‘Under Henry VIII, all men feared to speak though the meaning were not evil. Now every man has the liberty to speak without danger.’
SIR WILLIAM PAGET TO EDWARD SEYMOUR, DUKE OF SOMERSET, LORD PROTECTOR, 25 DECEMBER 1548.1
On 31 January 1547, Edward had been publicly proclaimed king, his courtiers ‘tempering their sorrow for the death of their late master with the joy of his son’s happy succeeding [of] him’.2 The salvoes of guns firing triumphantly along the battlements of the Tower of London and the strident, clarion notes of the trumpets sounding that afternoon must have startled the Duke of Norfolk, still imprisoned within its walls and tremulously awaiting his grim fate. But those guns signified his reprieve, despite reports to the contrary.3
Norfolk was scheduled to die on the block the very morning Henry died. The legal formalities were all in place; it was simply a question of Hertford and his allies delivering the signed death warrant to the Constable of the Tower. That order was never issued, probably because of their preoccupations with forming a new regency government under Hertford, as Lord Protector of the realm. Perhaps even Hertford wondered whether he could dare to press ahead with the execution. In the event, he took no chances: the Duke of Norfolk remained in the Tower throughout the six years of Edward’s reign and was only released on Mary’s accession in 1553. The Act of Attainder against him was then reversed and his estates and title restored to him on 3 August of that year. As Earl Marshal, he presided over Mary’s coronation4 and the following year, at the age of eighty-one, he was appointed lieutenant-general of government forces to put down the Kentish rebellion (Wyatt’s Rebellion), caused primarily by Mary’s decision to marry Philip of Spain. But he hardly covered himself with military glory, being panicked into a humiliating retreat back to London with his small force of white-coated royal troops.5 Norfolk died in his own bed at Kenninghall on 25 August 15546 and was later buried in his new mortuary chapel at Framlingham, Suffolk. His beautifully carved Renaissance tomb was erected five years later.7
Back in 1547, the French king, Francis I, ordered a solemn Mass to be said for Henry’s soul at the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris.8 He was dead himself in March. The Emperor Charles V renounced his throne in favour of his son Philip in 1555 and died, after living the pious life of a monk, three years later. The three monarchs who had dominated Europe for more than three decades had all gone in the space of eight years.
A week after ascending to the English throne, Edward – still closely guarded inside the Tower – wrote a dutiful letter of condolence, in his best schoolroom Latin, to his stepmother. ‘Since it has seemed good to God, the best and greatest, that my father, your spouse, the most famous king, has now ended this life, the two of us share one common grief,’ he wrote pompously, if not precociously. He continued:
This indeed brings us consolation: he is now in heaven [and] that he has departed this wretched life [and entered] fortunate and eternal bliss.
For whosoever lives a fortunate life here and well governs the commonwealth, as my most noble sire has done, who has promoted all religion and driven forth all superstition, shall have a most sure way into Heaven.
Though nature bids me weep and shed much tears for the loss of him that has departed, nevertheless scripture and wisdom bids me restrain these sentiments, lest we seem void of all hope in the resurrection of the dead and life eternal.
Since your highness has conferred so much good on me, it is meet I should hasten to bestow upon you what advantage I may. I pray for your highness. Farewell revered queen.
The letter was signed: ‘Edward the king.’9
One of the first actions of his councillors was to award themselves new titles and generous grants of lands, in addition to confirming Hertford as Lord Protector and Governor of the King’s Person. He was also called the ‘Lord Great Master’ – a title with the Stalinist ring of a modern-day North Korean leader.
Secretary Paget swore before the Privy Council a deposition of Henry’s unfulfilled intentions – ‘to have such things paid and performed as was partly owing to them and partly promised’. According to Paget, all these royal good intentions were contained in a book that Henry had slipped into the pocket of his nightshirt. Sadly, the book had now gone missing and ‘ere [these plans] could be achieved, God took him from us’, said the official solemnly. But all was not lost. Mirabile dictu!10 Paget, like any efficient civil servant, was of course blessed with a remarkable photographic memory and his vivid, detailed and wholly convenient recollections were naturally fully supported by Sir Anthony Denny and Sir William Herbert, his master’s confidants – and subsequent beneficiaries.
The old king, Paget testified, considered that ‘the nobility of this realm was greatly decayed, some by attainders, some by their own misgovernance and riotous wasting and some by sickness and sundry other means’. Therefore, even whilst facing the forbidding prospect of death, Henry had discussed with his secretary the advancement of some of his courtiers ‘to higher places of honour’ and Paget had duly noted down the names of the candidates.
The names on his list will hardly come as a surprise. To the victors and survivors in the great struggle for power went the spoils. Hertford was to be made Duke of Somerset and Earl Marshal, and Dudley, Viscount Lisle, Earl of Warwick11 and Great Chamberlain. William Parr was elevated to Marquis of Northampton, while Russell, Wriothesley and Lord St John were also to be made earls. Amongst the barons to be created were Sir Thomas Seymour, now Lord High Admiral, and that notorious weathercock Sir Richard Rich, ever swinging with the political wind. Incomes from the estates of Norfolk and Surrey were also available for distribution. Paget said that he had suggested to Henry that as he had advanced these true and faithful servants
it might please him to bestow liberally upon such as should please him. Whereunto, he accorded and willed me to bring him [the titles] of the lordships and valuations.
