The Temptation of Elizabeth Tudor (24 page)

Catherine had not seen Princess Mary for more than a year by the time she arrived at Sudeley. She had made overtures of friendship before, but was aware that the wound caused by her seemingly hasty marriage to Seymour was still open.
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Already in her late thirties, Catherine feared the risks of her confinement and she knew that there was a chance that she would not survive the birth. She therefore reached out again to Mary that summer in letters. To her satisfaction, the princess, who missed Catherine, happily replied, indicating that she was once again Catherine’s ‘humble and assured loving daughter’.
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Longing to be a mother herself, Mary was pleased for her stepmother and wrote, trusting ‘to hear good success of Your Grace’s great belly’.
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She was relieved, she said, ‘to hear of your health, which I pray almighty God to continue and increase to His pleasure, as much as your own heart can desire’. As well as agreeing to act as godmother for the expected baby, Mary went so far as to ask Catherine ‘to take the pain to make my commendations to My Lord Admiral’. Letters such as this were joyful to Catherine, but they must also have helped to bring home the fact that she was separated from Elizabeth – to whom she had more fully been a mother.

Elizabeth was still on her sickbed at Cheshunt when she plucked up the courage to write to her stepmother. She agonized over doing so, aware of the damage that had been done to the relationship and that Catherine, who was both unwell and emotional, was ‘not quiet to read’.
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Nevertheless, she hoped to salvage the relationship, as she had done when she had previously been left behind at Hanworth in the autumn of 1547. She was grateful for the queen’s efforts to preserve her reputation in not publishing the reason for her departure, even if the rumours still circulated. The girl sounded truly remorseful in her letter: ‘what may I more say than thank God for providing such friends to me, desiring God to enrich me with their long life, and me grace to be in heart no less thankful to receive it than I now am glad in writing to show it’. It was a tentative letter. She must have worried about just how it would be received.

Catherine did not herself respond to the letter. In early July, however, Elizabeth received an unexpected missive from Seymour, who apologized for not corresponding sooner.
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She was polite – even friendly – in her reply, declaring that he ‘needed not to send an excuse to me’ and confirming that she recognized his ‘goodwill’ towards her. She could not consider him unkind, she said, assuring him ‘for I am a friend not won with trifles, nor lost with the like’. Although she assured Thomas of her continuing goodwill, it was Catherine who was on her mind. Could he please humbly commend her to his wife, to whom she had not yet dared to write again? She was, she promised him, his ‘assured friend to my little power’.

The correspondence between the women was most likely a test, Elizabeth’s conventional – and appropriate – response a key to Catherine admitting her once again as a daughter. The queen wanted to heal the rift before her confinement. This letter opened the floodgates to the affection between stepmother and daughter, with Catherine writing several letters to Elizabeth over the following weeks. The princess was ecstatic, admitting that each missive was ‘most joyful to me in absence yet, considering what pain it is to you to write, Your Grace being so great with child, and so sickly, your commendation were enough in My Lord’s letter’.
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In spite of their rapprochement, there was still much that remained unsaid as messengers hurried between Sudeley and Cheshunt. Catherine kept her letters to safe subjects, writing of her health and her new-found love of the countryside around Sudeley. She also missed the teenage girl deeply, speaking of her longing to have her with her again, although she did not dare to send for her. Reassured and gratified, Elizabeth informed Catherine that she would never leave her company voluntarily, even should residence at Sudeley begin to feel stale to her (something Catherine had feared might happen, had Elizabeth stayed in the household). Elizabeth wished she could be there to assist the queen during her impending confinement. When the queen wrote proudly of the child’s somersaults in the womb, Elizabeth replied that if she could only attend ‘his’ birth she would ‘see him beaten, for the trouble he hath put you to’.

The tone of the correspondence was jovial and affectionate. Elizabeth became so certain of Catherine’s forgiveness that she even dared mention Kate Ashley, to whom the queen ascribed the lion’s share of the blame for the preceding events. Both Elizabeth’s lady mistress and the Dennys sent their prayers for ‘a most lucky deliverance’, she assured her stepmother. Basking in Catherine’s forgiveness, Elizabeth almost forgot Seymour, asking only that he keep her informed ‘from time to time’ of ‘how his busy child doth’ when the queen was unable to write. She might have found Thomas both fascinating and attractive, but it was her stepmother who provided the emotional warmth on which she thrived. Catherine’s ‘humble daughter’ looked hopefully towards a return to the maternal fold once the birth was safely out of the way.

Catherine still had one other royal stepchild left with whom she longed for direct contact, as did Thomas. Although now far from Hampton Court, Thomas retained a strong influence with young Edward, thanks to the good offices of John Fowler. Seymour kept the flow of money steadily trickling towards the gentleman, who repaid him by regularly nagging the king to thank Seymour for the gentleness that he showed him and ‘for his money’.
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Fowler was always praising the Admiral in the boy’s presence.

Thomas wrote to Fowler on 15 July 1548, soliciting a letter from Edward for the queen.
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Fowler showed Seymour’s letter to Edward, who felt sufficiently guilty for his lack of contact with his ‘dear mother’ that he purloined a tiny scrap of paper and scribbled a note to his uncle, declaring: ‘My Lord thank you and pray you to have me recommended to the queen’, before dating it from Hampton Court on 18 July and signing it ‘Edward’.
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His motives were, perhaps, not solely affectionate, since he had come to rely on his uncle’s largesse to make the financial gifts expected of a king to his servants. On another scrap the young king also scribbled: ‘My Lord send me for Latimer
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as much as ye think good and deliver it to Fowler. Edward’.
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Cursory these may have been, but since Somerset closely monitored both Edward’s visitors and his access to pen and paper, these two scraps were a considerable victory. The boy spent so little time alone that, although he protested he would like to write more fully to the queen, he never had even half an hour to himself. And Catherine was certainly not on his approved list of correspondents.

