The Temptation of Elizabeth Tudor (36 page)

Parliament did not sit on 18 January, although the peers reassembled the following day. It must have been a strange assembly, with both Seymour and his brother absent from their seats. Business continued as usual, considering trade, fines and customs, but it was Lord Chancellor Lord Rich who adjourned proceedings. Somerset was still occupied in gathering evidence against his brother. Later that day William Sharington was moved from his prison to the more secure Tower. The hapless John Fowler joined the others there too.
48

Although he had been held under investigation for some time, the slippery Sharington had maintained some contact with the outside world. When men came to take him to the Tower, he was searched and found carrying a letter from Thomas Dowrishe, his deputy at the Bristol mint, setting out details of the mass of coins and silver they had ready.
49
In the face of such evidence, there was little defence to be mounted. Despite this, he was subjected to particularly intense interrogation in the Tower. At first, the focus was on his own misdeeds, his interrogators demanding to know how many testoons he had made and who had funded the operation.
50
When asked: ‘What money hath comen through his hands within these six months, to be delivered to any nobleman; to whom, when, and how much?’, he answered that he had delivered money only to the Lord Admiral, giving him the £900 that was paid to Dorset and a further £600 to buy wool.

Once Sharington had given his answers, the examiners came back to him with another list of questions.
51
He kept his answers brief, unwilling to incriminate himself or his confederates further if he could help it. To the question ‘When you began the melting down, and how long you continued the same?’, he answered only: ‘I can say nothing without my books by the which I am bound.’ He was highly anxious. When asked what money he had given to his wife, he replied that ‘I am not able to say, if my wits were a hundred more; she knoweth much better I think.’

In the face of such probing, and in terror of his life, Sharington finally decided to abandon Seymour. From his prison, he wrote to the Protector offering his complete testimony in return for clemency.
52
His approach was accepted. It was not Sharington that Somerset wanted to catch.

Ignoring the biblical day of rest, the Council met again on Sunday 20 January. They received worrying news from Sir Thomas Cawarden, who had been sent to Sussex to make an inventory of the Admiral’s property there. While he found the manors neglected, Cawarden discovered that Thomas had used his expertise as Master of the Ordinance to set up furnaces deep within the Forest of Worth to cast guns and shot.
53
There was an alarmingly large quantity of such hidden military supplies, with £66 of shot alone squirrelled away at the Sussex manor of Sheffield, at Thomas’s command. The illicit production was immediately halted on Thomas’s arrest. On his arrival, Cawarden was asked plaintively by the skilled gunfounders whether ‘they shall cast any more ordinance and shot or no and of what kind?’
54
No accounts of the furnaces and mills at Sheffield had been made since 1546. The clerk there, John Sherief, had agonized over this discrepancy, but Thomas had not wanted to open his endeavours to scrutiny. He had probably hoped to transfer the munitions to his army – when it was raised.

The Council was busy that Sunday, as witnesses clamoured to exonerate themselves. Keeping his hands as clean as he could, Somerset appointed Lord Russell, Sir William Petre and the former lord chancellor, Wriothesley, to hear the investigation.
55
Carrying out a thorough job was almost certainly the price of the conservative Wriothesley’s rehabilitation: he threw himself into the task.
56
It was all rather neat, since he had only again taken up a seat on the Council that month.
57

The Marquess of Dorset immediately became talkative in a bid to clear himself, supplying a number of depositions against Seymour. The Protector left no stone unturned, even seeking a version of events from Edward, signed by the young king himself.
58
The boy had no compunction in telling his Council of all Seymour’s dealings, including his behaviour around the opening of the first Parliament and Seymour’s attempts to enlist Fowler to his support. He probably hoped to absolve himself of any collusion with his younger uncle. In spite of his youth, he was calm, signing ‘Edward’ neatly at the foot of the page.
59

On the same day that Russell, Wriothesley and Petre were appointed, they summoned William Wightman to enquire whether he could recall anything more of the Lord Admiral’s activities. He could, he said, telling them of Parry’s visits to Seymour Place. Explosively, he added that he had seen Elizabeth’s cofferer speak with Seymour only ‘three or four days before his apprehension’.
60

Suspicion now fell squarely on the princess at Hatfield.

