The Temptation of Elizabeth Tudor (29 page)

In Thomas’s absence, the best that his servants could do was to provide Jane with an honourable retinue as she made her slow progress northwards. Significantly, John Harington, who had been so successful the previous year in obtaining Jane, went with them.
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But Harington, the gentlemen and the maids were all under Seymour’s strict instructions, when he was informed of events, not to hurry home, in the hope that they should soon be charged with bringing the marquess’s daughter back down the road towards Sudeley. Harington well knew Thomas’s plans for the girl, since Seymour had told him more than once ‘that she should not be married until such time as she should be able to bear a child, and her husband able to get one’.
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Clearly, the intended bridegroom was not Thomas Seymour.

Harington met with some success in his attempts to persuade the suggestible Dorset to reconsider. So, too, did the letters from Thomas, which hurried after Jane and her father, and for which the girl wrote to thank him on 1 October.
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She was grateful, she said, for his goodness towards her and confirmed that she was willing to obey Seymour again as her ‘father’. It was a short note, but it signified the agreement of the Dorsets to allow Seymour a guiding hand in Jane’s life. The following day Jane’s mother also wrote.
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She considered herself ‘most bounded to you, for that you are so desirous for to have her continue with you’. At their next meeting – already arranged – she promised that they would speak further and she was sure that she could leave Thomas ‘satisfied’, while she herself was ‘contented’. She looked forward to seeing him again at Bradgate House.

Seymour set out for Bradgate in the first week of October 1548. He rode quickly, gathering up Sir William Sharington, who was still lurking close to Sudeley, to accompany him on the route. Although he had reached a tentative agreement with the Dorsets, he was not on such good terms with them yet that he was invited to stay. Instead, he rested overnight at the dowager Countess of Rutland’s house in Leicester, before riding the remaining 10 miles to Bradgate in the company of Sharington and her son the following morning.
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Thomas had known the countess since their days at court under Henry VIII. He was fond, too, of her son Henry Manners, the 2nd Earl of Rutland, whom he jovially informed was his ‘friend’ as they rode together. The young earl recalled that Seymour told him he ‘would be glad to do me what pleasure he could’. The earl had only just turned twenty-two and was flattered by Seymour’s attention, thanking him for his friendship and informing him of his own goodwill. He had a favour to ask: he begged Thomas to assist in securing his place in the House of Lords that autumn since, when the writs for the Parliament had been issued the previous year, he had still not quite reached his twenty-first birthday, and so had not been summoned. Seymour was doubtful of the earl’s chances, since that autumn’s sessions were to be attended only by those that had been summoned in 1547. He told Rutland that he had better ask the Council – although (as the earl related) ‘he was glad that I should be of the House, for that he trusted to have my voice with him’. Rutland, who was shrewd beyond his years, said that he had told Seymour he ‘was content in what my conscience would serve me’. Nonetheless, he did indeed take his seat that autumn, perhaps with Seymour’s assistance – he certainly sought Thomas out as soon as he arrived in London.

Once the pair’s amity had been established, as they rode together Thomas began, typically, to question Rutland about his lands and estates. He asked him how much support he could muster in the local area, before boasting of the ‘great number of his friends, and also how he was banded in the countries’. More pointedly – showing that he had already done his research – Seymour asked Rutland to confirm that he was indeed, as he thought, so well liked in the area that he was able to match the power of the Earl of Shrewsbury (George Talbot). Rutland merely demurred, remembering: ‘I could not tell; howbeit, I thought My Lord would do me no wrong’. Thomas then told Rutland to ‘make much’ of the gentlemen of the local area, especially the honest and wealthy yeomen, who were ‘ringleaders in good towns’. He considered, he confided, that gentlemen could not be trusted, but that, of the lower sort of folk, by ‘making much of them, and sometimes dining like a good fellow in one of their houses’ one could have their goodwill to go with them, wherever he should lead them. He was already considering how to build support against his brother.