But he liked it not and in my presence called Master Gates and bad him fetch such books as he had of the duke of Norfolk and earl of Surrey’s lands, which he did.12
The king’s first attempt at sharing out the spoils was not satisfactory. The secretary, no doubt with an eye to bestowing favours that would have to be repaid in the future, said this ‘was too little’ and discussed it further with Henry. ‘He bade me speak with them [the intended recipients of the king’s munificence] and know their dispositions and he would after tell me more.’ The faithful and manipulative Denny was also not to be forgotten:
And then considering what painful service Master Denny did take daily with him [the king], and also moved of honesty for that Mr Denny had diverse times been a suitor for me and I never for him, I beseeched his majesty to be [a] good lord unto him and to give him [the manor of] Bungay [Suffolk] which I had heard he much desired.
His majesty much commended my suit and said he had thought before to be good to him and to Mr [William] Herbert and Mr Gates also …13
Henry, ever avaricious, finally decided to keep Norfolk’s lands in his own hands, with the exception of some in Sussex and Hampshire.
Thus, at a stroke and by very dubious practice, members of the new government considerably enriched themselves. If you have the power, why not flaunt it? Who was going to argue with them or dispute this largesse?
Hertford received lands worth £800 a year, with a further £300 annually from ‘the next bishop’s lands that shall fall void’. Lisle and Wriothesley were to get revenues of £300 a year and Sir Thomas Seymour lands worth £500 per annum. Rich was awarded the very precise income of £66 13s 4d a year. Denny got Bungay and lands worth £200; Herbert, lands worth 400 marks (‘to help get him out of debt withal’); and Gates, 100 marks.
Straight-faced, Paget pledged that all this being ‘remembered on his deathbed’ by Henry ‘that he had promised great things to diverse men, he willed in his testament that whatsoever should in any wise appear to his Council to have been promised by him, the same should be performed’.14
Herbert attested that one name was missing from the long list of beneficiaries of Henry’s munificence – Paget himself. According to Herbert, they had pointed this out to the dying king and had praised the secretary’s faithful service. Yes, said Henry, he remembered him well enough and ‘he must needs be helped’.15 So Paget, too, was given lands worth 400 marks a year.
Hertford, or Somerset as he now was, and his colleagues on the Council agreed that these bountiful gifts ‘had been determined’ by ‘our late sovereign lord’ and therefore after his death, ‘partly for the conservation of our own honesty and specially for the honour and surety of our sovereign lord that now is, [we] take upon us the degrees of honour and enter into the charge of attendance and service in the great and weighty affairs’ of Edward VI. Moreover, they thought that ‘we cannot otherwise discharge ourselves towards God and the world then if we paid [back] that which was given or promised’.16 So that was all right, then. There are few things in life more comforting than feeling morally justified in accepting great honours and wealth.
Paget had delivered fully: not only, at best, a doubtful will, but also a cynical distribution of royal gifts to those who had conspired to provide absolute power to Somerset. Only Wriothesley objected to Somerset’s coup d’état, and he was quickly to pay the price of opposition. He was accused of acting illegally in his use of the Great Seal of the realm in appointing four colleagues to hear Chancery cases on his behalf. On 6 March, Wriothesley was fired as Lord Chancellor, kicked off the Privy Council, fined £4,000 and put under house arrest in London17 to prevent any chance of him fomenting trouble in his home county of Hampshire. He was, however, readmitted to the Council sometime in 1548, but in the internecine struggles for power that followed two years later he was again struck off and banished from court after an abortive conspiracy against the government leaders. He died, supposedly of grief over his expulsion from court, on 30 July 1550.
Somerset turned out to be a good soldier but a hopeless administrator. He was arrogant, headstrong and impetuous, and ruled by his imperious second wife, Anne Stanhope. Paget tried desperately to make him both more amenable to the differing views within the Council and more flexible in the implementation of government:
Of late, your grace is grown into great choleric fashions when so ever you are contraried [to] that [which] you have conceived in your head.
A subject in great authority, as your grace is, using such fashion is like to fall into great danger and peril of his own person besides that to the commonwealth.
I beseech you: when the whole Council shall move you or give you advice in a matter … to follow the same and relent some time from your own opinions.18
No wonder Paget later wrote to the Lord Protector on 7 July 1549:
Remember what you promised me in the gallery at Westminster before the breath was out of the body of the king … Remember what you promised me immediately after, devising with me concerning the place which you now occupy. And that was to follow my advice in all your proceedings, more than any man’s.19
Paget also felt it necessary later to send Somerset very sensible advice about the practice of good governance, laying down his ‘manifesto’ in a letter to the Lord Protector on 2 January 1549: ‘I pray your grace accept this token in good part which very hearty love and great carefulness of your grace’s well doings has moved me to send [you], to whom I wish as well as I do to my own soul.’ Always, he counselled:
Deliberate maturely in all things.
