Sing up, heart, sing up, heart, and sing no more down,
For joy of King Edward, that weareth the crown!
Henry VIII was the last of the adult Tudor males. When he died the only males with royal Tudor blood in their veins were Henry’s own son, Edward, now nine years and three months old, and the infant Lord Darnley, son of his niece Margaret Douglas, who had married into a collateral branch of the Stuart family. Apart from these two children, the English royal house had become exclusively and depressingly female. There were Henry’s two daughters, the Ladies Mary and Elizabeth; his other two nieces, Frances Grey, Marchioness of Dorset and Eleanor Clifford, Countess of Cumberland and their daughters – three Greys, Jane, Katherine and Mary, aged respectively nine, seven and two, and one Clifford, Margaret, now seven years old – while the main branch of the Stuart-Tudor line was solely represented by the young Queen of Scotland.
This preponderance of women and little girls was politically as well as dynastically unfortunate, for it meant that until Edward was old enough to take over – at least another six or seven years – control would pass out of Tudor hands. King Henry’s will had provided for a council of sixteen executors, each ‘with like and equal charge’, to rule the country during his son’s minority – an arrangement so patently unworkable that it had been set aside within a week of the old King’s death. At a meeting of the executors held on 31 January it was agreed that ‘some special man’ would have to be preferred before the rest. The choice was an obvious one and the council obediently proceeded to confer on Edward Seymour, Earl of Hertford, ‘the name and title of Protector of all the realms and dominions of the King’s majesty that now is, and of the Governor of his most royal person’.
There were, of course, plenty of precedents for appointing the uncle of a child King as regent and guardian, and Edward Seymour had other qualifications. He was a man of proven ability, an experienced and successful soldier and diplomat, generally respected by his colleagues and trusted by the late King. But he was not of the blood royal. The son of a Wiltshire landowning family, he owed his earldom in part to his own exertions, but more to the fact that his sister had had the singular good luck to become Queen. His elevations to vice-regal status would inevitably give rise to jealousy and faction, and it remained to be seen whether he possessed the ruthlessness needed to fight off competition.
He had begun promisingly. Guided by his friend and ally, that shrewd political tactician, Secretary of State William Paget, Seymour had left Whitehall in the early hours of 28 January, before the old King’s body was cold. His destination was Hertford Castle, the current residence of the new King; his purpose to get custody of his nephew while Paget handled his interests in London. Largely thanks to Paget, the coup was so skilfully managed that by the time the council met on the thirty-first, they were simply rubber-stamping an already accomplished transference of power.
Seymour brought Edward as far as Enfield to join the Princess Elizabeth before breaking the news of their father’s death. Brother and sister clung together in such floods of tears that the onlookers were deeply moved, but whether the children cried from grief, from shock or just in sympathy with each other, it is impossible to say. Henry, at least in his own estimation, had been a concerned and affectionate father – Edward certainly had been the apple of his eye. Yet it is not easy to believe that either Edward or Elizabeth felt genuine human sorrow at his loss. In spite of Katherine Parr’s well meant efforts, neither had ever known any real family life; neither had ever been given the opportunity to form a genuine human relationship with their awesome parent. But they both knew that his death meant their sheet anchor had gone; that in spite of the kneeling courtiers, the elaborate deference and the fine words, they were now, at nine and thirteen, alone and all too vulnerable in a potentially very dangerous world.
The small, solemn, blond boy who rode through the mid-winter landscape on his way to take possession of his capital seemed a very different type from the bouncing, rumbustious extrovert his father had been at a similar age, and if anyone noticed an ominous resemblance to his uncle Arthur, no one commented on it. Physically Edward was an attractive child, with delicately modelled features, big grey eyes and the family’s reddish gold hair, while mentally and intellectually he showed the greatest promise. An enthusiastic contemporary wrote:
If you knew the towardness of that young Prince your heart would melt to hear him named … the beautifullest creature that liveth under the sun, the wittiest, the most amiable and the gentlest thing of all the world. Such a spirit of capacity, learning the things taught him by his schoolmasters, that it is a wonder to hear say. And finally he hath such a grace of deportment and gesture in gravity when he cometh into any presence, that it should seem he were already a father, and yet passeth he not the age of ten years.
