The Temptation of Elizabeth Tudor (37 page)

Elizabeth presented a picture of confused innocence; but Tyrwhitt was annoyed. He could see there was more to tell. Interrupting her, he advised the princess to consider her honour and the trouble that she might find herself in, and charged her on her loyalty to the king. He tried a new tack, lamenting ‘what a woman Mistress Ashley was’. It would be a simple matter, he hinted, to lay the blame at the lady mistress’s feet. Elizabeth ignored this move and would say nothing of ‘any practice’ committed by Kate or Parry concerning Thomas Seymour. Tyrwhitt did not believe her. He wrote to the Protector later that day to say that ‘I do see it in her face that she is guilty’.
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However, he could also see that she would abide many storms before she would accuse the woman that she loved most in the world. The interview was over for the day, and Elizabeth returned to the disapproving custody of her acting lady mistress. The pressure was intense. Day and night, Elizabeth was never free of the watchful Tyrwhitts.

Sir Robert summoned the princess early the following day, requiring her to ‘deliberate’ on various matters.
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Although attempts to persuade her to blame her servants had so far not been successful, he continued to employ ‘gentle persuasions’ with her. As the day went on, he believed that he was growing ‘with her in credit’, and it seemed as though victory was near. She told him of her meeting with Parry in December, when he asked whether she would marry the Lord Admiral were the Council to allow it. Where Tyrwhitt thought he was getting truth, however, she was almost certainly lying. Elizabeth’s confession was considerably different to Parry’s, which was drawn from him in the darkness of the Tower of London. Tyrwhitt ended the day hopefully, considering it to be ‘a good beginning’, by which – as he wrote to Somerset – ‘I trust more will follow’.
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Tyrwhitt had a trick of his own to play. As he ended this interrogation, he informed Elizabeth that Kate was actually not, as yet, taken to the Tower and that she remained imprisoned in ‘Petty Calais’, an area of Westminster known for its wool dealers.
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At this news, Elizabeth rejoiced; but it was a lie intended only to entice her to speak. Perhaps if she confessed, she might save Kate from the horrors of the Tower? Tyrwhitt thought he now had the measure of the princess, explaining to Somerset that ‘she hath a very good wit, and nothing is gotten off her, but by great policy’.

Nevertheless, after two days of interrogating a fifteen-year-old girl, Sir Robert had actually achieved very little. Although still a minor, the princess was self-possessed in the extreme and highly conscious of her royal status. She had only recently taken possession of a throne, covered in cloth of gold and crimson velvet with a canopy above.
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Sitting in her father’s chair, she must have suddenly seemed a formidable opponent to her inquisitor.

On the following day, 24 January, Tyrwhitt received a letter from Somerset. This evidently repeated some of the rumours circulating about the princess, since (as Tyrwhitt claimed) he only showed it to her ‘with a great protestation’ that he would not for £1000 have the contents known. Both that day and the next, he tried to show her ‘great kindness’ in the hope that she would unburden herself to him. He failed in his goal, and on the evening of 25 January he complained bitterly to his master that ‘I cannot frame her to all points, as I would wish it to be’; she was just too elusive. He had got nowhere with the princess, and so he asked Somerset to send Lady Browne to Hatfield again, since ‘for the experience that I have of her, there is nobody may do more good to cause her to confess the truth than she’.

On receiving Tyrwhitt’s letter, Somerset was growing impatient. Elizabeth’s testimony was essential to his investigation. By 25 January, it had been over a week since Thomas had been committed to the Tower, and since then he had been largely ignored while the witness statements were gathered. He spent his time with his keeper, Christopher Ayer, but was cut off from the world outside. Finally, a deputation from the Council came to him on the 25th. Seymour, brought before them, had no interest in what they had to say; he appeared surly and unwilling to respond.
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He had no desire to cooperate with the erstwhile colleagues who had imprisoned him. It was only with difficulty that he finally agreed to give a few brief answers.

When asked ‘whether he hath communed with any person or persons, touching an alteration of the order of the person of the King’s Majesty, and of his Council’, Seymour answered that, as he desired ‘to be saved’, since the last Parliament he had spoken on such matters with no one save the Earl of Rutland, ‘upon occasion of talk of the King’s Majesty’s towardness, whom I said would be a man three years before any child living; and that I thought within two or three years, he would desire more liberty, and the honour of his own things’. He had, he said, told Rutland that should the king command him to make a ‘motion’ (i.e. raise the matter) to Somerset and the Council then he would do so.

As he was speaking, Seymour had no idea who else had been interrogated and what the government knew at that point. Shrewdly, he kept his answers only to what he believed Rutland could have told them; as Elizabeth had done, he was determined to keep his silence. In spite of this, he was hopeful that he could make amends with his brother. Thomas therefore confessed that he had thought his brother should be chief of the Council rather than Lord Protector; yet, he insisted, ‘if I meant any hurt to My Lord’s Grace my brother, more than I meant to my soul, then I desire neither life nor other favour at his hand’. He asked the lords to bring a message to his brother to that effect, promising always to be at his commandment. It was a start, but far from what the Protector required to justify his proceedings against his brother. Certainly, there was nothing there that amounted to a confession of treason.

