THE BLOG
Extra material for The May Bride
Chances are, if you’re a Tudor afficionado, you’ve come across the Seymour family scandal of the 1520s. But you’re probably thinking: Remind me again? It’s not your fault: there’s almost nothing, officially, to know. As far as I’m aware, the historical record gives us only this: Edward Seymour – eldest brother of Henry V111’s third wife, Jane, and, ultimately, Lord Protector of England during the reign of Henry and Jane’s young son – repudiated his first wife, Katherine Fillol/Filiol, sometime in the early years of their marriage, sending her to a nunnery and disinheriting their two infant sons. His reason? Well, for that, we have only the rumour that he believed she’d had an affair with his father.
Perhaps you think that kind of carry-on was normal for the Tudors: repudiated wives, nunneries. But far from it – although, interestingly, another man, at exactly this time, was trying very hard to set aside his own wife. ‘Man’, ‘wife’? King, queen, no less: Henry V111 and Catherine of Aragon. Try as the king might, though, it took him seven years and the wrenching of England from Rome, and even then you couldn’t really have called it a success.
No, what happened at Wolfhall was drastic even then, and particularly so for a family such as Edward’s. The Seymours of the 1520s were not who they’d become in the following two decades thanksin different waysto Edward and his maverick younger brother, Thomas. The Seymours of Katherine Filliol’s time were by all accounts well-respected country people; the father was Justice of the Peace for Wiltshire. They weren’t at court, didn’t keep company with the characters we read about, the characters who still, from five hundred years back, grab our attention.
And Edward himself: I simply couldn’t square this awful story with what I knew of him. He was ambitious in what I think of as the right way, by which I mean he was hardworking, diplomatic, capable and cautious. You can debate the success or otherwise of his years as de facto ruler of England, but there’s no denying that the far-reaching changes of Edward V1’s reign – crucial in shaping English culture as we recognise it today – happened under his protectorate. He was nothing if not forward-thinking.
A man, surely, I felt, who’d have gone to any lengths to avoid personal scandal. But, then, in a sense that’s exactly what he did, because how better to deal with a supposedly errant wife than to shut her up in a nunnery.
So, what’s the truth of it? What’s a matter of historical record? Katherine was co-heiress (with her sister) of Sir William Filliol/Fillol, of Woodlands at Horton, in Dorset, which was within fifty miles of the Seymour’s Wiltshire home of Wolfhall. Edward and Katherine married in the early 1520s, when they themselves were in their early twenties, and went on to have two sons (John and Edward). In 1527, Katherine’s father re-wrote his will shortly before his death to stipulate that neither Katherine nor Edward nor their children receive ‘parts or parcell’ of his estate, and that Katherine receive an annual pension of £40 on condition that she live in ‘some honest house of Relegion of wymen’. By an Act of Parliament in 1530, Edward had the terms of that will set aside. He was re-married by 1536, which can only mean that Katherine had either died or become a nun. In 1540, he received a grant through Parliament permitting him to alter his succession to the children of his second wife.
The rumour of adultery comes from a marginal note in Vincent’s Baronage, added well after the deaths of everyone concerned, which translates from the Latin to claim that Katherine was ‘repudiated’ because, after the marriage, she had ‘known the father’.
And there we have it; that’s all what we have.
Just think of what we don’t know. Did Katherine and Edward marry for love? As newlyweds, where did they live? – at Wolfhall? And then what really did happen? was it really as the Latin scribble has it? And if so, how did it happen? (Perhaps we shouldn’t assume that if there was a liaison, it was was consensual on Katherine’s part.) And – sorry to be indelicate – how much of it happened? – how long was it going on? When? And then how did it ever come to light? What did Katherine admit to, what did she deny or attempt to explain away? Who did or didn’t believe her? How did Edward’s father answer the accusation? What sanctions – if any – did he face, and how did he live it down, both inside and outside the family? How did Edward, himself, live it down? – because he certainly did, going from strength to strength. Where did Katherine go, and what were the terms of her confinement? Did she ever see her sons, and what did they grow up knowing? What was her ultimate fate?
