The Fairytale of Nicolas Denisot and the Seymour Sisters

Skeptical voices notwithstanding, Anne, Margaret, and Jane Seymour are still widely assumed to have written the Hecatodistichon (1550), a set of 104 Latin distichs memorializing Queen Marguerite of Navarre. The story of their authorship goes back to the girls’ sometime tutor, Nicolas Denisot (1515-1559). His account, however, must be understood as a kind of fairytale in which the sisters are turned into princesses, while Denisot himself plays the wizard-tutor. The distichs’ true author is Denisot. Proof comes from both internal and philological evidence. The work’s sources, it turns out, are far too wide-ranging and recondite for beginning Latin pupils like the Seymours. Further proof is gleaned from comparing the Hecatodistichon with the manuscript that Denisot wrote on the death of Henry VIII and presented to Edward VI in early 1547. Both works draw on the same core of continental poets, in particular Tito and Ercole Strozzi and Helius Eobanus Hessus.