The House of Tudor (31 page)

There was no sentimental cult of youth in the sixteenth century. Childhood was widely regarded as an unfortunate but unavoidable preliminary to useful adult life - a period of mental and physical infirmity which, for everyone’s sake, should be got through as quickly as possible. Precocity or ‘towardness’ was therefore to be encouraged and cultivated. Edward was naturally a serious-minded boy. He had been brought up from infancy as the heir to the throne and there is no reason to suppose that at nine years old he did not fully understand and accept the duties and the responsibilities of his position. Childish behaviour in these circumstances would obviously have been particularly unsuitable.

Edward arrived in London during the afternoon of 31 January and received an ecstatic welcome from the waiting crowds as he was escorted through the city to the fortress palace of the Tower, where his apartments had been ‘richly hung and garnished with rich cloth of arras and cloths of estate as appertaineth unto such a royal King’. Next day came his formal introduction to ‘the most part of the nobility of his realm, as well spiritual as temporal’ who had gathered in the presence chamber to kiss his hand and to hear the official promulgation of Seymour’s appointment as Protector and Governor of the King’s person. The assembled lords declared that they would be ready at all times ‘with all their might and power’ to defend the realm and the King, and finally ‘cried all together with a loud voice, “God save the noble King Edward!”‘. In reply to this very proper demonstration of loyalty, the noble King Edward took off his cap and recited his piece. ‘We heartily thank you, my lords all; and hereafter in all that you shall have to do with us for any suits or causes, you shall be heartily welcome to us.’

These preliminaries being out of the way, the regime began to settle down and to make plans for the coronation which was to take place on 20 February, agreeing that, as a grudging concession to the King’s youth, the antique ceremony should be shortened from the usual eleven or twelve hours to about seven. On 18 February there was a grand investiture, as the new rulers of England made their first experiments with the sweets of power. Edward Seymour, Earl of Hertford, was created Duke of Somerset to emphasize the grandeur of his position. John Dudley, Viscount Lisle, became Earl of Warwick, and the younger Seymour brother, Thomas, Baron Seymour of Sudeley.

On the nineteenth Edward made the recognition procession from the Tower to Westminster. Dressed all in white and silver with the tall, imposing figure of the Duke of Somerset at his side, the third Tudor King rode through gaily decorated, freshly gravelled streets, surrounded by all the pomp and panoply amassed by his ancestors, the cheers of the people breaking over him in warm, generous waves. The city had, as usual, put on a royal show, with allegorical pageants, singing boys and Latin orations at every corner; but, as far as Edward was concerned, the high-spot of the afternoon was undoubtedly the acrobat who performed ‘masteries’ on a rope stretched above St. Paul’s Churchyard, and who delayed the King’s majesty with all the train ‘a good space of time’.

The coronation ceremony itself, performed by Edward’s godfather Archbishop Cranmer, went without a hitch, though it was perhaps ironical that the first King of England to be crowned as Supreme Head of the Church, God’s vice-regent and Christ’s vicar within his own dominions should have been a child of nine. If anyone found anything faintly ludicrous in the idea, they were naturally careful not to say so and in sermon after sermon preached in the weeks following the coronation Edward was compared to Old Testament heroes such as David, Josiah and the young Solomon. The age of the spiritual father of the people was immaterial, his extreme youth a mere temporary inconvenience. What mattered was the fact that he was God’s anointed, ‘elected of God and only commanded by him’, divinely ordained to guide the people into the paths of righteousness. Edward certainly believed this. Whatever inner misgivings he may have felt were not connected with God’s purposes but with man’s.

As soon as the excitement of the coronation and its attendant festivities was over, the King went back to his lessons and the other members of the royal family were able to start adjusting to their new situation. The Queen Dowager had been left with no further say in the upbringing of her stepson, but she had been generously provided for in her husband’s will. Katherine Farr was now an extremely wealthy lady and, until the King married, she remained the first lady in the land, taking precedence even over the princesses. But the most important thing as far as Katherine was concerned, was that she was now for the first time in her life entirely independent and free to please herself Soon after Henry’s death she had moved to her dower house at Chelsea - a modern, red-brick building, convenient for London and pleasantly situated overlooking the Thames. Here she was joined by the Princess Elizabeth and also by young Jane Grey, thus continuing the time-honoured custom of turning a royal lady’s household into a finishing school for girls. With the progressive party now firmly in the saddle, Katherine could indulge her religious and intellectual proclivities without fear or concealment, and Chelsea Palace rapidly became a recognized centre of advanced godliness where the minds of potentially very important wives and mothers were being moulded.

