‘Becoming Elizabeth’: Did Thomas Seymour Really Try to Kidnap the King?

For weeks we’ve been watching the seductive Thomas Seymour (Tom Cullen) make one bad choice after another. However, in Becoming Elizabeth Episode 5, he finally pulls an Icarus. He flies too close to the proverbial sun and self-immolates via his own actions.

The Starz Tudor drama has made no bones about the fact that Thomas Seymour sexually abused a young, unwitting, teenaged Princess Elizabeth (Alicia von Rittberg). Now that he’s lost his anchor, Catherine Parr (Jessica Raine), Thomas plows into two very stupid plans. He aggressively pursues Elizabeth’s hand in marriage and decides that he must wrest control of his nephew, King Edward VI (Oliver Zetterström), from the Lord Protector, aka his brother Edward Seymour (John Heffernan). It’s not just that Thomas’s plans are terrible, but he goes about trying to pull them off in the most self-incriminating way possible.

Becoming Elizabeth Episode 5 “Necessity Compels Me to Plague You” shows us the shocking way Thomas Seymour fell from grace (but not before giving us more uncomfy Thomas/Elizabeth scenes).

Starz’s Becoming Elizabeth was created by Anya Reiss and follows the tumultuous events after Henry VIII’s death. In the wake of the tyrant’s death, his lords, ladies, and courtiers jockeyed for power through relationships with his three extremely different children. The most ambitious men moved themselves as close as possible to the child king, while others — playing a more complex game — attempted to cozy up with either the teenaged Princess Elizabeth or the older, Catholic Princess Mary (Romola Garai).

Initially, it seemed that Elizabeth was safe in her stepmother’s house. After all, it was Catherine Parr who had worked to bring all three of Henry VIII’s legitimate children back to court. However the clever Catherine had one Achilles’s Heel: her love for Thomas Seymour. The two married secretly shortly after Henry VIII’s death, which not only married Thomas to the last queen of England, but put him in close proximity with the impressionable Elizabeth.

While it seemed that Elizabeth had finally grown wise to the fact that Thomas Seymour was pursuing her in order to get closer to power, she actually succumbs once more to his seductions. However, the one place where Elizabeth is firm — thank bejesus — is that she will not, like Catherine, elope with him in secret. This forces Thomas to ask the Lord Protector for permission to marry Elizabeth, which he is promptly denied. Feeling frustrated that his brother holds all the power, Thomas concocts a plan to seize that power by kidnapping the king. It’s an idea so dangerous that even the idiotic Henry Grey (Leo Bill) is like, “Nah, dude.”

Thomas straight up sneaks into the King’s chambers with weapons, shoots his dog, and then gets into an altercation with Robert Dudley (Jamie Blackley). He is ultimately arrested. Worse, the episode ends with Elizabeth in trouble, too. The implication is this might have been all her plan.

It’s such a wild, soap-y scene, you might be wondering…did it really happen?

Uh, yeah. Thomas Seymour snuck into the king’s chambers with weapons and shot one of his dogs. It was bad. And while there is debate about what Thomas’s intentions were, his actions came on the heels of the Privy Council’s growing suspicions that he was trying to steal more and more power for himself. (Also Robert Dudley was one of the noble youths who would have been attending the king at this time. So that, too, is accurate.)

Much as we see in Becoming Elizabeth, Thomas’s rash decision to sneak into the king’s chambers immediately sends him to the Tower and puts Elizabeth in danger, too.

What happens next? Well, you’ll have to crack open a history book or wait until next week’s Becoming Elizabeth to find out. The good news is we can at least be sure that Elizabeth will once again wiggle out of this scrape. After all, she’s got to become Elizabeth I of England.