The Temptation of Elizabeth Tudor (41 page)

Elizabeth’s reaction to the news of Seymour’s condemnation went unrecorded. But it can hardly have been a surprise. The attainder did serve to take some of the pressure off her, since the government was now no longer interested in collecting evidence against Seymour from the princess. Emboldened, on 7 March Elizabeth dared to write to Somerset in favour of the still imprisoned Kate Ashley.
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She had not done so before, she said, for fear that the Protector and Council ‘will think that I favour her evildoing’. It was a brave attempt. While she insisted that she did not ‘favour her in any evil (for that I would be sorry to do)’, she still felt duty-bound to speak for a woman ‘who hath been with me a long time and many years, and hath taken great labour and pain in bringing of me up in learning and honesty’.

She also sought to excuse her former lady mistress, arguing that although she had indeed meddled in the projected marriage with Thomas, ‘she did it because, knowing him to be one of the Council, she thought he would not go about any such thing without he had the Council’s consent thereunto. For I have heard her many times say that she would never have me marry in any place without Your Grace’s and the Council’s consent.’ Finally, she added for good measure that Kate’s release was necessary for her own reputation. If Kate continued in the Tower, people would think Elizabeth was ‘not clear of the deed’ herself. She could not bear to think of her beloved Kate ‘in such a place’, where her own mother had died. She hoped that Somerset would take her words ‘no other ways that it is meant’.

Elizabeth could not be sure of how the Protector – a man who had condemned his own brother – would react. While he had no interest in trying Kate Ashley, he also ignored Elizabeth’s letter. His mind was on other things. On 10 March, while sitting in the Council chamber, it was noted that he appeared world-weary, with the case so ‘heavy and lamentable’ to him.
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It was no small matter to order his brother’s execution, and the Protector quailed at it, both out of fraternal feeling and because of the damage that it would do to his own reputation. The Council offered to organize the execution itself, ‘without further troubling or molesting in this heavy case either his Highness or the Lord Protector’. Somerset did not, however, take them up on the offer, instead going with his fellows to the king after dinner. He sat down beside his nephew as the boy listened to Lord Rich confirm that the bill had passed. Edward did not hesitate to reply, saying that ‘he had well perceived their proceedings herein, and gave them his hearty thanks for their pains and travails’. At that, the Council left.

Thomas remained in the Tower throughout the proceedings in Parliament. On 15 March the Bishop of Ely, who had doubted that he was guilty of treason, came to him. On greeting Thomas, the bishop informed him that he had come to help him prepare for death and ‘to instruct him of such things as might appertain to the wealth of his soul and to the patient taking of his worthy execution’.
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But it was a cursory visit, in truth designed more to salve the souls of those who had condemned him, and the bishop soon left. Two days later, the Council, meeting at Westminster,
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called in the bishop, who informed them that he had been with Thomas to ‘instruct and comfort’ him as they had asked. On hearing that this was done, the Council tersely agreed a ‘time most convenient for the execution of the said Lord Admiral’. Between them, they settled on the next Wednesday – only three days away – and, as a body, they signed the warrant for Seymour’s execution. Somerset, who had professed himself so unwilling to be involved in the condemnation of his brother, was the first to set his pen to paper.

With that, all that remained for Thomas Seymour was to prepare himself for death. The bishop was once again sent to him to inform him of the arrangements. Could the bishop also, the Council asked, ‘teach him the best he could to the quiet and patient suffering of justice, and to prepare himself to Almighty God’? They hoped he would die quietly.

The prelate found a more resigned prisoner. For once, Seymour was willing to speak. He told the bishop that he would like Hugh Latimer, the radical Bishop of Worcester who had been a favourite of Catherine Parr, to minister to him on the day of his death.
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Suddenly hopeful, he then asked for a deferment of his execution; but the bishop could only shake his head. Resigned again, Thomas asked that some of his servants be permitted to attend his death, which would ensure that he was decently buried. The bishop informed him that it was agreed that ‘his body and head’ would be buried in the Tower chapel – a phrasing that can only have caused him to shudder. Thomas also thought of his baby daughter. Might she be sent to her mother’s dearest friend, the Duchess of Suffolk, ‘to be brought up’? With that, Seymour’s visitor left.