Somerset was haunted by the idea of just how close Thomas had come to marrying Elizabeth. The security of the princess’s virginity became a prime concern. On 26 January, while he sat in the Lords, a bill was introduced to Parliament declaring that the marriage of the king’s sisters without the Council’s consent be considered treason. This was clearly aimed at Elizabeth; no one thought Princess Mary was in danger of eloping. On the same day, he wrote in frustration to Tyrwhitt, ordering him to continue to press the teenager to confess ‘by all means and policy’.
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Somerset also found himself frustrated in Parliament. The bill was not as well received as he had hoped, and although it struggled through to a second reading on 28 January, it proceeded no further.
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Bills required three readings and a vote in both Lords and Commons before royal assent was sought, and this bill was never going to pass. In addition, to his surprise, Somerset received a letter from his brother.

After his interrogation on 25 January, Thomas had spent a day alone in his room in the Tower. Although parts of the fortress included fine royal apartments and rich offices, for Thomas it was a prison, where conditions were basic. He must have feared that he would be left to languish there, forgotten. With the hours dragging by, he finally resolved to write to his brother and was provided with writing materials. Signing himself ‘Your Grace’s to command, and brother’,
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he mentioned his previous deposition, in which he now assured ‘Your Grace, on my faith, I wrote all that came to my remembrance’. However, he added that overnight he had recalled that he had once spoken to the king when he had walked with him in the gallery at Hampton Court. He commented that the boy ‘was grown to be a goodly gentleman, and trusted that within three or four years, he should be ruler of his own thing’, to which Edward had only said: ‘Nay.’ They had then, Seymour said, discussed other matters, while Thomas confessed himself unsure of whether or not he had told this to John Fowler. He assured his brother that his failure to mention this had been innocent, before ‘requiring Your Grace to be my good lord, and to remit my oversight, as Your Grace hath done to a number of other. But if I meant either hurt or displeasure to Your Grace, in this or any other thing that I have done, then punish me to extremity.’

Seymour had always been forgiven by his brother in the past, and it seemed possible – even likely – that the same would happen again now. He scrawled his letter over two sheets of parchment, the messy penmanship evidence of his unstable mental state.
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Yet, for Somerset, Thomas’s failure to confess all was infuriating. Elizabeth, too, was saying she had told all she could recall. In both cases, the Protector knew that they were lying.

While Somerset remained impotently furious at Elizabeth’s defiance, Sir Robert Tyrwhitt was nonplussed. He replied to the Protector’s letter of 26 January two days later on 28 January, after continuing daily interviews with the princess.
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To Tyrwhitt’s obvious frustration, Elizabeth continued steadfastly to deny that she knew anything more than she had already told him. She was growing angry – although she did appear ‘more pleasant’ to her interrogator when he showed her Somerset’s letter: she was wary of offending such a powerful man. Despite such pleasantries, Tyrwhitt did not believe a word that she told him. He had finally got the measure of her, telling Somerset plainly that ‘I do very believe that there hath been some secret promise, between My Lady, Mistress Ashley, and the cofferer, never to confess to death; and if it be so, it will never be gotten of her, but either by the King’s Majesty, or else by Your Grace’.

Tyrwhitt was admitting defeat in his battle with the self-possessed fifteen-year-old. He was forced to confine himself to the small triumph of noting some small household accounting irregularities, which he brought to the Protector’s attention with relish. There was, though, a hint that while Elizabeth would support Kate Ashley in everything, she might be prepared to abandon Parry. In discussing her household expenses, Tyrwhitt told Somerset that ‘if any make suit to you to be her cofferer, that Your Grace will stay it, till she speak with you; for it is thought a meaner officer will serve that room, and save in her purse £100 a year’. It seems Elizabeth could countenance Parry’s replacement in order to save herself and Kate.

Later on 28 January, Elizabeth, sensing Tyrwhitt’s failure, wrote herself to the Protector, in her fine italic hand. She was furious and wanted the pressure to end, but she wrote humbly, declaring: ‘My Lord, your great gentleness, and good will towards me, as well in this thing, as in other things, I do understand, for the which, even as I ought, so I do give you most humble thanks.’
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She acknowledged that the Protector ‘willeth and counselleth me, as an earnest friend’ to declare everything she knew to Tyrwhitt, and also to write it herself, and promised that she would do so.

She set out everything she had told Tyrwhitt, speaking of the letter concerning Edmund Allen and her suit for Durham Place, as well as Thomas’s offer of his own house. She mentioned some of Kate Ashley’s speeches, saying that she had said the Lord Admiral would come a-wooing. She insisted, however, that ‘I never consented unto any such thing, without the Council’s consent thereunto. And as for Kat Ashley or the cofferer, they never told me that they would practice it.’ She was the picture of innocence, insisting that this was all she knew, before calling on her conscience as her witness, ‘which I would not for all earthly things offend in anything; for I know I have a soul to save, as well as other folks have’. She laid it on thick, promising that ‘if there be any more things which I can remember, I will either write it myself, or cause Master Tyrwhitt to write it’.

As Elizabeth’s defiance continued, Tyrwhitt now tried a harsher approach. He informed her of rumours that he had heard in London, which the princess admitted to Somerset ‘be greatly both against my honour, and honesty’.
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It was whispered, Tyrwhitt told her, that she was already in the Tower and, scandalously, ‘with child by My Lord Admiral’. Seymour had not been seen in London for some days, and this title-tattle must have been spoken almost from the moment of his arrest, spreading like wildfire. Elizabeth was aghast and outraged at ‘these shameful slanders’. She would come to court, she said, so ‘that I may show myself there as I am’. Then people would see that she was not pregnant. But no invitation arrived from the Protector. She was almost as much a prisoner as Kate and Parry.