Allowing for the fact that almost any child of average intelligence being put through the academic forcing process devised by Edward’s tutors might seem a prodigy to the uninitiated, it is still fair to say that Edward was well above average intelligence. As for his gravity of deportment and gesture, the priggish, unchildlike behaviour which often makes the young King appear both pathetic and repulsive, this was simply the natural result of his training and background.
There was no sentimental cult of youth in the sixteenth century. Childhood was widely regarded as an unfortunate but unavoidable preliminary to useful adult life – a period of mental and physical infirmity which, for everyone’s sake, should be got through as quickly as possible. Precocity or ‘towardness’ was therefore to be encouraged and cultivated. Edward was naturally a serious-minded boy. He had been brought up from infancy as the heir to the throne and there is no reason to suppose that at nine years old he did not fully understand and accept the duties and the responsibilities of his position. Childish behaviour in these circumstances would obviously have been quite unsuitable.
Edward arrived in London during the afternoon of 31 January and received an ecstatic welcome from the waiting crowds as he was escorted through the city to the fortress palace of the Tower, where his apartments had been ‘richly hung and garnished with rich cloth of arras and cloths of estate as appertaineth unto such a royal King’. Next day came his formal introduction to ‘the most part of the nobility of his realm, as well spiritual as temporal’ who had gathered in the presence chamber to kiss his hand and to hear the official promulgation of Seymour’s appointment as Protector and Governor of the King’s person. The assembled lords declared that they would be ready at all times ‘with all their might and power’ to defend the realm and the King, and finally ‘cried all together with a loud voice, “God save the noble King Edward!”’. In reply to this very proper demonstration of loyalty, the noble King Edward took off his cap and recited his piece. ‘We heartily thank you, my lords all; and hereafter in all that you shall have to do with us for any suits or causes, you shall be heartily welcome to us.’
These preliminaries being out of the way, the regime began to settle down and to make plans for the coronation which was to take place on 20 February, agreeing that, as a grudging concession to the King’s youth, the antique ceremony should be shortened from the usual eleven or twelve hours to about seven. On 18 February there was a grand investiture, as the new rulers of England made their first experiments with the sweets of power. Edward Seymour, Earl of Hertford, was created Duke of Somerset to emphasize the grandeur of his position. John Dudley, Viscount Lisle, became Earl of Warwick, and the younger Seymour brother, Thomas, Baron Seymour of Sudeley.
On the nineteenth Edward made the recognition procession from the Tower to Westminster. Dressed all in white and silver with the tall, imposing figure of the Duke of Somerset at his side, the third Tudor King rode through gaily decorated, freshly gravelled streets, surrounded by all the pomp and panoply amassed by his ancestors, the cheers of the people breaking over him in warm, generous waves. The city had, as usual, put on a royal show, with allegorical pageants, singing boys and Latin orations at every corner; but, as far as Edward was concerned, the high spot of the afternoon was undoubtedly the acrobat who performed ‘masteries’ on a rope stretched above St Paul’s Churchyard, and who delayed the King’s majesty with all the train ‘a good space of time’.
The coronation ceremony itself, performed by Edward’s godfather Archbishop Cranmer, went without a hitch, though it was perhaps ironical that the first King of England to be crowned as Supreme Head of the Church, God’s vice-regent and Christ’s vicar within his own dominions should have been a child of nine. If anyone found anything faintly ludicrous in the idea, they were careful not to say so and in sermon after sermon preached in the weeks following the coronation Edward was compared to Old Testament heroes such as David, Josiah and the young Solomon. The age of the spiritual father of the people was immaterial, his extreme youth a mere temporary inconvenience. What mattered was the fact that he was God’s anointed, ‘elected of God and only commanded by him’, divinely ordained to guide the people into the paths of righteousness. Edward certainly believed this. Whatever inner misgivings he may have felt were not connected with God’s purposes but with man’s.
