The Temptation of Elizabeth Tudor (30 page)

Deciding against the capital, Elizabeth consulted Sir Anthony Denny in her choice of residence. He suggested Hatfield, in Hertfordshire, which had been under his charge since 1542. He could assure her that it was comfortable, having overseen extensive repairs only the previous year, when the chamber of presence and other rooms were updated.
7
It was also only a short ride of 10 miles from Cheshunt, while also close enough to visit London with ease.

Elizabeth had first stayed at Hatfield when she was only a few months old. She was fond of the place and knew it well, enjoying reading in the park even in winter and exploring its labyrinthine rooms. The house, once home to the Bishop of Ely, was built in russet-coloured brick towards the end of the previous century.
8
It was a contradiction: modern in its construction materials, but retaining much of the medieval gothic so familiar to the princess in the churches and chapels in which she worshipped.
9

While Elizabeth was asking Denny’s advice, Thomas was ensuring that he was kept informed of the princess’s movements. He sent at least one servant, a man named Edward, to attend on the princess for the move. Kate Ashley made a point of speaking to him as the horses were being saddled and the last of Elizabeth’s possessions were loaded onto wagons: she later recalled that he had told her of the Lord Admiral being heavy in his grief for the queen.
10
Also arriving to escort the princess on the journey was young John Seymour, the Protector’s eldest son by his first marriage. He pulled Kate aside, saying that he had been sent by his uncle to enquire of Elizabeth ‘whether her great buttocks were grown any less or no?’ Kate’s response is unrecorded.

By autumn 1548, Thomas Seymour’s finances had become hopelessly entwined with William Sharington’s. In the summer, the coiner had lent £2,000 to Sir William Herbert, which was likely to have been at Thomas’s urging.
11
This was not the only debt owed to Sharington, who kept the names of his debtors safe in a bill of remembrance; it even included the Protector himself, who had tapped Sharington for a loan of £500. In return, Sharington owed £300 to Seymour, but the bulk of the debt flowed the other way, with Thomas owing him around £2,800 for the counterfeit coins and for the building work that the tasteful Sharington had undertaken on his behalf. Such a sum was enormous and – if it had been known – would have drawn government attention to the Bristol mint.

Sharington was a man bowed low under the pressure of his wrongdoing, living every month in fear that he would be undone ‘by so often melting of the money’ for his own financial gain.
12
He had cause to worry, since even a cursory glance at his finances suggested fraud. By his own reckoning, the amount he had spent on his house at Lacock had outstripped his income every year for the last three.
13
He was a man of relatively modest means, with an annual income of approximately £630.
14
On top of that, he maintained houses in Bristol and London and was deeply in debt, owing £3,000 to the king. Every moment he feared detection, aware that his early attempts at coining – before he had perfected the art – were so ‘evil made’ that discovery was inevitable. At least he had the vast sum of £4,000 squirrelled away, ready to finance his escape or to bribe the relevant parties when the inevitable happened.

Sharington’s mint was vital to Thomas’s plans, so his friend’s increasing instability was a worry. The pair agreed that, in order to cloak matters, they should turn the debt around. Instead of acknowledging Thomas as the debtor, Sharington agreed to pretend that he had borrowed the £2,800. Seymour then approached both his brother and the Council to swear that it was the gentleman who owed him the money.
15
This took the heat off them for the moment; but Sharington still knew he was a man living on borrowed time.

Money matters were also becoming a concern for Elizabeth in her new environment. At Hatfield, for the first time in her life, she was mistress of her own household, numbering around 120 to 140 people, all there to serve her.
16
She was well aware of her status as a king’s daughter and ensured that she lived like royalty. When she dined, she was served in a ‘prince-like’ way, with a respectful hush over the room as she ate in the company of her ladies and the gentlemen of her household.
17
Roger Ascham, for one, considered that she rivalled her continental counterparts, since her household was so ‘honourably handled’. Such display was not achieved cheaply. After only a few weeks of independence, her accounts were in a mess thanks largely to her comptroller, who, it was discovered, ‘had little understanding to execute his office’.
18
Her outgoings far exceeded her generous income, and she was soon looking to make even small savings from her wage bill.

The household was also far from harmonious, with Roger Ascham failing to prove as popular as William Grindal had been. He continued to work daily with Elizabeth at her studies and was friendly with both the princess and Kate Ashley.
19
However, he would later complain that even before the move to Hatfield he had suffered a ‘bitter injury’, ‘out of a relationship from which I should fairly have expected the sweet fruit from my labours’.
*2
For him, it was to be a long two years with Elizabeth before he could finally be ‘released’.
20

In her own household, Elizabeth was beginning to show her promise as an adult princess, displaying ‘beauty, stature, prudence, and industry’.
21
She was dignified among her servants and gentle towards them too, as well as continuing to engage with her study of the reformed religion. However, Ascham, increasingly disaffected, suggested that she was not always scrupulously fair, telling his friend, the theologian Martin Bucer, that ‘I am fortified, my dear Bucer, by my own conscience, as regards all I said or did when I was at her court, and, if shame did not restrain me, I would tell you what advantages my illustrious mistress got from me.’ He could only hope that ‘the current of my illustrious mistress’s favour again sets in towards me’. Later it did – she made him her private secretary, though that was nearly a decade after he left her household under a cloud in 1550.
22
Despite their difficulties, the two would eventually build up a lasting friendship and rapport, which would extend until Ascham’s death.
23

