The Sisters Who Would Be Queen: The tragedy of Mary, Katherine and Lady Jane Grey

Jane had ridden with over a hundred other ladies and gentlemen, to escort the dowager Queen of Scots through London to Westminster. In the great banquet that followed she sat with the other court ladies in the Queen dowager’s great chamber, enjoying three courses of delicacies. The court women were all dressed ‘like peacocks’ in jewels and rich clothes, their hair loose as a compliment to the Scots style. There was no sign of the Princess Elizabeth, any more than of her half-sister Mary, but Elizabeth had met the Queen dowager earlier in the week and had left a memorable impression. While most guests had their long hair ‘flounced and curled and double curled’ on to silk-clad shoulders, Elizabeth had ‘altered nothing, but to the shame of them all kept her old maidenly shamefastness’.11 Elizabeth had a natural gift for visual messages, and this one was designed to appeal to her brother.

The King’s tutor in political affairs, William Thomas, had presented his master recently with a work promoting modest and Godly dress in women. Elizabeth, whose reputation had been so tainted by her association with Sudeley, had cleverly stolen a march on Jane as the leading evangelical princess. But Jane’s father, together with her tutor Aylmer, were equally determined that the younger girl learn quickly from Elizabeth’s example. Just before Christmas a series of letters went out from the Grey family’s magnificent new home at Suffolk Place in Southwark, which Frances had inherited from the Brandon brothers. They were directed to the pastor of the Zurich Church, Bullinger. Jane’s father begged Bullinger to continue guiding his daughter in modesty and decorum, writing to her ‘as frequently as possible’.12 Aylmer then wrote asking specifically that Bullinger should ‘instruct my pupil, in your next letter, as to what embellishment and adornment of person is becoming in a young woman professing Godliness’. He noted that despite Elizabeth’s example, and preachers declaring against fashionable finery, at court ‘no one is induced…to lay aside, much less look down upon, gold, jewels and the braiding of hair’. If Bullinger addressed the subject to Jane directly, however, he believed ‘there will probably, through your influence, be some accession to the ranks of virtue’.*

Aylmer need not have been so anxious about Jane. The enormous effort that had gone into her education had shaped by now a most determined evangelical, and she was not short of reminders of the futility of vanity. On every barge trip to Whitehall, Jane passed Seymour Place where Catherine Parr had lain with her ambitious husband. Next to it was Somerset House, the Renaissance palace that the former Protector had been building, and would never live to see completed. In December, Somerset was tried and condemned to death on the basis of the trumped-up murder plot, with the new Dukes of Suffolk and Northumberland - Grey and Dudley - his judges. Many evangelicals were horrified that the man who had introduced ‘true religion’ into England should die convicted of attempted murder. Harry Suffolk assured the German John of Ulm that the King was keen to spare his uncle’s life, and claimed Northumberland hoped this would be possible. But although the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer, begged Northumberland to show Somerset mercy, the Lord President’s principal concern was that the sentence be carried out with minimum disruption.

Edward, the kindly child who had comforted his friends when they lost at cards, was to play the role of executioner of a second uncle. But first, a spectacular Christmas season was planned at Greenwich, providing a distraction from the grim task ahead. The great public spaces of the royal palaces were like bare stages when the King was not in residence and for weeks carpenters and painters, masons and joiners had been put to work. Furniture and tapestries were added to the public rooms and silver plate brought, along with any other props necessary, ‘to glorify the house and feast’.13 When Christmas arrived there were plays, masques, tournaments, and a Lord of Misrule. This pagan survival was vested on a courtier who presided over a world turned upside down. Even an execution could be parodied - and was. Misrule attended the decapitation of a hogshead of wine on the scaffold at Cheapside in January, and the red juice flowed to cries of laughter instead of dismay.14 At Suffolk Place, however, the twelve-day festivities enjoyed by the young Grey sisters were more determinedly decorous.

