CHAPTER IX 1548-1549 Seymour and the Princess Elizabeth--His courtship--He is sent to the Tower--Elizabeth's examinations and admissions--The execution of the Lord Admiral.

The matter of Jane’s guardianship satisfactorily settled, Seymour turned his attention to one concerning him yet more intimately. He was a free man, and he meant to make use of his freedom. As after the death of Henry, so now when fate rendered the project once more possible, he determined to attempt to obtain the Princess Elizabeth as his wife. The history of the autumn, as regarding him, is of his continued efforts to increase his power and influence in the country and to win the hand of the King’s sister. Again the contemporary Spanish chronicler supplies a popular summary of the affair which, inaccurate as it is, is useful in showing how his scheme was regarded by the public.

According to this dramatic account of his proceedings, the Admiral went boldly before the Council; observed that, as uncle to the King, it was fitting that he should marry honourably; and that, having formerly been husband to the Queen, it would not be much more were he to be accorded Madam Elizabeth, whom he deserved better than any other man. Referred by the Lords of the Council to the Protector, he is represented as approaching the Duke with the modest request that he might be granted not only Elizabeth as his bride, but also the custody of the King.

“When his brother heard this, he said he would see about it.” Calling the Council together, he repeated to them the demand made by the Admiral that his nephew should be placed in his hands; continuing, as the Lords “looked at each other,” that the matter must be well considered, since in his opinion his brother could have no good intent in asking first for the Princess, and then for the custody of the King. “The devil is strong,” said the Protector. “He might kill the King and Madam Mary, and then claim the crown.”86

Whilst this was the version of the Admiral’s project current in the street, there is no doubt that his desire to obtain a royal princess for his wife was calculated to accentuate the distrust with which he was regarded by the Protector and his friends. He was well known to aspire to at least a share in the government. As Elizabeth’s husband his position would be so much strengthened that it might be difficult to deny it to him, or to maintain the right of Somerset to retain supreme power. His proceedings were therefore watched with jealous vigilance, his designs upon the King’s sister becoming quickly matter of public gossip. It was not a day marked by an over-scrupulous observance of respect for the dead, and Katherine was hardly in her grave before the question of her successor was freely canvassed amongst those chiefly concerned in it.

“When I asked her [Ashley] what news she had from London,” Elizabeth admitted when under examination at a later date, “she answered merrily ‘They say that your Grace shall have my Lord Admiral, and that he will shortly come to woo you.’”87

The woman, an intriguer by nature and keen to advance Seymour’s interests, would have further persuaded her mistress to write a letter of condolence to comfort him in his sorrow, “because,” as Elizabeth explained, “he had been my friend in the Queen’s lifetime and would think great kindness therein. Then I said I would not, for he needs it not.”

The blunt sincerity prompting the girl’s refusal did her credit. It must have been patent to all acquainted with the situation, and most of all to Elizabeth, that the new-made widower stood in no need of consolation. But, in spite of her refusal to open communications with him, and though a visit proposed by Seymour was discouraged “for fear of suspicion,” he can have felt little doubt that in a struggle with Protector and Council he would have the Princess on his side.

In Seymour’s household, naturally concerned in his fortunes, the projected marriage was a subject of anxious debate; and it was recognised by its members that their master was playing a perilous game. In a conversation between two of his dependants, Nicholas Throckmorton and one Wightman, both shook their heads over the risk he would run should he attempt to carry his plan into effect.

Beginning with the conventional acknowledgment of the Admiral’s great loss, they wisely decided that it might after all turn to his advantage, in “making him more humble in heart and stomach towards my Lord Protector’s Grace.” It was also hoped that, Katherine being dead, the Duchess of Somerset might forget old grudges and, unless by his own fault, be once again favourable towards her husband’s brother. The two men nevertheless agreed that the world was beginning to speak evil of Seymour, and, discussing the chances of his attempt to match with one of the Princesses, they determined, as they loved him, to do their best to prevent it, Wightman in especial engaging to do all he could to “break the dance.”88 If Seymour was going to his ruin it was not to be for lack of warnings. Sleeping at the house of Katherine’s friends, the Tyrwhitts, one night soon after her death, the question of a marriage with a sister of the King’s was mooted; when, although Seymour’s aspirations were not definitely mentioned, Sir Robert spoke in a fashion frankly discouraging to any scheme of the kind on the part of his guest.

Conversing after supper with his hostess, Seymour called to her husband as he passed by, saying jestingly that he was talking with my lady his wife in divinity—or divining of the future; that he had told her he wished the crown of England might be in as good a surety as that of France, where it was well known who was heir. So would it be in England were the Princesses married.