Rutland was far from convinced, telling Seymour that he judged the Admiral’s power to be much diminished by the death of the queen. Seymour, however, made light of this, telling him ‘judge, judge, the Council never feared him so much as they do now’. Rutland was still not persuaded, but Seymour then burst into praise of the king. The boy was, he said, ‘now of some discretion’ and he wished that he should have the rule of his own affairs ‘and not as that is now; for that which now is done, the king’s highness beareth the charges, and my brother receiveth the honour thereof’. He assured Rutland that ‘I would not desire My Lord my brother’s hurt, marry, I would wish he should rule, but as a chief counsellor’. Rutland made no comment to this, merely enquiring as to Thomas’s relations with his brother. The earl was surprised by the conversation and glad when they reached Bradgate, allowing him to depart.

Dorset’s country house was a fine brick mansion, built on high ground overlooking his park. From its large windows, the family could easily see their visitors’ approach. On arrival, Seymour and Sharington were shown into the marquess and marchioness’s presence. The Lord Admiral marshalled all his considerable charm and greeted Dorset as an old friend, speaking earnestly and insistently and refusing to take ‘no’ for an answer from either the marquess or his wife.
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Eventually, the couple began to concede, with Seymour renewing his promise that Jane would marry the king, saying that, as the marquess remembered, ‘if he might once get the king at liberty, he durst warrant me that His Majesty would marry my daughter’.

This was Sharington’s cue to speak persuasively to Frances, taking her aside while Thomas continued to urge her husband. Seymour was dashingly plausible, so much so that Dorset, ‘seduced and availed’, promised him that – excepting only the king – ‘he would spend his life and blood in his the said Lord Admiral’s part against all men’. He did not love Seymour enough to send his daughter for no charge, however. The always impecunious Dorset gratefully received £900 in cash, which had been minted and carried by Sharington as a down-payment on Jane’s wardship.
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In addition to this, Seymour promised the marquess a ‘loan’ of £2,000, quickly sending the first £500 of it when he arrived back at Sudeley. Jane’s father, who had expressed himself so keen to be involved in raising her himself only two weeks before, was now happy enough to use her as a security for the debt.

While Jane’s guardian and father discussed her future, Thomas also turned his attention to Dorset’s military power. He advised him to move his household to Warwickshire, which ‘was a country full of men’ to be won to his cause.
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Dorset insisted that his house there – Astley Castle – was crumbling and that he had no funds to repair it, to which Seymour replied that he would send his own builders before Christmas to take charge. Dorset still refused, saying that his provisions were at Bradgate, but even this was no obstacle as far as Seymour was concerned. He asked how far away the two houses were from each other. On hearing that it was some 16 miles, he laughed: ‘why that is nothing,’ it would be an easy matter for everything to be moved to Warwickshire. Just as Seymour wanted the Earl of Rutland to stand in opposition to the Earl of Shrewsbury in Leicestershire, so he wanted Dorset to oppose the Earl of Warwick in Warwickshire, where the two were rivals for control of the county.
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During the course of the meeting, he declared dangerously that ‘he loved not the Protector, and would not have any Protector’. He confided to Dorset his plans. Within three years, he promised, he would have the king at his liberty, with Somerset relegated to mere head of the Council. To the Dorsets, this seemed plausible. ‘After long debating and much sticking on our sides,’ as they later claimed, they sent Jane back with the Lord Admiral to Sudeley.

Thomas and Sharington rode together as they wended their way back through rolling countryside and falling leaves. As their horses clip-clopped along the uneven mud roads, they spoke quietly together, making sure that they were not overheard. Thomas, who had previously contented himself with showing his friend a map of England to demonstrate his areas of influence, now pointed out places, commenting: ‘All that be in these parts be my friends.’ He told Sharington that he had a great number of gentlemen that loved him and, candidly, that he thought even more loved him than loved the Protector. He was a man, he said, ‘happy that hath friends in this world, whatsoever should chance’. More significantly, he also pointed out that of his own tenants and servants he could muster 10,000 armed men.
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Not long after Seymour returned to Gloucestershire, he considered that figure again, asking Sharington how much money would serve to pay and ration 10,000 men for a month.
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Sharington thought for a moment, before coming up with the amount of sixpence per day for a man. When Thomas heard this, he commented only that it was good ‘to have always a good mass of money ready, for if a man have money, he may build at all times’. He then asked: ‘God’s faith, Sharington, if we had £10,000 in ready money; that were well, could not you be able to make so much money? I trust we should not lack it.’ Sharington promised that ‘if the mint did stand at Bristol’ he would make the counterfeits, although when he asked specifically what Thomas wanted the money for, his friend was – for once – circumspect. Later, in another indication of where Seymour’s thoughts lay, he told Sharington that the Earl of Warwick wanted to purchase his lands at Stratford upon Avon; but he would not give them up, since ‘it was a pretty town, and would make a good many men’.

