The thirteen-year-old Elizabeth, officially in mourning for her father, was unaware that Seymour swiftly made a bid for her and received a firm refusal from Protector Somerset and the council. She and her household had gone to live with Catherine Parr outside London, in the pretty dower house of Chelsea, bounded by the river Thames and open fields. In that relaxed, affectionate setting, a stealthy love affair began to develop; someone came riding to the manor under cover of darkness, and was secretly let in through the garden gate by Catherine, brimming with love and happiness. “I pray you let me have knowledge over night at what hour you will come, that your porteress may wait at the gate to the fields for you,” she wrote tenderly, and reminded her lover that he “must take some pain to come without suspect.” It was only a matter of weeks since the death of her husband, the king, an indecorously short time in which to have pledged herself to another man, but that man was Thomas Seymour, and she found him irresistible.
It seemed natural to Catherine that Thomas should have come to woo her; he had been her suitor four years earlier, in 1543, before Henry VIII intervened with his own peremptory proposal, and now, as the protector’s brother and the king’s widow, it was God’s will that they should marry—“God is a marvellous man,” she wrote joyously. Thomas sent her loving, confident letters from St. James’s, grumbling that the weeks when he was not with her seemed far longer than they had “under the plummet at Chelsea,” and addressing his betrothed as “Your Highness” so frequently as to betray a tinge of gloating. Catherine, who retained the title of “Catherine the Queen” even after her remarriage, was an excellent match, of royal status, rich, and lovable, and as her husband Thomas would probably have easier access to her stepson, King Edward, around whom he was already forming vague plans. He bribed one of the king’s gentlemen, John Fowler, to ask the nine-year-old king whom he, Thomas, should marry; Fowler reported that when he put the question to young Edward, “His Highness said, ‘My Lady Anne of Cleves,’ and so, pausing a while, said after, ‘Nay, nay, wot you what? I would he married my sister Mary, to turn her opinions.’ ” Indulgent and jolly with children, a typical favorite uncle, Thomas skillfully obtained his royal nephew’s support for his marriage with Catherine, and persuaded the boy to write an official letter counseling them to marry, several weeks after the hasty secret ceremony had actually taken place.
“The Lord Seymour married the Queen, whose name was Catherine, with which marriage the Lord Protector was much offended,” Edward noted in his diary for the month of May. The lord protector was offended at his brother’s subterfuge, and shocked at the precipitancy of his marriage, which came so soon after the death of Henry VIII that if Catherine immediately became pregnant there might be doubts about the paternity of the child. The protector’s wife, the haughty Duchess of Somerset, was infuriated that the wife of her husband’s younger brother would take precedence over herself, and a thoroughly unfraternal atmosphere prevailed. The protector administered Catherine’s lands entirely against her wishes, and tried to withhold the jewels that Henry VIII had given her, even down to her wedding ring. “My Lord your brother hath this afternoon a little made me warm,” Catherine wrote to her husband on one occasion. “It was fortunate we were so far distant, for I suppose else I should have bitten him.” She added with spirit that any man with such a wife as the protector’s ought “continually to pray for a short dispatch of that Hell.” It was well known that the duchess, in turn, bore Thomas a deep grudge “for the Queen’s cause.”
Despite their friction with the protector and his wife, Thomas and Catherine were a delightfully happy couple. Catherine’s kind, sensible nature and the admiral’s boisterous ways gave their household a sunny atmosphere; living with them at the dower houses of Chelsea and Hanworth, or at Thomas’s London residence, Seymour Place, Elizabeth observed, probably for the first time in her life, a tender, mature love relationship between a man and a woman of her own rank. When briefly separated from Thomas during her pregnancy in the following year, Catherine sent him news of their unborn baby with touching familiarity: “Mary Odell being abed with me had laid her hand upon my belly to feel it stir. It hath stirred these three days every morning and evening, so that I trust when you come it shall make you some pastime.” The natural undercurrent of physical enjoyment in evidence during the first weeks of their marriage was made the more overt by Thomas’s splendidly virile personality and uninhibited manners. With his hearty oaths—“By God’s most precious soul!” was his favorite—and the aura of sexual vigor upon which Henry VIII had knowingly commented, he must have appeared an awesome, exciting figure to Elizabeth, whose daily life had previously been bounded by her doting governess Katherine Ashley and the gentle tutor Grindal.
