Could not you be able to make so much money?" Sharington assured him he could, and the bargain was made. A few months later, when Seymour's house was searched, a great store of money was found hidden there.
In unstable times Seymour's bluff bonhomie and old-fashioned trucu-lence were a welcomed contrast to the indecisive leadership of the Protector. The latter was believed to be an altruist, yet he dared not go among the people for fear his irascible temper would betray him. His much admired military prowess, which had made him popular in the past, had been stalemated in Scotland, where the heavy cost of occupying his conquest meant that the victory at Pinkie Cleugh could not bring the Scots permanently within English control. The admiral, on the other hand, held not only the fleet—and swore "he was as glad to be admiral as of any office in the realm, and that no one would take that office from him without taking his life too"—but stalwart men across England, and swore he had the arms and even the ordnance to equip them. (Two cannon foundries, it was said, were producing at full speed to meet his requirements.)
Realistic and sober men were inclined to dismiss Seymour as a reckless fool, who would no doubt be stopped before his plan had gone very far. Yet so precarious was England's security that a few hundred soldiers, let alone the admiral's vaunted thousands, could indeed threaten the king and the council, especially if they had mobile ordnance (which even King Henry had lacked at times) and took the initiative. What was more, Seymour seems to have had the avid interest, and potential backing, of the French. 14
The centerpiece of the admiral's bid for power was Elizabeth, and as he went about rallying his supporters he never lost sight of his objective of marrying her., Throughout the fall he flirted with the idea, bringing it up as if rhetorically with Lord and Lady Tyrwhitt on one occasion, hinting to Catherine's brother William Parr, earl of Northampton, on another that he might even broach the subject informally to the Protector, to see what his attitude would be. 15
Legally, Seymour could do nothing without the written and sealed consent of a majority of the council members. Under the terms of King Henry's will, if either of his daughters married without that consent she automatically forfeited all right to the succession. 16 This in itself ought to have made Elizabeth exceedingly cautious; she had a great deal to lose. Yet the admiral was not just any adventurer scheming to win her hand. He was the king's favorite uncle, and was urging his eleven-year-old nephew to assert his independence in just such matters as approving his favorite uncle's marriage to his sister. And Seymour was the Protector's brother, and had exploited this advantage of blood once before in just such a situation, marrying where he had been warned not to and getting away with it. Of
course, the risk of marrying Elizabeth, who was second in line to the throne, was greater than the risk of marrying Henry VIII's widow. But Seymour was stronger now in authority and followers, and had the girl's chief keepers, if not the girl herself, firmly on his side.
Kat Ashley, Elizabeth's easygoing, uncircumspect mistress had wanted the two to marry for so long it had become almost an obsession. Nothing that happened while Seymour was married to Catherine had changed her opinion, and indeed if she heard Seymour's name slandered she rose hotly to his defense. 17 She more than anyone knew what "familiarities" had been between them, and believed firmly that, contrary to the general view, if Seymour married Elizabeth he would not treat her shabbily but would "make but too much of her." 18 (In a candid conversation with Thomas Parry, so Parry deposed later, Kat had told him about Catherine's discovery of Elizabeth in Seymour's arms, and made a tantalizing reference to further indiscretions. "She sighed, and said, as I remember," Parry deposed, " 'I will tell you more another time,' " becoming anxious afterward and swearing Parry to absolute secrecy lest Elizabeth "be dishonored forever, and she likewise undone." Clearly there was more to hide.)
Sometime during the fall of 1548 Kat was brought before the Protector and his imperious wife, and criticized for being too lax in watching over the king's sister. She had let Elizabeth "go one night on the Thames in a barge," and had allowed other ill-advised freedoms. The duchess had threatened to replace Mistress Ashley with someone more responsible, "fearing that she bore too much affection for my lord admiral." 19 Yet for the time being nothing was done, and as Seymour's plans ripened Kat became more eager for her cherished Elizabeth to marry the dashing admiral.
"What news is at London?" Elizabeth recalled asking Kat.
