The Temptation of Elizabeth Tudor (16 page)

At around the same time, the Earl of Warwick also heard of Seymour’s paper and called for him.
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Did he not know, he asked, that if Somerset heard all that he was doing ‘he will set the said Lord Admiral fast in the Tower’? It was what
he
would do if he was Lord Protector, he assured Seymour. Swearing ‘by God’s precious soul!’, Thomas became incensed with his former naval superior. If anyone tried to lay hands on him to send him to prison, Thomas declared, ‘I shall thrust my dagger in him.’

In such conversations Seymour was bullish, even if his underlying stress was obvious in his explosive temper. In private though, both Blagge’s and Warwick’s warnings had an effect on him. He already knew that he was a poor public speaker and likely to stumble over his words in the Commons or the Lords. Without the authority of the king, his letter carried very little weight, so he abandoned it. He continued to try to build support for himself, however. He spoke to his allies on the Council and his friends among the nobility, requiring them to ‘stick and adhere unto him for the alteration of the state of and order of the realm’ and, vaguely, ‘to attain his other purposes’.
26

Thomas Seymour had already been attempting to nurture support among the members of the Commons, who were mostly local gentry or the wealthier villagers and townsmen. When in the countryside, he made it his business to seek out the leading men of the villages – the yeomen and franklins. These individuals, who were one step below the gentry, had comfortable houses and lifestyles. Although they tilled the land, they were also senior enough to sit on juries and commissions, and they acted as leaders of their communities in a way that their social betters could never hope to achieve.

In his personable and jovial way, Thomas made much of these men, whom he considered to ‘be best able to persuade the multitude’. He visited their houses, flattering them and bringing with him a flagon or two of wine so that they could drink together and make merry. He would also bring a pasty of venison – a rare delicacy for those who did not possess carefully stocked parks in which to hunt. For all his failings, Thomas Seymour understood the people better than his elder brother, who deliberately set himself apart from those around him. These lower-ranking countrymen loved him for it, something which, as he later confided to the Marquess of Dorset, ensured that he would have them at his commandment.
27
To demonstrate this, Seymour kept a map of England, which he delighted in displaying, pointing out the areas in which he could count on support as well as indicating just how far his lands stretched.
28
In these, as he would say to William Sharington, ‘I am in the midst of my friends’.

He would also point out the lands of his brother or the Earl of Warwick, ‘unto whom,’ Sharington could perceive, ‘he had no great affection’. But Seymour, Somerset and Warwick were to be drawn together in the House of Lords that very winter.

On Friday 4 November 1547 Thomas dressed himself in his Parliament robes of rich scarlet and ermine.
29
He had spent the night at Seymour Place so had only a short distance to ride, quickly joining the procession of the Lords at Westminster Abbey, with the king himself leading the company. The group made their way to the neighbouring Westminster Palace and took their places before their monarch, who sat enthroned. Young Edward surveyed his assembled Lords and the elected Commons, all crammed into the Parliament chamber.
30
He had just turned ten and was still spare and pale-looking – as his mother had been. He sat in silence as a clerk read out his commission, composed only the previous day. It vested control of the Parliament in his uncle the Protector, although it was written as if it had come direct from the sovereign. That done, the session opened with an oration by Lord Chancellor Richard Rich, Wriothesley’s successor, who sat upon the traditional woolsack.
31

Thomas Seymour was present, but belittled: he was noted in the records as the least significant of all the Council members and officers of state. The snub hurt. Later, on around 11 or 13 December, he was talking with Sir William Sharington at Seymour Place when, in fury, he complained that – unlike his brother – he had been denied a prominent seat in the Lords as one of the king’s uncles.
32
But on 4 November he said nothing publicly. Once the commission had been read out, the assembled Parliamentarians departed to spend Saturday and Sunday in their London lodgings. Thomas Seymour had two days to dwell on events and to plot.

The House of Lords reconvened on Monday 7 November. Seymour and his fellow peers were once again in attendance. Unlike members of the Commons, who sat in a smaller chamber, the Lords were permitted to remain in the White Chamber at Westminster Palace. The lord chancellor once again took up his ceremonial seat upon a woolsack in front of the empty throne, while the other peers sat on benches around the room. Both Somerset and Seymour attended every session of the Lords during November and the first week of December, allowing them to eye each other warily across the room. It was an important session of Parliament for Somerset, since he hoped to push through the religious reforms central to his policy as Protector, which would propel the country beyond Henry VIII’s religious settlement and more clearly on a Protestant course. A bill placing the valuable chantries in the hands of the king was one of the most significant matters on the agenda.
*2
It was to be accompanied by new legislation allowing the laity to take wine in communion (previously reserved for the clergy) as well as bread, and the repeal of some of Henry’s laws.

In spite of the enmity between the Seymour brothers and their wives, the four had reformist religion in common. Catherine was deeply committed to her faith, as her narrow escape from the taint of ‘heresy’ in the last months of Henry VIII’s reign had shown. She had raised her younger stepchildren in the tenets of her beliefs.
*3
Having been emboldened by the tenor of the Parliament, by December Catherine’s household at Seymour Place was no longer celebrating the mass; the ceremony was also abandoned by the Protector and the Earl of Warwick.
33
Times were changing. Already, the great crucifix that had stood for centuries on the altar in St Paul’s Cathedral had been cast down. Elsewhere, churches were being stripped of their ornaments. As time went on, even where the mass was still being celebrated parishioners were beginning to sing their psalms in English. For Princess Mary, who remained in her deep depression until the end of the year, this direction in England’s religious practices was devastating; for her half-sister Elizabeth, by contrast, it was enlightening.

