In 1549, at just 15 years old, Princess Elizabeth (the future Elizabeth I) found herself at the centre of a sexual scandal that almost destroyed her chances of becoming queen.
With her father now dead, the teenage Elizabeth was living with her stepmother Katherine Parr, whose new husband Thomas Seymour was rumoured to have used his position to gain access to the young princess and make sexual advances towards her.
Here, Chief Historian Tracy Borman explains why rumours of the ‘Seymour Affair’ haunted Elizabeth for the rest of her life.
In the end this shall be for me sufficient: that a marble stone shall declare that a queen, having reigned such a time, lived and died a virgin.
Elizabeth I
Image: Miniature portrait of a young Elizabeth as princess. © Royal Collection Enterprises Ltd 2026 | Royal Collection Trust.
Elizabeth I spoke these words to the first Parliament of her reign, on 10 February 1559. They were received with deep-seated scepticism. The Imperial envoy summed up the majority view: ‘That she should wish to remain a maid and never marry is inconceivable.’
As a self-confessed ‘weak and feeble woman’, the new Queen’s subjects and advisers believed it imperative that she find a husband as soon as possible so that he could take over the reins of government and enable her to fulfil a Tudor queen’s primary purpose: the production of heirs to continue the dynasty.
But as time wore on, so they began to realise with dawning horror that Elizabeth meant every word. She was determined to rule alone, as she roundly told her overbearing councillors: ‘I will have but one mistress here, and no master!’
As well as prompting a succession crisis, the Queen’s unmarried status sent the rumour mill into overdrive. Most of the gossip centred around her chief favourite Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, with whom she spent many hours away from the prying eyes of court. It was even said that she had borne him a secret love child. As her reign progressed, so the whispers became louder. In fact, Elizabeth would spend years battling to defend her reputation.
But that battle had begun long before she became Queen.
Image: Thomas Seymour by Nicholas Denizot. © National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London.
The seeds for the ‘Seymour scandal’ were sown shortly after the death of Elizabeth’s father Henry VIII; his widow Katherine Parr married again with such haste that it shocked the court.
Katherine’s new husband was Thomas Seymour (brother of the late Queen, Jane Seymour), with whom she had been in love for years. The late King’s eldest daughter Mary (the future Mary I) refused to have anything more to do with Katherine and urged her half-sister Elizabeth to follow her example, considering the ‘scarcely cold body of the King our father so shamefully dishonoured by the Queen our stepmother.’
But for Elizabeth, respecting the memory of a father who had put her mother to death was of less importance. Besides, she had always been close to Katherine so when the latter invited her to live with her and her new husband at their home in Chelsea, Elizabeth didn’t hesitate to accept.
Image: Elizabeth I when princess c1546. © Royal Collection Enterprises Ltd 2026 | Royal Collection Trust.
At first, life was as blissful as the young princess anticipated and she thrived in the lively, intellectually-stimulating atmosphere at Chelsea. But before long, storm clouds began to gather. Thomas Seymour was not the doting husband that Katherine believed him to be and began to pay inappropriate attention to his new wife’s former stepdaughter.
Now aged 14, Elizabeth was growing into a striking young woman. She had the fine features, pointed chin and dark eyes of her mother Anne Boleyn, combined with the abundant red hair of the Tudors. As the half-sister of the new King, Edward VI, she was an attractive prospect to any suitor – and a fatally irresistible one to her new stepfather.
Seymour started bursting into Elizabeth’s bedchamber early in the morning, before she was up and dressed. What he passed off as innocent fun – tickling her in bed, slapping her ‘on the buttocks familiarly’ – spelt grave danger for the princess.
After years of being derided as the ‘Little Whore’, daughter of the ‘Great Whore’ Anne Boleyn, Elizabeth’s legitimacy was as precarious as her reputation. She was painfully aware that a sexual scandal had been the death of her mother and that it could prove just as dangerous for her.
At first, Katherine seemed to view her husband’s antics as harmless and even joined in on occasion, pinning Elizabeth down while Seymour cut her gown into ‘a hundred pieces’. Perhaps, too, she was distracted by the trials of early pregnancy. But eventually her suspicions were aroused.
Matters came to a head one day in June 1548, when Katherine went in search of her husband and Elizabeth and ‘came suddenly upon them, where they were all alone, (he having her in his arms).’
