Elizabeth and Mary: Cousins, Rivals, Queens

The new young king, himself only nine years old, wrote to this favourite sister: ‘There is very little need of my consoling you, most dear sister, because from your learning you know what you ought to do, and from your prudence and pity you perform what your learning causes you to know.’ His letter was in answer to one from her seeking to console him and place their loss in the context of her classical and religious studies. She had obviously shown herself to be in control of her emotions for Edward added, ‘I perceive you think of our father’s death with a calm mind.’

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Elizabeth had never lived intimately with either her mother or her father and essentially both were unknown to her. However, in her governess Catherine Ashley she had the most loyal, if limited, of mother figures who had been with her all her life and was to remain, until her death, the woman Elizabeth cared for most. The death of Henry and her subsequent status as an orphan was not a personal wrench so much as a loss of the idealized father as hero. Practically too, Elizabeth could no longer rely on that powerful umbrella of protection and instead was exposed to the untrammelled ambitions of others. Henry’s death marked the end of a certain status quo.

Elizabeth’s stepmother, Catherine Parr, Henry’s last wife, was an affectionate woman with a talent for nurturing and inspiring the young. Her previous stepdaughter, Margaret Neville, left a glowing affidavit in her will: ‘I was never able to render her grace [Catherine] sufficient thanks for the godly education and tender love and bountiful goodness which I have ever more found in her.’

(#litres_trial_promo) On marrying Henry in 1543 Catherine had embarked on her new life as his queen with a sense of vocation and had fulfilled her duties admirably. She was thirty-one, already had been twice married and twice widowed and was a mature woman of considerable character and independent means. Catherine was the first of Henry’s wives to make any real attempt to take responsibility for the royal children and was to be a particularly important influence on the clever, watchful and spirited Princess Elizabeth. Only ten years old at the time, the young princess was already emotionally self-protective, yet avid for experience and knowledge.

Henry had at least settled the succession before he died. His immediate heir was his son Edward, for whose precious existence he had prayed, plotted and laid waste so many lives, even the foundations of his country’s faith. Edward’s children were to be next in line, followed by Princess Mary – and her heirs – and only then by his second daughter, Elizabeth.

(#litres_trial_promo) At this time there was every reason to hope that Edward, an intellectually gifted, brave and independent-minded boy, would survive to manhood and have children of his own. For much of her girlhood there was little expectation that Elizabeth would ever be more than a royal princess.

The death of such a long-reigning despot as Henry VIII inevitably released a ferment of long-suppressed ambitions, for power, wealth and the propagation of the reformed religion in England which Henry’s equivocation had stalled. The powerful men around the new young king, specifically in his Privy Council in whose hands his father had left the governance of the kingdom, were predominantly reformist. The most notable among them were Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury and architect of the enduring Edwardian prayer book, John Dudley, and the boy-king’s uncle, Edward Seymour, who became Lord Protector, awarding himself the dukedom of Somerset.

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 months of widowhood, Catherine married Seymour. This was considered 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 stepfather, 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 strove 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 sexualized Parr – Seymour household.

There can be little doubt too that this perceptive girl noticed a marked change in the energy and manner of her much-admired stepmother. Catherine was scholarly, dutiful, religious, yet courageous and radical in a way that was similar to Elizabeth’s own mother in her promotion of the evangelical reformed religion. She maintained the heretical belief that everyone should have access to a Bible and be able to read the great book for him- or herself, a belief that had brought lesser personages than her to the stake.

She was also a woman of active feelings and, in following her passion at last and marrying the love of her younger self, both she and Seymour were aware that the prime of their lives was past and there was little time now to lose. This can only have heightened the emotional temperature and in an age when prudery had little place in personal lives it must have been clear to the curious girl that sex and love were powerful, transformative things. They could also prove to be most dangerous if you were a young woman and a princess, without wise counsel or family elders to protect you.

Events started to become unsettling, and in the end alarming, for Elizabeth when the good-natured horseplay, which in the beginning gratifyingly had included her, turned more serious. Seymour began to focus his boisterous sexual energies on his wife’s young stepdaughter sometime during Catherine’s pregnancy. Elizabeth’s loyal governess Mrs Ashley had always been very taken by Seymour’s charm and even maintained that before Henry’s death he had all but obtained the old king’s approval for a marriage between himself and Princess Elizabeth: ‘that if the King’s Majesty, that Dead is, had lived a little longer, she should have been his wife’.

