As an eligible bachelor in his late thirties, his obvious first step towards political advancement was a good marriage and, according to gossip, his first choice had been the thirteen-year-old Elizabeth. Warned off by his brother and the council. Thomas turned back to the Queen whose feelings for him, he was confident, had not changed. He was quite right in this assumption and Katherine made no attempt to conceal her delight at his renewed attentions. ‘I would not have you to think that this mine honest good will toward you to proceed of any sudden motion of passion’, she wrote to him from Chelsea. ‘For as truly as God is God, my mind was fully bent the other time I was at liberty to marry you before any man I knew.’ God, on that occasion, had withstood her will ‘most vehemently’ but now she was to have her reward for self-abnegation, and at thirty-four the pious, high-minded Queen was radiant as any teenager at the prospect of marrying the man she loved.
Certainly Katherine deserved some happiness. The pity was that she had not made a better choice. Thomas Seymour was physically a very attractive man with plenty of surface charm. ‘Fierce in courage, courtly in fashion; in personage stately, in voice magnificent, but somewhat empty of matter’ runs the well-known, near contemporary assessment. He was also a vain, greedy, selfish man - dangerous both to himself and to others.
The Queen Dowager and the Lord Admiral were married privately - so privately intact that no one knows exactly where or when the ceremony took place, although It was probably no later than the beginning of May 1547. Katherine had talked rather half-heartedly about delay and observing a decent period of mourning but Thomas, who was anxious to avoid delay, had experienced very little difficulty in cajoling her out of her scruples.
The next thing was to find a tactful way of breaking the news to the rest of the family and Thomas wrote to the Princess Mary, asking if she would further his suit with the Queen. He got severely snubbed for his pains. Mary was old-fashioned enough to disapprove of hasty re-marriage, especially in this case ‘considering whose wife her grace was of late’. But, of course, it was the King’s opinion which really mattered. Thomas Seymour had few opportunities of seeing his nephew -this was one of his principal complaints - and he had already taken the precaution of suborning John Fowler, a gentleman of the Privy Chamber, to carry messages and generally act as go-between. He now instructed Fowler to broach the subject of his marriage to Edward in general terms and received the, for Edward, waggish response: ‘Wot you what? I would he married my sister Mary to turn her opinions.’ Thomas progressed to enquiring, again via Fowler, if Edward ‘could be contented I should marry the Queen’, and then Katherine herself took a hand. Sometime towards the end of May she paid a visit to Court and discussed the whole question of her re-marriage with the King, explaining that no disrespect was intended to his father’s memory. Reassured on this point, Edward raised no objections. He was genuinely fond of his stepmother and had nothing against his uncle Thomas - who was busily currying favour with surreptitious gifts of pocket money.
When news of his brother’s matrimonial activities reached the ears of the Lord Protector he was, as Edward noted laconically in his Journal, ‘much displeased’. But the thing was done now and, in any case, the Protector had weightier matters on his mind that summer. Towards the end of August he left for the North to pursue Henry VIII’s policy of attempting to intimidate the Scots into surrendering their little Queen to the cousinly care of her English fiancé and accepting English suzerainty. Somerset succeeded in inflicting yet another devastating defeat on the Scots at the battle of Pinkie, but he did not persuade them to become Englishmen. On the contrary, his ‘rough wooing’ had the extremely predictable result of driving Scotland ever more firmly into the arms of France. The four-year-old Mary was hastily moved to the island sanctuary of Inchmahome, and the following spring she was spirited away to the Continent and betrothed to the Dauphin. King François had not long survived his old rival Henry Tudor, but the French throne was now occupied by his son, Henri 11 - a resolute individual who would know how to protect his future daughter-in-law. The King of England would have to look elsewhere for a bride and any chance of uniting the British kingdoms had gone for another generation,
Thomas Seymour should have commanded the fleet during the Scottish campaign, but the Lord Admiral preferred to delegate his duties and remained at home to develop certain projects of his own. He was now living openly as Katherine’s husband - sometimes at Chelsea, sometimes at the Queen’s manor of Hanworth and sometimes at his own town house, Seymour Place. Katherine was transparently happy in her new life and the Admiral, having achieved the first of his objectives, in high good humour. With the irruption of his loud-voiced, ebullient male presence the atmosphere of the Queen’s household had become noticeably more relaxed and informal - in one direction at least unusually so, for Thomas Seymour soon began to amuse himself by teasing his wife’s stepdaughter. He ‘would come many mornings into the Lady Elizabeth’s chamber, before she were ready, and sometimes 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 sometime go through to the maidens and play with them, and so go forth.’ If Elizabeth was still in bed, *he would put open the curtains, and bid her good-morrow, 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.’
