Edward Seymour was swift to elevate himself to the Dukedom of Somerset when he took control of his nephew, Edward VI’s, Regency Council in 1547. The duke had twelve children as a result of his two marriages. His first marriage was to Catherine Filliol by whom he had two sons – or rather he thought he did but after his wife’s affair with her father-in-law came to light it all became rather complicated. John and Edward found themselves excluded from their inheritance on the grounds that no one knew if their father was actually their half-brother. Catherine was packed off to a nunnery where she conveniently died circa 1535 before nunneries became a thing of the past. I should point out that there is no existing contemporary evidence that Catherine and her father-in-law were rather closer than they should have been.
Seymour married for a second time to Anne Stanhope. Today’s post is supposed to be about her daughter – Anne. She had more sisters including Margaret and Jane. All three of them were noted writers of their day. Anne, the oldest married John Dudley the eldest surviving son of John Dudley, Earl of Warwick as he was when the engagement was contracted and Duke of Northumberland when the marriage came to pass. John died of goal fever as a result of being locked in the Tower following froths father’s cunning but not terribly successful plan to put Lady Jane Grey on the throne.
The girls received a humanist education of the kind that included Latin, French, Italian and Greek as well as other subjects. The sisters were also supposed to be notable singers. Her first marriage was supposed to seal a political alliance between Seymour and Dudley but within weeks of the marriage Seymour was off to the Tower for a date with the headsman. When John died Anne was still only sixteen or seventeen years old. An old family friend of the Seymours arranged a second marriage to Sir Edward Unton. She and her husband had seven children, though it didn’t stop him from going off on a Grand Tour. During that time and whilst her youngest child was scarcely out of babyhood she was declared to be a’ lunatic with lucid intervals.’ She was twenty-eight years old.
Anne and her sisters composed 103 Latin distichs- choric praise in couplets and rhyming quatrains- for the tomb of Margaret of Navarre which were published in France in 1550. This then makes the three young women an important voice in the development of the female written word but at the time they were regarded as political pawns on the marriage board. Marriage to John Dudley bought disaster but also financial advantage. Elizabeth I saw to it that she received an income from her jointure. Her second marriage saw her as a footnote. There is no explanation of her insanity.
There is even less known about Margaret Seymour who may have died at a similar time to her sister Jane who was born circa 1541 and died in 1561 from tuberculosis having served for a short time as one of Elizabeth I’s ladies. It was she who was the sole witness to her brother Edward Seymour’s marriage to Lady Katherine Grey.
Demers, Patricia. “The Seymour Sisters: Elegizing Female Attachment.” The Sixteenth Century Journal, vol. 30, no. 2, 1999, pp. 343–365. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/2544708. Accessed 30 May 2021.
Henry VIII was buried on 16th February 1547 at Windsor with Jane Seymour. Their son Edward was now king with a regency council nominated by Henry VIII. It wasn’t long before Edward Seymour had nobbled the council and rather than five equal men had become Lord Protector.
Edward’s younger brother Thomas felt aggrieved. Even though he was now the Lord High Admiral (sounds vaguely Gilbert and Sullivan), Baron Sudeley and a privy councillor he felt it was somewhat unfair that his brother was the Lord Protector. What resulted was two years of rampant ambition, scandal and tragedy followed by Thomas’s execution on three charges of treason not that he was ever brought to trial.
Sir Francis Bryan was nicknamed either by Henry VIII or Thomas Cromwell as the Vicar of Hell. Henry allegedly asked what sort of sin it was to ruin a mother and then her child where upon Bryan commented that it was the same sort of sin as eating a hen and then its chicken. Alternatively online sources suggest that Cromwell gave Bryan the name on account of his role in bringing the Boleyn faction down.
The dissolute vicar who managed to survive Henry’s reign without falling foul of the Tudor terror had one surviving sister. Her name was Elizabeth and she became Lady Carew when she was about twelve. By the time she was thirteen she was a mother, Henry VIII was purchasing mink coats for her and giving her husband Sir 
Sir Francis became Henry VIII’s cup bearer in 1516 and two years later was admitted to the ranks of Gentlemen of the Privy Chamber. The following year Francis was one of the young men that Wolsey had removed from court as a bad influence on the king and overly familiar with the monarch- not least because he’d been on a mission to France and returned with an expensive taste in French tailoring and a habit of mocking those dressed in the English fashion- but it wasn’t long before he was back. He turns up in 1520 with Henry at the Field of Cloth of Gold but it would be several more years before he was re-admitted to the privy chamber.