Tyrwhitt answered drily. Whosoever married one of them without the consent of King or Council, he said he would not wish to be in his place.

“Why so?” asked the Admiral. If he, for instance, had married thus, would it not be surety for the King? Was he not made by the King? Had he not all he had by the King? Was he not most bound to serve him truly?

Tyrwhitt refused to be convinced, reiterating that the man who married either Princess had better be stronger than the Council, for “if they catch hold of him, they will shut him up.”89 Lord Russell, the Lord Privy Seal, spoke no less openly to the adventurer of the danger he was running. The two were riding together to Parliament House in the Protector’s train, when Russell opened the subject by observing that certain rumours were abroad which he was very sorry to hear, and that if the Admiral were seeking to marry either of the King’s sisters—the special one being left discreetly uncertain—“ye seek the means to undo yourself and all those who shall come of you.”

Seymour replied carelessly that he had no such thought, and the subject dropped. A few days later, however, he himself re-introduced it, demanding what reason existed to prevent him, or another man, wedding one of the late King’s daughters? Again Russell reiterated his warning. The marriage, he declared, would prove fatal to him who made it, proceeding to point out—knowing that the argument would have more weight with the man with whom he had to do than recommendations to caution and prudence—that from a pecuniary point of view the match would carry with it no great advantage, a statement vehemently controverted by the Admiral, who throughout neither felt nor feigned any indifference to the financial aspect of the affair.

During the ensuing months he was busily engaged in the prosecution of his scheme. He may have had a genuine liking for the girl to whom his attentions had already proved compromising; he could scarcely doubt that he had won her affections. But by a clandestine marriage Elizabeth would, under the terms of her father’s will, have forfeited her right to the succession, and she was therefore safeguarded from any attempt on her suitor’s part to induce her to dispense with the consent of the lawful authorities. Forced to proceed with circumspection, he made use of any opportunity that offered for maintaining a hold upon her, aided and abetted by the partisanship of her servants. A fortnight before Christmas he proffered the loan of his London house as a lodging when she should pay her winter visit to the capital, adding to her cofferer, through whom the suggestion was made, that he would come and see her Grace; “which declaration,” reported to her by Parry, “she seemed to take very gladly and to accept it joyfully.” Observing, moreover, that when the conversation turned upon Seymour, and especially when he was commended, the Princess “showed such countenance that it should appear she was very glad to hear of him,” the cofferer was emboldened to inquire whether, should the Council approve, she would marry him.

“When that time comes to pass,” answered Elizabeth, in the language of the day, “I will do as God shall put in my mind.”

Notwithstanding her refusal to commit herself, it was not difficult for those about her to divine after what fashion she would, in that case, be moved to act. Yet she retained her independence of spirit, and when told that the Admiral advised her to appeal to the Protector through his wife for certain grants of land, as well as for a London residence, she turned upon those who had played the part of his mouthpiece in a manner indicating no intention of becoming his passive tool.

“I dare say he did not so,” she replied hotly, refusing to credit the suggestion he was reported to have made that she, a Tudor, should sue to his brother’s wife in order to obtain her rights, “nor would so.”

Parry adhered to his statement.

“Yes,” he answered, “by my faith.”

“Well, I will not do so,” returned his mistress, “and so tell him. I will not come there, nor begin to flatter now.”

If the Admiral possessed partisans in the members of Elizabeth’s household, it was probably no less owing to hostility towards the Somersets than to liking for himself; a passage of arms having taken place between Mrs. Ashley and the Duchess, who had found fault with the governess, on account of the Princess having gone on a barge on the Thames by night, “and for other light parts,” observing—in which she was undoubtedly right—that Ashley was not worthy to have the charge of the daughter of a King. Such home-truths were not unfitted to quicken the culprit’s zeal in the cause of the Admiral, and Ashley was always at hand to push his interests.

It was, nevertheless, necessary that the Princess’s dependants should act with caution; and, discussing with Lord Seymour the question of a visit he desired to pay her, Parry declined to give any opinion on the subject, professing himself unacquainted with his mistress’s pleasure. The Admiral answered with assumed indifference. It was no matter, he said, “for there has been a talk of late ... they say now I shall marry my Lady Jane,” adding, “I tell you this but merrily, I tell you this but merrily.”90

The gossip may have been repeated in the certainty that it would reach Elizabeth’s ears and in the hope of rousing her to jealousy. But had it suited his plans, there is no reason to doubt that Seymour would not have hesitated to gain permanent possession of the ward who had been left him “as a gage.” Elizabeth was, however, nearer to the throne, and was, beside her few additional years, better suited to please his taste than the quiet child who dwelt under his roof.

