by John Guy
Born into a Hertfordshire gentry family in 1501, Denny had first studied under a legendary grammarian, William Lily, at St Paul’s School before progressing to St John’s College. Butts was a Norfolk man who had attended Gonville and Caius College, barely a hundred yards from St John’s, where he had stayed until he married a gentlewoman in Mary’s household and was summoned to Court as a royal physician. For twenty years he had been a patron of preachers and scholars with links to Cromwell and Cranmer, acclaimed by his admirers as ‘Maecenas’ and ‘master’.34
A Fellow of Denny’s college and a client of Butts, John Cheke had made his name at Cambridge as another leading champion of the Renaissance and its values by devising a new system for pronouncing classical Greek that for the first time made it fully intelligible. The trail does not end there, because Cheke was Roger Ascham’s tutor, a rising star among the new intellectual elite whom Thomas More’s eldest daughter, Margaret, had attempted in vain to recruit as a tutor for her own children.35
Before long, Ascham would be lobbying to secure an appointment for himself as Elizabeth’s schoolmaster, which he believed would guarantee his position in the pantheon of scholars. But at first, Cheke selected a younger man, one of Ascham’s own pupils, William Grindal, whose appointment Henry confirmed in October 1544.36
By then, the king had returned from France. On his homecoming, his two younger children’s households were once more detached from Katherine Parr’s and sent back to Hertfordshire. Circling in an orbit based on Ashridge, Hatfield, Hertford and Hunsdon, Elizabeth’s establishment became a satellite of her half-brother’s in reality rather than just in theory, and would remain so until Henry’s death.37 It was Mary, now almost thirty, who stayed largely at Court, where she and the queen continued to draw down prodigious quantities of fabric from the Whitehall silk store.38 Edward did his best to keep in touch with his elder sister, writing her letters and regularly exchanging gifts and other small tokens of affection.39 But although Mary regularly returned gifts, including a clock, she rarely wrote him letters. To Elizabeth she did not write at all.
Under Grindal’s direction, Elizabeth advanced by leaps and bounds, getting to grips with Latin and starting on Greek.40 She also became fluent in French, taught by Belmain—a teacher she shared with Edward—and was continuing her Italian, most likely now as a pupil of Giovanni Battista Castiglione, who had fought with Henry’s troops in France in 1544 and returned with them to England.41
But Henry never allowed his youngest daughter to stray far from the limits Vives had set for her half-sister when he had urged that she should hear and speak only ‘what pertains to the fear of God’. The purpose of educating a woman, the king still believed, was to increase her feminine virtue, not to equip her to rule, which was to be her brother’s work. This explains why the tasks her tutors set for her—rather than original compositions or extempore speeches—were translations of texts to be given as New Year’s gifts to her father, stepmother, and half-brother.
Of these translations, the most proficient is of a mystical religious poem, The Mirror or Glass of the Sinful Soul by Margaret of Angoulême, the devoutly evangelical sister of Francis I. Elizabeth turned the poem, a meditation by a tormented sinner on the nature of God’s redemptive love, into English prose for her stepmother as a New Year’s gift for 1545, sending it with a letter and an elaborate needlework cover embroidered by herself.42
Since the original poem includes metaphors of love, spiritual and physical, that to modern ears can appear to border on the incestuous, it is sometimes said that Elizabeth’s choice of copy text reflects a congenital distaste for matrimony on her part. In reality, little was unusual about her selection. Her great-grandmother, Margaret Beaufort, had translated an equally disturbing text on the filthiness and misery of human beings and the joys of Paradise entitled The Mirror of Gold for the Sinful Soul.43 The aim was to combine training in translation with a religious exercise on a penitential theme. Texts of this nature were routinely given as exercises to young aristocratic women. Elizabeth’s choice does not necessarily imply anything about her personal opinions.
