“I have been informed,” replied Russell, “that you mean to marry either the Lady Mary or the Lady Elizabeth, or else the Lady Jane.”
Sudeley remained silent, and his interlocutor proceeded: “My Lord, if ye go about any such thing, ye seek the means to undo yourself, and all those that shall come of you.”
Sudeley, shaking his head, denied ever having had any such intention; he “had no thought of such an enterprise.” And so, for the time being, the conversation dropped. But a few days later, when the Lord Admiral was again riding with his Lordship, he said to Russell, “Father Russell, you are very suspicious of me; I pray you tell me who showed you of the marriage that I should attempt, whereof ye brake with me the other day.”
Russell answered, “I will not tell you the authors of the tale, but they be your very good friends”; and he advised Seymour “to make no suit of marriage that way”—meaning with Elizabeth or Mary, or eventually with Lady Jane.
Nothing daunted, Seymour replied, “It is convenient for them to marry, and better it were that they were married within the realm than in any foreign place without the realm; and why might not I, or another man raised by the King their father, marry one of them?”—in allusion to the fact that Henry VIII had passed a law legalising the marriage of a Princess of the Blood with a subject.
Russell warned him honestly, “My Lord, if either you, or any other within this realm, shall match himself in marriage either with my Lady Mary or my Lady Elizabeth, he shall undoubtedly, whatsoever he be, procure unto himself the occasion of his undoing, and you especially, above all others, being of so near alliance to the King’s Majesty.” Then, bearing in mind the Lord Admiral’s love of money, Lord Russell straightway asked, “And I pray you, what shall you have with either of them?”
Here Seymour was on his own ground: “He who marries one of them shall,” he said, “have three thousand pounds a year.”
“My Lord,” responded Russell, “it is not so, for ye may be well assured that he shall have no more than ten thousand pounds in money, plate, and goods, and no lands; and what is that to maintain his charges and estates who matches himself there?”
“They must have three thousand pounds a year also,” said the Lord of Sudeley.
Thereupon Russell lost his temper, and with some strong expressions retorted “they should not.”