Katherine the Queen: The Remarkable Life of Katherine Parr

by Linda Porter

  Jane was based at Seymour Place, where her life seems to have been happy and straightforward. She was just ten years old, small and slight, but with the Tudor colouring of reddish hair and pale skin. The tradition that she was a priggish, serious little girl ill-treated by her parents and cast out into the care of Katherine Parr is part of the centuries-old Protestant hagiography of Jane. A recent biography of Jane and her sisters paints a more balanced picture.2 Certainly clever and committed to her studies, she was to grow into a strong-minded young woman of considerable intellect, whose reformist ideas were fully in keeping with those of her parents, especially her father, Henry Grey, who was viewed as a radical in his time. Katherine Parr nurtured Jane’s belief through her own example, but she did not create the Protestant martyr of history; the groundwork for Jane’s developing personality had been laid at home, in Bradgate, her father’s country seat in Leicestershire.

  Life at the lord admiral’s impressive London dwelling brought Jane closer to the most influential people in England, but, though no doubt aware of her status, she was probably too young to realize that opportunity can also breed danger. We actually know very little about the daily pattern of her existence, or the details of her schooling at this time. She seems to have adapted well to the separation from her friends and sisters and to have been genuinely fond of her guardian and his wife. Whether she held any warm feelings for the Lady Elizabeth, four years her senior, and closer to the throne, is another matter.

  The difference in their age, coupled with the fact that Elizabeth spent most of her time with the queen at Chelsea and Hanworth, suggests that the cousins were not close. They do not appear to have shared lessons. No record of their opinions of each other, no letters exchanged or conversations held, have survived. This silence can, perhaps, be attributed to the inevitable loss of evidence with the passage of time. But it may also indicate something more. Elizabeth was very conscious of who she was, the daughter of Henry VIII and second in line to the throne. Her childhood had been more insecure than Jane’s and, though she was a wealthy young woman, she was still illegitimate in the eyes of the law. Katherine Parr had been her stepmother for four years and, though they had not lived together for all that time, they had formed a close bond. Elizabeth may not have relished sharing her attention with a distant relative whom she hardly knew. Whether she heard talk of Thomas Seymour’s scheme to marry Jane to Edward VI when they were both of a suitable age must remain a matter of speculation, but had she been aware of the plan it would surely not have endeared Jane to her.

  Elizabeth had arrived to take up residence with Katherine, bringing her own servants and household, many of whom had been with her for years. Hers was an establishment within that of the queen and Seymour. Closest of all were Elizabeth’s governess, Katherine (Kat) Ashley, Ashley’s husband, John, and Thomas Parry, the cofferer, who was responsible for managing Elizabeth’s finances. None of these was a stranger to the queen or, indeed, her husband, and the intention was that Elizabeth’s personal life would be more secure and dependable under the protection of Katherine Parr. Her business affairs (for, like her half-sister, Mary, Elizabeth was essentially a business in her own right) would continue to be managed separately. The terms of the settlement on both sisters in Henry VIII’s will were clear and the Privy Council was entrusted to carry them out carefully. Domestic arrangements were another matter, and Katherine seemed the ideal person to direct the young lady’s continuing education and preparation, presumably, for the marriage market.

  Katherine Parr already knew that Elizabeth was receiving a first-class education. Her tutor in the spring of 1547 was William Grindal, a Greek scholar from St John’s College, Cambridge, and protégé of Roger Ascham. He also knew John Cheke and may have helped tutor Edward VI before he became king. As the troubled year of 1546 drew to a close, Grindal took up a full-time position with Elizabeth. He was an immediate success with his very able thirteen-year-old pupil, to the delight of Ascham, who paid the new tutor the great compliment of saying that he did not know ‘to what degree of skill in Latin and Greek she [Elizabeth] might arrive, if she shall proceed in that course of study wherein she hath begun by the guidance of Grindal’.