*1
This uncertainty over which princess Seymour was courting suggests that the information came from the Tyrwhitts, who were only privy to the general outline of his plan.

The house at Hatfield was quiet in the early morning of 21 January 1549. Although still deep winter, the days were slowly beginning to draw out, with the sun rising earlier each day to reveal the morning frost. This day began with the usual hustle and bustle of life in a great noble household. No messengers were expected; but the sound of approaching hooves caused uproar.
1

Someone, looking out of the window, recognized Lord St John and Sir Anthony Denny. On hearing that these two members of the Council were at the gate, Thomas Parry turned pale and immediately ran to his own chamber, where he found his terrified wife. Tearing his chain of office from his neck and wrenching the rings from his fingers, he cried out: ‘I would I had never been born, for I am undone.’ In the commotion, his servant and other members of the household entered to see him pacing the floor in distraction, continually wringing his hands. Another servant recalled that he looked very pale and sorrowful, to their surprise. The news of Seymour’s arrest had reached Hatfield some days earlier, and now it seemed to Parry as though the end had come for him too.

It was with difficulty that Parry’s wife, Lady Fortescue, managed to calm her husband. She had been a widow before she married the cofferer, choosing the lower-ranking gentleman out of love rather than status.
*1
Composing themselves, the couple left their chamber, going to greet the visitors with Kate Ashley before sitting down with them to dine. Lord St John, as Lord Great Master, was an important member of the Protector’s government. The meal was tense and highly charged. To the surprise of Parry and other of Elizabeth’s servants, the visitors left them alone for a time after eating, in order to begin their interrogation of the princess.
2

Elizabeth, who already knew of events in London, kept her cool and revealed little. She, Kate and Parry had already sat down together to agree their stories, maintaining – almost as a mantra – that nothing had been considered matrimonially without the Council’s consent. She kept silent on whether or not she had agreed to marry the Lord Admiral. Given the tenor of the messages passed between her and Seymour, she most likely would have gone willingly as his fiancée had he arrived at Hatfield on the morning of 17 January with the king in his possession.

The princess was a good deal more composed than Parry’s wife. Once the company had left the table, Lady Fortescue looked at her husband and now broke down into fits of weeping, declaring to Kate: ‘I am afraid lest they will send my husband to the Tower, or what they will do with him.’
3
Elizabeth’s lady mistress, who was calmer, stopped her, declaring: ‘Nay I warrant you there is no such cause.’ Everything Kate and Parry had said was in private conversations; she was sure they had committed no offence. The three separated, but later Lady Fortescue came to Kate with a message from her husband, saying that ‘he would be torn in pieces rather than he would open the matter’. Kate again sent to Parry to insist that he keep his dealings with Seymour secret, lest her husband should hear of them.

Kate had still not grasped the seriousness of her own dealings with Seymour, but she soon learned. Late that night, after the household had retired to bed, Kate and Parry were summoned once more.
4
The lady mistress, who appeared wearing her nightdress, was horrified to find herself and Parry placed under arrest ‘for the matter of the Admiral’, and to be carried to the Tower that very night.
5
They were not even given time to dress.

Parry’s wife had been roused along with her husband, and on learning of his arrest she immediately rode to London. Although she was not imprisoned herself, she was kept under government observation while it was decided whether she should be examined.
6
Sir John Astley, who was already in the capital, was also summoned to account for his actions. Entirely unfairly – since he had always counselled his wife to keep away from Seymour – he was locked in the Fleet Prison on 23 January.
7
He may have been thankful that he was not sent to the doleful Tower, but his new lodging held few attractions.
8
It had stood close to the River Fleet, in Farringdon, for nearly 400 years and was a tattered, miserable place. As a gentleman, Astley might have been able to secure some comfort through payments to the gaolers; but the experience must have been gruelling, and he would have been forgiven for cursing his wife for her meddling.

