Katherine the Queen: The Remarkable Life of Katherine Parr (43 page)

T
HE PRECISE DETAILS
and timings of Thomas Seymour’s secret courtship of Katherine Parr are unknown. It has been suggested that she became his mistress only a matter of weeks into her widowhood, but that would have been a speedy conquest even for one who enjoyed the reputation of sweeping ladies off their feet. In the immediate aftermath of Henry’s death, Katherine had to observe strict mourning. Prior to the royal funeral, access to her must have been very limited. And she was quite evidently involved in a covert struggle with the new regime. Her priority at this time seems to have been her relationship with her stepson. On 7 February, Edward wrote thanking her for a letter she had sent ‘which is a token of your singular and daily love to me’. He commiserated with her on their joint loss, observing: ‘And now, as it hath seemed good to God, the greatest and best of beings, that my father and your husband, our most illustrious sovereign, should end this life, it is a common grief to both. This however consoles us, that he hath gone out of this miserable world into happy and everlasting blessedness.’
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The child had called her ‘dearest mother’ and she must have derived comfort from his continued affection. Even though there was only a slim chance of her bid for the regency succeeding, surely she would not have compromised her chances, or divided her attention, by indulging so soon in a sexual liaison.

Thomas Seymour, too, had much to occupy his mind during February 1547. The prospects of Katherine (and possibly Mary and Elizabeth also) may well have figured in his considerations, but he was primarily concerned with improving his own situation. It was, in those days, frequently the lot of younger brothers to believe themselves hard done by, and Thomas felt particularly keenly the disparity between himself and Edward Seymour. By a
mere accident of birth, his brother seemed to have gleaned all the spoils. Henry VIII had named Thomas as one of the assistant councillors in his will and left him
£
200, but this was small beer in comparison to the power and wealth his elder brother now enjoyed. Thomas wanted more and the Protector obliged. On 16 February, as Katherine Parr watched the body of Henry VIII being laid to rest at Windsor, Thomas Seymour was created Baron Seymour of Sudeley in Gloucestershire and given additional lands worth
£
500 per annum. The next day he was also appointed to the office of Lord High Admiral, and named a Knight of the Garter. And he was awarded a full place on the Privy Council.

Still, he did not consider these adequate rewards. Although he has been depicted as a greedy chancer, his disgruntlement was not entirely unfounded. He had served his king well during the last four years of Henry’s reign, accepting the loss of Katherine Parr with surprising equanimity for a man who sometimes found it hard to contain his emotions. Instead, he devoted himself wholeheartedly to diplomacy and his military career. He was with the king in the French war of 1544 and participated in the capture of Boulogne. By October, when Henry and Katherine were enjoying a tender reunion in Kent, Thomas was both master of the ordnance and an admiral of the English fleet. The sea was a genuine love and he revelled in his new appointment, breasting the waves in his flagship, the
Peter Pomegranate
, and producing plans for making the English navy a more effective tactical fighting force.
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At home, he became a Member of Parliament for Wiltshire, though he does not seem to have attended often. It was not really his milieu. More gratifying was the possession of Hampton Place, outside Temple Bar in London, which was granted to him late in 1545. With an enthusiasm bordering on pretentiousness, he renamed his new property Seymour Place.

So he was neither overlooked nor forgotten, but he was not one of the great men. There was no leading role for him in national affairs. He was well off but aspired to be rich. Above all,
he was not accorded the respect he believed should be his as the king’s uncle. His brother had taken it all for himself. Thomas believed that the roles of Protector and Governor of the King’s person should never have been vested in one man. Looking for historical precedent to support his views, he found encouragement in the arrangements made for the minority of Henry VI. Yet he overlooked the fact that this was not the most promising of history lessons, for Henry VI’s reign produced civil war and vicious faction-fighting, but it was true that Henry V’s brothers had divided responsibilities for their nephew between them. Seymour convinced himself of the seriousness of his argument. And he knew, once Henry VIII was in his grave and Katherine Parr began to emerge from her seclusion, where he could find a sympathetic ear – and perhaps much more. There was still a strong spark of desire, and, indeed, of deeper affection, between them. A permanent union would bring them personal happiness and political opportunity, if they could continue to manage their relationships with the royal children successfully. The extension of Somerset’s authority on 12 March, which allowed him to bypass the advice of the Privy Council if he saw fit, must also have brought home to both Thomas and Katherine the realization that their individual options were disappearing. It was against this backdrop of unpalatable political reality that the new Lord Seymour of Sudeley and the dowager queen renewed their interrupted romance during the lengthening spring days.

