Katherine the Queen: The Remarkable Life of Katherine Parr

by Linda Porter

  In fact, his arrest was not a spur-of-the-moment decision rendered unavoidable by nocturnal forays near the royal bedchamber; there had clearly been discussions about it over some days, but Thomas did not fully appreciate his danger. The marquess of Northampton, Katherine Parr’s brother, recalled that: ‘The night before he was committed to the Tower, the admiral called me and seemed perplexed, declaring that the council had secret conferences that day in the garden, but he could not learn their effect; he could get nothing of the Lord Privy Seal [Lord John Russell, who had warned him against an alliance with either of the king’s sisters]. He thought they conferred to see if they could get anything against him from Sharington, who was more straitly handled for his sake.’

  He was certainly correct in that analysis, though he was not the only one who might have been concerned over revelations of their dealings with Sharington. Various people close to Seymour owed the fraudster money, including his brother, Somerset, his brother-in-law, William Herbert, and even the duchess of Suffolk, some of whose jewels and plate Sharington held as surety for her debt.

  For his part, Thomas professed not to be worried: ‘But he cared not,’ Northampton recalled, ‘for he was able to answer all charges. The protector was in fear of his own estate and was very jealous because the admiral was better furnished with men about him.’ This last was an empty boast. Thomas had no contingent of men he could call upon to defend him at this crucial juncture. But the mere reference to such a possibility may have been the final straw that caused the council to act. Parr must have seen him on the 17th itself, when Thomas told him he expected to be called before the council to answer charges from Lord Rutland. ‘He would question Rutland before all the other lords, saying he would answer all things at his liberty, and not be shut up when he should not answer.’24 He had, though, omitted to mention the fact that he had told the councillors that his appearance before them was conditional on William Paget remaining at Seymour Place as surety for Thomas’s continued freedom. Such a deal was a bold offer but not one the council was likely to indulge.

  His self-confidence was sounding increasingly forced. During his journey by river to the Tower Thomas was advised ‘Sir, arm you with patience, for now … it shall be assayed.’ He replied, ‘I think no. I am sure I can have no hurt, if they do me right; they cannot kill me, except they do me wrong: And if they do, I shall die but once: and if they take my life from me, I have a master that will once revenge it.’25 The first question raised with him was whether he had conferred with anyone about changing ‘the order of the person of the king’s majesty’. This Thomas emphatically denied. He admitted commenting to Rutland about Edward VI’s precocity, saying that he thought his nephew ‘would be a man three years before any child living’, and that this ‘towardness’ would very likely mean that the king would want more liberty and a greater say in the direction of his own personal affairs. He had never intended this as an attack on the duke of Somerset, stating: ‘And if I meant hurt to my lord’s grace my brother, more than I meant to my soul, then I desire neither life nor other favour at his hand.’ He repeated the essence of this explanation in a brief, disordered letter written to the Protector two days later, in which he reiterated that he had intended no ill to his brother: ‘But if I meant either hurt or displeasure to your grace, in this or any other thing that I have done, then punish me by extremity. And thus I humbly take my leave of your grace.’26 In this sad little note there speaks, for the last time, the miscreant younger brother apologizing to the elder for his bad behaviour.

  But it was too late. Even the young king was pressed for evidence against his uncle. Edward divulged that Thomas had given him money and tried to get him to sign a bill for parliament. Others who had known the lord admiral, sensing the way the wind was setting, hastened to disassociate themselves from Thomas Seymour. Only John Harington, his servant, and Nicholas Throckmorton (who was not interrogated) refused to join in the stampede. Details poured forth of what he had said about the governance of the king, his bragging about private armies, his pleasure that the office of lord admiral gave him command of ships and men, his attempts to win friends through money and favours. Much of the information supplied was virtually identical, for Thomas had been neither original nor reticent in repeating his views. Whether there was also an element of collusion among the noble lords who were so eager to remember everything is an interesting question. For one person, however, there was no such possibility. Thomas’s intentions towards Elizabeth formed a major part of the charges brought against him. If it could be proved that she had welcomed or encouraged marriage plans, then she would be implicated in his treason, and might expect to share his fate.

