by Linda Porter
Thomas Seymour, too, had much to occupy his mind during February 1547. The prospects of Katherine (and possibly Mary and Elizabeth also) may well have figured in his considerations, but he was primarily concerned with improving his own situation. It was, in those days, frequently the lot of younger brothers to believe themselves hard done by, and Thomas felt particularly keenly the disparity between himself and Edward Seymour. By a mere accident of birth, his brother seemed to have gleaned all the spoils. Henry VIII had named Thomas as one of the assistant councillors in his will and left him £200, but this was small beer in comparison to the power and wealth his elder brother now enjoyed. Thomas wanted more and the Protector obliged. On 16 February, as Katherine Parr watched the body of Henry VIII being laid to rest at Windsor, Thomas Seymour was created Baron Seymour of Sudeley in Gloucestershire and given additional lands worth £500 per annum. The next day he was also appointed to the office of Lord High Admiral, and named a Knight of the Garter. And he was awarded a full place on the Privy Council.
Still, he did not consider these adequate rewards. Although he has been depicted as a greedy chancer, his disgruntlement was not entirely unfounded. He had served his king well during the last four years of Henry’s reign, accepting the loss of Katherine Parr with surprising equanimity for a man who sometimes found it hard to contain his emotions. Instead, he devoted himself wholeheartedly to diplomacy and his military career. He was with the king in the French war of 1544 and participated in the capture of Boulogne. By October, when Henry and Katherine were enjoying a tender reunion in Kent, Thomas was both master of the ordnance and an admiral of the English fleet. The sea was a genuine love and he revelled in his new appointment, breasting the waves in his flagship, the Peter Pomegranate, and producing plans for making the English navy a more effective tactical fighting force.9 At home, he became a Member of Parliament for Wiltshire, though he does not seem to have attended often. It was not really his milieu. More gratifying was the possession of Hampton Place, outside Temple Bar in London, which was granted to him late in 1545. With an enthusiasm bordering on pretentiousness, he renamed his new property Seymour Place.
So he was neither overlooked nor forgotten, but he was not one of the great men. There was no leading role for him in national affairs. He was well off but aspired to be rich. Above all, he was not accorded the respect he believed should be his as the king’s uncle. His brother had taken it all for himself. Thomas believed that the roles of Protector and Governor of the King’s person should never have been vested in one man. Looking for historical precedent to support his views, he found encouragement in the arrangements made for the minority of Henry VI. Yet he overlooked the fact that this was not the most promising of history lessons, for Henry VI’s reign produced civil war and vicious faction-fighting, but it was true that Henry V’s brothers had divided responsibilities for their nephew between them. Seymour convinced himself of the seriousness of his argument. And he knew, once Henry VIII was in his grave and Katherine Parr began to emerge from her seclusion, where he could find a sympathetic ear – and perhaps much more. There was still a strong spark of desire, and, indeed, of deeper affection, between them. A permanent union would bring them personal happiness and political opportunity, if they could continue to manage their relationships with the royal children successfully. The extension of Somerset’s authority on 12 March, which allowed him to bypass the advice of the Privy Council if he saw fit, must also have brought home to both Thomas and Katherine the realization that their individual options were disappearing. It was against this backdrop of unpalatable political reality that the new Lord Seymour of Sudeley and the dowager queen renewed their interrupted romance during the lengthening spring days.
The course of their liaison is revealed in the love-letters they exchanged at this time. This correspondence, preserved in various collections in England, provides us with a compelling picture, rare for the Tudor period, of the private passions of two highprofile individuals. Their emotions are powerfully on display, unsullied by the passage of four and a half centuries. The language is uncomplicated and direct: ‘I would not have you think’, wrote Katherine, in the earliest of the letters in the sequence, ‘that this mine honest goodwill towards you to proceed of any sudden motion or passion …’10 Thomas soon put her mind at ease: ‘I beseech your highness to put all fancies out of your head that might bring you in any one thought that I do think that the goodness you have showed me is of any sudden motion, as at leisure your highness shall know to both our contentions … From the body of him whose heart ye have, T. Seymour.’11 And he ended with the amusingly revealing postscript that ‘I never overread it after it was written, wherefore if any faults be I pray you hold me excused.’
