11
WHEN SHE WAS thirteen, Elizabeth had her portrait painted. The work, a companion piece to one of Edward, was intended for her father. It shows a serious young girl on the brink of womanhood. The small pointed breasts are visible under the gorgeous red damask of the gown. She is obviously studious, as one of her exquisite long white fingers is inserted at her place in the book she is holding, while another book – probably the Bible – is on a lectern behind her. The red-gold hair of the Tudors framing the white face is revealed under the fashionable French hood studded with pearls. Pearls, which were to become the trademark of the Virgin Queen because of their purity, encircle the slender neck and waist and embellish the top of the gown. The face still holds some of its childish roundness, but she has the high arched nose of her father; there is already a hint of the long, thin, oval face with high cheekbones and pointed chin she has inherited from her mother. The mouth is determined. The eyes are already wary.
In lieu of her father, Elizabeth presented the portrait to her brother in the late spring of 1549. Always conscious of and insecure about her looks but aware from an early age of her intellectual prowess, she wrote: ‘For the face, I grant, I might well blush to offer, but the mind I shall never be ashamed to present.’
As Elizabeth had not yet come of age – fourteen for a girl – at her father’s death, it was decided that she would continue in the household of the Queen Dowager, Katherine, with whom she enjoyed such a close and convivial relationship. Katherine, already a rich widow when she married Henry, had been left a generous legacy by the King; she now withdrew to her manor of Chelsea. Both Henry’s daughters were taken aback by Katherine’s remarriage, which took place with unseemly haste within three months, without waiting out the proper period of mourning for their father. Mary wrote to Elizabeth to suggest she leave their stepmother’s household, but Elizabeth replied this would cause offence.
Thomas Seymour had been Katherine’s sweetheart before her marriage to the King; he had tactfully withdrawn once the King’s interest in Katherine, then Lady Latimer, had become apparent. It is salutary to know that the ambitious Seymour renewed his suit to the Queen Dowager only after he had asked his brother, Protector Somerset, for the hand of either Mary or Elizabeth – preferably the latter, who was by far the more nubile and attractive – and been refused. According to Henry VIII’s will, neither of his daughters might marry without the Council’s consent, and that would hardly have been forthcoming for a marriage between the Lady Elizabeth and this ambitious troublemaker. Besides, there was the obstacle of consanguinity: Seymour was the brother of one of Elizabeth’s stepmothers, whose marriage to the King her father had been made possible by the execution of her own mother, and he was the uncle of her brother; soon he would be the husband of another stepmother. It only shows how deluded Seymour was to have believed that such a match would ever have been considered.
Elizabeth seems to have learned of his interest from her governess, later admitting: ‘Kat Aschylye tolde me, after that my Lord Admiralde was married to the Quene, that if my Lorde might have his own Wil, he wolde have had me, afore the Quene.’ For her part, Katherine probably reasoned that she had nursed three ageing husbands – she had had to employ all her wits to survive Henry’s capricious temperament – and now deserved some pleasure. She seems to have been in love with Seymour, a handsome rogue whose brazen charm and physique made him highly attractive to women.
Lord Admiral and newly created Baron Seymour of Sudeley, Thomas Seymour’s ambition far outstripped his ability. He bitterly resented the fact that his elder brother had sole authority over their nephew and a monopoly of power, while he was merely allotted a place on the Council, a title, office and lands. Thomas sought to win the influence he felt was rightly his by other means. Quite unrealistically, he aimed to become the King’s governor, leaving his elder brother to run the country. Already more popular with his nephew simply because he was more fun, he tried to subvert the King by slipping him extra pocket money. Katherine was appalled that her stepson, who had lacked for nothing when as regent she had charge of him, was being treated as a mere schoolboy and kept short of cash by Somerset. Since Henry VIII’s will nominated the Suffolk family, the descendants of his younger sister Mary, as next in line of succession after his own three children, Thomas secured the Lady Jane Grey, the Suffolks’ eldest daughter, as his ward, promising her ambitious parents that he would marry her to the King. Meanwhile, his own marriage to the Queen Dowager had given him control of the Lady Elizabeth, who effectively became his stepdaughter.
