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‘To bear rule, as other kings do’

However bright he was, Edward still had a very long way to go before he could rule for himself. At first he was much too young to understand the sometimes tough world of Tudor court politics. He was a boy king who flourished in a lively royal court but whose vulnerability was thrown into sharp silhouette by the ambitions of one of his uncles, Thomas Seymour. Edward VI’s growing-up was punctuated by some uncomfortable episodes.

From the beginning of Edward’s reign, government was in the hands of Edward Seymour, who by March 1547 had a whole portfolio of impressive titles and offices: Duke of Somerset, Earl of Hertford, Viscount Beauchamp, Lord Seymour, Governor of the king, Protector of his people, realms and dominions, Lieutenant General of his majesty’s land and sea armies, Treasurer and High Marshal of England, Knight of the Garter. At first bound to act only with the advice and consent of Henry VIII’s executors, very quickly he was free to govern pretty much at will.

Edward was not a kind of half-forgotten prince pushed to one side by his uncle, spending his days only in dreary Latin grammar exercises. True, if anyone wanted to get something done in government or fancied a piece of royal patronage they would speak to Somerset through his officials. Protector Somerset got on with the business of running the country, as he was supposed to do, leaving his nephew free to live as a young king in a busy and lively court. There was every reason to believe that one day Edward would be old enough to rule for himself.

Royal life worked to familiar routines. Edward lived much as his father had done. He was dressed by servants, his meals were brought up to his private chambers from the privy kitchens below stairs. He said his prayers and listened attentively to sermons. He studied his lessons with John Cheke, played and listened to music and saw plays, interludes and masques, in which occasionally he acted. He enjoyed the companionship and conversation of trusted servants. Every few months the court would ‘remove’ to one of the royal palaces – Oatlands, Richmond and Hampton Court in Surrey, Greenwich in Kent, Windsor Castle in Berkshire and Whitehall and St James’s in Westminster. Doubtless Edward had his favourite palaces, but each one had its own peculiar nooks and corners.

Dozens of men and boys were employed to keep Edward busy and entertained. By 1552 forty-two musicians, two singers, six singing children and nine minstrels were on the payroll of the King’s Chamber. There were also trumpeters, a harpist, violinists, a bagpiper, a flautist, a drummer and players of the lute, the rebeck, the sackbut and the virginal. Edward played the lute, his proficiency brought on from 1546 by Philip van Wilder, who also directed the singing children of the Privy Chamber. The names of the musicians suggest a lively and international group: there was the Welsh minstrel Robert Reynolds, from the Low Countries the viol player Hans Horsnett and Peter van Wilder (we can guess that he was Philip’s brother), and the Italian violinists Albert de Venice, Ambrosio de Lapi de Milan, Vincent de Venice and Francis de Venice.

Every so often we come across telling snapshots of Edward’s life at court. In February 1548, for example, he acted in a Shrovetide masque. Sir Michael Stanhope, the chief gentleman of Edward’s Privy Chamber, gave the order for ‘garments to be made for six masquers, whereof the king’s majesty shall be one, and the residue of his stature, and six other garments of like bigness for torchbearers’. In other words, the twelve masquers were Edward and his young companions.¹

Hunting was the greatest sporting pursuit of any royal court. Whole departments of men looked after the king’s buckhounds and hawks and falcons. There was a keeper of the king’s bears as well as a keeper of his mastiffs. Dozens of armourers, bowyers and fletchers made and maintained the weapons and equipment for hunting and for tournaments of chivalry. Edward soaked up all the energy of the tournament and he had a boy’s fascination for war, more so as the son of a king who had gloried in combat and loved military campaigning. As early as 1545 Roger Ascham presented to Edward a book he had written on the subject of archery. The young king became highly proficient with a bow.

So we have to imagine a bustling court. The gentlemen of his Privy Chamber, his tutors, visiting courtiers, busy servants, entertainers and musicians, physicians and apothecaries, and young noble companions: Edward was hardly left idle. One of the grooms of his Privy Chamber, John Fowler, wrote in 1548 that Edward was never alone for more than a quarter of an hour. The king’s life was packed with activity and people.

Edward had a number of companions at court, young noblemen and the heirs to great titles and estates. Four boys were especially close to the king: Henry, Duke of Suffolk and his younger brother Lord Charles; Thomas Butler, Earl of Ormond; and Ormond’s cousin Barnaby Fitzpatrick, the son of an Irish baron. Lord Charles was much the same age as Edward, Duke Henry and Barnaby two years older.