  But, to the great sorrow of all who knew him, Grindal’s promising career was tragically cut short when he died of the plague in January 1548. Elizabeth was devastated. She did not, however, bow to her stepmother’s wishes when a replacement was discussed. Katherine wanted Francis Goldsmith, who had long been a faithful supporter of hers, but Elizabeth had other ideas. Her choice was Roger Ascham. She had lost the young man he had trained and now she wanted the older scholar himself. A considerable battle of wills ensued, with Elizabeth involving Cheke in the discussion. Ascham, uneasy at being the cause of disagreement between the queen and her stepdaughter on such an important matter, actually counselled Elizabeth to accept Goldsmith. He reported to Cheke that the princess had told him ‘how much the queen and my lord admiral were labouring in favour of Goldsmith. I advised her to comply with their recommendations … and entreated her to set aside all her favour towards me and to consider before all else, how she could bring to maturity that singular hope in her awakened by Grindal’s teaching.’3

  Ascham’s tactful approach did not prevail. Elizabeth had her way. The outcome shows a remarkable spirit and determination in a girl who was grappling, as was Katherine, with quite different emotions in her life at the time. For the much-missed William Grindal was not the only man to have awakened something in Elizabeth. Thomas Seymour had unleashed a flood of quite different desires. In so doing, he caused Katherine much anguish and nearly compromised Elizabeth fatally.

  ALTHOUGH THE TAUNTS aimed at his wife had died down, Thomas Seymour’s discontent continued to simmer throughout the autumn of 1547. He did not accompany Somerset on the military campaign against the Scots in September and was furious when the Lord Protector did not even appoint him in a temporary capacity as Governor of the king’s person during his absence. The man put in charge of Edward at the time, Sir Richard Page, was, Thomas claimed, a useless drunkard. He did not mince words when anger took him. And his frustration began to creep into his feelings for Katherine, now the period of secret wooing was replaced by the day-to-day reality of living with a queen of England. There was no escaping the fact that she had a high profile (his feelings about her literary career may not have been so different from those of Henry VIII) and that her household was costly. As Sir Nicholas Throckmorton remembered:

  Her house was term’d a second court of right,

  Because there flocked still nobility

  He spared no cost his lady to delight

  Or to maintain her princely royalty.4

  All this, and his underlying resentment at his junior role in government combined to make Tom Seymour a volatile spouse. He was also a very emotional man, not uncommon in Tudor England, but his trademark loud oaths – much of his displeasure was preceded by the exclamation ‘By God’s precious soul!’ – were often followed by outbursts of intemperate anger. These may have been short-lived, but Katherine, now bound to obey him by her marriage vows, even if she was a queen, found them frightening. Her status was a source both of pride and jealousy. It was said that he did not like her being alone with other men, even members of her household. Thomas Parry, Elizabeth’s cofferer, recalled Kat Ashley relating an incident of what seems like quite unreasonable sensitivity on Seymour’s part: ‘And as for the jealousy of my lord admiral, I will tell you: As he came upon a time up a stair to see the queen, he met with a groom of the chamber upon the stair with a coal basket, coming out of the chamber, and because the door was shut, and my lord without, he was angry and pretended that he was jealous.’5 This sounds extraordinarily petty, and Mrs Ashley dismissed it as being of little importance, perhaps no more than a joke. But if Katherine did hold private conversations with other, more senior members of her household, especially on financial matters, it is not entirely surprising that her husband might want to be included. I
f, on the other hand, his attitude was driven by sexual jealousy, then it says a good deal for Katherine’s continued attractions at the age of thirty-five. And Katherine, of course, had a considerable temper of her own. Their relationship was certainly not a placid one. The coal basket incident is not dated, but presumably took place in the colder months of the year. By then, the queen had ample reason for jealousy of her own. Her husband’s behaviour towards Elizabeth was giving rise to gossip and threatening her own peace of mind at a time when Katherine herself had just become pregnant. What should have been a happy period of her life, the fulfilment of all her hopes when she married for the fourth time, turned progressively into a time of bewilderment and distress.

