Anne was arrested and was taken to the Tower of London on 2nd May, 1536. Four of the accused men were tried in Westminster ten days later. Smeaton pleaded guilty but Weston, Brereton, and Norris maintained their innocence Three days later, Anne and George Boleyn were tried separately in the Tower of London. She was accused of enticing five men to have illicit relations with her. (11) Adultery committed by a queen was considered to be an act of high treason because it had implications for the succession to the throne. All were found guilty and condemned to death. The men were executed on 17th May, 1536. Anne went to the scaffold at Tower Green on 19th May.
Edward was christened when he was three days old, and both his sisters played a part in this important occasion. In the great procession which took the baby from the mother's bed-chamber to the chapel, Elizabeth carried the chrisom, the cloth in which the child was received after his immersion in the font. As she was only four years old, she herself was carried by Edward Seymour. Jane was well enough to receive guests after the christening. Edward was proclaimed prince of Wales, duke of Cornwall, and earl of Carnarvon.
The historian, Elizabeth Jenkins, believes that the "Queen Dowager, released from the sufferings of her marriage to Henry VIII, behaved like an enamoured girl." (22) Seymour wanted to marry Parr but realised the Council would reject his proposal, as it would be pointed out that if she became pregnant, there would have been uncertainty about whether the child was Seymour's or Henry's. (23) Seymour married Parr in secret in about May 1547.
Thomas's desire to resume his relationship with Catherine was due, in part, to his previous affection for her, but it was also driven by ambition. His brother, Edward, was now arguably the most influential person in the land, and sadly for Thomas, his brother possessed all the qualities of leadership that he himself lacked. Henry VIII had recognized this and made Edward one of his close advisers, sending him abroad on key diplomatic missions. Edward VI's Council similarly recognized Edward's powers as a reliable, intelligent, capable soldier and administrator.
When the Council awarded titles to its various Councillors, Edward became the 1st Duke of Somerset. Thomas also received the tide of lst Baron Seymour of Sudeley and was appointed Lord High Admiral, but he was far from satisfied. Edward was still more important, and Thomas was furious that his brother had risen so far so fast. Thomas was not only ambitious: he genuinely believed that he was equal, if not superior, to his brother.
Thomas's subsequent behaviour both involving Catherine, and later, Elizabeth sought to level the playing field. Marriage to the Dowager Queen was just one step further towards reaching a particular goal. Until Edward VI married, which was some years off yet, Catherine was the First Lady in England and the beloved stepmother of the King. She was arguably the most important woman in the country and could be expected to use her influence to support her husband in gaining the King's favour, if he so required.
While he was wooing Catherine, Thomas was also in communication with some of the Councillors to see if they might match him with either of Edward VI's half-sisters, Mary or Elizabeth. He received a strong negative response, as sometime in April or May of 1547 he secretly married Catherine.
Edward VI noted Edward Seymour's reaction to the marriage in his journal: "The Lord Seymour of Sudeley married the Queen, whose name was Catherine, with which marriage the Lord Protector was much offended." While Catherine had approached her stepson and asked for his approval for the union, which he gladly gave, neither Thomas nor Catherine had approached the Council, perhaps suspecting that the Lord Protector might prevent the marriage, not just on the grounds of timing, but also because it would give too much influence to Thomas. When Edward VI took the throne, Thomas had tried to persuade the young King to sign a Bill to allow him to share the role of Protector, which Edward had refused.
By June, the marriage was common knowledge at Court and Thomas was living openly at Chelsea with Catherine and her household, which now included Elizabeth, but soon grew to encompass 11-year-old Lady Jane Grey. As part of Thomas's plans to increase his power, he plotted to arrange a marriage between Edward VI and Jane, the granddaughter of Mary Tudor, Henry VIII's sister, and Edward's own cousin. Evidence for what happened next at Chelsea, and at Catherine and Thomas's houses at Hanworth and Seymour Place in London, came from statements given by witnesses in the 1548-49 enquiry into the treasonable actions of Thomas Seymour. The most prominent and damaging statements came from Kat Ashley and Sir Thomas Parry, Elizabeth's Cofferer (treasurer).