  ELIZABETH WAS AT Hatfield at the time of Seymour’s arrest. Within days, Katherine Ashley and Thomas Parry were both themselves taken into the Tower for questioning. Deprived of the two people in whom she had the most confidence, however misplaced, Elizabeth swiftly realized her danger. Sir Robert Tyrwhit and his stern, god-fearing wife, had been sent to take charge of her. She must have sensed, if she did not already know, their antipathy towards Thomas and, by extension, their dislike of her. Both had been long in Katherine Parr’s service and they knew about the horseplay and early morning visits at Chelsea and Hanworth. Sir Robert was determined to get a confession out of Elizabeth but, though she was ‘marvellously abashed, and did weep very tenderly a long time’ when she learned what had happened to Ashley and Parry, Tyrwhit could get nothing of any substance out of her. In fact, he suspected that she and her servants had made a pact to say nothing that would be incriminating.

  At the age of fifteen, surrounded by those determined to break her and false friends (Lady Browne was still in Elizabeth’s service, but ‘Fair Geraldine’ was happy to act as a spy on her mistress), the princess had to suppress her emotions, keep a clear head and live on her wits. She may have been a king’s sister, but she was still legally a bastard and she was powerless. There was no throne beckoning in those bleak January days of 1549, only disgrace, and perhaps worse. Over nearly a week, Tyrwhit persisted in trying to wring out of her the confession that Somerset apparently required. But despite the fact that both her governess and her cofferer had effectively betrayed her, pouring out everything they could possibly recollect about her relationship with Thomas Seymour and her reaction to the idea of marriage to him, Elizabeth would not give way. When told that Parry had given chapter and verse about her alleged partiality for Seymour, her evident pleasure when the admiral was mentioned and her blushing at talk of marriage, Elizabeth momentarily lost her composure, calling her cofferer a ‘false wretch’. She quickly recovered. At a young age, she was able to frame answers that would not trap her and she knew her rights. Tyrwhit wrote to Somerset on 28 January to tell him that he was getting nowhere: ‘Pleaseth your grace to be advertised that I have received your letter … and according to the purpose of the same, have practised with my lady’s grace, by all means and policy, to cause her to confess more than she hath already done; wherein she doth plainly deny that she knoweth any more than she already hath opened to me, which things she hath willingly written to your grace with her own hand …’27

  Sensing that she was winning this war of wills, Elizabeth decided to take the fight directly to Somerset himself. She did not deny that she knew about the marriage rumours, or Thomas’s interest in her lands and finances, or that there was talk that he might come and see her after the queen’s death. Parry had asked her ‘… whether, if the council did consent that I should have my lord admiral, whether I would consent to it or no. I answered that I would not tell him what my mind was …’ Neither she nor her governess, she claimed, had ever contemplated the idea of marriage, with Thomas or anyone else, ‘without the consent of the king’s majesty, your grace’s, and the council’s’. There was no improper response, not even the merest thought, of stepping outside the boundaries laid down in her father’s will. This being so, she demanded full protection for her damaged reputation:

  Master
Tyrwhit and others have told me that there goeth rumours abroad which be greatly both against mine honour and honesty, which above all other things I esteem … that I am in the Tower and with child by my lord admiral. My lord, these are shameful slanders, for the which, besides the great desire I have to see the king’s majesty, I shall most heartily desire your lordship that I may come to the court after your first determination, that I may show myself there as I am.28

  Somerset did not agree to her request. In fact, he took such exception to the tone of this reply and an even tarter one, in which Elizabeth objected to the removal of Katherine Ashley and her formal replacement by Elizabeth Tyrwhit, that the princess gave him something approaching an apology, saying that she thought the appointment of a new governess would make people say ‘that I deserved through my lewd demeanour to have such a one, and not that I mislike anything that your lordship of the council shall think good …’.29