Henry died in the early hours of Friday, 28 January 1547, leaving a will that reaffirmed the terms of the Third Act of Succession and made the inheritance of Mary and Elizabeth strictly conditional. Each would be excluded from the throne if she married without the ‘assent and consent’ of those privy councillors he had now named, or as many of them as were still living.44
The dying king had never shaken off his conviction that females in the succession were a dangerous risk.45 He spelled out what was to happen if either of his daughters married without permission—she would lose her place. And if both were disqualified, then the throne would pass, in turn, to the heirs of his nieces, the Ladies Frances and Eleanor Brandon, the daughters of his younger sister, Mary, who had been Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk’s third wife.46
Henry appointed sixteen privy councillors to govern in his son’s name until he was 18. Twelve other individuals were to assist and be ‘of counsel’ to them. The copious amount of small print explaining precisely how this arrangement was meant to work, ensuring stability and a political consensus during the years of Edward’s minority, shows just how far Henry was attempting to rule from beyond the grave.
The will made no provision for the appointment of a single person to act as a Lord Protector, quite the opposite. Since, however, Henry entrusted his will to the safekeeping of his erstwhile brother-in-law, Edward Seymour, he was clearly someone whom the old king expected to exercise leadership in the new reign.47
Many of Henry’s wishes would quickly be set aside. Edward Seymour, although created Duke of Somerset and given a generous grant of lands, was dissatisfied. On 12 March, he broke the will after a series of backstairs manoeuvres masterminded by his ally Sir William Paget. By a menacing combination of inducements and threats, a majority of Edward’s new councillors were inveigled into making Somerset Lord Protector and Governor of the King’s Person. A grant of letters patent gave the duke near-sovereign powers as regent until Edward was 18.48
Over the next two years, Somerset would succeed in alienating the very same men whom Henry had tried to shape into a consensus.49 His fellow privy councillors envisaged that, as Protector, the duke would consult them about key policy decisions and not attempt to govern as if he were himself the king. Instead, he made critical decisions about entering into wars with Scotland and France, about domestic security and the economy in England and Ireland, and about the advance of the Protestant Reformation in ways that his fellow councillors considered to be arbitrary and ill-informed.
But Somerset’s nemesis was his younger brother, Thomas Seymour, who jealously coveted the post of Governor of the King’s Person.50 Although made Lord Admiral and given a barony as Lord Seymour of Sudeley, Seymour was not so easily bought off. Handsome, dashing and reckless, his consuming ambition made him a highly disruptive force.51
Aiming at nothing less than to control the king and bind himself into the royal family, Seymour sought first to persuade his brother to allow him to marry Mary.52 When he was rebuffed, he began to milk his Court connections ruthlessly. A gentleman of the king’s Privy Chamber and on familiar terms with John Cheke and several of Edward’s body servants, he had the potential to cause dissension from the outset. He even had a duplicate key to every door in the palace of Whitehall.53
Seymour set about suborning the young king, telling him that ‘Ye are a beggarly king, ye have no money to play or to give’ and sending him tidy sums with which to supplement the meagre allocations to his privy purse.54 This clearly struck a chord with Edward. As he ruefully reflected, ‘My uncle of Somerset dealeth very hardly with me and keepeth me so straight that I cannot have money at my will, but my Lord Admiral both sends me money and gives me money.’55
Seymour’s ace of trumps was his relationship with Katherine Parr. With unseemly haste, he paid court to the Dowager Queen, who was soon admitting him to her Presence Chamber e
very morning at 7 a.m. at her dower houses at Chelsea and Hanworth in Middlesex. He also put out feelers to Edward and Mary, seeking their goodwill towards the marriage.