And those two little boys? In my experience, that’s what people most often want to know, and history books do give us an answer of sorts. Both sons are said to have been with Edward in the Tower when he was indicted for treason (on largely trumped up charges) in the late 1540s, John dying there (of illness) a few months after his father’s execution. Edward Junior became High Sheriff of Devon: in other words, he seems to have gone on to have a respectable career, and, indeed, family life, because after the death of the 7th Duke of Somerset in the eighteenth century, the line of descendancy reverted so that it is from him, Katherine’s second son, that the current Duke is descended.
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As for all those unanswered questions, here’s what I think… My guess is that Katherine and Edward did marry for love, or at least something like it, because they married at an age that was – for their class – relatively young; neither would’ve been under pressure to marry at that time. Edward could’ve – and, in the light of what happened, should’ve – waited until he’d begun to make a career for himself at court; he could’ve then married one of the in-crowd. His second wife – the scarily ambitious Anne Stanhope – was an ideal match for him.
I suspect the young newlyweds did live at Wolfhall, and I wonder if the few months that Edward spent away in France (having joined the Duke of Suffolk’s brief, unsuccessful campaign of 1527), had something to do with what went wrong. I’ve read that Edward discovered poems written for his wife by his father, but as far as I know, that’s unsubstantiated. What is true, though, is that Seymour senior was friends, when younger, with the poet John Skelton. A few words, here, about Edward’s father, John: he’d ‘married up’, and was younger than his wife; I calculate that he’d have been in his mid-forties at the time of the scandal. Not old, then, as it’s easy to assume. I’ve come across a claim that he had an illegitimate son before he married, but, actually, that doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.
And Katherine: where did she end up? Well, she was a Dorset girl living in Wiltshire. Two of England’s wealthiest, most powerful nunneries were in Dorset and Wiltshire: Shaftesbury and Wilton. But whether a repudiated wife from a prominent family would be sent to a major house, as befitted her origins, or, on the contrary, precisely because of those origins, buried away somewhere obscure, I don’t know. Forty pounds per year, though, compares favourably with the Prioress of Shaftesbury’s pension of twenty pounds per year, and the Prioress of Wilton’s ten, almost a decade later at the time of dissolution.
Reading and thinking my way through all this, I began developing my own take on what might’ve happened that was so catastrophic at Wolfhall in the mid 1520s. Something was dawning on me. Dates are patchy, but Jane Seymour was most likely around fifteen when her brother married and seventeen when the terrible situation blew up at home. Mid-teens when her father was accused of fathering a child with his own daughter-in-law.
What do we know of the Jane who endured this calamity? Almost nothing – which actually, I think, tells us a lot. She was the eldest girl in a large family, but with three older brothers: heavily imposed-upon in the domestic sphere, almost certainly, and overshadowed. Those brothers of hers were notably handsome, but to judge from the Holbein portrait of Jane when she became queen, she was – to say the least – no looker. There’s no record of her having travelling or lived away from home during her girlhood nor having been educated beyond, presumably, the basics. In adulthood, she was, reputedly, traditional in her religious leanings, and her needlework was much admired. She was a spinster in her late twenties when the king turned his attention to her. I don’t think it’d be too wide of the mark to describe her as shy.
A shy, plain fifteen year old joined at Wolfhall by the bride of the brother who was fast becoming a star. It intrigued me, the relationship between those two girls. Jane was at a formative age, and I couldn’t help but imagine her in thrall to Katherine. What, then, did Jane know – or not know – of what went wrong? In the aftermath, when Katherine was despatched to a nunnery, Jane went to Catherine of Aragon, that gentlest and most pious of queens: Jane appears in records of the queen’s household from around this time. Which, ironically, was exactly when the king made his first, tentative move to persuade his queen to stand down, step aside, pursue a religious vocation. How bizarre that Jane should come – perhaps for refuge, perhaps for rehabilitation – from a home in which exactly that had just happened, only to have to witness the same all over again, but writ large. Very large, because Catherine of Aragon was no Dorset girl; she was a princess of the Holy Roman Empire, crowned queen of England, loyal spouse of two decades’ standing and mother of the sole heir to the throne. She had right on her side and she knew it. She wasn’t going to go quietly. Thus ensued seven long desperate years of resistance, which Jane, close at hand, would have witnessed and lived through.