Thomas made much of his wife’s stepdaughter. He took to bursting into Elizabeth’s bedroom early in the morning, before she was ready, and sometimes when she was still in bed. 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.” If he caught her still in bed, he would fling 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.” At Hanworth the games continued. On two occasions Catherine joined Thomas, and together they tickled Elizabeth while she was in bed. Wriggling and laughing helplessly as they tickled her, in the fun that Thomas initiated, or being held by Catherine in the garden while Thomas, in mock anger, cut her black cloth dress to ribbons, was a kind of romping for which Elizabeth was a little too old, with overtones for which she was a little too young.
Katherine Ashley watched the admiral’s behavior towards her charge with mixed feelings. She was impressed by him; just as he spent money in bribing young King Edward’s close servant Fowler, so the admiral spent time in charming Elizabeth’s fond governess, and even before the death of Henry VIII Kat had rewarded him by remarking artlessly that she wished he might marry Elizabeth. But now that he was married to the queen instead, Kat was perturbed by his familiarities with the thirteen-year-old girl. Once, disturbingly, he tried to kiss Elizabeth in bed, but Kat intervened and scolded him, telling him to “go away, for shame.” Another time, at Chelsea, a suspicious little incident was reported to the governess; Elizabeth had heard someone fumbling with the lock, and knowing it was Thomas about to come in, jumped out of bed and ran to hide behind the bed curtains with her maids, while he waited determinedly for her to emerge. Worried, Kat met him in the gallery of the Chelsea house, and told him that these things were being talked about, and Elizabeth’s reputation was in danger. Defiantly, “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.” It was characteristic of Thomas to take it for granted that his brother would support him, and to persist in doing as he pleased.
Kat Ashley told the queen of her anxiety; with her customary good sense, Catherine “made small matter of it,” and closed the subject by saying that she would accompany her husband in the romps in the future. However, it was Elizabeth herself who eventually quelled them, by taking care to be up and dressed and working at her books by the time Thomas came in to greet her. “At Seymour Place, when the Queen lay there,” the governess afterwards recalled, “he did use a while to come up every morning in his night-gown, bare-legged in his slippers, where he found commonly the Lady Elizabeth up 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.” Kat remonstrated with the admiral for coming bare-legged into the girl’s bedroom, and on this occasion he was angry, but stopped doing so—an indication that Elizabeth’s cooler reception of him was effective.
The girl was unsettled by the unaccustomed physical encounters with a man. If at first she was delighted with the attention paid to her by her stepmother’s magnificent husband, and accepted his familiarities as friendly games, it cannot have been long before
she became aware of the deeper element which so upset her governess and, eventually, her stepmother. There was a curious incident at Hanworth, when Catherine Parr told Kat that the admiral had looked through the gallery window and seen Elizabeth throw her arms around a man’s neck. Kat taxed the girl with it, and Elizabeth “denied it weeping, and bade her ask all her women. They all denied it.” On reflection, the governess knew it could not be true, because no man had been there, except Grindal the schoolmaster, and she finally came to the conclusion that the queen was jealous of Thomas’s interest in her stepdaughter, and had invented this report as a means of warning Kat to keep a close watch over the girl’s doings. Catherine was acutely aware of the dangers of scandal, even though Thomas apparently was not.
The spreading ripples of disquiet in an otherwise happy household resulted rather from selfish irresponsibility in Thomas’s nature than from any better defined motive. His wife, the dowager queen, of whom he seemed deeply fond, was a healthy woman in her thirties, so there was no reason to expect that he would ever be free to marry Elizabeth, even had the protector and council withdrawn their fierce opposition to such a scheme. That a man newly married to a charming woman should deliberately have courted the death penalty by seducing a virgin of the blood royal also seems highly unlikely. The key to Thomas’s behavior lay in the streak of naïveté beneath his vigorous masculinity; his thought was for immediate benefits rather than the eventual results of a calculated course of action. He was happy with Catherine, but he enjoyed the teasing romps with Elizabeth, which transformed her from a grave, self-contained royal scholar into a giggling hoyden, and he saw no harm in indulging his inclinations and giving her an occasional surreptitious kiss, which he could easily pass off as play. That servants’ gossip might endanger Elizabeth’s reputation, or that it might be disturbing for her to be prematurely aroused by a man who stood for her in the role of stepfather, seemed less important to Thomas than his apparently harmless wish to gratify thus his strong attraction to the girl.