While Thomas’s fortunes reached their lowest ebb, Elizabeth’s began to rise again. On the day the death warrant was signed, the Council ordered that £300 19s 7d be sent for her use from the value of the lands allotted to her.
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There was no longer any danger that she would marry Thomas Seymour.

Somerset hurriedly left London on 19 March, anxious that he should not be in the capital when his brother died.
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Hugh Latimer came to the Tower that day, but he found a prisoner unrepentant and defiant.
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Latimer was a poor choice to comfort Seymour on his final day, since secretly the bishop despised the Lord Admiral, considering him ‘a wicked man’ of whom ‘the realm is well rid’. Seymour, for his part, had little interest in religion; indeed, it was rumoured that he had gone so far as to deny the immortality of the soul.
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The uncompromising Latimer had no time for heretics. Thomas would only speak of the king, repeating ‘the king, the king’ without elaborating further, to the bishop’s annoyance. Was he hoping that his nephew, contrite in his own complicity in the offence, would send a last-minute reprieve? If so, nothing came.

On that evening, Thomas’s last, he was alone in his chamber. Although denied a pen and paper, he was determined to write. Carefully, he pulled a small pointed aglet attached to the end of a lace in his hose.
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Dipping it into a pot of improvised ink, he began to write, filling two small scraps of paper that he had found. One was addressed to Princess Mary and one to Elizabeth. In both, he begged the princesses to conspire against the Protector, before carefully sewing them into the sole of one of his velvet shoes. It was quite a feat, demonstrating the strength of his anger against his brother, as well as the fact that his thoughts turned again, near the end, towards Elizabeth. He carefully showed his servant where to find the notes, before spending his last night alive quietly in the Tower. At some point that evening, he swore before God that he had not ‘intended any harm to the king’s body’.
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The following morning – Wednesday 20 March – dawned all too soon. Slipping on his final outfit and his comfortable velvet shoes, Thomas stepped out of the Tower somewhere between 9 o’clock and 12 noon. He was separated from his servants as he walked to Tower Hill, close by the walls of the ancient fortress. A crowd had already gathered in anticipation. Seymour mounted the straw-strewn scaffold. Seeing the block for the first time, he turned suddenly to a servant of the Lieutenant of the Tower, who was standing nearby. ‘Bid my servant speed the thing that he wots of,’ he muttered.
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It was customary for the condemned to make a short speech, admitting their guilt and the rightness of their punishment. Thomas Seymour, however, said only: ‘I have been brought here to suffer death, for as I was lawfully born into this world so I must lawfully leave it because there is some work to be accomplished which cannot be fulfilled unless I am put out of the way.’
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With this final act of defiance, he asked everyone assembled ‘to pray God of his mercy to receive’ his soul, before falling to his knees and laying his head on the block.
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He did not seek forgiveness – although, since it took two brutal strokes to sever his head from his body, Bishop Latimer tartly reflected: ‘Who can tell but that between two strokes he doth repent?’

It was a painful, bloody death. As Seymour’s body and severed head were recovered from the scaffold’s straw and laid in a wagon, his servant informed the authorities about the hidden letters. The head was placed alongside the body and buried quietly in the Chapel of St Peter ad Vincula in the Tower. There, Thomas Seymour, Baron Sudeley, joined the equally headless bodies of Elizabeth’s mother and others that he had known during his rise to power.

When word of Thomas’s execution was brought to Elizabeth at Hatfield that afternoon, she said only that ‘this day died a man of much wit and very little judgment’.
*5
Yet in all her long life, it was Thomas Seymour who came closest to being her husband.

*1
The stolen goods largely did not find their way back to their owners (Gruffydd, p. 60).

*2
A bill of attainder – used rarely, and for the most part in cases of treason – avoided a trial, instead requiring a vote in Parliament as to the person’s guilt and then the sovereign’s assent to the (almost inevitable) execution. Catherine Parr’s predecessor as queen, Catherine Howard, was attainted, although in her case the king evaded giving his formal assent to the subsequent beheading of his wife.