For the most part, Elizabeth continued to confide in Kate, who remained her closest attendant. In 1548, the princess was second in line to the throne, after Mary who, it seemed, would probably remain unmarried. Edward, though, was young and healthy, his marriage already being considered by his Council. Elizabeth’s most likely future was not as a monarch but as a great lady, married either to a foreign husband, for reasons of international diplomacy, or to a great nobleman at home. But the idea of marrying a man that she had never seen always filled her with horror. And why should she not please herself? Elizabeth liked attractive men, and she liked Thomas Seymour – and could see that she was becoming part of his plans. All indications suggest that she was considering tying the ‘knot that cannot be untied’ with him.
24
Besides, as the king’s uncle, he seemed a very suitable match for Edward’s half-sister.

Kate Ashley certainly thought so. Towards the end of October, with the household newly established at Hatfield, she begged leave to go to London.
25
Surprised by the request, the princess demanded to know what her business was, and Kate replied that it was to speak with Thomas. On hearing this, Elizabeth shook her head: Kate should not go, since ‘it would be said that she did send her’. Mistress Ashley, however, insisted, pointing out that she also wanted to speak to the gatekeeper at Durham Place, a house that had been granted to Elizabeth as her London residence but of which, as yet, she had not secured control.

Kate must have indeed made the trip, because while in the capital she was called to court, to answer to the Duke and Duchess of Somerset personally for Seymour and Elizabeth’s relationship, which had begun to be talked about in London. The duchess took it upon herself to berate Kate, telling her that ‘another should have her place, fearing that she bare too much affection to My Lord Admiral’.
26
It was an astute observation, for it was indeed Kate who provided much of the momentum for Elizabeth’s contact with Seymour. The duchess had also heard that when Elizabeth had been at Seymour Place earlier in the year, she had been seen, at night, going in a barge on the Thames as well as in ‘other light parts’. Since a Christian princess was supposed to avoid any such acts of levity and stay home, unless chaperoned, such behaviour was reprehensible.
27
Even dancing was meant to be avoided by a virtuous young maiden, as it was held to be ‘uncontrolled, audacious, arousing the passions, full of unchaste touches and kisses’ – at least, in the eyes of the author of
The Education of a Christian Woman
.
28
The Duchess of Somerset told Kate that she ‘found great faults with her’ and her conduct towards her charge,
29
and that she regarded Kate as unworthy of the governance of a king’s daughter. She was largely correct in her criticism of the dangerously lax Kate Ashley; but her tirade had little effect other than to further propel Elizabeth’s lady mistress towards Seymour. When she returned home defiant, Kate pulled Thomas Parry aside to tell him what had happened before loudly praising the Admiral.

The princess still looked upon Thomas to fulfil something of a parental role, writing to him in November to ask him to show favour to her chaplain – a moderate evangelical named Edmund Allen.
30
At the end of the letter, Elizabeth asked him to ‘credit her trusty servant, her cofferer [Thomas Parry], in all other things’. She would later insist that she had only meant by this that they were to discuss how she should go about claiming Durham Place from the Protector, but the phrase could be interpreted as having a much wider meaning. Parry himself wrote the letter, although Elizabeth saw it, and he set out to deliver it personally to Thomas in London. He needed to go to London anyway, for he had found the time to secure his election to Parliament as representative for Wallingford, and his presence was now required in the Commons
31
– as Seymour’s was needed in the House of Lords.

When Seymour arrived in London in November 1548 to attend Parliament, the Marquess of Northampton came to visit him, the pair walking in the gallery at Seymour Place. Thomas was certain of his disenchanted brother-in-law’s loyalty and gloated of his recent success. ‘There would be much ado for My Lady Jane, the Lord Marquess Dorset’s daughter,’ he said, since the Somersets were already doing all they could to obtain her for their son.
32
Seymour was bullish though, declaring that ‘they should not prevail therein’ because Dorset ‘had given her wholly to him, upon certain covenants that were between them two’. Northampton – a divorcé – knew enough of the complications of matrimony to sound a note of caution. ‘What would he do,’ he asked, ‘if My Lord Protector handling My Lord Marquess Dorset gently, should obtain his good will, and so the matter to lie wholly in his own neck?’ Seymour merely said that ‘he would never consent thereunto’. He was adamant that his consent was needed.

Not long afterwards, Seymour casually mentioned to Northampton that ‘he had heard of a wonderful thing’. He told Catherine’s brother that he had been credibly informed that the Protector had said that he would ‘clap him in the Tower, if he went to My Lady Elizabeth’. Northampton told him he thought it only a vain rumour, but in case it was not he urged Seymour to speak plainly to Somerset ‘and to break the matter in such sort to him, as he might put all suspicion out of My Lord Protector’s head, if any there were, touching My Lady Elizabeth and him’.
33
Seymour – lying – swore that ‘there was no woman living, that he went about to marry’. Nonetheless, he told Northampton that he intended to ride shortly for Sudeley, but beforehand he would ask Somerset whether there was anything he wished to say or bring to Elizabeth, since he intended to visit her at Hatfield on his way. That way, he told Northampton, he would get a feel for Somerset’s feelings towards him. Clearly, Elizabeth was much on his mind that November.