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’.6 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’.7 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.’8 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,’9 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’.10
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’.11 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