John Fowler kept Edward’s notes hidden away overnight, before writing a more fulsome letter to his patron the next day, proudly enclosing the two ‘small lines of recommendation’ written with the king’s ‘own hand’. There was little else for him to report in a court that had largely closed for business in the summer heat and plague-affected city. There were some concerns over the campaign in Scotland, but this was of little import to Thomas, immersed in domesticity at Sudeley.

At the same time, Fowler passed on the news that the Duchess of Somerset ‘is brought to bed of a goodly boy’ and, diplomatically, trusted ‘in Almighty God the Queen’s Grace shall have another’. It was a testament to the frosty relationship between the Seymour brothers that no official announcement was made to Thomas of his nephew’s birth. Somerset took the opportunity of his brother’s absence to try to break into his network of connections. He promised the mercenary Fowler that he could have his choice of the keepership of various Sussex parks. The atmosphere at court was hostile enough towards the Admiral that Fowler implored Thomas to keep his letter secret, to ensure that it ‘shall tell no more tales after your reading; for now I write at length to Your Lordship, because I am promised of a trusty messenger’. Their dealings were furtive that summer, as Thomas attempted from Sudeley to keep his hold on the young king’s affections.

Both Catherine and Seymour were pleased with Edward’s notes, taking the time to discuss the boy, whose growth into manhood they both looked forward to. As at Hanworth, the queen walked in the gardens each day in an attempt to keep her weight down and her body healthy. In summer’s bloom, the grounds were lush. Catherine could wander out to the little chapel, some distance from the castle, or walk along the gravelled paths or dew-wet grass.

One day, Catherine was strolling with her kinsman Sir Robert Tyrwhitt in the park. He was one of her highest-ranking officers, who ensured the smooth running of her household and payments to her servants, and whom she could trust with her money.
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She was fond of the dour household officer and his wife, both of whom shared her reformist religious beliefs. That day, as they ambled through the grass, she spoke plainly with him, criticizing the Protector’s habit of granting away Crown lands to his supporters. When the king comes of age, she said, she was certain that ‘he will call his lands again, as fast as they be now given from him’.
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Tyrwhitt, who had the castle in view as he walked, raised an eyebrow to this. Surely, he commented, Sudeley would also be taken back from Thomas? Catherine and her husband had already discussed such a possibility, and now she laughed: ‘marry, I do assure you, he intends to offer them to the king, and give them freely to him at that time’. Since they were busily (and expensively) trying to establish the fine building as their baronial seat, such a willing gift to the king was unlikely. But they probably hoped that making the gesture would be enough to ensure continuing royal favour should Somerset’s regime begin to unravel. Thomas had been granted several properties from the king’s lands and he cannot truly have desired to return them when the boy reached eighteen.

Supporting Catherine’s royal household took significant amounts of money, as did the regular bribes to the king and his servants, so Thomas expected his manors to earn their keep. He was, accordingly, interested in the smooth running of his estates. There were deer to be driven in the parks and livestock to be sold. His sheep were diligently stamped with the letter ‘S’ as a demonstration of his ownership.
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Seymour was enterprising, employing twenty-three men on one Sussex manor to keep his furnaces going to cast raw iron, before sending it to London to fetch a good price.
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He had great money-making schemes. In 1547 he had already pushed his friend Sharington into Parliament, for Sussex, to assist in his plan to build a town in the county, on forest land that had belonged to Sele Priory.
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Seymour handled the negotiations himself and also fixed upon the site – although the town, like so many of his plans, never came to fruition.

Thomas continued, however, to be involved in Sharington’s ambitions of a more criminal nature. By 1548, Sharington was dividing his time between Lacock, Sudeley – and Bristol, where he had the official position as Under-Treasurer of the Mint.
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Since the boy-king was officially the treasurer at Bristol, the under-treasurer effectively controlled the mint at Bristol, the only mint outside London authorized to strike gold as well as silver coins. Sharington did so in great numbers, much of his coinage destined to be shipped to Ireland to line purses there. These were the official issue; but he was determined to profit himself from his position.

In the spring of 1548, Sharington began minting testoons – silver shilling pieces – bearing his own initials ‘WS’ and the mark of the Bristol mint as well as a bust of Henry VIII. These small coins were worth three times as much as the more common groat. Sharington’s issue looked entirely official, but it was not. He had already received an official command from Sir Edmund Peckam, High Treasurer of the Mints in England, to cease production of the official issue of the coins, which were relatively new additions to the currency. Yet, Sharington needed the cash – as he later confessed – to have ‘more money in my hands’ to spend at the St James’s Day fair at Bristol.
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He wanted to buy silver at this two-week event, which began on 25 July and was the highlight of Bristol’s civic calendar. His testoons, minted in 1548, were therefore counterfeits.

Sharington was able to mint at least £300 worth of testoons after the order to cease production, without anyone in authority noticing, while at the same time he kept the mint busy with an official issue of groats for Ireland. Thomas Seymour was already well aware of Sharington’s activities in Bristol. Not long after the old king had died, he had sent a servant carrying £500 of silver groats to the coiner as a favour to his kinsman. As Thomas knew, Sharington required silver to melt down, and Sharington paid for it with £500 in other coin. The Admiral also promised to send him some of his own silver plate to melt down, intending to enter into a business relationship with Sharington.
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