Katherine saw no harm in this sort of romping - she sometimes accompanied the Admiral on his early morning forays and together ‘they tickled my Lady Elizabeth in the bed, the Queen and my Lord Admiral’. But the princess’s governess took a more realistic view of the situation. Mrs. Katherine Ashley, a disapproving spectator of much giggling and shrieking and games of hide-and-seek round the bed-curtains, was devoted to her charge and she knew that the sight of a man -even one who might, at a pinch, be considered a member of the family - apparently welcome to invade her bedroom in his nightgown and slippers would inevitably set tongues wagging. After all, Elizabeth was fourteen that September and no longer a child. Mrs. Ashley therefore attempted to remonstrate with the Admiral, telling him that his behaviour was complained of and that her lady would be ‘evilly spoken of. The Admiral, of course, swore by God’s precious soul that he meant no harm, that the Lady Elizabeth was like a daughter to him and that he would know how to deal with slanderers. But Mrs. Ashley, whose sharp nose for gossip had already picked up the rumour that if my lord could have had his own will he would have married the Lady Elizabeth before he married the Queen, was unconvinced and went to lay her problem before the Queen herself Katherine ‘made a small matter of it’ - she was not in the mood to take anything very seriously that summer -but she did promise to chaperone her husband more closely in future.
Just what, if anything, Thomas Seymour expected to gain by his barely-concealed sexual pursuit of Elizabeth is hard to say. Most likely it had begun simply as his idea of a joke but no doubt it also gave him a gratifying sense of power to be on such terms with Henry VIII’s daughter. He never attempted similar tactics with the other young girl living under his wife’s roof- Lady Jane Grey was still too undeveloped physically to give any spice to slap-and-tickle and besides the Admiral had other plans for her.
Under the terms of his will, Henry VIII, using the powers conferred on him by the 1536 Act of Succession, had settled the crown, in default of heirs from his own children, on the descendants of his younger sister - arbitrarily excluding the senior Scottish line. Jane Grey’s dynastic importance had therefore increased dramatically and Thomas Seymour wasted no time in cultivating the friendship of her father. He experienced no particular difficulty in persuading the Marquis of Dorset to put Jane’s future in his hands in exchange for certain financial considerations and a promise that the Admiral would see her placed in marriage much to her father’s comfort. When Dorset asked for details, John Harington, one of Seymour’s most trusted agents who was conducting the negotiations, replied impressively ‘I doubt not but you shall see he will
marry her to the King’, and on this understanding the bargain was struck.
No one, of course, thought it necessary to ask Jane’s opinion and Jane herself would not have expected it. A formidably intelligent and ‘toward’ child, she took very little interest in anything but her lessons. Like her cousins Edward and Elizabeth, she was already well grounded in the classics and was also studying Greek, French and Italian; but unlike her cousins she, alone of the royal family, was a true scholar, content to devote herself to the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake and not as a means to an end.
Jane was not getting the intensive academic training she so much enjoyed because her parents had any great respect for learning - Frances Dorset, a buxom, vigorous, hard-riding woman who bore a frightening resemblance to her late uncle Henry, and her ambitious but weak-minded husband were very much more interested in worldly advancement - but because, largely thanks to Katherine Parr, higher education for girls had become fashionable and therefore desirable. Jane did not get on with her parents (she once went so far as to tell that sympathetic educationist Roger Ascham that she thought herself in hell when in their company) and was unhappy at home. In the Queen’s household she was petted and praised; her cleverness, accomplishments and piety were openly discussed and admired, her brilliant prospects whispered over - and at this time her future did look extremely promising. Katherine, whose influence was still considerable, had quickly become very fond of her, the Admiral was kind to her and in this congenial atmosphere she naturally began to blossom.
