The Temptation of Elizabeth Tudor (33 page)

Naturally enough, Elizabeth summoned Parry to speak with her when she heard that he had returned. He had news concerning her suit on behalf of Edmund Allen, but he reiterated that her hopes for Durham Place were impossible – it would certainly become a mint.
22
Elizabeth already knew this from Parry’s letter, and was also aware of Seymour’s offer of his London residence. The cofferer watched his mistress closely as he spoke, since he had a question to ask and was not at all sure of what the answer would be. To the Welsh gentleman, the princess seemed to take Seymour’s offer ‘very gladly, and to accept it very joyfully and thankfully towards him’.

Parry decided to be brave, and he suddenly pressed the princess, asking ‘whether that if the Council would consent that My Lord Admiral should have her, whether she would be content therewith, all or no’. Elizabeth’s and Parry’s accounts of her response to this impertinent question later differed. The princess claimed that she was abashed by this questioning and refused to be drawn, declaring that ‘she would not tell what her mind was therein’. Instead, she demanded what he meant or who had bidden him ask that question. Parry insisted that no one had asked him to speak of the matter, but it was something that he had gathered, through Seymour’s questioning about her lands and household charges.
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Elizabeth retorted sharply, with an acid tongue: ‘It was but his foolish gathering.’
24

Elizabeth’s servant, though, recalled none of this. His mistress, he later claimed, merely answered: ‘When that comes to pass, I will do as God shall put in my mind.’ This encouraged him to probe deeper. He told her that Seymour considered that she should seek her letters patent to her lands, and Elizabeth asked ‘whether he was so desirous or no in deed’. Parry nodded. The Admiral had indeed been earnest in his desires, as well as seeking the exchange of some of her lands to better complement his. Intrigued, Elizabeth asked what Parry ‘though he meant thereby’. ‘I could not tell, unless he go about to have you also,’ said the cofferer. To Parry’s surprise, Elizabeth suddenly appeared angry declaring that she would do nothing of the sort. Later though, she came to her cofferer again and asked him whether he had told Kate of Seymour’s ‘gentleness and kind offers’. He replied, untruthfully, that he had not. His mistress replied: ‘Well in any wise, go tell it for I will know nothing but she shall know it.’ She was silent for a moment, before insisting that ‘in faith I cannot be quiet, until ye have told her of it’.

Parry’s account, which is the more detailed, seems to ring true. The princess was known in the household for the easy manner with which she talked to servants, and she was fond of Parry.
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By December 1548, Elizabeth was well aware of Seymour’s interest and displayed every indication that she reciprocated it.

Elizabeth, Kate and Parry always insisted, later, that they only contemplated the marriage in the event of the Council consenting to it. But no one can seriously have believed that Somerset would permit such a marriage. Seymour had taken a royal bride once before without official consent, so he might well take the same course again, by going over the Council’s head. In December 1548, Thomas still had easy access to King Edward through John Fowler and John Cheke. To marry Elizabeth in secret, as he had done with Catherine, would have been a risk, but a calculated one since the boy-king loved his younger uncle and his ‘sweet sister temperance’. Moreover, Edward had little love for the Protector.

Seymour agreed with the boy’s sentiments. Before Christmas, Thomas invited the Marquess of Dorset to walk with him, again in his favoured spot for intrigues in the gallery at Seymour Place. He was as loquacious as usual, telling his ally that ‘he in no wise liked the doings of My Lord Protector and Council’.
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He continued that ‘he loved not the Lord Protector, and would have the king have the honour of his own things, for of his years he is wise and well learned’. Confidently, he asserted: ‘Let me alone; ye shall see I will bring it to pass within these three years.’ Dorset wondered what, precisely, he was planning.

