Abstract
This chapter will first examine early-modern and modern documents and histories characterizing Anne Seymour, Duchess of Somerset, as a domineering wife, who urged her husband Edward, first Duke of Somerset, the Lord Protector of Edward VI, to commit fratricide. They also accused her of acting as lady protectress and demanding precedence over the dowager queen, Katherine Parr, who had recently wed Thomas, Lord Seymour of Sudeley. In 1891, aware of these denunciations, Edmond Bapst identified Lady Somerset as the haughty poetic wolf created by Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey. To counter these claims, the unbiased facts about her life will be presented to argue that she did not have great influence over public policy, never disputed with the queen dowager over precedence, and was not Surrey’s model for the poetic wolf. It will also provide social and cultural contexts for understanding Lady Somerset’s relationship with Katherine Parr and her Seymour husband, examine her extensive activities as a religious patron, and her family life after Somerset’s execution.
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John Nichols, “Somerset,” p. 381; Warnicke, “Anne Seymour”; HMC, Calendar of the Manuscripts of the Marquis of Bath Preserved at Longleat, Wiltshire, ed. Marjorie Blatcher, vol. 4 (London: HMSO, 1904), p. 178, has a record of Hertford’s expenses for his unmarried sisters, Mary, Katherine, and Elizabeth in 1563.
Charles Martin (ed.), The Journal of Sir Francis Walsingham from December 1570 to April 1583. From the Original Manuscript in the Possession of Lieut.-Colonel Carew, The Camden Miscellany VI, vol. 104 (London: Camden Society, 1871), p. 32.
BL Lansdowne MS 33, art. 3; Wallace MacCaffrey, “Place and Patronage in Elizabethan Politics,” Elizabethan Government and Society, ed. S. Bindoff, J. Hurstfield, and C. Williams (London: Athlone Press, 1961), p. 112.
John Nichols, “Somerset,” p. 378; Arthur Stanley, Historical Memorials of Westminster Abbey, 3 vols. (New York: Anson D. F. Randolph & Co., 1889), II, 14.
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© 2012 Retha M. Warnicke
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Warnicke, R.M. (2012). Anne Seymour, Duchess of Somerset. In: Wicked Women of Tudor England. Queenship and Power. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230391932_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230391932_4
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