knowledge that I have always served the King faithfully, for I have been most diligent about his Majesty in his affairs, both at home and abroad, and no less diligent in seeking the common commodity of the whole realm.’
Somewhere a woman sobbed and there was a tense silence. Then Somerset spoke again, forgiving his enemies and begging the pardon of any he might have offended. He looked once more at the ordinary folk.
‘Good people of England, the time has come for me to die and I once again require that you will keep yourselves still, lest through your tumult, you might frighten me. For albeit the spirit be willing and ready, the flesh is frail and wavering, and through your quietness, I shall be much more the quieter. God bless each and every one of you.’
He turned to the headsman. ‘Get it over quickly for God’s sake.’
‘And your forgiveness, my Lord?’
Edward gave the man a coin, and on the executioner’s instruction turned back his collar. ‘I pardon you all for my death,’ he said to the warden and the sheriffs, then he knelt but was forced to rise once more to remove his doublet which still covered his neck. Ned again went down on his knees, covering his face with his handkerchief. Then just as the words, ‘Lord Jesus, save me,’ came to his lips, the axe fell and it was over.
A solitary voice rose above the sound of weeping. ‘A blight on the Tudors for all that they have done. May they be barren stock and thus their line perish.’
Nobody moved and there was no arrest, for it was not possible to identify who had shouted. Only the cry of the wheeling gulls from the Thames broke the massive silence as they screamed out at the moment of Edward’s passing.
Epilogue
They came into the daylight like moles, their eyes blinking at the brightness, shuffling uncertainly, not quite sure what was expected of them.
Anne Seymour was first, walking stiffly, her beautiful face lined and drawn, her fall of red hair quite white. Behind her came Stephen Gardiner, the Bishop of Winchester, who had always looked gaunt and so had changed little. Then, like flowers feeling the precious sun for the first time, Jasper and Sylvanus Howard, rake-thin, with parchment faces, walked out on either side of an old grizzly. He had lived and survived, he was eighty years old, he was the most venerable of them all. Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk, was leaving the Tower of London a free man after six and a half years of imprisonment.
Heading the party who awaited them was the Queen of England herself. Short, blunt, with bad eyesight and a gruff voice, she had triumphed over everyone and taken the crown. Mary Tudor, the ill-treated daughter of Katharine of Aragon, had come into her birthright at last.
That poor spoiled boy, her half-brother, that nonsense of a person created by fawning courtiers and zealous tutors, had died when he was fifteen, in great pain and misery. And perhaps it had been better so, for King Edward was already showing signs of the cruelty and coldness that had so characterised his monstrous father.
But Mary had not achieved her rightful place without a struggle. Northumberland, the dictator who had killed Edward Seymour, had married his son Guildford Dudley to the little mouse Jane Grey and then had claimed that under the terms of King Edward’s will she was the new Queen of England. There had been fighting and bloodshed and, in a way, Ned had been avenged. For Northumberland and his son and Jane Grey, all three, had gone to the block for their upstart temerity in trying to take what was not lawfully theirs. And now it was over. Mary had triumphed. She stood by the gate of the Tower, repaying her debt to old friends. It was August 1553 and the new Queen was releasing the prisoners.
They came to where she waited, a small, sad, dowdy figure, and went on their knees to their saviour. And when Norfolk tried to rise again and felt pain in his ancient joints, it was the Queen herself who first assisted him, then passed him into the care of a dark-haired man who stood respectfully behind her.
‘Zachary,’ said the Duke, ‘my son. Oh my very dear child.’
Slowly, moving almost as if they were in a trance, the little group began to disperse: Anne Seymour with her old friend the Queen, arm-in-arm, Mary calling Anne ‘good gossip’ as she had done all those years ago; Zachary with his father and sons towards the barge which was to take them to Greenwich, where he would love and care for them and bring them back to strength, together with Emily, his new daughter, born to Cloverella exactly ten months after his return.
‘It is over,’ said the Duke simply. ‘I have been spared, to help my family prosper once more. Zachary, I want you to live in Norfolk with me, return to your roots. Will you do so?’