"The voice goes there," was the reply, "that the lord admiral shall marry you."
Elizabeth smiled. "It is but a London news," she said, and dropped the subject. But Kat would not let it rest. "You shall see shortly," she said sometime later, "that he that would fain have had you before he married the queen will come now to woo you." 20
Weeks went by, then months, and by Christmas the admiral's doings were rumored all over London. He had come to the capital, and was staying at Seymour Place where his proceedings were virtually public knowledge. Elizabeth's cofferer Thomas Parry—who was judged to keep "very uncertain" books and to have "little understanding to execute his office"—went to him there frequently, and stayed an hour or more each time. It was not
difficult to guess what they were discussing. Elizabeth knew for certain, for Parry came to her and described how Seymour had asked him in detail about the costs of her household, the extent of her lands and the state of the patents she held—all the questions a very practical suitor would pose. The admiral had proposed an exchange of properties, Parry said, and 'Vent about to have her" along with them. Then Parry asked her the question Seymour had no doubt told him to ask: "whether if the council would like it, she would marry with him?"
"When that comes to pass," the cofferer recalled her saying, "I will do as God shall put my mind."
Undaunted by this equivocation, Parry persisted. Seymour, he told Elizabeth, needed his future wife's help in obtaining the council's permission. The best way would be to win over the Protector's wife, and he was counting on Elizabeth to accomplish this. She was to go to the duchess, charm her, and eventually persuade her to use her considerable influence to promote the marriage.
It was pure fantasy; worse still, the admiral had misjudged Elizabeth's reaction to his demand for help.
"I dare say he did not so, nor would so!" she said sharply.
"Yes, by my faith," Parry insisted, bewildered.
"Well, I will not do so, and so tell him. I will not come there, nor begin to flatter now!"
The duchess's hauteur rankled with Elizabeth, as did her recent threats against Mistress Ashley. Elizabeth was angry that Seymour should think her capable of such hypocrisy. She may even have exaggerated her reaction for reasons of her own.
Young as she was, flattered and infatuated as she was, Elizabeth may well have begun to sense that Seymour's venture would prove to be stillborn. He was underplaying his hand. His ultimate aims, as far as she could tell, had not changed, but his tactics had stalled. He held back from making his dramatic bid for power, from massing his men and marching them to London. He had made no political headway either—or else why rely on Elizabeth's feeble leverage to gain the council's support for their marriage? Instead of acting, he was procrastinating, shut away in his London house, waiting, it seemed, for events to favor his hopes.
Whether from fear or shrewdness, Elizabeth refused to see him or communicate with him. She may have given him secret encouragement, but if so it has remained secret. Questioned about the widespread rumor of an impending marriage, Kat Ashley—struggling hard to lie convincingly, no doubt—denied it absolutely, saying "it was never meant nor thought." 21
Parry and Seymour continued to meet, but in a changed atmosphere. Seymour was sarcastic and bitter, and seemed for the first time to mistrust the cofferer. He felt totally thwarted by the Protector, and told Parry in some heat that the marriage "would not be," as "his brother would never consent to it." Then, as if forgetting that Parry was there, he began muttering angrily under his breath, stammering out th
e words so that the cofferer could barely make them out. "I am kept back," or "I am kept under," was as much as he could hear. After a perfunctory request to meet again the next time Elizabeth came to London, Seymour let Parry go. It was their last meeting.
Shortly afterward Seymour risked all in a foolhardy act of bravado. Having sent away the yeomen of the watch on various errands, he broke into the king's private apartments, but before he could get at the boy he alerted the entire palace to the danger by taking out his pistol and shooting the barking dog that kept watch outside the bedchamber door. The chamber gentlemen rushed to protect their master, and the rest of the servants came running. They eventually found Seymour hiding in the palace with a party of his followers. Summoned to appear before the council, he refused, demanding a guarantee of safe conduct and a hostage besides; instead of these accommodations he was given safe conduct to the Tower, and left there.