As soon as the excitement of the coronation and its attendant festivities were over, the King went back to his lessons and the other members of the royal family were able to start adjusting to their new situation. The Queen Dowager had been left with no further say in the upbringing of her stepson, but she had been generously provided for in her husband’s will. Katherine Parr was now an extremely wealthy lady and, until the King married, she remained the first lady in the land, taking precedence even over the princesses. But the most important thing as far as Katherine was concerned, was that she was now for the first time in her life entirely independent and free to please herself. Soon after Henry’s death she had moved to her dower house at Chelsea – a modern, red-brick building, convenient for London and pleasantly situated overlooking the Thames. Here she was joined by the Princess Elizabeth and also by young Jane Grey, thus continuing the time-honoured custom of turning a royal lady’s household into a finishing school for girls. With the progressive party now in the ascendant Katherine could indulge her religious and intellectual proclivities without fear or concealment, and Chelsea Palace rapidly became a recognized centre of advanced godliness where the minds of two potentially very important wives and mothers were being moulded.
Unfortunately, this feminine mini-paradise was soon to be invaded by old Adam in the shape of Katherine’s former sweetheart, Thomas Seymour. The Protector’s younger brother was currently labouring under an acute sense of grievance. Not altogether surprisingly he thought poorly of an arrangement which allowed one of the King’s uncles to enjoy all the fruits of this valuable relationship, while leaving the other out in the cold. Thomas regarded his barony and his new office of Lord Admiral, passed on to him by John Dudley, as mere consolation prizes and he had every intention of redressing the balance as soon as he was in a position to do so.
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 in fact 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. Some time 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 Inchmahone, 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 II – 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 agreeable 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 deference 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. After three childless marriages Katherine had fallen pregnant for the first time, and seems no longer to have been 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 throw her arms round a man’s neck. The princess denied the accusation tearfully but Mrs Ashley knew it could not be true, ‘for there came no man but Grindal, the Lady Elizabeth’s schoolmaster’, and he was evidently quite unembraceable. All the same, the governess began to wonder rather uneasily if the Queen was becoming jealous and had invented the tale of a strange man as a warning that she should take better care of her charge, ‘and be, as it were, in watch betwixt her and my Lord Admiral’. Mrs Ashley’s husband also warned his wife more than once to be on her guard, as he had noticed that the Lady Elizabeth ‘did bear some affection’ for the Lord Admiral. Matters came to a head shortly before Whitsun when ‘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’ and hereupon ‘there was much displeasure’.
Katherine’s ‘displeasure’ is very understandable, but she could not afford the luxury of making scenes – gossip once started would be unstoppable and a public scandal would have disastrous consequences for all concerned. She did, though, take immediate steps to put as much distance as possible between the princess and the Admiral, sending Elizabeth away on an extended visit to Sir Anthony and Lady Denny, both old and trusted friends of the royal family, at their house at Cheshunt. The Queen and her stepdaughter parted affectionately. Katherine was determined to avoid any suggestion of hard feelings 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 hands 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.’ Fortunately everyone knew that the Queen Dowager, now in the sixth month of an uncomfortable pregnancy, was planning to spend the summer on her husband’s estate at Sudeley in Gloucestershire, and in the general upheaval of the move 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. It was at Sudeley, on 30 August, that Katherine’s baby was born, a girl christened Mary. At first all seemed to be well and the Protector sent a kind note congratulating his brother on becoming the father ‘of so pretty a daughter’. But sadly the congratulations were premature. Katherine developed the dreaded symptoms of childbed fever and within a week she was dead. She was buried in the chapel at Sudeley Castle with all the pomp and ceremony due to a Queen Dowager of England; Miles Coverdale, the biblical translator, preached the sermon and Jane Grey, a diminutive figure in deepest black, acted as chief mourner for the only person ever to show her disinterested kindness.