Before long, what had started for me as a fascination with how and why Katherine Filliol was more or less wiped from history had grown to become as much about her plain, shy little sister-in-law, Jane Seymour: how and why Jane had ended up best able of all the women in England to take the throne the day after Anne Boleyn had knelt for the executioner.
In search of Katherine:
Katherine Filliol disappeared almost five hundred years ago. Except that she didn’t, quite, because a trace of her remain in a few facts: she married Edward Seymour when they were both in their early twenties and had two sons, but a few years later she was banished to a nunnery and the boys disinherited.
Edward did a characteristically good job when he banished his wife: there’s almost nothing, officially, to know. The historical record gives us only Katherine’s father’s will, leaving her an annual pension of £40 on condition that she live in ‘some honest house of Relegion of wymen’. Within a decade, Edward had re-married – meaning that Katherine had either become a nun or died – and altered his succession in favour of the children of his second wife.
It’s a marginal note in Vincent’s Baronage, from as long as a century afterwards, which gives us, in Latin, the rumour that Katherine was ‘repudiated’ because, after her marriage, she had ‘known the father’.
Katherine’s father-in-law keeps himself to himself, historically-speaking: Justice of the Peace for Wiltshire and Warden of Savernake Forest, he was rarely at court, not even when his eldest daughter, Jane, became Henry V111’s third queen. Edward was the one making the family name: clever, cautious Edward who, in the twenty years following his first wife’s disappearance, became de facto ruler of England during the reign of the boy-king Edward V1 and ‘The Good Duke’ beloved of the common people, before it all went wrong as, in those days, it so often did.
Of Katherine, there’s no word after 1527, not even of which nunnery took her in.
Having resolved to write about her, about what might have gone so very wrong for her and her young husband, I decided that if the history books couldn’t give me anything, I’d go and look. Literally. I’d get up from my desk and go to where Katherine was born and grew up, and if I looked hard enough or perhaps inventively enough, surely there’d be something. There had to be something. Anything. A view to which she habitually woke. A church or chapel in which she used to sit, freezing. A memorial, bearing the names of people who’d known her and, once, had hopes for her.
She was born around the turn of the fifteenth century at “Woodlands, Horton, Dorset”. Open your map and there it is: Woodlands, a hamlet just outside Horton in south east Dorset. ‘Woodlands’, though? An odd address, because prominent residences of the time were usually styled ‘house’ or ‘manor’ or indeed ‘manor house’. None of my trusty histories of the area mention a Woodlands Manor House. It was there on my map, though, and the internet provided a postcode.
A new build, then, or re-build? Whatever, I decided, it’d be worth a look. And, anyway, there’d be a church nearby, a fair chance of seeing the Filliol name in stone. And up the road, the other side of Salisbury, was Seymour-country. A trip was shaping up for me: a Tudor-themed mini-roadtrip.
So, one fine, late-autumn day, I filled my flask and set off.
Woodlands isn’t wooded, now, if it ever was. It’s open countryside; unremarkable, in a nice way. Nor was the hamlet as I’d anticipated: it’s one long road stretching almost to the nearby conurbation, strung with sizeable modern houses. There’s something like a green, but not particularly green-shaped. No pub, no school. Church? A Methodist chapel was what I saw first, then a church which looked like a chapel: low, brick-built, late Victorian. And locked.
Strolling, I saw eighteenth- and nineteenth century terraced cottages that would’ve been home once to farm labourers, and mid- twentieth century council-built housing. There’s an old schoohouse, now a private residence but with those telltale big windows and the giveaway name. An intriguingly round-shaped house (‘Round House’, no less) is reputed, I discovered later, to have been the workshop of Huguenot silk weavers. Rising above a hedge close to the church were impressive, rickety chimney stacks. The Old Vicarage, its listing informs us, is partly sixteenth century in origin. My guess is that it’s an even older something else because you can’t have a vicarage without a church and nowhere can I find reference to any church before the late-Victorian one provided by the Countess of Shaftesbury. The schoolhouse, too, was Shaftesbury-gifted. This might’ve been Filliol land at one time but later became Shaftesbury-land.
