The Temptation of Elizabeth Tudor (31 page)

Northampton was but one among Thomas’s visitors at Seymour Place that month, as the Lords and Commons began to converge on the capital in their droves for the long-delayed resumption of Parliament. Conscious that it was his duty to do so, the Earl of Rutland called on Seymour, walking with him in the wintry gardens at Seymour Place. He, too, found the Lord Admiral in confident mood, discussing with him a patent that Lord Abergavenny had promised him. Such levity surprised the astute young earl, who was well aware of the talk surrounding Seymour. Ignoring his empty chatter, Rutland cut him short, warning him ‘to beware whom he trusted’. Thomas promised that ‘he would do so, as no man alive should accuse him’.
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But in reality Rutland’s warning fell on deaf ears.

On the day Parliament opened, William Sharington set out to take his seat, too, in the Commons.
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While walking, he met a man of his acquaintance named William Smethwick, who seemingly appeared out of nowhere. In a ‘friendly’ manner, Smethwick – also heading to Parliament – told Sharington not to come to Princess Elizabeth, although there is no hint that he had plans to visit Hatfield. To the master of the Bristol mint’s surprise, Smethwick then hurried away, leaving him alone in the street once more. Sharington suspected that Thomas Seymour, who knew Smethwick, had sent the message, but he could not understand why.
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He therefore decided to speak to him about this, but with the clamour of Parliamentary business he forgot for a week, until he happened to see Thomas passing his house one morning on the way to his barge.

Sharington hurried out to Thomas, and the pair walked together in Sharington’s garden for a few moments. Seymour was in a hurry, but he returned later that day, as promised, once his business on the Thames was done. They talked in the barren, winter-stripped grounds until supper, where Sharington informed him of Smethwick’s warning. Apparently feeling hurt, he told Seymour that he took it as a warning not to meddle in the matter of Elizabeth, declaring that he would indeed leave it alone. Seymour made light of it, declaring ‘that he had nothing to do there’. He asked: ‘Why should not the king’s daughter be married within the realm?’ Seymour did not explain why the coiner had been warned off. Perhaps even Thomas was growing anxious of Sharington’s visibility and his barely hidden criminality. Sharington would have done well to follow the advice of Smethwick, a man who was very good at keeping away from the unwelcome glare of the Protector’s suspicion.
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Finally, on 24 November, everyone was ready for the second Parliamentary session of Edward’s reign to assemble. The bishops, led by the bishops of London and Bath and Wells, and the peers, headed by Lord Chancellor Sir Richard Rich, arrived in the Upper House.
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Although Somerset did not attend on this first day, his younger brother was there. The business was dull; proxies for the absent peers were considered and decided upon, but then everyone returned home for two days of rest. Seymour probably wanted to be there to ensure that his nomination as one of the proxies to Lord De La Warr was passed, allowing him to cast an additional vote on the peer’s behalf.

The second session truly got under way on 27 November, when most of the peers were present, including the Lord Protector himself. On 29 November Seymour, who attended all that week, was appointed as Lord Zouche’s proxy alongside Lord Russell. He sat resolutely in his seat the next week, hearing such humdrum matters as the jointure for the marriage of Lady Margaret Long, and provision for the sale of cattle in Calais. The two Seymour brothers were rarely in the same room if they could help it, so when that happened it must have made for a tense assembly, the pair eyeing each other warily from either side of the hall. Thomas did nothing controversial, however, as his brother’s further religious changes, with which he was largely sympathetic, were pushed through. New Acts of Parliament allowed clerics to marry and introduced a mandatory Book of Common Prayer, in English, to be used across the kingdom. These measures were by no means universally popular – as time would tell.

During the days of 14–18 December, the Lords were dominated by ‘a notable disputation of the sacrament’, which caught even the boy-king’s attention.
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This great debate, in which the bishops considered the truth of transubstantiation in the Eucharist, was a triumph for Somerset, who presided, king-like, from his seat.
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He was one of only three laymen to intervene, magisterially commanding the bishops to come to some agreement as he opened the debate.
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His comments during the course of the often heated exchanges also made it clear exactly where his own beliefs lay. At one point the Protector dismissively interceded, saying ‘he took bread, &c. Take, eat, this is my body. Who can take this otherwise but there is bread still?’ The Earl of Warwick, who also spoke, was more forceful, heckling one bishop with whom he disagreed, asking ‘Where is your Scripture now, My Lord of Worcester?’ when the bishop had failed to prove his point. Thomas was present, but he sat in silence, as did many of the other peers – who slowly began to melt away in the final fortnight before Christmas. With absences beginning to increase, on 20 December Thomas also lost patience and declined to attend, along with the Marquess of Northampton. The following day, only six peers and two bishops arrived to adjourn the Parliament until January 1549.

The short Parliamentary sessions each day had allowed Seymour considerable free time, and he continued to work to bolster support, directing his interest squarely towards Elizabeth. It meant he also had time to receive Thomas Parry, the emissary carrying a letter from the princess, who eventually – around 11 December – gathered his nerves and made his way to Seymour Place.

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The Earl of Surrey, who was the last person to be executed on the orders of Henry VIII, described Elizabeth Fitzgerald as the ‘Fair Geraldine’ in his poem ‘The Geraldine’, written when she was only ten years old. She would eventually be married twice, first to Sir Anthony Browne in 1543, at the age of only sixteen, and when he was already in middle age and the father of eight children.