The course of their liaison is revealed in the love-letters they exchanged at this time. This correspondence, preserved in various collections in England, provides us with a compelling picture, rare for the Tudor period, of the private passions of two highprofile individuals. Their emotions are powerfully on display, unsullied by the passage of four and a half centuries. The language is uncomplicated and direct: ‘I would not have you think’, wrote Katherine, in the earliest of the letters in the sequence, ‘that this mine honest goodwill towards you to proceed of any sudden motion or passion . . .’
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Thomas soon put her mind at ease: ‘I beseech your highness to put all fancies out of your head that might bring you in any one thought that I do think that the goodness you have showed me is of any sudden motion, as at leisure your highness shall know to both our contentions . . . From the body of him whose heart ye have, T. Seymour.’
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And he ended with the amusingly revealing postscript that ‘I never overread it after it was written, wherefore if any faults be I pray you hold me excused.’

As no doubt she did. Katherine was a woman of thirty-four, widowed three times. He was three years older and had never been married. This was not a young couple discovering love for the first time. Yet we can still feel their excitement, their hopes and fears, the rising tide of resentment against the elder Seymour and his wife felt by Katherine, and Thomas’s attempts to counsel and calm her. In this written testimony of a love reborn, Thomas Seymour is measured in his advice on how to deal with the situation. He realizes that work will have to be done to make their relationship acceptable to those in power, but he does not come across as a self-serving braggart propelling a gullible woman towards the altar, but as a gentleman in love. Of course, there were advantages in marrying Katherine; she was quite a different proposition from the Lady Latimer he had first courted. She would for ever be ‘Kateryn the Quene KP’, even when she became his ‘most loving, obedient and humble wife’, and he always addressed her as ‘your highness’. But his feeling for her appears genuine.

Only one of the letters around the probable time of their marriage is dated, so we cannot say with certainty when the relationship resumed or exactly how this came about. The earliest opportunities for public meetings must have been after the coronation of Edward VI. Seymour had played a prominent ceremonial role in proceedings but there is no record of the queen, or either of her stepdaughters, attending. Yet Katherine was evidently allowed to see Edward and it may have been one of these ‘official’ appearances at court that provided the impetus for
the renewal of their love. The courtship was, however, pursued well away from the glare of prying eyes, in Katherine’s dower manors at Chelsea and Hanworth. In this respect, the new regime’s concern to control the queen’s access to her stepson allowed her to conduct her private life without great risk of unwanted scrutiny. Somerset was to discover that marginalizing the queen led to unforeseen complications. For Katherine and Thomas took full advantage of their freedom.