Huguenots and Shaftesburys, but no Filliols, or none that I could see. Next stop, the Manor House. It’s off the road to Horton, down a long, gated drive shared with a golf course bearing the charming name of ‘Remedy Oak’ in commemoration of a visit of the boy-king Edward V1, son of Henry V111, who sat beneath an oak to dispense his healing touch to needy locals. (Something Tudor!) The touch of a king was believed to cure scrofula, an infection of the lymph glands in the neck, usually tuberculous in origin: one of the scourges of earlier centuries. (I’m fairly regularly asked, would you believe, if I’d like to have lived in Tudor times…)
Stuck to one of the gateposts was a planning permission application for solar panels. Those gates were open and, after what was no doubt some rather shifting-looking deliberation, I braved the driveway. But further along, that Manor House, with other suggestively-named residences (‘The Coachhouse’ etc), was behind a second, entryphone-controlled gate, so I got no more than tantalising glimpses of Tudor-like chimney stacks – in much better nick, though, than the one near the church.
Was this where Katherine grew up, long before solar panels and entryphones? – if not in that house, then on its site? Here and there in the walls of the existing houses, I’ve since read, are remnants of ‘a major house’ dating from the ‘early sixteenth century’. But that’s the latest Katherine was born, and anyway the sources attribute that house to a Mr Henry Hastings, who post-dates the Filliols. And something else: in that gated complex were buildings named as if they’d once been part of a farm. Every manor house of the time had its own farm, but not necessarily on a shared site. Those farms were of considerable importance in any locality at a time when farms were what mattered, when most of us worked on them. Over the centuries, ‘Manor farm’, ‘manor farmhouse’ and ‘house’ tend to have been used interchangeably. So, what I was peering at, through that gate, might not have originally been a manor house but its farm: a big farmhouse that had become, over time, a des res. Mind you, it’s just as likely that a fine house fallen into disrepair would become, in time, a farmhouse. When I was back home, I learned from a local history that Woodlanders from the century before last used to refer to ‘Woodlands Farm’ as ‘Woodlands House’. See what I mean? It’s a short step from ‘Woodlands House’ to ‘Woodlands Manor House’. Maybe ‘Woodlands Manor House’ was actually, in time gone by, just ‘Woodlands Farm’… although, conversely, of course, it’s just as likely that what became ‘Woodlands Farm’ was once ‘Woodlands House’.
Well, I could stand there at that gate and go around in circles, as it were, or I could take the road to Horton in search of something more tangible. Horton is home to a specactular edifice, if not one for which I was looking: Horton Tower, an eighteenth century folly, nowadays housing telecommunications paraphenalia. The village is suitable village-like: plenty of wisteria-roped cottages, tumbeldown farm buildings, a Victorian schoolhouse, a vicarage and an ‘abbey house’ (its eighteenth century frontage hiding, says its listing, a fifteenth century timber frame)…. and an old church. Not old enough, though, I saw, for my purposes. This one was Georgian.
The booklet on sale inside the fetchingly-named St Wolfrida’s informed me that it was built on the site of a medieval church, in turn built on the site of the church of a Benedictine Abbey. Some of the north wall – I was pretty sure I could see where – dates from the twelfth or thirteenth centuries. A notice on the wall mentioned, as if in passing, that under the belfy of the old church were memorials to the Filliol family.
There they were, right beneath my feet. Or some of them, or something of them. Beneath my very feet! So near and yet so far. I stood there, confounded.
Then I looked up, and, in front of me, reinstated on the wall is something which does remain of the old building: a beautifully-lettered seventeenth-century plaque erected by an aunt in memory of a Victoria Uvedale who died when she was “6 years and 9 months”. The booklet tells how the memorial was discovered upside down in the floor of the old Manor Farm Dairy (..which later became the vicarage… See what I mean about buildings coming in and out of different uses, making use of whatever is to hand?). It was good to see it there, to honour the wish of Victoria’s bereaved aunt, to think for a moment of that little girl now over three hundred years gone.
