The Children of Henry VIII (20 page)

Katherine clearly feared a sex scandal could have lethal consequences. It had not helped that Seymour had insisted on riding with Elizabeth on the first stage of her journey from Chelsea in full public gaze.
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Whether Elizabeth had a teenage crush on Seymour is a secret she took with her to the grave. John Ashley warned his wife that ‘the Lady Elizabeth did bear some affection to my Lord Admiral. For he did mark that when anybody did talk well of my Lord Admiral, she seemed to be well pleased therewith, and sometime she would blush when he were spoken of.’
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A month or so after Elizabeth’s departure, Katherine herself left Chelsea, attended by Jane Grey, for her husband’s castle of Sudeley in Gloucestershire. With the risk of plague still present, she wished to have her baby in the safety of the countryside. She gave birth to a healthy daughter on 30 August, but died of puerperal fever six days later despite her physician’s strenuous efforts to save her life. The chief mourner at her funeral, the first Protestant royal funeral in English history, was Jane.

Now Seymour’s ambition would be his undoing. He approached Thomas Parry, Elizabeth’s cofferer (i.e. chief accountant), a broad-faced Welshman who had first been employed by Thomas Cromwell during the Dissolution of the Monasteries, with a view to finding out the extent of her wealth. Utterly unscrupulous, Seymour was also attempting to marry Mary even as he pitched his suit to marry Elizabeth.
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As his Court agent, William Wightman, confided to one of Katherine Parr’s cousins at Sudeley, his ‘desire of a kingdom knoweth no kindred.’
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At 8 p.m. on Thursday, 17 January 1549, Seymour was arrested and the interrogations swiftly followed. Somerset sent two of Katherine Parr’s most senior officials, Sir Robert Tyrwhit, her comptroller, and Sir Walter Buckler, her secretary, to take immediate control of Elizabeth’s household. And he ordered Sir Robert, whose wife, one of Katherine’s long-standing attendants, had first-hand knowledge of many of the incidents at Chelsea and Hanworth, to get to the truth.

Tyrwhit, however, despite repeated attempts to secure a confession, could not browbeat Elizabeth. She barracked him so successfully, he was forced to admire her pluck. ‘I do assure your grace’, he reported back to the Protector, ‘she hath a very good wit, and nothing is gotten of her, but by great policy.’
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Kat Ashley and Parry were sent to the Tower, where they quickly babbled what they knew—or most of it. The crux was whether Elizabeth, advised by Kat, had entertained Seymour’s suit. Tyrwhit was incensed by the answers he got to this question.
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Elizabeth adamantly insisted that Kat had never urged her to marry Seymour after Katherine Parr’s death—other, that is, than with the Council’s consent. Tyrwhit knew that this was almost certainly a lie. But no one could be broken on the point. In her own interrogation,
Kat confessed that she had asked Elizabeth if she would marry Seymour now that he was free again. When she had replied ‘Nay’, Kat claimed to have gone on to say, ‘I know you would not refuse him
if the Council would be content therein
.’
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But all Elizabeth’s servants used almost exactly the same phrase, chanting it like a mantra.
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It seemed quite incredible that they were all experts on the precise wording of Henry’s will.

Elizabeth survived along with her servants, including Kat, but she was a changed woman. It had been a searing experience, the moment she was thrust into adulthood. She was shocked by rumours that she was pregnant by Seymour and complained indignantly to Somerset. Such ‘shameful slanders’, she fumed, be ‘greatly both against my honour and honesty, which above all other things I esteem.’
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Seymour was charged with plotting to seize Edward and take him ‘into [his] own hands and custody’ and with attempting to marry Elizabeth.
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On 25 February, a bill of attainder was introduced into Parliament in which his offences were declared to be high treason. On 5 March, the bill passed and Seymour was executed on Tower Hill on the 20th.

What few had predicted was that Seymour’s fall would become the prelude to the dismantling of the Protectorate itself. Increasingly loathed by his colleagues in the Privy Council for his autocratic methods, Somerset was unable to react quickly enough when confronted by a threatening run of popular ‘stirs’ and uprisings across the southern and eastern counties of England in the spring and summer of 1549. His dithering led to a coup. Articles of impeachment accused him of governing ineffectively and of failing to consult his colleagues, or else of summoning them only
occasionally and ‘for the name’s sake’ to rubber stamp decisions he had taken already.
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On 14 October he was sent to the Tower and the Protectorate was dissolved. Henry’s attempt to build a consensus government for his young son from the grave had been a failure. His will had been subverted, but the Protectorate had failed largely because the ambition of Thomas Seymour had thrown the political system into crisis. Now the architects of the coup claimed that they would govern through the agreement of the Privy Council and with the support of the wider governing elite.

The wheel had turned full circle.