  By the time this letter was written, on 21 February, Thomas Seymour’s fate was sealed. He had been asked, a few days earlier, how he knew that the council intended to proceed against him; he replied that he ‘suspected it by diverse conjectures’. Again, he reiterated that he ‘did never determine, in all his life, to remove the king out of [the] lord protector’s hands, but by consent of the whole realm’.30 Thereafter, he turned increasingly inwards, refusing to answer further questions unless his accusers faced him. Somerset informed the king of his uncle’s intransigence but Thomas still refused to budge. He was never given a trial before his peers. Instead, an Act of Attainder (the same legal process that had been used to rid Henry VIII of Katherine Howard) was introduced into parliament. It passed unopposed in the House of Lords on 25 February, and in the House of Commons on 5 March, where it was opposed by only a handful of members.

  In the end, the authorities had thrown everything they could at Thomas Seymour, even down to the accusation that, in connection with his wife’s death, ‘he helped to her end to hasten forth his other purposes’. The cumulative effect of his intentions were spelt out, reaching an inevitable conclusion: ‘this marriage of your [the king’s] sister, the getting of the rule and order of your majesty’s mint at Bristol in to his hands, [the] 10,000 men he accounted himself furnished of, his preparations of victuals and money at your castle of the Holt [one of Seymour’s properties on the Welsh borders] cannot otherwise be taken but to be a manifest declaration of a traitorous aspiring to your crown, to depose your majesty and to compass the death of your most noble person’.

  The act concluded: ‘considering that he is a member so unnatural, unkind and corrupt and such a heinous offender of your majesty and your laws as he cannot be suffered to remain in body of your grace’s commonwealth but to the extreme danger of your highness and it is too dangerous an example that such a person, so much bound and so forgetful of it … should remain among us’. He was to be ‘adjudged and attainted of high treason and … shall suffer such pains of death as in cases of high treason have been accustomed’.31

  Faced with the reality of death, Thomas contemplated the wreck of his life. He had retreated into silence as far as those who condemned him were concerned and given up hope that family ties might, even at this extremity, compel his brother to exercise clemency. It must have been quite clear to him, as it was to Elizabeth, that Somerset would not save him. Later it was said that his fate was sealed by Duchess Anne, who threatened to leave her husband if he did not deal with Thomas. But while in the Tower Seymour made his peace with the God others accused him of rejecting, writing the following lines:

  Forgetting God

  to love a king

  Hath been my rod

  Or else nothing:

  In this frail life

  being a blast

  of care and strife

  till in be past.

  Yet God did call

  me in my pride

  lest I should fall

  and from him slide

  for whom loves he

  and not correct

  that they may be

  of his elect

  The death haste thee

  thou shalt me gain

  Immortally

  with him to reign

  Who send the king

  Like years as noye

  In governing

  His realm in joy

  And after this

  frail life such grace

  As in his bliss

  he may have place.32

  He met his death bravely in the early morning of 20 March 1549. It took two blows of the axe to sever his head. Not content with executing him, the council now took pains to ensure that the assault on his reputation continued with a viciousness that matched the manner of his despatch. It was put about that he had written letters to Mary and Elizabeth urging them to rise up against his brother’s regime and had hidden these rantings in the soles of his shoes. This accusation formed part of the sermon vilifying him preached by Hugh Latimer, a cleric who had received Seymour’s financial support and had visited him in the Tower. Thomas had asked Latimer to preach his funeral sermon, presumably hoping that its sentiments would accord with those that he had himself expressed in his poem and reunite him, in death, with the wife whose own writings about the elect had expressed similar ideas. Latimer repaid his patron’s trust by delivering the most thunderous condemnation in a sermon before Edward VI on 29 March. Thomas Seymour had been a popular man with his servants, the general populace of London and, for much of his nephew’s life, with the king himself. So there was a need to ensure that the lord admiral was not remembered fondly. Latimer wanted his hearers to understand that bad lives tend to bad ends. He even questioned the likelihood that such a man could have repented of his sins. ‘And when a man hath two strokes of the axe,’ he pondered, ‘who can tell but that between two strokes he doth repent? It is very hard to judge. Well, I will not go so nigh to work; but this I will say, if they ask me what I think of his death, that he died very dangerously, irksomely, horribly.’ He went on to say: ‘he was a man the farthest from the fear of God that I ever knew or heard of in England … surely he was a wicked man and the realm is well rid of him’.33