Unfortunately, this feminine mini-paradise was soon to be invaded by old Adam in the shape of Katherine’s former sweetheart, Thomas Seymour. The Protector’s younger brother was currently labouring under an acute sense of grievance. Not altogether surprisingly he thought poorly of an arrangement which allowed one of the King’s uncles to enjoy all the fruits of this valuable relationship, while leaving the other out in the cold. Thomas regarded his barony and his new office of Lord Admiral, passed on to him by John Dudley, as mere consolation prizes and he had every intention of redressing the balance as soon as he was in a position to do so.

As an eligible bachelor in his late thirties, his obvious first step towards political advancement was a good marriage and, according to gossip, his first choice had been the thirteen-year-old Elizabeth. Warned off by his brother and the council. Thomas turned back to the Queen whose feelings for him, he was confident, had not changed. He was quite right in this assumption and Katherine made no attempt to conceal her delight at his renewed attentions. ‘I would not have you to think that this mine honest good will toward you to proceed of any sudden motion of passion’, she wrote to him from Chelsea. ‘For as truly as God is God, my mind was fully bent the other time I was at liberty to marry you before any man I knew.’ God, on that occasion, had withstood her will ‘most vehemently’ but now she was to have her reward for self-abnegation, and at thirty-four the pious, high-minded Queen was radiant as any teenager at the prospect of marrying the man she loved.

Certainly Katherine deserved some happiness. The pity was that she had not made a better choice. Thomas Seymour was physically a very attractive man with plenty of surface charm. ‘Fierce in courage, courtly in fashion; in personage stately, in voice magnificent, but somewhat empty of matter’ runs the well-known, near contemporary assessment. He was also a vain, greedy, selfish man - dangerous both to himself and to others.

The Queen Dowager and the Lord Admiral were married privately - so privately intact that no one knows exactly where or when the ceremony took place, although It was probably no later than the beginning of May 1547. Katherine had talked rather half-heartedly about delay and observing a decent period of mourning but Thomas, who was anxious to avoid delay, had experienced very little difficulty in cajoling her out of her scruples.

The next thing was to find a tactful way of breaking the news to the rest of the family and Thomas wrote to the Princess Mary, asking if she would further his suit with the Queen. He got severely snubbed for his pains. Mary was old-fashioned enough to disapprove of hasty re-marriage, especially in this case ‘considering whose wife her grace was of late’. But, of course, it was the King’s opinion which really mattered. Thomas Seymour had few opportunities of seeing his nephew -this was one of his principal complaints - and he had already taken the precaution of suborning John Fowler, a gentleman of the Privy Chamber, to carry messages and generally act as go-between. He now instructed Fowler to broach the subject of his marriage to Edward in general terms and received the, for Edward, waggish response: ‘Wot you what? I would he married my sister Mary to turn her opinions.’ Thomas progressed to enquiring, again via Fowler, if Edward ‘could be contented I should marry the Queen’, and then Katherine herself took a hand. Sometime towards the end of May she paid a visit to Court and discussed the whole question of her re-marriage with the King, explaining that no disrespect was intended to his father’s memory. Reassured on this point, Edward raised no objections. He was genuinely fond of his stepmother and had nothing against his uncle Thomas - who was busily currying favour with surreptitious gifts of pocket money.

