The Temptation of Elizabeth Tudor (25 page)

Thomas was very interested in his friend’s ability to produce counterfeits. One day during the summer of 1548, he was walking with Sharington. Turning to him, he asked ‘what money he could make him [i.e. Sharington] if need were?’
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Thinking for a moment, Sharington suggested about £400. ‘Tush,’ said Thomas dismissively, ‘that is but a little; but what could you make me?’ This was a different matter entirely since Seymour, with his plate and access to silver, could provide a very ready source of the raw materials for coining. Sharington considered before answering that at short notice it would be hard for him to make the Admiral much more than £400, ‘but if you give me a little warning, I shall be able to make you so much as I have stuff to make it’. This was what Seymour wanted to hear, and he asked his friend to begin collecting together into his hands as much coinage as he could. Sharington’s secret operation was going to get considerably more busy, since Seymour firmly believed that with a ‘mass of money ready’ a man ‘might do somewhat withal’.

Although absent from London, Seymour continued to dwell on the wrongs he believed his brother had done him. His lawyer, Richard Weston, had tried to arrange a meeting of lawyers to discuss the case of Catherine’s jewels. But there was plague in the Temple – the legal heart of London – and many of the lawyers that Thomas’s servants had sounded out about the case were out of town and unavailable. In July 1548 Weston wrote to Seymour, asking if the matter could wait until Thomas returned to London, so that he too could escape the diseased air of the capital.
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With nothing resolved, the Seymour brothers spent the summer sniping at each other by letter, while Catherine awaited the birth of her baby.

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Sharington’s first wife was Ursula, an illegitimate daughter of John Bourchier, the 2nd Lord Berners. Bourchier was the son of Elizabeth Tylney, Countess of Surrey, who was the half-sister of Thomas’ maternal grandmother, Anne Say. Sharington’s father-in-law and Seymour’s mother were therefore first cousins.

*2
Emery identifies the east range, which was heavily altered, to be the richest part of Sudeley Castle. He suggests that these changes can be linked to royalty. Although he identifies Richard III as the likely instigator, it seems more probable that the changes were made for Catherine Parr at Thomas Seymour’s behest. The design of the windows is similar to that at Lacock, and this, coupled with the fact that Seymour paid £1,100 to Sharington to rebuild Sudeley, means that it is likely the changes were newly made in 1548.

*3
Jane received Catherine’s prayer book on the queen’s death. When Jane was in the Tower awaiting execution in 1554, she passed the book to her sister, also named Catherine, informing her that ‘I have here sent you, good sister Katerine, a boke, which although it be not outwardly trimmed with gold, yet inwardly it is more worth than precious stones’ (Harleian Miscellany, Vol. I, p. 372).

*4
The princess, fond of her stepmother, later took mementos from Catherine’s personal possessions when she became queen herself. Carley (pp. 141–2) notes that Mary acquired most of Catherine’s books, including her religious works: in spite of their differences in belief, Mary remembered Catherine as a ‘spiritual mentor’.

*5
This was Bishop Hugh Latimer, who served as one of Edward’s chaplains and whom the king wished to reward for preaching before him. The fanatically Protestant churchman, who proved no friend to Seymour, would be burned in 1555, during the reign of Mary.

For royal women, the last month of pregnancy was spent in the quiet of their chamber. Queen Catherine retired to hers, at Sudeley, in early August 1548. Many years before, Edward’s great-grandmother, the domineering Margaret Beaufort, had set down a set of ordinances by which she expected royal mothers to live. Catherine – anxious to preserve her status – would not have deviated from them. Thus, her male household officers were replaced by female ones as she rested and waited to bear her expected son.

While Catherine ceased to appear in public during that long dry summer at Sudeley, a near constant stream of messengers to the castle ensured that Thomas was kept occupied.
*1
That July, the Protector had been troubled by the news of a French army off the coast of Scotland. On 7 July, the five-year-old Mary, Queen of Scots, was betrothed to the French dauphin: the ‘rough wooing’ to bring about a marriage between Edward and Mary seemed to have failed. There were now at least 18 French galleys, sailing with nearly 200 other ships, all sitting low in the water, carrying a force of 7,000 armed men.
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Hurriedly, Somerset ordered a royal fleet of eighty ships to be prepared. Once again, he preferred Lord Clinton as commander to his brother.
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The English fleet, with its modern galleasses – paid for with the funds lavished on the navy by Henry VIII – was a force to be reckoned with, so Lord Clinton had reasons to feel positive. The difficulty would come with actually locating the French, who were rumoured to be planning a quick landing in Scotland to spirit Queen Mary away to France. While the English fleet was smaller, Clinton, with his brash, seafaring air, was ‘extremely confident’, since his ships were so well fitted out. It was just the sort of mission that Seymour would have appreciated; but he was excluded from it.
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Nonetheless, his office kept him busy in other ways, and Thomas continued, while at Sudeley, to take an active interest in ships and their cargoes. On 19 July 1548 he wrote to the Mayor of Waterford to order him to deliver a captured pirate ship into his servant’s custody.
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He took great pains to ensure that the vessel and a smaller boat should be delivered ‘with all the goods in them’, and that they should then be conveyed to him along with ‘all such men as were in them’. On 23 July 1548 he wrote again to the mayor, having heard that two ships – one Portuguese and one Spanish – had been captured by pirates before being retaken when they attempted to dock at Waterford.
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He sent his servant, Thomas Woodlock, to obtain the two ships, as well as their captains, taking the thieves and their booty into his own hands. In return for the compliance of the mayor (his ‘loving friend’), Seymour offered his goodwill and aid in any private matter.

