“Thus guiltless he through malice went to pot,
Not answering for himself, not knowing cause.”
No better proof can possibly be quoted in his favour, so far as the accusation of his having murdered Katherine Parr is concerned, than the fact that his wife’s closest connections remained his only friends in his trouble.
Still Thomas Seymour stood out boldly for his innocence. He did not deny his flirtation with Elizabeth; it was a mere romp between a man and a child, with no harm in it beyond such as his enemies chose to impute. But the poor man’s foes proved too much for him, and on 23rd February he was brought face to face with his accusers, and condemned by the Council without hearing or defence. The King, his nephew, seems to have made some effort to save him, but the Council forced the boy to sign the fatal warrant, which he delivered with a trembling hand, the tears standing in his eyes, and this despite the fact that the reference to Seymour’s death in the King’s Journal contains not a word of regret. Seymour had done him, personally, no great ill, and appears to have shown him kindness on more than one occasion. Cranmer, who ever ran with the hare and hunted with the hounds, hastened to affix his signature to the document ordering the Admiral’s execution, and this, as Hume observes, “in contravention of the Canon Law, and in sheer spite.” The Bishop of Ely informed Seymour that his earthly life was shortly to be ended, and a Catholic priest was sent to confess him; but he is said to have refused these ministrations, as well as those of a Protestant clergyman. He contrived, according to Latimer, to write letters to the Princesses Mary and Elizabeth denying the accusations against him, which letters he hid between the leather of one of his servants’ shoe-soles. Suspected of serving his master too well, the poor faithful creature was arrested, the letters discovered, and the unfortunate man hanged without trial.
Without entering into any controversy as to the magnitude of Thomas Seymour’s guilt, it may be admitted, in fairness to his brother of Somerset, that, if the misdemeanours of a personal character attributed to Sudeley rest on the gossiping evidence of women, the graver charges of collecting stores of arms, raising an army to strike a blow against his brother, and unscrupulously attempting to obtain funds even through pirates and notorious swindlers, do in a measure justify the severity of his punishment and excuse the infliction of an apparently unnatural and fratricidal sentence of death. Somerset, with all his faults, had a high sense of justice and of the responsibility of his exalted office. His brother had offended not only as an ordinary subject of the realm, but as a trusted servant of the nation, and his treason and unscrupulous abuse of his position were beyond all pardon. The voice of nature was stifled in the heart of the statesman, and thus the Duke, with a tolerably clear conscience, signed a death-warrant which must at the time have cost him a pang of horror and which has since branded him as a merciless fratricide.[148]
The Lord of Sudeley’s rage against the Council, his brother, and his enemies in general, when he heard himself condemned, knew no bounds and admitted of no Christian forgiveness or resignation. He cursed them one and all with every terrible oath his tongue could utter. He was beheaded on Tower Hill on 20th March 1549, six months and some days after the death of Queen Katherine Parr. His demeanour on the scaffold caused great scandal: he refused to listen to the pastor deputed to minister to him, and the attendants had much difficulty in forcing him to kneel to receive the fatal stroke. He wrestled hard with the executioner, who, being a strong man, hurled him down on the scaffold and struck off his head at last, after a cruel hacking, due to his desperate struggles.
For nearly a week after the death of the Admiral, Lady Jane remained alone with her attendants in the desolate house in the Strand. Then her father, Lord Dorset, came to London to take her back with him to Bradgate.
On the Sunday after the execution, Hugh Latimer preached a sermon at Paul’s Cross which for bitterness and uncharitableness has never been surpassed. “This I say,” he remarked, “if they ask me what I think of the Lord Admiral’s death, that he died very dangerously, irksomely, and horribly.” “He shall be to me,” he furiously exclaimed, “Lot’s wife as long as I live. He was a covetous man—a horrible covetous man. I would there were no mo’ in England. He was an ambitious man. I would there were no mo’ in England. He was a seditious man—a contemner of the Common Prayer. I would there were no mo’ in England. He is gone. I would he had left none behind him.”
The worst charge that posterity can bring against Somerset is not that he signed his brother’s death-warrant, but that he seized the dead man’s estates and even his wearing apparel, and despoiled his orphaned child, the infant daughter of Katherine Parr.[149]
Princess Elizabeth learnt the death of the courtier she “loved most” with a composure singular for so young a lady, simply remarking that he was over clever—“a man of the greatest wit and the least judgment.”