The family chaplain, James Haddon, complained to Bullinger that the common people of England insisted on amusing themselves ‘in mummeries and wickedness of every kind’. But, he reported smugly, this was not the case with ‘the family in which I reside’.15 The austerity we associate with seventeenth-century Puritanism was already evident in the household. John Aylmer disapproved of music at home as well as at church, and the three Grey sisters were expected to limit the amount of time they spent playing or listening to it. Thus deprived, Katherine and Mary later showed no great interest in music that we know of. There was some friction, however, between the pious expectations of Aylmer and Haddon on the one side, and the great living expected of the nobility as a reflection of their status. The servants at Suffolk Place were banned from playing cards at Haddon’s insistence, but Frances and her husband continued to do so in their private apartments, and for money.

Haddon put his employers’ bad behaviour down to ‘force of habit’ and ‘a desire not to appear stupid, and not good fellows, as they call it’. He had hoped to shame them into change by addressing their failings in a sermon to the household on the wickedness of cards, but was given short shrift for it. Even the Godly King Edward liked to gamble and Haddon confessed that the duke and duchess had told him he was ‘too strict’. It was hard, Haddon moaned to Bullinger, to persuade courtiers to ‘conquer and crucify themselves’.16 The eleven-year-old Katherine, who showed no signs of wanting to mimic Elizabeth in anything, must have been a particular concern. But Haddon’s frustration was alleviated somewhat by Jane. She had responded enthusiastically to Aylmer’s suggestion that she imitate Elizabeth’s plain style of dress, and in the process made a point of snubbing the Princess Mary. Aylmer later recalled that Mary had sent one of her ladies to Jane with a set of fine clothes of ‘tinsel cloth of gold and velvet, laid over with parchment lace of gold’. New Year was the traditional time for such gifts. But Jane, looking at the magnificent gown, asked the gentlewoman brusquely: ‘What shall I do with it?’ ‘Marry,’ the woman replied, ‘wear it.’ ‘Nay,’ snapped Jane, ‘that would be a shame to follow my lady Mary against God’s word, and leave my Lady Elizabeth who followeth God’s word.’17 Aylmer felt no small satisfaction over this incident, which he recorded after Elizabeth became Queen.

With the Christmas season over, Londoners awoke early on the morning of 22nd January to find a curfew in place. The streets were full of soldiers. Somerset’s execution was about to take place on Tower Hill. As was so often the case with state killings, efforts to veneer the crude business of taking a man’s life were disrupted by moments of farce. Somerset was making a dignified final speech from the scaffold when it was interrupted by the arrival of two horsemen clattering on the cobbles. A cry went up: ‘A pardon, a pardon, God save the duke!’ and hats were cast into the air. But Somerset realised before most in the crowd that the horsemen had come to witness the execution. He begged them to be quiet so that he could prepare to die. It was not yet 8 a.m. when he tied his handkerchief around his eyes. He admitted he was afraid and as he laid his head on the block there was a sudden flush in his cheeks. But he was ready for the end. Unfortunately the executioner was not. The collar of Somerset’s shirt covered part of his neck. The headsman asked Somerset to stand up again and move it. He did so and when the axe fell at last it struck cleanly, cutting off his head with one blow. The duke’s corpse was then thrown into a cart and returned to the Tower for burial.18

Somerset’s ten children - some no more than infants - were left parentless. Their mother remained in the Tower; their father’s property was attainted and returned to the crown. The twelve-year-old Hertford, who had tried to save his father in 1549 by galloping to Wiltshire to beg for help in defence of the Protectorship, lost his title along with much of his inheritance. It was as plain Edward Seymour that he was placed as the ward of Northumberland’s elder son, the Earl of Warwick. The earl was married to Hertford’s sister, Anne, but she could not easily console him. She suffered a physical collapse after the execution. His younger sister, the nine-year-old Lady Jane Seymour, whom Somerset had wished to marry to the King, was left in a kind of limbo until May. She was then placed in the care of the widowed Lady Cromwell in Leicestershire, not far from Bradgate, from where Harry Suffolk could keep an eye on her. For Somerset’s royal nephew, meanwhile, the belief that his uncle’s fate was God’s work, and he was only God’s instrument, may have assuaged the agony and guilt of signing the death warrant. But some later remembered that he used to cry in his rooms, and another contemporary story survives that hints at emotional turmoil.

