The Temptation of Elizabeth Tudor (38 page)

The interrogations at Hatfield continued without let up. On 31 January, Tyrwhitt informed Somerset that ‘I think nothing true’ in what the girl was saying, since she insisted that ‘this Ashley’ had not spoken to her seriously about marriage.
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Elizabeth’s loyalty to Kate had taken him by surprise. He had come to realize that ‘she will no more accuse Mistress Ashley than she will her own self’. Indeed, if anyone criticized Kate or appeared to ‘disapprove her doings’, the princess would defend her fiercely, but she would still confess nothing. As she started to demand to be allowed to see the king, Tyrwhitt became exasperated. It was not his fault, he pleaded to Somerset, since, ‘if Your Grace did know all my persuasions with her all manner of ways weighing her honour and safety to the country, Your Grace will not a little marvel that she will no more cough out matters than she doth’. He blamed Kate’s ‘ill’ influence, for ‘the love she hath to Ashley is to be marvelled at’. In Tyrwhitt’s opinion, they were looking in the wrong direction. If Kate would confess, then he was sure that he could make Elizabeth ‘cough out the full’.

While Elizabeth suffered under the mental strain of her interrogation, her lady mistress’s troubles were much more physical. Kate was kept in a dank chamber in the Tower, the floor covered in straw and the glassless window letting in the freezing January wind that gusted relentlessly.
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She spent her nights hunched up and sleepless as she tried to keep warm: she was still wearing only the thin russet-coloured nightdress in which she had left Hatfield. Scrabbling around in the cold to stuff the window with straw did little to ease her suffering, instead plunging the room into murky blackness during the sparse winter hours of daylight; though the gloom was preferable to the winter chill. Within days she had become a hunched, shivering creature to be pitied. She begged that if only her conditions were to become more palatable, then her memory, ‘which is never good when I am in best quiet’, might improve.

Thomas Parry, too, was suffering – and it was he, not Kate, who cracked first. On 2 February, Kate was hauled out of her cell and brought ‘face to face’ with Parry, whom she had not seen for nearly two weeks.
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The pitiable cofferer stood silently, as his two handwritten confessions were read out. He had broken his silence to speak of his meetings with Seymour and his conversations with the princess on his return to Hatfield.
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Parry went far beyond what the three had agreed to reveal, even recounting Kate’s tales of Elizabeth’s relations with Thomas before the queen’s death. As everything tumbled out, Kate turned to her fellow prisoner, almost daring him to deny the claims; but he ‘stood fast’ to all that he had recounted. Kate, burning with anger, shrieked ‘false wretch’ at him, furiously berating him for revealing what ‘he had promised he would never confess it to death’.
*3
Parry had acknowledged as much in his confession. The princess would later comment that it must have been ‘a great matter for him to promise such a promise and to break it’.
*4

Kate’s own resolve now faltered. She had held her tongue in the face of the cold and darkness in which she was kept, but she longed to be released. Later that day, she made her first declaration; others followed on 4 February.
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She spoke of everything she could recall, going right back to within weeks of the old king’s death. She unburdened herself about the morning romps at Chelsea, Hanworth and Seymour Place, and she spoke of the incident in the gardens at Hanworth, when Elizabeth’s dress was slashed. She spared few details, speaking of her own affection for Thomas and her desire that he should become the princess’s husband. Always, however, she insisted – as did Parry – that no marriage had been intended without first obtaining the Council’s consent. She hoped, unrealistically, that her depositions would see her released and reinstated with the princess. Although she would ‘look not’ for it, if she were to return to Elizabeth then ‘never would I speak nor wis [know] of marriage – no, not to win all the world’.
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While Kate Ashley only wanted to be back at Hatfield, Princess Elizabeth must have wished that she was almost anywhere else. On 4 February, Kate’s and Parry’s confessions were collected and hurried over to Elizabeth’s residence, along with another letter from Somerset to the princess. Tyrwhitt read through the documents jubilantly. On the following day, he summoned Elizabeth to him.
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She was stunned when her interrogator produced the depositions. At a glance, the girl recognized the handwriting of both her servants. The horror struck her that ‘they have both confessed all they know’.
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She appeared ‘much abashed, and half breathless’ as she read over the documents, struggling to get to the end of them. She had thought that her servants, who had taken an oath to serve her faithfully, would remain true.
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Yet, everything that she had tried to conceal was right there, inked in front of her. With her composure gone, Tyrwhitt allowed her to go. He promised his master, in a letter written the same day, that on the following day he would travail all he could ‘to frame her for her own surety, and to utter the truth’. Elizabeth had some urgent thinking to do.