Thomas Seymour was made Lord Seymour of Sudeley and Lord High Admiral. Somerset, though arrogant, grasping and unscrupulous, had some enlightened ideas of government. Seymour, on the other hand, had the total selfishness and irresponsibility of a criminal. He bitterly resented the fact that the office of Protector was not shared equally between Somerset and himself; from the time of their nephew's accession, they behaved like a pair of brothers in some classical tragedy of fratricide.
Vain, reckless and unreasonable as Seymour was, he had the charm of a handsome man who is genial and high-spirited. "Fierce in courage," runs the famous description, "courtly in fashion, in person stately, in voice magnificent, but somewhat empty in matter." The latter drawback, as far as women were concerned, did not injure the rest of his qualities. On the King's death, Seymour proposed to the Council that he should marry Elizabeth, and Mrs. Ashley who thought the King himself had favoured the idea was disappointed that the matter came to nothing. But Seymour received an unequivocal rebuff from the Council, and immediately renewed his old suit. The Queen Dowager, released from the sufferings of her marriage to Henry VIII, behaved like an enamoured girl. She married Seymour secretly, and received his clandestine visits at her house in Chelsea, where her porteress let him in at five in the morning. The situation was full of submerged danger, for by the Council's permission Elizabeth was now living with her stepmother.
Seymour, for all his geniality, was a man of ruthless ambition. He was twenty years older than Elizabeth, but as he was in his prime this meant only that he had the maturity a very young girl admires, and his attractions were of the kind to which she was susceptible all her life. He had been put into her head already as a possible husband, and now he was coming and going in romantic secrecy, in the first light of the May mornings, as the husband of her still-youthful stepmother.
Had Seymour left Elizabeth alone, no harm would have come of it; but one of his reasons for marrying the Queen Dowager was that Elizabeth had been consigned to her care. His brother had control of the King: he himself would have control of the King's enigmatic young sister. It was true that if she were drawn into any entanglement it might be regarded as high treason, and that the penalty for this was, for a woman, beheading or burning alive. Seymour knew these facts, but he preferred to disregard them.
The Queen Dowager's household was a charming one. Beyond it, indeed, matters were stormy. Seymour was perpetually at variance with his brother, refusing to accept his authority or to carry out his own duties as Lord Admiral, while the situation between the brothers was the more embittered by the hostility of their wives. The Duchess of Somerset, eminently strong-minded and disagreeable, had once been obliged to treat Catherine Parr with ceremonious respect; she now took pains to show her that the Queen Dowager was merely the wife of the Protector's younger brother. This occasioned anger abroad, but at home all was pleasure, ease and a delightful freedom from past restraints.
The Princess's household formed a unit within the Queen Dowager's; it included Mrs. Ashley, the tutor, young Mr. Grindal, and several ladies-in-waiting. There was also attached to it a man who would seem to have had more sense than all the rest put together; this was the Princess's distant cousin John Ashley. In the months after the King's death he gave his wife a warning "to take heed for he did fear that the Lady Elizabeth did bear some affection to my Lord Admiral". He had noticed that she looked pleased and sometimes blushed when Seymour was spoken of. His wife was coarser-fibred; either she saw no danger, or in the congenial atmosphere of ease and pleasure with the exciting undercurrent that Seymour's presence brought, she would not recognize it.