An Italian, visiting England shortly after Somerset’s execution in 1552, witnessed a grim incident that took place during a boating trip in the presence of the court. Edward asked to see a falcon, which he had been told was the best he had. He then demanded it be skinned alive. The falconer did as the King ordered. As Edward then looked on the bird’s gruesome remains, he commented: ‘This falcon, so much more excellent than the others, has been stripped, just as I, the first among all the others of the realm, am skinned.’19 Brutally deprived of his mother’s family, his loneliness must have felt raw indeed. Several of Somerset’s allies were also executed, although Somerset’s old friend, Sir William Paget, who had written desperately in the middle of Christmas night 1548, warning him of the folly of his arrogance, was more fortunate. He was merely accused of fraud and humiliated by having the Garter taken from him as one who had no gentle blood on his mother or his father’s side. All that now remained was for Northumberland’s ‘crew’ to turn on each other, as their children were pushed ever further into the already blood-soaked political arena.

* It is likely that, like the Queen of Navarre, Jane would have used her mentor’s letters in her spiritual meditations.

PART TWO Queen and Martyr

‘…you would not be a queen?’

‘No, not for all the riches under heaven.’

Henry VIII, Act II scene iii

William Shakespeare

Chapter IX No Poor Child

In May 1552 Jane turned fifteen, the same age at which her mother had been betrothed, and she had no serious rivals left as Edward’s future bride. Lady Jane Seymour was now the daughter of an executed criminal. Plans for Edward to marry the daughter of the French King, Henri II, had also fallen through in March, when Edward had formally declined to ally against the Emperor, Charles V. Increasingly, furthermore, Jane was being treated as the leading evangelical woman in England. She was being sought out as a patron by such figures as Michel Angelo Florio, the first pastor of the Stranger’s Church for religious exiles in London, and was looked up to and admired by pious, female intellectuals, as Catherine Parr had once been.1

An anonymous letter in Greek written to Jane at about this time, and believed to be from Sir William Cecil’s wife, Mildred Cooke, enclosed with it a gift. It was a work by Basil the Great, the fourthcentury Bishop of Caesarea, whom Lady Cecil had translated and with whose greatness Jane was now compared. ‘My most dear and noble Lady,’ the letter began. Basil the Great had excelled ‘all the bishops of his time both in the greatness of his birth, the extent of his erudition, and the glowing zeal of his holiness’; yet Jane was his match, ‘worthy both in consideration of your noble birth, and on account of your learning and holiness’. The gift of this book was only ‘ink and paper’, but it was expected that the profit Jane would gain from it would be more ‘valuable than gold and precious stones’.2 The phrase would stick in Jane’s mind. It referred to the Old Testament axiom that wisdom was worth more than rubies, and this was something she passionately believed to be true.3 Jane remained in regular correspondence with the theologian and pastor Heinrich Bullinger, and sent his wife gifts, including gloves and a ring. But she was also widening her circle of contacts in Europe. Jane was keen particularly for Bullinger to introduce her to Theodore Biblander, who had translated the Koran, as well as being a famous scholar of Hebrew. It was said later that she had even begun to learn Arabic.4

Jane hoped her pretty sister Katherine would follow in her footsteps, not just in the study of Greek, but also in piety. Katherine was still not yet showing many signs of having a serious nature, and little Mary had not yet begun to study classical languages, but both were very young, and much could be expected of them in the future.

