The Children of Henry VIII (19 page)

Henry died in the early hours of Friday, 28 January 1547, leaving a will that reaffirmed the terms of the Third Act of Succession and made the inheritance of Mary and Elizabeth strictly conditional. Each would be excluded from the throne if she married without the ‘assent and consent’ of those privy councillors he had now named, or as many of them as were still living.
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The dying king had never shaken off his conviction that females in the succession were a dangerous risk.
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He spelled out what was to happen if either of his daughters married without permission—she would lose her place. And if both were disqualified, then the throne would pass, in turn, to the heirs of his nieces, the Ladies Frances and Eleanor Brandon, the daughters of his younger sister, Mary, who had been Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk’s third wife.
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Henry appointed sixteen privy councillors to govern in his son’s name until he was 18. Twelve other individuals were to assist and be ‘of counsel’ to them. The copious amount of small print explaining precisely how this arrangement was meant to work, ensuring
stability and a political consensus during the years of Edward’s minority, shows just how far Henry was attempting to rule from beyond the grave.

The will made no provision for the appointment of a single person to act as a Lord Protector, quite the opposite. Since, however, Henry entrusted his will to the safekeeping of his erstwhile brother-in-law, Edward Seymour, he was clearly someone whom the old king expected to exercise leadership in the new reign.
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Many of Henry’s wishes would quickly be set aside. Edward Seymour, although created Duke of Somerset and given a generous grant of lands, was dissatisfied. On 12 March, he broke the will after a series of backstairs manoeuvres masterminded by his ally Sir William Paget. By a menacing combination of inducements and threats, a majority of Edward’s new councillors were inveigled into making Somerset Lord Protector and Governor of the King’s Person. A grant of letters patent gave the duke near-sovereign powers as regent until Edward was 18.
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Over the next two years, Somerset would succeed in alienating the very same men whom Henry had tried to shape into a consensus.
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His fellow privy councillors envisaged that, as Protector, the duke would consult them about key policy decisions and not attempt to govern as if he were himself the king. Instead, he made critical decisions about entering into wars with Scotland and France, about domestic security and the economy in England and Ireland, and about the advance of the Protestant Reformation in ways that his fellow councillors considered to be arbitrary and ill-informed.

But Somerset’s nemesis was his younger brother, Thomas Seymour, who jealously coveted the post of Governor of the
King’s Person.
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Although made Lord Admiral and given a barony as Lord Seymour of Sudeley, Seymour was not so easily bought off. Handsome, dashing and reckless, his consuming ambition made him a highly disruptive force.
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Aiming at nothing less than to control the king and bind himself into the royal family, Seymour sought first to persuade his brother to allow him to marry Mary.
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When he was rebuffed, he began to milk his Court connections ruthlessly. A gentleman of the king’s Privy Chamber and on familiar terms with John Cheke and several of Edward’s body servants, he had the potential to cause dissension from the outset. He even had a duplicate key to every door in the palace of Whitehall.
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Seymour set about suborning the young king, telling him that ‘Ye are a beggarly king, ye have no money to play or to give’ and sending him tidy sums with which to supplement the meagre allocations to his privy purse.
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This clearly struck a chord with Edward. As he ruefully reflected, ‘My uncle of Somerset dealeth very hardly with me and keepeth me so straight that I cannot have money at my will, but my Lord Admiral both sends me money and gives me money.’
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Seymour’s ace of trumps was his relationship with Katherine Parr. With unseemly haste, he paid court to the Dowager Queen, who was soon admitting him to her Presence Chamber every morning at 7 a.m. at her dower houses at Chelsea and Hanworth in Middlesex. He also put out feelers to Edward and Mary, seeking their goodwill towards the marriage.