Seymour went openly to work. He began romping with the Princess, and his wife did what many women do in such a case: to prove to herself and everybody else that there was no harm in the romp, she joined it herself. There was no doubt as to Elizabeth's state of mind - Ashley had recognized it at once; but with the passion there was considerable fear. Seymour's boisterous approaches were liable to be alarming to a girl of fourteen, and one with, who knows what buried dread of men? Seymour would come into her bedchamber in the mornings. If she were up "he would strike her familiarly on the back and buttocks". If she were in bed he would open the bed curtain "and make as though he would come at her", while she "would go further into the bed". One morning he tried to kiss her in her bed, at which Mrs. Ashley, who slept in the Princess's room "bade him go away for shame". Elizabeth's bedroom, at Chelsea and at Seymour's town house, Seymour Place, was above the Queen Dowager's, and Seymour used to come up "in his nightgown, bare-legged in his slippers". Mrs. Ashley told him "it was a shame to see a man come so, bare-legged, to a maiden's chamber", but her protests were not taken seriously. The Queen Dowager, however, took to coming with her husband on his morning visits and one morning they both tickled the Princess as she lay in her bed. In the garden one day there was some startling horse-play, in which Seymour indulged in a practice often heard of in police courts; the Queen Dowager held Elizabeth so that she could not run away, while Seymour cut her black cloth gown into a hundred pieces. The cowering under bedclothes, the struggling and running away culminated in a scene of classical nightmare, that of helplessness in the power of a smiling ogre. Seymour had possessed himself of a masterkey, and early one morning at Chelsea, Elizabeth heard the privy lock undo, and, "knowing he would come in" - Seymour, smiling in his long red beard - " she ran out of her bed to her maidens and then went behind the curtains of the bed, the maidens being there; and my Lord tarried a long time in hopes she would come out". Afterwards, "she was commonly up and at her book", by the time Seymour came, and then he would merely look in at the door and say good morning. But he had overcome her initial resistance; the Queen Dowager, who was undergoing an uncomfortable pregnancy, could not bring herself to make her husband angry by protesting about his conduct, but she began to realize that he and Elizabeth were very often together; then one day in May, she went into a room unexpectedly and found Elizabeth in his arms.
There was no quarrel and no public appearance of her being sent away in disgrace, but it was decided she should remove with her establishment to the house of Sir Anthony Denny at Cheshunt. She and her train arrived there just after Whitsun, and Elizabeth wrote to her stepmother to say that at their parting she had been too much moved to thank her properly for her kindness, so sad was she to go away, leaving her "in doubtful health", and, she said, "albeit I answered little, I weighed it the more, when you said you would warn me of all evils you should hear of me, for if your Grace had not a good opinion of me, you would not have offered friendship to me that way".
The abrupt parting from Seymour, the disgrace and the contrition, and the warring of sexual excitement with deep-buried dread, all this coming upon her at the critical age of fourteen-and-a-half, coincided with, if it did not bring on, an illness. In Mrs. Ashley's words: "She was first sick about mid-summer." At times she was "sick in her bed", and so unwell for the rest of the year that Mrs. Ashley said she herself had never been more than a mile from the house."
For the next few years, the Princess suffered from intermittent illhealth; she developed migraine attacks and pains in the eyes, and by the time she was twenty, it was a matter of common rumour, of particular interest to ambassadors, that her monthly periods were very few or none, a condition often accounted for by shock and emotional strain. In Elizabeth's history, the events of her mother's death, and that of her mother's cousin, and the engaging of her own affections by Seymour's outrageous siege, seem to have done her nervous system and her sexual development an injury from which they never recovered. But her loyalty in her affections remained unshaken. She wrote anxiously of her stepmother's condition, "so big with child and so sickly", and to Seymour she wrote a letter, brief and touching. She waived away an apology he made for not being able to fulfil some small promise:"I shall desire you to think that a greater matter than this could not make me impute any unkindness to you, for I am a friend not won with trifles, nor lost with the like."
In August the Queen Dowager's daughter was born, and in the delirium offever, Catherine complained that those she had meant well to, and tried to be good to, stood around her bed, laughing at her pain. She died within a week, and was buried in the small chapel of Sudeley Castle. The chief mourner in the scene of sable draperies and attendants hooded in black was Lady Jane Grey, in deepest mourning, with a long mourning train upheld by another young lady.
Her parents now wished Lady Jane to return to them, but the child's body contained an infusion of the precious royal blood and Seymour did not intend to let her go. He held out a dazzling prospect: "If I can get the King at liberty, I dare warrant you he shall marry none other than Jane." The Dorsets were elated, and that Seymour might have complete authority in negotiating their daughter's marriage, Dorset sold him her wardship for Za,ooo, of which Seymour gave him kSoo on account immediately.