Actually, there’s something in St Wolfrida’s that’s far older than Victoria’s once-lost memorial: two stunning effigies (one marble, the other stone) of a knight and his lady. He was the Norman Sir Giles Braose – of, among other places, so says the booklet, Woodland Manor! – and she, it’s believed, was his first wife, Beatrice. She – in stone – has aged less well than he has, but we should be grateful for anything at all of her because, my booklet says, ‘female effigies of this period are uncommon’. The couple are believed to date from the very end of the thirteenth or very beginning of the fourteenth century.
And that’s why I love old – and not so old – churches: you walk off the street (or, more likely, lane) and there, for your delectation, will be something from perhaps almost a millenium ago. No charge to see it, and you’ve almost always got it to yourself for as long as you want.
Braoses, but no Filliols. Reluctantly, I accepted that I was going to have to give up on the Filliols for the time being and drive north in search of the Seymours. So, after buying a jar of honey from outside a cottage, I set off for Savernake Forest.
Savernake Forest is true to its name, it is wooded, or at least in parts. ‘Forest’ didn’t used to mean exclusively or densely wooded, but, instead, areas of copse and scrubland, ideal for hunting. Savernake Forest hasn’t changed in essence for many hundreds of years. It’s ancient forest (the New Forest is, by comparison, what it claims to be), and England’s only ancient forest to be in private hands – the Earl of Cardigan’s, since you ask. The same hands, in a sense, since 1066: it’s never been sold, but passed down the generations, thirty-one to date. It’s currently leased to the Foresty Commission and we members of the public are welcome every day of the year except one. For one day each year – usually the first working day of the year – its roads are blocked, which preserves its private status.
Edward’s father, Sir John Seymour, was Warden of this forest and lived with his family at Wolfhall. (Nothing to do with wolves, by the way, but a corruption of the Saxon name ‘Ulf). Wolfhall was to where Katherine Filliol probably came as a bride. All the usual sources insist that the Seymour’s old home no longer exists and that no one knows where it stood, athough the quickest of searches will turn up a ‘Wolf Hall Manor’ and ‘Wolf Hall Farmhouse’ near Burbage, both of which have sixteenth century components. There are rumours that a house once known as The Laundry might have been just that to the old Wolfhall – but then again, that, too, is disputed.
In the light of all this, I wasn’t looking for any house. Rather, I’d decided to go to the church in Great Bedwyn, which has some stained glass said to have come from the old Wolfhall, and an impressive memorial to Sir John and his children.
Great Bedwyn is nowadays a large village (shops, pubs, a school), the buildings dating mostly from the eighteenth century and later. The Church – St Mary’s – is, says its booklet, ‘one of the largest and finest in the district’, Early English in origin but built on the site of something earlier, much altered over the centuries.
As well as those fragments of stained glass – ‘badges’, coats of arms – there is on the chancel wall a small brass memorial of Jane and Edward’s eldest brother, John, who died at around the age of ten. He’s depicted full-length, standing. Brasses tend to be generic, though – no one’s going to learn anything of him by peering at his face. What’s interesting, I think, is that Edward wasn’t the eldest son until relatively late in his childhood. To me, he seems the quintessential eldest child – ambitious and organised – but actually it was a mantle he took on in his later childhood; he wasn’t – in his earliest years – raised as such. Well, not unless, I suppose, his older brother was unwell long-term or otherwise compromised and unlikely to survive to adulthood or to make a success of it. Who knows?
Sir John, father of the family, is on excellent form, lying in his armour. Above the tomb is a fulsome inscription (I’m not sure I’ve ever seen lengthier), giving us a potted history of all the children (“Six Sonnes and Fower Daughters”), including the ones who didn’t survive to adulthood. We learn, for example, that Elizabeth (who did survive and then some) was ‘first maryed to Sir Henry Ughtred, Knight after to Gregorie, Lorde, Cromwell [Thomas Cromwell’s son] and last to Jhon, Lord Sainet John of Basinge, after Marquess of Winchester.”