As stepfather and guardian, it was Seymour’s duty to protect Elizabeth, an under-age girl living in his household. Instead, he abused his position of trust; it could be said that he sexually abused her. It was Elizabeth’s first encounter with adult sexuality and was to mark her indelibly for life. All later favourites, particularly Leicester and Essex, bore some physical resemblance to Seymour. Tall and well built, with auburn hair and beard, he was dangerous, rash and impetuous, but even mature women found his charm irresistible. It is not altogether surprising therefore that Elizabeth fell for him; it was heady stuff, this delicious, forbidden entanglement with a man who made her feel desirable. And there was just that tinge of incest – taking ‘Father’ away from ‘Mother’, or accepting the sexual advances of ‘Uncle’ – to make it more piquant.
After Thomas Seymour was arrested for his treasonable activities and Kat Ashley was held in the Tower for questioning, she testified that
he wold come many Mornyngs into the said Lady Elizabeth’s Chamber, before she were redy, and sometime before she did rise. And if she were up, he wold bid hir good Morrow, an ax how she did, and strike hir upon the Bak or on the Buttockes famylearly, and so go forth through his Lodgings … And if she were in hir Bed, he wold put open the Curteyns, and bid hir good Morrow, and make as though he wold come at hir: and she wold go further in the Bed, so that he could not come at hir.
An invitation, if ever there was one, for him to do so. On another occasion, ‘he strave to have kissed hir in hir Bed’, at which Kat Ashley ‘bad hym go away for shame’. When they were in residence at his town house, he possessed a key to the room and would sometimes enter in a state of undress, in his nightshirt and bare-legged. For Elizabeth, these visits must have been thrilling, exciting and frightening.
Although a sinister interpretation has always been placed on Seymour’s actions, they might have been innocent horseplay. Even so, it was hardly appropriate behaviour for the King’s unmarried sister, and Elizabeth must have appreciated this, because she took to rising very early, so that she was already at her books by the time Seymour entered her bedchamber. Katherine, pregnant and aware of her husband’s frolics with her stepdaughter, does not seem to have known what to make of the situation or how to deal with it. After a word from a concerned Kat Ashley, she began to accompany Seymour when he came to tickle Elizabeth in bed, to ensure that it was just innocent play. On another occasion, however, Katherine laughingly held Elizabeth prisoner, while Seymour systematically tore her black mourning gown to shreds. The sexual innuendo is obvious, but Katherine seems to have been oblivious to it.
Any lingering doubts Katherine harboured as to her husband’s probity were removed when she found Seymour and Elizabeth in an embrace. Angry recriminations took place behind locked doors. Probably Katherine did not hold her stepdaughter responsible, but she seems to have given Elizabeth a very stern lecture on the importance of guarding her virtue. The daughter of a queen who had been tried and executed for adultery and incest could not afford the slightest blemish on her reputation. Her enemies would be only too willing to believe that Anne Boleyn’s daughter was as lascivious as her mother, or, indeed, as her aunt, Mary Boleyn, who had been King Henry’s mistress.
The dual spectre of adultery and incest had overshadowed Elizabeth from birth and here she was, reliving the sins of her parents. A female without virtue would not be considered worthy of the crown or as a suitable bride for a prince. To preserve Elizabeth’s reputation and to remove temptation from her grasping husband, Katherine decided it was best to send her to Cheshunt, the home of Sir Anthony Denny, a friend who had served the late King as chief gentleman of the privy chamber and who was married to Kat Ashley’s sister, Joan.
It was a sobering experience for Elizabeth, who left the Queen Dowager’s household uncharacteristically lost for words. On the journey she had time for reflection. She wrote to Katherine:
Although I could not be plentiful in giving thanks for the manifold kindness received at your highness’s hand at my departure, yet I am something to be born withal, for truly I was replete with sorrow to depart from your highness, especially leaving you undoubtful of health [Katherine had been very sick in early pregnancy]. And albeit I answered little I weighed it more deeper when you said you would warn me of all evil 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 …
She signs the letter, ‘Your highness’ humble daughter, Elizabeth’.
Katherine moved to Sudeley Castle in Gloucestershire for her confinement and was soon missing Elizabeth’s company. The two continued a loving correspondence. On 7 September 1548, Elizabeth’s fifteenth birthday, Katherine gave birth to a daughter, and died of puerperal fever a few days later. In her delirium, she raved about those whom she loved betraying her. One of her attendants, Lady Tyrwhit, witnessed the scene, and would later hold it against Elizabeth.
Elizabeth’s sorrow at the loss of such a true friend can be imagined; she must also have felt guilt, shame and remorse at her part in causing Katherine unhappiness during the last months of her life. The association between sex and death, first planted in the child’s mind when she learned of her mother’s execution, came back to haunt the adolescent. If Elizabeth had not already made up her mind at eight years of age never to marry, she might well have decided at fifteen that it led inevitably to death. It was perhaps no coincidence that she fell ill after the Queen Dowager’s death.
