The Tudor Society
  • #OTD in Tudor history – 19 March

    Portrait of a woman thought to be Elizabeth Seymour, Lady Cromwell, by Holbein

    On this day in Tudor history, 19th March, Arthur Brooke, who wrote the first version of the story of Romeo and Juliet in English, died in a shipwreck; Elizabeth Seymour, Lady Cromwell, died; and Henry VIII’s barber, Edmund harman, died…

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  • March 19 – Elizabeth Seymour, Lady Cromwell and Romeo and Juliet’s author dies in a shipwreck

    On this day in Tudor history, 19th March 1568, Elizabeth Seymour, Lady Cromwell, died. She was around fifty years old at her death.

    Elizabeth was the sister of a queen, and a lord protector, and two of her brothers were executed as traitors, but what else do we know about Elizabeth Seymour and how is she linked to the Cromwell family and a portrait once thought to be of Queen Catherine Howard?

    Find out more in this talk…

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  • 19 March – Elizabeth Seymour, Lady Cromwell

    On this day in Tudor history, 19th March 1568, Elizabeth Seymour, Lady Cromwell, died. She was around fifty years old at her death.

    Elizabeth was the sister of a queen, and a lord protector, and two of her brothers were executed as traitors, but what else do we know about Elizabeth Seymour and how is she linked to the Cromwell family and a portrait once thought to be of Queen Catherine Howard?

    Find out more in today’s talk.

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  • Seymour Family – True or false?

    The Seymour family was a very important family in the reigns of Henry VIII and Edward VI, but just how much do you know about them? Grab a coffee and snack, and settle down to test your knowledge with this fun quiz. Good luck!

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  • 19 March 1568 – Death of Elizabeth Seymour, Lady Cromwell by Teri Fitzgerald

    On this day in history, 19th March 1568, Elizabeth Seymour, the wife of John Paulet, Lord St John died. She was laid to rest on 5th April in the Paulet family church of St Mary at Basing, Hampshire.1 She was around fifty years of age.

    The undated inscription on the wall of the vault in the church (as transcribed by Lord Bolton, 16th Dec. 1903) reads:

    “Hic jacet D[omina] Cromwell, quondam conjux Johis, Marchionis Winton.”2

    Known by her superior title of Lady Cromwell, Elizabeth was never a Marchioness – her husband succeeded his father as 2nd Marquess of Winchester after her death.

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  • Elizabeth Seymour, Baroness Cromwell

    Elizabeth Seymour was a younger daughter of Sir John Seymour and his wife, Margery Wentworth. Her date of birth is unknown but is estimated to have been between 1511 and 1518. She married her first husband, Sir Anthony Ughtred, in January 1531; since sixteenth-century women could marry, at the earliest, at the age of twelve, realistically Elizabeth could have been born no later than January 1519. Such an early marriage, however, would have been extraordinary, since the Seymours were a respected gentry family, but they were not nobility. Historians have noted that Tudor noble- and gentlewomen tended to marry by the age of twenty. It is possible that Elizabeth served alongside her sister Jane in the household of Anne Boleyn, Henry VIII’s second wife, who became queen in 1533. Usually, the queen’s maidens were aged in their mid-to-late teens, although Jane herself would have unusually been around twenty-four years old when appointed to Anne’s household. For Elizabeth to have married Ughtred in 1531 and to have served the queen two or three years later would indicate that she was probably born no later than c. 1515.

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