(#litres_trial_promo) This was rather unlikely and, although Seymour surely considered the advantages of his marrying either one of the royal sisters, he knew that once his astute elder brother had become Lord Protector any such political advancement for himself would be strongly resisted.

The idea persisted, however, not least with Catherine Ashley who, in her limited way, felt such a marriage would be a good one for her much-loved charge. She lost no opportunity to talk of Seymour to Elizabeth, who blushed, with a ‘Countenance of Gladness, when he was well spoken of’.

(#litres_trial_promo) But Elizabeth’s governess was also foolishly fuelling romantic fancies and the natural rivalry which any girl might feel for an older woman who had prior claim on a man they both desired: ‘Kat. Ashley told me’, Elizabeth admitted under later cross-examination, ‘after that my Lord Admiral was married to the Queen, that if my Lord might have his own Will, he would have had me, afore the Queen.’

(#litres_trial_promo) Even if the young princess at that time had not considered Seymour in a romantic light, given such a provocative piece of information by her trusted governess, it is unlikely that Elizabeth could continue to view Seymour neutrally.

But it was a respectable marriage for Elizabeth for which Catherine Ashley hoped, and the Lord Admiral seemed to her the most eligible suitor: ‘I would wish her his Wife of all Men living,’

(#litres_trial_promo) she had declared. However, when Seymour, as a married man, began behaving over-familiarly with the girl, risking her reputation, Mrs Ashley exhibited all the fierce protectiveness of a mother. On one occasion Seymour had attempted to kiss Elizabeth while she was still in bed and been roundly told off by Mrs Ashley, who ‘bade him go away for shame’.

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The relationship between the Lord Admiral and the young princess was a gradual progression from playful affection to something intrusive and oppressive, denying her a necessary privacy and sense of safety in her home. In all there was an element of sexual attraction that Elizabeth felt for this flashy man of action, the first of a particular type who, throughout her life, would capture her romantic imagination. But for a young and inexperienced girl, this emotional complicity merely added confusion and guilt to the already potent combination of fear and desire his attentions aroused in her.

At first, Seymour would appear in Elizabeth’s bedchamber, before she was up and dressed, and tickle her in bed, sometimes slapping her ‘upon the Back or on the Buttocks familiarly’. Other times he would open the curtains of her bed and wish her good morning, ‘and make as though he would come at her. And she would go further in the Bed, so that he could not come at her.’ It is not clear whether Elizabeth’s shrinking from his threatened embrace was through excitement or alarm, or whether a confusing mixture of both. Certainly Catherine Ashley told of occasions when Elizabeth, wishing to avoid these early-morning incursions, rose earlier from her bed, so that Seymour then found her dressed and at her books rather than vulnerably half-dressed. On another occasion, Elizabeth, caught out and hearing the lock on her door open, rushed from her bed to hide with her women of the bedchamber until Seymour, having tarried a while, gave up and left the room. Mrs Ashley remonstrated with him on this occasion and on another when he came to bid Elizabeth good morning in a state of semi-undress himself, ‘in his Night-Gown, barelegged in his Slippers’.

(#litres_trial_promo) He answered the governess’s warnings with anger and self-justification; he meant no harm and to suggest otherwise was to slander him.

The whole confused business was further clouded by the unexpected involvement of the Dowager Queen Catherine herself in some of her husband’s excesses. There was an episode in the garden at Hanworth when Seymour remonstrated with Elizabeth over something and then cut to ribbons the black gown she was wearing, revealing her undergarments. Elizabeth explained later to her horrified governess that she could do nothing to protect herself because the queen had been holding her down during the whole process. A possible explanation of Catherine’s implication could be that newly married, just pregnant and very much in love with her husband, she was careful to indulge him, afraid of reproving him. Perhaps she harboured some anger at Elizabeth for the continued flirtation between her stepdaughter and him. It was a historic and religious tradition that sexual attraction between a man and woman was invariably seen as the woman’s responsibility, even if she be just a girl and he a much more experienced man, old enough indeed to be her father.

There came a point, however, when Queen Catherine recovered her confidence and good sense and brought this difficult situation to an end. She had come upon Elizabeth and her own husband in an embrace. This was a traumatic debacle for the young princess and was vividly related by her treasurer, Thomas Parry: ‘I do remember also, [Mrs Ashley] told me, that the Admiral loved [Elizabeth] but too well, and had so done a good while; and that the Queen was jealous of her and him, in so much that, one Time the Queen, suspecting the often Access of the Admiral to the Lady Elizabeth’s Grace, came suddenly upon them, where they were all alone, (he having her in his Arms:) wherefore the Queen fell out, both with the Lord Admiral, and with her Grace also.’