Earlier, in June, Seymour was also enriched with £200 from the profits of his ironworks in Sussex – a sum that testified to the success of his enterprises there.
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He also continued to try to build support, sending Lord Russell warrants to take two bucks from Enfield Chase as a gift, to which the peer gave ‘hearty thanks’.
7

Yet, outside problems also kept intruding on the summer domesticity at Sudeley. On 16 July Seymour sent a terse note to a correspondent demanding payment of a debt owed to the queen.
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The previous month, he found himself dragged into an unfortunate dispute following his sale of Yanworth manor in Gloucestershire to a man named Bush.
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Although Seymour sold the manor as his own, he was astounded to hear that another gentleman, Thomas Culpeper, claimed it. With time on his hands, Seymour did some digging around, finding out that several manors had been settled on Culpeper’s kinsman, Thomas Culpeper the Younger, in remainder.
*2
These had been forfeited to the Crown when the young man was found to have been involved in an adulterous relationship with King Henry’s fifth wife, Catherine Howard. As far as Seymour was concerned, the manors were rightfully his own to sell. He wrote to his brother’s secretary, William Cecil, to so ‘use the matter so that I have no cause to be further troubled to sue for any recompense on behalf of Bush’.

Thomas had parted from his brother on poor terms. Their relations remained ice-cold, even though their written conversations were as hot as the sweltering August sun. The Lord Protector stayed at Hampton Court into the first week of August, finishing up business before he sailed up-river for Sheen.
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Somerset – honouring his brother’s title of Lord Admiral if not the authority that went with it – kept him scrupulously informed of military events. He wrote in August that the loss of life they had expected in Scotland was not as great as feared.
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He was pleased to see from Thomas’s letter that his brother showed a ‘good bearing of the last evil chance in Scotland which in deed is nothing so evil as we first thought’.
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However, the war with Scotland was not going well. The French, still insisting that ‘they break no peace’ with England, offered considerable provocation that August when they fired on the pier at English-held Boulogne.
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Somerset, along with the rest of the Council, now wished Seymour to marshal his ships in Devon and Cornwall to go to sea against the French. Seymour immediately wrote to his vice-admirals, informing them that it was better to take the initiative ‘with such suspicious friends rather than to suffer injuries and sustain costs’.
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The idea of his navy taking pre-emptive action against the French pleased Seymour. He was all for it, condemning them for their ‘open enmity at sea and their feigned profession of friendship since communication between Your Grace and their ambassadors and our ambassador and the French king’. He wrote to his brother and the Council on 11 August to confirm that his ships intended to ‘distress their fleet of Newfoundland fish’: French ships had been returning from the New World with fish for market. Thomas, in common with his brother, hoped that the fish – packed in ice to keep them fresh – would soon be sold in markets along the English coast, rather than landing on French dinner tables.
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His vice-admirals were quickly writing of their good success in tackling the French, reports that contrasted pleasingly for Seymour with his rival Clinton’s failure
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in Scotland: that summer, almost under the noses of the English, the little Queen of Scots landed in France, accompanied by ‘a great number of ladies and gentlemen’.
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Thomas’s own fleet was not entirely successful, however – it failed to find the French fish after all.

Even when the Seymour brothers were in agreement about naval matters, they could not resist sniping at each other, with each determined to be the true master of the Admiralty. An opportunity arrived for Somerset in the complaint of a seasoned ship’s caption, one Matthew Hull.
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Ordinarily the Protector, immersed in his war against the Scots and quarrels with the French, would pass such matters to a subordinate. But he was usually ready to hear the worst against his brother, as many knew. Now, sitting at his writing desk at Sheen on 16 August 1548, Somerset surveyed Hull, standing before him.

Hull had a sad tale to tell. He owned a ship, available for hire, with good space for merchandise to be stowed beneath the heaving decks. Standing before Somerset, he swore to him that he had had no reason to be suspicious about the men who had come to him seeking a ship to carry their cargo. What Hull did not know, he assured the Protector, was that the men had insured their goods for four times what they were actually worth. The men were intending that the ship, and the goods, should be lost at sea, so that
he
would suffer but they would gain very substantially.

Hull was rather vague on the details of exactly how this plot had been discovered by Thomas Seymour’s men, but he was furious when
both
the goods and the ship were impounded and declared forfeited to the Admiralty. Hull’s specific complaint was that ‘not only his furnishings is detained from him but also that he is troubled in the Admiralty court alleging that he would have taken away his own ship with the goods in the same’. This was hardly an unreasonable belief for the court to hold, given the facts of the case: it was rather hard to wreck a ship without the collusion of the captain and crew.

Thomas’s own deputy, Anthony Hussey, believed that Hull had agreed to spirit away the cargo and the ship, keeping them both, while his co-conspirators would claim for their goods on the insurance. He intended to prosecute Hull for this in court. But Somerset believed Hull’s story. Arousing Thomas’s anger, he turned the matter into an attack on Seymour’s loyal deputy, the Protector complaining that Hussey ‘hath not behaved himself uprightly now or other matters also wherein we may charge him unto you’. In Somerset’s judgment, Matthew Hull was wronged, and Hussey’s conduct in the ‘troubling of this poor man’ amounted to little more than harassment.