Mary was no longer at Court. She had been granted lands in Norfolk, Suffolk and Essex worth £3,000 a year together with the royal manors of Hunsdon and New Hall as part of the settlement of her father’s will and was living mainly at New Hall.
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Her
reaction to what she disparagingly called Seymour’s ‘strange news’ was cold. It was surely up to Katherine to decide, she replied. Her own opinion hardly mattered. But ‘if the remembrance of the King’s Majesty my father (whose soul God pardon) will not suffer her to grant your suit, I am nothing able to persuade her to forget the loss of him, who is as yet very ripe in my own remembrance.’
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Edward did write a letter of encouragement to Katherine, which, if read at face value, makes it appear that he had personally instigated the proposed marriage. Except it turns out that the letter had all along been dictated by Seymour.
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Besides, by the time Edward’s letter was sent out on 25 June 1547, the wedding had already taken place. Katherine was pregnant early in 1548, and it would not be long before Seymour would be chortling with delight at the news that ‘my little man’—he, like the old king, was wholly confident of a son—had been felt ‘shaking his head’ in her womb.
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The true extent of Seymour’s ambition was now revealed. A week before Somerset was sworn in as Lord Protector, Katherine had been granted custody of Elizabeth, who was brought by Kat Ashley—as she was known since her marriage—from Hatfield to Chelsea in the middle of March.
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Despite the fact that Lady Troy was still technically in charge of Elizabeth’s establishment,
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Kat had somehow contrived to replace her as Elizabeth’s governess shortly before the old king died.
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Katherine, Seymour and Kat were in cahoots, making it easy for Seymour to merge the two households, their staffs and budgets. It would not be much more than another year before Lady Troy, who thus far had been accustomed to sleep on a pallet in Elizabeth’s
bedchamber, was displaced and pensioned off, ostensibly on the grounds that the bedchamber at Chelsea was too small.
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Blanche Parry briefly replaced her on the pallet, but was soon ousted from it by Kat, who ‘could not abide to have nobody [
sic
] lie there, but only herself’.
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Not content with this, Seymour purchased the guardianship of Lady Jane Grey, the eldest surviving child of Frances Brandon and so the first residuary legatee to the throne by the terms of Henry’s will. Jane’s father, Henry Grey, Marquis of Dorset, agreed to the unusual bargain after Seymour promised him in almost as many words that the 10-year-old girl would one day marry Edward.
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But when Seymour moved in at Chelsea, he began flirting with Elizabeth, who was nearly 14 and sexually aware. This had not been part of the plan. As Kat later confessed under interrogation, with Lady Troy gone from the pallet, he would visit Elizabeth in her bedchamber early in the mornings, sometimes before she had risen or was dressed. ‘And if she were up, he would bid her good morrow and ask how she did, and strike her upon the back or on the buttocks familiarly, and so go forth through his lodgings. … And if she were in her bed, he would open the curtains and bid her good morrow, and make as though he would come at her. And she would go further in the bed, so that he could not come at her.’
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When one morning he tried to kiss Elizabeth, Kat spotted him, and ‘bade him go away for shame.’ Katherine at first seemed to condone her husband’s actions, perhaps considering them harmless or perhaps in a naive attempt to control them, since at Hanworth she twice came with him into the chamber early in the morning and they tickled Elizabeth in bed together. A notorious incident took place in the garden at Hanworth, when Katherine and Seymour frolicked with Elizabeth and ‘cut her gown in[to] a
hundred pieces, being black cloth’. Kat severely rebuked Elizabeth for this unseemly behaviour, but she answered, ‘I could not do withal, for the queen held me while the Lord Admiral cut it.’
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Worse, the Dowager Queen later told Kat one day at Hanworth that Seymour had chanced to look in at a gallery window and seen Elizabeth with her arms around another man’s neck. Kat was shocked. But who could this man be?
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Kat confronted Elizabeth, ‘who denied it weeping’. Kat realized she was telling the truth, ‘for there came no man, but Grindal.’ The mention of Elizabeth’s schoolmaster dates the episode to before the end of January 1548, when he died of the plague. Kat thought the incident proved that Katherine had become ‘jealous’ of the friendship between her husband and stepdaughter. She had ‘feigned’ the story, Kat surmised, to make sure that a closer watch was kept on Elizabeth.
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F
IGURE
10
Elizabeth wrote this letter in her finest italic script to her stepmother, Katherine Parr, as soon as she arrived at Sir Anthony Denny’s house at Cheshunt in May 1548, where she was sent to escape the scandal caused by rumours of her relationship with Sir Thomas Seymour.

Finally, Katherine, realizing the situation was fast slipping out of her control, sent Elizabeth away. The date has often been disputed, but Kat remembered it was in ‘the week after Whitsuntide’, i.e. the week beginning 20 May 1548.
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The teenager was taken back to Hertfordshire under a cloud, not at first to Hatfield, but to Cheshunt where the Dennys lived. Arriving on a Saturday, Elizabeth wrote a letter to her stepmother in her finest italic hand (see
Figure 10
). At their parting, Katherine had warned her of the danger to her reputation. ‘Truly I was replete with sorrow to depart from your highness’, Elizabeth responded. ‘And albeit I answered little, I weighed it more deeper when you said you would warn me of all evils that you should hear of me.’
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