Katherine the Queen: The Remarkable Life of Katherine Parr (19 page)

His situation, however, looked far from promising. Cromwell had appropriated the title of earl of Essex on the death of William Parr’s father-in-law in 1540. Although he only enjoyed the title briefly before his fall, there was worse to follow for the disappointed Parr. His marriage with Anne Bourchier, on which Maud Parr had staked so much, was by now beyond repair. While many other couples who were incompatible managed somehow to get along, at least with a veneer of success, Anne Bourchier had no interest in observing proprieties. Quite why she hated her husband, who was good-looking and socially adept, is impossible to say. She had always resisted the idea of living with him and disliked court life, which he, of course, embraced wholeheartedly. In 1541, to add insult to injury, she ensured that he would never have her father’s title by eloping with a lover of whom little is known but whose child she bore the following year. The blow to Parr’s pride (and to the family’s as well) was tremendous, and William swiftly took steps to contain the damage. He obtained a legal separation in 1542 and a bill in parliament the following year, in the first month of his sister’s widowhood, barring any child of Anne’s from inheriting Bourchier or Parr estates. Thus did his great marriage evaporate. Yet he probably already sensed that his future was far from hopeless. As a child, he was
close to his sister Katherine. Yet even as he contemplated the collapse of everything he had anticipated since he was thirteen years old, he saw another prospect, more glorious still, beckoning. He could not yet be sure; it all depended on Katherine herself.

L
ADY
L
ATIMER
, however, was contemplating her own happiness rather than William’s lost earldom. She already sensed the direction her life was likely to take but could not bring herself to acknowledge it because she had fallen in love. The man who had conquered her heart was the only man she ever truly loved for himself, the king’s brother-in-law, Sir Thomas Seymour. It is impossible to say when she first became aware of this compelling attraction – perhaps she did not know herself – but, as soon as Lord Latimer was laid to rest, Katherine was more than willing to be wooed. As she told Seymour four years later: ‘as truly as God is God, my mind was fully bent the other time I was at liberty to marry you before any man I know’.
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Nothing could be plainer. And why not? For Tom Seymour was the most desirable man at court.

He was the fourth of six sons of a Wiltshire knight, Sir John Seymour, and he might have remained in obscurity, the younger son of a minor country gentleman, had his sister Jane not replaced Anne Boleyn in the affections of Henry VIII and become the king’s third wife.
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It was a brief marriage but Jane managed to produce the longed-for heir and in so doing justified all the pain that Henry believed he had suffered in his search to ensure the future of his dynasty. Jane’s death in October 1537, the result of complications following the birth of Prince Edward, left the king with fond memories and probably ensured the continuing favour of her family. Jane was the closest in age to Thomas but they seem to have been quite unalike in temperament, nor, apparently, did they much resemble each other. Where Jane was fair and calm, Thomas Seymour was tawny and tempestuous. He was a
man who bore his good looks dramatically and he played to the hilt his reputation as the most dashing blade at court in the 1540s. William Parr, who had known the Seymour brothers since childhood (he knew Edward Seymour well from their time together in the duke of Richmond’s household), was a charming ladies’ man, but he could not compete for sheer charisma with the overwhelming presence of Sir Thomas. A versifier and well-travelled sophisticate, with a magnificent speaking and singing voice, Seymour was on good terms with the king. He was also ambitious (perhaps the one trait he shared with his late sister) and though broadly aligned with the religious reformers, not someone to be found deep in study of the Bible. After his death, he was accused of being a non-believer, a serious accusation in an age that found atheism deeply shocking, but this seems to have been part of a deliberate campaign to degrade his memory. Probably he was not especially devout, and in that he may have been more honest than many of his contemporaries. But whatever his personal beliefs, one thing was certain. Although in his mid-thirties, he was still unmarried.
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That he should have appealed to Katherine Parr, after nearly fifteen years of dutiful wedlock, is not surprising. Nor is it unreasonable to believe that he was genuinely attracted to her, a slim, elegant and accomplished woman with hair the colour of burnished gold, a warm personality and exemplary private life masking hidden depths of sensuality that a man with his experience of the world might have detected even while she was still married. Katherine had a reasonable income but was not a rich widow. He was aware of this – Seymour was the sort of man who would have found out, however romantic he might appear – so the inference must be that their affection was mutual. His subsequent behaviour strongly suggests that it was. They were close in age, he being about three years older, and she clearly wanted to be his wife. One can conjecture that he might have been content with a less formal relationship, at least to begin with, but whatever his intentions, he clearly pursued them with
some alacrity once it was proper to do so. Thomas Seymour liked his roistering persona, but there is absolutely no evidence that he sought to make Katherine his mistress while Lord Latimer was alive. We do not know when they first met but the likelihood is that Katherine’s brother was the link. Katherine had probably known Thomas Seymour for some years before she was widowed for the second time.