None of this stopped Seymour from renewing his suit now that he was free. Elizabeth blushed at mention of his name. But while her governess, Kat Ashley, was urging her to consider him, Elizabeth kept a cool head. ‘You may have him if you will,’ Kat told her. Elizabeth had probably already decided against it, but she kept her own counsel. When her treasurer, Thomas Parry, pressed her to admit that she would be pleased to marry Seymour if the Council’s consent was forthcoming, she answered carefully: ‘When that comes to pass, I will do as God shall put in my mind.’ She refused to write Seymour a consolatory letter on the death of his wife, ‘for then she should be thought to woo him’. Nothing daunted, Seymour took it upon himself to hold discussions with Parry about the state of her finances – the normal prelude to any sixteenth-century aristocratic marriage.
The world might have been none the wiser about this sordid episode in Elizabeth’s youth if Thomas Seymour had not been arrested for treason in January 1549. He had been plotting against his brother and tried to secure the person of the young King by breaking into his bedchamber, killing his spaniel in the process. The Council needed to establish whether or not he aimed at the crown through a marriage with Elizabeth. If Elizabeth had agreed to marry him without the Council’s consent, she too could be indicted for treason. Kat Ashley and Thomas Parry were arrested and taken to the Tower for questioning. One sight of the instruments of torture for Parry and a night or two in a cold damp cell had them both spilling the beans on the goings-on in the late Queen Dowager’s household.
At first badly shaken by the arrest of her servants and the appearance at Hatfield of Sir Robert Tyrwhit, who had been sent to interrogate her, Elizabeth quickly took control of herself and faced her interrogator with all the power of her formidable mind. ‘She hath a very good wit, and nothing is gotten of her but by great polity,’ he complained to Somerset. He was convinced that Elizabeth, Ashley and Parry had rehearsed their story beforehand – ‘they all sing one song’ – because there had been ‘a secret promise between [them] never to confess to death’. There is probably some truth in this. When Sir Anthony Denny and William Paulet, Lord St John, came to Hatfield unannounced to take in Ashley and Parry for questioning, there seems to have been time to discuss tactics. Elizabeth might well have appealed to Denny, whose household she had left comparatively recently, and Paulet for advice, which was freely given.
Elizabeth quickly grasped the point that the only treasonable offence was if she had actually agreed to a marriage with Seymour without the Council’s consent, and she had not done that. She knew the terms of her father’s will and she would never disobey it. It was humiliating, of course, that thanks to the confessions of her servants over the following weeks the Council was to learn all the embarrassing details of her romps with Seymour, but none of that constituted treason, only the loss of her dignity.
‘And as concerning Kat Ashley,’ Elizabeth wrote to Somerset at the end of January 1549, ‘she never advised me unto it but said always (when any talked of my marriage) that she would never have me marry – neither in England nor out of England – without the consent of the king’s majesty, your grace’s, and the Council’s.’ She ended her letter by declaring her innocence ‘whereof my conscience beareth me witness, which I would not for all earthly things offend in anything, for I know I have a soul to save as well as other folks have’.
The clever fifteen-year-old now moved on to the offensive:
Master Tyrwhit and others have told me that there goeth rumors abroad which be greatly both against mine honor 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 the court after your first determination, that I may show myself there as I am.
What emerges in succeeding letters is Elizabeth’s preoccupation with her reputation and, above all, how she is perceived by the people: her public image was to be a lifelong obsession and its manipulation the key to her success as sovereign. She is concerned that Somerset has not done anything to quell the rumours about her, but she declines to name the perpetrators, as he suggests, ‘for it is mine own cause, and again that should be but a breeding of an evil name of me that I am glad to punish them, and so get the evil will of the people, which thing I would be loath to have’. She demanded a proclamation confirming her innocence and it was duly issued.
By early March Elizabeth had Protector Somerset sufficiently wrapped around her little finger to request the return of her governess, Kat Ashley. When Lady Tyrwhit had taken her place, Elizabeth had expressed her dissatisfaction in a storm of rage, tears and sulks. She had not so demeaned herself, she said, that the Council had to replace her lady mistress. Tyrwhit was of the opinion that the headstrong girl needed not one but two governesses, while Lady Somerset had severely castigated Kat Ashley, telling her she was not fit to have charge of a king’s daughter. Now Elizabeth pleaded Kat’s cause, not least ‘because that she hath been with me a long time and many years, and hath taken great labor and pain in bringing of me up in learning and honesty’.