Execute quickly the deliberations.
Do justice without respect.20
Make assured and staid wise men ministers under you. Maintain the ministers in their offices.
Punish the disobedient according to their deserts.
Reward the king’s worthy servants liberally and quickly. Give your own to your own and the king’s to the king’s frankly.
Dispatch suitors shortly. Be affable to the good and stern to the evil.
Follow advice in Council.
Take fee or reward of the king only.
Keep your ministers about you uncorrupt.
Paget added: ‘Thus God will prosper you, the king favour you and all men love you.’21 It is good advice that some governments could do worse than follow closely today.
What of Katherine, now the dowager queen? In his will, Henry repaid her devoted care of him and her compassion for his children with substantial legacies granted in praise of her virtues of ‘great love, obedience, chastity of life and wisdom’.22
She was angry that the role of regent had been taken away from her and protested to the new government, but it ignored her appeals. At least she was not going to starve. The cash and goods left to her, worth just over £1 million at today’s prices, were not overgenerous, but the dower and jointure made Katherine very wealthy indeed. Her income and her matronly good looks rendered her an attractive catch for anyone audacious enough to woo the king’s widow.
Within just a month after Henry’s death, she was again smitten with her old sweetheart, the roguish Thomas Seymour. Nine love letters exchanged between them over a period of seventeen months survive in various private and public archives to this day. By March 1547, Katherine had probably accepted the Lord High Admiral’s offer of marriage but, as with Henry, told him that there had to be a decent period of public mourning before a wedding could be staged.
In one letter, Seymour writes playfully of a supper with Katherine’s sister Anne Herbert and her husband, Sir William, later to be created Earl of Pembroke.
She waded further with me touching my lodging with your highness at Chelsea, which I denied … but that indeed, I went by the garden as I went to the bishop of London’s house and at this point stood with her a long time.
Till at last, she told me further tokens, which made me change my colours, who, like a false wench, took me [in] with the manner.
Then remembering what she was and knowing how well you trusted her, examined whether those things came from your highness or were feigned. She answered that they came from your highness … for which I render unto your highness my most humble and hearty thanks.
For by her company, in default of yours, I shall shorten the weeks in these parts, which heretofore were four days longer in everyone of them than they were under the plummet [featherbed] at Chelsea.23
He writes of Katherine’s ‘goodness to me, showed at our last lodging together’ and asks to receive her letters – even just ‘three lines in a letter from you’24 – and for her to send him ‘one of your small pictures, if you have any left, who with his silence,25 shall give me occasion to think on the friendly cheer that I shall receive when my suit shall be at an end’.
The Herberts acted as a discreet post office for the lovers’ letters, but chief amongst the couple’s concerns was what the new boy king, let alone the Lord Protector, would think of their plans for marriage so soon after Henry’s death. Katherine wrote to Seymour from her palace in Chelsea regarding his attempts to win approval from his brother:
My lord: As I gather from your letter, delivered to my brother Herbert, you are in some fear how to frame my lord your brother [the Lord Protector] to speak in your favour. The denial of your request shall make his folly more manifest to the world, which will grieve me more than the want of his speaking.
I would not wish you to importune for his goodwill, if it come not frankly at the first …
I would desire you might obtain the king’s letters in your favour and also the aid and furtherance of the most notable of the Council … which thing obtained shall be no such small shame to your brother and loving sister.26
Seymour was obviously in a hurry to arrange the wedding ceremony, which worried her:
My lord, whereas you charge me with a promise, written with mine own hand, to change the two years into two months, I think you have no such plain sentence written in my hand.
I know not whether you be a paraphraser or not.
If you be learned in that science, it is possible you may of one word make a whole sentence, and yet not at all times alter the true meaning of the writer; as it appears by this your exposition upon my writing.
Katherine was keen to keep up good appearances and to avoid the risk of scandal:
When it shall be your pleasure to repair hither, you must take some pain to come early in the morning that you may be gone again by seven o’clock and so I suppose you may come without suspect [suspicion].
I pray you let me have knowledge overnight at what hour you will come, that your portress may wait at the gate to the fields for you.
She signs herself: ‘By her that is, and shall be, your humble, true and loving wife during her life, Katherine the Queen.’
Another of her letters sought reassurance that her lover was not offended by her slowness in writing, ‘for my promise was but once in a fortnight’. The letter also contains the first signs of a rift between Katherine and her prospective brother-in-law, the Lord Protector, and his feisty wife Anne. Katherine, as dowager queen, felt very slighted at being edged away from the court and the centre of attention:
My lord, your brother, has deferred answer concerning such requests as I made to him till his coming here, which he said shall be immediately after the term.
This is not his first promise I have received of his coming and yet under-performed.