By contrast, the fifteen-year-old Elizabeth slept soundly on the night of 21/22 January, entirely unaware of the commotion in her household. But she was also ‘under grave suspicion’.
9
Somerset and the Council strongly suspected that Seymour had intended to marry her without permission, before contriving to secure the consent of Edward, who would have already been in his custody, and they were determined to have the truth.

Either that night of 21/22 January, or perhaps early the next morning before he rode for Parliament, the Protector summoned Sir Robert Tyrwhitt. Sir Robert – a younger son – had spent a lifetime in service at court and was well versed in the politicking and plots that existed in the seat of government. He had been without official employment since Catherine Parr’s death, and he now agreed readily to ride for Hatfield to conduct the investigation into Elizabeth’s own conduct.

His wife, Elizabeth, went too, since without Kate the princess required an acting lady mistress.
10
Catherine’s cousin by marriage, Elizabeth Tyrwhitt was as staunchly religious as the former queen, with distinctly puritan tastes.
11
On being interviewed by the Council at the same time as her husband, she appeared to them well qualified to straighten out the girl and make her ‘prosper in all virtue and honesty’.
12
Privately, they instructed her ‘in such matters’ of how to handle Elizabeth, sanctioning the strict religious timetable by which she expected a household to live. The princess should confess her ‘grievous offences’ committed ‘in thought, word and deed’ each day before morning prayers.
13
Accepting her appointment, Lady Tyrwhitt must have regarded Elizabeth as a sinner into whom she could really get her teeth. And of course the Tyrwhitts had few warm feelings for Thomas Seymour.

The horses clattered over a well-trodden path, being admitted to Hatfield early in the morning of 22 January. The Tyrwhitts probably rode with Lady Browne, or met her on the way, since she also found her way to Hatfield.

Sir Robert set to work zealously from his arrival. As a former member of Catherine’s household, he was as suspicious of her stepdaughter as he was of her widowed husband, and held no affection for Elizabeth. His first act was an attempt to scare the princess into submission before he had even begun his interrogation. On arriving, he hurriedly forged a letter to Blanche Parry, purporting to be from a friend of hers, which he had brought to deliver.
14
The spinster gentlewoman, who quietly adored Elizabeth, took it at once to her mistress after reading its contents with shock. It informed Blanche that both Kate and Parry, who had been spirited away to London, had been imprisoned in the Tower. This was devastating news for the princess, who was now barred from information of the outside world; she wept for a long time before sending for Lady Browne to ask whether the pair had confessed anything. This was suspicious behaviour, since it suggested collusion. Elizabeth was unaware that the pretty young widow was there to spy on her.

When Elizabeth heard that Lady Browne had gone to Sir Robert with her words, she sent for him herself. Perhaps he expected her to confess everything; he certainly found her red-eyed from weeping. Nonetheless, she was resolute. ‘She had forgotten,’ she said imperiously, ‘certain things to be opened to My Lord Great Master [St John], and Master Denny.’
15
She would tell him now, she added, ‘and all other things which she could call to her remembrance that she done’. In spite of this, Elizabeth certainly did not intend to tell Tyrwhitt any more that she needed to. All she would say was that she had indeed written to Seymour, but in favour of her chaplain, Edmund Allen. She admitted that at the end of the letter she had asked Seymour to ‘credit her trusty servant, her cofferer, in all other things’, but she assured Tyrwhitt that she had only meant with regard to the negotiations for Durham Place. Surely he could see nothing suspicious in that? After all, she assured her inquisitor that she had refused Seymour’s offer to visit her on his way to Sudeley.