The Temptation of Elizabeth Tudor (13 page)

Elizabeth’s maids slept in a connecting room to her chamber, but they were not with her when the key turned once more in the lock. Elizabeth, though out of bed, was still in her nightdress, which hung loose at the waist. The garment’s lining caused heavy drapes of fabric to cling to her legs. Seymour was in a short nightgown, ‘barelegged in his slippers’ as he approached her slowly, again bidding her ‘good morrow’ before asking ‘how she did’.
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At this, the princess turned to move away, but not before Seymour reached out to smack her on the back and then ‘familiarly’ on her buttocks. For a girl who blushed even to brush hands with her stepfather when dancing, this was startling. She fled to her maidens, but Seymour followed, speaking playfully with the girls’ attendants as if nothing were amiss.
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Although no longer free to marry Elizabeth, Thomas was undeniably interested in the company of his wife’s maturing stepdaughter. There was danger in this. As the author of
The Education of a Christian Woman
put it, ‘from meetings and conversations with men, love affairs rise. In the midst of pleasures, banquets, dances, laughter, and self-indulgence, Venus and her son Cupid reign supreme’.
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For a closeted young princess, whose usual dealings with men were confined to exchanges with servants, Seymour seemed a dangerously enticing and heady presence.

When Queen Catherine married Thomas Seymour, along with the promise in the conventional marriage vows that she would be ‘buxom’ in bed, she vowed to obey him. The fact of her marriage allowed him dominance over every aspect of her person for, as a married woman, she ceased to exist independently in law. Everything that married women owned, down to the clothes on their backs, passed to their husbands, to whom wives were utterly subject. In autumn 1547 Seymour began to take full advantage of his status, requiring that his wife’s officers transfer regular and huge sums of money to him to help support his extravagant lifestyle.
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In total, and ‘by his commandment’, Seymour took over £2,000 from Catherine’s coffers in only three months, providing a tangible demonstration of his power over her. When Thomas arrived at Chelsea in the summer of 1547, he arrived as the house’s new master. No door was locked against him – he held a key to them all.

Seymour’s authority extended over every aspect of the claustrophobic world of Chelsea. The building, which was small, was packed to the rafters.
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Even though, as dowager queen, Catherine’s household had necessarily reduced in size, more than a hundred people accompanied her to Chelsea. Some were boarded out in local houses, but for many there was nightly competition for space in which to unroll beds in the crowded rooms and corridors.
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As well as accommodating Elizabeth’s own household too, Catherine was attended by a number of gentlewomen who brought their own servants, as well as by household officers and other attendants.
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To add to the manor’s population, Catherine had adopted her little nephew, Edward Herbert, placing him under the care of the same matron who had previously nursed her stepdaughter Margaret Neville.
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Frustrated by her own failure to bear a child, Catherine lavished attention and money on the boy, buying him necessary items such as his shirts, as well as more extravagant purchases, including a little jacket of damask and velvet obtained that July.
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By Christmas, he had outgrown it, appearing instead in black and yellow taffeta.
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When Henry VIII had acquired the smart brick manor house at Chelsea, directly fronting the street, he had never intended it to be a permanent residence. With its flat facade broken up only with chimney stacks flanking the entrance, the house was very far from palatial; but it had served him as a stopping point – a place to stay, with a skeleton household, on his way to summer hunting or other pleasures. As such, it had the character and aspect of a holiday home, a place of escape from the capital when hot weather or plague drove the court towards the countryside. With Catherine Parr’s permanent arrival, it became something different – filled with domestic tumult. Fresh rushes were regularly swept over the floor as feet scurried about their duties. There was scant privacy in the crowded, plain rooms, but this mattered little to Thomas Seymour. His interest in Elizabeth was becoming common knowledge within the household, but Catherine, for one, resisted seeing it as anything other than a man taking an interest in his wife’s child. She would later join in the tickling herself on occasion, as if to show the world – and herself – how innocent it was.

Thomas Seymour had never been conventional, but he was always personable. He was twenty-five years older than Elizabeth, but she was reaching an age enough to be attracted to men. As he was well aware, people found him handsome, with his long, thick and impressively masculine auburn beard. He always dressed to impress in the latest fashions and cut a fine figure at Chelsea, where he was the only man of rank. Seymour liked it that way.

Catherine was a woman of great passions,
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but she was under Thomas’s thumb, anxious to do nothing to antagonize him even if this meant persuading herself to look the other way. Seymour expected his wife to do as she had promised and obey her husband. He would even start petty quarrels as a means of testing her devotion and her willingness to submit. Once, in the highly charged summer of 1547, he accused her of infidelity after finding the door to Catherine’s chamber shut just before a groom emerged, carrying a coal basket. Although he later claimed to be feigning jealousy, Seymour flew into a rage.
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He was rumoured to be an ‘oppressor’ in his domestic arrangements, and Catherine, though she loved him, dared not vex him. Thomas Seymour, a man ruled by ambition and given to fiery passions, was not someone that any at Chelsea dared to cross.
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No one wanted to intervene when he began his morning visits alone to Elizabeth’s bedchamber.