I think my lady has taught him this lesson: for it is her custom to promise many comings to her friends and to perform none. I trust in greater matters, she is more circumspect.27
Seymour, in his thin, spindly, spider-like scrawl, replied in haste from St James’s Palace:
Yesterday in the morning, I had written a letter to your highness upon occasion I met with a man of my Lord Marquis [Katherine’s brother William Parr, Marquis of Northampton] as I came to Chelsea, whom I knew not, who told Nicholas Throgmorton28 that I was in Chelsea fields with other circumstances which I defer till at more leisure.
Which letter being finished … I remembered your commandment29 to me, wherewith I threw it into the fire, be minding to keep your requests and desires, and for that it hath pleased you to be the first breaker of your appointment, I shall desire your highness to reserve my thanks of the same …
As touching on my lord’s promise, I trust to make you friends, assuring you that I wait as well on him as any man he has, to creep into his favour to bring our matters well to pass.
My lady of Somerset told me on Friday night that she would [go] to Sheen the next day and at her return on Tuesday (which is tomorrow) she would see your highness, but I think it will be Wednesday ere she comes for that my lord will be tomorrow all day in the Star Chamber.30
He adds: ‘I never over-read it after it was written, [therefore] if any faults be I pray you hold me excused.’
Katherine received another of Seymour’s letters, delivered by one of her sister’s servants. She wrote back that beforehand, she was hell bent on writing to Somerset so that
he might well and manifestly perceive my fantasy to be more towards you for marriage than any other.
Notwithstanding I am determined to add thereto a full determination never to marry and to break it when I have done, if I live two years. I think to see the king one day this week at which time I would be glad to see you, though I scarce dare ask in speech.
She promises to write letters to him once every three days and that she had
sent in haste to the painters for one of my little pictures which is very perfect by the judgement of as many as has seen the same. The last I had myself I bestowed … upon my lady of Suffolk.
Katherine adds plaintively:
I dare not desire to see you for fear of suspicion. I wish the world was as well pleased with our meaning as I am well assured the goodness of God’s but the world is so wicked that it cannot be contented with good things.31
Both official and family approval for the marriage was essential. After being approached by Seymour, Princess Mary, on 3 June, firmly declined to become involved:
[I have] received your letter wherein (I think) I perceive strange news concerning a suit you have in hand to the Queen for marriage.
My lord … it stands less without my poor honour to be a meddler in this matter, considering whose wife her grace was of late.
Besides, if she be minded to grant you your suit my letters shall do you but small pleasure. On the other side, 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 remembrance.
Wherefore, I shall most earnestly require you to think no unkindness in me though I refuse to be a meddler anyways in this matter (wooing matters set apart, wherein I being a maid, am nothing cunning).32
Seymour then tried the young king. He employed John Fowler, a member of the Privy Chamber, to suggest the idea that Edward’s uncle should marry his stepmother. After several embarrassing false starts – including the king’s bright but inconvenient idea of Seymour marrying Anne of Cleves – on 25 June, Edward wrote to Katherine blessing the union:
Proceed therefore in your good course. Continue to love my father and show the great kindness to me, which I have ever perceived in you.
Cease not to love and read the Scriptures but persevere in always reading them.33
The couple may have signed the written marriage contracts and exchanged rings within thirty-four days of Henry’s death. They were probably not married at Chelsea until early June, although it may even have been later by a few weeks, as van der Delft reported on 10 July 1547 that
the Queen [dowager] was married a few days ago since to the Lord Admiral, the brother of the Protector and still causes herself to be served ceremoniously as queen, which, it appears, is the custom here.
Nevertheless, when she went lately to dine at the house of her new husband she was not served with the royal state, from which it is presumed that she will eventually live according to her new condition.34
Somerset was sorely offended by the marriage and disputed the ownership of the jewels given to the dowager queen by Henry. Katherine vented her anger to her new husband at the cavalier treatment accorded her by Somerset:
My lord: This shall be to advertise you that my lord your brother has this afternoon a little made me warm.
It was fortunate we were so much distant for I suppose else I should have bitten him.
What cause have they to fear [you] having such a wife? It is requisite for them to continually pray for a short dispatch of that hell.
Tomorrow or else upon Saturday at afternoon about three o’clock I will see the king where I intend to utter all my choler to my lord your brother, if you do not give me advice to the contrary: for I would be loath to do anything to hinder your matter.
I will declare unto you how my lord has used me concerning Fausterne,35 and after I shall most humbly desire to direct mine answer to him in that behalf … My lord, I beseech you send me word with speed how I shall use myself to my new brother.36
It was a testing time for her, made worse by the insistence of precedence over her at court by Somerset’s wife. Katherine wrote to Seymour:
How is this that through my marriage to you, the wife of your brother is treating me with contempt and presumes to go before me.
I will never allow it, for I am Queen and shall be called so all my life and I promise you if she does again what she did yesterday I will pull her back myself.37
Somerset was unsympathetic. He wrote to Seymour: ‘Brother, are you not my younger brother and am I not Protector? Do you not know that your wife, before she married the king, was of lower rank than my wife?’
