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

Khalid Elhassan March 22, 2019 24 min

25. Seymour’s Marriage to Katherine Parr Gave Him an Opportunity to Seduce Princess Elizabeth

Chelsea Manor, where Thomas Seymour lived with his wife, Katherine Parr, and her stepdaughter, princess Elizabeth. Pintrest

13 year old princess Elizabeth, who had rejected Thomas Seymour indecent marriage proposal, found herself faced with a serious problem when the baron married her stepmother. Elizabeth’s father had chopped off the head of her mother, Anne Boleyn, and now that he was dead himself, the princess was a double orphan. Katherine Parr had filled the role of mother when she married Henry VIII, and Elizabeth was raised in her stepmother’s house, Chelsea Manor. Parr’s marriage to Thomas Seymour brought into that house as a stepfather the man who had sought to marry Elizabeth just a few months earlier. He would prove to be an exceptionally creepy stepfather.

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.