Thomas Seymour had been sufficiently shaken by his wife’s death to consider sending Lady Jane back to her parents, but this uncharacteristic attack of self-doubt soon passed and on 17 September, a fortnight after the funeral, he told Lord Dorset that he found he would not, after all, be obliged to break up his household. The Dorsets, though, were growing restive. More than a year had gone by with no sign of any of the Admiral’s ‘fair promises’ being fulfilled, and while Lord Dorset assured Lord Seymour that he was still ready to be guided by him in the matter of his daughter’s ‘bestowing’, he was plainly looking for an excuse to back out of his previous undertakings. Jane, he wrote, was too young to be left to rule herself and he feared lest, for want of a bridle she might take too much head and forget all the good behaviour she had learned from Queen Katherine. His lordship, therefore, felt strongly that she should be returned to the governance of her mother ‘to be framed and ruled towards virtue’. Frances Dorset added her voice in a letter enclosed with her lord’s, in which she thanked her ‘good brother’ the Admiral for all his gentleness, but begged him to trust her and to believe that a mother knew what was best for her child.
This sudden concern for their daughter’s welfare imperfectly concealed the Dorsets’ ruthless determination to sell her to the highest bidder and they were, in fact, beginning to wonder whether it might not be wiser to settle for a match with the Lord Protector’s son, which had already been tentatively discussed. But Jane was too valuable an asset to lose without a struggle. Tom Seymour went to see the Dorsets and, according to the Marquis, was ‘so earnestly in hand with me and my wife’ over the custody of Lady Jane that in the end he would not take no for an answer. He renewed his promise that if only ‘he might once get the King at liberty’ he would ensure that his majesty married none but Jane and agreed to advance another £500 of the £2,000 he was ‘lending’ to her parents. No need for a bond, declared the Admiral expansively, the Lady Jane’s presence in his house would be security enough. The Dorsets, greedy, foolish and chronically hard up, rose to the bait and Jane went back to Hanworth, where old Lady Seymour had been installed as chaperone.
Although the Admiral was now hardly bothering to conceal his eagerness to put an end to the Protectorate, dropping broad hints about his plans and boasting of his strength in the country to anyone who would listen to him, he was no nearer to getting his hands on Edward than he had ever been. Elizabeth also remained out of his reach. But in the princess’s household, once more established at Hatfield, there was much excited speculation about his intentions. Katherine Ashley, who was already hearing wedding bells, told her charge that now ‘her old husband’ was free again, he would be sure to come wooing before long. To the romantic Mrs Ashley it looked like a happy ending. Thomas Seymour had, after all, been considered worthy to marry the Queen and was ‘the noblest man unmarried in this land’. Such a fine figure of a man, too. What could be more suitable for her beloved princess?
The Admiral, in fact, still had just enough sense not to come wooing in person but he was taking a close, almost a proprietorial interest in Elizabeth’s affairs, cross-examining her steward, Thomas Parry, about the state of her finances, the whereabouts of her landed property, the number of servants she kept and the details of her housekeeping expenses. Gossip soon began to link their names and it was being whispered that the Admiral had kept the late Queen’s maids together to wait on the Princess Elizabeth after they were married.
In November, Lord Russell, the Lord Privy Seal, tried to warn Thomas Seymour – pointing out that any Englishman who attempted to marry either of the princesses would ‘undoubtedly procure unto himself the occasion of his utter undoing’ and Thomas, who was so closely related to the King, would be particularly at risk. After all, observed old John Russell, it was a well-known fact that both Henry VII and Henry VIII, although wise and noble princes, had been famous for their suspicious natures. What, therefore, was more likely than that Edward would take after his father and grandfather in this respect? If one of his uncles married one of the heirs to his crown, he would inevitably think the worst, ‘and, as often as he shall see you, think that you gape and wish for his death’.