To these boys Edward was both a friend and a king who gave commands, a fact that made his letters to Barnaby, who by 1552 was away on an embassy to Paris, a peculiar mix of friendly candour, gossip, high moral tone and kingly bossiness. Edward certainly knew who was in charge.

His young friends were boys of talent and promise. Barnaby Fitzpatrick was taken under the wing of some of Edward’s most experienced officials. Duke Henry and Lord Charles were universally praised (indeed probably over-praised) for their achievements, their reputations for brilliance enhanced by their untimely deaths in an outbreak of sweating sickness in Cambridge in 1551. Here Edward is frankly a mystery: in his ‘Chronicle’ he made not one reference to the deaths of these two young men, lauded for their virtues and talents by John Cheke and his scholarly circle. Perhaps they were too painful for him to record. But other celebrations of the boys’ lives give us some impression of the companions they were for Edward. Henry waited on the king in his private chambers, and one writer, Thomas Wilson, who was close to Cheke, wrote in praise of the young duke ‘that few were like unto him in all the court’. Lord Charles was a gifted scholar and a talented musician and athlete. Duke Henry, too, was both gifted intellectually and physically capable, ‘delighted with riding and running in armour upon horseback’. It was no wonder that when a French embassy visited Edward’s court in 1550 Duke Henry took part in a tournament of mixed teams of French and English knights, his side wearing yellow, their opponents blue, an observation the king did choose to record in his ‘Chronicle’.²

Cheke’s curriculum for the schoolroom looks formidable today. A ten-year-old boy had to work through Roman writers like Cicero, commit to memory passages of Latin and then translate them first into English and then back into Latin again. Edward’s exercise books show us that he was diligent in applying himself to the kind of education that had made the best scholars of a generation.

Cheke was an inspiring teacher and a constant for Edward in all the busyness, the fun and the formality of court, a fixed point in his life. Roger Ascham remembered Cheke’s words:

I would have a good student pass and journey through all authors both Greek and Latin. But he that will dwell in these few books only, first, in God’s Holy Bible, and then join with it Tully [Cicero] in Latin, Plato, Aristotle, Xenophon, Isocrates and Demosthenes in Greek, must needs prove an excellent man.

Cheke’s task was to shape Edward’s mind and indeed his whole moral attitude. The kingdom would have a philosopher prince whose values were rooted in God, in learning and in chivalry.³

The greatest of all texts on public service was the Offices (De Officiis) of the great Roman politician and orator Cicero. With Cheke Edward worked carefully through its first and second books with no short cuts and no skim-reading. Edward practised his handwriting with Ascham, the best English penman of his generation, specially recruited for the task by Cheke. Together Ascham and the king worked to the models set out in the copybook on the roman hand written by the Italian scholar Giovanni Battista Palatino.

These exercises with Ascham tested Edward’s precision and eye for detail. To form the letters perfectly each movement of his pen had to be just right: he had to use care and self-discipline. It was the kind of rigour a king needed to practise: to find the time and the patience to do his duty properly, to apply himself, his mind always on God. Edward’s lessons with Ascham would have brought some moments of peace and stillness to the Privy Chamber, for it was impossible to write like Ascham, Cheke, Palatino or any other master of penmanship without being able to find a quiet and undisturbed place to work.

This was close and private time in Edward’s inner rooms, so we are very lucky to have a few words by Ascham that give us an idea of how they talked to each other. Ascham wrote: ‘his grace would oft most gently promise me, one day to do me good, and I would say, “Nay, your majesty will soon forget me when I shall be absent from you.” Which thing, he said, he would never do.’

Ascham continued: ‘I do not mistrust these words because they were spoken of a child, but rather I have laid up my sure hope in them because they were uttered by a king.’ Edward was both a boy and a king: young, as impressionable as he was intelligent, still at barely ten years of age learning so much about the world. He lived in the bubble of court and majesty, where it was easy to trust the good intentions of those around him when they appeared to serve him loyally.⁴

The children of Henry VIII were not naive: political experience came to them early in life. In February 1548 Princess Elizabeth sent to her brother some lines in Latin that, when we realize that Elizabeth was fourteen when she wrote them, are breathtakingly revealing: ‘it is … rather characteristic of my nature not only not to say in words as much as I think in my mind, but also, indeed, not to say more than I think.’ In that same letter she punned on two words in Greek, kólakas (flatterers) and kórakas (crows). Kings, Elizabeth wrote, should not appear to have ‘more flatterers within their chambers than crows outside their court’.⁵

Edward’s first experience of the tough politics of power at the Tudor court came with the Seymour affair in 1547 and 1548. He was eleven years old when it ended. It showed how, for all the security of his court, he was still vulnerable to the influence of an uncle. It gives us also a wonderful chance to hear the voices of men close to the king.

