The young elizabeth, p.11
The Young Elizabeth, page 11
* A reed instrument.
CHAPTER VI
Elizabeth’s Admiral
* * *
IN drawing up his will, Henry VIII had named sixteen executors who were to form a Council of Regency during Edward’s minority. There was no mention of a Protector or Governor of the Realm, Henry being apparently reluctant to trust any one man with supreme power, and each member of the Council was to have equal precedence. This inner Cabinet was to be supplemented by a secondary body of assistant executors who could offer guidance and advice, but whose exact powers and status were not defined.
During his lifetime Henry had always been careful to maintain a balance between those members of the Privy Council who favoured his own peculiar brand of Catholicism, and those who urged further reform. After Cromwell’s fall, some five years previously, the conservatives had, on the surface at any rate, seemed to gain the edge over the progressives – although the fact that the heir to the throne was being educated as a Protestant did not promise well for their future. Then, in the last months of the old King’s life, the conservative party had suffered a virtual death-blow in the loss of its two most influential leaders: the Duke of Norfolk, that eminently dislikeable old man who had, nevertheless, always served King Henry with the grim loyalty of a savage watchdog; and Stephen Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester, a brilliant but tricky lawyer and diplomat.
The ruin of the Howard family seemed complete. Norfolk’s arrogant soldier-poet son, the Earl of Surrey, was executed for treason on 19 January 1547, and Norfolk himself escaped a similar fate by a hair’s breadth – he had been due to meet the headsman only a few hours after Henry’s own death. Stephen Gardiner had fallen out of favour during the autumn of 1546, and when Henry was drafting the final version of his Will in December he struck the Bishop off the list of executors saying that ‘he was a wilful man and not meet to be about his son’.
The reasoning which lay behind the assault on the Howards and the removal of Gardiner is by no means clear, but in each case the initiative came direcdy from the King. Henry may have doubted whether either Norfolk or Gardiner was entirely sound on the question of the Royal Supremacy. He may have feared a Roman counter-attack once his own strong hand had gone, possibly even open violence between the opposing factions. He was also, surely, too much of a realist not to have known that the progressives could not be restrained indefinitely and that with them, in the last resort, must lie the future greatness of the English nation. Henry’s motives were frequently either obscure or obscured, but one thing is plain enough: before his death he himself had ensured that in his son’s reign the balance of power would be decisively tilted in favour of the Protestants.
The sixteen members of the Council of Regency were all ‘new’ men, in the sense that none of them bore a title more than ten years old. They were all men who had risen to wealth and influence by their loyalty and service to the Tudor monarchy, and their unquestioning acceptance of the doctrine of Royal Supremacy. Only four of their number could be regarded as having any sympathies with Catholicism. The remainder either had no strong convictions or were declared Protestants. The outstanding figure among them was Edward Seymour, Earl of Hertford, the new King’s maternal uncle and a rising star in the political firmament.
Edward Seymour not unnaturally saw himself as the obvious choice for Regent, and while Henry was still alive, speechless and barely conscious in his great bed at Whitehall, Seymour and his friend and ally, that experienced tactician, Secretary of State William Paget, paced the long gallery outside the royal bed-chamber, waiting for the end and discussing future arrangements. During their vigil several important matters were settled. It was agreed that Seymour should go at once to Hertford Castle to fetch the new King and bring him to London. In the meantime, Paget would keep Henry’s Will in his own hands (temporarily suppressing any inconvenient portions of it) and would use his considerable authority and prestige to persuade the other executors that Seymour should be made Protector during his nephew’s minority. In return, it was understood that Paget should act as Seymour’s principal adviser in the new government. It was also agreed that until such time as the transference of power had been completed, the fact of Henry’s death should be concealed.
This plan went smoothly into action, the only hitch occurring when Seymour, in his haste to set out to fetch Edward, inadvertently took with him the key of the chest containing the Will and was obliged to send it back to Paget from Hertford Castle, with a hurried note written ‘between three and four o’clock in the morning’ of 29 January.1 Such indeed was the speed and efficiency of the whole operation that there was no time for opposition to form.
The executors – or the twelve of them who were in London – met together formally for the first time on Monday, 31 January, and Paget had little difficulty in getting them to disregard both the spirit and the letter of their late master’s Will. They agreed
that being a great number appointed to be executors with like and equal charge, it should be more than necessary, as well for the honour, surety and government of the most royal person of the King our sovereign lord that now is, as for the more certain and assured order and direction of his affairs, that some special man of the number and company aforesaid should be preferred in name and place before others.
After this, by unanimous consent and ‘upon mature consideration of the tenderness and proximity of blood’ between the new King and the Earl of Hertford, the executors proceeded to bestow on Hertford ‘the first and chief place among us, and also the name and title of the Protector of all the realms and dominions of the King’s majesty that now is, and of the Governor of his most royal person’.2
The news of Henry VIII’s death was now officially released and later that same day, 31 January, King Edward arrived in the capital, escorted by his uncle, and was lodged, according to established custom, in the Tower. The coup d’état had been a brilliant and painless success, though in fairness to the new Protector it should be said that he did have strong claims to an office normally considered essential during a royal minority. Edward Seymour was an able, sincere and well-meaning man. Whether he possessed the necessary strength and ruthlessness to defend his position against the competitors who would inevitably rise to assail it remained to be seen.
