The Temptation of Elizabeth Tudor (42 page)

Protector Somerset had stayed out of the way at Syon when Thomas was executed. But every time he passed the nursery there, he was met with an uncomfortable reminder of his complicity in his brother’s death. Mary Seymour, Thomas’s ‘pretty’ little daughter, had been moved to Syon following her father’s arrest, accompanied by her nurse Mrs Aglionby and at least eleven other servants.
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She was seven months old in March 1549, and oblivious to both her father’s death and to the financial ruin occasioned by his attainder. On taking her into their house, the Somersets ensured that her fine nursery furniture travelled with her. The baby could settle down for the night in her familiar cradle, furnished with a scarlet tester and curtains of crimson taffeta. Her nurse slept beside her, to care for her when she cried. There was a chair with cushions of cloth of gold, should anyone of importance visit her, and she could play in a room decorated with tapestries showing the twelve months of the year. She was a princess in all but birth, her simple weaning food served up to her on silver plates. To support her, Somerset also arranged for an allowance to be paid to her from the royal treasury. Yet she could hardly remain indefinitely with him given the circumstances of her orphaning.

Seymour had asked that Mary be sent to live with her mother’s friend Catherine Willoughby, the Duchess of Suffolk. Lady Suffolk did not readily agree to this, aware that the girl, as the daughter of a queen, was expected to live in an almost royal style. To help persuade her, the Duchess of Somerset promised that Mary’s possessions, including her silver tableware, should be transported with her.
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This settled the matter, and Mary moved to Grimsthorpe in Lincolnshire with her twelve servants, including her nurse, in spring 1549.
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Unfortunately, however, Lady Somerset’s promise proved worthless, and Mary’s valuables disappeared into the duchess’s grasping possession. At the same time, Protector Somerset neglected to pay the infant’s pension.

Mary Seymour was a burden that the Duchess of Suffolk had not looked for. By July 1549 she was furious that this penniless ‘queen’s child’ was still in her house.
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She wrote countless letters to the Protector and his wife, before complaining to William Cecil that month that funding the baby’s household ‘will not bring me out of debt this year’. She had already spoken to the baby’s uncle, the Marquess of Northampton (‘to whom I ought to deliver her’), but, as the duchess found, ‘he hath as weak a back for such a burden as I have’. She was writing to Cecil in the hope that the Protector could be prevailed upon to support his niece; but Somerset showed no such inclination.

Mary was finally restored to her father’s lands and titles towards the end of 1549. On 13 March 1550, the Council granted money for household wages, servants’ uniforms and food
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– and no more was heard of her. For centuries, her fate remained a mystery, although her disappearance from the records was taken to indicate that she had died in infancy. Recent research has all but confirmed this. A Latin epitaph in the first person, published by Catherine’s chaplain John Parkhurst, refers to ‘I whom at the cost of her own life, my queenly mother bore with the pangs of labour’, before lamenting the fact that a stone of marble is now ‘a memorial to my brief life’.
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Thomas and Catherine’s ‘little knave’ never did avenge her parents as they had hoped. She followed them, all too quickly, to the grave.

In spite of the wide net that Thomas cast in his intrigues, no one else died with him. The Marquess of Dorset successfully managed to extricate himself, to be created Duke of Suffolk in right of his wife in 1551, following the death of her half-brother Charles Brandon. The couple continued in their ambitions for their daughter. But shortly before King Edward’s own juvenile death in July 1553, the king and his regime made a doomed attempt to forestall Catholic Princess Mary becoming queen by altering the succession in favour of the unfortunate Jane Grey. Following Mary’s triumphal accession that year, Jane was beheaded the following February. She went to the scaffold carrying Catherine Parr’s prayer book, perhaps as a memento of happier times. Her father and her uncle, Lord Thomas Grey, were executed for good measure.