He was not the only one. The authorities were also starting to look more closely at Thomas’s activities. He had already begun to fortify Holt Castle, which stood at an important crossing point on the River Dee, giving it control of access to South Wales.
27
This was ominous in itself, but that Christmas word also reached the Council that Seymour’s deputy steward and other officers had been instructed to begin provisioning the castle with wheat, malt, beef and ‘other such things as be necessary for the sustenance of a great number of men’.
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They could, though, have been mistaken.
*2
The provisions might have been sent to Bewdley, in Worcestershire, where Thomas was intending to spend the summer of 1549 in princely splendour.
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Although 70 miles from Holt, Bewdley was far to the north-west of London and strategically unimportant. But it was not a massive leap for the government to imagine that the provisions were actually meant for the fortress and that it was there that Thomas intended to keep his army. Perhaps they were right. Seymour was indeed planning to raise men to fight on his behalf.

By December 1548, Thomas has amassed a good sum of counterfeit coins with which to pay his men. He could also see that Sir William Sharington, who had returned to London in Christmas week from a visit to Canterbury, was deeply troubled.
30
Sharington went straight to Seymour to tell him that ‘I could not continue my doings in the mint’, although he had – he thought – successfully covered his tracks in the record books there. But for the nervous Sharington, the omens were not good and fate did not seem to look favourably on counterfeiters that cold winter. He would have heard that on the evening of 21 November, part of the Tower of London had exploded when a light was dropped into a vessel of gunpowder. In the confusion of falling masonry, one prisoner, a Frenchman, was killed when a slab of stone fell onto his bed as he slept.
31
He was a coiner, imprisoned for counterfeiting testoons.
*3

Sharington had become an unreliable ally, and his unease helped focus Thomas’s mind towards action. Elizabeth, on the other hand, had been frightened into inaction. When she asked for Sir Anthony Denny’s advice regarding Thomas’s offer of Seymour Place, he warned her not to accept. She heeded his warning, taking to her sickbed once again at Hatfield over Christmas.
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She did not even rouse herself enough to arrange a New Year’s gift for the king, instead writing to apologize for the lapse on 2 January.

The atmosphere at Hatfield was tense that Christmas. On Twelfth Night Parry came to Kate’s chamber, and the pair sat companionably together in rooms warmed by fires and lit by candles. A few weeks before, Elizabeth had told Parry to inform Kate of all Seymour had said, and he did so, telling his fellow servant that ‘it seemed to me, that there is good will between the Lord Admiral and Her Grace; I gather it both by him and Her Grace also’. ‘Oh!’ exclaimed Kate, ‘it is true, but I had such a charge in this, that I dare nothing say it, but I would wish her his wife of all men living.’ She said that she dared not speak of it further, ‘till I see him’, before outlining the earlier history between the princess and Seymour. Secrecy was vital, she said, as she asked Parry to pass on her goodwill to Seymour. He would, he said, before reassuring her that he would ‘rather be pulled with horses’ than betray Elizabeth and her suitor.

Thomas Parry returned to London as soon as the days of Christmas were over, going straight to Seymour, whom he found staying at the court at Westminster. He was again there a week later, speaking privately with the Lord Admiral for a long time.
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It was evening and black as pitch in the streets outside. Elizabeth’s cofferer found his host tense and alert.
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Thomas immediately asked Parry: ‘How doth Her Grace?’, to which the cofferer answered: ‘Well.’ He then asked when Elizabeth would be in London, and Parry replied that the Protector had still not given her a date. Thomas nodded: ‘No, that shall be when I am gone to Boulogne’, recognizing that his brother had no desire for the pair to meet.

To lighten the mood, Parry sent Mistress Ashley’s commendations. ‘Oh,’ said Thomas, ‘I know she is my friend.’ Parry spoke a few more words, before adding bravely: ‘Sir, she would Her Grace were your wife of any man’s living.’ Thomas shook his head. ‘Oh, it will not be. My brother will never agree unto it.’ He muttered – and Parry strained to hear – ‘I am kept back or under.’ Seymour seemed furious, but the cofferer did not really understand what he said. It was 13 January 1549, or possibly the following evening, and Parry was alarmed at the change in the Admiral, who dismissed him abruptly, saying only: ‘I pray you let me know when she comes up, and come another time.’

