The Temptation of Elizabeth Tudor (20 page)

Thomas and Catherine had always planned that their baby should be born at Sudeley, in Gloucestershire, in the castle intended to stand as their ancestral seat. There was also a more practical reason to leave for the country that summer: London and its environs were riven by plague. By July 1548 the king and the Council had fled the city to avoid the pestilence, moving to the cleaner air of Hampton Court.
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In early June 1548, therefore, Catherine’s vast household of servants and retainers were already busying themselves in packing up her possessions. It was to be a major operation, with curtains stripped from the windows and carpets from the floors, before being carefully stowed alongside the furniture to adorn the new residence. The Tudor nobility never travelled lightly and queens even less so, preferring the familiar comforts of their own things, even against a frequently changing backdrop as they moved residences – and even when so many of the coffers remained unopened.
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Although the bulk of Catherine’s jewels were still in the Protector’s grasping custody, she had managed to retain many fine items, including gold rings set with diamonds or rubies. Catherine packed indiscriminately, taking everything with her, including several fine jewellery boxes and broken, worn favourites, such as her seventeen little buttons of gold garnished with small pearls (many of the pearls being lost) or the damaged ruby ring stored away for repair at some later date or to be made into something new. Her prayer books and psalm books came too, as well as a little pair of silver tweezers used for plucking hair and twenty-eight hair-nets of gold and silver. She brought her inkwell, to allow her to stay in touch with family and friends. The household servants all had to stow carefully their own possessions in trunks. It was thus no surprise that those first days of June 1548 were bustling, busy ones at Hanworth as everyone struggled to be ready to take the road to Sudeley.

Although Catherine was a seasoned traveller, having lived with her first two husbands in the north and endured annual progresses with King Henry, she must have baulked at the hundred-mile journey north-west to Sudeley. A rider might cover that distance in two to three days, but a train encumbered by wagons, and in which the queen was carried in a litter, would take much longer, requiring frequent stops along the road.

Unsurprisingly, the queen wanted her husband with her and feared any delay to their journey. But Thomas was at court as the household packed, tying up the loose ends of his business in the Council and the Admiralty. There were concerns that he might have to postpone his journey, since rumours were rife that the French were planning to attack the English coast. Catherine was ‘very sorry,’ she wrote on 9 June, to hear this, telling her husband that ‘I pray God it be not a let to our journey’.
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She was worried and could not ‘be very quiet’ until she heard one way or the other. Thomas was anxious to ensure that his wife was upset no more and replied immediately. He had already informed his brother, he said, that they would be leaving on Wednesday 13 June as arranged. While the Protector was ‘very sorry’ to hear this, Catherine’s husband bowed to no persuasions. He agreed only to remain at Westminster for one more day, ‘to hear what the Frenchmen will do’, before leaving on the Monday for Hanworth. He would be there in time for dinner, served mid-morning, he promised.

As Admiral, Seymour’s place was with his navy in the face of such a crisis, but he was determined it would be no ‘let’ to the journey. He put a positive slant on it, spreading it abroad that, with regard to his wife, ‘his devotion was such that he would not leave her palace’.
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Already, at Westminster, his thoughts were far from any proposed invasion. On the Monday morning, 11 June, he went over to the court, but instead of seeing his brother he called only for John Fowler.
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The gentleman heeded the summons, coming quickly to Thomas’s chamber.

On Fowler’s arrival, he found Seymour alone and in a confident mood. Thomas told him: ‘Mr Fowler as I would do nothing but I would the King’s Majesty should be privy of it, I pray you tell His Grace I will be a suiter to My Lord my brother for certain jewels which the king that dead is did give the queen.’ He assured Fowler that he had the law on his side, but his ally only shook his head, saying: ‘alas My Lord that the jewels or the muck of the world should make you to begin a new matter between My Lord’s Grace and you’. ‘Nay,’ replied Seymour dismissively, ‘there will be no business for this matter for I trust My Lord my brother will be content’. He said nothing more on the topic, merely calling for his boat, which was ready to take him to Hanworth and his dinner. As he stepped aboard, he turned once again to Fowler, bidding him to send only to him if the king lacked anything, as well as to ensure that the boy-king remained in ‘remembrance of him’ in his absence. Seymour was ever terrified that the monarch might ‘forget him’.
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Someone in no danger of forgetting Thomas was the king’s half-sister. Elizabeth met few men of substance for, being a minor, she had little access to the court or to the Protector. At Hanworth, as always, she spent her time immersed in her studies. She found Ascham a gentle, dedicated schoolmaster and thrived under his care. His approach was enlightened, informed by the belief that ‘there is no such whetstone, to sharpen a good wit and encourage a will to learning, as is praise’.
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He did not believe in punishments for simple mistakes, instead encouraging Elizabeth to come to him when she was uncertain. He wanted to inspire a love of learning in his charge. He was successful, since Elizabeth often chose to read Greek for pleasure, as well as Latin, Italian, French and Spanish.

It made sense for the princess to discuss her studies with her young cousin, Jane Grey, who was herself becoming highly proficient in Greek under the guidance of her own tutor, Dr Aylmer. The ten-year-old would soon be reading Plato for her amusement. Ascham was fascinated by Jane too, striving to become very ‘intimate’ with her during their time together in Catherine’s household.
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He found a friend in Dr Aylmer, whom he adopted as something of a protégé, calling him ‘my Aylmer’ when he wrote to Jane. Aylmer was a man whom Elizabeth’s tutor trusted, one into whose ‘bosom shall abundantly pour all my sorrows’. The two men, bringing their pupils together at times, shared notes on their curricula. Ascham lauded his fellow tutor’s young charge, telling her: ‘O happy Aylmer to have such a pupil, and much happier you to have him for a tutor!’
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Such occasions were some of the only opportunities that Elizabeth had to speak with anyone of her own rank, save Catherine and Thomas.