William Sharington did receive his pardon, in November 1549; even his lands and property were returned the following year. His wife was unable to secure the return of her jewellery, though, which had passed into the Duchess of Somerset’s coffers. Otherwise, the couple survived unscathed. Sharington was even trusted with money again, being appointed as one of the commissioners to collect 200,000 crowns from the French in 1550 as part of the purchase price for Boulogne.
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He died later that year, so fully rehabilitated that Bishop Latimer declared him to be ‘an honest gentleman and one that God loveth’.
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John Fowler, too, fared well. After being released from the Tower he was allowed to retain his post in the king’s Privy Chamber and continued to prosper in the succeeding reigns of both Mary and Elizabeth.
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He died around 1575. Even the discontented Marquess of Northampton was brought back into the fold, taking up a seat on the Council in July 1549, following the finalization of his divorce.
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Although they remained in favour during the reign of Edward VI, the Tyrwhitts subsequently did rather less well. Lady Tyrwhitt, whom her husband proudly considered to be ‘half a scripture woman’, failed to build a relationship with Elizabeth during her period as the princess’s lady mistress.
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By late spring 1549, Kate Ashley and Thomas Parry had been released from the Tower and were able to return to their old posts with the princess.
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Elizabeth bore a grudge against the Tyrwhitts. Soon after her accession to the throne in 1558, she confiscated Mortlake and other manors from them.
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Sir Robert died in 1572. His wife, imitating her friend Catherine Parr, published her own prayer book in 1574, and died four years later.

Elizabeth’s contemporaries believed that ‘if some slur has attached to a girl’s reputation from men’s opinion of her, it usually remains forever and is not erased except by clear proofs of her chastity and wisdom’.
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Faced with rumours of a pregnancy or a concealed baby, Elizabeth set about ensuring that her conduct was blameless for the rest of her brother’s reign. Habitually wearing sombre black, she presented herself as a model to other young Protestant maidens to follow.
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Elizabeth finally turned sixteen on 7 September 1549. She had reached her majority.
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In March of the following year she received her long-desired patents to her lands, making her a considerable landowner in her own right.
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She had become a figure of international importance, and on 24 September 1549 received ambassadors from Venice, whose duke was considering a matrimonial alliance with her.
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Elizabeth was careful this time, immediately instructing Parry to write to Cecil to inform him of the duke’s suit. She would not be accused of trying to arrange her own marriage again. As Parry noted, the talk did not seem to be of any great weight, but she needed advice on how to reply: ‘Her Grace will neither know nor do in matters that either may sound or seem to be of importance without doing of My Lord’s Grace [Somerset] to understand thereof’. As the cofferer assured the Protector’s secretary, even Elizabeth’s mind was open to scrutiny. Any thought ‘shall no sooner be in Her Grace’s head than My Lord’s Grace shall have intelligence thereof’.

Elizabeth was invited to spend Christmas at court in 1549. She arrived there in the middle of December and was welcomed ‘with great pomp and triumph’.
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The king had missed her and they spent the season continually in each other’s company. Elizabeth had grown into an assured young woman; there were now ‘great praises of her person and of her bringing up’.
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Her marriage continued to be raised. In August 1551, it was an Italian duke who sought her hand, while just under two years later she was courted by a German prince.
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During what remained of her half-brother’s reign, Elizabeth was considered ‘one of the darlings of fortune’, and the pair shared genuine affection for one another.
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As Elizabeth began to regain her place in society, Protector Somerset was rapidly losing his. Both Seymour brothers had considered themselves ‘tossed upon the waves of fortune’, and, although they could not know it, their fates were closely linked.
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Contemporaries murmured that ‘the fall of one brother, would be the ruin of the other’, while some suggested that it was God’s judgment that the older brother should die in the same manner as the sibling he condemned.
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In October 1549, it was Somerset’s turn to fall.

During the summer of 1549, the kingdom had been troubled by rebellion and civil unrest at home, and by renewed threats from Scotland and France. In June, in the West Country, objectors to the imposition of the English Book of Common Prayer and the general Protestant direction of the country gathered forces in Cornwall. Soon they were besieging Exeter. In July, in Norfolk, Robert Kett led a popular uprising against the practice by landowners of enclosing common land, and took over Norwich. The revolts were put down by military force, led by Lord Russell and the Earl of Warwick respectively, but they contributed to a sense of an embattled regime.