When news of his brother’s matrimonial activities reached the ears of the Lord Protector he was, as Edward noted laconically in his Journal, ‘much displeased’. But the thing was done now and, in any case, the Protector had weightier matters on his mind that summer. Towards the end of August he left for the North to pursue Henry VIII’s policy of attempting to intimidate the Scots into surrendering their little Queen to the cousinly care of her English fiancé and accepting English suzerainty. Somerset succeeded in inflicting yet another devastating defeat on the Scots at the battle of Pinkie, but he did not persuade them to become Englishmen. On the contrary, his ‘rough wooing’ had the extremely predictable result of driving Scotland ever more firmly into the arms of France. The four-year-old Mary was hastily moved to the island sanctuary of Inchmahome, and the following spring she was spirited away to the Continent and betrothed to the Dauphin. King François had not long survived his old rival Henry Tudor, but the French throne was now occupied by his son, Henri 11 - a resolute individual who would know how to protect his future daughter-in-law. The King of England would have to look elsewhere for a bride and any chance of uniting the British kingdoms had gone for another generation,

Thomas Seymour should have commanded the fleet during the Scottish campaign, but the Lord Admiral preferred to delegate his duties and remained at home to develop certain projects of his own. He was now living openly as Katherine’s husband - sometimes at Chelsea, sometimes at the Queen’s manor of Hanworth and sometimes at his own town house, Seymour Place. Katherine was transparently happy in her new life and the Admiral, having achieved the first of his objectives, in high good humour. With the irruption of his loud-voiced, ebullient male presence the atmosphere of the Queen’s household had become noticeably more relaxed and informal - in one direction at least unusually so, for Thomas Seymour soon began to amuse himself by teasing his wife’s stepdaughter. He ‘would come many mornings into the Lady Elizabeth’s chamber, before she were ready, and sometimes before she did rise. 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 sometime go through to the maidens and play with them, and so go forth.’ If Elizabeth was still in bed, *he would put open the curtains, and bid her good-morrow, and make as though he would come at her. And she would go further into the bed, so that he could not come at her.’

Katherine saw no harm in this sort of romping - she sometimes accompanied the Admiral on his early morning forays and together ‘they tickled my Lady Elizabeth in the bed, the Queen and my Lord Admiral’. But the princess’s governess took a more realistic view of the situation. Mrs. Katherine Ashley, a disapproving spectator of much giggling and shrieking and games of hide-and-seek round the bed-curtains, was devoted to her charge and she knew that the sight of a man -even one who might, at a pinch, be considered a member of the family - apparently welcome to invade her bedroom in his nightgown and slippers would inevitably set tongues wagging. After all, Elizabeth was fourteen that September and no longer a child. Mrs. Ashley therefore attempted to remonstrate with the Admiral, telling him that his behaviour was complained of and that her lady would be ‘evilly spoken of. The Admiral, of course, swore by God’s precious soul that he meant no harm, that the Lady Elizabeth was like a daughter to him and that he would know how to deal with slanderers. But Mrs. Ashley, whose sharp nose for gossip had already picked up the rumour that if my lord could have had his own will he would have married the Lady Elizabeth before he married the Queen, was unconvinced and went to lay her problem before the Queen herself Katherine ‘made a small matter of it’ - she was not in the mood to take anything very seriously that summer -but she did promise to chaperone her husband more closely in future.

Just what, if anything, Thomas Seymour expected to gain by his barely-concealed sexual pursuit of Elizabeth is hard to say. Most likely it had begun simply as his idea of a joke but no doubt it also gave him a gratifying sense of power to be on such terms with Henry VIII’s daughter. He never attempted similar tactics with the other young girl living under his wife’s roof- Lady Jane Grey was still too undeveloped physically to give any spice to slap-and-tickle and besides the Admiral had other plans for her.

Under the terms of his will, Henry VIII, using the powers conferred on him by the 1536 Act of Succession, had settled the crown, in default of heirs from his own children, on the descendants of his younger sister - arbitrarily excluding the senior Scottish line. Jane Grey’s dynastic importance had therefore increased dramatically and Thomas Seymour wasted no time in cultivating the friendship of her father. He experienced no particular difficulty in persuading the Marquis of Dorset to put Jane’s future in his hands in exchange for certain financial considerations and a promise that the Admiral would see her placed in marriage much to her father’s comfort. When Dorset asked for details, John Harington, one of Seymour’s most trusted agents who was conducting the negotiations, replied impressively ‘I doubt not but you shall see he will marry her to the King’, and on this understanding the bargain was struck.