As it proved he was destined to further his ambitious projects neither by marriage with Jane nor her cousin. By the middle of January the Protector had struck his blow—a blow which was to end in fratricide. Charged with treason, in conspiring to change the form of government and to carry off the person of the King, Seymour was sent on January 16 to the Tower—in those days so often the ante-room to death.

Though he had long been suspected of harbouring designs against his brother’s administration, the specific grounds of his accusation were based upon the confessions of one Sherrington, master of the mint at Bristol; who, under examination, and in terror for his personal safety, had declared, truly or falsely, that he had promised to coin money for the Admiral, and had heard him boast of the number of his friends, saying that he thought more gentlemen loved him than loved the Lord Protector. The same witness added that he had heard Seymour say that, for her qualities and virtues, Lady Jane Grey was a fit match for the King, and he would rather he should marry her than the daughter of the Protector.

Many of great name and place in England must have been disquieted by the news of the arrest of the man who stood so near the King, and who, if any one, could have counted upon being safeguarded by position and rank from the consequences of his rashness. His assertion that he was more loved than his brother amongst his own class was true, and not a few nobles will have trembled lest they should be implicated in his fall. Loyalty to a disgraced friend was not amongst the customs of a day when the friendship might mean death, and most men were anxious, on these occasions, to dissociate themselves from a former comrade.

Elizabeth was not one of those with least to fear, and it is the more honourable to her that she showed no inclination to follow the example of others, or to abandon the cause of her lover. She was in an embarrassing, if not a dangerous situation. No one knew to what extent she had been compromised, morally or politically, and the distrust of the Government was proved by the arrest of both Ashley and Parry, and by the searching examination to which the Princess, as well as her servants, was subjected.

Sir Robert Tyrwhitt, placed in charge of the delinquent, with directions to obtain from her all the information he could, found it no easy task.

“I do assure your Grace,” he wrote to Somerset, “she hath a good wit, and nothing is to be got from her but by great policy.”

She would own to no “practice” with regard to Seymour, either on her part or that of her dependants. “And yet I do see in her face,” said Sir Robert, “that she is guilty, and yet perceive she will abide more storms before she will accuse Mrs. Ashley.”

Whatever may be thought of Elizabeth’s former conduct, she displayed at this crisis no less staunchness and fidelity in the support of those she loved than a capacity and ability rare in a girl of fifteen, practically standing alone, confronted with enemies, and without advisers to direct her course. Writing to the Protector on January 28, she thanked him for the gentleness and good will he had displayed; professed her readiness to declare the truth in the matter at issue; gave an account of her relations with the Admiral, asserting her innocence of any intention of marrying him without the sanction of the Council; and vindicated her servants from blame.

“These be the things,” she concluded, “which I declared to Master Tyrwhitt, and also whereof my conscience beareth witness, which I would not for all earthly things offend in anything, for I know I have a soul to be saved as well as other folks have; wherefore I will, above all things, have respect unto the same.” One request she made, namely, that she might come to Court. Rumours against her honour were afloat, accusing her with being with child by the Lord Admiral; and upon these grounds, that she might show herself as she was, as well as upon a desire to see the King, she based her demand.

Tyrwhitt shook his head over the composition. The singular harmony existing between Elizabeth’s story and the depositions extracted from her dependants in the Tower struck him as suspicious, and as pointing to a preconcerted tale.

“They all sing one song,” he wrote, “and so, I think, they would not, unless they had set the note before”; and he continued to watch his charge narrowly, and to report her demeanour at headquarters, assisted in his office by his wife, who had been sent to replace the untrustworthy Ashley as governess to the Princess.

“She beginneth now a little to droop,” he wrote, “by reason she heareth that my Lord Admiral’s houses be dispersed. And my wife telleth me she cannot hear him discommended, but she is ready to make answer thereto.”91

Put as brave a face as she might upon the matter, Elizabeth was in a position of singular loneliness and difficulty. Her lover was in prison on a capital charge, her friend and confidant removed from her, her reputation tarnished. Nor was she disposed to accept in a humble spirit the oversight of the duenna sent her by the Council. As the close friend of the step-mother whose kindness the Princess had so ill requited, Lady Tyrwhitt, for her part, would not in any case have been prejudiced in favour of her charge, or inclined to take an indulgent view of her misdemeanours; and the reception accorded her when she arrived to assume her thankless post was not such as to promote good feeling. Mrs. Ashley, the girl told the new-comer, was her mistress, and she had not so conducted herself that the Council should give her another. Lady Tyrwhitt, no more inclined than she to conciliation, retorted that, seeing the Princess had allowed Mrs. Ashley to be her mistress, she need not be ashamed to have any other honest woman in that place, and so the intercourse of governess and pupil was inaugurated.