Seymour’s reputation has suffered much over the centuries. Vilified after his death, his image as a shallow, posturing blackguard and womanizer has been meat and drink to historical novelists. Yet there is no evidence that contemporaries thought him unusually dissolute. He may well have enjoyed casual amours with the ladies of the courts he frequented, both in London and overseas, but the names of his mistresses are not known and there is no suggestion that he had illegitimate children.
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And there were those who admired him during his lifetime, who sought and enjoyed his company, and remained true to him after his death. Nicholas Throckmorton, Katherine’s cousin, composing his memoirs years later, wrote: ‘He was, at all essays, my perfect friend, and patron too, until his dying end’, a generous tribute to someone who is often criticized for reckless selfishness. It is time to look at him again, to try to separate the legend (some of which he might well have enjoyed) from the reality.

Katherine’s suitor already had a long career in and around the court, as well as plenty of diplomatic and military experience. This aspect of his life went back well before his sister’s time as queen, to when Henry was still married to Katherine of Aragon. In the year 1530 he was in France with one of Henry’s favourites, Sir Francis Bryan. Bryan, highly experienced as a diplomat in Rome and France, was known for being outspoken and a man who had pursued his pleasures with brio when he was younger. It may well be that the young Thomas Seymour modelled himself on this clever and energetic man, who had already told the king that the cause of the divorce was completely lost in Rome. But Bryan also knew how to mask his true feelings to good effect in
a volatile political climate, a lesson that his protégé forgot in later life.

The life of a diplomat and occasional soldier might have been expected to remain the lot of this junior member of an unremarkable family. He was not cut out for the Church and though his brother Edward showed an early interest in the new learning and religious reform, Thomas seems to have embraced them with less conviction. Though evidently well educated, he liked action, as younger brothers often do. One of his earliest surviving letters finds him at sea with the king’s fleet between the Isle of Wight and Portsmouth, on the look-out for French men-of-war infiltrating English waters.
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He especially loved being at sea and relished a naval scrap. Even his enemies acknowledged his personal bravery. But he was not destined to remain on the fringes, sending dispatches back to London from distant courts. Jane Seymour’s bid for the title of queen consort in 1536, as Henry’s marriage to Anne Boleyn disintegrated, was very carefully planned: Edward Seymour used his promotion to the position of gentleman of the king’s Privy Chamber in early March of that year to get his sister quite literally within reach of the king via a private passage to the Seymours’ apartments in Greenwich Palace.

Thomas had to wait a little longer for the same appointment, until early October 1537, less than two weeks before his sister gave birth to her son. It was swiftly followed by a knighthood, and by Jane’s death on 24 October. The brief but spectacular rise of the Seymour family now seemed over, yet the Privy Chamber posts meant that the brothers remained close to the king. Their presence reminded Henry that they were his son’s uncles and they continued to receive favours from the king. To his knighthood, Thomas Seymour now had added important offices in the Welsh borders, as well as lands in the same area. He also benefited from grants of land taken from dissolved monasteries in Essex, Hampshire and Berkshire at the beginning of 1538.

