The House of Tudor (34 page)

51 The reign of Queen Jane; contemporary woodcuts.

In her present predicament Elizabeth needed all the wit and self-control she could muster. Utterly alone, her household full of strangers and spies, she was being called upon to answer the kind of charge - based chiefly on tittle-tattle and innuendo -which IS always most difficult to refute. She faced hours of skilled and relentless questioning, designed to trap her into admissions which would have ruined her good name and quite possibly cost her her place in the succession. Her liberty, her whole future might very well be at stake. And she was still only fifteen years old. Tyrwhit tried all the tricks of the interrogator’s trade but on 28 January, after more than a week of unremitting effort, he was obliged to report: ‘I have practised with my lady’s grace by all means and policies to cause her to confess more than she has already done. But she does plainly deny that she knows any more than she has already opened to me.’

The Protector himself had now written to Elizabeth, counselling her ‘as an earnest friend’ to declare all she knew. This was the opportunity Elizabeth had been hoping for and she took it with both hands. Her reply to Somerset, polite but businesslike and written in the exquisitely legible Italic script she had learned from Roger Ascham, is by any standards a masterpiece of its kind. There had never at any time been any sort of secret understanding with the Admiral and neither Mrs. Ashley nor Parry had ever advised her to marry anyone without the full consent of the King’s Majesty, the Protector and the Council. Even if they had, she herself would never have agreed to such a thing. She had already told Robert Tyrwhit everything she knew about her own and her servants’ contacts with Thomas Seymour since the Queen’s death, but if she remembered anything further, she would either write it herself ‘or cause Master Tyrwhit to write it’. Her letter ended with an indication of the sort of methods being used to break her resistance. ‘Master Tyrwhit and others have told me that there goeth rumours abroad which be greatly against my honour and honesty (which above all other things I esteem) which be these; that I am in the Tower and with child by my Lord Admiral. My lord, these are shameful slanders, for the which, besides the great desire I have to see the King’s majesty, I shall most heartily desire your lordship that I may come to Court after your first determination, that I may show myself there as I am.’

Elizabeth Tudor had defended herself and her friends against the most unwarrantable accusations with courage and dignity, and had more than hinted that she would expect an official apology. Unfortunately, though, neither her much loved governess nor her steward possessed the stalwart qualities of their mistress. Under interrogation in the Tower, first Parry and then Katherine Ashley broke down and made long, verbose statements. These were rushed to Hatfield where, on 5 February, Robert Tyrwhit was able to confront the princess with her servants’ ‘confessions’. ‘She was much abashed and half breathless’ he reported and studied the signatures with particular attention, although, as Tyrwhit remarked, she knew both Mrs. Ashley’s hand and the cofferer’s ‘with half a sight’. He went on, ‘I will tomorrow travail all I can to frame her for her own surety and to utter the truth.’

But by the next day Elizabeth had recovered her poise. It was, of course, acutely humiliating to see the intimate details of those merry romps at Chelsea and Han-worth set down in writing for everyone to read. It was humiliating but it was not remotely treasonable. There was still no evidence whatever that Elizabeth, or Mrs. Ashley, or Thomas Parry had been involved in any sort of plot. So, when Tyrwhit returned to the attack, the princess graciously allowed him to take down her own ‘confession’ which, apart from a few unimportant details, contained absolutely nothing new. ‘They all sing the same song’, wrote Tyrwhit in exasperation, ‘and so I think they would not do, unless they had set the note before.’

The Council now appointed Sir Robert’s wife to replace Mrs. Ashley as the princess’s governess, hoping that the princess would ‘accept her service willingly’. The princess would not. She cried all that night and ‘lowered’ at Lady Tyrwhit all the next day - signs that prolonged strain was having its effect. ‘She beginneth now a little to droop’, Tyrwhit reported towards the end of February, ‘by reason she heareth that my Lord Admiral’s house be dispersed. And my wife telleth me now that she cannot bear to hear him discommended but she is ready to make answer therein; and so she hath not been accustomed to do, unless Mistress Ashley were touched, whereunto she was very ready to make answer vehemently.’

