Behind the Palace Doors (3 page)

“You have treated me so kindly, like a most loving father, and one who would wish me always to act rightly,” Edward wrote to the king. “I also thank you that you have given me great and costly gifts, as chains, rings, jewelled buttons, neck-chains, and breast-pins, and necklaces, garments, and very many other things; in which things and gifts is conspicuous your fatherly affection towards me; for, if you didn’t love me, you would not give me these fine gifts of jewellery.”

Father and son never really knew each other, and before Edward turned ten, Henry VIII was dead. Now the new king’s maternal uncles, Edward and Thomas Seymour, would vie with each other to gain control over their royal nephew.

Henry VIII’s will specified that a regency council should rule with equal say during his son’s minority. Yet as soon as the king breathed his last, Edward Seymour managed to subvert his brother-in-law’s wishes. With a combination of shrewd backroom maneuvering and outright bribery, he managed to secure all power for himself. Seymour became Lord Protector—a king in all but name. He “governs everything absolutely,” reported the imperial ambassador Van der Delft.

Soon enough, the Protector was so intoxicated with power that he began to see himself as royal. One of his first acts as de facto sovereign was to make himself Duke of Somerset (the title by which he will be referred to henceforth). That elevation was followed by his adoption of a coat of arms closely resembling those of his late sister Queen Jane. Somerset even had the temerity to address the French king as his brother, a
presumption that earned him a sharp rebuke from across the Channel.

Like most kings, Somerset believed that his role had been divinely ordained. “Thou, Lord, by thy providence hast called me to rule,” he said in a prayer after becoming Protector; “make me therefore able to follow thy calling.”

Seething in the shadows during his older brother’s rapid ascent was Thomas Seymour, an erratic but charming rascal, bursting with ambition. Though he had been given the office of Lord Admiral, and all the land and income that accompanied it, Seymour wasn’t satisfied. He wanted a share in his brother’s power, to be appointed governor of their young nephew, the king. “Why was he [Somerset] made Protector?” Seymour fumed. “It was not the King’s will that dead is that any one man should have both the Government of the King … and also the Realm.”

Thwarted in his aim to be young Edward’s governor, Seymour sought advantage elsewhere. He set his sights on Henry VIII’s widow, Queen Katherine Parr, with whom he had shared a love affair before Henry decided she would become his sixth wife. Now that Katherine was free from the ill-tempered ogre she had dutifully attended, she was ready for some real passion. Thomas Seymour, on the other hand, was ready for an influential ally.

The couple wed in secret, without Somerset’s permission, which was dangerous. So to insulate himself from his brother’s wrath, Seymour convinced his pliable young nephew the king to write a letter to Katherine, essentially urging her to marry Seymour and promising his protection.

“Wherefore ye shall not need to fear any grief to come, or to suspect lack of aid in need,” King Edward wrote to his stepmother; “seeing that he [Somerset], being mine uncle, is so good in nature that he will not be troublesome … if any grief shall befall, I shall be a sufficient succor.”

Somerset was incensed not only by his brother’s blatant defiance of his authority but because he had no recourse, given the king’s promise of protection. Even Edward felt his uncle’s anger, noting in his journal that “the Lord Protector [Somerset] was much offended.” In time, Seymour would give his brother Somerset even more cause for grief.

Exacerbating the tension brewing between the Seymour brothers were their wives, who, one observer noted, “raised so much dust at last to put out the eyes of their husbands.” Somerset’s impossibly proud spouse, Anne—“more presumptuous than Lucifer,” as one court observer described her—loathed Katherine Parr, whom she had once served as lady-in-waiting. The Duchess of Somerset insisted that she, as the Protector’s wife, now had precedence over the widowed wife of Henry VIII. Katherine disagreed, and on one occasion commanded Anne, or “that Hell,” as she called the duchess, to carry her train. This Anne flatly refused to do, for, as the nineteenth-century historian William Camden put it, “It was unsuitable for her to submit to perform that service for the wife of her husband’s younger brother.”