But although Jane Grey was a child of whom any family might justly have been proud, of the half dozen or so young people who represented the rising generation of the House of Tudor it was on Edward that attention naturally focused. Edward himself was beginning to find some of this attention a trifle burdensome - especially the attentions of his maternal relatives. The Duke of Somerset was proving a strict guardian and by the end of the first six months of his reign the young King had conceived a perfectly dispassionate dislike of his elder Seymour uncle, who kept him short of money, treated him like a child and was using the royal ‘we’ in his own correspondence. To do the Protector justice, there is no reason to suppose that his intentions towards his nephew were ever anything but honourable, but he was a cold, stiff man, ‘dry, sour and opinionated’ was the verdict of the Imperial ambassador, with very little idea of how to make himself acceptable to a child-like Edward - incapable of striking the admittedly difficult balance between the deference due to the royal persona, the warmth of a close blood tie and the authority needed to guide and to guard this exceptional small boy.
Edward’s uncle Thomas was, by contrast, jovial and open-handed. Edward did not hesitate to take advantage of the open-handedness and soon fell into the habit of despatching terse demands for cash by means of the useful John Fowler. But he was becoming irritated and a little frightened by the Admiral’s persistent, half-bullying suggestions that he should do more to assert himself and his attempts to involve him in the Seymour family feuds. A particularly acrimonious dispute had arisen that autumn over some items of the Queen Dowager’s jewellery which Katherine claimed were her own property, gifts from the late King. But the Protector insisted they belonged to the crown and refused to give them up. Matters were exacerbated by the attitude of the Duchess of Somerset, a vindictive shrew who furiously resented the fact that Katherine continued to take social precedence over her and made no secret of her feelings on the subject.
Edward’s first Parliament was due to meet in November and the Admiral, inspired with a renewed sense of his various wrongs, stamped about shouting that, by God’s precious soul, he would make this the blackest Parliament that ever was in England. When his cronies, alarmed by his violence, tried to calm him down, he roared defiantly that he could live better without the Protector than the Protector without him, and that if anyone went about to speak evil of the Queen he would take his fist to their ears, from the highest to the lowest.
Thomas Seymour had tried to inveigle Edward (now quite considerably in his debt financially) into signing a letter to be presented to the House of Lords, asking them to favour a suit which his uncle meant to bring before them. According to the Admiral, this was merely a petition to recover Katherine’s jewels but more likely he was hoping to get the Lords’ support for his plan to have the offices of Protector of the Realm and Governor of the King’s person divided between his brother and himself Edward was clearly suspicious. Beneath that impassive, childish exterior an alert Tudor brain was picking up danger signals and the King turned for advice to his principal tutor, Sir John Cheke, the one person he trusted completely. Cheke warned him very seriously against signing anything he might be made to regret and Edward refused his kind uncle’s request. The Admiral, frustrated, took to prowling hungrily in the corridors of St. James’s Palace, throwing out hints that he wished the King were at home in his house and speculating on how easy it would be to steal him away. But even Thomas Seymour could see the folly of trying to kidnap Edward without the assurance of some very solid backing. He patched up his quarrel with the Protector and subsided - temporarily at least.
There was a Tudor family reunion that Christmas. Elizabeth came up to Court from Chelsea in December and apparently enjoyed herself so much that she asked to stay on over the holiday. Edward wrote inviting Mary to join the party and, for the first time since their father’s death, these three survivors of Henry’s long, desperate battle to beget an heir met under one roof. The relationship between brother and sisters had altered radically since they had last been together. The respect accorded to a Tudor king, even one just ten years old, was immense; nor were the formalities relaxed on the occasion of a family dinner party. Etiquette required that the King’s sisters must not sit close enough to be overshadowed by the cloth of estate above his head, and a visiting Italian reported that he had seen the Princess Elizabeth drop on one knee five times before her brother before she took her place at table with him. Petruccio Ubaldini thought these elaborate ceremonies ‘laughable’, but both Mary and Elizabeth had been brought up to regard the person of the sovereign with the utmost reverence and neither would have found anything in the least laughable about kneeling to their little brother who was also their King.
