Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 17.djvu/211

 Edward_VI, when he came to the throne had three uncles, brothers of his mother, Queen Jane: Sir Edward Seymour [q. v.], earl of Hertford, and afterwards duke of Somerset, and 'protector;' Sir Henry, who lived in obscurity, and died in 1578; And Sir Thomas. Sir Thomas, unless Bishop Latimer was a gratuitous defamer,was a man of profligate life, without a conscience, and without a heart, always needy, and insatiably ambitious. He was somewhat past thirty years of age, of no more than average abilities, but shapely and handsome. In the king's will, while the Earl. of Hertford was appointed one of the sixteen executors to whom was entrusted the government of the kingdom during the minority of the young prince. Sir Thomas Seymour was named among the twelve who were to form a council to advise the executors when advice should be needed. Seymour was dissatisfied. On 10 Feb. the Earl of Hertford was created Duke of Somerset, and the younger brother Baron Seymour of Sudeley, with a liberal grant of lands to support his title. Next day he was made lord high admiral of England. The admiral was unmarried. Whom should he choose? There were three who were eligible — three, any one of whom might satisfy even his vaulting ambition — the Princess Mary, now just completing her thirty-second year, the Princess Elizabeth, in her fourteenth year, and the queen dowager, an old love, it might be about thirty-three or thirty-four years of age. Would either of the princesses have him? He was sure of the queen, and could always fall back upon her. He shrank from approaching the Princess Mary. On 26 Feb. he addressed a letter to Elizabeth, offering himself as her husband. On the 27th she wrote in reply, refusing her consent to such an alliance, and declaring that 'even when she shall have arrived at years of discretion she wishes to retain her liberty, without entering into any matrimonial engagement' (, p. 15). On 3 March it is said he was formally betrothed to the queen dowager, and shortly after this the two were married. The queen was living at Chelsea; the young princess made her home with her stepmother. Soon there came rumours that Seymour had availed himself of his position to indulge in familiarities with the princess which would have been unseemly towards a child of six, and were wholly inexcusable towards a young lady whom he had actually offered to make his wife a few weeks before. The queen remonstrated, and finally the princess removed her household and set up her establishment at Hatfield. On 7 Sept. 1548 the queen died, after giving birth to a daughter a week before. She was no sooner buried than her worthless husband began again his advances to the princess. Elizabeth had a hard game to play; it needed all the caution and craft of a practised diplomatist. She stood alone now. Her suitor was an utterly mercenary and unscrupulous man, who was trying to supersede his own brother and gain for himself something like the supreme power in the state. Elizabeth was the personage upon whom all eyes were fixed. Would Seymour win her? On 16 Jan. 1549 the protector ordered the arrest of his brother on a charge of high treason, and committed him to the Tower. But as the princess had been named only too frequently of late, and had been in some way implicated in the doings of her suitor, the principal persons of her household were arrested also, and she herself was kept under surveillance, and, though at Hatfield, she was treated to some extent as a prisoner under restraint. Then followed examinations and confessions on the part of her servants in the Tower — hearsay stories, backstairs gossip, and all the vulgar tattle of waiting-maids and lackeys. Then the princess herself was questioned. There was nothing to be got from her that did not tend to weaken confidence in the so-called evidence that had been carefully compiled. If the protector had ever any design upon the life of Elizabeth, it may be that the love which her brother bore her saved her from danger. Seymour was brought to the block on 20 March 1549. When they told Elizabeth she did not betray emotion. 'This day died a man with much wit and very little judgment,' she said, and passed on, to the wonder of those who were there to watch and listen and report upon her words and looks and manner.

During the year that followed Elizabeth, living sometimes at Cheshunt, sometimes at Hatfield, suffered much from ill-health. She passed her time of retirement in pursuing her studies. Roger Ascham was her tutor then, and Lady Tyrwhitt, her governess, was not unworthy of the title she had gained, a woman of learning and taste, accomplished, wise, and religious in that age of learned ladies. Ascham's account of her studies during this year is somewhat droll: She had read 'almost the whole of Cicero and a great part of Livy,' says the pedagogue, but 'with me,' he adds. Not a line of the poets from anything that appears. 'Select orations of Isocrates and the tragedie's of Sophocles' were her Greek pabulum. She had even dipped into patristic learning, but here she had been restricted to extracts from St. Cyprian. They who know Ascham's 'Scolemaster' know what his method was,