But the tomb and its inscription don’t date from the death of Sir John in 1536, nor the lifetimes of any of his children. Instead, it was the project of one of his grandsons, who, in 1590, had Sir John disinterred from ‘Eston priorie church’ – tradtional resting place of the Seymours – after the site had been ‘ruined [and] much defased’ during ‘the Mynoritie of Edwarde’ (the 1540/50s, the later stages of the Reformation). The Seymour who had this impressive tomb built was clearly keen that Sir John Seymour be remembered well; indeed, it’s his stated aim, up there in that inscription: ‘for the better Continuans of his Memore’.
A notice near the tomb explains that no one knows exactly where Easton Priory once stood. Back in the car, I peered at the map. There’s a village called Easton Royal, which seemed a fair bet. Despite longing for a nice cup of tea in nearby Marlborough, I couldn’t resist a dash to Easton Royal in the dying light. It’s a mere handful of miles from Great Bedwyn but the gentle Vale of Pewsey makes for very different countryside. The village itself is chocolate box, a profusion of thatch. The church, by contrast, might best be described as unobtrusive. Open, though, even at the late hour: there’s that to say for it.
Inside, a lovely 1950s plaque commemorates the Seymour family for all it did over the for the church and priory. In fact, this plain little church – lively with the scrabblings of a mouse, when I was there – has had a chequered history. The current building is late-Tudor, Victorian-rebuilt. A medieval church had fallen into such disrepair by the fourteenth century that villagers requested to be able to use, instead, the priory church. The priory, a sign told me (no equivocation), had been sited across the lane. Nothing remains to see: just the thatched houses in the gloom, and, behind them, fields. It burned to the ground at the end of the fifteenth century and was re-built only to be in ruins again within a couple of decades. From a later read-up at home, I learned there were usually between two and five priests in residence, attended by a couple of servant-women. I must admit I’d been envisioning something like Rievaulx: hundreds of monks, a herb garden, infirmary, library. The reality of the majority of religious houses, though, it seems, was more likely this Father Ted-like scenario, quite possibly without the laughs.
That, then, was where Sir John chose to lay until Judgement Day, only to be upped and shifted fifty years later. His daughter, Jane, who died after giving birth to Henry V111’s longed-for heir, lies beside the king in St George’s Chapel, Windsor. Her brother, Edward is probably stowed – the two supposedly traiterous pieces of him – beneath the floor of the chapel at the Tower of London. No one knows the final resting place of his first wife, Katherine Fillol, as elusive in death as she was in life. Perhaps she was buried where she died – perhaps at nearby Shaftesbury or Wilton Abbeys. Of Wilton Abbey, nothing remains; of Shaftesbury, a few stones in a garden. It’s not impossible, though, I suppose, that she was reclaimed in death by her family and buried alongside her forebears in the old, subsequently built-over St Wolfrida’s. Her father isn’t there, though: in his will, he requested burial at Grey Friairs in Salisbury. If you look for Grey Friars in Salisbury, now, what you’ll find, in the lee of the cathedral, is Greyfriars Close – 1960s blocks of flats – and a research paper about excavation of part of a wall in 1966. Grey Friars is gone, itself buried. Yet I imagine that Sir William was laid to rest there in as much splendour as he and his family could afford, because that was what people did, back then – especially those eschewing their local church for a friary. What mattered to people at that time, above all, was to be remembered; you could even say that it was, in a way, what pre-Reformation people lived for, because being prayed for by the living would facilitate your passage to Heaven, would help save your soul. Sir William would’ve died entrusting his everlasting life to those friars, who had been on that site for so many hundreds of years. He couldn’t have seen – nor did anyone – how, in less than a decade, they’d be gone.
Gone, now, any sign of them, probably many times over, under five hundred years of layers, the topmost of tarmac. And that’s the closest I’ve come, so far, physically, to Katherine: the road beneath which, almost certainly, lie the remains of her father. What I learned from my fieldtrip is that there’s no rhyme or reason to what survives five hundred years and what – or who – is lost to us for ever.