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In fact, although the queen did not fall out with either husband or stepdaughter for long, this episode propelled Elizabeth and her retainers out of her stepmother’s house. As Parry continued in his confession: ‘as I remember, this was the Cause why she was sent from the Queen; or else that her Grace parted from the Queen: I do not perfectly remember whether … she went of herself, or was sent away.’

(#litres_trial_promo) It was sometime in the summer of 1548 and late in Catherine’s pregnancy and the queen’s tolerance and patience had run out. She certainly lectured Mrs Ashley on her responsibilities in keeping Elizabeth’s behaviour within bounds and her reputation free from scandal. It is evident that she also pointed out to Elizabeth the necessity of guarding her good name and the dangers of indiscreet behaviour giving rise to unwelcome talk.

It was a humiliating and unhappy situation for the fourteen-year-old princess. She had betrayed her stepmother’s kindness and trust and her pride was wounded. Her own feelings for Seymour were distressing and confusing, with elements of fear and desire, of longing and recoil. The chastened girl replied in a letter to Catherine: ‘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.’

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Thus in exile from her stepmother’s house for her own unseemly behaviour, Elizabeth was denied any further exposure to this lively intellectual household, where her cousin Lady Jane Grey had also spent some time. Instead she was sent to Cheshunt in Hertfordshire to stay with Sir Anthony Denny and his wife. It was not a particularly lively household for Sir Anthony was a scholar and had been a loyal chief gentleman to her father but now was very near the end of his life. Elizabeth turned increasingly to the consolation of study.

At the beginning of 1548 her tutor Grindal had died of the plague. This young man had been an inspirational tutor to the princess since she was just eleven years old. The excellence of her grounding in Greek, Latin and foreign languages was so outstanding that his mentor Roger Ascham admitted he did not know ‘whether to admire more the wit of her who learned, or the diligence of him who taught’.

(#litres_trial_promo) The commonplace but tragic death of someone so young and close to Elizabeth stripped more security from her life. Both Ascham and Elizabeth’s step-parents had other suggestions for a successor for the talented Grindal, but she insisted, against some resistance, on replacing him with his friend and teacher, Roger Ascham himself. This was the first example of another interesting pattern in Elizabeth’s life. Lacking parents, lacking close family, unmarried as she would remain, and childless too, Elizabeth when queen surrounded herself with brilliant men, loyal advisers and favourites whom she made as close as family to her. When they became too old, as did William Cecil, Lord Burghley, or died, like Robert Dudley, the Earl of Leicester, she took on their sons. Although for the old queen, Leicester’s stepson the Earl of Essex was a less happy replacement as favourite, the young princess’s insistence on replacing Grindal with his own mentor and tutor was inspired. This was to prove a most successful marriage of teacher with pupil, with the princess impressing the scholar from the start with her native intelligence, diligence and remarkable aptitude for learning.

During those difficult months after her banishment Elizabeth’s health suffered ‘an affliction of my head and eyes’

(#litres_trial_promo) and she did not like either her governess or her tutor to leave her side. This suggested a kind of nervous collapse; perhaps these familiars provided the only security and family feeling left to her in an increasingly menacing world. On the last day of August, Catherine Parr’s difficult pregnancy came to an end with the birth, not of the expected son, but of a daughter, Mary. However the relief and happiness at a safe delivery were short-lived. Instead a commonplace tragedy was set in motion. Almost immediately the queen started to sicken with a fever. She became delirious as the infection took hold and within six days was dead of puerperal fever.

Apart from Catherine Ashley’s passing mention that she was sick in the period immediately after the queen’s death, we have no further record of how Elizabeth took this latest loss. She had left her stepmother’s company only a few months before, when she was healthy, hopeful of the birth of her first baby, the ‘little Knave’

(#litres_trial_promo) as she called it, full of life and love. But Catherine’s death showed just how dangerous love could be to life. To a clear-sighted logical young woman like Elizabeth there was no denying the evidence that if a woman’s destiny involved sex it was fraught with pain and danger. Her own mother had survived Elizabeth’s difficult birth only to die because the baby was the wrong sex; her brother’s mother, Queen Jane, had died in giving birth to him; now Catherine, the closest the young princess had come to having a mother and a female intellectual mentor, was dead herself, in the process of giving life.

