The Temptation of Elizabeth Tudor (18 page)

Earlier in February, Dr Wotton, English ambassador in Paris, sent details of the large-scale naval preparations to the Protector.
25
At the same time, four English ships carrying wine for Edward VI’s own table were captured by France’s Scottish allies. To Wotton, all the signs pointed to an imminent war. As late as spring 1548, he was met only with evasive answers and delays when he attempted to obtain compensation for the captured English vessels.
26
In an attempt to avoid war, the Council authorized a commission to meet with the French to settle the boundaries of English territory around Boulogne. Thomas Seymour was one of the signatories present when the Council decided on this course.
27
It looked to everyone, though, that a war on two fronts beckoned. And it was a prospect that England’s Lord Admiral – who still saw himself as a naval hero – rather relished.

That spring, as relations with France soured, Somerset wrote to Thomas to request that he use his authority to help some London merchants, who had unfortunately chosen to ship their goods to Rouen and Dieppe using French vessels.
28
Predictably, they had met with a fleet of Englishmen who, not knowing the provenance of the goods, had boarded and captured the ships, appropriating everything on board. When the merchants complained to Somerset, he passed the matter to his brother, commanding him to remedy it. In light of this ‘detestable robbery and spoil’, Thomas wrote at once to order his officers to search for the ships, and to seize the goods, if they found them, on his behalf.

Little, if any, of the merchandise made its way back to the rightful owners, however, since Thomas had already begun using the navy for his own personal profit. For some months, he had been extorting money from merchant ships intent on landing in England. He had also begun to take bribes from ships before they sailed, ‘contrary to the liberties of this realm and to the great discouragement and destruction of the navy of the same’ – as was the accusation later laid against him.
29
Although Seymour had a sizeable income when coupled with his wife’s dower, he wanted even more. He turned his attention to the goods of foreign merchant ships that, being ‘with wind and weather broken’, yet came ‘unwrecked to the shore’.
30
He ignored direct orders from the Council to return the goods – orders that had actually been signed by him in the Council chamber. Instead, as the Council would later charge him, ‘you have not only given contrary commandment to your officers, but as a pirate have written lines to some of your friends to gather them as much of those goods as they could should be conveyed away secretly by night further off, upon hope that if the same goods were assured, the owners make no more labour for them, and then you might have enjoyed them’. Such conduct was ‘contrary to justice and your honour’.

Seymour, however, did not care. By the spring of 1548, he had effectively turned pirate. Many of his seafaring friends were on the wrong side of the law. When a pirate was taken, Thomas would often wade in, freeing the man and confiscating the goods and ships, which rightly belonged to the individuals who had captured them from the pirate. To add insult to injury, he came down firmly on the side of the pirates, sometimes even imprisoning their captors to create a very effective deterrent to would-be pirate-takers.
31
In fact, Thomas Seymour had so embraced piracy that his houses were soon stuffed with stolen goods, from both foreign and English merchants.
32
Much of the evidence was hearsay, or could be put down to Seymour’s poor judgment or incompetence; but it was notable that Thomas kept the strategically useful Scilly Isles in his own hands.
33
The Protector, for one, heard a whisper that his brother was accounted the ‘chief pirate’ in the waters around England.
34
The best that could be said of the Lord Admiral was that he failed to ‘guard the seas better against the robbers’.
35

Thomas Seymour continued to direct his energies to buying support for his cause. In early 1548, he decided to approach his brother-in-law William Parr, Marquess of Northampton, one of the highest-ranking peers in England. Northampton was a few years younger than Catherine, but had been the darling of the Parr family. His widowed mother had indebted herself to buy his marriage to Anne Bourchier, heiress to the Earl of Essex. Northampton had, eventually, acquired his wife’s earldom, but the marriage proved a disaster. Both partners took lovers, and Anne bore at least one illegitimate child.
36
Perhaps emboldened by Somerset’s repudiation of his own adulterous first wife, Northampton petitioned for divorce in April 1547. Unwilling to wait on the glacial pace of proceedings, Northampton secretly married his mistress Elizabeth Brooke at the persuasion – it was rumoured – of Catherine and the Duchess of Suffolk.
37

This move was a miscalculation. In late February 1548 he was commanded by the Council to abandon Elizabeth Brooke and never speak to her again on pain of death. Northampton was outraged at what he saw as the Protector’s duplicity, as was the queen, who showed her support by bringing Brooke into her household. It was a simple matter then for Seymour to bring the disaffected marquess over to his own party. As the storm broke, Seymour approached his brother-in-law, telling him that he perceived he was not contented.
38
He advised Northampton to set up his household in the north, in the midst of his lands and support, since ‘being well beloved there’ of his friends and tenants he ‘should be the more strong, and more able to serve the King’s Majesty’. Northampton would also be better able to serve the interests of his brother-in-law.