  The origins of Seymour’s increasingly dangerous flirtation with Elizabeth seem to go back to the very beginning of his marriage, or, at least, the time that he and the queen were officially living together as man and wife. Katherine Ashley, not, admittedly, the most reliable of sources, when questioned on ‘what familiarity she hath known betwixt the Lord Admiral and the Lady Elizabeth’s Grace’, claimed that these goings-on had started at Chelsea, ‘incontinent [immediately] after he was married to the queen’. Her further revelations have enlivened the pages of many an historical novel and several films. There have been assertions that Seymour was a sexual predator preying on a young girl, of three-in-a-bed romps, of passion-filled trysts and an unwanted pregnancy. The reputations of Thomas, Katherine and Elizabeth were dragged through the mire by contemporaries and what took place during the space of barely a year, when Elizabeth lived with the queen and her last husband, has provided titillation ever since. The story that Elizabeth had a son by Seymour makes good television drama but is poor history. Yet, even allowing for exaggeration and the fearful circumstances in which Kat Ashley and Thomas Parry poured out their tales under interrogation, it is clear that Seymour’s relationship with his wife’s stepdaughter did raise eyebrows at the time and that it troubled Katherine. But what did, in fact, take place, and what should we make of it now, more than 450 years after these events took place?

  Had there been merely a couple of isolated incidents, it is likely that Seymour’s behaviour with Elizabeth might never have been known, or, at worst, dismissed with some tongue-clucking as overly boisterous. Kat Ashley, however, relates a pattern of contact between her young charge and the master of the house that seems to have begun as horseplay but soon turned into something less innocent. She reported:

  He would come many mornings into the said Lady Elizabeth’s chamber, before she were ready, and sometime before she did rise. 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 sometime go through to the maidens [Elizabeth’s ladies], and play with them, and go forth: and if she were in her bed, he would put open the curtains, and … make as though he would come at her: And she would go further into the bed, so that he could not come at her.

  Further revelations poured forth from Elizabeth’s governess. One morning ‘he strave to have kissed her in her bed’, but mistress Ashley ‘bade him go away for shame’. At Hanworth, Katherine, perhaps by now alerted to what was going on and having reasons of her own for not wishing her husband to spend too much time by himself with her stepdaughter, joined in as well. At Hanworth, ‘they tickled my lady Elizabeth in her bed, the Queen and my Lord Admiral’. By now, Katherine was an accomplice in more than tickling. In the garden at Hanworth, Seymour pretended to take exception to a black gown that Elizabeth was wearing. He ‘cut her gown into one hundred pieces, being black cloth’. Ashley reproved Elizabeth for permitting such behaviour, but the girl told her ‘she could not do with all [she was unable to resist] for the Queen held her, while the Lord Admiral cut it’.

  Katherine Ashley was eventually concerned enough about what lay behind all this to broach her misgivings with Thomas Seymour himself, though apparently she did not raise anything with Katherine. She ‘told my lord the things that were complained of, and that my lady was evil spoken of’, following another morning when Elizabeth had run to her ladies when she heard Seymour trying to come into her chamber. The source of this particular complaint seems to have been the gentlewomen, rather than Elizabeth. Thomas, however, showed no contrition. ‘The Lord Admiral swore, God’s precious soul! – he would tell my Lord Protector how it slandered him, and he would not leave it, for he meant no evil.’

  And, so it appears, he was true to his word. His morning visits continued in his own house. ‘At Seymour Place, when the Queen lay there, he did use a while to come up every morning in his night-gown, barelegged in his slippers, where he found the Lady Elizabeth commonly at her book: and then he would look in at the gallery door, and bid my Lady Elizabeth good morrow, and so go his way.’ Again, said Kat Ashley, she complained. She told him ‘it was an unseemly sight to come so barelegged to a maiden’s chamber; with which he was angry, but he left it’. Perhaps, at last, he began to feel the weight of Katherine Ashley’s concern for her mistress. But by then, he might also have sensed his wife’s dismay. Ashley recounted a strange incident in which Katherine reproved her, claiming that Seymour had seen Elizabeth ‘cast her arms about a man’s neck’. This accusation the girl tearfully denied, and, as her governess pointed out, ‘there came no man but Grindal, the Lady Elizabeth’s schoolmaster’. There was, thought Ashley, an all together different slant. She suspected ‘that the Queen was jealous betwixt them, and did but feign this, to the intent that … [I] should take more heed, and be, as it were, in watch between her and my Lord Admiral’.6

