The Temptation of Elizabeth Tudor (23 page)

The identity of the mother cannot be proved. But the evidence suggests that the murdered infant might have been a Seymour baby, just as Jane Dormer suggested, born illegitimate at Wolf Hall to one of the Seymour women or a mistress of one of their men. This does not mean that the mother was Elizabeth, since there is no evidence that she visited Thomas Seymour’s childhood home or even the local area. If she was pregnant when she left Catherine’s household in June 1548, her baby was not the child thrown on the fire.

Nevertheless, Jane Dormer’s story was not the only one to suggest that Elizabeth was no virgin when she left Hanworth. In 1594, the thinly veiled narrative poem
Willobie His Avisa
had the young Avisa, who can be convincingly interpreted as Elizabeth, defending her honour with a knife.
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A nobleman of ‘ripe years’ has apparently tried to force himself upon Avisa, forcing the girl to snatch the dagger from his belt. The courtship, tantalizing and dangerous, was considered by the late sixteenth century to be ‘a warning to all young maids of every degree, that they beware the alluring enticements of great men’.
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In this fictionalized account of the courtship, the nobleman declares to the girl: ‘Ah silly wench, take not a pride, though thou my raging fancy move thy betters far, if they were tried, would fain accept my proffered love; T’was for thy good, if thou hadst wist, for I may have whom ere I list.’ The nobleman of the poem belittles the girl when she tries to reject his advances, asking: ‘Art thou preciser than a queen?’ He offers her everything he can – ‘my house, my heart, my land, my life, my credit to thy care I give’. In reality, while Catherine lived, Seymour could hardly offer Elizabeth honour.

In the summer of 1548, ill in her bed, Elizabeth was aware of the rumours circulating around her. They made her furious. She remained so poorly that word reached the Protector, who wrote enquiring about her health, as well as sending a royal physician, Dr Thomas Bille, to attend her.
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It was no surprise that Elizabeth was reluctant to hazard her health to a local physician: the medical profession was not held in high repute, even by some of its own members,
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and Elizabeth always insisted on being treated by royal doctors.
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Thomas Bille was a Cambridge man who had joined the College of Physicians in the early 1540s, and who had served both King Henry VIII and Edward VI.
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He was trusted, taking great ‘diligence and pains’ with the princess, placing her on the road to recovery. In September, the princess sat down to write her thanks to the Protector, asking that the physician be rewarded. She hesitated, though, to put in writing just what had ailed her, instead informing Somerset that Bille ‘can ascertain you of mine estate of health wherefore I will not write it’. She was grateful for Somerset’s support ‘in this time of my sickness’. Just what exactly this sickness was is unknown, which helped to fuel the rumours.

In the case of expectant mothers, it was usual for royal ladies to be attended in their confinements by doctors rather than midwives, as Queen Catherine would be that same September. It was not impossible that in Elizabeth’s case a cover-up occurred and a child was born. Pregnancies could be – and were – hidden, even in the full glare of the court.
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If such a child existed, however, it was very well concealed and the truth was never discovered. But the fact that Catherine sent her stepdaughter away, and that Elizabeth then took to her bed at Cheshunt did little to hinder the rumour mill.

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The mother, too, is traditionally believed to haunt Littlecote.

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Even a century later, a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians and the Royal Society published a damning indictment of the London medical profession (see Goddard). Behind the scenes, ‘raw and slovenly apprentices’ did the work of preparing the prescriptions, with such creatures being ‘no ways capable of discovering his secrets, but only fit to kindle fires, tend a still or furnace, beat a mortar’.

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Elizabeth’s own mother was several months’ pregnant before her marriage was announced. Her cousin, Catherine Grey, was close to full term when she finally confessed her pregnancy at Elizabeth’s court.

By the time that Elizabeth left Hanworth in June 1548, Catherine was six months’ pregnant. The queen would place her hand on the tiny life in her womb, ‘to feel it stir’, and speak soothingly to her unborn child.
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The baby kicked ‘like an honest man’ both in the morning and in the evening, delighting its mother, who was reassured by each fluttering movement. Only recently Catherine had been happily sharing these experiences with Thomas, telling him that ‘when ye come it will make you some pastime’. Yet her husband had instead looked for his pastime with Elizabeth, and although the queen could not upbraid him in public she dwelled on that fact.

They set out for Sudeley on 13 June, as planned. Moving slowly down dry, rutted roads, the household looked more like a procession, snaking its way through villages and into the countryside as it left the environs of London far behind. The queen, naturally enough, attracted attention wherever she went. She was glad finally to arrive at the place where her baby was to be born. The castle was visible for miles from the high London road, lying in a wooded valley close to the town of Winchcombe in Gloucestershire.
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The idea of Sudeley was a romantic one for Thomas. Although a manor house had long stood on the site, whose outline was still visible in the grass of the park, the castle was only a hundred years old. It gratified Seymour that it had been constructed on naval gold. Ralph Boteler, the first Lord Sudeley, had become rich as an admiral in the French wars of Henry V and Henry VI.
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That one of the towers was named after a French ship captured and ransomed by his famous predecessor seized Thomas’s imagination.