For Princess Elizabeth, the arrival of the beautiful – if scandalous – Elizabeth Brooke in the household was enlivening. The princess also supported and recognized her marriage to William Parr, and the two women would later be close.

Elizabeth continued to spend most of her time at her studies, enjoying the rigorous curriculum implemented by her new tutor. Roger Ascham was particularly noted for his fine italic hand, which he now took pains to teach to his young pupil, as well as ensuring that she could write in Greek.
39
During their time together, Elizabeth and Ascham progressed slowly through the works of Cicero, as well as much of Titus Livius’s monumental history of Rome. The daily routine became familiar. The princess worked on the New Testament in Greek during the morning, before tackling Classical works in the afternoon, including the tragedies of Sophocles. Each work was carefully selected, Ascham hoping that ‘from those sources she might gain purity of style, and her mind derive instruction that would be of value to her to meet every contingency of life’. More daringly, he added to her readings Philip Melanchthon’s
Commonplaces in Theology
, which was a Lutheran text published less than thirty years before, and which he considered ‘best suited, after the Holy Scriptures, to teach her the foundations of religion, together with elegant language and sound doctrine’.

Elizabeth learned quickly and was attentive, asking for guidance on words that she thought had ‘a doubtful or curious meaning’. Under Ascham’s tutelage she quickly developed sophisticated tastes. She told her teacher that she could not abide writers who imitated the great Erasmus who ‘tied up the Latin tongue in those wretched fetters of proverbs’. Elizabeth knew what she liked, and this was ‘a style that grows out of [its] subject; chaste because it is suitable, and beautiful because it is clear’. As Ascham noted, ‘she very much admires modest metaphors, and comparisons of contraries well put together and contrasting felicitously with one another’. She had a good ear and excellent judgment, attributes that greatly assisted her abilities in Greek, Latin and English composition. In her English compositions, she had a very concise writing style.

Elizabeth’s writing reached a wider audience that spring when she found that she had become a published author. Somehow, the reformist firebrand John Bale, who had been exiled under Henry VIII, managed to acquire a copy of her translation of the
Mirror of the Christian Soul,
which she had finished some months before.
40
For Bale, it was manna from Heaven. Although Protestant in his convictions, his publications while in exile were too critical of the political regime to find favour with Somerset. His works were still banned in England. By late 1547 Bale was a man cast adrift and badly in need of a patron, as someone in Catherine’s household – with access to Elizabeth’s manuscript – was all too aware. Catherine herself disliked him, for during Henry’s reign Bale had printed the names of some of her ladies in connection with the Protestant martyr Anne Askew, placing them in danger.
41
It seems most unlikely that Elizabeth voluntarily published with Bale, who was as far from the mainstream as it was possible to be; it would have been more straightforward, had Elizabeth wanted to publish, to use Catherine’s publishing channels rather than relying on the exile. But if not Elizabeth, who did send out the manuscript? Only her tutor or her closest ladies are likely to have had access to her personal writings, and few would have dared offend her by actually
stealing
them. Perhaps it was, after all, an act of youthful rebellion against the authority of her stepmother, who she knew would be offended by any contact with Bale.

John Bale certainly believed that Elizabeth had sent him the work in the hope that others might profit from its ‘consolation in spirit’. As he flicked through the manuscript with glee, he began to prepare it for publication, addressing it ‘to the right virtuous and Christianly learned young lady Elizabeth, the noble daughter of our late sovereign King Henry VIII’. Bale had been informed that the princess worked chiefly to improve her studies, although she also wanted the ‘spiritual exercise of her inner soul with God’. He was impressed with her work, which was ‘neither to be reckoned childish nor babyish though she were a babe in years’. The girl’s youth charmed him; he praised her royal blood too. He wanted her to be his patron.
*1
The book, which was printed in April 1548 under the title
A Godly Meditation of the Christian Soul
, depicted Elizabeth as she then showed herself to the world, in its woodcut on the title-page: a young girl wearing an elaborate embroidered dress with fine necklaces, kneeling in prayer.
42

Quite different from John Bale’s, or even Roger Ascham’s, interest in the fourteen-year-old princess was Thomas Seymour’s continued fascination. Queen Catherine had doubtless hoped that the distance between Hanworth and London in the autumn and winter of 1547/48 would dull her husband’s interest. This proved not to be the case. He made his intentions very plain the morning after the princess’s arrival at Seymour Place. On that morning, and on every one afterwards, he appeared in his loose-fitting nightgown (which reached only to his knees), his legs bare and his feet slippered.
43
Elizabeth had been expecting this. Concerned for her reputation, she made sure that she was up and reading her book at her desk. Disappointed, Seymour merely looked into the bedchamber and wished her ‘good morrow’, before going on his way, resolving privately to try again the following day, and the next. Finally, Kate Ashley roundly berated Thomas, informing him that ‘it was an unseemly sight to come so bare legged to a maiden’s chamber’. Seymour, who had been grooming those around Elizabeth for some time, was angry to be crossed, but left.