By September 1549, Somerset and much of the Council, especially its more conservative members, were in dispute, with Warwick pragmatically backing Somerset’s opponents in a bid to force him to ‘amend some of his disorders’.
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On 1 October matters reached a head, as Somerset issued a proclamation, ostensibly from the king, in which he commanded all his ‘loving subjects’ to come armed to Hampton Court, ‘to defend his most royal person, and his most entirely beloved uncle, the Lord Protector, against whom certain hath attempted a most dangerous conspiracy’.
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In reality, just as with Thomas Seymour’s own plots, the king was never in danger. It was the Protector that was the focus of the Council’s coup. On 6 October, Somerset ordered the armour to be brought out of the armoury at Hampton Court as men began to gather. Late on the next evening, when the king was in bed, Edward was suddenly spirited away by his uncle to Windsor. Somerset effected the kidnap of the king that his late brother, at most, had attempted without success. This time, there was no question as to the boy’s complicity or lack of it: he was furious.

As Warwick’s troops gained support, Somerset remained holed up at Windsor. The king had caught a cold on the journey, and, being incensed at his treatment, complained loudly: ‘Methinks I am in prison; here be no galleries nor no gardens to walk in.’
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The memory of the Protector’s fratricide was uppermost in many minds as Somerset clung on to power. Sir Thomas Smith, who had served as the Council’s secretary during Seymour’s incarceration, now took part in the action against the Protector. He rode to Windsor, and wrote to Sir William Petre on 8 October that he had been with the Protector that day. He had persuaded him, he said, to give up his office – and he hoped, therefore, that ‘no man seeks the blood of him who has been too easy of others’.
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The ghost of Thomas Seymour still haunted the Duke of Somerset. Three days later, Somerset was taken to the Tower.
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Less than seven months after Seymour’s death, his brother was finally divested of his offices of Protector and governor of the king.
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The role of Lord Protector was abolished. Thomas Seymour had moved too soon.

For the moment, though, Somerset’s fate was different to that of his brother. After admitting all the charges against him and throwing himself on the Council’s mercy, he was released early in 1550.
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He even managed to return to the Council that April, although his rehabilitation was short-lived. Under the aegis of the Earl of Warwick – who had now become the Duke of Northumberland – he was arrested again on 17 October 1551, charged with treason and returned to the Tower, with his wife accompanying him the next day. This time there would be no reprieve. Tried before twenty-eight peers, he was acquitted of treason but found guilty of gathering armed men, a capital offence.

Somerset had once been popular. Despite his autocratic methods and self-aggrandizement, he was also lauded by many in England for his perceived sympathies with the poor, notably in trying to crack down on the practice of illegal enclosures, and for attempts to turn the country towards the reformed religion.
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He was led out to Tower Hill at 8 o’clock on the morning of 22 January 1552, to be faced by the greatest crowd that anyone could remember.
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It was a tense assembly. The Council had taken the precaution of ordering a sizeable armed guard to ensure that no rescue was attempted. Shortly before Somerset died, a great rumbling was heard, as if guns were firing and horses thundering towards them; some of the skittish crowd fell down in fear.
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No one tried to save him, however. Like his brother, Somerset refused to admit any guilt, declaring only that ‘I am brought hither to suffer death, albeit that I never offended against the king, neither by word nor deed, and have been always as faithful and true unto this realm, as any man hath been.’
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He had no regrets: ‘Neither I repent my doings, but rejoice therein.’ He died on the straw of the scaffold and was buried close to his brother. His wife, the domineering Anne Stanhope, was lucky to escape with her own life. She later remarried, living until 1587. Her half-brother Sir Michael Stanhope, whom Thomas Seymour had so deplored for his influence over the king’s household, was less fortunate. He followed his brother-in-law to the block the following month.
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