As no doubt she did. Katherine was a woman of thirty-four, widowed three times. He was three years older and had never been married. This was not a young couple discovering love for the first time. Yet we can still feel their excitement, their hopes and fears, the rising tide of resentment against the elder Seymour and his wife felt by Katherine, and Thomas’s attempts to counsel and calm her. In this written testimony of a love reborn, Thomas Seymour is measured in his advice on how to deal with the situation. He realizes that work will have to be done to make their relationship acceptable to those in power, but he does not come across as a self-serving braggart propelling a gullible woman towards the altar, but as a gentleman in love. Of course, there were advantages in marrying Katherine; she was quite a different proposition from the Lady Latimer he had first courted. She would for ever be ‘Kateryn the Quene KP’, even when she became his ‘most loving, obedient and humble wife’, and he always addressed her as ‘your highness’. But his feeling for her appears genuine.
Only one of the letters around the probable time of their marriage is dated, so we cannot say with certainty when the relationship resumed or exactly how this came about. The earliest opportunities for public meetings must have been after the coronation of Edward VI. Seymour had played a prominent ceremonial role in proceedings but there is no record of the queen, or either of her stepdaughters, attending. Yet Katherine was evidently allowed to see Edward and it may have been one of these ‘official’ appearances at court that provided the impetus for the renewal of their love. The courtship was, however, pursued well away from the glare of prying eyes, in Katherine’s dower manors at Chelsea and Hanworth. In this respect, the new regime’s concern to control the queen’s access to her stepson allowed her to conduct her private life without great risk of unwanted scrutiny. Somerset was to discover that marginalizing the queen led to unforeseen complications. For Katherine and Thomas took full advantage of their freedom.
In the beginning, there was caution mingled with evident delight. She had stipulated that they should exchange letters only once a fortnight, but broke this rule herself almost immediately. They began secret trysts at Chelsea, where Seymour would stay overnight, though Katherine warned him: ‘When it shall be your pleasure to repair hither, ye must take some pain to come early in the morning, that ye may be gone again by seven o’clock.’ She did not want to be discovered in bed with him at the time the house was rising. Discretion was still important to her, though only up to a point. ‘And so, I suppose, ye may come without suspect. I pray you let me have knowledge overnight at what hour ye will come, that your portress may wait at the gate to the fields for you.’12 This was all well and good, but such comings and goings, as Katherine’s instructions acknowledged, inevitably involved other people. Servants might be trusted, but word got out. Their affair had not long been consummated when it appears to have been known in the household of Katherine’s brother, William Parr. ‘I met with a man of my lord marquess as I came to Chelsea’, reported Seymour, ‘whom I knew not, who told Nicholas Throckmorton that I was in Chelsea fields with other circumstances which I defer till at more leisure.’ He was, he said, remembering to burn her letters. This prudence, however, could not conceal his midnight visits to the pleasant manor of Chelsea.13
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p; Soon the gossip about the comings and goings was known in the Herbert household as well. On 16 May, Seymour dined with Katherine’s sister and brother-in-law, and Anne Herbert, who was apparently being used as a post-box for messages between the queen and Seymour, decided it was time to probe more deeply. ‘She waded further with me’, reported the bashful lover, ‘touching my lodgings with your highness at Chelsea.’ His first reaction was to deny the charge, saying that he merely happened to be passing en route to the bishop of London’s house. He maintained this defence for some time, ‘till, at last, she told me further tokens, which made me change my colours, which, like a false wench, took me with the manner’. His lame story thus demolished, Seymour decided that he could trust the woman he now referred to as ‘my sister’. She was not quite that, yet, but he would now happily take her into his confidence, knowing that Anne could report back to Katherine ‘how I do proceed in my matter’. By this, he meant preparing the ground for acceptance of their marriage. Meanwhile, he hoped that Katherine would write to him every three days and he begged her to send him one of the miniatures of herself that she had commissioned when she was married to Henry VIII: ‘Also, I shall humbly desire your highness to give me one of your small pictures, if ye have any left, who with his silence, shall give me occasion to think on the friendly cheer that I shall receive when my suit shall be at an end.’