The escapade was interpreted in the most menacing light: obviously, it was said, Seymour had meant to kill the king, the Protector and eventually Mary as well, then marry Elizabeth and rule as king himself. Paget referred to him as a "great rascal" or bandit who had "more greed than wit or judgement," but made it plain that the admiral could not hope for mercy merely because he lacked the brains of an archcriminal. 22 His accomplices were sought out, his associates questioned, and a long list of treasonable charges was amassed against him. Seymour and everyone linked with him came under grave and fateful suspicion.
Within days of his apprehension a party of men came riding to Hatfield, clearly bent on weighty business. The cofferer, hearing of their arrival, rushed like a hunted man to his living quarters, his hands trembling and his face white with fear. A servant remembered later that he looked "very pale and sorrowful," and began wringing his hands, saying to his wife "I would I had never been born, or I am undone." Parry had no doubt that the men had been sent for him, and he was frightened for his life. He managed to grab the chain of office from around his neck and to yank the jeweled rings from his fingers before he was taken; his wife fled to London, probably taking these and other valuables with her.
Before they could save themselves, before they could appeal to their mistress or speak a word to one another, Parry, Kat Ashley and another servant were spirited away by the grim-faced guardsmen, who sped off in great haste along the high road to London.
S5
No croked legge
No blered eye
No part deformed out of kinde
Nor yet so ouglye
Half can be
As is the inward suspicious minde.
T
JLhc
he inquiry—it was not yet an interrogation—began at once. Elizabeth was asked about her dealings with Seymour even as Kat Ashley and Parry were being taken into custody, and she answered briefly, too startled to do more than deny any contact between them. Later, after the men and their prisoners had gone, she became apprehensive, and the next day her worried surmises were confirmed.
Robert Tyrwhitt, the shrewd and cynical investigator sent by the council to Hatfield to extract the truth from Elizabeth, opened his campaign with a ruse. He saw to it that a letter, ostensibly sent to one of Elizabeth's women by a friend but in fact composed by Tyrwhitt himself, came into Elizabeth's hands. In it she read her servants' fate: both Kat and the cofferer had been committed to the Tower.
Lady Browne, a familiar figure in the household who had Elizabeth's confidence, watched her read the fearsome news and reported her reaction to Tyrwhitt. She was "marvellous abashed," and burst at once into tears. After weeping "very tenderly a long time," she recovered herself enough to ask Lady Browne the crucial question: Had Ashley or Parry confessed anything?
Most likely Lady Browne claimed not to know, and Elizabeth, her mind alive with conjecture despite her distress, tried to decide what innocuous
86
incidents her servants would most likely have revealed. She sent for Tyr-whitt so that, on a pretense of full disclosure, she could confirm what she believed Ashley and Parry had said.
When he came to her she volunteered two inconsequential bits of information. First, that she had once added a postscript to a letter written to Seymour asking him to "credit" Parry in all things. But this referred not to any secret design between them, she said, merely to a minor matter of her housing in London. And second, Mistress Ashley had once written to the admiral warning him not to come to Hatfield "for fear of suspicion." But Elizabeth had been displeased with her for even acknowledging that such "suspicion" existed in the minds of others, and in fact the reference implied no guilt. 1
To Tyrwhitt Elizabeth's tactics were obvious, and he cut straight through to the chilling reality of her situation by reminding her "to consider her honor and the peril that might ensue, for she was but a subject." Then, taking his cue from her reference to Kat Ashley, he spoke at length about what an irresponsible and sinful woman Mistress Ashley was, not only indiscreet and foolish but morally unfit, adding that Parry was no better. If only Elizabeth would confess everything, he said, he was sure that, "her youth considered," all the "evil and shame" would be ascribed to them.
But Tyrwhitt had seriously misjudged Elizabeth if he thought she would grasp like a child at the opportunity to blame others, especially her beloved mistress. "I do see it in her face that she is guilty," he reported to the Protector, yet she persisted in denying that Ashley and Parry had had any secret understanding with Seymour. Furthermore he sensed that it would take much more than irate speeches and threats to break her. "She will abide more storms," he wrote, "ere she accuse Mistress Ashley."