Given the general sacrifice of young women to their reproductive functions it was understandable that the gods, and even God Himself, was seen to value women less highly than men. Men died prematurely in war as a result of man’s will but the risks to women’s lives through childbirth seemed inextricably bound up with some divine plan. It was not surprising if any clever, perceptive girl came to the conclusion that women were more expendable than men, but only if they succumbed to sexual desire and the usual consequence, childbirth, with its handmaidens of pain and possible death.

But sexual desire was dangerous for a woman too if it compromised her reputation. Catherine Howard, one of the more racy and fleeting of Elizabeth’s stepmothers, had lost her life for her sexual incontinence and Anne Boleyn, Elizabeth’s own mother, had been vilified with terrible accusations of immorality and incest. Trumped up as they almost certainly were, such charges were enough to merit her death. Princes could be murderous, mad, licentious, fathering bastards at any opportunity, and still continue to rule. Princesses had to be very careful.

We cannot know what factors contributed to Elizabeth’s decision to remain celibate, despite the stirrings of her own heart and the most telling pressure from her advisers throughout her life. We only know that by the time she ascended to the throne at the age of twenty-five this revolutionary decision had already been made. It is not too fanciful to think that in her mid-teens, steeped in her classical and religious texts, drawing conclusions from sharp observations of society around her, this thoughtful girl was pondering her fate and deciding what she wanted to make of her life.

There was danger too for Elizabeth in Catherine’s death. Almost immediately Seymour reprised his ambitions to marry her, thereby dragging the young princess into a scandal which rapidly evolved into treason, with all the peril that entailed. Seymour’s jealous politicking against his brother, the Lord Protector Somerset, had alerted the Privy Council to his reckless schemes: ‘the World beginneth to talk very evil favourable of him, both for his Slothfulness to serve, and for his Greediness to get, noting him to be one of the most covetous Men living’.

(#litres_trial_promo) It transpired that Seymour had tried to undermine King Edward’s confidence in his elder uncle. He had bribed the boy, who resented how short he was kept of funds, with gifts of money. He corrupted an official at the Bristol Mint fraudulently to raise thousands of pounds in readiness for any possible uprising. He put into action his ambitious wooing of the Princess Elizabeth.

To be so indiscreet in his rapacity was suicidally risky, for all these activities could be interpreted as treason. Nicholas Throckmorton, in conversation with one of Seymour’s servants, spelt out the danger. ‘My Lord is thought to be a very ambitious Man of Honour; and it may so happen that, now the Queen is gone, he will be desirous for his Advancement to match with one of the King’s Sisters.’ Then in confirmation of the servant’s response that seeking to marry Elizabeth without the consents of the King and his Council would bring upon his master ‘his utter Ruin and Destruction’, Throckmorton replied: ‘it is most true, for the Desire of a Kingdom knoweth no Kindred’.

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When Thomas Seymour was arrested and sent to the Tower of London in January 1549, Elizabeth’s natural feelings of guilt, fear and shame were intensified: the whole business of the Lord Admiral’s intentions towards her were extracted under oath and spread before the Privy Council. The first she knew of how serious the situation had become for her was when her governess Catherine Ashley and her treasurer Parry were arrested at Hatfield. Elizabeth was left alone to be interrogated by Sir Robert Tyrwhit, an agent appointed for this purpose by the Privy Council. On learning that her two loyal servants had been incarcerated in the Tower too, Elizabeth was momentarily very afraid. ‘She was marvellous abashed, and did weep very tenderly a long Time, demanding of my Lady Browne, whether they had confessed any Thing or not.’

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Elizabeth was not just frightened for her life, at this point her reputation was almost as precious to her. If she wished to safeguard her place in the succession, or even continue to be considered eligible for a good marriage, she had to remain virtuous and be seen to be virtuous. This was of particular sensitivity in her case because of the traumatic history of her mother’s downfall. These rumours of lascivious relations with a stepfather were too close an echo of the accusations of incest brought against Anne Boleyn and her own brother.

Elizabeth had been caught unawares. The Lord Protector and the council had their suspicions that Elizabeth herself, aided and abetted by her servants, had been complicit in some of Seymour’s plans, not least the one secretly to marry. Elizabeth needed time to collect herself and edit the story that would best protect her from these serious allegations. At this first interview she was unprepared and alarmed and could not hide her agitation. Tyrwhit reported back to the Lord Protector: ‘in no Way she will not confess any Practice by Mistress Ashley or the Cofferer [treasurer], concerning my Lord Admiral; and yet I do see it in her Face that she is guilty’.