Thomas, Lord Seymour of Sudeley was the younger brother of Protector Somerset. In 1547 he was about forty years of age, unmarried and, though not possessed of any great talent, the lord admiral of Edward’s navy. But Thomas Seymour wanted more: he wanted to be his royal nephew’s Governor. He wanted power and standing, and he was willing to try to manipulate the king’s servants at court, and even Edward himself, in order to achieve his ambitions. He failed, and the price he paid for that failure was his life.

Thomas Seymour was experienced enough in the ways of a royal court to know that to get to the king he needed to befriend Edward’s servants. He was himself a gentleman of the Privy Chamber and this gave him valuable access to the private suite of rooms around his nephew. When Edward’s court was at St James’s Palace in June 1547 Lord Seymour called in to see one of the king’s grooms, John Fowler. Perhaps Fowler was sympathetic to Lord Seymour, who had the ability to rub along nicely with many people. Probably too, Fowler was flattered by his lordship’s attentions. With hindsight he was very naive.

Fowler later recalled the words of their conversation that day at St James’s. The exchange began something like this:

Very quickly their conversation took a rather elliptical turn. Seymour asked if the king ‘lacked anything’, to which Fowler replied ‘No’. Then he asked Fowler if the king ‘would not in his absence ask for him, or ask any question of him’. Fowler answered that Edward ‘would ask sometime for him but nothing else’. We can imagine Fowler wondering to himself at this point what on earth Seymour was driving at.

There was a pause; and then Seymour said:

Master Fowler, I pray you, if you have any communication with the king’s majesty soon or tomorrow, ask his highness whether he would be content I should marry or not. And if he say yea, I pray you ask his grace who he would should [sic] be my wife.

Fowler agreed.

And so that night, when Edward was alone, Fowler said to the king: ‘If it please your grace, I marvel that my lord admiral marrieth not.’ Edward said nothing, so Fowler pressed on: ‘Could your grace be contented he should marry?’ The king said ‘very well’. Whom, Fowler asked Edward, would his grace choose to marry Lord Seymour? Edward said at first, ‘My Lady Anne of Cleves’, his father’s fourth wife, by then thirty-one years old and living in unhappy retirement in Kent. But then the king paused and said: ‘Nay, nay, wot you what [do you know what?] I would he married my sister [Princess] Mary to turn her [Catholic] opinions.’ That was the end of their conversation: and a very peculiar one it had been.

Lord Seymour came to St James’s next day and met Fowler in the king’s gallery. The admiral called Fowler over and asked him if he had done what he had been asked to do. Fowler said yes, and then told Seymour exactly what his nephew had said. Seymour laughed. He was silent for a little while. But then he said: ‘I pray you, Master Fowler, if you may soon ask his grace if he could be content that I should marry the queen [Queen Katherine].’ Would Fowler be a suitor for the admiral, and ask Edward to write a letter to Katherine? Fowler said that he would and spoke to the king about it that night.⁶

The following day Seymour came once again to the palace and had a private audience with Edward. Fowler wrote in a deposition a few months later that he had no idea what they talked about. But he hinted pretty strongly that a letter by Edward to Queen Katherine proposing the marriage between the queen and the admiral, though the work of the king, was written under Seymour’s guidance. Seymour himself delivered Katherine’s reply to Edward.

This was all a shadow play. Thomas Seymour and Queen Katherine had in fact already married. What Seymour believed he had got from the king was his blessing for a secret marriage that, once made public, would cause a huge political fuss. But Thomas Seymour had done more even than this, getting so close to the king that Edward had written a letter on his uncle’s behalf and signed it ‘Edward R’, a teasing promise of power and patronage. A man as ambitious as Lord Seymour saw the possibilities.

And so Seymour played his hand at court, knowing whom to confide in, whom to get on his side: John Fowler, Sir Thomas Wroth and John Cheke of the Privy Chamber. He often spoke to Fowler over a drink in the privy buttery. Always he asked the same question: what had the king said about him?