But he went on storming at her for hours, "deliberating" many matters, eventually abandoning the direct assault and trying a variety of other tones, searching for her soft spot. He found it. "Gentle persuasion" worked where angry confrontation had failed, and Tyrwhitt believed that through gentleness he was "beginning to grow with her in credit." In fact she made a substantial confession, telling Tyrwhitt about her long conversation with Parry in which he asked her whether she would marry Seymour if the council gave consent. "This is a good beginning," Tyrwhitt recorded. "I trust more will follow." 2
For three days the questioning went on, but by the fourth Tyrwhitt was losing his sense of mastery. It wasn't that Elizabeth was uncooperative; on the contrary, she had become almost friendly—"more pleasant than she has been at any time since my being here," he wrote—since he showed her a letter from the Protector. (The letter was another ruse; though it was
written for her to see Tyrwhitt showed it to her "with a great protestation that he would not for £1,000 to be known of it." She considered it "a great kindness," so he thought.)
Yet it was becoming clear that Elizabeth would disclose only as much as she chose to, and no more. "I do assure your grace," Tyrwhitt wrote to Edward Seymour, "she hath a very good wit, and nothing is gotten of her, but by great policy." Try as he would he could not penetrate her reserve beyond a certain point. Uncertain what else to do, he wrote to the Protector asking for help and advice, and asking, too, for Lady Browne, who had left Hatfield soon after his arrival. "There is no body may do more good to cause her [Elizabeth] to confess the truth than she," he said of Lady Browne, praising both her "wise counsel" and her dedication to persuading Elizabeth to hold nothing back. It was not the first time that Lady Browne's influence with Elizabeth had been sought and prized. Seymour too had tried to use her to speak favorably of him in Elizabeth's presence, finding her, in the words of one of his servants, "wise and able to compass matters." 3
In fact Elizabeth seems to have been gathering strength as, day after day, she stood up to the onslaught of questioning. In addition she found, to her relief, that Kat had not been condemned to lie on filth in a stinking, lightless Tower cell but was being held in less harsh confinement. There might be hope for her release, if only she, Elizabeth, could remain resolute and argue convincingly that though Parry had mentioned marriage with the admiral, Kat had "never advised her to
it," and had never even touched on the subject except to caution Elizabeth in the most responsible fashion that she could never marry anyone without the council's consent.
After a week of constant demands and queries Elizabeth was rising resilient to the challenge. Steadfast denials had given way to righteous indignation, which flared when she learned—Tyrwhitt told her, to goad her —that farfetched rumors were circulating among the people, deepening the stains on her reputation. She wrote to the Protector, thanking him for his "great gentleness and good will" and, after repeating what she had already told Tyrwhitt, came to her main purpose for writing.
"Master Tyrwhitt and others have told me that there goeth rumors abroad, which be greatly both against my honor, and honesty (which above all other things I esteem)," she wrote, "which be these: that I am in the Tower, and with child by my lord admiral."
In truth the rumors went further. A midwife, it was said, had been brought from her house blindfolded to attend a mysterious birth. She came into a candlelit room, and saw on a bed "a very fair young lady" in labor.
In the darkness she could not tell whether she was in a palace or a hovel, or whether the beauteous young lady was Elizabeth or not, but it was said that the child she delivered was "miserably destroyed" afterward, and because of the mutterings about the admiral and the king's sister, she drew her own conclusions. 4
Nor were the mutterings confined to taverns and parlors. Hugh Latimer, former bishop of Worcester and the most outspoken popular preacher of the day, thundered so forcefully from the pulpit against the sinful doings of Thomas Seymour and Elizabeth that his condemnation lent credence to more fanciful rumors, and made some formal response from the Protector or council all but imperative. 5 Elizabeth was in no doubt about what form her response should take.
The first Elizabeth Page 10
