Katherine the Queen: The Remarkable Life of Katherine Parr (51 page)

Faced with the reality of death, Thomas contemplated the wreck of his life. He had retreated into silence as far as those who condemned him were concerned and given up hope that family ties might, even at this extremity, compel his brother to exercise clemency. It must have been quite clear to him, as it was to Elizabeth, that Somerset would not save him. Later it was said that his fate was sealed by Duchess Anne, who threatened to leave her husband if he did not deal with Thomas. But while in the Tower Seymour made his peace with the God others accused him of rejecting, writing the following lines:

Forgetting God

to love a king

Hath been my rod

Or else nothing:

In this frail life

being a blast

of care and strife

till in be past.

Yet God did call

me in my pride

lest I should fall

and from him slide

for whom loves he

and not correct

that they may be

of his elect

The death haste thee

thou shalt me gain

Immortally

with him to reign

Who send the king

Like years as noye

In governing

His realm in joy

And after this

frail life such grace

As in his bliss

he may have place.
³²

He met his death bravely in the early morning of 20 March 1549. It took two blows of the axe to sever his head. Not content with executing him, the council now took pains to ensure that the assault on his reputation continued with a viciousness that matched the manner of his despatch. It was put about that he had written letters to Mary and Elizabeth urging them to rise up against his brother’s regime and had hidden these rantings in the soles of his shoes. This accusation formed part of the sermon vilifying him preached by Hugh Latimer, a cleric who had received Seymour’s financial support and had visited him in the Tower. Thomas had asked Latimer to preach his funeral sermon, presumably hoping that its sentiments would accord with those that he had himself expressed in his poem and reunite him, in death, with the wife whose own writings about the elect had expressed similar ideas. Latimer repaid his patron’s trust by delivering the most thunderous condemnation in a sermon before Edward VI on 29 March. Thomas Seymour had been a popular man with his servants, the general populace of London and, for much of his nephew’s life, with the king himself. So there was a need to ensure that the lord admiral was not remembered fondly. Latimer wanted his hearers to understand that bad
lives tend to bad ends. He even questioned the likelihood that such a man could have repented of his sins. ‘And when a man hath two strokes of the axe,’ he pondered, ‘who can tell but that between two strokes he doth repent? It is very hard to judge. Well, I will not go so nigh to work; but this I will say, if they ask me what I think of his death, that he died very dangerously, irksomely, horribly.’ He went on to say: ‘he was a man the farthest from the fear of God that I ever knew or heard of in England . . . surely he was a wicked man and the realm is well rid of him’.
³³

Nicholas Throckmorton characterized Seymour’s end very differently. For Throckmorton, it was other men’s ambitions, as much as the admiral’s, that brought about his downfall:

Off went his head, they made a quick despatch,

But ever since I thought him sure a beast

Who causeless laboured to defile his nest

Though guiltless, he, through malice, went to pot

Not answering for himself nor knowing cause.
³⁴

And Harington, who languished another year in the Tower for his lord’s sake, had not denied Seymour’s contact with the Dorsets or his thoughts on Jane Grey’s future prospects, but steadfastly refused to acknowledge that there was anything treasonable in his intent. Like Throckmorton he defended Thomas Seymour unreservedly as a

Friend to God’s truth, and foe to Rome’s deceit . . .

Yet, against nature, reason and just laws

His blood was spilt, guiltless, without just cause.
³⁵

But perhaps the truest, and most touching, remembrance of Thomas Seymour was pronounced by the girl with whom he had flirted and almost taken to disaster. When news of his execution was brought to her, Elizabeth remarked: ‘This day died a man of much wit and very little judgement.’ These few words, mingling as they do regretful tenderness and shrewd political assessment,
are a fitting epitaph for one of Tudor England’s most colourful courtiers. Thomas Seymour was a flawed man, but his detractors conveniently forgot that, in his younger days, he had served his king and country ably. The vilification of his reputation did the Edwardian regime little credit. He had no party, no clear strategy and no real aims beyond his obsession with the notion of separating the offices of Protector and king’s Governor. Ambition, impatience and an inability to dissemble cost him dear. A more devious man would have bided his time and ensured that his support was real, not imagined. But Thomas Seymour was, in many ways, a man born out of his time. He saw himself as a sort of feudal baron, his prestige and power based on property and the loyalty of a personal following. Perhaps he was a great rascal, as Paget had declared. Yet both Katherine and Elizabeth, two of the most outstanding women of their time, loved him, despite his weaknesses. His importance in Elizabeth’s development cannot be overstated, for he had awakened in her a lifelong penchant for men of roguish charm. She learned much from his fall, but she did not forget him. In one of her worst moments, when she was about to be sent to the Tower during her sister Mary’s reign in 1554, she recalled that Somerset subsequently told her that ‘if his brother had been allowed to speak with him, he would never have suffered’.
³⁶