But Thomas Seymour was past listening to advice. He continued to conduct his courtship of Elizabeth through the willing agency of Parry and Mrs Ashley. Like most adventurers, the Lord Admiral was extremely plausible and perhaps the steward and the governess can hardly be blamed for failing to realize just how flimsy was the flamboyant façade he presented to the world. But one person did realize it. Although the fifteen-year-old Elizabeth could not entirely conceal the ‘good will’ she still felt for the Admiral, her behaviour, compared with those who were supposed to be caring for her, was a model of discretion. She had not responded to Mrs Ashley’s eager promptings and when Thomas Parry had the temerity to ask her outright whether, if the Council approved, she would marry the Admiral, she snubbed him sharply. The Tudor princess was fully alive to the dangers of being drawn into anything which might be construed as secret correspondence with a man committed to opposing the lawful government. Nor had she forgotten the clause in her father’s will which laid down that if she or Mary married without the consent of their brother and his Council, they would forfeit their right of succession to the throne.
The New Year came in and the Lord Admiral’s career approached its predestined climax. Tales of his various ‘disloyal practices’ had become too numerous and too circumstantial to be ignored any longer and in January 1549 the faction headed by John Dudley, Earl of Warwick, which had been waiting patiently for the Seymour brothers to destroy one another, decided that the time had come to start applying pressure on the Duke of Somerset. The Protector seems to have made a last minute effort to avert disaster by trying to send Thomas abroad, but it was too late – Lord Seymour of Sudeley had already tied a noose round his neck with the rope so generously paid out to him. He was arrested on 17 January and the Council started on the business of rounding up his associates. John Fowler of the Privy Chamber, Katherine Ashley and Thomas Parry were all taken away for questioning, while Sir Robert Tyrwhit was sent down to Hatfield to extract a confession from the Princess Elizabeth.
When Elizabeth was told that her governess and her steward had been arrested ‘she was marvellous abashed and did weep very tenderly a long time’, demanding to know whether they had confessed anything or not. This sounded promising and Robert Tyrwhit did not anticipate any difficulty in getting a useful statement out of her. All the same, their first interview was disappointing. The princess, it seemed, had nothing to tell him and Tyrwhit felt obliged to warn her ‘to consider her honour and the peril that might ensue, for she was but a subject’. Having allowed Anne Boleyn’s daughter to digest this scarcely veiled threat, Sir Robert went on to advise her to be frank with him. If she would ‘open all things herself’, then her youth would be taken into consideration by the Protector and the Council and the ‘evil and shame’ ascribed to Mrs Ashley and to Parry, who should have taken better care of her. But this was not the way to approach Elizabeth Tudor, always fiercely loyal to her friends. ‘And yet’, wrote Tyrwhit, ‘I do see it in her face that she is guilty, and do perceive as yet she will abide more storms ere she accuse Mistress Ashley’.
At their next interview Elizabeth told Sir Robert how the Admiral had kindly offered her the use of Seymour Place when she came up to London to see the King (Durham House, where she usually stayed, being temporarily unavailable); how she had once written him a note asking some small favour for her chaplain; how there had been a suggestion that the Admiral might pay her a visit but Mrs Ashley had thought perhaps better not, knowing how people gossiped. It was all very innocent, very trivial and quite beside the point – just the ordinary friendly intercourse between two members of the same family. Still, it was a start and Tyrwhit hoped that more would follow now that he had begun ‘to grow in credit’ with the princess. At the same time, he told the Protector, ‘I do assure your Grace she hath a very good wit, and nothing is gotten of her but by great policy.’
In her present predicament Elizabeth needed all the wit and self-control she could muster. Utterly alone, her household full of strangers and spies, she was being called upon to answer the kind of charge – based chiefly on tittle-tattle and innuendo – which is always most difficult to refute. She faced hours of skilled and relentless questioning, designed to trap her into admissions which would have ruined her good name and quite possibly cost her her place in the succession. Her liberty, her whole future might very well be at stake. And she was still only fifteen years old. Tyrwhit tried all the tricks of the interrogator’s trade but on 28 January, after more than a week of unremitting effort, he was obliged to report: ‘I have practised with my lady’s grace by all means and policies to cause her to confess more than she has already done. But she does plainly deny that she knows any more than she has already opened to me.’