There was a second powerful and ambitious Seymour brother, who was to teach the teenage Elizabeth some malign lessons on the delusions of sexual desire and the snares of ruthless men who would be king. Thomas Lord Seymour of Sudeley, at nearly forty years old, still cut a dashing soldierly figure having distinguished himself in diplomatic, naval and military campaigns under Henry. He became Lord Admiral early in the reign of Edward VI under the protectorship of his own elder brother, Somerset. Thomas Seymour had not only been admired by Henry, he had been loved by his queen. In marrying the King rather than this love, Catherine Parr had sacrificed her heart for the sake of duty. However, on Henry's death her sense of obligation was fulfilled and after only four month, of widowhood, Catherine married Seymour. This was considered in indecorous haste, especially for a queen - and for a couple well into Tudor middle-age. But even more surprisingly the thirty-five year-old queen, who had remained childless throughout her first three marriages, now belatedly conceived. This could only enhance the self-confidence and reputation of an already proudly virile man. It seemed inevitable that such a man would have sired a son.
Elizabeth was still only thirteen when her stepmother, of whom she was most fond, married for love. The young Princess remained in her care, living principally with her at her dower houses at Chelsea and Hanworth. Ever curious and watchful, Elizabeth could not fail to have noted the effects of the sudden transformation in Catherine Parr's life. From patient, pious consort of an ailing elderly king she had been transmuted into a lover, desired and desiring.
Although not legally her step-father, Thomas Seymour assumed his role as head of the household and with his manly demeanour and exuberant animal spirits he became for the young Princess a charismatic figure of attraction and respect. Some twenty-five years her senior, Seymour in fact was old enough to be her father and the glamour of his varied heroic exploits in war and diplomatic dealings brought a welcome worldly masculinity into Elizabeth's cloistered female-dominated life.
Up until now, Elizabeth had never lived in daily proximity with a man other than her tutors and servants. Her father had been a distant, revered, almost superhuman figure to her, someone she strived to impress with something of her own talents and individuality, but it is unlikely that Henry offered her more than the scantest recognition. From the start, there was evidence that Seymour paid Elizabeth most gratifying attention.
From a purely political point of view, Elizabeth was worthy of this attention for Seymour always had an eye for the main chance and this receptive young woman was a royal Princess, third in the line of succession. But Elizabeth was also attractive in her own right, tall with fair reddish-gold hair, fine pale skin and the incongruously dark eyes of her mother, alive with unmistakable intelligence and spirit. She was young, emotionally inexperienced and understandably hungry for recognition and love. She easily became a willing if uneasy partner in the verbal and then physical high jinks in the newly sexualised Parr-Seymour household.
departure, yet I am something to be borne withal, for truly I was replete with sorrow to depart from your highness, especially leaving you undoubtful of health. And albeit I answered little, I weighed it more deeper when you said you would warn me of all evils that you should hear of me; for if your grace had not a good opinion of me, you would not have offered friendship to me that way that all men judge the contrary. But what may I more say than thank God for providing such friends to me, desiring God to enrich me with their long life, and me grace to be in heart no less thankful to receive it than I now am glad in writing to show it. And although I have plenty of matter, here I will stay for I know you are not quiet to read.
Master Tyrwhit and others have told me that there goeth rumours abroad which be greatly both against my honour and honesty, which, above all other things, I esteem, which be these, that I am in the Tower, and with child by my Lord Admiral (Thomas Seymour). My lord, these are shameful slanders, for the which, besides the great desire I have to see the king's majesty, I shall most heartily desire your lordship that I may show myself there as I am.
It might seem good to your lordship, and the rest of the council, to send forth a proclamation into the countries that they refrain their tongues, declaring how the tales be but lies, it should make both the people think that you and the council have great regard that no such rumours should be spread of any of the King's majesty's sisters (as I am, though unworthy) and also that I should think myself to receive such friendship at your hands as you have promised me, although your lordship showed me great already.