The first Lord Sudeley had built a palace rather than a fortress, with blue-green beryl used in place of glass in the round windows of the great hall. It was opulent and splendid. Dark rumours of treason also hung over the castle. It was later reported that Boteler, on riding to London to make his peace with the Yorkist King Edward IV, had looked back at his mansion and declared: ‘Sudeley Castle, thou art a traitor, not I’, before passing it to the king in return for his freedom. For Thomas, there was this added frisson of rebelliousness in the place, Boteler having earlier been one of the leading advisers to the young Lancastrian King Henry VI.

Sudeley Castle had been in a poor state when Seymour acquired it in February 1547, but he had then made it fit for his and Catherine’s quasi-royal dynasty.
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In this effort, Thomas had acquired the help of his friend and second cousin by marriage, Sir William Sharington, who was a Norfolk man by birth and nearly twenty years his kinsman’s senior.
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Sharington had heavily lidded and uneven eyes, and arching thick eyebrows, surmounting a broad, round face, which was lengthened slightly by a bushy brown beard. This last he kept trimmed back below his mouth before allowing it to grow curly over his neck.
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He habitually dressed plainly. His one great passion in life was building, on which he spent lavishly.

Sharington had secured the grant of Lacock Abbey in Bedford-shire following Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries, at first taking up residence in the abbess’s house while he made a plan of works.
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With the help of the builder John Chapman, who had previously been employed in the king’s works, he set about transforming his new residence into a building that rivalled even the ambitions for Somerset Place on the Strand.
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Sharington was always a contradiction: plain-living, yet overseeing the most ornate house in England; quiet in his tastes, yet marrying three times; a pillar of the local community and yet – beneath the veneer – a common thief, for the funds for his extravagant building works were not acquired honestly. Sharington was cunning. He was just the kind of fellow Seymour, with his underhand schemes, needed, and Thomas was drawn to his older kinsman.

Lacock Abbey, exuding French-inspired classical detailing, was an exorbitantly expensive marvel. Its Cotswold stone and large windows spoke to the world of their owner’s exquisite taste.
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Sharington’s renovations began in the southern range close to the wall of the destroyed abbey church. He wanted to build a modern home, producing his own characteristically ‘Sharingtonian’ style, with its fine gable-coping, square-headed doorways and transomed windows with panes dividing into four large panels.
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His approach was unique and tasteful, and Sharington was much in demand as a designer.

Early in 1547, Thomas had engaged Sharington to make the 60-mile journey to Sudeley to oversee the fine alterations planned there. Seymour trusted him so much that he gave him nearly £3,000 to spend on works at both Sudeley and his other house at Bromham. Others, too, hoped to engage Seymour’s friend for their own projects. He had been kept busy for over a year, and he was now present in the West Country as Seymour and Catherine made their way towards Sudeley in June 1548.

The castle that greeted Thomas and Catherine was also a Cotswold stone building, set amid pretty parkland and ornate gardens. Sharington had been busy on Thomas’s behalf, his hand visible in the fine augmentation of the east range, which sat in the inner courtyard of the castle close to its very heart.
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The rooms there were palatial, as visitors would discover after being led through the elaborate outer wall of the castle into the newly remodelled grand apartments. The queen could enter through a small corridor from the ground floor, where she would find herself in a compact outer chamber leading into the large, principal room. It was dominated by a great bay window, looking out on the courtyard and onto anyone approaching the building.

In the winter this room could be heated by the large fireplace; in the summer, guests could view the lush green gardens from three ornate windows on the opposite side of the room facing the bay window. Up a narrow spiral staircase there was a fine presence chamber, where Catherine could receive visitors. The ceiling rose two storeys high, and light flooded the room through a huge window. Additional windows stretched from floor to ceiling, giving the impression almost of being out in the open. At one end of this chamber was a private room, where occupants could retire alone, for peace. At the other end was a private chapel, so minute that to reach it visitors had to squeeze past a fireplace built precariously next to a doorway, clutching their clothing close to avoid the spluttering flames.

These rooms at Sudeley were all fine ones, yet Catherine did not choose any of them for her own residence. Instead, she selected a more intimate suite almost in the centre of the castle, behind a comfortable ante-room in which she could sit with her ladies. The queen, who was always conscious of her royal status, wanted both privacy and comfort as the time of her confinement neared.

For company, Catherine had many of those she loved around her. Her beloved sister made the journey to be with her, as did her friend Elizabeth Tyrwhitt, who shared her radical religious views. Although the absence of Princess Elizabeth left a gap in Catherine’s household, it could partially be filled by Jane Grey, who was approaching eleven years old and who was now the only other royal lady in the household. Catherine was coming to rely on Jane as her closest companion, while Jane truly loved and admired her guardian, honouring her memory to the end of her own, brief life.
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She flourished under Catherine and Thomas’s care, enjoying, as she put it, the ‘great goodness’ that they had shown her ‘from time to time’.
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For her, Seymour had ‘been towards me a loving and kind father’, while Catherine became a second mother. Jane recognized the great benefits that they had heaped upon her and was ‘ready to obey’ their ‘godly monitions and good instructions’ as any grateful daughter should. She was not and could never be, however, Catherine’s daughter. As her own baby stirred in the womb, the queen’s thoughts turned once again to her royal stepchildren.