‘If my wife agrees, yes. There is nothing left for me here. I have seen too much evil, known too much hardship. All I want now is to help my boys grow strong and see them set out on their chosen paths in life.’
He hugged them close to him, two fine young men, their faces already beginning to glow from the freshness of the river breeze.
‘Then I shall pray,’ said the Duke, and there was silence while he and Zachary remembered a time long ago, when a wild-headed child had been taken to Kenninghall Castle on the night his mother had been burned as a witch.
‘She called you Zachary, didn’t she?’ he said now, smiling and recollecting.
The astrologer bent his dark head so that Norfolk could stroke it. ‘Yes, Lord Duke my father,’ he answered.
*
In the first sweet crispness of autumn Cloverella went alone to Wolff Hall, walking its empty corridors and gardens, listening to the silence, hearing the sound of herself echo and re-echo through the house that had once known so much laughter.
Then, having said farewell to it for ever, Zachary’s wife rode to Merlin’s Mound, just beyond the town of Marlborough, and there she tethered her mount and climbed to the top of the steep slope. Far below, the river Kennet sparkled and leapt with every golden light in Christendom.
‘It’s a sword,’ said Cloverella, ‘a jewelled sword.’
Was it fancy that a light voice answered, ‘No, it’s a ring. A golden wedding ring’, that a carefree laugh rang out, that a serious voice said, ‘What strange creatures you are’? That as she turned to go the river was the colour of wine in the dying sunlight and that the wind sang the word ‘Remember’?
Historical Note
About every famous person of the past there are always several schools of thought, in fact one could go so far as to say no two reference books interpret the facts in quite the same manner. Therefore, when making a study of characters from history, one is forced eventually to form one’s own conclusion based on the evidence presented.
The two contradictory stories about Jane Seymour, one that she sat on the King’s knee accepting his caresses with equanimity, the other that she adopted a highly moral tone when he sent her a gift of money, returning it at once, have so baffled historians that they tend to accept one or the other. Yet it seems possible that both situations could have arisen in the development of their relationship. That Jane became Henry’s mistress before they married is pure speculation but does make sense of the two apparently incompatible but well-documented accounts.
That Jane gave birth to Prince Edward by Caeserean section is not believed by all historians, some claiming that it was a rumour which was circulated at the time in order to discredit Henry VIII. The dangers of such an operation were then so great that for a husband to give consent for it to be undertaken was virtually to put a sentence of death upon the mother.
However, both Neville Williams and Robert Lacey state quite firmly that Jane was subjected to such an ordeal.
It is certain that Thomas Seymour was in love with Katherine Parr, stepped out of the picture when Henry VIII came on the scene, but married her secretly very soon after Henry’s death. What is not so clear is his behaviour with Elizabeth at this time. One theory, believed by many, is that he proposed to Elizabeth before Katherine Parr and only turned his attentions back to his former love when Elizabeth refused him. The chief evidence for this lies in letters supposedly written by Elizabeth and Thomas, published by an Italian called Gregorio Leti in his Vita di Elizabetta. No trace of the originals exists and other letters reproduced by this author are extremely dubious. In fact Neville Williams in his biography of Elizabeth I states categorically that Elizabeth’s letter ‘is undoubtedly a forgery of Leti’s’.
That Thomas was fascinated by Elizabeth is beyond dispute but that he actually proposed to her in the forlorn hope that the Council would permit him to marry a thirteen-year-old princess in line for the throne is hard to believe. It is far more likely that on the King’s death he immediately resumed his courtship of Katherine, now a very wealthy widow of high station. Elizabeth’s deposition at the time of his arrest states that Katherine Ashley said Thomas, ‘would have had me [i.e. Elizabeth] before the Queen’. This merely repeats a remark of Kat’s made at the time when she, bribed by the Admiral, was attempting to encourage Elizabeth to marry him. Further, if Elizabeth had really written a letter refusing Thomas’s proposal of marriage, would she not now have produced a copy of it to clear her name?