Thomas Seymour’s preparations to build an army were already under way.

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The lady wooing a gentleman was not the way Tudor marriage negotiations were expected to proceed. There is an excellent study of sixteenth-century courtship in O’Hara (2000).

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PROB 11/33/458. Margery Seymour’s memory was failing by March 1550, when she struggled to set out her last will; if this was dementia, it may be that she had been suffering from fading recollection for some time.

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The Earl of Rutland’s later confession (S. Haynes, p. 81) refers to this visit. It has proved difficult to locate the Countess of Rutland’s house. The family’s main seat – Belvoir Castle – was more than 30 miles to the north-east of Bradgate and can be discounted, as can the other manors included in the countess’s dower (as mentioned in the will of her husband in Testamenta Vetusta, Vol. II, p. 720). The family is known to have owned property in Leicester, and this seems the most likely location of her house in 1548. The identification is, however, tentative.

In the early autumn of 1548, as Thomas Seymour cast off his grief for Catherine and his thoughts turned to ways of achieving power, he had not forgotten the essential ingredient in his plans – a new wife for himself. One day, speaking to William Sharington in the company of his serving man Pigot, he whispered that ‘I will wear black for this twelvemonth. After that I know where to have a wife’.
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And at that moment, she was living at Cheshunt.

On 7 September 1548, Princess Elizabeth celebrated her fifteenth birthday. She was still weak with sickness, and her condition, combined with the queen’s death, meant that no one felt like celebrating. Yet it was another step towards womanhood. She was already a year past what was considered to be a marriageable age. Girls she knew from her childhood were married and had become mothers already. As the princess’s health started to improve over the autumn, she began to discuss the possibility of moving to a house of her own.

Thomas retained his close interest in Elizabeth. The idea of her leaving the Dennys’ supervision appealed, but the expense of such a move was high, since the princess would require additional servants and furnishings. Elizabeth had independent means, but Thomas was keen for her to reduce her household charges, perhaps reasoning that he already had a household of servants fit for a royal woman. Why go to so much expense if, as he hoped, she would soon be his bride? To this end, he sent William Wightman to Uxbridge that autumn to see Lady Browne, the widow of Wightman’s former patron.

Lady Browne, the twenty-one-year-old formerly known as Elizabeth Fitzgerald – and poetically as ‘the Fair Geraldine’ – was youthful and vibrant.
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She was also well known to Princess Elizabeth, whom she had served as a childhood companion. Bizarrely, Thomas’s message asked that she break up her household and move in with Princess Elizabeth, so that they could both save household charges. To sweeten the widow to his schemes, he hinted that he would give her 500 marks. He had recently looked over his old will, while going through his papers at Hanworth, and had noticed that he had bequeathed this sum to her. If he died at any point, ‘she should have been no loser by him’.
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Thomas had more to tell Lady Browne. The next time he was in London he tried earnestly to see her, but she avoided him, instead sending a message that she was going to visit Elizabeth the next morning.

The object of Thomas Seymour’s matrimonial advances had little interest, too, in sharing a household and was busy preparing to leave Cheshunt that autumn. But where to go? In London, the plague still ‘reigned sore’, unhampered by the drought that had lasted for all the hot summer, and which had turned roadways to dust and left parched brown earth in the parklands and fields.
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There was little cheer to be had in the narrow streets within the city, or even in the settlements clustered on its edges. That October a calf with two heads (both with ‘white faces’) and eight legs provided some diversion for Londoners, with crowds braving the pestilence to pay to view its carcass in Newgate market: the spectacle remained for some time until, alarmed by the potentially infectious mob and the stinking of the fetid cadaver, the lord mayor called for the carcass to be hurriedly buried in the fields outside the city’s bounds.
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On 28 September the Protector issued a proclamation banning even preaching in the town in an attempt to root out the sickness.
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The next month, some of his own household died from the disease. On 25 October 1548, Parliament, which had been adjourned months before, was postponed for a further month, in the hope that London’s streets would then finally be free of plague.
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