“The Admiral loved her but too well, and had done so a good while,” Kat Ashley afterwards confided to Thomas Parry, Elizabeth’s cofferer, “in so much that, one time the Queen, suspecting the often access of the Admiral to the Lady Elizabeth’s Grace, came suddenly upon them, where 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.” The admiral’s flirtation had gone too far; the laughter was hushed. Catherine was angry and unhappy. It was decided that Elizabeth and her servants must leave the admiral’s household, and after a painful interview with Catherine, during which the fourteen-year-old girl stood almost mute while her stepmother gave her quiet words of advice and warning, Elizabeth, her governess, her cofferer, and the rest of her servants set off for Cheshunt, soon after Whitsun 1548.
Although I could not be plentiful in giving thanks for the manifold kindnesses received at Your Highness’s hand at my departure, 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, 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, for if Your Grace had not a good opinion of me you would not have offered friendship to me that way, that all men judge the contrary, but what may I more say than thank God for providing such friends to me.
So wrote Elizabeth to her stepmother. It was a forlorn letter, but the style and the exquisite, even handwriting showed a control far beyond her years. The girl who answered little but stood weighing matters the “more deeper” was learning, painfully, to suppress her emotional responses.
Catherine was pregnant and unwell at the time. During Thomas’s temporary absences she exchanged bantering letters with him about their “little knave”—they took it for granted that their baby would be a boy—and Thomas teasingly instructed his wife to “keep him so lean and gaunt with your walking and good diet that he may creep out of a mousehole.” Elizabeth wrote, with a sad attempt at lightheartedness, “If I were at his birth, no doubt I would see him beaten for the trouble he has put you to.” Kind and sensible as ever, Catherine kept up an affectionate correspondence with her stepdaughter after their parting, and encouraged Thomas to write to her as well. “He shall be diligent to give me knowledge from time to time how his busy child doth,” Elizabeth wrote gratefully. At the end of August 1548, the child was born; it was a girl. Eight days later, Catherine died, raving with puerperal psychosis. There was a pathetic little scene shortly before her death, when, holding Thomas’s hand, she cried deliriously, “Those that be about me careth not for me, but stand laughing at my grief, and the more good I will to them, the less good they will to me.” Puzzled, the admiral answered, “Why sweetheart, I would you no hurt,” but Catherine drew him close and whispered sinisterly, “But my Lord, you have given me many shrewd taunts.” With the anxious, blundering tenderness of a strong man in a sickroom, Thomas lay down on the bed beside her, to see “if he could pacify her unquietness with gentle communication,” but she only became more anguished.
For a few days after her death Thomas was dazed with grief—“so amazed, that I had little regard either to myself or to my doings,” he wrote later. Temporarily he had no heart to carry on with any of his plans, and little Lady Jane Grey, whom he had taken into his household with the intention of marrying her to the young king, was bundled home to her bullying parents, the Marquess and Marchioness of Dorset.
A long, gossipy conversation took place soon after Catherine’s death, between Thomas’s servant Wightman and Sir Nicholas Throckmorton. Having “debated the great loss my Lord had by reason of her departure,” they went on to speculate about the admiral’s future. Throckmorton said piously that he hoped the loss of “so notable a wife” would “make him more humble in heart and stomach towards my Lord Protector’s Grace,” and added that “it stood my Lord upon to alter his manners, for the world beginneth to talk very evil-favoredly of him, both for his slothfulness to serve, and for his greediness to get, noting him to be one of the most covetous men living.” Then, significantly, he remarked, “My Lord Admiral is thought to be a very ambitious man of honour, and it may happen that, now the Queen is gone, he will be desirous for his advancement to match with one of the King’s sisters.” Since it was laid down in Henry VIII’s will that Mary and Elizabeth might only marry with the council’s consent, it would be treason for Thomas to seek Elizabeth without its permission, and that, as Wightman replied to Throckmorton, “must needs be his utter ruin and destruction.”