Katherine responded by saying that she had ‘sent in haste to the painters for one of my little pictures which is very perfect by the judgement of as many as have seen the same; the last I had myself I bestowed it upon my Lady of Suffolk’. She also reassured him about the Herberts, saying that she had decided to take her sister completely into her confidence: ‘It seemed convenient unto me,’ she wrote, ‘at her being here … to open the matter unto her concerning you (which I never before did) at the which unfeignedly she did not a little rejoice, wherefore I pray you at your next meeting with her to give thanks for the same, taking the knowledge thereof at my hand.’
She had said, in the same letter, that if Somerset mentioned the prospect of her marrying again, she would be ready with an answer, ‘so that he might well and manifestly perceive my fantasy to be more towards you for marriage than any other’. But she went on to say that she was ‘determined to add thereto a full determination never to marry, and break it when I have done, if I live two years’. Meanwhile, though she expected to see the king later the same week, and knew Seymour might be there, as well, she would continue to behave in public with all due restraint. Thomas was alarmed by her sudden hesitancy about marriage itself. ‘Ye shall not think of the two years ye wrote of in your last letter before this’, he responded. And, to drive the point home, he told her how pleased he was that she was seeking his advice on how to handle disputes with his brother about her lands.14 Clearly, by this point, he did not want her to waver.
Any hesitation she might have very fleetingly felt was soon overcome. She was genuinely in love and, as he had reminded her, marriage was to their mutual advantage. The passage of time was only exposing her still more to the perils and uncertain status of being merely a dowager queen. So, probably some time in the last two weeks of May 1547, Katherine Parr took as her fourth husband Lord Thomas Seymour of Sudeley. The marriage may have taken place earlier in the month (Seymour’s letter of 17 May lends credence to this possibility) but as the correspondence he and the queen exchanged is carefully phrased, we cannot be sure. No information about the priest who performed the ceremony, the location in which it took place or those who witnessed it, has ever been found. This conspiracy of silence was necessary to protect the newly-weds, who could not yet live together publicly. First, they had to embark on an urgent campaign to get the possibility of their union accepted by the young king and his advisers. Katherine was especially concerned about this aspect, writing, ‘I would desire you to obtain the king’s letters in your favour, and also the aid and furtherance of the most notable of the Council, such as ye shall think convenient.’ Her political sense had not entirely left her, despite her emotional commitment to Thomas. Once they had succeeded in gaining official approval, they could then make the delicate admission that, in fact, their marriage had already taken place. Neither of them could be sure how this acknowledgement of their deceit would be received.
MARRY IN HASTE, repent in leisure, so the saying goes. Once the deed was done, the back-tracking was far less pleasant than the anticipation of Seymour’s stealthy midnight creeping through the spring blossoms of Katherine’s Chelsea garden. It was all very well for the Herberts to condone the marriage. Others, whose friendship Katherine had enjoyed, or whose support Seymour needed, reacted with a mixture of cool disapproval and warm anger. One of the earliest casualties, before the marriage had even taken place, was the queen’s relationship with her elder stepdaughter. Mary continued to live with Katherine for several months after the death of Henry VIII, but she moved out of the dowager queen’s household in April. This was partly because she was now a substantial woman of property in her own right, under the terms of her father’s will. It was natural that she wished to establish her own household, to be independent, and to spend some time inspecting her new estates. Yet Katherine had been her closest companion for what would prove to be the happiest four years of her adult life and their parting should have been a matter of regret to both women. Instead, it may have come as a relief to the queen, distracted by her affair with Seymour and unwilling to recognize Mary’s disapproval of her behaviour. But disapprove Mary most certainly did. The extent of her distaste can be judged from the clinical detachment of her response to Seymour, when he tried to involve her in his quest for Katherine’s hand: ‘I have received your letter,’ she wrote, ‘wherein, as me thinketh, I perceive strange news, concerning a suit you have in hand to the Queen for marriage, the sooner obtaining whereof, you seem to think that my letters might do you pleasure.’ Apart from the carefully implied reprimand, she was determined to remind him – and Katherine herself – of the indelicacy of their actions:
it standeth least with my poor honour to be a meddler in this matter, considering whose wife her grace was of late, and besides that if she be minded to grant your suit, my letters shall do you but small pleasure. On the other side, 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 mine own remembrance.