The beautiful gardens at Chelsea offered their own opportunities for secret dalliances, should anyone have cared to use them. They were the one part of the manor and its grounds on which Henry VIII had been prepared to spend money. Catherine, too, consulted with her gardeners over the ‘making of the little garden’.
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She even had archery butts set up in the grounds for her amusement.
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When not at her books, Elizabeth would walk in the gardens with the queen, as might her cousin Jane Grey. With sweet-smelling rosemary and lavender planted low in borders filled with roses and fruit trees, the gardens were idyllic in the summer of 1547.

Ten years earlier, Henry had paid 29 gardeners to plant 64,000 privets, which had now grown to create a maze of pathways and secret spaces.
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The privacy afforded by the nooks and crannies had already been appreciated by Catherine and Thomas as they courted in the moonlight, earlier in the year, among the spring-blossomed trees. By June the blossom had given way to budding fruit, but the foliage was as dense as ever. There were, in theory, opportunities for Elizabeth and Seymour to be alone – a chance meeting in the gardens could lead them towards a secluded pathway.

Elizabeth was, though, always watched by Kate Ashley. By day, Thomas Seymour was mostly content to play his games with Elizabeth in public –– hiding his behaviour in plain sight. Elizabeth looked on Kate as a mother figure, acknowledging that she ‘hath taken great labour and pain in bringing of me up in learning and honesty’.
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To her credit, Elizabeth was as devoted to her lady mistress as Kate was to her, later declaring that ‘we are more bound to them that bringeth us up well than to our parents, for our parents do that which is natural for them – that is, bringeth us into this world – but our bringers-up are a cause to make us live well in it’.
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Kate only wanted the best for her charge, but she was deeply misguided when it came to Thomas Seymour and, perhaps, more than a little in love with him herself.

Seymour’s attentions towards Elizabeth showed no signs of abating as the summer heat increased and the household packed up its trunks, moving westwards in July 1547 to Hanworth in Middlesex.
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This manor, which Henry VIII had also granted to Catherine, was pleasantly situated – close to the village of Hounslow but also within a day’s ride of London and the court.
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The queen regularly took advantage of this proximity, distributing alms to the poor that she met on the route.
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Hanworth was also close to the Thames and not far from Hampton Court, so that Thomas was able to make his daily visits to the king there by boat during Somerset’s absence in Scotland.

The move to Hanworth from the crowded Chelsea manor meant that the latter could now receive a badly needed clean. Filthy rushes could be swept from the floor and new straw laid, while walls and surfaces could be scrubbed and linens washed. As the building emptied, such work became easier, since the queen took much of her personal furniture with her, loaded onto wagons. The royal women rode, unless they were carried in litters, either way avoiding the bone-jarring awfulness of the wagons, which lacked suspension. The journey took the best part of a day.

By 1547 Hanworth was an imposing structure; nestling among cattle pasture and meadows, it dominated the rural landscape. The house itself was situated in the midst of a great park, dissected by the public road that allowed passers-by a glimpse of their social betters.
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Poor women would make the trip along the dried, rutted mud road, bringing small offerings of apples, strawberries or other home-grown dainties for the queen, while hooves thundered down the lane bringing news from court.
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Members of the household going hunting would pass the same way. Here, too, Catherine set up archery butts in the grounds for the diversion of her ladies.
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Entering the house over a drawbridge to the front, visitors passed over a moat that had been ‘cleansed and scoured’ only a few years before.

The house had room for Catherine’s vast household of over 120 gentlemen and yeomen, as well as the ladies of her privy chamber, maids of honour and the respective attendants of her husband, stepdaughter Elizabeth and great-niece Jane Grey.
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The queen still expected to be treated as the first lady in the land, and many of those that had been sworn to attend her during Henry VIII’s lifetime remained in her service afterwards
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They were sternly warned in her ordinances not to be ‘pickers of quarrels or sowers of discord and sedition’.
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All required bed and board at Hanworth, where Elizabeth was one of very few occupants to enjoy her own bedchamber. Most members of the establishment laid down beds each night to sleep in the crowded, noisy great hall. And two enormous kitchen fireplaces were well able to feed the hungry royal household.
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Henry VIII and his father, who had first acquired the manor, had both spent considerable sums in stocking and setting up the park, as well as ‘cleansing’ the ground. It was a pretty house, and one which Elizabeth’s grandfather had struggled to purchase. The notoriously cautious Henry VII had so coveted the place that he had already spent considerable sums on building and repairs before the sale was finally completed six years after his death.
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He had been well known to have ‘a singular mind, affection and pleasure to resort unto [Hanworth] for the health of his body’.
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There were also reminders everywhere of Elizabeth’s mother. Anne Boleyn had received the house as a present from Henry VIII back in 1532, the year prior to their marriage. Anne had brought her considerable style to the place. The furniture – boxes, cupboards, desks, chests, tables and even doors – had been selected by her from Hampton Court, newly acquired by Henry after Cardinal Wolsey’s fall from favour. She had ordered decorative battens for the roof of her private chapel and a chimney ornamented with painted ‘antique’ scenes. Everything was exquisitely done. Anne had removed ‘certain antique heads’ of terracotta from Greenwich Palace to incorporate them into Hanworth too. These classical busts of long-dead emperors now glared down unsmiling from the walls. They were so important to the decorative scheme that Anne had employed two skilled Italian craftsmen to place them for her.