The Admiral had, of course, been doomed from the moment of his arrest. Although Elizabeth herself had turned out to be such a disappointing witness, there was no lack of evidence from other sources. Even the King obligingly recalled the details of certain conversations with his uncle, and those gifts of pocket money, once eagerly accepted, were now produced as evidence of treasonable intent. Since Parliament was still in session, the Council decided not to accord Thomas Seymour the courtesy of an open trial, but to proceed against him by means of an Act of Attainder - a cheap and convenient method of dealing with enemies of the State. First, though, the consent of the victim’s two closest relatives must be obtained and on 24 February, ‘after the King’s majesty had dined’, the full Council assembled in his presence. The Lord Chancellor ‘declared forth the heinous facts and treasons of the Admiral’, adding that the prisoner had obstinately refused to answer any of the charges except in open trial. Everyone then cast their votes in favour of remitting the matter to his Majesty’s high court of Parliament. When it came to the Protector’s turn, he said - and he had very little choice, after all - that deeply distressing though the case was to him, his first duty must be to the King’s majesty and the crown of “England, for he ‘did weigh more his allegiance than his blood’. Now it was up to the King. Was he going to make any effort to help his kind uncle? He was not. ‘We do perceive’, announced the eleven-year-old Edward Tudor, ‘there is great things which be objected and laid to my lord Admiral mine uncle, and they tend to treason; and we perceive that you require but justice to be done. We think it reasonable, and we will well that you proceed according to your request.’ At these words, ‘coming so suddenly from his Grace’s mouth of his own motion’, the assembled company, greatly relieved by his Grace’s admirably unsentimental attitude, gave him ‘most hearty praise and thanks’.

Thomas Seymour was executed on Tower Hill on 20 March but unlike that other Queen Dowager’s widower who had suffered a similar fate in the market square at Hereford nearly ninety years ago, the Lord Admiral left no posterity to alter the course of history. Little Mary Seymour, stripped of her inheritance and abandoned to the reluctant care of the dowager Duchess of Suffolk - once one of Queen Katherine Parr’s closest friends - disappeared from sight and is believed to have died in childhood.

The indifference which Edward had shown over the downfall of his uncle Thomas had been noted by the Earl of Warwick and had encouraged that intelligent individual - now in the final stages of preparing his own bid for power -to hope that the King would be equally indifferent to the fate of his other Seymour uncle. Events soon began to play into Warwick’s hands. The year 1549 was marked by a general and increasing popular discontent - due partly to economic hardship caused by rising prices and widespread unemployment, and partly to an angry reaction in the more backward rural areas against the sweeping religious changes introduced since King Henry’s death. This discontent presently erupted into two quite serious revolts, one in the West Country and one in Norfolk, which caused considerable alarm among the propertied classes. Somerset’s high-minded liberalism might earn him the title of ‘the Good Duke’ among the common people, but his merciful attitude towards rebellious common people did not endear him to the nobility and gentry, who turned thankfully to the Earl of Warwick - a capable soldier with no tiresome notions about the rights of the poor.

Meanwhile, the Protector’s growing arrogance and intolerance of opposition were also alienating his colleagues on the Council and his friend William Paget, who had done so much to help him attain his elevated position, warned him bluntly that unless he showed more consideration in debate and allowed other people freedom to speak their minds, he would soon have cause to regret it. But Paget had no more success in trying to warn the elder Seymour than John Russell had once had with the younger. Somerset, increasingly harassed and worried by the failure of his policies at home and abroad, seems to have been no longer able to face the realities of the political scene and had taken refuge behind a smokescreen of irascibility. His public image, too, had been fatally damaged by his brother’s death -just as the Earl of Warwick had known it would be. His outwardly cold-blooded reaction to the Admiral’s attainder and execution had disgusted a lot of people who now, most unfairly, stigmatized him as a fratricide, ‘a blood-sucker and a ravenous wolf.’

In mid-September Warwick returned triumphantly to London after suppressing the rebellion in East Anglia. As well as being the hero of the hour, he now had a well-armed and victorious body of troops ready at his command. This was clearly the moment for a move to dislodge the Lord Protector from his shaky throne. Towards the end of the month, the citizens of London were surprised to see those members of the Council who followed Warwick’s lead going armed about the streets, ‘their servants likewise weaponed, attending upon them in new liveries’. There was much coming and going at the Earl’s house in Holborn and rumours were flying round the city that the confederates were planning to seize the Tower.