The following day Tyrwhitt came to a seemingly chastened Elizabeth. Without offering further proofs, he persuaded her ‘with good advice’ to write to the Protector. She agreed, promising him that ‘she will call all things to her remembrance’ in her letter. Returning to her chamber, and with the disagreeable Lady Tyrwhitt still in absolute control of her daily circumstances, she must have been furious at her predicament. It is just possible that she took this fury out on Seymour in one of the only hints that she was ever displeased with his actions. Taking a copy of Catherine Parr’s
Psalms, or, Prayers
that had once belonged to her father, she turned to the words ‘certainly even from my beginning I have used myself proudly’.
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Beneath this, in her own hand and in Latin, the princess inscribed: ‘vanity of vanities, and the height of vanity. T. Seymour’, before adding an insignia of a superimposed ‘T’ and ‘R’ for Thomas Rex. For the moment, beset by her own troubles, she saw her suitor for what he really was: a fortune hunter.

Despite the weight of testimony, Elizabeth’s instinct remained to fight. In the safety of her own chamber, she wrote a short note to the Protector. She was full of indignation at the continuing interrogations as ‘I would not (as I trust you have not) so evil an opinion of me that I would conceal anything that I knew, for it were to no purpose’.
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If she failed to admit anything, it was not her fault, she argued, since ‘surely forgetfulness may well cause me to hide things, but undoubtedly else I will declare all that I know’.

Her tart letter badly misjudged the Protector’s sympathies, and the princess received a stern rebuke in return for her discourtesy towards Tyrwhitt and – as Elizabeth summarized it – for seeming ‘to stand in mine own wit in being so well assured of mine own self’.
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Somerset took her letters in ‘evil part’. He was outraged that she did not seem more contrite. She needed to use herself more humbly.

Elizabeth must have felt entirely alone, but she still stood firm. On 7 February she silently passed a confession – written in her own hand – to Tyrwhitt.
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It was a masterful document, accepting most of what had been revealed by her servants, but in no way incriminating herself. She began neatly, in her italic hand, before – writing more quickly – it became more of a scrawl.
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She remained self-possessed throughout, however, signing ‘Elizabeth’ with a looping flourish at the end.

After reading it, Tyrwhitt was crestfallen. He wrote ruefully to Somerset that it was ‘not so full of matter as I would it were, nor yet so much as I did procure her to do’. The most that she would admit to was that Kate had often counselled her on the marriage, but that it was dependent on achieving the Council’s consent.
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All Tyrwhitt could say, as he summed up the confession to Somerset, was that sadly ‘in no way, she will confess, that our Mistress Ashley, or Parry willed her to any practice with My Lord Admiral, either by message or writing’. Their confessions were embarrassing to Elizabeth – with their talk of tickles in bed and of the size of her buttocks – but they did not amount to treason.

Elizabeth might well have feared that her servants had yet more to reveal. To neuter this, she ended her own deposition with a note of finality. She would offer nothing more, for ‘these are the articles which I do remember, that both she and the cofferer talked with me of; and if there be any more behind which I have not declared as yet, I shall heartily desire your lordship and the rest of the Council, not to think that I do willingly conceal them, but that I have indeed forgotten them’.

Finally, it was Elizabeth who prevailed – her secrets remained concealed from the world and unacknowledged.

If Elizabeth feared what more Kate or Thomas might say, she at least need not have worried about revelations from the man who would have been her husband. During the early part of February, he seemed to his gaoler Ayer to be in reasonably good spirits. He was waiting for an answer to the letter to his brother. Several times he assured Ayer that he hoped to have his answer on Friday 13 February, since ‘on the Friday the Lords do not sit in the Parliament; and therefore then they will come, or send to me; if no, Saturday or Sunday; so that then I shall know somewhat of their minds towards me; if that day pass then I have no hope till Friday come again’.
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No reply came. On the Friday, Seymour seemed to Ayer ‘very sad’. The keeper, who kept his prisoner kindly enough, attempted to console him, saying that ‘he was very sorry to see his lordship so sad’. Thomas replied that he ‘thought as that day to have heard somewhat from My Lord’s Grace and the Council’, but now he ‘seeth the contrary’. Seymour was beginning to understand just how serious matters were. ‘I had thought before I came to this place that My Lord’s Grace, with all the rest of the Council, had been my friends, and that I had had as many friends, as any man within the realm; but now I think they have forgotten me.’

Pausing for a moment, Thomas mournfully asked Ayer the reason for his imprisonment. The gaoler, incredulous that he should ask this, replied that he could not tell him, before asking him: ‘Do not you know, My Lord?’ Seymour replied: ‘No by my troth, for I cannot judge myself of an evil thought, never since last Parliament.’ He continued asserting his innocence: ‘I am sure of this, that as concerning the king, there was never poor knave truer to his prince than I am, and to all his succession, both My Lady Mary and My Lady Elizabeth. And as for My Lord my brother, I never meant evil thought to him. Marry, this, before the last Parliament, I thought that I might have the King’s Majesty in my custody, with the consent of the Lords and Commons of the Parliament: and to say that ever I went about to take the king, from My Lord my brother by force, I never meant nor thought.’ Thomas appeared genuinely baffled.