The Protector himself had now written to Elizabeth, counselling her ‘as an earnest friend’ to declare all she knew. This was the opportunity Elizabeth had been hoping for and she took it with both hands. Her reply to Somerset, polite but businesslike and written in the exquisitely legible Italic script she had learned from her best remembered tutor Roger Ascham, is by any standards a masterpiece of its kind. There had never at any time been any sort of secret understanding with the Admiral and neither Mrs Ashley nor Parry had ever advised her to marry anyone without the full consent of the King’s Majesty, the Protector and the Council. Even if they had, she herself would never have agreed to such a thing. She had already told Robert Tyrwhit everything she knew about her own and her servants’ contacts with Thomas Seymour since the Queen’s death, but if she remembered anything further, she would either write it herself ‘or cause Master Tyrwhit to write it’. Her letter ended with an indication of the sort of methods being used to break her resistance. ‘Master Tyrwhit and others have told me that there goeth rumours abroad which be greatly against my honour and honesty (which above all other things I esteem) which be these; that I am in the Tower and with child by my Lord Admiral. My lord, these are shameful slanders, for the which, besides the great desire I have to see the King’s majesty, I shall most heartily desire your lordship that I may come to Court after your first determination, that I may show myself there as I am.’
Elizabeth Tudor had defended herself and her friends against the most unwarrantable accusations with courage and dignity, and had more than hinted that she would expect an official apology. Unfortunately, though, neither her much loved governess nor her steward possessed the stalwart qualities of their mistress. Under interrogation in the Tower, first Parry and then Katherine Ashley broke down and made long, verbose statements. These were rushed to Hatfield where, on 5 February, Robert Tyrwhit was able to confront the princess with her servants’ ‘confessions’. ‘She was much abashed and half breathless’ he reported and studied the signatures with particular attention, although as Tyrwhit remarked, she knew both Mrs Ashley’s hand and the cofferer’s ‘with half a sight’. He went on, ‘I will tomorrow travail all I can to frame her for her own surety and to utter the truth.’
But by the next day Elizabeth had recovered her poise. It was, of course, acutely humiliating to see the intimate details of those merry romps at Chelsea and Hanworth set down in writing for everyone to read. It was humiliating but it was not remotely treasonable. There was still no evidence whatever that Elizabeth, or Mrs Ashley, or Thomas Parry had been involved in any sort of plot. So, when Tyrwhit returned to the attack, the princess graciously allowed him to take down her own ‘confession’ which, apart from a few unimportant details, contained absolutely nothing new. ‘They all sing the same song’, wrote Tyrwhit in exasperation, ‘and so I think they would not do, unless they had set the note before.’
The Council now appointed Sir Robert’s wife to replace Mrs Ashley as the princess’s governess, hoping that the princess would ‘accept her service willingly’. The princess would not. She cried all that night and ‘lowered’ at Lady Tyrwhit all the next day – signs that prolonged strain was having its effect. ‘She beginneth now a little to droop’, Tyrwhit reported towards the end of February, ‘by reason she heareth that my Lord Admiral’s house be dispersed. And my wife telleth me now that she cannot bear to hear him discommended but she is ready to make answer therein; and so she hath not been accustomed to do, unless Mistress Ashley were touched, whereunto she was very ready to make answer vehemently.’