Thomas’s grief over Catherine’s death did not last long; his defiant swagger soon returned to him. He had no intention of humbling himself to the protector, or of sweetening his reputation, but on the contrary became more determined than ever to increase his power. On September 17, within a fortnight of his wife’s death, he began to negotiate with the Dorsets for the return of their daughter Lady Jane Grey to his care; the eleven-year-old girl was fourth in line to the throne and as such she was wrangled over like any other piece of valuable property. Thomas intended to marry her to the king—who, unlike his sisters, did not have to have the council’s consent to his marriage, only its advice—and his interest in the matter was heightened by the fact that the protector hoped to marry her to his own son, the young Earl of Hertford. The admiral won the child’s parents over with what was delicately called “certain covenants,” namely £500 down and a promise of a further £1,500, and to Lady Jane herself he acted the role of a kindly, jovial father, for which she was earnestly grateful.
The secret of Thomas Seymour’s charm lay in his ability to adopt the tone that would be most pleasing to his hearer. To Elizabeth he was a teasing admirer, to Jane a gentle parent, and to Edward he was a jolly, boyish uncle. He gave his royal nephew continual gifts of money, and instituted a delightful conspiratorial system whereby Edward should leave notes for him under a carpet in the palace. The boy king drew the required contrast between his tw
o uncles, and remarked mutinously, “My uncle of Somerset deals very hardly with me, and keeps me so strictly that I cannot have money at my will. But my Lord Admiral both sends me money and gives me money.” Thomas stirred the boy’s thoughts further, with such artless observations as “You must take upon yourself to rule, for you shall be able enough as well as other kings,” pointing out that then he would have plenty of money of his own. The servant Fowler, whom Thomas bribed heavily, “was always praising of him,” and often remarked to Edward, “You must thank my Lord Admiral for kindness that he showed you, and for his money.” In January 1547, when Edward Seymour had become protector, there had been some question of Thomas being made governor of the king’s person. “It was never seen,” Thomas afterwards said, ominously, “that in the minority of a king, when there have been two brethren, that the one brother should have all the rule, and the other none.” It was said that he had researched into precedents in the history chronicles. Understandably, the protector was thought to be “in fear of his estate,” and to hold his younger brother “in a great jealousy.”
In the month following Catherine’s death, Elizabeth and her large household had moved from Cheshunt, where they had been since Whitsun, to go to the old manor of Hatfield. Her closest female companion now was Kat Ashley, who was well meaning and devoted, but a fool; dazzled by the admiral, she kept up a misguided campaign to further his suit with her charge. “You shall see shortly,” she said slyly, “he that would fain have had you, before he married the Queen, will come now to woo you.” Despite Elizabeth’s coolheadedness, it became obvious that Kat’s talk was secretly pleasing to her. John Ashley, Kat’s husband, showed sense; several times he cautioned his wife “to take heed, for he did fear that the Lady Elizabeth did bear some affection to my Lord Admiral, she seemed to be well pleased therewith and sometimes she would blush when he were spoken of.” But the governess had an ally in the cofferer of the household, Thomas Parry, who repeated to Elizabeth interesting items from his conversations with the admiral—how he wished she resided at Ashridge so that he could visit her on his way down to the country, how he had inquired about her household expenses and described his own, how he wished her lands could be exchanged for those of his late wife, and so forth. Half-won though the girl was, she would not be drawn beyond a certain limit; when Parry asked her outright whether, if the council consented, she would marry the admiral, she perceptively demanded, “Who bade him say so?” and to his reply that “nobody made him say so, but that he gathered by his asking of these questions before,” Elizabeth said snubbingly, “It was but foolish gathering.”
The Men Who Would Be King Page 3