Perhaps it was this growing portfolio of estates, as well as the continuing goodwill of the king towards his baby son’s male
relatives, that prompted the first serious discussion of his marriage – or certainly the first that is known. The proposal was, at first sight, a grand one and it was not even instigated by Seymour himself. Instead, the suggestion was made to Henry VIII by the duke of Norfolk that his widowed daughter, Mary Howard, duchess of Richmond, should wed Sir Thomas. Norfolk was casting around for ways to rehabilitate his family following the Boleyn affair; he took the view that this would be an advantageous union for the Howards, noting that Seymour was his choice for Mary because he ‘is so honestly advanced by the king’s majesty, as also for his towardness and his other commendable merits’. But a further comment ascribed to Norfolk is far more revealing of his outlook: ‘there ensueth’, he ventured, ‘no great good by conjunction of great bloods together [and] he sought not . . . nor desired to marry his daughter in any high blood or degree’. In this superb example of Howard cunning and snobbery it sounds as though Norfolk was musing on the disaster of his own marriage to Elizabeth Stafford, as well as delivering a dismissal of the upstart family with whom he proposed to unite his daughter. The king apparently found the idea most amusing and ‘answered merrily that if he [Norfolk] were so minded to bestow his daughter . . . he would be sure to couple her with one of such lust and youth, as should be able to please her well at all points’.
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Mary had been the wife of the king’s illegitimate son, the duke of Richmond, who died in 1536. She was not yet twenty and, from what can be seen of the Holbein uncompleted sketch of her, not displeasing, if perhaps no great beauty. The resemblance to her father is apparent. But, looks aside, Mary Howard was a high-born lady. She was also an impecunious one, still fighting her not so devoted father-in-law, the king, for her jointure as duchess of Richmond. She was not keen to lose it all together, as she feared would undoubtedly happen if she married again at this point. In fact, she was far from eager to marry at all, even someone as attractive as Thomas Seymour.

Seymour’s own reaction to the idea was somewhat muted; he never came to seek the lady in person. In fact, his reaction was to let someone else handle further discussion, despite the king’s approval. That person was Thomas Cromwell, who, as well as being the chief minister was the father of Sir Thomas’s brother-in-law, Gregory.
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On 14 July 1538 Sir Ralph Sadler, one of Cromwell’s most trusted servants, wrote to the minister: ‘The king has spoken to Sir Thomas about it [the Howard marriage] and he, considering that your son has married his sister, prefers you to have the maining of the matter.’
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Sadler himself thought well of Seymour, describing his ‘honesty, sadness [which meant seriousness in Tudor England] and other good qualities’. His opinion of Seymour may not have been shared by history, but it is worth noting, for Ralph Sadler was not the sort of man to give praise where it was not due. In the end, nothing came of Norfolk’s idea. It does, however, throw a fascinating light on the family politics of Henry VIII’s court in the late 1530s. And, as the years went by and both parties remained unmarried, it was not all together forgotten. Eventually it was proposed again, at a crucial point of Katherine Parr’s reign as queen consort.
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Resuming his diplomatic career, Seymour’s lifestyle meant that he was often on the move over the next five years. He had no ties, and no great expectations, so it was the perfect existence for his restless nature. Soon he was back at the French court, going from there to Cambrai, where Mary of Hungary, the imperial regent, was in residence. At this point of his career, it was his monarch’s marriage, rather than his own, that he was pursuing. Christina of Denmark, the handsome lady in whom Henry VIII was interested at the time, did not reciprocate, but by the end of the following year Henry’s fourth wife, Anne of Cleves, was at Calais on her way to England. Seymour was among the knights who dined with her on 13 December, before her storm-tossed journey across the Channel. His opinion of the German princess’s looks is unknown, but the following May Day, when her time as Henry’s queen was running out fast (though
she did not know it), Thomas Seymour was back in London, enjoying his participation in a major jousting and sporting event at Whitehall. Dressed in white velvet, he must have dazzled Anne and her ladies. But two months later he was on the road again, this time for Vienna and the court of the emperor’s brother, Ferdinand of Austria. Henry sent him there to gauge the situation in Hungary and Germany. It was an interesting post, and Seymour learned much. His despatches show that he was a shrewd observer of the military strengths and strategies of Hungary in its battle with the Ottoman Empire. When the siege of Pest failed all together in October 1542, Seymour made his way back through Germany, looking to recruit mercenaries who could be signed to Henry VIII’s army. He spent Christmas in Nuremberg and when the king decided not to meet the financial terms demanded by the German soldiers of fortune, Seymour was recalled on 14 January 1543. He would have been back in London at about the time that Lady Latimer knew that her husband was not long for this world. Once he was buried in early March, Seymour could quite properly pay court to her. In age, background and interests, they were well matched, two good-looking people of considerable charm, well connected but not themselves powerful, who liked the court and the life it offered. There was every reason that they should have chosen each other, and Thomas, with his accustomed confidence, set about wooing Katherine in earnest. He seems not to have realized at first that there was a rival suitor. Katherine may not have acknowledged this herself but when she did, it must have made Seymour all the more attractive – and all the more unattainable. For the other man taking a keen interest in Lady Latimer was the king himself.