The Admiral had, of course, been doomed from the moment of his arrest. Although Elizabeth herself had turned out to be such a disappointing witness, there was no lack of evidence from other sources. Even the King obligingly recalled the details of certain conversations with his uncle, and those gifts of pocket money, once eagerly accepted, were now produced as evidence of treasonable intent. Since Parliament was still in session, the Council decided not to accord Thomas Seymour the courtesy of an open trial, but to proceed against him by means of an Act of Attainder – a cheap and convenient method of dealing with enemies of the State. First, though, the consent of the victim’s two closest relatives must be obtained and on 24 February, ‘after the King’s majesty had dined’, the full Council assembled in his presence. The Lord Chancellor ‘declared forth the heinous facts and treasons of the Admiral’, adding that the prisoner had obstinately refused to answer any of the charges except in open trial. Everyone then cast their votes in favour of remitting the matter to his Majesty’s high court of Parliament. When it came to the Protector’s turn, he said – and he had very little choice, after all – that deeply distressing though the case was to him, his first duty must be to the King’s majesty and the crown of England, for he ‘did weigh more his allegiance than his blood’. Now it was up to the King. Was he going to make any effort to help his kind uncle? He was not. ‘We do perceive’, announced the eleven-year-old Edward Tudor, ‘there is great things which be objected and laid to my lord Admiral mine uncle, and they tend to treason; and we perceive that you require but justice to be done. We think it reasonable, and we will well that you proceed according to your request.’ At these words, ‘coming so suddenly from his Grace’s mouth of his own motion’, the assembled company, greatly relieved by his Grace’s admirably unsentimental attitude, gave him ‘most hearty praise and thanks’.
Thomas Seymour was executed on Tower Hill on 20 March but unlike that other Queen Dowager’s widower who had suffered a similar fate in the market square at Hereford nearly ninety years ago, the Lord Admiral left no posterity to alter the course of history. Little Mary Seymour, stripped of her inheritance and abandoned to the reluctant care of the dowager Duchess of Suffolk – once one of Queen Katherine Parr’s closest friends – disappeared from the record and is believed to have died in childhood.
The indifference which Edward had shown over the downfall of his uncle Thomas, had been noted by the Earl of Warwick and had encouraged that intelligent individual – now in the final stages of preparing his own bid for power – to hope that the King would be equally indifferent to the fate of his other Seymour uncle. Events soon began to play into Warwick’s hands. The year 1549 was marked by a general and increasing popular discontent – due partly to economic hardship caused by rising prices and widespread unemployment, and partly to an angry reaction in the more backward rural areas against the sweeping religious changes introduced since King Henry’s death. This discontent presently erupted into two quite serious revolts, one in the West Country and one in Norfolk, which caused considerable alarm among the propertied classes. Somerset’s high-minded liberalism might earn him the title of ‘the Good Duke’ among the common people, but his merciful attitude towards rebellious common people did not endear him to the nobility and gentry, who turned thankfully to the Earl of Warwick – a capable soldier with no tiresome notions about the rights of the poor.
Meanwhile, the Protector’s growing arrogance and intolerance of opposition were also alienating his colleagues on the Council and his friend William Paget, who had done so much to help him attain his elevated position, warned him bluntly that unless he showed more consideration in debate and allowed other people freedom to speak their minds, he would soon have cause to regret it. But Paget had no more success in trying to warn the elder Seymour than John Russell had once had with the younger. Somerset, increasingly harassed and worried by the failure of his policies at home and abroad, seems to have been no longer able to face the realities of the political scene and had taken refuge behind a smokescreen of irascibility. His public image, too, had been fatally damaged by his brother’s death – just as the Earl of Warwick had known it would be. His outwardly cold-blooded reaction to the Admiral’s attainder and execution had disgusted a lot of people who now, most unfairly, stigmatized him as a fratricide, ‘a blood-sucker and a ravenous wolf’.
In mid-September Warwick returned triumphantly to London after suppressing the rebellion in East Anglia. As well as being the hero of the hour, he now had a well-armed and victorious body of troops ready at his command. This was clearly the moment for a move to dislodge the Lord Protector from his shaky throne. Towards the end of the month, the citizens of London were surprised to see those members of the Council who followed Warwick’s lead going armed about the streets, ‘their servants likewise weaponed, attending upon them in new liveries’. There was much coming and going at the Earl’s house in Holborn and rumours were flying round the city that the confederates were planning to seize the Tower.