The showdown between the duchess and the dowager queen was in fact a declaration of war. “If Master Admiral [Seymour] teach his wife no better manners,” Anne snorted, “I am she that will.” For her own part, Katherine wrote to her husband, Thomas, and announced that she had prayed for the duchess’s “short dispatch.”

Katherine no doubt had similar prayers for the Duke of Somerset, who she believed had usurped her expected role as regent during King Edward’s minority. In retaliation for her presumption, Somerset refused to deliver to the queen the jewels Henry VIII had left her—including her wedding ring. Still, Katherine urged her husband not to overreact to his brother’s ill treatment of her. “With all heart not to unquiet yourself with any of his unfriendly parts,” she counseled, “bear them for the
time, as well as you can.” But when Somerset began leasing her dower lands without her approval, Katherine was feeling a little less benevolent. “My Lord your brother hath this afternoon made me a little warm [angry],” she wrote to Thomas. “It was fortunate we were so distant, for I suppose else I should have bitten him.”

Thomas Seymour saw an opportunity to gain more control over his nephew while his brother was occupied elsewhere fighting the Scots. Money was the means he used to ingratiate himself with the king, offering himself as a bountiful contrast to Somerset, who was apparently quite stingy with the purse. “My uncle of Somerset dealeth very hardy with me,” Edward was heard to say, “and keepeth me so straight that I cannot have any money at my will.”

Seymour’s largesse was a welcome addition to the young king’s allowance, but it wasn’t enough to bend him to his uncle’s will. After Somerset returned from Scotland, Seymour tried to force through Parliament a bill that would make him Edward’s governor, and he wanted the king to sign it. Citing protocol, Edward refused. He would do nothing without Somerset’s permission.

Undaunted, Seymour continued to pressure his nephew, tempting the king with more money and dangling before him the prospect of more personal power. He even tried to shame the boy, calling him “a beggarly king,” beholden to Somerset for whatever crumbs he deigned give. Edward buckled but ultimately remained resolved. “The Lord Admiral [Seymour] shall have no bill signed or written by me.”

Without the king’s cooperation, Seymour became increasingly desperate, and delusional. He convinced himself that he could gain enough support to seize power by force, boasting, as Henry Grey, Marquis of Dorset, reported, that “he had as great a number of gentlemen that loved him, as any nobleman in England.”

To finance his ambitions, Seymour embarked on a number of
illegal schemes, such as a racketeering deal he conducted with the very pirates he was supposed to be fighting in his post as Lord Admiral. He also established a connection with William Sharington, under-treasurer of the Bristol mint and an accomplished counterfeiter, who simply forged the money Seymour needed.

Some of the Lord Admiral’s plans were even more maniacal. Despite his advantageous marriage to Katherine Parr, for example, he tried to seduce the king’s fifteen-year-old sister, Elizabeth, who was then living in his household. The queen caught Seymour embracing the young princess and sent Elizabeth away. But when Katherine died soon after giving birth to the couple’s daughter Mary, Seymour renewed his pursuit of Elizabeth, which not only put her in grave peril (see
Chapter 5
) but added to the impression that his ambitions had grown wildly out of control.

“For God’s sake take heed what you do,” the Earl of Southampton warned. “You may say what you will that you mean well and mind all for the king, but in deed you shall show yourself his greatest enemy.… You may begin a faction and trouble but you cannot end it when you will.”

By this time, though, Thomas Seymour was beyond all reason. On January 16, 1549, he tried to kidnap the king. He came as close as Edward’s bedchamber at Hampton Court, but upon unlocking the door, he was surprised by the boy’s pet spaniel. In a panic, he shot the barking animal, which alerted the king’s guard. While his terrified nephew looked on, his dead dog beside him in the doorway, Seymour tried to explain that he was merely checking on the king’s security and obviously meant him no harm. The council believed otherwise, however, and the next day Seymour was taken away to the Tower.