Mary was no longer at Court. She had been granted lands in Norfolk, Suffolk and Essex worth £3,000 a year together with the royal manors of Hunsdon and New Hall as part of the settlement of her father’s will and was living mainly at New Hall.56 Her reaction to what she disparagingly called Seymour’s ‘strange news’ was cold. It was surely up to Katherine to decide, she replied. Her own opinion hardly mattered. But ‘if the remembrance of the King’s Majesty my father (whose soul God pardon) will not suffer her to grant your suit, I am nothing able to persuade her to forget the loss of him, who is as yet very ripe in my own remembrance.’57
Edward did write a letter of encouragement to Katherine, which, if read at face value, makes it appear that he had personally instigated the proposed marriage. Except it turns out that the letter had all along been dictated by Seymour.58
Besides, by the time Edward’s letter was sent out on 25 June 1547, the wedding had already taken place. Katherine was pregnant early in 1548, and it would not be long before Seymour would be chortling with delight at the news that ‘my little man’—he, like the old king, was wholly confident of a son—had been felt ‘shaking his head’ in her womb.59
The true extent of Seymour’s ambition was now revealed. A week before Somerset was sworn in as Lord Protector, Katherine had been granted custody of Elizabeth, who was brought by Kat Ashley—as she was known since her marriage—from Hatfield to Chelsea in the middle of March.60 Despite the fact that Lady Troy was still technically in charge of Elizabeth’s establishment,61 Kat had somehow contrived to replace her as Elizabeth’s governess shortly before the old king died.62
Katherine, Seymour and Kat were in cahoots, making it easy for Seymour to merge the two households, their staffs and budgets. It would not be much more than another year before Lady Troy, who thus far had been accustomed to sleep on a pallet in Elizabeth’s bedchamber, was displaced and pensioned off, ostensibly on the grounds that the bedchamber at Chelsea was too small.63 Blanche Parry briefly replaced her on the pallet, but was soon ousted from it by Kat, who ‘could not abide to have nobody [sic] lie there, but only herself’.64
Not content with this, Seymour purchased the guardianship of Lady Jane Grey, the eldest surviving child of Frances Brandon and so the first residuary legatee to the throne by the terms of Henry’s will. Jane’s father, Henry Grey, Marquis of Dorset, agreed to the unusual bargain after Seymour promised him in almost as many words that the 10-year-old girl would one day marry Edward.65
But when Seymour moved in at Chelsea, he began flirting with Elizabeth, who was nearly 14 and sexually aware. This had not been part of the plan. As Kat later confessed under interrogation, with Lady Troy gone from the pallet, he would visit Elizabeth in her bedchamber early in the mornings, sometimes before she had risen or was dressed. ‘And if she were up, he would bid her good morrow and ask how she did, and strike her upon the back or on the buttocks familiarly, and so go forth through his lodgings. … And if she were in her bed, he would open the curtains and bid her good morrow, and make as though he would come at her. And she would go further in the bed, so that he could not come at her.’66
When one morning he tried to kiss Elizabeth, Kat spotted him, and ‘bade him go away for shame.’ Katherine at first seemed to condone her husband’s actions, perhaps considering them harmless or perhaps in a naive attempt to control them, since at Hanworth she twice came with him into the chamber early in the morning and they tickled Elizabeth in bed together. A notorious incident took place in the garden at Hanworth, when Katherine and Seymour frolicked with Elizabeth and ‘cut her gown in[to] a hundred pieces, being black cloth’. Kat severely rebuked Elizabeth for this unseemly behaviour, but she answered, ‘I could not do withal, for the queen held me while the Lord Admiral cut it.’67
Worse, the Dowager Queen later told Kat one day at Hanworth that Seymour had chanced to look in at a gallery window and seen Elizabeth with her arms around another man’s neck. Kat was shocked. But who could this man be?68
Kat confronted Elizabeth, ‘who denied it weeping’. Kat realized she was telling the truth, ‘for there came no man, but Grindal.’ The mention of Elizabeth’s schoolmaster dates the episode to before the end of January 1548, when he died of the plague. Kat thought the incident proved that Katherine had become ‘jealous’ of the friendship between her husband and stepdaughter. She had ‘feigned’ the story, Kat surmised, to make sure that a closer watch was kept on Elizabeth.69
FIGURE 10 Elizabeth wrote this letter in her finest italic script to her stepmother, Katherine Parr, as soon as she arrived at Sir Anthony Denny’s house at Cheshunt in May 1548, where she was sent to escape the scandal caused by rumours of her relationship with Sir Thomas Seymour.