  The most obvious explanation for these events, as remembered by Elizabeth’s governess, is that there was an underlying attraction between Thomas Seymour and the princess that neither openly acknowledged nor, on the other hand, wished to curtail, or even conceal. Seymour’s behaviour cannot be explained away as that of a surrogate parent who lacked experience in judging what was appropriate behaviour towards a teenage girl. The concept of adolescence did not exist in Tudor England. Elizabeth was a young woman of marriageable age and, as the famous portrait of her painted probably in the last year of her father’s reign shows, she was regal but attractive. Lady Browne, the Irish beauty admired by both the earl of Surrey and Thomas Seymour, had joined Elizabeth’s entourage at the age of about eleven. By the time she was fifteen, she was married to Sir Anthony Browne, a man nearly thirty years her senior. The age gap of twenty-four years between Elizabeth and Thomas Seymour was rather less than that. Elizabeth was a strong-willed and sometimes imperious young lady, very conscious that she was a king’s daughter, who passed her fourteenth birthday in September 1547. Though secure in the affection of her household and her stepmother, she had never encountered the kind of attention she received from Seymour. Perhaps she was a little intimidated, but the excitement of it seems to have outweighed any real fear. At any point, she could have made it very plain that his approaches were repugnant to her, complained to Katherine, the Privy Council, her sister Mary, even the Lord Protector himself, if she had chosen. She was young but not defenceless. No doubt she was confused and later she seems to have been genuinely contrite, but at the time it was probably the most thrilling encounter of her life.

  Thomas, for his part, could not desist. His behaviour was not connected with his wife’s pregnancy, or part of some devious, sinister plan to provide himself with marital insurance for the future; it was merely a feature of who he was. He liked the admiration and the company of women. Elizabeth and her giggling maids were the perfect audience for his exuberance and his ego. Still smarting at his relative political insignificance, this half-play, half-serious pursuit of Henry VIII’s younger daughter was an amusing diversion. Her reactions, and the occasional scolding of Katherine Ashley (who was more than a little sweet on him herself) doubtless encouraged him still more. He might swear his great oaths, but he knew that what he was doing might cause tittle-tattle. Quite simply, he did not care. But in indulging himself wit
h Elizabeth Tudor he risked ruining her reputation and greatly hurting his wife. Yet these considerations were pushed aside, as was the even more serious possibility that all this might yet come back to haunt him if his quarrel with his brother escalated. But between June 1547 and May 1548, when Elizabeth left Katherine Parr’s household, though there may have been rumour and innuendo, there was no public scandal. Katherine Ashley was herself partly to blame for indulging her charge too freely. In the summer of 1547 it was not the fact that Elizabeth was tickled in bed by Thomas Seymour that amazed the duchess of Somerset (who had daughters of her own) but that she was allowed unchaperoned on a barge on the Thames in the evening. And nothing improper reached the ears of Henry and Frances Dorset, the parents of Lady Jane Grey. Thomas Seymour’s plans for their daughter were extremely ambitious, but he seems to have been a kind and responsible guardian to her.

  So there remain questions unanswered and unknowable about the ‘romance’ of Thomas and Elizabeth. Its long-term impact on the princess at an impressionable time of her life can only be guessed. In the short term, however, matters reached a point where Katherine Parr felt it necessary to send Elizabeth away. Thomas Parry, while under arrest at the beginning of 1549, gave his version of what had happened. His account was, admittedly, second-hand and based on a confidence from Katherine Ashley. Parry had been questioned on Seymour’s intentions towards Elizabeth in the autumn of 1548, and recalled Mrs Ashley saying ‘that the Admiral loved her [Elizabeth] but too well, and had done so a good while; and that the Queen was jealous of her and him, in so much that, one time the Queen, suspecting the often access of the Admiral to the Lady Elizabeth, came suddenly upon them, where they were all alone [he having her in his arms]: wherefor the Queen fell out, both with the Lord Admiral and with her Grace also’. Shaken and angry, though perhaps not entirely surprised by what she had witnessed, Katherine sent for Elizabeth’s governess ‘and told her fancy in that matter; and of this was much displeasure. And it was not long, before they parted asunder their families [households]; and, as I remember, this was the cause why she was sent from the Queen; or else that her Grace parted from the Queen: I do not perfectly remember … whether she went of herself, or was sent away.’7