For Elizabeth, Thomas remained a constant but complex source of fascination. It was clear even to her less intimate servants that there was ‘good will between the Lord Admiral and Her Grace’.
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When Catherine asked Elizabeth to arrange a messenger to carry the sealed letter of 9 June to Thomas at court, the princess – perhaps emboldened by Thomas’s physical absence from the house – decided to add her own message on the reverse. Taking up her quill, she pointedly inscribed the letter with the words ‘Thou, touch me not’ in Latin, before deleting the phrase and substituting ‘let him not touch me’.
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Even though attracted to Seymour, she knew that his intimate behaviour was unacceptable, and she was now all but ordering him to stay away. Her first, erased phrase was bluntly addressed direct to Thomas; her second was almost a plea for someone else to relieve her of Seymour’s over-familiar attentions. The truth was, she did not really know how the situation should be handled. Either way, Thomas Seymour had no intention of staying away from her. He ignored Elizabeth’s note.

Catherine Parr loved her husband with a great passion, in spite of his own jealousies and his frequent absences. She could understand jealousy, for she felt it herself. After warning Kate to be more watchful of Elizabeth, the queen had continued to observe, growing daily more suspicious of what she saw. Whenever Thomas was present at Hanworth, his eye was caught by Elizabeth and his attention drawn to her. It was obvious that – as Elizabeth’s cofferer, Thomas Parry, would later put it – he ‘loved her but too well, and had so done a good while’.
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As Catherine approached motherhood, her belly growing larger by the day, she had watched anxiously and with increasing anger. Jealous of, and confused by, both her husband and her stepdaughter, she was more alert than ever to reasons as to why her worries might be justified, ‘suspecting the often access of the Admiral to the Lady Elizabeth’s Grace’.
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After Seymour returned to Hanworth on 11 June, following his meeting with Fowler and having pondered Elizabeth’s note, he pulled the girl aside. The queen, noticing that they had disappeared, went to seek them out. She came upon her stepdaughter in her husband’s arms, alone together, embracing in an otherwise empty room.
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She was devastated by the sight, and her initial reaction was to rant and rave at the pair, falling out with them both in her fury. This intimate embrace seemed a brutal confirmation of her fears. It could not be construed as playful tickling or adolescent high jinks. Neither Thomas nor Elizabeth, pulling away from the each other, had much to say, since their actions spoke louder than words. Although Elizabeth had tried to save her stepmother’s feelings and had commanded Seymour to stay away, ultimately she could do little to resist him in his own house; and Thomas was too dangerously attracted to Elizabeth, for her youth and beauty and for her position as second in line to the throne. Catherine’s actual words to Elizabeth and Thomas were not recorded. Perhaps Thomas sought to blame Elizabeth, reminding his wife of Anne Boleyn’s reputation.
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It took considerable effort on Catherine’s part to regain her composure.

Catherine’s ire also turned on Kate Ashley, who had entirely failed to watch her young charge. The queen called for her at once, telling her exactly what she thought of the matter and venting her ‘displeasure’. For all Catherine knew, the pair might already have been sleeping together; she certainly feared what they had been doing when they were alone. After venting her spleen with Kate, Catherine dismissed Elizabeth’s lady mistress from her presence.

Elizabeth must have been filled with dread as to the consequences. Catherine had to consider quickly what to do with her stepdaughter, now that preparations for the move to Sudeley were almost complete. She knew with certainty that she could not allow the girl to stay in her household, given the danger that Elizabeth posed both to the queen’s marriage and to her own reputation. The princess needed a new guardian.

The queen therefore decided to send Elizabeth to stay at Cheshunt, Hertfordshire, in the house of Sir Anthony Denny and his wife Joan. When they were first mentioned, the couple must have seemed a surprising choice for the girl, since they were very close to Kate Ashley and her husband. Joan and Kate were sisters, and although of very different characters the two couples moved in the same social circles. Still, the queen knew that she could rely on the couple to be discreet and watchful.
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Elizabeth’s new host was a serious-minded man in late middle age. He was a scholar, having been given a fine humanist education at St Paul’s School in London, before studying at Cambridge. He had been an early friend of Elizabeth’s father, and was the only man brave enough to inform the old king that his end was approaching in January 1547. Sir Anthony’s father, who had spent much of his time in London, had been a staunchly religious man, asking for masses to be said for his soul to speed him through Purgatory.
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It was Anthony who made the family’s fortune, far eclipsing his father as he also turned away from the traditional faith.
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He was a straight-talking, honest man, zealous in religion, and he was well matched with his forceful, pious wife.

Joan Denny was a practical, no-nonsense woman who trod a more conventional path than her sister.
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She liked fine things, though, possessing several gold tablets decorated with diamonds, which she looked on as family heirlooms and hoped to pass down to her daughters. To show her piety, she wore a beautiful gold cross, garnished with five diamonds, which sparkled against her sober clothing, while at her wrists were gold bracelets. As a sign of the trust between husband and wife, Sir Anthony bequeathed her his personal gold chain – his most precious possession – which she diligently later passed to their eldest son, who was named ‘Henry’ after Elizabeth’s father.