This post is another entry in my (very) occasional series on famous Tudors and their connection to Abingdon. It was sparked by a discovery I made while I was looking for something else entirely, but my obsession with the Tudors made me follow the trail. I was looking for a bit of information concerning the history of Abingdon in the Victoria County History of Berkshire. I was scrolling down a very long page of text when a couple of sentences caught my eye:
The site of the monastery [i.e. Abingdon Abbey] was granted in 1547 to Lord Seymour of Sudeley. He was attainted in 1549, and it was put into the hands of Sir John Mason to hold for life with a salary of 4d. a day.
This refers to Thomas Seymour, Baron of Sudeley, brother to Queen Jane Seymour, and to Edward Seymour, later to be Lord Somerset and Lord Protector and effectively regent in place of King Edward VI, who was still a boy. The mention caught my eye because I am just re-reading ‘Revelation’ by C.J. Sansom, in which Thomas Seymour appears as a character, notable chiefly for lusting after Catherine Parr and being incredibly rude to the narrator Matthew Shardlake (calling him ‘Master Crookback’ and such throughout the book). I also knew Thomas Seymour from ‘Wolf Hall’, where he appears as a slightly vacuous, rakish character.
So who was Thomas Seymour? He was born in 1508 or 1509 at the Seymour family seat Wolf Hall in Wiltshire. Apart from the two siblings already mentioned above he also had another sister Elizabeth who married three times, first Sir Anthony Ughtred, second Gregory Cromwell, First Baron Cromwell and Thomas Cromwell’s son, and third John Paulet, 2nd Marquess of Winchester. There was also a younger brother Henry, who did not distinguish himself in any way and about whom not much is known.
Like most of his siblings Thomas Seymour also went to court, where he had a decent but not spectacular career. He started as servant to the prominent courtier Francis Bryan, perhaps around 1526. Ten years later he was appointed Gentleman of the Privy Chamber, an advancement he owed to the fact that he was now the king’s brother-in-law, but also to his good relations with Thomas Cromwell. As the dissolution of the monasteries went into full swing, he was granted a large number of manors from former monastic properties, ensuring a comfortable income but not amazing riches. He also served in the king’s navy as the captain of a couple of ships. Later he was even promoted to Lord Admiral. In 1542, over thirty and still unmarried, he met Catherine Parr, who had been widowed twice by then. She was considering another marriage and was attracted to him, and he also had his eye on her, although perhaps chiefly because, as historian David Loades supposes, he was on the look-out for a rich widow. Whether he was in love or not, she certainly was, but unfortunately the king got there first and married her as his sixth wife in 1543. Finally, after Henry’s death in 1547, Catherine Parr and Thomas Seymour got together. 1547 was also the year that Seymour was granted the site of Abingdon Abbey.
I hadn’t known until I stumbled upon that quote above that there was a connection between Seymour and Abingdon at all. Seymour’s name is hardly ever mentioned, probably because his distant involvement was only a blip on the timeline of Abingdon’s history. It is doubtful that he ever set foot in the place, even though he owned it (the Abbey, I mean, not Abingdon). It might not have been such an attractive place at that time, although of course worth a bit of money. But after the Abbey was dissolved in 1538, many of the buildings had been demolished and the stone carted away and used elsewhere. Even before that the Abbey was not in the best state. The team of surveyors sent to Abingdon around the time of the dissolution complained that they couldn’t actually stay there: ‘the late abbey […] is the poorest house’, they reported to Thomas Cromwell back in London. When Richard Rich of the Court of Augmentations arrived some time later, among other things to check whether the Abbey could be converted into a residence for Henry VIII, he found that it was by no means fit for a king:
The houses, except the church, a great and goodly thing well repaired, are decayed. The abbot’s lodging will not be fit for the king without great expense. No land either on the north-east side or on the south, where the meadows of the Thames lie, may be imparked without great hindrance to the town.
So it is perhaps not surprising that Thomas Seymour didn’t want to live there either. He probably never even contemplated living there. Rich people were buying land all over the country without intending to move there, only to hold it as property and make a profit from it, and Seymour had other places to live, particularly Sudeley, where his new wife Catherine moved in with him.
At any rate, he didn’t get to enjoy his Abbey lands for very long. As the quote at the beginning states, he was attainted in 1549. But what does that mean?
Thomas Seymour was accused of committing a variety of treasonable acts, more on that below. He demanded an open trial, but that was denied, and instead a Bill of Attainder was issued against him. This was a legal device to find someone guilty of a crime and sentence them without a trial. It means that in effect Parliament passes the sentence instead of a court of law, and passes the Bill of Attainder as a parliamentary act.
So what had he actually done? That is a bit more difficult to define. Historians don’t agree about how guilty he was of all the things he was accused of. The main strand of accusations levelled against him were tales of inappropriate behaviour towards the Princess Elizabeth. Elizabeth lived with her stepmother Catherine Parr and by extension with Seymour. Descriptions of what Seymour did range from silly behaviour like tickling and horse-play on Elizabeth’s bed in the mornings to sexual assault. Some have accused Elizabeth of being a willing participant in the ‘verbal and then physical high jinks in the newly sexualised Parr-Seymour household.’
Seymour was also accused of plotting to marry Elizabeth, even though he was still married to Catherine Parr. Perhaps he was thinking of his long-term future? David Loades at least appears to be taking it as fact that he flirted with Elizabeth and had serious designs on her, at least after Catherine’s death in September 1548. It is perhaps interesting to note that Thomas Cromwell was similarly accused of plotting to marry Henry VIII’s daughter Mary.
Lastly there are stories of him trying to kidnap the young King Edward VI. It seems he was caught trying to enter the king’s bedchamber at night, and he even shot a guard dog when it made too much noise. He had been jealous of his brother’s influence over the king and had been trying to extend his own influence, but what he was actually planning to do that night I don’t know.
It is beyond the scope of this post to ponder what may be the truth in these matters. Whatever it was, the result was that Thomas Seymour was sentenced to death and executed on 20 March 1549.
A Bill of Attainder means that the property of the attainted person falls to the crown. This was the case with Seymour’s property, and included the lands of Abingdon Abbey.
But what happened to Abingdon Abbey and whose hands is passed through before and after Thomas Seymour is a story for another time. The point of this post was only to deal with Thomas Seymour’s possession of the land and his connection with Abingdon, however loose and fleeting. Still, it pleased me that such a well-known Tudor figure should also appear in the annals of the town with whose history I deal with every day.
Elin Bornemann, Collections Officer
Sources:
Mieneke Cox: The Story of Abingdon, Part II: Medieval Abingdon (1990)
David Loades: The Seymours of Wolf Hall. A Tudor Family Story (2015)
Victoria County History of Berkshire available online here: https://www.british-history.ac.uk/search/series/vch–berks
Further information about Thomas Seymour and the Princess Elizabeth taken from here: https://spartacus-educational.com/TUDseymourT.htm
Featured image: Portrait of Thomas Seymour by Nicolas Denizot
Abingdon Museum Blog 