The Men Who Would Be King (4 page)

In character the brothers were very different. As Duke of Somerset, Edward Seymour was described as “a dry, sour, opinionated man,” and said to be unpopular. He was clever and high principled, an able military commander, but he was intolerant of his fellows. Shrewd Paget descriptively reproved him for his “angry and snappish” behavior in council meetings, and told him that his sharpness towards those who disagreed with his views had actually reduced one lord to tears. Thomas Seymour, in contrast, had boundless charm. Jovial, boisterous, informal in his manners, he was the embodiment of manly good fellowship; but, at first unrecognized by Catherine Parr and the girl Elizabeth, beneath his attractive exterior lay selfish ambition.

Since his elevation as brother-in-law to Henry VIII, Thomas had had a colorful career. In 1538, when he was about thirty, there had been a plan to marry him to the powerful Duke of Norfolk's only daughter, the widow of Henry's beloved illegitimate son, the Duke of Richmond. It was a gratifying acknowledgment of the Seymour family's new status. Norfolk pronounced that Thomas's “commendable merits” and advancement by the king outweighed his lack of “high blood or degree,” and Henry remarked with bawdy good humor that in marrying his daughter to Thomas, Norfolk would “couple her with one of such lust and youth as should be able to please her well at all points.” But despite Thomas's evident sexual prowess and valuable qualities, the plan came to nothing, and within three months of the failed courtship he had begun to serve his king on responsible diplomatic missions abroad. From Vienna in 1542 he sent vigorous reports on the progress of King Ferdinand's war against the Turks, spiced with such exotic information as “The King hath had, as they say, 6,000 light horse this two months near unto the town of Buda, who hath sent hither, as yesternight, for a present, a wagonload of Turks' heads, and one, in the same wagon, alive.” In the spring of 1543 he was appointed joint ambassador to Flanders, where he had a special commission to find a first-class gunfounder who would supply the English with brass ordnance for their forthcoming campaign against the French, and in that summer he was honored with the post of marshal of the English forces, second-in-command under Sir John Wallop. In that capacity he led a detachment against the castle of Rinquecen, took and destroyed it, and for good measure razed another castle, Arbrittayne, admiringly described as “one of the strongest piles within Boulogne.” Further honors and rewards followed, and then, in the autumn of 1544, he was appointed Admiral of the Fleet, under the lord high admiral, John Dudley, Viscount Lisle. While Elizabeth was busy in the schoolroom, studying with her new tutor, William Grindal, or working on her New Year's gift for her stepmother, Catherine Parr, Thomas Seymour was on board the 1,500-ton flagship
The Great Harry,
eagerly waiting in mid-Channel for the chance to attack the French fleet. For the rest of her life Elizabeth was to be attracted to men of such hearty masculinity and experience.

As long as Henry VIII lived, Thomas's ambition was kept within bounds, and served to spur him to energetic service of the crown. But the king's death and his own brother's easy assumption of power seemed to open up a horizon gleaming with possibilities for a man of his bravado. He had previously experienced great benefits from his late sister's royal marriage; now he intended to gain more from his own.

The thirteen-year-old Elizabeth, officially in mourning for her father, was unaware that Seymour swiftly made a bid for her and received a firm refusal from Protector Somerset and the council. She and her household had gone to live with Catherine Parr outside London, in the pretty dower house of Chelsea, bounded by the river Thames and open fields. In that relaxed, affectionate setting, a stealthy love affair began to develop; someone came riding to the manor under cover of darkness, and was secretly let in through the garden gate by Catherine, brimming with love and happiness. “I pray you let me have knowledge over night at what hour you will come, that your porteress may wait at the gate to the fields for you,” she wrote tenderly, and reminded her lover that he “must take some pain to come without suspect.” It was only a matter of weeks since the death of her husband, the king, an indecorously short time in which to have pledged herself to another man, but that man was Thomas Seymour, and she found him irresistible.

