Katherine the Queen: The Remarkable Life of Katherine Parr (50 page)

William Paget subsequently backed up the story circulating in Calais, when, on being pushed by Van der Delft about why Seymour had been arrested, said the Privy Council had felt
compelled to act ‘when the admiral was finally discovered within the palace late at night, with a large suite of his own people and the dog that keeps watch before the king’s door was found dead’.
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The death of this animal is the one constant in the versions of this incident that later circulated. It has been claimed that Thomas, finally moved to desperation, decided to kidnap Edward VI under cover of darkness, knowing he was inadequately guarded, and quite possibly with his nephew’s connivance. Carrying a pistol, he is said to have shot the dog when it persisted in barking, thus alerting members of the king’s household and alienating Edward. It is worth noting, however, that neither the imperial ambassador’s first report nor Paget’s explanation makes any mention of the fact that Seymour was armed or exactly how the dog was killed. Nor were any specific charges relating to this incident included in the accusations against Thomas. But by the time of Van der Delft’s interview with Paget, on 8 February, the campaign to besmirch the admiral was firmly in place. As Paget, ever the master of the pithy phrase put it, he had been ‘a great rascal’ and that was how the Privy Council wanted him to be remembered.

In fact, his arrest was not a spur-of-the-moment decision rendered unavoidable by nocturnal forays near the royal bedchamber; there had clearly been discussions about it over some days, but Thomas did not fully appreciate his danger. The marquess of Northampton, Katherine Parr’s brother, recalled that: ‘The night before he was committed to the Tower, the admiral called me and seemed perplexed, declaring that the council had secret conferences that day in the garden, but he could not learn their effect; he could get nothing of the Lord Privy Seal [Lord John Russell, who had warned him against an alliance with either of the king’s sisters]. He thought they conferred to see if they could get anything against him from Sharington, who was more straitly handled for his sake.’

He was certainly correct in that analysis, though he was not the only one who might have been concerned over revelations of
their dealings with Sharington. Various people close to Seymour owed the fraudster money, including his brother, Somerset, his brother-in-law, William Herbert, and even the duchess of Suffolk, some of whose jewels and plate Sharington held as surety for her debt.

For his part, Thomas professed not to be worried: ‘But he cared not,’ Northampton recalled, ‘for he was able to answer all charges. The protector was in fear of his own estate and was very jealous because the admiral was better furnished with men about him.’ This last was an empty boast. Thomas had no contingent of men he could call upon to defend him at this crucial juncture. But the mere reference to such a possibility may have been the final straw that caused the council to act. Parr must have seen him on the 17th itself, when Thomas told him he expected to be called before the council to answer charges from Lord Rutland. ‘He would question Rutland before all the other lords, saying he would answer all things at his liberty, and not be shut up when he should not answer.’
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He had, though, omitted to mention the fact that he had told the councillors that his appearance before them was conditional on William Paget remaining at Seymour Place as surety for Thomas’s continued freedom. Such a deal was a bold offer but not one the council was likely to indulge.

His self-confidence was sounding increasingly forced. During his journey by river to the Tower Thomas was advised ‘Sir, arm you with patience, for now . . . it shall be assayed.’ He replied, ‘I think no. I am sure I can have no hurt, if they do me right; they cannot kill me, except they do me wrong: And if they do, I shall die but once: and if they take my life from me, I have a master that will once revenge it.’
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The first question raised with him was whether he had conferred with anyone about changing ‘the order of the person of the king’s majesty’. This Thomas emphatically denied. He admitted commenting to Rutland about Edward VI’s precocity, saying that he thought his nephew ‘would be a man three years before any child living’, and that this ‘towardness’ would very likely mean that the king would want more liberty
and a greater say in the direction of his own personal affairs. He had never intended this as an attack on the duke of Somerset, stating: ‘And if I meant hurt to my lord’s grace my brother, more than I meant to my soul, then I desire neither life nor other favour at his hand.’ He repeated the essence of this explanation in a brief, disordered letter written to the Protector two days later, in which he reiterated that he had intended no ill to his brother: ‘But if I meant either hurt or displeasure to your grace, in this or any other thing that I have done, then punish me by extremity. And thus I humbly take my leave of your grace.’
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In this sad little note there speaks, for the last time, the miscreant younger brother apologizing to the elder for his bad behaviour.

But it was too late. Even the young king was pressed for evidence against his uncle. Edward divulged that Thomas had given him money and tried to get him to sign a bill for parliament. Others who had known the lord admiral, sensing the way the wind was setting, hastened to disassociate themselves from Thomas Seymour. Only John Harington, his servant, and Nicholas Throckmorton (who was not interrogated) refused to join in the stampede. Details poured forth of what he had said about the governance of the king, his bragging about private armies, his pleasure that the office of lord admiral gave him command of ships and men, his attempts to win friends through money and favours. Much of the information supplied was virtually identical, for Thomas had been neither original nor reticent in repeating his views. Whether there was also an element of collusion among the noble lords who were so eager to remember everything is an interesting question. For one person, however, there was no such possibility. Thomas’s intentions towards Elizabeth formed a major part of the charges brought against him. If it could be proved that she had welcomed or encouraged marriage plans, then she would be implicated in his treason, and might expect to share his fate.