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A letter from Ascham to Lady Jane Grey (18 January 1551) makes clear that Jane knew of the troubles in the household, implying that they began at Hanworth early in 1548, when Jane and Elizabeth were both staying with Catherine.

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William Smethwick was, as Sharington’s account shows, associated with Seymour, yet he was able to avoid having his name further mentioned in the enquiries into Seymour’s conduct early in 1549. He also – unlike Sharington – escaped arrest. The worst that seems to have happened to him is that he failed to secure re-election to Parliament during Edward VI’s reign (History of Parliament, for William Smethwick).

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The debate being whether the bread and wine of the communion ceremony were literally transformed into the body and blood of Christ or rather, as the (Protestant) reformers held, were merely symbolic.

Thomas Parry, a man in his mid-thirties, was a thick-set, large-nosed Welshman from the majestic slopes of Breconshire. With a broad, friendly face,
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he gave off a bluff rural air; but Elizabeth’s cofferer preferred rich clothes and finery to country simplicity, even if they sat uneasily with his florid features.

His family home was the stunning, but isolated, Tretower Court, a fortified manor house with its own ruined castle in the grounds.
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In former times, the castle’s thick stone walls had kept back invaders or raiders intent on doing the family harm; but now sheep squeezed idly through gaps in the ruined masonry. Like Blanche Parry – who was no relation – he was really by name an ‘ap Harry’, in his case hailing from an illegitimate branch of the prominent and wealthy Vaughans. He had first arrived at court to serve Henry VIII’s great minister Thomas Cromwell, before drifting through various posts after his master’s execution in 1540. Parry was a relatively new addition to Elizabeth’s household in 1548; he was also keen to serve her well. She, in turn, liked and trusted him, as did Kate Ashley, whose passion for gossip and domestic intrigue he shared.

The idea of visiting the high and mighty Lord Admiral at Seymour Place daunted Parry. But he had to deliver Elizabeth’s letter. And so he finally plucked up the courage to make the short walk from Westminster over to Seymour Place on 11 December 1548.
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Parry’s resolution finally to convey Elizabeth’s words may have been encouraged by Kate herself, who arrived again in London around three or four weeks before Christmas.
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The princess had barely allowed Kate to make her previous London trip, and Kate knew that she would not get licence again without a good excuse. She therefore concocted a lie, telling Elizabeth that she was troubled by a sore arm and that she needed to be bled for it. The princess, concerned for Kate, readily gave her sympathetic blessing. Riding southwards with a servant, Mistress Ashley could reflect that her arm did indeed ache, though she could not in truth say that it was sore, even with the jolting of her horse along the well-worn road. It certainly required no treatment; but Kate had her own personal reasons for needing to visit the capital.

Kate’s husband, Sir John Astley, had also left Hatfield, to take up his seat in the House of Commons. He had had words for his wife, causing a ‘jar’, or quarrel, between them. Neither husband nor wife told anyone what it was about, but, given Sir John’s alarm at Seymour’s conduct in Catherine’s household, coupled with his growing suspicion of the Admiral’s intentions after the queen’s death, it might well have concerned Seymour. Kate later insisted on absolute secrecy with regard to her dealings with Seymour, lest her husband should hear of them. Sir John, packing up to ride south to London in November, could see clearly the danger his wife was in and was furious with her. When Kate wrote to him from Hatfield, he was so irate that he did not reply. Fearing for her marriage and knowing that ‘she could not be merry till she had spoken with him’, Kate concocted her story of the sore arm to get to London. She had already made arrangements to stay in the village of Hampstead, in the home of William Slanning, a West Country friend of her family.
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Kate did not intend to be in London long, though, and had little luggage to unpack, instead immediately sending a servant with a message to her husband. He was surprised, but rode at once to her, whereupon the pair reconciled and spent the night together. The next morning, Thomas Parry arrived in time for breakfast, and the three talked quietly together, before the men left for the Commons. They doubtless discussed Elizabeth’s message to Seymour, as yet undelivered.

Kate and Mistress Slanning also had plans for the morning. Taking horse, they rode to Fleet Street, to the house of Lady Berkeley, where Kate’s sister Lady Denny joined them. Probably deliberately, Kate had not packed clothes other than those she was wearing and a russet nightgown – which meant that she could not go to court to present Elizabeth’s token to the fearsome Duchess of Somerset. Instead, she conversed with the ladies before leaving for Hatfield at noon, only twenty-four hours after she had first arrived at the Slannings’ house.

Kate later insisted, defensively, that she had not spoken with either Seymour or any of his men during her visit. Yet Fleet Street was conveniently close to Seymour Place, and messages could have been passed. She had also received more visitors than just her husband during her afternoon at the Slannings’ house, including members of the West Country Carew family. Among them was Peter Carew, one of Thomas’s vice-admirals – who would have been able to take a message from Kate to Seymour, as indeed would Thomas Parry. Kate evidently managed to persuade her husband that she would have no more to do with Elizabeth’s marriage – and he regularly warned his wife ‘that he feared that suitors of My Lord Admiral would sure come to anguish or to an evil end’ and forbade her from meddling; but she could not help herself.
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The advice of her brother-in-law Sir Anthony Denny was also to warn her of Seymour’s obvious interest in the princess, and of Elizabeth’s in him.
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The danger seemed clear to everyone, except Kate and Parry, and Elizabeth and Thomas.