It seemed natural to Catherine that Thomas should have come to woo her; he had been her suitor four years earlier, in 1543, before Henry VIII intervened with his own peremptory proposal, and now, as the protector's brother and the king's widow, it was God's will that they should marry—“God is a marvellous man,” she wrote joyously. Thomas sent her loving, confident letters from St. James's, grumbling that the weeks when he was not with her seemed far longer than they had “under the plummet at Chelsea,” and addressing his betrothed as “Your Highness” so frequently as to betray a tinge of gloating. Catherine, who retained the title of “Catherine the Queen” even after her remarriage, was an excellent match, of royal status, rich, and lovable, and as her husband Thomas would probably have easier access to her stepson, King Edward, around whom he was already forming vague plans. He bribed one of the king's gentlemen, John Fowler, to ask the nine-year-old king whom he, Thomas, should marry; Fowler reported that when he put the question to young Edward, “His Highness said, ‘My Lady Anne of Cleves,' and so, pausing a while, said after, ‘Nay, nay, wot you what? I would he married my sister Mary, to turn her opinions.' ” Indulgent and jolly with children, a typical favorite uncle, Thomas skillfully obtained his royal nephew's support for his marriage with Catherine, and persuaded the boy to write an official letter counseling them to marry, several weeks after the hasty secret ceremony had actually taken place.

“The Lord Seymour married the Queen, whose name was Catherine, with which marriage the Lord Protector was much offended,” Edward noted in his diary for the month of May. The lord protector was offended at his brother's subterfuge, and shocked at the precipitancy of his marriage, which came so soon after the death of Henry VIII that if Catherine immediately became pregnant there might be doubts about the paternity of the child. The protector's wife, the haughty Duchess of Somerset, was infuriated that the wife of her husband's younger brother would take precedence over herself, and a thoroughly unfraternal atmosphere prevailed. The protector administered Catherine's lands entirely against her wishes, and tried to withhold the jewels that Henry VIII had given her, even down to her wedding ring. “My Lord your brother hath this afternoon a little made me warm,” Catherine wrote to her husband on one occasion. “It was fortunate we were so far distant, for I suppose else I should have bitten him.” She added with spirit that any man with such a wife as the protector's ought “continually to pray for a short dispatch of that Hell.” It was well known that the duchess, in turn, bore Thomas a deep grudge “for the Queen's cause.”

Despite their friction with the protector and his wife, Thomas and Catherine were a delightfully happy couple. Catherine's kind, sensible nature and the admiral's boisterous ways gave their household a sunny atmosphere; living with them at the dower houses of Chelsea and Hanworth, or at Thomas's London residence, Seymour Place, Elizabeth observed, probably for the first time in her life, a tender, mature love relationship between a man and a woman of her own rank. When briefly separated from Thomas during her pregnancy in the following year, Catherine sent him news of their unborn baby with touching familiarity: “Mary Odell being abed with me had laid her hand upon my belly to feel it stir. It hath stirred these three days every morning and evening, so that I trust when you come it shall make you some pastime.” The natural undercurrent of physical enjoyment in evidence during the first weeks of their marriage was made the more overt by Thomas's splendidly virile personality and uninhibited manners. With his hearty oaths—“By God's most precious soul!” was his favorite—and the aura of sexual vigor upon which Henry VIII had knowingly commented, he must have appeared an awesome, exciting figure to Elizabeth, whose daily life had previously been bounded by her doting governess Katherine Ashley and the gentle tutor Grindal.

Thomas made much of his wife's stepdaughter. He took to bursting into Elizabeth's bedroom early in the morning, before she was ready, and sometimes when she was still in bed. If she were up, “he would bid her good morrow, and ask how she did, and strike her upon the back or on the buttocks familiarly, and so go forth through his lodgings.” If he caught her still in bed, he would fling 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.” At Hanworth the games continued. On two occasions Catherine joined Thomas, and together they tickled Elizabeth while she was in bed. Wriggling and laughing helplessly as they tickled her, in the fun that Thomas initiated, or being held by Catherine in the garden while Thomas, in mock anger, cut her black cloth dress to ribbons, was a kind of romping for which Elizabeth was a little too old, with overtones for which she was a little too young.

