26. The Slimy Courtier Who Creeped on Queen Elizabeth I in Her Childhood
Thomas Seymour, 1st Baron Seymour of Sudeley (1508 – 1549), was one of the Tudor era’s slimiest figures. He and his older brother Edward pimped out their sister Jane Seymour to King Henry VIII, then married to but soured on Anne Boleyn. After the king had Boleyn’s head chopped off, he married Jane in 1536, and she gave him a son, the future King Edward VI. The Seymour family were catapulted from minor country gentry and into the upper reaches of the aristocracy. Thomas Seymour’s older brother Edward gained more power, however, and Thomas resented that. Soon, the siblings had morphed into mortal enemies. Thomas adopted a two-track strategy to increase his power. Gain personal influence over his nephew, the child King Edward who ascended the throne in 1547, or wed one of the king’s sisters, Mary or Elizabeth.
Less than a month after the death of her father, King Henry VIII, Thomas Seymour wrote a letter to thirteen-year-old Princess Elizabeth, asking her to marry him. An alarmed Elizabeth wrote back that she was too young – Seymour was 25 years older – and that she planned to mourn her father for the next two years. Thomas was not interested in Elizabeth because of who she was as a person, but because of what she was. She was the king’s sister, and a potential heir to the throne if the sickly Edward VI kicked the bucket. Seymoure wanted a princess – any princess – and to hedge his bets, even as he tried to get Elizabeth to marry him, he also proposed to her older sister, Princess Mary. She also turned him down.