Somerset was with Edward at Hampton Court when he learnt that the London Lords, as Warwick’s party had become known, intended to pay him a ‘friendly’ visit. Only two members of the Council had remained at his side and only about five hundred men - some of his own and some wearing the royal livery - were available to guard the palace. Realizing his danger somewhat late in the day, the Protector sent out anguished appeals for reinforcements and issued a proclamation in the King’s name, commanding ‘all his loving subjects with all haste to repair to his Highness at his Majesty’s manor of Hampton Court, in most defensible array, with harness and weapons, to defend his most royal person and his most entirely beloved uncle the Lord Protector, against whom certain hath attempted a most dangerous conspiracy.’

On 6 October, Cardinal Wolsey’s handsome Thames-side mansion bustled with activity. Weapons and harness were brought out of the armoury, guards were mounted at the gates, messengers rode to and fro and, as the King himself put it, ‘people came abundantly to the house’. But although Archbishop Cranmer arrived with a force of sixty horsemen, it soon became clear that help was not going to be forthcoming in time. The local peasantry had come in obediently to defend their king, but they would be no match for Warwick and his professional force; nor, in spite of all those warlike preparations, was Hampton Court defensible against any sort of determined assault.

At nine o’clock that night the Protector brought Edward down to the main gate of the palace where a large puzzled crowd was waiting and there, in the flickering torchlight, the child, prompted by his uncle, made a brief, rather sulky appeal to his assembled subjects. ‘Good people’, he said, ‘I pray you be good to us - and to our uncle.’ Then Somerset spoke, exclaiming rather hysterically that he would not fall alone. If he was destroyed, the King would be destroyed - kingdom and commonwealth would all be destroyed together. Pushing Edward in front of him, he went on: ‘It is not I that they shoot at - this is the mark that they shoot at.’ Horses were waiting saddled in the courtyard and uncle and nephew with a small escort mounted and rode hurriedly away into the night for the greater security of Windsor Castle.

It looked uncomfortably like flight and was for Edward a thoroughly upsetting and frightening experience. When he and Somerset reached Windsor at about three o’clock in the morning, no one was expecting them and nothing had been prepared. To the helpless boy surrounded by grim-faced adults talking in lowered voices over his head the gloomy, medieval fortress must have seemed more like a prison than a refuge, the whole adventure something of a nightmare. Nobody, it seemed, thought of offering him any comfort or reassurance. On the contrary, the Protector, anxious for the King’s support, had worked to impress him with a sense of his danger from their common enemies. Edward had never felt any particular affection or even liking for his austere uncle, but he had hitherto respected and, on the whole, trusted him. Now he saw only a panicky middle-aged man trying to save his own skin by hiding behind the sacred person of his sovereign lord. Trust and respect died, but fear did not. Edward was not yet twelve years old and still very much in his uncle’s power.

But not for long. Somerset had not succeeded in saving himself The London Lords, under Warwick’s skilful and determined leadership, pursued him to Windsor and on lo October he was taken away under guard to the Tower. The Lords then waited on the King and gave him a carefully edited account of their doings. Edward listened politely. He asked no awkward questions and thanked their lordships for the pains they had taken in safeguarding him and the realm. (He later entered in his Journal, an unrevealing document, a list of the Protector’s crimes, which included ambition, vainglory, entering into rash wars in the King’s youth, enriching himself with the King’s treasure, following his own opinion and doing all by his own authority.) The King kept his private thoughts on the October crisis to himself As he grew older, Edward kept his private thoughts more and more to himself

A few days after Somerset’s arrest, Edward returned to Hampton Court with a reconstituted entourage. Warwick was now securely in the saddle and the palace revolution was over. Edward had accepted his change of guardianship with his usual inscrutability, but did he perhaps reflect on the fact that he was the first child king so effectively to have turned the tables on uncles? That he might, in a manner of speaking, be said to have avenged the little princes in the Tower?