The Temptation of Elizabeth Tudor (11 page)

By 1547, Elizabeth’s household was largely harmonious, although wounds from just a few years before were still sore and whispered about. In late 1546, Lady Troy was approaching seventy at her retirement, having served for thirteen years in the princess’s household.
21
She returned to Wales. Elizabeth went on diligently paying her pension of half her previous salary up until the elderly woman’s death in 1557.
22
It was not much money, but the aged widow had been left comfortable by her husband and she enjoyed a long retirement.
23
She had hoped that her niece would succeed her as head of the princess’s household, but the quiet Blanche Parry faced a formidable rival in Kate. The former governess needed a new role after Grindal’s appointment. She was more ambitious than Blanche and acutely aware of status;
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she was also possessive of her royal charge and loved her dearly. When, on one later occasion, Blanche presented Elizabeth with a fine square of velvet edged with silver lace as a New Year’s gift, her rival outdid her with a dozen handkerchiefs edged with gold and silver.
25
With Kate lobbying for the appointment as lady mistress, the choice had been left to Henry VIII.
26
It was thus Kate Ashley who arrived at Chelsea in the role.

While Elizabeth spent her Chelsea days with her head bent over her books or writings, the queen was using her general estrangement from court to work on her own intellectual projects. Catherine was formidably intelligent and a published author. Her early works had been orthodox and unobjectionable, but even as Henry VIII lived she had quietly worked on a more radical composition. As she waited for time to pass, between Thomas Seymour’s visits to Chelsea, she had pulled out her old manuscript, reading through a work that delved deep into her innermost psyche. She wrote of the loathing that she felt about herself in the face of the perfection of God, ‘bewailing the ignorance of her blind life’. Released from the terrifying shadow of Henry VIII’s wrath, Catherine was able to be more open about her thoughts and beliefs.
*4
She discussed the manuscript in her household. Her visiting brother, the Marquess of Northampton, made an ‘earnest request’ that she print her work, while her friend the Duchess of Suffolk declared publication her ‘instant desire’ – as its subsequent title page recorded. During her now rare visits to court, the queen also sought the advice of William Cecil, a country squire and a rising star in the Protector’s household. He considered it ‘no shame’ for Catherine to ‘detect her sin’. She was persuaded and so prepared the work for publication all through the summer and autumn of 1547. It was a brave decision to expose herself in this way as a ‘miserable, wretched sinner’, particularly following the hasty marriage to Thomas, which was still looked on by some as a scandal.
27

Elizabeth approved of Catherine’s
Lamentations of a Sinner
, deciding to revise her own earlier work from 1545 in a show of solidarity for her stepmother. As an eleven-year-old, she had prepared a translation of Marguerite of Navarre’s
Mirror of the Sinful Soul
. The child had struggled with the content to produce a tiny, beautiful book as Catherine’s New Year’s present for 1545, finishing it only on the very last day of 1544.
28
She had been too young to understand all of the meaning, which focused on the dependence of the human soul on God. In the studious environment of Catherine’s household, Elizabeth again took up her work, giving it a fresh and more mature eye.

At the same time, the princess also copied out a number of biblical verses that had some meaning to her, including: ‘there is not a more wicked head than the head of a serpent and there is no wrath above the wrath of a woman’. She was thinking about marriage, considering that ‘he that hath gotten a virtuous woman hath gotten a goodly possession; she is unto him an help and pillar whereupon he resteth’. Yet, ‘it were better to dwell with a lion and a dragon than to keep house with a wicked wife’, while a man should ‘depart not upon a discreet and good woman that is fallen to thee for thy portion in the fear of the lord for the gift of her honesty is above gold’. As she approached fourteen, Elizabeth knew that she was reaching an age at which she could marry. Thomas Seymour’s proposal remained in her thoughts, reinforced by the teasing and urging of Kate Ashley, who had a soft spot for the new head of the household. Elizabeth ended her biblical copying with words from the Thirteenth Psalm: ‘the fool saith in his heart that there is no God’.
29

Many at court considered Thomas Seymour to be just such an ungodly fool. In spite of his estrangement from his brother, he continued to haunt the corridors of power, either riding over from Chelsea or from Catherine’s other manor of Hanworth, or stepping out from his London town house. The Seymour brothers’ falling out was not public knowledge that summer; but it lay heavy on Thomas’s mind.

One day, not long after Thomas’s marriage became widely known, John Fowler came across him in the gallery at St James’s Palace.
30
He watched Seymour pass into the king’s inner chambers, before following him in. Once again, Seymour ordered his servant to leave so that he could speak to Fowler privately. Furtively, he asked the king’s servant, according to Fowler’s later report, ‘whether My Lord his brother had been there or not since his last being there’. Fowler said no. Seymour made no acknowledgement of this, instead going on to say that his brother had ‘fallen out with him concerning the Admiralty and how His Grace took their part afore his’. Fowler had little sympathy on this score, telling Thomas to ‘bear with My Lord’s Grace, considering he is the Protector of the Realm, and your older brother’. ‘For God’s love,’ Fowler added plaintively, ‘let there be no unkindness between you two.’ But there already was. Thomas replied: ‘Mr Fowler, nay, nay, My Lord would have my head under his girdle.’ He then paused, before asking Fowler to tell the king what he had said, for fear that Somerset should otherwise slander him.