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LIZABETH WAS AT
Hatfield at the time of Seymour’s arrest. Within days, Katherine Ashley and Thomas Parry were both themselves taken into the Tower for questioning. Deprived of the two people in whom she had the most confidence, however misplaced, Elizabeth swiftly realized her danger. Sir Robert Tyrwhit and his stern, god-fearing wife, had been sent to take charge of her. She must have sensed, if she did not already know, their antipathy towards Thomas and, by extension, their dislike of her. Both had been long in Katherine Parr’s service and they knew about the horseplay and early morning visits at Chelsea and Hanworth. Sir Robert was determined to get a confession out of Elizabeth but, though she was ‘marvellously abashed, and did weep very tenderly a long time’ when she learned what had happened to Ashley and Parry, Tyrwhit could get nothing of any substance out of her. In fact, he suspected that she and her servants had made a pact to say nothing that would be incriminating.

At the age of fifteen, surrounded by those determined to break her and false friends (Lady Browne was still in Elizabeth’s service, but ‘Fair Geraldine’ was happy to act as a spy on her mistress), the princess had to suppress her emotions, keep a clear head and live on her wits. She may have been a king’s sister, but she was still legally a bastard and she was powerless. There was no throne beckoning in those bleak January days of 1549, only disgrace, and perhaps worse. Over nearly a week, Tyrwhit persisted in trying to wring out of her the confession that Somerset apparently required. But despite the fact that both her governess and her cofferer had effectively betrayed her, pouring out everything they could possibly recollect about her relationship with Thomas Seymour and her reaction to the idea of marriage to him, Elizabeth would not give way. When told that Parry had given chapter and verse about her alleged partiality for Seymour, her evident pleasure when the admiral was mentioned and her blushing at talk of marriage, Elizabeth momentarily lost
her composure, calling her cofferer a ‘false wretch’. She quickly recovered. At a young age, she was able to frame answers that would not trap her and she knew her rights. Tyrwhit wrote to Somerset on 28 January to tell him that he was getting nowhere: ‘Pleaseth your grace to be advertised that I have received your letter . . . and according to the purpose of the same, have practised with my lady’s grace, by all means and policy, to cause her to confess more than she hath already done; wherein she doth plainly deny that she knoweth any more than she already hath opened to me, which things she hath willingly written to your grace with her own hand . . .’
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Sensing that she was winning this war of wills, Elizabeth decided to take the fight directly to Somerset himself. She did not deny that she knew about the marriage rumours, or Thomas’s interest in her lands and finances, or that there was talk that he might come and see her after the queen’s death. Parry had asked her ‘. . . whether, if the council did consent that I should have my lord admiral, whether I would consent to it or no. I answered that I would not tell him what my mind was . . .’ Neither she nor her governess, she claimed, had ever contemplated the idea of marriage, with Thomas or anyone else, ‘without the consent of the king’s majesty, your grace’s, and the council’s’. There was no improper response, not even the merest thought, of stepping outside the boundaries laid down in her father’s will. This being so, she demanded full protection for her damaged reputation:

Master Tyrwhit and others have told me that there goeth rumours abroad which be greatly both against mine honour and honesty, which above all other things I esteem . . . 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 the court after your first determination, that I may show myself there as I am.
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Somerset did not agree to her request. In fact, he took such exception to the tone of this reply and an even tarter one, in which Elizabeth objected to the removal of Katherine Ashley and her formal replacement by Elizabeth Tyrwhit, that the princess gave him something approaching an apology, saying that she thought the appointment of a new governess would make people say ‘that I deserved through my lewd demeanour to have such a one, and not that I mislike anything that your lordship of the council shall think good . . .’.
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By the time this letter was written, on 21 February, Thomas Seymour’s fate was sealed. He had been asked, a few days earlier, how he knew that the council intended to proceed against him; he replied that he ‘suspected it by diverse conjectures’. Again, he reiterated that he ‘did never determine, in all his life, to remove the king out of [the] lord protector’s hands, but by consent of the whole realm’.
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Thereafter, he turned increasingly inwards, refusing to answer further questions unless his accusers faced him. Somerset informed the king of his uncle’s intransigence but Thomas still refused to budge. He was never given a trial before his peers. Instead, an Act of Attainder (the same legal process that had been used to rid Henry VIII of Katherine Howard) was introduced into parliament. It passed unopposed in the House of Lords on 25 February, and in the House of Commons on 5 March, where it was opposed by only a handful of members.

In the end, the authorities had thrown everything they could at Thomas Seymour, even down to the accusation that, in connection with his wife’s death, ‘he helped to her end to hasten forth his other purposes’. The cumulative effect of his intentions were spelt out, reaching an inevitable conclusion: ‘this marriage of your [the king’s] sister, the getting of the rule and order of your majesty’s mint at Bristol in to his hands, [the] 10,000 men he accounted himself furnished of, his preparations of victuals and money at your castle of the Holt [one of Seymour’s properties on the Welsh borders] cannot otherwise be taken but to be a manifest declaration of a traitorous aspiring to your crown, to
depose your majesty and to compass the death of your most noble person’.

The act concluded: ‘considering that he is a member so unnatural, unkind and corrupt and such a heinous offender of your majesty and your laws as he cannot be suffered to remain in body of your grace’s commonwealth but to the extreme danger of your highness and it is too dangerous an example that such a person, so much bound and so forgetful of it . . . should remain among us’. He was to be ‘adjudged and attainted of high treason and . . . shall suffer such pains of death as in cases of high treason have been accustomed’.
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