There are a number of puzzling facts about teen Elizabeth Tudor’s relationship with her charismatic stepfather Sir Thomas Seymour. In his second year as Elizabeth’s new stepfather, he was arrested for a score of misdeeds, including behaving inappropriately with her. A number of people were put in prison and many more were questioned, including Elizabeth herself, who was put under a sort of house arrest. The resulting 652 pages of “confessions” are an amazing historical record of 16th-century Tudor England. (See links below.)
One detail I’ve not been able to come to any satisfying conclusion about is this account in the “confession” of Elizabeth’s governess Kat Ashley:
At Hanworth, the queen told Mrs. Ashley that the Lord Admiral looked in at the gallery window and saw Princess Elizabeth cast her arms about a man’s neck. The which hearing, Mrs. Ashley asked Princess Elizabeth, who denied it weeping, and bade ask all her women. They all denied it. And Mrs. Ashley knew it could not be so, for there came no man but Grindle, Princess Elizabeth’s schoolmaster.
Kat Ashley goes on to say that she thought that Dowager Queen Kateryn Parr had made up this story so that Kat would keep a closer eye on her 15-year-old charge. This doesn’t seem plausible to me. If Kateryn Parr was making this up, she could have said that someone else had seen Elizabeth; why involve her husband?
Might Thomas Seymore have made up this story, told his wife that he’d seen their stepdaughter in the arms of a man? The only motivation I can think of is that he had in fact embraced Elizabeth and was nervous that they might have been seen, creating an “It wasn’t me!” defence by throwing Elizabeth under the bus. Cad that he was, this is possible — cover a crime with a crime — but would that have been to his advantage? Elizabeth would have known it was a fib. Thomas Semour was impulsive by nature and not always savvy in his often shady dealings, but this seems too shabby even for him.
Young Princess Elizabeth, http://www.luminarium.org/, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Also: might it have been true? Fifteen-year-old Elizabeth was constantly in the company of attendants and it would not have been at all in character for her to embrace a man. That her schoolmaster was entirely out of suspicion is, if anything, charming, giving a rare impression of what the distinguished Cambridge scholar might have been like.
For my novel, I’ve taken a fictional path — created whole-cloth, but not historically impossible — by creating a scene where Elizabeth is accosted by her stepbrother. John Neville, the Queen’s stepson by her second marriage, was a troubled youth who was later charged with rape and murder.
I write historical fiction, but I like it to be as close as possible to the known facts. I’m not entirely comfortable creating a fictional account of this episode, so I keep coming back to this breadcrumb of a clue: What really happened? What was going on? If only we could know.
A Collection of State Papers: relating to Affairs In the Reigns of King Henry VIII, King Edward VI, Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth: From the year 1542 to 1570, edited by Samuel Haynes, available online at https://tinyurl.com/HaynesStatePapers, pages 99-100. I’ve reworded this quote for clarity.
The post above was first posted on Substack, where I can be found at https://tinyurl.com/SandraSubstackNews. I’m enjoying Substack quite a lot, both as a reader and writer. I recommend it! Please subscribe there if you wish to catch all my musings.
The image at top: “Unknown man,” recently identified as possibly Thomas Seymour, a sketch by Hans Holbein the Younger, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
It has been so long since I posted here I couldn’t figure out how to do it. My last post was at the end of October of last year, so close to six months ago. It feels more like a year to me, in part because of our molassas-slow new reality.
I’m having what I consider a non-productive day: I’ve not written or edited a word. Resistance rules!
I’m fond of the French word flâneur, meaning an idle person who strolls about without object, who putters around, in other words.
Paul Gavarni, Le Flâneur, 1842
I’m especially fond of the verb form flâner, which means to stroll. Flânerie is the act of strolling, and that’s the kind of day I’m having. Distracted, easily side-tracked by shiny objects, unofficially off-track.
Or is it?
One of the things I came upon this morning were the animated portraits I made some time ago through My Heritage. It’s meant to allow people to animate photos of family members (which I found just a little creepy), but enchants me when used to animate historical portraits.
For example, based on a close-up clip from this portrait of Princess Elizabeth …
ATTRIBUTED TO WILLIAM SCROTS, Elizabeth I when a Princess c.1546
… I made this charming animation:
Needless to say, I then had to make animations of most of my cast of characters.
A word of caution however
“Flaneuring” (our household verb) can also lead to overwhelm. In rediscovering these animations, I found I had computer folders of desktop contents five layers deep. It’s like an archeological dig.
Unexpected joys
The drawing above is a self-portrait I made for a delightful course on Domestika.org: The Art of Sketching: Transform Your Doodles into Art by Mattias Adolfsson. The Domestika courses are professional, very well done, and really inexpensive. I find them irresistible.
I hope wherever this finds you that you are finding unexpected joys in our life of confinement. I have more to say, but I’ll leave this short—an icebreaker, if you will, after a long silence.
I recently read an article by the elusive Ryan Holiday, a professional book researcher. He made one very important point—at least to me. He said that the first step in researching is to acquire a research library which will include books that you will likely never read. He calls it an anti-library.
We all have books and papers that we haven’t read yet. Instead of feeling guilty, you should see them as an opportunity: know they’re available to you if you ever need them.
This is exactly what I do: buy too many books, print out too many articles, and read only a fraction of them. So now I’m going to stop feeling guilty about it.
Two of six shelves for the WIP. Note the white tag in the lower left. It reads: “Sun Court books at the back.” In other words, I’ve run out of shelf space.
One of my rules as a reader is to read one book mentioned in or cited in every book that I read.
I often scour footnotes for references to books the author has relied on. Lately, I’ve acquired two books in this way and they have proved to be invaluable.
One is Elizabeth’s Bedfellows; An Intimate History of the Queen’s Court by British historian Anna Whitelock. She was one of the experts on a documentary on Elizabeth I. I ordered her book and immediately on opening it saw details I badly needed to write a scene that had me stumped. I will only need a few chapters of this book—at least for this WIP—but they are gold to me.
I have a number of works by this wonderful historian, but this is the book that made me gasp. It’s full of the floorplans of Tudor palaces at that time, and amazing details as well. In no time flat, I began to mark it up.
A research trick I use: for a print book I own, if the “search me” feature is available on Amazon, I will add it to a list. Say I’m looking for events in 1553: I’ll search for that year in the Amazon link of the book—note that it has to be the print edition—and this will give me the pages to go to in my copy of the book. It’s an instant index to the type of thing that would never show up in an official index.