Furious, she ordered her former stepdaughter to leave Chelsea. Elizabeth never saw her again: Katherine died in childbirth three months later.
Katherine 'came suddenly upon them, where they were all alone, (he having her in his arms)'.
State Papers
Elizabeth and her trusted governess Kat Astley made their way to Cheshunt, the Hertfordshire home of Kat’s brother-in-law, Sir Anthony Denny.
The house provided much-needed privacy for the princess, who hoped to escape the inevitable gossip that her sudden departure prompted amongst Katherine’s servants.
As soon as she arrived, Elizabeth wrote to Katherine expressing her heartfelt sorrow about what had happened. Her former stepmother was quick to forgive her.
But there is some speculation that Elizabeth’s retreat to Cheshunt was for more than just decorum’s sake. Jane Dormer, a lady in waiting to Elizabeth’s half-sister Mary, reported the rumour that Elizabeth had given birth to Seymour’s child whilst staying at the house. ‘There was a bruit [rumour] of a child born and miserably destroyed’, she recounted. ‘Only the report of the midwife, who was brought from her house blindfolded thither… said it was the child of a very fair young lady.’
It’s true that Elizabeth was kept in strict seclusion at Cheshunt, and Kat Astley noted that her charge was sick with an unspecified illness for several weeks. But Jane Dormer was notoriously hostile towards Elizabeth, and there is little else to support her story.
Following his wife’s death, Seymour renewed his attentions towards Elizabeth. As a royal princess and second in line to the throne, she still presented an attractive prospect for a man of his ambition. But an act passed by Henry VIII stipulated that anyone of royal blood must secure the sovereign’s permission to marry. Thomas knew Edward VI was unlikely to grant it; his brother Edward dominated the King, and there was certainly no love lost between the Seymour brothers.
In January 1549, Thomas Seymour was arrested on charges of high treason after bursting into the King’s bedchamber late at night with a loaded pistol.
He was committed to the Tower of London, along with three of Elizabeth’s closest attendants, including Kat Astley.
Image: The White Tower at the Tower of London. © Historic Royal Palaces.
Elizabeth herself was confined to her residence at Hatfield, where she held firm under intense interrogation. While Kat Astley remained tight-lipped, another of Elizabeth’s servants gave his interrogators all the lurid details of Seymour’s scandalous behaviour towards the princess at Chelsea. Elizabeth was painfully aware that her mother had been condemned on less evidence.
In the end, both princess’s attendants were subsequently released and Elizabeth escaped any further reprisals. But Seymour paid the price for his recklessness: he was condemned for treason and executed in March 1549.
For the 15-year-old Elizabeth, it had been a lucky escape – and a lesson she would never forget.
From that moment onwards, the princess presented herself as a young woman of impeccable virtue, taking care to be seen in simple clothes and always carrying a prayer book.
Image: Hatfield House © David Sands.
‘I am sure that her maidenly apparel, which she used in King Edward’s time, made the noblemen’s daughters and wives ashamed, to be dressed and painted like peacocks, being more moved with her most virtuous example’.
The reformist scholar and bishop John Aylmer, writing about Princess Elizabeth
Image: The Knot Garden at Hampton Court Palace. © Historic Royal Palaces.
It was a talent for reinvention that Elizabeth would employ to even greater effect after coming to the throne in 1558.
The Seymour scandal would be one of many rumours to circulate about Elizabeth during her long life. In fact, the question of her virginity would dominate court gossip in England and Europe for more than half a century and is one that still holds fascination today.
Perhaps the truth will never be known for certain. But there is a tantalising clue – and it comes from the lips of Elizabeth herself. In October 1562, she was staying at Hampton Court Palace when she fell dangerously ill with smallpox. Then aged 29, she had reigned for just four years and had no named successor. Panic spread throughout the palace and the council called an urgent meeting to try to agree who should come to the throne when she died, as seemed inevitable.
Elizabeth, too, believed she had little time left and summoned a priest to her bedside so that she could confess her sins. She vowed that nothing improper had ever passed between her and Robert Dudley and that her virtue was intact. A cynic might say words are easy, but in this God-fearing age, when people spent their lives striving to secure their place in heaven, Elizabeth would have been unlikely to risk her eternal salvation by uttering a lie.
So there we have it – straight from the Queen herself. Despite all the rumours and scandal that swirled about her, from Thomas Seymour to the Earl of Leicester, Elizabeth really was the Virgin Queen she claimed to be.
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