Somerset was with Edward at Hampton Court when he learnt that the London Lords, as Warwick’s party had become known, intended to pay him a ‘friendly’ visit. Only two members of the Council had remained at his side and only about five hundred men – some of his own and some wearing the royal livery – were available to guard the palace. Realizing his danger somewhat late in the day, the Protector sent out anguished appeals for reinforcements and issued a proclamation in the King’s name, commanding ‘all his loving subjects with all haste to repair to his Highness at his Majesty’s manor of Hampton Court, in most defensible array, with harness and weapons, to defend his most royal person and his most entirely beloved uncle the Lord Protector, against whom certain hath attempted a most dangerous conspiracy.’
On 6 October, Cardinal Wolsey’s handsome Thames-side mansion bustled with activity. Weapons and harness were brought out of the armoury, guards were mounted at the gates, messengers rode to and fro and, as the King himself put it, ‘people came abundantly to the house’. But although Archbishop Cranmer arrived with a force of sixty horsemen, it soon became clear that help was not going to be forthcoming in time. The local peasantry had come in obediently to defend their king, but they would be no match for Warwick and his professional force; nor, in spite of all those warlike preparations, was Hampton Court defensible against any sort of determined assault.
At nine o’clock that night the Protector brought Edward down to the main gate of the palace where a large puzzled crowd was waiting and there, in the flickering torchlight, the child, prompted by his uncle, made a brief, rather sulky appeal to his assembled subjects. ‘Good people’, he said, ‘I pray you be good to us – and to our uncle.’ Then Somerset spoke, exclaiming rather hysterically that he would not fall alone. If he was destroyed, the King would be destroyed – kingdom and commonwealth would all be destroyed together. Pushing Edward in front of him, he went on: ‘It is not I that they shoot at – this is the mark that they shoot at.’ Horses were waiting saddled in the courtyard and uncle and nephew with a small escort mounted and rode hurriedly away into the night for the greater security of Windsor Castle.
It looked uncomfortably like flight and was for Edward a thoroughly upsetting and frightening experience. When he and Somerset reached Windsor at about three o’clock in the morning, no one was expecting them and nothing had been prepared. To the helpless boy surrounded by grim-faced adults talking in lowered voices over his head the gloomy, medieval fortress must have seemed more like a prison than a refuge, the whole adventure something of a nightmare. Nobody, it seemed, thought of offering him any comfort or reassurance. On the contrary, the Protector, anxious for the King’s support, had worked to impress him with a sense of his danger from their common enemies. Edward had never felt any particular affection or even liking for his austere uncle, but he had hitherto respected and, on the whole, trusted him. Now he saw only a panicky middle-aged man trying to save his own skin by hiding behind the sacred person of his sovereign lord. Trust and respect died, but fear did not. Edward was not yet twelve years old and still very much in his uncle’s power.
But not for long. Somerset had not succeeded in saving himself. The London Lords, under Warwick’s skilful and determined leadership, pursued him to Windsor and on 10 October he was taken away under guard to the Tower. The Lords then waited on the King and gave him a carefully edited account of their doings. Edward listened politely. He asked no awkward questions and thanked their lordships for the pains they had taken in safeguarding him and the realm. (He later entered in his Journal, an unrevealing document, a list of the Protector’s crimes, which included ambition, vainglory, entering into rash wars in the King’s youth, enriching himself with the King’s treasure, following his own opinion and doing all by his own authority.) The King kept his private thoughts on the October crisis to himself. As he grew older, Edward kept his private thoughts more and more to himself.
A few days after Somerset’s arrest, Edward returned to Hampton Court with a reconstituted entourage and the palace revolution was over. In fact, Somerset was to survive, in and out of the Tower, for another fifteen months – until 22 January 1552, when the King made another entry in his Journal: ‘The Duke of Somerset had his head cut off upon Tower Hill between eight and nine o’clock in the morning.’
Edward’s apparent lack of any human feelings on this occasion has earned him a reputation for callous cold-heartedness, but did he perhaps derive some secret satisfaction from the knowledge that he was surely the first child king so effectively to have turned the tables on uncles? That he might, in a manner of speaking, be said to have avenged the little Princes in the Tower?