Although Thomas did not give Fowler the details of his dispute over the Admiralty, it most likely related to the invasion of Scotland. Somerset had inherited war with England’s old enemy thanks to Henry VIII’s desire to marry his son to Mary, the young Queen of Scots.
*5
By late August, the court had moved to Hampton Court and martial preparations were fully underway, although Thomas’s role in them was far from certain.
31
That month, Somerset refused to include him on a list of councillors to remain in London and rule while he was away leading the campaign.
32
At the same time, he also informed anyone who cared to know that ‘his brother was to go to the west of England to see after anything that might be necessary there’. These rather vague instructions to quit the capital must have rankled with Thomas, but his brother certainly did not want him close to his vacant seat of power during the six weeks or so that he intended to be away; and neither did he want Thomas with him as he moved northwards at the head of the king’s army.

When Thomas first heard that he had been appointed as Lord Admiral, he had professed himself pleased, declaring to his friend Sir William Sharington that ‘he was glad of that office as of any office within the Realm and that no man should take that office from him but he should take his life also’.
33
Sharington – a tricky, dishonest fellow looking for a profit – seriously doubted this, pointing out that there were many better offices that Seymour might have had. Yet Thomas insisted that he would never give up his patent as Admiral, since with it he had ‘the rule of a good sort of ships and men. And I tell you it is a good thing to have the rule of men.’

If Seymour hoped that he would really be given effective command of England’s navy he was, however, to be severely disappointed. The appointment was a largely symbolic one. Instead, he was forced to sit while the Council debated the wisdom of sending to Germany for naval munitions, in order to ensure that the Scots were unable to purchase them.
34
He was denied command of the navy in the waters around Scotland. The Earl of Warwick’s brother, Andrew Dudley, had already been recruited as admiral to the north within weeks of Thomas Seymour receiving his appointment, although Dudley was then replaced in readiness for the invasion by the more experienced Lord Clinton.
35
Clinton’s instructions, dated 1 August 1547, were full of excitement and promise, as he was sent northwards against ‘our ancient enemies the Scots’ to take revenge against them and rid the seas of the French galleys haunting the waters.
36
This was the kind of adventure Thomas Seymour relished; but he was not invited to take part.

Thomas had another reason to be discontented. He was furious when he discovered that Somerset had no intention of leaving him as governor of the king when he was in Scotland. He ranted about Somerset’s appointee in his stead, ‘so drunken a fellow as Sir Richard Page’.
37
This man’s preferment rankled particularly, because Page was the stepfather of the Duchess of Somerset, whose family the Protector very clearly favoured over the Seymours. Instead of heading westwards, as was intended, Thomas remained resolutely in London, kicking his heels about the court as Somerset surged northwards, winning a victory against the Scots at the Battle of Pinkie, east of Edinburgh, on 10 September 1547. Gallingly for the Protector’s younger brother, the navy, under Lord Clinton, played a notable role, supporting the army from the Firth of Forth. There was, at least, one silver lining for Thomas. With the Protector gone and Page apparently less than fit for office, he was able to gain access easily to the king in his apartments at Hampton Court.

Sitting with his royal nephew one day, Thomas told Edward that Somerset would never be able to dominate in Scotland ‘without loss of a great number of men or of himself; and therefore that he spent a great sum of money in vain’.
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This hit a nerve with the king, since Somerset was widely believed to be embezzling Henry VIII’s treasury and jewels.
39
The Protector was also rumoured to be wreaking ‘havocs’ among the king’s lands and inheritance, with sales made ‘under pretence of mere necessity’, and with many of the king’s best lands transferred to his own possession. These charges were largely unfair, since the royal treasury had been much depleted by the time of Edward’s accession, while Somerset’s character was ‘not by any means such as to make him lavish, but rather leads him to parsimony in everything’.
40
However, it was an easy charge for Thomas Seymour to make, particularly since the Protector deliberately kept the boy-king short of pocket money.

Thomas chided his nephew that he was ‘too bashful’ in his own affairs, and that he should speak up in order to ‘bear rule, as other kings do’.
41
Edward shook his head, declaring that ‘I needed not, for I was well enough’, yet he registered his uncle’s words. When Thomas came to him again that September, he told the child that ‘ye must take upon you yourself to rule, for ye shall be able enough as well as other kings; and then ye may give your men somewhat; for your uncle is old, and I trust will not live long’.
42
Edward’s reply was chilling: ‘it were better that he should die’. There was little love lost between the monarch and the Lord Protector. Thomas also informed Edward that ‘ye are but even a beggarly king now’, drawing attention to the fact that he had no money with which to play at cards or reward his servants. He told his nephew that he would supply him with the sums he needed.

Somerset’s absence in Scotland had had the effect of handing the king to his brother, and Thomas meant to capitalize on it. He trawled through royal records, seeking out precedents to support his bid to become the king’s governor, and he openly began to build support at court. He already had three members of Edward’s household – Thomas Wroth, John Cheke
*6
and John Fowler – in his party.
43
Thomas Seymour was, however, incapable of concealing his actions. Word soon reached Somerset that a plot was afoot.
44
The king had shown himself a member of the younger brother’s party, declaring that he was happy to take ‘secret measures’ to replace Somerset as governor. This was naturally alarming for the Lord Protector, who, abandoning a promising situation in Scotland, hurried southwards in order to re-establish his authority at court.

The Duke of Somerset kept up the outward appearance of friendship with his younger brother. That month, the Duchess of Somerset sent a freshly killed doe as a present to Catherine.
45
She followed it up, later on, with boxes of marmalade.
46
Thomas returned home to Catherine, thwarted for now – but not beaten.