The next day, in the chapel either at Westminster or St James’s Palace, the Protector’s wife ‘came and thrust herself forward and sat in the Queen’s place. As soon as the Queen saw it, she could not bear it and took hold of her arm and said: “I deserve this for degrading myself from a queen to marrying the admiral.” The other ladies that were there would not allow the quarrel to go further.’
The duchess was brimming over with fury about Katherine’s behaviour, refused to bear her train and told all and sundry about her contempt for the dowager queen:
Did not Henry VIII marry Katherine Parr in his doting days when he brought himself so low by his lust and cruelty that no lady that stood on her honour would venture on him?
And shall I now give place to her who in her former estate was but Latimer’s widow and is now fain to cast herself on a younger brother.
If master admiral teaches his wife no better manners, I am she that will.38
Aside from court jealousies and the row over ownership of her jewels, Katherine was still dutifully concerned about the welfare of her stepchildren. A letter to her from Elizabeth, written from Cheshunt, Hertfordshire, sometime in 1547 talks fondly of the queen dowager’s friendship:
Truly I was replete with sorrow to depart from your highness, especially leaving you undoubtful of health. Although I answered little, I weighed it more deeper when you said you would warn me of all evils that you should hear of me.
For if your grace had not a good opinion of me, you would not have offered friendship to me that way, that all men judge the contrary.
But what may I more say than thank God for providing such friends to me; desiring God to enrich me with their long life and [grant] me grace to be in heart no less thankful to receive it than I now am glad in writing to show it.
Although I have plenty of matter, here I will stay for I know you are not quiet to read.39
Elizabeth, now aged thirteen, came to live with Katherine at Chelsea very soon after Henry’s death and was to spend seventeen months with her stepmother and her new husband. Therein lay great danger: the boisterous Seymour was fond of fun and games with the princess, and she, in the first flush of puberty, enjoyed his flirtations. Her governess Catherine, or ‘Cat’, Ashley later testified:
At Chelsea, after he was married to the Queen, he would come many mornings into Lady Elizabeth’s chamber before she was ready and sometimes before she had risen and if she were up he would bid her good morrow and would ask her how she did and strike her on the back or on the buttocks familiarly …
And if she were in bed, he would put open the curtains and make as though he would come at her and one morning he strove to have kissed her in bed.
That one morning at Hanworth, the Queen came with him and she and the Lord Admiral tickled the Lady Elizabeth in the bed.
Another time at Hanworth, he romped with her in the garden and cut her gown, being black cloth, into a hundred pieces, and when this deponent came up and chided Lady Elizabeth, she answered that she could not strive withal, for the Queen held her while the Lord Admiral cut her dress.40
There is evidence that Katherine grew uneasy and angry at this flirting: ‘The Lord Admiral came sometimes [to Elizabeth’s chamber] without the Queen, which some misliked.’41 Shortly after Whitsun 1548, Katherine put her foot down and sent Elizabeth back to Cheshunt.
Then, astonishingly, the dowager queen, at the age of around thirty-five, became pregnant. She retreated from Chelsea to her manor of Hanworth in Middlesex because of the spread of the plague. One of her letters from there, on 9 June 1548, talks of her unborn child stirring in her womb:
I gave your little knave your blessing who like an honest man stirred apace after and before. For Mary Odell, being abed with me, had laid her hand upon my belly to feel it stir.
It has stirred these three days every morning and evening so that I trust when you come, it will make you some pastime.
And thus I end, bidding my sweetheart and loving husband better to fare than myself.42
Katherine was hoping that Seymour would escort her from Hanworth to their home at Sudeley Castle, near Winchcombe, Gloucestershire, where she was planning to spend her confinement. But a threatened attack by the French fleet on Pevensey Castle, Sussex, could have summoned the admiral to duty at any time. ‘I am very sorry for the news of the Frenchmen,’ she wrote to him. ‘I pray God it not be a let [hindrance] to our journey. As soon as you know what they will do, good my lord, I beseech you to let me hear from you, for I shall not be quiet till I know.’
Her husband replied from Westminster the same day, saying that her letter revived his spirits ‘partly for that I do perceive you be armed with patience’ but ‘chiefest, that I hear my little man doth shake his poll’, referring to the unborn child’s movements, probably of its head. Seymour had spoken to the Lord Protector about taking a leave of absence from his duties:
I spoke to him of your going down into the country on Wednesday, who was sorry thereof, trusting that I would be here all tomorrow to hear what the Frenchmen will do.
And on Monday dinner, I trust to be with you. As for the Frenchmen, I have no mistrust that they shall be any let of my going with you on this journey or of any continuance [at Sudeley] there with your highness.43
He adds: ‘I do desire your highness to keep the little knave so lean and gaunt with your good diet and walking, that he may be so small that he may creep out of a mouse hole.’ Seymour took his wife and Lady Jane Grey – the young daughter of the Marquis of Dorset and Seymour’s ward – to Sudeley on 13 June, for the last three months of Katherine’s pregnancy. She was clearly having a difficult time. Elizabeth wrote to Katherine as her confinement drew near:
Although your highness’s letters be most joyful to me in absence, yet considering what pain it is for you to write, your grace being so great with child and so sickly …
I much rejoice at your health, with the well liking of the country, with my humble thanks that your grace wished me with you … [Seymour] shall be diligent to give me knowledge from time to time how his busy child doth and if I were at his birth, no doubt I would see him beaten for the trouble he hath put to you.