L
ADY
M
ARY
S
EYMOUR
was left a dispossessed orphan by her father’s death. She was not quite seven months old. Thomas had given her into the care of Katherine Brandon, duchess of Suffolk, Katherine Parr’s close friend. His reasons for this course of action are unclear. It is hardly surprising that he would not have desired her to remain with the Somersets, who had been looking after her at Syon House while Thomas was in the Tower. Katherine Parr’s own brother, meanwhile, had also fallen out with the Lord Protector over his attempts to annul his first marriage to Anne Bourchier (they were still locked together legally, despite Anne’s
elopement years before). His remarriage to Elisabeth Brooke, a lady of the court who had served his sister, was regarded as illegal and outrageous by the prim duke of Somerset. Northampton was scarcely in a position to offer shelter to his niece, and in any case he does not seem to have taken much interest in her. The duchess of Suffolk described him as ‘having a weak back for such a burden’.
³⁷
Anne Herbert and her husband, the survivors of many career setbacks themselves, apparently steered well clear. So Lady Mary Seymour was denied the affection of any members of her immediate family.

Thomas probably thought that the duchess of Suffolk, known for her strong religious views, mistress of large estates in Lincolnshire and the mother of two sons, would direct his daughter’s upbringing in a responsible and loving environment. It was his dying wish that Mary should be assigned to the duchess’s protection. But, as with Latimer, so with Katherine Brandon; he had been too trusting. The duchess of Suffolk’s strident evangelical views did not encompass true Christian charity. She regarded Lady Mary Seymour as an expensive nuisance, for although the little girl came with a full complement of staff, a mini-household of her own, as befitted a queen’s daughter, there were substantial costs in supporting this establishment, and after several months, when Somerset did not pay the
£
500 a year pension that had been agreed for Mary by the Privy Council three days before her father’s execution, Katherine Brandon’s patience was exhausted. She wrote an exasperated letter to William Cecil, clearly believing that his influence with the Somersets might succeed where hers had not: ‘It is said’, she began, ‘that the best means of remedy to the sick is first plainly to confess and disclose the disease, wherefore, both for remedy and again for that my disease is so strong that it will not be hidden, I will disclose me unto you.’ She was, she told him, in very straitened financial circumstances: ‘All the world knoweth . . . what a very beggar I am.’ And her situation was rapidly worsening, for a variety of causes, but ‘amongst others . . . if you will understand, not least the queen’s child hath layen, and still doth lie at my house, with her company about her, wholly at my charges. I have written to my lady of Somerset at large, that there be some pension allotted unto her according to my lord grace’s promise. Now, good Cecil, help at a pinch all that you may help.’ The duchess of Somerset had promised her some months ago that ‘certain nursery plate’ should be provided for Mary. She provided a list of the items that had come with the baby – the same ones that had been intended for the crimson and gold nursery at Sudeley Castle – and also included a letter from mistress Aglionby, the child’s governess, who, she complained, ‘with the maid’s nurse and others, daily call for their wages, whose voices my ears hardly bear, but my coffers much worse’.
³⁸
Even allowing for the duchess’s pecuniary embarrassment (which may have been exaggerated, as was common at the time), it is a thoroughly unpleasant epistle. The picture it paints of an unwanted child, her anxious servants unpaid and her guardian describing her as a sickness, does the duchess of Suffolk little credit.

Perhaps the letter did eventually stir Somerset and the Privy Council into some sort of action. On 22 January 1550, less than a year after her father’s death, application was made in the House of Commons for the restitution of Lady Mary Seymour, ‘daughter of Thomas Seymour, knight, late Lord Seymour of Sudeley and late High Admiral of England, begotten of the body of Queen Katherine, late queen of England’. She was made eligible by this act to inherit any remaining property that had not been returned to the Crown at the time of her father’s attainder. But, in truth, Mary’s prospects were less optimistic than this might suggest. Much of her parents’ land and goods had already passed into the hands of others.

Lady Mary Seymour never claimed any remaining part of her father’s estate, and this is the last record we have of her. Her grant from the council was not renewed in September 1550, when it would have fallen due. The assumption must therefore be, in the absence of any further reference, that she was dead by
the time of her second birthday. Childhood diseases produced high mortality rates in the sixteenth century, and it is likely that she succumbed at Grimsthorpe in Lincolnshire, still under the reluctant eye of the duchess of Suffolk. In the nineteenth century the historian Agnes Strickland, author of the
Lives of the Queens of England
, referred to a tradition that Lady Mary Seymour had survived, cared for by her governess, Elizabeth Aglionby, and that she had subsequently married Sir Edward Bushell, an Elizabethan courtier who later served Anne of Denmark, queen to James I. A Sussex family still claims to be descended from her. Such things are not, of course, impossible but it seems far more likely, in the absence of documentary proof, that Lady Mary, abandoned and unloved, left ‘this frail life’ at the mid-point of the sixteenth century, to join her parents in the ‘bliss’ that Thomas had so fervently hoped to find.