Leaving Seymour Place, Parry worried that Thomas Seymour was ‘in some heat, or very busy, or had some mistrust in me’. He never saw him again.

*1
Wightman suggested, in his confession (No. 2, in S. Haynes, p. 68) that Parry’s first visit was three weeks before Christmas, but Parry was more specific, giving 11 December as the date (‘Parry’s Communication with the Lord Admiral,’ in ibid., p. 98). Since the visit was a more significant one for Parry, his date seems more likely.

*2
Although the charge would later appear in the draft articles against Seymour, it was not in the final version.

*3
Fire was an unfortunately common occurrence in winter, where light and warmth both required naked flames. Only the Friday before, at 11 o’clock at night, St Anne’s church in nearby Aldersgate Street had also burned (Wriothesley, p. 6).

On 6 January 1549, three of the Lord Protector’s servants gathered together at Bristol Castle to compose a letter. They had arrived in the city some hours earlier, having first called at Lacock Abbey, home of Sir William Sharington.
1
There, in the presence of Lady Sharington, they had collected all the writings, money, plate and jewels that they could find. Sharington’s wife stood mute as the items were sealed into chests and placed in the custody of four men who remained at the house to ensure that no word leaked back to London of what had happened.

The three agents – masters Chamberlain, Berwick and Fisher – then rode hard for Bristol. They entered the mint, calling the officers there before them and examining them in turn. They were disappointed to learn that only the Wednesday before, James Paget, a teller at the mint, had arrived from London and hurried away with all of Sharington’s papers, stopping at Lacock on his way home. To avoid suspicion, the Protector’s men ordered that work should continue as usual at the mint, while they planned their pursuit of the elusive Paget, whom they believed ‘knoweth much’ (and who was probably a relative of Lady Sharington).
2
The government was already reading Sharington’s correspondence.
3
Within days, the coiner was taken in for examination.

Seymour had been oblivious to the events in Bristol. On the day the mint was searched, he was visiting the king’s apartments at Westminster, where he helped himself to both bread and wine from the cupboard, while talking jovially to the king’s attendants celebrating the New Year.
4
Thomas was again at court the night that Sharington was apprehended. He was disturbed by John Fowler bursting into his chamber in a state of alarm and crying: ‘Alas, what have Mr Sharington done?’
5
Seymour calmly replied: ‘By my troth I hear no great matter as yet laid to his charge.’ It was nothing, he assured the agitated gentleman. ‘Marry, there is one accuses him for coining of testoons since the commandment given by the Council, but he denies it.’ Feigning innocence, Thomas added that ‘if Sharington be a false man, I will never trust man for his sake’. According to the Lord Admiral, the arrest was an attack on him by the Council – nothing more.

Fowler, in the dusky light of the chamber, was not mollified. He had had some dealings with Sharington himself and was terrified. ‘My Lord,’ he said, ‘remember about a twelvemonth ago you willed me as I lacked any money for the King’s Majesty I should send in your absence to Mr Sharington?’ Well, continued Fowler, he had done just that, writing to him for £20 when Seymour had been out of town. Cursing his foolishness for putting this in writing, he bemoaned the fact that ‘if that letter be found I am utterly undone’. He felt he had to confess to the Protector, before his name was mentioned.

This roused Thomas somewhat, who sought to reassure his skittish companion. ‘Doubt you not, he would not keep your letter.’ Fowler had not thought of that, yet he was still deeply concerned and leaning towards a confession. ‘Well,’ said Seymour, he should say that the money was given to the king. ‘But, what is that to me?’ retorted Fowler. Thomas shrugged: he would just have to devise some answer if he were questioned on it. By that point, the king’s attendant was very nearly hysterical, begging the Admiral: ‘I pray you devise to save me.’ Thomas nodded. He would protect him if the worst happened, promising, as his visitor left, that he would always use him gently.