“At the twelvemonth’s end
I’ll change my black gown for a faithful friend.”
Loves Labors Lost, I.ii
With Karim Ainouz’s new film, Firebrand, about Henry VIII’s sixth and final wife, Queen Katherine Parr, set to be released in mid-June, it seemed the appropriate time to draw one of the most iconic and inappropriate mysteries out of the back of young Queen Elizabeth’s closet.
This mystery involves a little black dress, a frolic in a late summer garden and a very sharp blade.
Only slightly less experienced than Henry with the walk down the aisle, Katherine Parr had four husbands, of which Henry was the third. Within 4 months of Henry’s death at the end of January 1547, she had secretly married the love of her life, Thomas Seymour, 1st Baron Seymour of Sudeley, brother to prior Queen Jane Seymour who had given Henry his longed-for son and heir, Edward. Within half a year of marrying Thomas, Katherine was overjoyed to be pregnant herself for the first time. Intelligent, well-educated and fiercely Protestant, Katherine had published several religious best-sellers under her own name as queen, which earned her dangerous enemies at court. She personally oversaw the educations of both Prince Edward and Princess Elizabeth. It was Katherine who pressed Henry to restore Elizabeth to the line of succession after she had been declared a bastard. Katherine and Elizabeth had such a close friendship that, after Henry’s death, Katherine invited Elizabeth to live with her and her new husband in Chelsea. At the time, Elizabeth was 14 and Katherine, 36 years old.
At 40, Thomas Seymour, possessed of “strong limbs and manly shape”, developed the habit of paying the princess early morning visits in her bedchamber before she was out of bed or dressed, as reported by the formidable Kat Ashley, who had been in Elizabeth’s service since she was four years old. According to Kat, if Elizabeth were still in bed, Seymour attired only in his nightshirt, would “open the curtains and bid her good morrow, and make as though he would come at her. And she would go further in the bed”. If she were out of bed, “he would bid her good morrow and ask how she did, and strike her upon the back or on the buttocks familiarly”. Once he strove to kiss her in bed.
Things really got overheated between them in the garden during the late stages of Katherine’s pregnancy in August 1548. The story goes that both Thomas and Katherine were frolicking with Elizabeth amid the shrubbery, unseen by anyone else. When Elizabeth emerged into the open, it was with “her gown [cut] in a hundred pieces, being black cloth.”
What would possess anyone to repeatedly slice a teenage girl’s gown while it was on her body? Were the later rumors true that it was Thomas Seymour who slashed Elizabeth’s gown to shreds in that garden while Katherine held her down? Did he use a fencing foil or a knife? Were they three involved in some type of dangerous game in the bushes? Or was the person who wielded the blade so dexterously that it cut only the fabric and not the princess, the heavily-pregnant and jealous Katherine who wanted to give her husband good reason to fear touching the young princess again and give Elizabeth a going-away party she would never forget? If it was anything a noble woman’s hands knew how to do, it was to work expertly with fine fabrics.
We will never know, but Katherine promptly had Elizabeth packed up and shipped off to stay with Sir Anthony Denny in his house at Cheshunt.
They never saw each other again.
Sadly, Katherine died following delivery of her child, convinced that her husband did not love her and had poisoned her. When Thomas Seymour was arrested some months later for an ill-conceived attempt to marry Elizabeth, Kat Ashley testified that he had also tried to marry the princess before he had married Katherine Parr. Thomas was beheaded in March, 1549.
If only that little black dress could tell us who worked upon it so expertly with a very particular set of skills.
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