T
HE
cool intelligence behind the coup against Protector Somerset belonged to John Dudley, Earl of Warwick. A pragmatic realist who had risen to a dominant position in the Privy Council as a naval commander in Henry VIII’s last wars, he wisely shunned the title of Protector, taking instead that of Lord President of the Council. His ally Thomas Wriothesley, once Thomas Cromwell’s secretary and who had dipped a toe into the evangelical reform movement in the 1530s, led a faction of traditionalists staunchly opposed to the Protestants. But Wriothesley’s appetite for intrigue made him dangerously unstable—Warwick did not trust him an inch. Nor did Mary, since when the conspirators against Somerset attempted to win her support by offering her the regency in his place, she brushed them aside, saying that she ‘was sad to see the realm going to perdition so fast’ and that ‘no good will come of this move’.
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The thirty or so months after Somerset was sent to the Tower in October 1549 were among the most fraught and fragile since
Henry VII had won the crown at the battle of Bosworth. Warwick’s own faith and interest firmly aligned him with the religious reformers, and early in February 1550 he was forced to purge Wriothesley from the Privy Council and banish him from Court for plotting against him.
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His dilemma was that to do so, he had to free Somerset and allow him to return to the Council under stringent conditions, because if he was to marginalize and exclude Wriothesley’s faction, he needed Somerset back on his side.

Wasting no time, Warwick made a largely successful effort to reverse the destabilization permitted, or left unchecked, by Somerset. He suppressed the ‘stirs’ and revolts of 1549 using a cohort of crack troops assisted by Italian and German mercenaries. Above all, he speedily began peace negotiations with France and Scotland to end Somerset’s disastrous wars and put England’s finances back on the slow road to recovery.

Warwick’s fixer in conjuring a political consensus was Cranmer, Edward’s godfather. As the man closest to the young king apart from John Cheke, the archbishop was in a position where he could pack the boy’s Privy Chamber with Warwick’s nominees. Cranmer’s beliefs had by now moved well beyond Lutheranism and come closer to those of the mainstream of the Swiss reformers. And it was to this more radical version of the Reformation that Cranmer meant to convert the king.

Just as Henry VIII had been said to be a second King David or King Solomon or a second Emperor Constantine or Justinian, Edward was to be a second King Josiah. No more than a child of eight when he had succeeded to the throne, the Old Testament Josiah had purged Judah and Jerusalem of the ‘carved images, and the molten images. And they brake down the altars of Baal in his presence’ (2 Kings 22–23). It was in his reign that ‘the book of the
law’ had been rediscovered by the high priest of the temple at Jerusalem. But significantly, Josiah’s attack on idolatry had been less the work of the boy himself than of his ‘godly councillors’ acting in his name. This was a lesson that Warwick and Cranmer would set out to replicate, casting themselves and their fellow privy councillors in the role.

F
IGURE
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A woodcut specially designed in 1570 for an enlarged edition of John Foxe’s
Acts and Monuments
(or ‘Book of Martyrs’) to illustrate the swing to Protestantism in the reign of Edward VI, whom the Protestants hailed as a second ‘King Josiah’.

Warwick and Cranmer did not begin entirely from scratch. Somerset in 1547–8 had already revived Cromwell’s iconoclasm, authorizing the stripping of rood lofts and related statuary from the parish churches and repealing Henry VIII’s Act of Six Articles. To Protestant acclaim, he also abolished the restrictions on who was allowed to read the English Bible. But his attempt in 1549 to impose, with Parliament’s assent, ‘one convenient and meet order, rite and fashion of Common Prayer’ in the English language to replace the Latin mass was botched and proved extraordinarily divisive.

Lacking an officially defined theology of the Eucharist, Somerset’s new liturgy was ambiguously traditional and failed to satisfy anyone. Its single achievement from the reformist perspective was to allow communion in both the bread and the wine. The Protector claimed that his approach was bipartisan, but in reality he sought to appease Mary’s cousin, Charles V, whose neutrality towards England he wished to guarantee whilst the country was at war with Scotland and France.
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When, early in 1550, Wriothesley had begun plotting against Warwick, he aimed to reverse the Reformation if he could. After that brush with danger, Warwick meant to exclude the traditionalists from power by placing as many Protestants as possible in influential positions. Soon he would even risk antagonizing Cranmer by appointing the aggressively advanced reformer John Hooper to the bishopric of Gloucester and the fiery Scottish preacher John Knox to be one of Edward’s chaplains. Both attacked what they believed to be Cranmer’s timidity and moderation, especially over reforming the ceremonies of the Church and the dress of the clergy.

Warwick, meanwhile, unleashed Cranmer to overhaul the liturgy that Somerset had botched. A large number of Protestant
refugees were arriving in London during Edward’s reign after Charles’s victory over the forces of the Schmalkaldic League at the battle of Mühlberg in 1547. For the very first time, England was regarded as a safe haven for the reformers, several of whom such as Peter Martyr Vermigli and Martin Bucer were Cranmer’s friends and to whom he gave important preaching or teaching positions in the Church and universities.
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