In the beginning, there was caution mingled with evident delight. She had stipulated that they should exchange letters only once a fortnight, but broke this rule herself almost immediately. They began secret trysts at Chelsea, where Seymour would stay overnight, though Katherine warned him: ‘When it shall be your pleasure to repair hither, ye must take some pain to come early in the morning, that ye may be gone again by seven o’clock.’ She did not want to be discovered in bed with him at the time the house was rising. Discretion was still important to her, though only up to a point. ‘And so, I suppose, ye may come without suspect. I pray you let me have knowledge overnight at what hour ye will come, that your portress may wait at the gate to the fields for you.’
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This was all well and good, but such comings and goings, as Katherine’s instructions acknowledged, inevitably involved other people. Servants might be trusted, but word got out. Their affair had not long been consummated when it appears to have been known in the household of Katherine’s brother, William Parr. ‘I met with a man of my lord marquess as I came to Chelsea’, reported Seymour, ‘whom I knew not, who told Nicholas Throckmorton that I was in Chelsea fields with other circumstances which I defer till at more leisure.’ He was, he said, remembering to burn her letters. This prudence, however, could not conceal his midnight visits to the pleasant manor of Chelsea.
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Soon the gossip about the comings and goings was known in the Herbert household as well. On 16 May, Seymour dined with Katherine’s sister and brother-in-law, and Anne Herbert, who was apparently being used as a post-box for messages between the queen and Seymour, decided it was time to probe more deeply. ‘She waded further with me’, reported the bashful lover, ‘touching my lodgings with your highness at Chelsea.’ His first reaction was to deny the charge, saying that he merely happened to be passing en route to the bishop of London’s house. He maintained this defence for some time, ‘till, at last, she told me further tokens, which made me change my colours, which, like a false wench, took me with the manner’. His lame story thus demolished, Seymour decided that he could trust the woman he now referred to as ‘my sister’. She was not quite that, yet, but he would now happily take her into his confidence, knowing that Anne could report back to Katherine ‘how I do proceed in my matter’. By this, he meant preparing the ground for acceptance of their marriage. Meanwhile, he hoped that Katherine would write to him every three days and he begged her to send him one of the miniatures of herself that she had commissioned when she was married to Henry VIII: ‘Also, I shall humbly desire your highness to give me one of your small pictures, if ye have any left, who with his silence, shall give me occasion to think on the friendly cheer that I shall receive when my suit shall be at an end.’

Katherine responded by saying 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 have seen the same; the last I had myself I bestowed it upon my Lady of Suffolk’. She also reassured him about the Herberts, saying that she had decided to take her sister completely into her confidence: ‘It seemed convenient unto me,’ she wrote, ‘at her being here . . . to open the matter unto her concerning you (which I never before did) at the which unfeignedly she did not a little rejoice, wherefore I pray you at your next meeting with her to give thanks for the same, taking the knowledge thereof at my hand.’

She had said, in the same letter, that if Somerset mentioned the prospect of her marrying again, she would be ready with an
answer, ‘so that he might well and manifestly perceive my fantasy to be more towards you for marriage than any other’. But she went on to say that she was ‘determined to add thereto a full determination never to marry, and break it when I have done, if I live two years’. Meanwhile, though she expected to see the king later the same week, and knew Seymour might be there, as well, she would continue to behave in public with all due restraint. Thomas was alarmed by her sudden hesitancy about marriage itself. ‘Ye shall not think of the two years ye wrote of in your last letter before this’, he responded. And, to drive the point home, he told her how pleased he was that she was seeking his advice on how to handle disputes with his brother about her lands.
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Clearly, by this point, he did not want her to waver.

Any hesitation she might have very fleetingly felt was soon overcome. She was genuinely in love and, as he had reminded her, marriage was to their mutual advantage. The passage of time was only exposing her still more to the perils and uncertain status of being merely a dowager queen. So, probably some time in the last two weeks of May 1547, Katherine Parr took as her fourth husband Lord Thomas Seymour of Sudeley. The marriage may have taken place earlier in the month (Seymour’s letter of 17 May lends credence to this possibility) but as the correspondence he and the queen exchanged is carefully phrased, we cannot be sure. No information about the priest who performed the ceremony, the location in which it took place or those who witnessed it, has ever been found. This conspiracy of silence was necessary to protect the newly-weds, who could not yet live together publicly. First, they had to embark on an urgent campaign to get the possibility of their union accepted by the young king and his advisers. Katherine was especially concerned about this aspect, writing, ‘I would desire you to obtain the king’s letters in your favour, and also the aid and furtherance of the most notable of the Council, such as ye shall think convenient.’ Her political sense had not entirely left her, despite her emotional commitment to Thomas. Once they had succeeded in gaining
official approval, they could then make the delicate admission that, in fact, their marriage had already taken place. Neither of them could be sure how this acknowledgement of their deceit would be received.