Master [Sir Anthony] Denny and my lady [his wife, Joan] with humble thanks pray most entirely for your grace, praying the almighty God to send you a most lucky deliverance …
Written, with very little leisure, this last day of July.
Your humble daughter, Elizabeth.44
Mary also wrote, rather stiffly, on 9 August:
I trust to hear great success of your grace’s great belly and in the meantime shall desire much to hear of your health, which I pray almighty God to continue and increase to his pleasure as much as your own heart can desire.45
Katherine, attended by Henry’s former physician Dr Robert Huicke, gave birth to a healthy daughter on 30 August. She was named Mary, after the princess, her stepsister. Seymour’s brother, the Lord Protector, wrote to congratulate him from Syon on 1 September:
We are right glad to understand by your letters that the Queen your bedfellow has had a happy hour and escaping all danger, has made you the father of so pretty a daughter.
Although (if it so pleased God) it would have been both to us and we suppose to you, a more joy and comfort if it had been this the first a son, yet the escape of danger and the prophecy and good promise of this to a great sort of happy sons, the which as you write, we trust no less than to be true.46
But all was not well. Like Jane Seymour, Katherine contracted an infection and became delirious. She died of puerperal fever between two and three in the morning of 5 September 1548. Lady Elizabeth Tyrwhit said that two days before her death, Katherine told her that ‘she did fear such things in herself’ and ‘that she was sure she could not live’. Katherine had held Seymour’s hand and said: ‘My lady Tyrwhitt, I am not well handled, for those that be about me care not for me, but stand laughing at my grief and the more good I will them, the less good they will to me.’ The admiral answered: ‘Why sweetheart, I would do you no hurt.’ But she replied: ‘No, my lord, I think so,’ and whispered in his ear, ‘But my lord, you have given me many shrewd taunts.’ She went on: ‘My lord, I would have given a thousand marks to have had my full talk with Huicke the first day I was delivered but I dared not for [fear of] displeasing you.’47
Although sounding sinister, these are likely to be the murmurings of a woman in delirium. She recovered her reason to dictate her will, ‘being persuaded of the approach of death’, leaving everything to her husband. It remained unsigned but was attested as a true record of her wishes by her doctor, Huicke, and her chaplain, John Parkhurst.
Seymour was devastated. He told the Marquis of Dorset that he was ‘so amazed [by] my great loss’ that he would break up and dissolve ‘my whole house’.48 But it was not long before he saw an end to his grief and his ambitions remained unchecked. In January 1549, Pigott, his servant, told his sister that he had overheard the admiral saying that ‘he would wear black for a year and then knew where to have a wife’.49
In May 1782, Katherine’s grave was found by one of those strange parties of eighteenth-century tourists, part day-trippers, part antiquarians, always with an active morbid curiosity. Some ladies were examining Sudeley Castle’s ruined chapel of St Mary,50 then used to house rabbits, and after noting a large alabaster slab fixed in the north wall, they began digging in the ground not far away:
Not much more than a foot from the surface, they found a leaden envelope51 which they opened in two places, on the face and breast, and found it to contain a human body wrapped in cerecloth.
Upon removing what covered the face, they discovered the features and particularly the eyes in perfect preservation.
Alarmed at this sight and with the smell, which came principally from the cerecloth, they ordered the ground to be thrown in immediately without judiciously closing up the cerecloth and lead, which covered the face.52
Written on a label attached to the lead coffin was an inscription identifying the body within: Katherine – ‘wife to King Henry the VIII and the wife of Thomas Lord of Sudeley, high admiral of England and uncle to King Edward VI’. Two years later, another party disturbed her remains and found that decomposition had ‘reduced the face to bone’. In 1786, an antiquary recovered samples of the clothes worn by the corpse, its hair and a tooth, which are preserved still at Sudeley Castle. The queen was reburied in a new monument, including a life-size effigy of her, designed by that architect of high Victorian gothic taste, Sir George Gilbert Scott, in 1863.53
Katherine’s daughter Mary went to live with her mother’s old friend and lady-in-waiting, Katherine, Duchess of Suffolk, but died probably before the age of two.
Just over a month after being chief mourner at Katherine’s funeral,54 Lady Jane Grey, then a child of eleven, wrote a letter in her careful handwriting to the Lord Admiral:
Thinking myself so much bound to your lordship for your great goodness towards me from time to time, that I cannot by any means be able to recompense the least part thereof, I purposed to write a few rude words to your lordship rather as a token to show how much worth I think your lordship’s goodness than to give worthy thanks for the same.