In the spring of 1548 a storm was brewing in the Queen Dowager’s household.
Katherine, now pregnant for the first time, was no longer taking quite such a light-hearted view of her husband’s playful attentions to her stepdaughter. Had she perhaps begun to suspect that they were no longer quite so playful? There had been an odd little incident at Hanworth, when the Queen told Mrs. Ashley that the Admiral had looked in at the gallery window and seen the princess with her arms round a man’s neck. Mrs. Ashley, who knew there had been no man, wondered rather uneasily if the Queen was becoming jealous and had invented this tale as a warning. Mrs. Ashley’s husband, an observant and sensible man, also warned his wife to be on her guard as he had noticed that the Lady Elizabeth seemed to be getting dangerously fond of the Lord Admiral. Matters came to a head when, according to testimony given some eight months later, ‘the Queen, suspecting the often access of the Admiral to the Lady Elizabeth’s grace, came suddenly upon them, when they were all alone, he having her in his arms. Wherefore the Queen fell out, both with the Lord Admiral and with her grace also.’
Fortunately for all concerned, Katherine knew how to keep her head in a crisis and she immediately took steps to put as much distance as possible between the princess and the Admiral, sending Elizabeth away on a visit to Sir Anthony and Lady Denny, both old friends of the family, at their house at Cheshunt. The Queen and her stepdaughter parted affectionately. Katherine was determined there should be no suggestion of an open breach and a penitent Elizabeth recognized and appreciated the older woman’s generosity. ‘Although I could not be plentiful in giving thanks for the manifold kindness received at your highness’s hand at my departure’, she wrote from Cheshunt, ‘yet I am something to be borne withal, for
truly I was replete with sorrow to depart from your Highness, especially leaving you undoubtful of health. Everyone knew that the Queen Dowager, in the sixth month of an uncomfortable pregnancy, and her husband were planning to spend the summer on their estates at Sudeley in Gloucestershire and in the general upheaval of packing up, it had been possible to contrive Elizabeth’s departure without causing comment.
The Seymours left for the country on 13 June accompanied by a princely retinue and taking Jane Grey with them. Jane’s parents had been growing restive as the months passed and the Admiral’s ‘fair promises’ showed no sign of materializing. They had tried to get their daughter back, but Thomas Seymour was too persuasive for them and Jane stayed with Katherine. Three months later she was called on to perform a melancholy service for the only person ever to show her disinterested kindness. Katherine’s baby, a girl christened Mary, was born on 30 August, but six days later Katherine herself died of puerperal fever. She was buried in the chapel at Sudeley with all the pomp due to a Queen Dowager of England, the ten-year-old Jane Grey acting as chief mourner.
Katherine’s death had extinguished one of the most attractive personalities of the age. The younger members of the Tudor family had lost their most influential friend and Thomas Seymour his only protection against himself After a brief period, during which the widower was ‘so amazed’ that he had small regard either to himself or his doings, he pulled himself together and began to re-build his wild and whirling schemes on even more fragile foundations.
In the confusion after Katherine’s death, the Admiral had sent Jane Grey home to her parents, but she was too valuable a property to lose - especially since he had got wind of a plan being discussed between his brother and the Dorsets to marry her to the Protector’s son - and now he had to set about getting her back. The Dorsets were in two minds, a sudden access of concern about their daughter’s welfare imperfectly concealing a ruthless determination to sell her to the highest bidder. However, Thomas Seymour was very insistent and, according to the Marquis, refused to take no for an answer. Even more to the point, he agreed to pay over another five hundred pounds towards the two thousand which would be due to Jane’s parents on the day her marriage was arranged. No need for a bond, declared the Admiral expansively, the Lady Jane’s presence in his house was security enough. This clinched the matter. The Dorsets, greedy, foolish and chronically hard up, fell into the trap and Jane went back to Hanworth, where old Lady Seymour had been installed as chaperone.
The House of Tudor Page 23