Shrewdly, Elizabeth realized that if Kat were not returned to her ‘it shall and doth make men think that I am not clear of the deed myself, but that it is pardoned in me because of my youth, because that she I loved so well is in such a place.’ But it was more than that. Elizabeth’s servants were her ‘family’ in the true sense: they were the one fixed point in the insecure universe of her childhood and she would be loyal to them to the end. Even Parry, who it emerged in the course of the investigations had mismanaged Elizabeth’s finances, was welcomed back, with the proviso that she would in future check her accounts herself.
No one who went to trial for treason in Tudor England escaped the scaffold, but, still, Thomas Seymour’s execution on 20 March 1549 must have come as a shock to Elizabeth. She had been very fond of him. The comment she is supposed to have made – ‘this day died a man of much wit and very little judgement’ – is purely apocryphal. The whole affair marked Elizabeth’s passage into adulthood. Her relationship with Seymour set a pattern for all her subsequent relationships with men: they ended in stalemate, frustration, even death. The experience threw into sharp relief what mattered to her, what defined her: her virtue which was integral to her royal status, her reputation, discretion, the good opinion of the people. Love, sex, marriage – they all came at a high price, perhaps one she was unwilling to pay, let alone risk.
Elizabeth had had a narrow escape and realized that she needed to repair her tarnished reputation. As she was always to do in difficult or stressful periods, she buried herself in her studies. Her tutor William Grindal had died of plague in early 1548 and immediately been replaced by Roger Ascham. Ascham was rare in that he did not believe in pressurizing his pupils – encouraging by his more kindly approach a love of learning – but Elizabeth had an extraordinarily brilliant mind, and he now had the opportunity to develop it to the height of its potential, rounding off the finest humanist education in England.
He had her begin each day reading the New Testament in Greek, after which ‘she read the orations of Isocrates, and the tragedies of Sophocles, which I judged best adapted to supply her tongue with the purest diction, her mind with the most excellent precepts, and her exalted station with a defence against the utmost power of fortune.’ She was steeped in ‘almost the whole of Cicero’ – to teach her oratorical skills – ‘and a great part of Livy’. Ascham’s goals were to inculcate in his pupil moral precepts or maxims, to fortify her mind against adversity, and to impart a model of style. For Elizabeth, style was everything, although in the convoluted sentences of her letters and speeches she did not always follow her tutor’s precept to express herself plainly and directly.
She began to affect sobriety of dress, a calculated bid to persuade any sceptics that she was indeed a virtuous princess. Ascham noted that ‘with respect to personal decoration, she greatly prefers simple elegance to show and splendour, so despising the outward adorning of plaiting the hair and wearing of gold.’ John Aylmer, tutor to Lady Jane Grey, remarked that for the whole of Edward’s reign Elizabeth declined to wear the rich clothes and jewels left her by her father, instead wearing the sort of plain apparel more suited to a Protestant maiden, making the ladies of the court ‘ashamed to be dressed and painted like peacocks’. Indeed, when Mary of Guise made a state visit to Edward’s court, Elizabeth refused to follow the rest of the ladies ‘with their hair froused, curled, and double curled’, but wore hers loose and straight.
Elizabeth’s near disgrace does not seem to have damaged her warm relationship with her brother. When Somerset was toppled and subsequently executed, she ingratiated herself with John Dudley, Earl of Warwick, soon created Duke of Northumberland, who assumed power. Elizabeth, naturally acquisitive, now became a great landed magnate. According to her father’s will, she was to receive an income of £3,000 a year. Under Somerset, she had received this sum, but in cash; by living in the households of first her stepmother and then Sir Anthony Denny, Elizabeth, who had her grandfather Henry VII’s respect for money, was able to hoard a considerable stash of liquid capital. But it was land that counted, because with land came tenants and the ability to muster forces. Northumberland, whose interest was to keep Elizabeth onside and perhaps to use her for some dynastic marriage to a foreign prince, resolved the long-delayed question of what lands she should have with disarming speed. They would only be hers, of course, until marriage, when she would receive the £10,000 dowry stipulated in her father’s will.
