The Men Who Would Be King Read Online Free PDF Page A

said, ‘My Lady Anne of Cleves,’ and so, pausing a while, said after, ‘Nay, nay, wot you what? I would he married my sister Mary, to turn her opinions.’ ” Indulgent and jolly with children, a typical favorite uncle, Thomas skillfully obtained his royal nephew’s support for his marriage with Catherine, and persuaded the boy to write an official letter counseling them to marry, several weeks after the hasty secret ceremony had actually taken place.
    â€œThe Lord Seymour married the Queen, whose name was Catherine, with which marriage the Lord Protector was much offended,” Edward noted in his diary for the month of May. The lord protector was offended at his brother’s subterfuge, and shocked at the precipitancy of his marriage, which came so soon after the death of Henry VIII that if Catherine immediately became pregnant there might be doubts about the paternity of the child. The protector’s wife, the haughty Duchess of Somerset, was infuriated that the wife of her husband’s younger brother would take precedence over herself, and a thoroughly unfraternal atmosphere prevailed. The protector administered Catherine’s lands entirely against her wishes, and tried to withhold the jewels that Henry VIII had given her, even down to her wedding ring. “My Lord your brother hath this afternoon a little made me warm,” Catherine wrote to her husband on one occasion. “It was fortunate we were so far distant, for I suppose else I should have bitten him.” She added with spirit that any man with such a wife as the protector’s ought “continually to pray for a short dispatch of that Hell.” It was well known that the duchess, in turn, bore Thomas a deep grudge “for the Queen’s cause.”
    Despite their friction with the protector and his wife, Thomas and Catherine were a delightfully happy couple. Catherine’s kind, sensible nature and the admiral’s boisterous ways gave their household a sunny atmosphere; living with them at the dower houses of Chelsea and Hanworth, or at Thomas’s London residence, Seymour Place, Elizabeth observed, probably for the first time in her life, a tender, mature love relationship between a man and a woman of her own rank. When briefly separated from Thomas during her pregnancy in the following year, Catherine sent him news of their unborn baby with touching familiarity: “Mary Odell being abed with me had laid her hand upon my belly to feel it stir. It hath stirred these three days every morning and evening, so that I trust when you come it shall make you some pastime.” The natural undercurrent of physical enjoyment in evidence during the first weeks of their marriage was made the more overt by Thomas’s splendidly virile personality and uninhibited manners. With his hearty oaths—“By God’s most precious soul!” was his favorite—and the aura of sexual vigor upon which Henry VIII had knowingly commented, he must have appeared an awesome, exciting figure to Elizabeth, whose daily life had previously been bounded by her doting governess Katherine Ashley and the gentle tutor Grindal.
    Thomas made much of his wife’s stepdaughter. He took to bursting into Elizabeth’s bedroom early in the morning, before she was ready, and sometimes when she was still in bed. If she were up, “he would bid her good morrow, and ask how she did, and strike her upon the back or on the buttocks familiarly, and so go forth through his lodgings.” If he caught her still in bed, he would fling open the curtains, “and bid her good morrow, and make as though he would come at her. And she would go further into the bed, so that he could not come at her.” At Hanworth the games continued. On two occasions Catherine joined Thomas, and together they tickled Elizabeth while she was in bed. Wriggling and laughing helplessly as they tickled her, in the fun that Thomas initiated, or