In Parliament that November, Seymour made a beeline for the Marquess of Dorset.
34
Thomas’s lack of public recognition as the king’s uncle smarted. Grumbling, he asserted loudly that ‘if I be thus used, they speak of a black Parliament, by God’s precious soul, I will make the blackest Parliament that ever was in England’. Lord Clinton was standing behind and heard every word, declaring that ‘if you speak such words, you shall lose My Lord utterly, and undo yourself’. Thomas had not even noticed that Clinton – his deputy in the navy – was there. He turned to face him, stating: ‘I would you should know, by God’s precious soul, I may better live without him, then he without me.’ The two peers thought Thomas paranoid. He certainly seemed to be so, as he went on to claim he was sure that matters at the session were directed against the queen. In the throng of Westminster Palace, he ranted that ‘whosoever shall go about to speak evil of the queen, I will take my fist from the first ears to the last’. Much of his own status derived from his marriage to a queen.

The Marquess of Dorset was baffled. He wondered whether Seymour feared that Catherine’s marriage to Henry VIII would be declared invalid. Dorset considered this fear groundless, attempting to soothe Thomas gently: ‘My Lord, these words needs not, for I think there is no nobleman that would speak evil of her, for he should then speak evil of the king, that dead is.’ But Seymour continued openly to declare that ‘he would make the blackest Parliament that ever was in England’. His words were heard by many. In a fury, Somerset would later demand of him: ‘Did you so or no?’;
35
but in November 1547 Seymour would heed no advice, not even from his closest ally.

In practical terms, Edward’s refusal to support Thomas’s letter meant that there was little that Seymour could actually do in the way of mischief during the Parliament. He tried his best, nonetheless. Somerset’s authority had been originally conferred by letters patent in March 1547, but the Protector thought it prudent to have his protectorship confirmed by Parliament. This seemed a straightforward proposal, so he was amazed when his brother turned it into ‘a great matter’.
36
For Thomas, this was an opportunity to attack. He whispered in as many ears as he could find that once Somerset’s authority was approved by statute, the Protector would (improbably) give English-held Calais to the French as a means of securing an alliance.
37

Seymour’s actual Parliamentary involvement proved uneventful in the period leading up to the vote. He missed only two days during the first month of the session, which was a remarkable record given the fact that truancy was rife.
*4
He was also active in the Council during the period, diligently sitting with his brother and peers on 11 December as they debated the orders to be sent to the king’s ambassador in Germany.
38
As usual, the document was passed through several members of the Council before it finally reached Thomas’s hand for signature, but he made the best of it – marking his name with a signature as large and flourishing as his brother’s.

Finally, after sitting through the third reading of the Protector’s Bill, the time for the voting arrived. This was the moment that Seymour had been waiting for. On 14 December, as the royal court prepared for Christmas, he answered ‘nay’ as those around him gave their assents.
39
To his consternation, only the Marquess of Dorset joined him in this show of dissent, and the protectorate was confirmed. Thomas had probably grossly overestimated the support he could command in the Lords. Somerset was furious, and Seymour too was irate. As a sign of his discontent, Thomas petulantly objected to a bill concerning instruments used for weights the following day, but this time his dissent was followed only by Lord Cobham.

Thomas made himself scarce from the Lords from 20 December 1547 and did not attend on Christmas Eve, when the king came in person to adjourn the gathering until April. Seymour had probably been warned away by his brother. He received word to attend the Protector to answer for his conduct during the Parliament, but he refused to come.
40
No doubt readying his dagger to run through any that tried to arrest him, he was surprised to find that nothing happened to him. Somerset, out of lingering affection for his wayward brother, had resolved to show him ‘leniency’.
41
This absence of repercussions merely inspired Seymour to continue in his ‘mischievous purpose’. He had failed to disrupt the Parliament, but he still had designs on the governorship of the young king – and on the person of Princess Elizabeth.

Thomas Seymour spent Christmas in London with Catherine, still openly complaining ‘that it was never seen, that in the minority of a king, where there hath been two brethren, that the one brother should have all rule, and the other none; but if the one were Protector, the other should be Governor’. He had, by then, not seen Elizabeth for two months, and instead had focused only on his wife’s bed. With Seymour’s undivided attention, Catherine, despite being ‘past middle age’ and reputedly ‘barren’, surprised everyone by becoming pregnant.
42

*1
The secret was revealed only later under interrogation, after Catherine’s death, in a short deposition which, although written in her own hand, Kate Ashley did not sign.

*2
Chantries were chapels that carried endowments, whereby priests said masses for the souls of the dead. Their effective dissolution brought revenues for the state.

*3
For example, in the will of Catherine’s stepdaughter Margaret Neville (TNA PROB 11/31/45), who died as a teenager, she said that she looked inwardly into herself and found ‘nothing but damnation’, the only goodness within her coming from Christ.

*4
Absences from Parliament were technically quite serious matters. An absent peer was expected to send his excuse by another member, but if it was not accepted by the lord chancellor then ‘he is to be blamed by the house as the fault requires’ (BL Harley MS 6807 f. 75).

The winter of 1547–8 was bitterly cold and would prove to be a long one. Princess Elizabeth wrapped herself heavily in furs when she ventured outside. The biting weather, bringing chapped lips and red clumsy hands, seemed unremitting. From Denmark and further afield, there were reports of horses struggling to pull sledges over the frozen ground, when only a few months before they had hauled wagons.
1
The princess spent the Christmas season away from court, although she looked forward eventually to joining Catherine and Thomas in London.