The lands lay in a great arc to the north-west of London, sweeping from Berkshire and Oxfordshire round to Buckinghamshire and Hertfordshire, up to Northamptonshire and into Lincolnshire. They included Ashridge, one of her favourite childhood homes, set in rich, wooded hunting country on the Buckinghamshire–Hertfordshire border. Soon she also acquired Hatfield, strategically situated in the middle of the county and only twenty miles to the north of the capital. To the east, her lands bordered her sister’s large territory in East Anglia; it seemed that two over-mighty subjects had been created, but perhaps the intention was to make them rivals to each other rather than to the crown. In London she had Durham Place, but this was later exchanged for the much prized Somerset House, the splendid, Italianate river palace on which the fallen Somerset had lavished such attention.
While Mary remained stubborn in her outspoken opposition to the new regime’s radical religious stance, Elizabeth basked in her new-found favour at court. Henry’s three children had usually kept Christmas together and now Edward was King they maintained the tradition; that is, until Mary and Edward quarrelled over religion and Mary was reduced to tears. At Christmas 1551 the Imperial ambassador grudgingly noted Elizabeth’s arrival, ‘with a great suite of gentlemen and ladies, escorted by one hundred of the King’s horse. She was most honourably received by the Council, who acted thus to show the people how much glory belongs to her who has embraced the new religion and is become a very great lady.’
By the spring of 1553 it was apparent that Elizabeth’s relationship with Edward was under threat. It no longer suited Northumberland’s purposes for them to be close and it soon became obvious to Elizabeth that they were being kept apart. Edward had already entered his final illness, the tuberculosis for which there was no cure. Elizabeth was naturally concerned for a brother whom she genuinely loved. She set out to visit him and was turned back, ostensibly in the King’s name. She wrote to him of her disappointment that she was not to see him after all. She smelt conspiracy, but assured Edward that she had faith in him and in his affection for her: ‘but the best is that whatsoever other folks will suspect, I intend not to fear your grace’s goodwill, which as I know that I never deserved to faint, so I trust will still stick by me.’
Her trust was ill founded. As early as January 1553 Edward had begun to tamper with the succession, seeking to overturn his father’s will, excluding his half-sisters in favour of the Suffolk line, namely Lady Jane Grey’s male heirs. The ostensible reason was that both his sisters were bastards of the half-blood and unworthy to succeed, and that they might marry foreigners. It was also a typically chauvinistic reaction to the prospect of female rule. After Edward’s death, Nicholas Ridley, Bishop of London, was to go so far as to declare in sermons at Paul’s Cross on two successive Sundays that ‘the Lady Mary and the Lady Elizabeth, sisters to the king’s majesty departed, to be illegitimate and not lawfully begotten in the estate of true matrimony according to God’s law’ – an insult for which Elizabeth never forgave him or the bishops. So desperate was Edward to exclude Catholic Mary that he also allowed himself to be persuaded of Elizabeth’s unsuitability, despite her Protestantism. Like Northumberland, Edward must have been all too aware of Elizabeth’s loyalty to their father’s memory and wishes, of her implacable belief in dynastic legitimacy.
By the spring it was apparent that there would be no male heirs of the House of Suffolk in the short period Edward had left to live, so that Northumberland pressured him to redraft his ‘Device for the Succession’, leaving the crown directly to Lady Jane Grey, who in May was forced into marriage with Northumberland’s son. Northumberland’s transparent motives, his greed for power, should have been obvious to Edward and given him pause for thought. However, in extreme pain and discomfort and dosed with opiates and other dubious concoctions, the dying boy acceded to all his demands; indeed, there is some suggestion that he drove them.
Elizabeth played no part in events following Edward’s death, as Mary retreated into her East Anglian stronghold and led the rebellion against Northumberland and the new regime. She remained quietly at Hatfield awaiting the outcome, and then wrote Mary a prompt letter of congratulation. On 29 July Elizabeth entered London with an escort of 2,000, ostentatiously sporting the Tudor colours of green and white; it was a pointed reminder of her power as a great magnate, but also of her loyalty to the Tudor dynasty. She took up residence at Somerset House. A few days later, with her escort cut down to a less alarming half, she rode out to Wanstead to meet her sister as she prepared to make her triumphal entry into London. In the euphoria of victory, Mary welcomed her warmly. As heiress presumptive, Elizabeth rode into London just behind her sister.
Elizabeth had survived. The Tudor dynasty had survived. For the first time in English history a woman had succeeded to the crown and she had done so amid popular rejoicing. It seemed that all Elizabeth had to do was wait her turn.