While he was being held there, the evidence of his misdeeds mounted. “He was a great rascal,” Sir William Paget confided to the imperial ambassador. Thirty-three charges were eventually laid against the Lord Admiral and presented to the king.

“We do perceive,” King Edward declared in a scripted speech, “that there are great things 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 that you proceed according to your request.”

A bill of attainder was passed in Parliament, and Seymour was sentenced to death. With a barely legible scrawl, Somerset signed his brother’s death warrant. He was said never to have been the same afterward. On March 19, 1549, Thomas Seymour was beheaded upon Tower Hill. Less than three years later, on the same site, Edward Seymour, Duke of Somerset, would meet the same fate.

Somerset’s reputation suffered mightily from the execution of his brother. He was openly derided as “a blood-sucker” and “a ravenous wolf,” and it was commonly believed, as one observer wrote, that “the blood of his brother the Admiral cried against him before God.” Seymour’s death, though, was merely the beginning of Somerset’s problems. Slithering in to engineer his downfall was John Dudley, a man historian A. F. Pollard described as “the subtlest and most daring of the English disciples of Machiavelli.”

Conditions in England were dire at the time of Thomas Seymour’s execution, and getting worse. Somerset had not only embroiled the kingdom in a ruinous war with Scotland but showed himself to be hopelessly ineffective in the face of a series of rebellions that arose over the radical changes taking place in religion and the enclosure of common lands. Thousands of lives were lost in the uprisings, while Somerset’s position was fatally weakened.

“No improvement is observed in the keeping of order or the administration of justice,” reported the imperial ambassador
Van der Delft. “The people are all in confusion, and with one common voice lament the present state of things.”

The chaos and disorder in the realm that made Somerset so vulnerable proved to be a boon for Dudley, who organized the coup that ousted his rival from power. The king’s uncle was charged with twenty counts of treason, stripped of his title, and sent to the Tower. But he would not face the headsman—yet. Young Edward had already seen one uncle executed; he would not sanction the death of another.

“We must return good for evil,” Dudley said, addressing the council. “And as it is the king’s will that the Duke should be pardoned, and it is the first matter he hath asked of us, we ought to accede to His Grace’s wishes.”

Dudley appeared to acquiesce, but as Sir Richard Morison said of him, “He had such a head that he seldom went about anything but he conceived first three or four purposes beforehand.” He certainly recognized that his rise to power would be best accomplished by closely aligning himself with the king’s wishes. Thus, Somerset’s life was spared and he was restored to the council, though with significantly diminished influence. Dudley appeared to embrace the broken man but nevertheless remained determined to destroy him.

While personally lacking in any strong religious outlook, Dudley nevertheless synchronized himself with the king’s beliefs, which tended toward the fanatical. Henry VIII had taken the audacious step of breaking with Rome and establishing himself as head of the Church in England. But he was still relatively conservative and retained many Catholic doctrines. Not so his son. Edward VI was a radical Protestant who gloried in the English Reformation. “In the court there is no bishop, and no man of learning so ready to argue in support of the new doctrine as the king,” the imperial ambassador reported. The contemporary author John Foxe referred to Edward as “this godly imp,” in his
Actes and Monuments
, a widely read and vastly influential
book that spurred much of the anti-Catholic sentiment in England.

King Edward was still young, but he immersed himself in religious matters and came to see himself as the one chosen by God to deliver his kingdom from the grave errors perpetuated for so long by the pope—or, as the king called him, “the true son of the devil, a bad man, an Antichrist and abominable tyrant.” He would personally see England purified of all popish abominations, which included wholesale destruction of ancient religious art and treasures. “Edward was more than a keen participant in the ideas of the reformed religion,” wrote historian Chris Skidmore; “he was becoming an integral character in the shaping of the religious atmosphere at court, and therefore the nation at large.”