These my letters shall testify to you that like as you have become towards me a loving and kind father, so I shall be always most ready to obey your godly monitions and good instructions as becomes one upon whom you have heaped so many benefits.55
Thomas Seymour, always jealous of his brother, the Protector, had long nourished plans to snatch power and control the king. He had tried to win influence by giving Edward presents and pocket money. In addition, he had other grievances against Somerset. The admiral showed his brother-in-law William Parr, Marquis of Northampton, ‘the suits to the Protector touching the Queen’s servants, jewels and other things which he claimed to be hers’.56 All these had been denied her since Henry’s death. He also harboured dreams of marrying one of the two princesses, ideas firmly quashed by members of the Privy Council. He was, as in most things, rather obvious, and was arrested on 17 January 1549 for treason. Rumours swept London about what had happened. The Spanish ambassador van der Delft reported to his imperial master on 27 January:
Sire, I have heard that the Admiral of England, with the help of some people about the court, attempted to outrage the person of the young king by night and has been taken to the Tower.
The alarm was given by the gentleman who sleeps in the king’s chamber, who awakened by the barking of the dog that lies before the king’s door, cried out: ‘Help! Murder!’
Everybody rushed in but the only thing they found was the lifeless corpse of the dog.
Suspicion points to the Admiral because he had scattered the watch that night on several errands and because it has been noticed that he has some secret plot on hand, hoping to marry … the lady Elizabeth who is also under grave suspicion.57
John Fowler, Groom of the Privy Chamber, told the Council how, early one morning, Seymour had arrived at St James’s Palace and was surprised at the lack of guards there. He said there was ‘slender company about the king’ – no one in the presence chamber and ‘not a dozen in the whole house. A man might steal away the king now for I came with more men than is in all the house besides’.58
Paget told van der Delft later: ‘He [Seymour] has been a great rascal,’59 which may serve as a suitable epitaph on his life. Somerset signed his brother’s death warrant and the admiral was executed on 20 March 1549.
Elizabeth had been unwittingly dragged into Seymour’s plot and was now facing some embarrassing questions. She wrote in her careful, clear hand to Somerset that she had never contemplated marriage ‘without the Council’s consent thereto’. Moreover, she had heard that there were
rumours abroad which be greatly both 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.
Elizabeth ends:
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 the court after your first determination that I may show myself there as I am. Written in haste from Hatfield, this 28 of January. Your assured friend to my little power, Elizabeth.60
Somerset himself was toppled from power after openly quarrelling with his old ally John Dudley, Earl of Warwick. His influence and authority had also been damaged by his brother’s disgrace. In the government crisis of 1549, when rebellions broke out in the West, East Anglia and the Midlands and were threatened elsewhere, Somerset had acted hesitantly and incompetently. On 6 October, he had moved the king for his safety to Windsor Castle, but his colleagues in the Council in London arrested him on 14 October and he confessed to twenty-nine charges on 24 October. He was released in February 1550, freely pardoned and restored to membership of the Privy Council on 10 April, only to be arrested again in October 1551 on trumped-up charges of high treason and felony. He was convicted only of felony (for inciting a riot) but none the less was executed on 22 January 1552. The king, in his personal chronicle, recorded his uncle’s death merely as: ‘The Duke of Somerset had his head cut off upon Tower Hill between eight and nine o’clock in the morning.’
The energetic Warwick, later created Duke of Northumberland, had triumphed in the power struggle for control of king and realm, becoming president of Edward’s Council. When the king fell ill, probably with tuberculosis, in the early summer of 1553, the prospect of staunchly Catholic Mary succeeding loomed large in his and other Protestant minds. The king, sometime in early April, drew up his plan for the succession, which excluded both his half-sisters, who had been laid down as his successors by the Third Act of Succession passed in Henry VIII’s reign. Edward’s document created a brand-new succession path, beginning with the male heirs of Frances, Duchess of Suffolk, daughter of Mary, Henry’s younger sister. It continued with the male heirs of Frances’ daughters, Jane, Catherine and Mary Grey. The major problem was that none had any sons when Edward’s ‘devise for the succession’ was written.61 The solution for the Privy Councillors was easy: to make the succession far more viable by ensuring that it went directly to Lady Jane Grey and her male heirs. The alteration was open and above board: the judges, led by Lord Chief Justice Montague, were asked to deploy their legal brains on the issues raised. Unsurprisingly, they declined to become involved ‘for the danger of treason’ and Northumberland
fell into a great anger and rage and called [Montague] traitor before all the Council and said that in the quarrel of that matter, he would fight in his shirt with any man living.62
Edward summoned the judges to his presence on 15 June and told them in no uncertain terms ‘with sharp words and angry countenance’ to help him draw up the royal will. The legal opposition collapsed and letters patent, implementing the succession, were drawn up within the next few days.
Edward died, ‘thin and wasted’, on 6 July, in his sixteenth year. Lady Jane Grey was duly named as his successor and was proclaimed queen of England in London on 10 July 1553. Princess Mary had fled to East Anglia and, after mustering forces loyal to her cause and to a Catholic accession, marched on the capital where the Council named her as queen nine days later. Jane, who had married one of the sons of Dudley, now Duke of Northumberland, was beheaded on 12 February 1554, aged just seventeen. Northumberland was also doomed. At his trial, he questioned whether his actions, under the authority of the Great Seal of the realm, could be treason, but his judges told him that the Seal was not that of the lawful queen but of an usurper,63 the unhappy and unwilling Lady Jane Grey. On the Tower Hill scaffold, on 22 August 1553, he paid the penalty for it.