That Lady Tyrwhitt’s taunt was undeniably justified did not the more soften the Princess towards her, and it was duly reported to the authorities in London that she had taken “the matter so heavily that she wept all that night and lowered all the next day.... The love,” it was added, “she yet beareth [Ashley] is to be wondered at.”

Tact and discretion might in time have availed to reconcile the Princess to the change in her household; but the methods employed by the Tyrwhitts do not appear to have been judicious. Sir Robert, taking up his wife’s quarrel, told her significantly that if she considered her honour she would rather ask to have a mistress than to be left without one; and, complaining to his superiors that she could not digest his advice in any way, added vindictively, “If I should say my phantasy, it were more meet she should have two than one.”92

So the days went by, no doubt uncomfortably enough for all concerned. Regarding Tyrwhitt and his wife in the capacity of gaolers, charged with the duty of eliciting her confessions, it was not with them that Elizabeth would take counsel as to the best course open to her. The revelations attained by cross-examination from her imprisoned servants as to the relations upon which she had stood during the Queen’s lifetime with Katherine’s husband, were sufficiently damaging to lend additional colour to the scandalous reports in circulation, and her spirited demand that her fair fame should be vindicated by a proclamation forbidding the propagation of slanders concerning the King’s sister was fully in character with the woman she was to become. Though not without delay, her request was granted, and the circumstantial fable of a child born and destroyed may be supposed to have been effectually suppressed.

Whilst this had been Elizabeth’s condition during the spring, the man to whom her troubles were chiefly due had been undergoing alternations of hope and fear. It may have seemed impossible that his brother should proceed to extremities. But there were times when, in the silence and seclusion of the prison-house, his spirits grew despondent. On February 16, when his confinement had lasted a month, and his fate was still undecided, his keeper, Christopher Eyre, reported that on the previous Friday the Lord Admiral had been very sad.

“I had thought,” he said, upon Eyre remarking on his depression, “before I came to this place that my Lord’s Grace, with all the rest of the Council, had been my friends, and that I had as many friends as any man within this realm. But now I think they have forgotten me,” proceeding to declare that never was poor knave more true to his Prince than he; nor had he meant evil to his brother, though he had thought he might have had the custody of the King.93

There is something pathetic in the dejection of the Admiral, arrogant, proud, vain and ambitious, thus deserted by all upon whose friendship he had imagined himself able to count. It is impossible to avoid the conviction that, in spite of a surface boldness, the nobles of his day were apt to turn craven where personal danger was in question. On the battlefield valour was common enough, and when once hope was over men had learnt—a needful lesson—to meet death on the scaffold with dignity and courage. But so long as a chance of life remained, it was their constant habit to abase themselves in order to escape their doom. We do not hear of a single voice raised in Seymour’s defence. The common people, when Somerset in his turn had fallen a victim to jealousy and hate, made no secret of their sorrow and their love; but the nobles who had been his brother’s supporters were silent and cowed, or went to swell the number of his accusers. By March 20 hope and fear were alike at an end. A Bill of Attainder had been brought into the House of Lords, after an examination of the culprit before the Council, when his demand to be confronted with his accusers had been refused. The evidence against him was reiterated by certain of the peers; the bill was passed without a division; and, in spite of the opposition of the Commons, who supported his claim to be heard in his own defence, the Protector cut the matter short by a message from the King declaring it unnecessary that the demand should be conceded. His doom was sealed.

Was he innocent or guilty? Dr. Lingard, after an examination of the facts, believes that he was unjustly condemned; that, if he had sought a portion of the power vested in the Protector, and might have been dangerous to the authority of his brother, the charge for which he was condemned—a design to carry off the King and excite a civil war—is unproved.

Innocent or guilty, he was to die. In the words of Latimer—who, in sermons preached after the execution, made himself the apologist of the Council by abuse levelled at the dead man—he perished “dangerously, irksomely, horribly.... Whether he be saved or no, I leave it to God. But surely he was a wicked man, and the realm is well rid of him.”94 Thus Thomas Seymour was done to death by a brother, and cursed by a churchman. Sherrington, who had supplied the principal part of the evidence against him, received a pardon and was reinstated in his office.

Of regret upon the part of friends or kinsfolk there is singularly little token. As they had fallen from his side in life, so they held apart from him in death. If Elizabeth mourned him she was already too well versed in the world’s wisdom to avow her grief, and is reported to have observed, on his execution, that a man had died full of ability (esprit) but of scant judgment.95 Whether or not the Lord Protector was troubled by remorse, he was not likely to make the public his confidant; and Katherine, the woman who had loved him so devotedly, was dead.

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