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40 Facts About the Tudor Era’s Awful Courtier, Thomas Seymour

Khalid Elhassan March 22, 2019 24 min

27. Thomas Seymour Also Proposed to Elizabeth’s Sister, Princess Mary

Thomas Seymour was clearly not interested in princess Elizabeth because of who she was as a person, but because of what she was – the king’s sister, and a potential heir to the throne if the frequently ailing Edward VI kicked the bucket. What Seymour wanted was a princess – any princess – and so to hedge his bets, even as he was trying to get the 13 year old Elizabeth to marry him, he also proposed to her older sister, princess Mary. Like her kid sister, princess Mary rejected Seymour’s proposal.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.