It has become fashionable for all modern historians to regard Elizabeth’s refusal to marry either as ‘emotional, the result of the extraordinary strains of her childhood’, or as the manifestation of a fear that any husband might diminish her power.
Yet her father’s lifelong quest was to produce an heir and Elizabeth’s Council certainly believed that an heir to the throne would have strengthened the Queen’s position enormously. The case that Elizabeth I suffered from testicular feminisation is brilliantly presented in a paper by Professor Bakan, who states, ‘Recent advances in the understanding of the process of sexual differentiation and the description of the testicular feminisation syndrome justify a reconsideration of the value of the evidence of her contemporaries that Elizabeth’s refusal to marry was based on her knowledge of a physical defect’.
Another well-argued article by Robert Greenblatt entitled The Virgin Queen, which appeared in the British Journal of Sexual Medicine in 1986 asks the pertinent question, ‘What did Essex mean when, railing against Elizabeth, he said, “her conditions are as crooked as her carcass”?’ The article goes further, quoting Sir Walter Raleigh: ‘Her minions were not so happy as vulgar judgements thought them, being frequently commanded to un-comely and sometimes unnatural employment.’ A strange remark to say the least! Finally, it must be remembered the times in which Elizabeth lived. She was a Tudor Queen of England and twentieth-century views that she kept her virgin status for twentieth-century psychological reasons are not really relevant.
The opinion that Edward Seymour, though a proud and ambitious man, had the best interests of the country at heart is shared by most historians, but it is piquant to note that the Good Duke, for all his efforts, ended buried between the headless corpses of Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard, his enemy the Duke of Northumberland being put in beside him during the following year!
Mary, the child born to Katherine Parr and Thomas Seymour, is generally considered to have died in childhood. Following the execution of her father, the baby was sent to the Protector’s household at Syon House and then on to the Duchess of Suffolk’s establishment. It is from there that history loses trace of her, though Agnes Strickland in Lives of the Queens of England presents a plausible case for Mary having survived to womanhood, marrying Sir Edward Bushel by whom she had a daughter. A painting of a solemn little girl, said to be Mary Seymour, hangs in the nursery suite of Sudeley Castle to this day.
The site of the original Wolff Hall probably lies between the present Wolfhall Manor, a dilapidated and somewhat dispiriting place, and the house known locally as the Laundry. Nobody is quite sure. Parts of the present house are indeed very old but unlike Blickling Hall and Hever Castle, childhood homes of Anne Boleyn, time and lack of care have been allowed to erase the birthplace of Jane Seymour.
Sudeley Castle, however, where Katherine and Thomas lived and had their child, stands restored and proud in its beautiful parkland, while in the chapel in the grounds the mortal remains of Katherine Parr lie in peace.
Acknowledgements
My thanks are due to several people: Nicholas Fogg and Michael Gray who took me to Merlin’s Mound on one of the few hot days of 1987, Frances and Ken Ivens who made Marlborough such fun, Dominic Stoker with whom I first saw Stonehenge, Stephen Weekes who invited me to Penhow Castle and loaned me precious books about the Seymours, Wendy Davies and Iris Morgan who arranged my visit to and conducted me round Sudeley Castle on one of the few hot days of 1988! Bob Howell, who let me stay in his home in the converted stables of Wolfhall Manor, and Patricia Keen, upon whose well researched painting of the original Wolff Hall, Stephen Bradbury based his cover illustration. Thanks, too, to those who make my life easier — Anna Foinette, Geoffrey Glassborow, Peter Jeffrey of Barclays Bank, Erika Lock and Shirley Russell.
Bibliography
Henry VIII, John Bowle
The Chronicle of Calais, The Camden Society
The Channel, Shirley Harrison
Henry VIII and His Wives, Walter Jerrold
The Life and Times of Henry VIII, Robert Lacey
The Seymour Family, A. Audrey Locke
Annals of the Seymours, H. St Maur
Ordeal by Ambition, William Seymour
Lives of the Queens of England, Agnes Strickland
Elizabeth I, Neville Williams
Henry VIII and His Court, Neville Williams