Katherine Parr had been left no say in the guardianship of her stepson, but it was agreed that the Princess Elizabeth should be placed in the Queen Dowager’s care while she finished her education. This seemed an eminently suitable arrangement, and shortly after her father’s death Elizabeth moved with her household to join the Queen, now installed at Chelsea, part of her jointure property.
Henry VIII had acquired the manor of Chelsea from Lord Sandys in 1536, and had built a new house there, on the site of the present Cheyne Walk, just to the east of the Albert Bridge. Completed about 1540 and supplied with water from a spring in Kensington, it was apparently intended as an extra nursery for the royal children. Elizabeth had been there in May 1541, when an item occurs in the account presented by Robert Kyrton, Master of the Barge, ‘for serving my Lady Elizabeth from Suffolk Place to Chelsea’.3 In 1547, this pleasant red-brick mansion overlooking the Thames at Chelsea Reach, was to see the beginning of the first, and in some ways the most momentous crisis of her life.
Whatever resentment Katherine Parr may have felt at being excluded from any further share in Edward’s upbringing was soon forgotten in the excitement of a promising development in her private life. Her old suitor, Thomas Seymour, was renewing his attentions, and now all of a sudden it seemed to Katherine that ‘the time is well abbreviated, by what means I know not, except the weeks be shorter at Chelsey than in other places’.4
The well-known, near-contemporary description of Thomas Seymour – ‘fierce in courage, courtly in fashion; in personage stately, in voice magnificent, but somewhat empty of matter’ – is accurate, as far as it goes. It does not add that he was also vain, greedy, selfish and dangerous. Utterly unscrupulous in his use of man, woman or child – especially woman or child – in any scheme which would further his own ends, Tom Seymour, the classic confidence-trickster, possessed just the kind of charm calculated to make him irresistible to his victims.
On 17 February, Edward Seymour had been created Duke of Somerset to match his new dignity, and in the general sharing-out of honours which took place before the coronation Thomas became Baron Seymour of Sudeley and was given the office of Lord High Admiral. He had been named as one of the assistant executors in Henry VIII’s Will, which now ensured him a place on the Privy Council, but he was far from satisfied – regarding his elder brother’s semi-regal state with savage envy. It seemed the height of injustice to Thomas Seymour that one of the King’s uncles should enjoy all the fruits of their valuable relationship, while the other was apparently to be fobbed off with mere consolation prizes.
Labouring under an acute sense of grievance, therefore, the Lord Admiral set about considering ways and means of altering this distressing state of affairs. As an eligible bachelor in his late thirties, his obvious first step was to choose a wife whose position would improve his own status, and with astonishing effrontery he considered the Princesses Mary and Elizabeth in turn. As Henry’s daughters had been restored to the Succession with the explicit proviso that any marriages they might make must first be fully approved by the King and Council, Tom Seymour cautiously sounded some of his fellow councillors on the subject and was, not surprisingly, rebuffed. It was only after this that he turned back to the Queen Dowager whose feelings towards him, he was confident, had not changed.
He was perfectly correct in this assumption and Katherine, unaware of her lover’s treacherous behaviour, was transparent with happiness. ‘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 earnestly 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.’5 The Almighty, it seemed, had withstood her will ‘most vehemently’ on that occasion, but now she was to have her reward for self-abnegation and could only say, with heartfelt sincerity, that ‘God is a marvellous man.’
Katherine was thirty-four now but, not having been worn out with child-bearing, she was still young enough and attractive enough to be eager to snatch her chance before it was too late. The Admiral was impatient – he had no intention of being balked again – and some time that spring there was another secret wedding between a Queen Dowager of England and a bold, handsome adventurer. As on the previous occasion, no record survives of where or when the ceremony took place, but the evidence points to a date in April or early May.