In August 1533 it fell to Francis to tell his king that the Pope had excommunicated him. By this time Francis’ cousin Anne was not only queen but heavily pregnant. By the following year though things were turning sour. Chapuys noted that the king was involved romantically with a young lady – another of Francis’ cousins but Francis was closely associated with the Boleyn’s. So perhaps it is not surprising that it was in 1534 that Francis’ got into an argument with George Boleyn (pictured right)- after all Francis had a long experience of Henry’s pattern of womanising and knew when the king’s interest had moved on. Even so in 1536 when a list of all Anne Boleyn’s relations was drawn up Francis’ name was on it and he was questioned about his cousin but unlike George was not arrested. In fact he was promoted to Chief Gentleman of the Privy Chamber and sent off to tell Jane Seymour the good news although he managed to plot his copybooks because he appears to have been sympathetic to Mary Tudor and queried whether or not she could be returned to the rank of princess.
Sir George Vernon was born around 1508 but his father, Richard, died in 1517 whilst he was still a child so the Vernon lands were subject to the rules about wardship- which always ran the risk of financial loss but in George’s case his guardians, who included Cardinal Wolsey, appear not to have drained his resources. In fact by the time of his death in 1565 the peerage records the fact that he had possession of thirty manors. Sir Henry Vernon, George’s grandfather pre-deceased his son by only two years.
King Henry VIII died on 28 January 1547. This post does not deal with women like Mistress Webbe who were regarded as so unimportant that they deserved absolutely no mention in court correspondence.
Wife number two laster for three years if we discount the seven year chase beforehand. Anne Boleyn married Henry in 1533 because she was pregnant. Elizabeth was born at the beginning of September 1533 and was motherless by mid-1536. Henry still found time to be attracted to a lady at court who was sympathetic to Catherine and Mary’s plight; Anne’s own cousin Madge or Mary Shelton as well as Joan Dingley who history names as a laundress but who was probably of a higher rank. Joan gave birth to a child called Ethelreda or Audrey and there is sufficient evidence in the form of land grants and wills to read between the lines and recognise her as one of Henry’s children (if you feel that way inclined.) This is also the time that sees a reference to a mysterious Mistress Parker.
Jane Seymour started off as a mistress – and she was yet another Howard girl but like a predecessor advanced from bit of fluff to queen with the removal of Anne Boleyn. Jane Seymour gave birth to Prince Edward on the 12th October 1537 and then promptly died on the 24th October 1537 assuring herself of the position of Henry’s “true wife” and the one who he had depicted in all of Holbein’s Tudor family portraits. There wasn’t really time for much notable womanising given the shortness of her tenure and the fact that 1536 was a bit of a bad year for Henry on account of the Pilgrimage of Grace not to mention the bad jousting accident that caused Anne Boleyn to miscarry her child (so she claimed) and which left Henry with an infected and inflamed leg. Even so it was noted that Henry did say he wished he hadn’t married so hastily when he saw two pretty new ladies-in-waiting.
By January 1536 Henry had developed an interest in Jane Seymour despite the Boleyn family’s best efforts to keep him distracted with their own young women. Famously Henry told Anne to mind her own business as her betters had done when she confronted him on the topic.
December 2 1542
Arthur Plantagenet, Lord Lisle was the illegitimate son of Edward IV. He turns up in the court of Elizabeth of York during the reign of Henry VII and as mentioned in another post had a kind heart, wrote many letters and ended up in the Tower where he died with the relief of being set free rather than having his head ceremoniously removed from his neck having been accused of treason. Most of what we know about Anne Bassett comes from the letters she wrote or which were written about her and survived in the archive of Lisle letters.
When Anne of Cleves arrived on the scene our Anne reported for duty as one of the queen’s ladies-in-waiting but there were too many German ladies and Anne was told that her services were not required. Anne Bassett wrote to her mother expressing her irritation. Lady Lisle used her connections to find out that Mother Lowe, Anne of Cleves’ german mother of the maids was the person to approach and before long Anne Bassett was serving queen number four.
Jane Seymour, perhaps the original Plain Jane if Chapuys comments are to be believed, became wife number three on 30th May 1536. She was another descendent of Edward III via Hotspur. She’d also been a lady-in-waiting to Catherine of Aragon and also to Anne Boleyn. One story said that Anne was deeply distressed to encounter Jane sitting on Henry’s lap. Her chosen motto was “Bound to serve and obey” – a wise choice given Henry’s complaints about wife number two and presumably wife number one’s implacable logic and argument. Her emblem is the phoenix rising from a tower surrounded by those burgeoning roses reflecting both a Plantagenet and Lancastrian inheritance. The pheonix is a symbol of love and renewal. Jane is the renewed Tudor hope for an heir.