Finally, Katherine, realizing the situation was fast slipping out of her control, sent Elizabeth away. The date has often been disputed, but Kat remembered it was in ‘the week after Whitsuntide’, i.e. the week beginning 20 May 1548.70 The teenager was taken back to Hertfordshire under a cloud, not at first to Hatfield, but to Cheshunt where the Dennys lived. Arriving on a Saturday, Elizabeth wrote a letter to her stepmother in her finest italic hand (see Figure 10). At their parting, Katherine had warned her of the danger to her reputation. ‘Truly I was replete with sorrow to depart from your highness’, Elizabeth responded. ‘And albeit I answered little, I weighed it more deeper when you said you would warn me of all evils that you should hear of me.’71
Katherine clearly feared a sex scandal could have lethal consequences. It had not helped that Seymour had insisted on riding with Elizabeth on the first stage of her journey from Chelsea in full public gaze.72
Whether Elizabeth had a teenage crush on Seymour is a secret she took with her to the grave. John Ashley warned his wife that ‘the Lady Elizabeth did bear some affection to my Lord Admiral. For he did mark that when anybody did talk well of my Lord Admiral, she seemed to be well pleased therewith, and sometime she would blush when he were spoken of.’73
A month or so after Elizabeth’s departure, Katherine herself left Chelsea, attended by Jane Grey, for her husband’s castle of Sudeley in Gloucestershire. With the risk of plague still present, she wished to have her baby in the safety of the countryside. She gave birth to a healthy daughter on 30 August, but died of puerperal fever six days later despite her physician’s strenuous efforts to save her life. The chief mourner at her funeral, the first Protestant royal funeral in English history, was Jane.
Now Seymour’s ambition would be his undoing. He approached Thomas Parry, Elizabeth’s cofferer (i.e. chief accountant), a broad-faced Welshman who had first been employed by Thomas Cromwell during the Dissolution of the Monasteries, with a view to finding out the extent of her wealth. Utterly unscrupulous, Seymour was also attempting to marry Mary even as he pitched his suit to marry Elizabeth.74 As his Court agent, William Wightman, confided to one of Katherine Parr’s cousins at Sudeley, his ‘desire of a kingdom knoweth no kindred.’75
At 8 p.m. on Thursday, 17 January 1549, Seymour was arrested and the interrogations swiftly followed. Somerset sent two of Katherine Parr’s most senior officials, Sir Robert Tyrwhit, her comptroller, and Sir Walter Buckler, her secretary, to take immediate control of Elizabeth’s household. And he ordered Sir Robert, whose wife, one of Katherine’s long-standing attendants, had first-hand knowledge of many of the incidents at Chelsea and Hanworth, to get to the truth.
Tyrwhit, however, despite repeated attempts to secure a confession, could not browbeat Elizabeth. She barracked him so successfully, he was forced to admire her pluck. ‘I do assure your grace’, he reported back to the Protector, ‘she hath a very good wit, and nothing is gotten of her, but by great policy.’76
Kat Ashley and Parry were sent to the Tower, where they quickly babbled what they knew—or most of it. The crux was whether Elizabeth, advised by Kat, had entertained S
eymour’s suit. Tyrwhit was incensed by the answers he got to this question.77 Elizabeth adamantly insisted that Kat had never urged her to marry Seymour after Katherine Parr’s death—other, that is, than with the Council’s consent. Tyrwhit knew that this was almost certainly a lie. But no one could be broken on the point. In her own interrogation, Kat confessed that she had asked Elizabeth if she would marry Seymour now that he was free again. When she had replied ‘Nay’, Kat claimed to have gone on to say, ‘I know you would not refuse him if the Council would be content therein.’78 But all Elizabeth’s servants used almost exactly the same phrase, chanting it like a mantra.79 It seemed quite incredible that they were all experts on the precise wording of Henry’s will.
Elizabeth survived along with her servants, including Kat, but she was a changed woman. It had been a searing experience, the moment she was thrust into adulthood. She was shocked by rumours that she was pregnant by Seymour and complained indignantly to Somerset. Such ‘shameful slanders’, she fumed, be ‘greatly both against my honour and honesty, which above all other things I esteem.’80
Seymour was charged with plotting to seize Edward and take him ‘into [his] own hands and custody’ and with attempting to marry Elizabeth.81 On 25 February, a bill of attainder was introduced into Parliament in which his offences were declared to be high treason. On 5 March, the bill passed and Seymour was executed on Tower Hill on the 20th.
What few had predicted was that Seymour’s fall would become the prelude to the dismantling of the Protectorate itself. Increasingly loathed by his colleagues in the Privy Council for his autocratic methods, Somerset was unable to react quickly enough when confronted by a threatening run of popular ‘stirs’ and uprisings across the southern and eastern counties of England in the spring and summer of 1549. His dithering led to a coup. Articles of impeachment accused him of governing ineffectively and of failing to consult his colleagues, or else of summoning them only occasionally and ‘for the name’s sake’ to rubber stamp decisions he had taken already.82