The next step was to find a tactful way of breaking the news. Katherine wrote again to the Admiral, probably before the marriage had actually been solemnised: ‘As I gather by your letter, delivered to my brother Herbert, ye are in some fear how to frame my lord your brother to speak in your favour.’ The Queen had no intention of crawling to the Protector (or to his wife, whom she disliked). ‘I would not wish you to importune for his good will’, she told Tom, ‘if it come not freely at the first; it shall be sufficient once to require it, and then to cease. I would desire you might obtain the king’s letters in your favour, and also the aid and furtherance of the most notable of the council … which thing obtained, shall be no small shame to your brother and loving sister, in case they do not the like.’6 In the meantime, however, it was necessary to be discreet. ‘When it shall be your pleasure to repair hither,’ wrote Katherine, ‘ye must take some pain to come early in the morning, that ye may be gone again by seven o’clock; and so I suppose ye may come without suspect. I pray you let me have knowledge over-night at what hour ye will come, that your porteress may wait at the gate to the fields for you.’7
Tom Seymour had already taken the precaution of suborning a gentleman of the Privy Chamber, one John Fowler, to further his interest with the King and act as a go-between. He also wrote to Mary, asking her to favour his suit, but got little satisfaction from this quarter. Mary was plainly shocked and disappointed, ‘considering whose wife Her Grace was of late’, that Katherine should even be contemplating another marriage so soon. What Elizabeth thought is, characteristically, open to question. She was probably in the secret from the beginning. Even if Katherine had not confided in her, she must have heard about those mysterious comings and goings in the Chelsea fields during the small hours. The boisterous, loud-voiced person of the Admiral was not easy to conceal at any time, and the Queen’s maids would have been agog with the excitement of it all.
The unreliable Italian, Leti, in his Life of Elizabeth, records that Mary sent her sister an urgent invitation to leave their unworthy step-mother’s roof and make a home with her, but that Elizabeth refused. Although expressing her grief and affliction at seeing ‘the scarcely cold body of the King, our father, so shamefully dishonoured’, she considered neither she nor Mary were in a position to risk offending so influential a couple as the Queen and the Admiral and that their best course would be dissimulation. According to Leti, she justified this by pointing out that Henry’s memory, ‘being so glorious in itself, cannot be subject to those stains which can only defile the persons who have wrought them’. Besides which, the Queen has shown her so great affection and done her so many kind offices, that Elizabeth ‘must use much tact … for fear of appearing ungrateful’.8
The invitation may have been sent and, if so, would surely have been gracefully declined – life at Chelsea, after all, promised to be more amusing than life buried in Essex with Mary – but the whole correspondence strikes a false note. Elizabeth was not a free agent to live where she chose and, whatever she thought, is hardly likely to have committed herself so far – even in a private letter to her sister. All the same, it is true that the text, if it is genuine, has been translated three times and may have suffered in the process. And it is quite possible that Elizabeth was somewhat piqued by her much-loved step-mother’s precipitate remarriage. In view of subsequent events, it is reasonable to assume that she did not yet know about Tom Seymour’s earlier matrimonial intentions towards herself. Leti again provides an elaborate apparatus of letters – an ardent proposal and an elegantly phrased refusal, both dated in February – but these are almost certainly inventions of his own. Nevertheless, it was not long before Katherine Ashley had heard the gossip about what would have happened if the Lord Admiral ‘might have had his own will’, and could not resist passing on this interesting piece of information to her charge.
The Queen paid a visit to court in May and seems to have discussed the whole question of her remarriage with the King, explaining that no disrespect was intended to his father’s memory. Reassured on this point, Edward wrote to her on 30 May: ‘since you love my father, I cannot but much esteem you; since you love me, I cannot but love you in return; and since you love the Word of God, I do love and admire you with my whole heart. Wherefore, if there be anything wherein I may do you a kindness, either in word or deed, I will do it willingly.’9
News that the marriage had actually taken place had leaked out by midsummer and the King was graciously pleased to give it his blessing. ‘I will so provide for you both’, he told Katherine magnificently, ‘that hereafter, if any grief befall, I shall be a sufficient succour in your godly or praisable enterprises.’ But the Lord Protector, as Edward noted laconically in his Chronicle, ‘was much displeased’. However, the damage was done, and the outbreak of war with Scodand later in the summer helped to distract the Protector’s attention from his brother’s misdeeds.
The Admiral should have commanded the Fleet in the Scottish campaign, but he preferred to remain at home to pursue certain projects of his own. He and Katherine, and Elizabeth, were now all living together – sometimes at Chelsea, sometimes further out in the country at Hanworth, another of the Queen’s dower houses, and sometimes at Seymour Place, Tom’s London residence. Katherine was relaxed and happy. Tom, having achieved one of his objectives, was in high good humour and the domestic atmosphere was gay and informal.
Remarkably informal, in fact, for it was at Chelsea, ‘incontinent after he was married to the Queen’, that the Lord Admiral began his semi-jocular pursuit of his wife’s step-daughter. 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 so go forth through his lodgings; 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.’ All good clean fun perhaps, and certainly quite a new experience for Elizabeth. There was one morning when the Admiral went rather too far and ‘strove to have kissed her in her bed’ but Mrs Ashley, who was present, ‘bade him go away for shame’.10
When the household moved to Hanworth, Tom would ‘likewise come in the morning unto her grace’, but found Elizabeth up and dressed, except for two occasions when the Queen came with him ‘and there they tickled my lady Elizabeth in the bed, the Queen and my lord Admiral’. Another time, in the garden at Hanworth, ‘he wrestled with her and cut her gown in an hundred pieces, being black cloth’. When Mrs Ashley scolded the princess, ‘her grace answered, she could not do with all, for the Queen held her, while the Lord Admiral cut it’.11