Katherine Ashley watched the admiral's behavior towards her charge with mixed feelings. She was impressed by him; just as he spent money in bribing young King Edward's close servant Fowler, so the admiral spent time in charming Elizabeth's fond governess, and even before the death of Henry VIII Kat had rewarded him by remarking artlessly that she wished he might marry Elizabeth. But now that he was married to the queen instead, Kat was perturbed by his familiarities with the thirteen-year-old girl. Once, disturbingly, he tried to kiss Elizabeth in bed, but Kat intervened and scolded him, telling him to “go away, for shame.” Another time, at Chelsea, a suspicious little incident was reported to the governess; Elizabeth had heard someone fumbling with the lock, and knowing it was Thomas about to come in, jumped out of bed and ran to hide behind the bed curtains with her maids, while he waited determinedly for her to emerge. Worried, Kat met him in the gallery of the Chelsea house, and told him that these things were being talked about, and Elizabeth's reputation was in danger. Defiantly, “the Lord Admiral swore, God's precious soul! he would tell my Lord Protector how it slandered him, and he would not leave it, for he meant no evil.” It was characteristic of Thomas to take it for granted that his brother would support him, and to persist in doing as he pleased.

Kat Ashley told the queen of her anxiety; with her customary good sense, Catherine “made small matter of it,” and closed the subject by saying that she would accompany her husband in the romps in the future. However, it was Elizabeth herself who eventually quelled them, by taking care to be up and dressed and working at her books by the time Thomas came in to greet her. “At Seymour Place, when the Queen lay there,” the governess afterwards recalled, “he did use a while to come up every morning in his night-gown, bare-legged in his slippers, where he found commonly the Lady Elizabeth up at her book; and then he would look in at the gallery door, and bid my Lady Elizabeth good morrow, and so go his way.” Kat remonstrated with the admiral for coming bare-legged into the girl's bedroom, and on this occasion he was angry, but stopped doing so—an indication that Elizabeth's cooler reception of him was effective.

The girl was unsettled by the unaccustomed physical encounters with a man. If at first she was delighted with the attention paid to her by her stepmother's magnificent husband, and accepted his familiarities as friendly games, it cannot have been long before she became aware of the deeper element which so upset her governess and, eventually, her stepmother. There was a curious incident at Hanworth, when Catherine Parr told Kat that the admiral had looked through the gallery window and seen Elizabeth throw her arms around a man's neck. Kat taxed the girl with it, and Elizabeth “denied it weeping, and bade her ask all her women. They all denied it.” On reflection, the governess knew it could not be true, because no man had been there, except Grindal the schoolmaster, and she finally came to the conclusion that the queen was jealous of Thomas's interest in her stepdaughter, and had invented this report as a means of warning Kat to keep a close watch over the girl's doings. Catherine was acutely aware of the dangers of scandal, even though Thomas apparently was not.

The spreading ripples of disquiet in an otherwise happy household resulted rather from selfish irresponsibility in Thomas's nature than from any better defined motive. His wife, the dowager queen, of whom he seemed deeply fond, was a healthy woman in her thirties, so there was no reason to expect that he would ever be free to marry Elizabeth, even had the protector and council withdrawn their fierce opposition to such a scheme. That a man newly married to a charming woman should deliberately have courted the death penalty by seducing a virgin of the blood royal also seems highly unlikely. The key to Thomas's behavior lay in the streak of naïveté beneath his vigorous masculinity; his thought was for immediate benefits rather than the eventual results of a calculated course of action. He was happy with Catherine, but he enjoyed the teasing romps with Elizabeth, which transformed her from a grave, self-contained royal scholar into a giggling hoyden, and he saw no harm in indulging his inclinations and giving her an occasional surreptitious kiss, which he could easily pass off as play. That servants' gossip might endanger Elizabeth's reputation, or that it might be disturbing for her to be prematurely aroused by a man who stood for her in the role of stepfather, seemed less important to Thomas than his apparently harmless wish to gratify thus his strong attraction to the girl.

“The Admiral loved her but too well, and had done so a good while,” Kat Ashley afterwards confided to Thomas Parry, Elizabeth's cofferer, “in so much that, one time the Queen, suspecting the often access of the Admiral to the Lady Elizabeth's Grace, came suddenly upon them, where 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.” The admiral's flirtation had gone too far; the laughter was hushed. Catherine was angry and unhappy. It was decided that Elizabeth and her servants must leave the admiral's household, and after a painful interview with Catherine, during which the fourteen-year-old girl stood almost mute while her stepmother gave her quiet words of advice and warning, Elizabeth, her governess, her cofferer, and the rest of her servants set off for Cheshunt, soon after Whitsun 1548.