  Nicholas Throckmorton characterized Seymour’s end very differently. For Throckmorton, it was other men’s ambitions, as much as the admiral’s, that brought about his downfall:

  Off went his head, they made a quick despatch,

  But ever since I thought him sure a beast

  Who causeless laboured to defile his nest

  Though guiltless, he, through malice, went to pot

  Not answering for himself nor knowing cause.34

  And Harington, who languished another year in the Tower for his lord’s sake, had not denied Seymour’s contact with the Dorsets or his thoughts on Jane Grey’s future prospects, but steadfastly refused to acknowledge that there was anything treasonable in his intent. Like Throckmorton he defended Thomas Seymour unreservedly as a

  Friend to God’s truth, and foe to Rome’s deceit …

  Yet, against nature, reason and just laws

  His blood was spilt, guiltless, without just cause.35

  But perhaps the truest, and most touching, remembrance of Thomas Seymour was pronounced by the girl with whom he had flirted and almost taken to disaster. When news of his execution was brought to her, Elizabeth remarked: ‘This day died a man of much wit and very little judgement.’ These few words, mingling as they do regretful tenderness and shrewd political assessment, are a fitting epitaph for one of Tudor England’s most colourful courtiers. Thomas Seymour was a flawed man, but his detractors conveniently forgot that, in his younger days, he had served his king and country ably. The vilification of his reputation did the Edwardian regime little credit. He had no party, no clear strategy and no real aims beyond his obsession with the notion of separating the offices of Protector and king’s Governor. Ambition, impatience and an inability to dissemble cost him dear. A more devious man would have bided his time and ensured that his support was real, n
ot imagined. But Thomas Seymour was, in many ways, a man born out of his time. He saw himself as a sort of feudal baron, his prestige and power based on property and the loyalty of a personal following. Perhaps he was a great rascal, as Paget had declared. Yet both Katherine and Elizabeth, two of the most outstanding women of their time, loved him, despite his weaknesses. His importance in Elizabeth’s development cannot be overstated, for he had awakened in her a lifelong penchant for men of roguish charm. She learned much from his fall, but she did not forget him. In one of her worst moments, when she was about to be sent to the Tower during her sister Mary’s reign in 1554, she recalled that Somerset subsequently told her that ‘if his brother had been allowed to speak with him, he would never have suffered’.36

  LADY MARY SEYMOUR was left a dispossessed orphan by her father’s death. She was not quite seven months old. Thomas had given her into the care of Katherine Brandon, duchess of Suffolk, Katherine Parr’s close friend. His reasons for this course of action are unclear. It is hardly surprising that he would not have desired her to remain with the Somersets, who had been looking after her at Syon House while Thomas was in the Tower. Katherine Parr’s own brother, meanwhile, had also fallen out with the Lord Protector over his attempts to annul his first marriage to Anne Bourchier (they were still locked together legally, despite Anne’s elopement years before). His remarriage to Elisabeth Brooke, a lady of the court who had served his sister, was regarded as illegal and outrageous by the prim duke of Somerset. Northampton was scarcely in a position to offer shelter to his niece, and in any case he does not seem to have taken much interest in her. The duchess of Suffolk described him as ‘having a weak back for such a burden’.37 Anne Herbert and her husband, the survivors of many career setbacks themselves, apparently steered well clear. So Lady Mary Seymour was denied the affection of any members of her immediate family.