The House of Tudor (32 page)

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 acceptable 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 respect 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.

Katherine, now pregnant for the first time, was no longer 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 with her arms round a man’s neck. Mrs. Ashley, who knew there had been no man, wondered rather uneasily if the Queen was becoming jealous and had invented this tale as a warning. Mrs. Ashley’s husband, an observant and sensible man, also warned his wife to be on her guard as he had noticed that the Lady Elizabeth seemed to be getting dangerously fond of the Lord Admiral. Matters came to a head when, according to testimony given some eight months later, ‘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.’

Fortunately for all concerned, Katherine knew how to keep her head in a crisis and she immediately took steps to put as much distance as possible between the princess and the Admiral, sending Elizabeth away on a visit to Sir Anthony and Lady Denny, both old friends of the family, at their house at Cheshunt. The Queen and her stepdaughter parted affectionately. Katherine was determined there should be no suggestion of an open breach 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 hand 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. Everyone knew that the Queen Dowager, in the sixth month of an uncomfortable pregnancy, and her husband were planning to spend the summer on their estates at Sudeley in Gloucestershire and in the general upheaval of packing up, 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. Jane’s parents had been growing restive as the months passed and the Admiral’s ‘fair promises’ showed no sign of materializing. They had tried to get their daughter back, but Thomas Seymour was too persuasive for them and Jane stayed with Katherine. Three months later she was called on to perform a melancholy service for the only person ever to show her disinterested kindness. Katherine’s baby, a girl christened Mary, was born on 30 August, but six days later Katherine herself died of puerperal fever. She was buried in the chapel at Sudeley with all the pomp due to a Queen Dowager of England, the ten-year-old Jane Grey acting as chief mourner.

Katherine’s death had extinguished one of the most attractive personalities of the age. The younger members of the Tudor family had lost their most influential friend and Thomas Seymour his only protection against himself After a brief period, during which the widower was ‘so amazed’ that he had small regard either to himself or his doings, he pulled himself together and began to re-build his wild and whirling schemes on even more fragile foundations.

In the confusion after Katherine’s death, the Admiral had sent Jane Grey home to her parents, but she was too valuable a property to lose - especially since he had got wind of a plan being discussed between his brother and the Dorsets to marry her to the Protector’s son - and now he had to set about getting her back. The Dorsets were in two minds, a sudden access of concern about their daughter’s welfare imperfectly concealing a ruthless determination to sell her to the highest bidder. However, Thomas Seymour was very insistent and, according to the Marquis, refused to take no for an answer. Even more to the point, he agreed to pay over another five hundred pounds towards the two thousand which would be due to Jane’s parents on the day her marriage was arranged. No need for a bond, declared the Admiral expansively, the Lady Jane’s presence in his house was security enough. This clinched the matter. The Dorsets, greedy, foolish and chronically hard up, fell into the trap 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 the palace 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.