One of his confederates involved in the fiasco of Lady Jane Grey’s abortive succession was the ubiquitous John Gates. While he undoubtedly was a religious reformer, his upwardly mobile progression through the Edwardine government was more motivated by personal ambition and greed. He was, however, a notorious and enthusiastic despoiler of churches. As Sheriff of Essex, he was ordered to enforce the injunctions of 1550 to destroy ‘superstitious altars’. The Essex historian Philip Morant later wrote of him:
This covetous man pulled the chancel [of Chelmsford Church] down for the sake of making money out of the materials, notwithstanding so many noble persons had chosen it for their resting place, namely Humfrey Stafford, duke of Buckingham, Anne, his wife and three of the sons, including Sir Henry, who had married Margaret, countess of Richmond, grandmother of Henry VIII.64
Gates also played a role in preventing the planned clandestine flight of Princess Mary to Antwerp in July 1550. In April 1551, he was made Vice-Chamberlain and Captain of the King’s Guard, with a seat on the Privy Council, and granted further lands worth £120 a year.65 On 7 July 1552, he was made Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. He was also executed for treason on 22 August 1553, shortly after Mary’s accession, the axeman requiring three blows to bloodily sever his head.66
Anthony Denny served in William Parr’s expedition to put down the Norfolk insurgents in Kett’s Rebellion in 1549, but died in September that year, probably on the 10th, at his home at Cheshunt, Hertfordshire.67
Paget was created Baron Paget of Beaudesert in 1549 and remained faithful to his troublesome leader, Somerset. After the Protector’s downfall, Paget was arrested in 1551 on suspicion of plotting against Dudley and the following year was degraded from the Order of the Garter and fined £6,000 over allegations that he exploited his offices for private gain. After Edward’s death, he joined Queen Jane’s Council, but quickly changed sides and sanctioned the proclamation declaring Mary queen. He was rewarded by being appointed a Privy Councillor and was made her Lord Privy Seal in 1556. On Elizabeth’s accession, he quit all his offices and died in 1563.
Stephen Gardiner quickly fell foul of the new Protestant government of Edward VI following its introduction of doctrinal changes and was held in the Fleet Prison from September 1547, to which ‘he had been as well used as if it had been his house’.68 He was released after promising to conform but
forgetful of his promises, he had raised much strife and contention and had caused all his servants to be secretly armed and harnessed69 and had put public affronts on those whom the Council sent down to preach in his diocese.
In some places, to disgrace them, he went into the pulpit before them and warned the people to beware of such teachers and to receive no other doctrine but what he had taught them.
He was placed under house arrest at his home in Southwark and, after preaching a ‘seditious’ sermon before Edward, was sent to the Tower ‘and the door of his closet sealed up’. In April 1551, he was deprived of his bishopric, but after the accession of the Catholic Mary Tudor in 1553, he was swiftly freed on 9 August, the day after Edward’s funeral, and was given the Great Seal of England, as Lord Chancellor, four days later. But his glory days were short-lived: on 13 November 1555, he died at the Palace of Westminster between noon and one o’clock. His body was brought by water to his home in Southwark and elaborate obsequies followed, before he was buried at Winchester.70
As for Cranmer, the Book of Common Prayer, with its wonderful, rolling English words and phrases, is his lasting memorial.71 The first version appeared in 1549 and a revised edition in 1552. As if his Protestant views were not damning enough in Mary’s eyes, he was persuaded to sign the document naming Lady Jane Grey queen and consequently, after her succession, he quickly ended up in the Tower, accused of treason and sedition. He was taken to Oxford and confronted with charges of heresy. In the face of death, the old man’s resolve weakened and he signed a number of papers acknowledging the supremacy of the Pope and the truth of Catholic doctrine. In the end, he withdrew these recantations and was burnt at the stake on 21 March 1556.
Anne of Cleves died in 1557 and was buried in Westminster Abbey in a tomb now scarcely visible on the south side of the high altar. At least in death she had attained the status of being amongst the kings and queens, a place so long denied her.
Finally, there is Will Somers, Henry’s fool. After the old king’s death, he went into honourable retirement in apartments at Hampton Court, occasionally appearing in plays, masques and entertainments at Edward’s court. Amongst these popular guest appearances was one at Christmastime 1551, at Greenwich, when he appeared in cardboard armour for personal mock-combat with the young king. Five shillings were also paid for other costumes for him of ‘white-banded blue brocaded silk, guarded [edged] with red satin’ and ‘a frock of tawny silk striped with gold [and] furred about the neck’.72 He also appeared in ‘interludes’ for Mary and was present at the coronation of Elizabeth in January 1559. He died on 15 June 1560,73 his laughter and merry jibes at last silenced, and was buried in the church of St Leonard’s, Shoreditch, London.