*3
Somerset, for all his show of reluctance, firmly drove the proceedings against Thomas. His wife may also have counselled him to this. The sixteenth-century Jesuit writer Nicholas Sander (though often unreliable) considered that ‘the Protector’s wife gave her husband no rest, matters came at last to this: the Protector, who, though he ruled the king, was yet ruled by his wife, must put his brother to death’ (Sander, p. 184). John Foxe also claimed that ‘the Duchess of Somerset had wrought his death’ (Foxe, p. 283).

*4
There is considerable dispute over the Earl of Warwick’s involvement in Seymour’s fall. Although he stirred up trouble between the two brothers in 1547, regarding the governorship of the king, he otherwise seems to have sat back and watched the Admiral destroy himself. Seymour was not Warwick’s main quarry since, politically, he was of little importance, and no contemporary records assign Warwick a leading role in the proceedings against Thomas. Where sources such as John Foxe state that ‘the subtle old serpent, always envying man’s felicity, through slanderous tongues sought to sow matter, first of discord between them; then of suspicion; and last of all, extreme hatred’ (p. 233), the people stirring up this trouble are not named. Warwick certainly helped to sow discord, but the rivalry between Seymour/Catherine and the Somersets largely did the damage. Seymour certainly did not view Warwick as an enemy (although they were far from friends). Not long before his arrest, Seymour told John Harington that he had recently met with Warwick, when one of them (Harington could not remember which) said that ‘the world said they were not friends,’ while the other answered that ‘the world should see the contrary, for the one of them would resort to the other’s house’ (S. Haynes, p. 83).

*5
The source of this remark is the dubious Leti, and it is therefore suspect. However, it does echo very well Paget’s own remark to Van der Delft, regarding Seymour’s lack of judgment, and the sentiment rings true. It may be that Leti did see a document confirming the veracity of the words.

As Christmas 1549 approached, Elizabeth’s household was busy with packing. Kate Ashley helped to supervise, while the princess’s cofferer, Thomas Parry, assisted with the arrangements for the journey. Nine months after Thomas Seymour’s execution, Elizabeth and her servants were being invited to court. They had weathered the storm.

Thomas Seymour’s death had shocked many. In choosing Hugh Latimer as his final confessor, Thomas had shown the bad judgment that plagued him throughout his lifetime. Just over a week after the beheading, the bishop – whom Seymour had accounted his friend – gleefully besmirched his memory in a sermon at Westminster. As the king and Protector sat by, he declared, his voice booming through the chapel, that the Lord Admiral had died ‘very boldly’: not a compliment. He doubted, he said, that he would even find his way to Heaven, since he had ‘heard much wickedness of this man’.

Thomas had been a man of action and had had little time for religion, but he had firmly believed himself to be one of God’s elect – preordained to join him in eternal glory. Latimer considered this unlikely, summing him up as ‘a covetous man, an horrible covetous man; I would there were no more in England: he was an ambitious man; I would there were no more in England: he was a seditious man, a contemner of Commune Prayer, I would there were no more in England’. His words caused murmuring, mostly of sympathy for the dead Admiral.
*1

Catherine’s cousin, Nicholas Throckmorton, had more mixed feelings. Reflecting later on the death, he considered that Seymour had been ‘a beast’ who ‘causeless laboured to defile his nest’
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and ‘through malice, went to pot’ – but nevertheless found him ‘guiltless’ of treason. This was how most people saw it. While Thomas ‘deserved to drink as he did brew’,
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and had thrown everything away that he had possessed, few believed that his foolishness really merited death. Even the Elizabethan Jesuit Nicholas Sander had grave doubts about the veracity of the charges, considering that ‘Thomas Seymour was innocent of everything for which he deserved to die, except heresy, and as the Protector, himself a heretic, could not lay that to his brother’s charge, it was necessary to have recourse to falsehood’.
3
Seymour was guilty of plotting against his brother, but the probable collusion of the king meant that it was not treason. He had tried to marry Elizabeth without the Council’s consent, but, thanks to the failure of the Protector’s bill to outlaw that possibility, that was also not treason. He was, rather, the casualty of his dispute with his brother.