She asked him not to think unkindly of her and she would be glad to help him in other ways, ‘wooing matters set apart, wherein I being a maid am nothing cunning’ (a strong hint that she was aware of what had been going on at Chelsea), ‘both for his blood’s sake that ye be of, and also for the gentleness which I have always found in you’.15 By the end, her tone had softened a little, but the overall message, that she wanted nothing to do with the personal life of her father’s last wife, is very clear. Her letter was dated 4 June, revealing that Seymour moved very quickly to get influential support for his marriage to Katherine.
If Katherine was dismayed by Mary’s answer, she wisely refrained from any further personal involvement. She may have calculated that her stepdaughter would not stay offended for long, and in this she was correct. Mary’s froideur was a setback, but not a major one. And Katherine had made her own first move, even earlier than Thomas’s, to give their union the ultimate respectability. The queen and her husband knew that it was the little king’s approval that mattered, and they had reason to believe that Edward’s unreserved benediction could be obtained if he was approached the right way. Opportunity soon presented itself. At the end of May, possibly within days of her actual marriage, Katherine was at court with the king. While there, she wrote him quite an extraordinary letter. This Latin epistle has not survived, but its gist can be easily discerned from Edward’s reply, written on 30 May:
Since I was not far from you, and in hopes every day to see you, I thought it best to write no letter at all to you. For letters are tokens
of remembrance and kindness between such as are at a great distance. But being at length moved by your request, I could not forebear to send you a letter: – first, to do somewhat that may be acceptable to you, and then to answer the letter, full of kindness, which you sent me from St James’s. In which, first, you set before mine eyes your love toward my father the king, of most noble memory; then your goodwill towards me; and lastly your godliness, your knowledge and learning in the Scriptures.
Her words had clearly pleased him greatly, combining the three things he valued most at that point in his young life. The boy went on to reassure her that ‘I do love and admire you with my whole heart. Wherefore if there be anything wherein I may do you a kindness, either in deed or work, I shall do it willingly.’16
His trust was, of course, deceived. The clue is in the last line of his reply, which strongly implies that Katherine had, in general terms, asked for his support and favour. He could not have known that his beloved stepmother, while professing her continuing love for Henry VIII, was actually softening him up so that she could obtain his agreement for her marriage to his uncle.
Edward was also very fond of Thomas Seymour. The dashing sea-dog appealed just as much to his nephew as he did to Katherine Parr. Again, this affection provided an opportunity for manipulation, but the king lived in a tightly controlled environment and Seymour realized very early after the death of Henry VIII that he would need to buy his way into it if he was to have any real hope of influence. He was prepared to be liberal, and was soon bribing John Fowler, a gentleman of the Privy Chamber. Fowler was to be his conduit to Edward when he could not see him personally, or when he wanted ideas put in the king’s mind. Chief of these was his own marital status. Fowler was to prepare the ground for acquiescence to the choice of bride. This he duly did, but Edward’s response was not what his uncle and stepmother would have wanted. On consideration, he first suggested Anne of Cleves, still very much alive and occasionally in attendance at court. The reply suggests that Edward rather liked her. But then, on mulling it over, he decided he had the perfect solution. His uncle should marry ‘my sister Mary, to change her opinions’. Apparently Thomas was amused by his nephew’s matchmaking schemes; marriage to Mary would have required the permission of the entire Privy Council and he was not going down that road. Edward needed to be steered to give the right answer. ‘I pray you, Mr Fowler,’ Thomas said, ‘if you may soon, ask his Grace if he should be contented I should marry the Queen.’ Katherine had not occurred to Edward as a likely wife for his uncle, which is hardly surprising, given her protestations of undying love for Henry VIII. Yet by 25 June the king was writing to Katherine to thank her for marrying Thomas.