Now Seymour was beginning to say out loud things that a wiser man would have kept to himself. Once he even suggested how easy it might be to take the king by force. At nine o’clock one morning Seymour came into the king’s gallery at St James’s, where Fowler was playing his lute. Early on a summer’s day, the court was unusually quiet. He greeted Fowler with a ‘good morrow’:

Fowler remembered the words of Seymour’s reply: ‘A man might steal away the king now, for there came more with me than is in all the house besides.’ And then he went to spend the morning privately with his nephew.⁷

In the course of eighteen months Thomas Seymour had secretly married the queen, tried to corrupt the king’s servants, given money to Edward, attempted to use his nephew to manipulate a parliament and recruited some of the most important noblemen in England to support his pretensions. He even made predatory sexual advances on Princess Elizabeth. At the beginning of 1549 the whole affair was blown wide open and exposed in the kind of excruciating detail we are used to today in those great inquiries that bring to public scrutiny communications their authors never imagined would be read by curious outsiders. So many people were complicit in the affair, keeping private Seymour’s overtures and indiscretions. Some of the greatest names in England must have squirmed as they gave their evidence to the king’s secretaries.

Two men close to Edward left particularly exposed by the Seymour affair were John Fowler and John Cheke. Cheke knew exactly what Lord Seymour was up to and how dangerous he was. Once Seymour had come to him at Whitehall Palace ‘with a piece of paper in his hand’, saying that he had a suit for Parliament and that the king was ‘well contented’ to endorse it. He wanted Cheke to give it personally to Edward. Cheke remembered the words written on that piece of paper, in Seymour’s handwriting: ‘My lords, I pray you favour my lord admiral mine uncle’s suit, which he will make unto you.’ It was in effect a blank cheque for whatever Seymour chose to draw on it. All it needed was Edward’s sign manual. Cheke told Seymour that the Duke of Somerset had commanded that the king should sign no document that he as Protector had not already countersigned. Cheke said to Seymour: ‘I durst not be so bold to deliver it, nor to cause the king’s majesty either to write it or else to set his hand unto it.’ Seymour pressed him: after all, he said, he had the king’s permission. But Cheke stood his ground, ‘earnestly’ refusing to accept from Seymour the piece of paper.⁸

In all the twists and turns of the Seymour affair the most important person was a ten-year-old king, a child at the centre of a world he did not yet fully understand, used and manipulated by an ambitious uncle. It is easy to be carried away by the grand words and great aspirations of kingly authority, but the fact is that Edward was vulnerable politically, physically and even emotionally.

The most extraordinary deposition in the Seymour affair is Edward’s own. It tells us so much about a king still growing up, about his intelligence and acuity just as much as his innocence. In this document we really hear the words of a young king, speaking for himself to his uncle, taking the advice of John Cheke, and being encouraged to stand up for himself. We see, too, Seymour’s cunning in playing on the vulnerabilities of Edward and his court: a king given pocket money by the chief gentleman of his Privy Chamber, a boy whose bluntness (‘It were better that he should die’) was surely to do with his youth and inexperience. Seymour had a talent for making others complicit in his power game – Fowler in effect his agent at court, Cheke and even a binder of the king’s books used to get money secretly from the admiral to his nephew. This is how Edward explained it:

The lord admiral came to me in the time of the last parliament at Westminster, and desired me to write a thing for him. I asked him what: he said it was none ill thing, it is for the queen’s majesty. I said if it were good, the lords would allow it; if it were ill, I would not write in it. Then he said they would take it in better part if I would write. I desired him to let me alone in that matter. Cheke said afterwards to me ‘Ye were not best to write’.

At another time within this two year at least, he said, ‘Ye must take upon you yourself to rule, for ye shall be able enough as well as other kings; and then ye may give your men somewhat; for your uncle is old, and I trust will not live long.’ I answered, ‘It were better that he should die.’ Then he said, ‘Ye are but even a very beggarly king now, ye have not to play or to give to your servants.’ I said, ‘Master Stanhope had for me.’ Then he said, he would give Fowler money for me, and so he did, as Fowler told me. And he gave Cheke money, as I bade him; and also to a bookbinder, as [Jean] Belmaine can tell; and to divers others at that time, I remember not to whom.

Fowler had praised Seymour, saying to Edward: ‘Ye must thank my lord admiral for [the] gentleness that he showed you, and for his money.’

The admiral pressed Edward to be a king. His nephew was ‘too bashful’. Why did he not want ‘to bear rule, as other kings do’? Edward’s reply was that of a boy still so much in the shadow of men: ‘I said, I need not, for I was well enough.’⁹