Watching, meanwhile, as Jane continued to step confidently forward on the public stage, her father surely hoped that it would now not be long before his ambitions for her to be a Queen consort were fulfilled. Edward, like Jane, was maturing fast. The King had been attending Council meetings since August 1551 and much was being made of the fact that he had passed his fourteenth birthday. It was at this age that his late cousin, James V of Scotland, had come into his majority and Edward had insisted his orders no longer needed to be co-signed by the full Council. Such self-assurance gave the regime confidence in facing down the charge that it was illegal to make changes to the national religion during his minority. Edward was ‘no poor child, but a manifest Solomon in Princely wisdom’, trumpeted the polemicist John Bale, as a radically revised Prayer Book was prepared for publication.5 This book was everything Harry Suffolk hoped for.

Strongly influenced by Bullinger and other Swiss reformers, the new Prayer Book was to sweep away all the half measures of 1549, damning the ‘fables’ of the Mass and offering a reshaped funeral service that removed all prayers for the ‘faithful departed’. The sense of a connection between the living and the dead, central to medieval religion, was finished. One of the Grey sisters’ family chaplains, a man called Robert Skinner, was also working with their friend Cecil on a new statement of doctrine, forty-two articles of faith that would take the English Church closer to the Swiss model.6 But while the revolution continued at brisk pace, there were growing divisions within its ranks. Archbishop Cranmer would never forgive Northumberland for the execution of the ‘Godly Duke’ of Somerset and was concerned by the increasing radicalism on the Privy Council, led by Harry Suffolk, Parr of Northampton and Northumberland. Cranmer refused to abolish kneeling for communion in the new Prayer Book and was furious when the Council allowed a final coda, a ‘black rubric’, inspired by the radical John Knox, that explained kneeling was permitted only to add dignity to the service.

Meanwhile, others within the elite had more secular concerns. The King’s coffers were empty, and there were many who were envious and afraid of the influence Northumberland wielded over Edward. Having engaged the King’s trust with his enthusiastic support for religious reform, Northumberland had sealed it by maintaining a close relationship with the boy. He had become a father figure: according to a servant of the French ambassador, the Sieur de Boisdauphin, Edward revered Northumberland almost as if he were the older man’s subject, rather than the other way round. Periodically, there were even accusations that Northumberland wished to be King himself. Only one man stood out as a potential rival to Northumberland’s position, his fellow soldier-politician, William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, and the Welshman’s position at court was looking increasingly shaky.

Pembroke had benefited hugely from his marriage to Anne Parr, sister of the late Queen dowager, Catherine. It had made him a member of Edward’s extended family, while Northumberland remained an outsider. But when Anne Parr died in February 1552, Northumberland moved quickly to take advantage of Pembroke’s weakened position. Within two months Pembroke had been sacked from his role as Master of the Horse, which had given him close access to Edward, and replaced with Northumberland’s elder son, the young Earl of Warwick. There is some evidence that Pembroke intended to retrieve his position by marrying his son Henry, Lord Herbert to Katherine Grey. His wife had been an old friend of Frances, dating back to their days in Catherine Parr’s Privy Chamber, and a betrothal may have been discussed, or even arranged, before she died.7 In any event, the next logical move for Northumberland was to secure a royal relative of his own.

Northumberland’s elder three children (all sons) were married. But his fourth son, Lord Guildford Dudley, was not. A later story that he was his mother’s favourite is a myth,8 but Guildford was a handsome youth of seventeen, tall and fair-haired - personal attributes that were all by the way. In great families it was the eldest son who was important, followed by his sisters, who were given dowries and expected to form great alliances. Younger sons were worth no more than ‘what the cat left on the malt heap’. Guildford Dudley’s elder brother, Lord Robert Dudley, the future Earl of Leicester, had married the daughter of a Norfolk squire because, as a third son, only a respectable union was expected of him. Guildford was even further down the pecking order; but nevertheless, Northumberland had a very ambitious marriage in mind for him.

Jane’s father would never have agreed to her marrying Guildford. But there was another royal, who like Jane was an heiress of marriageable and childbearing age. The bride Northumberland had in mind was the fifteen-year-old Margaret Clifford, daughter of Frances’s late sister, Eleanor. She was, like the Grey sisters, a descendant of Henry VII through their mutual grandmother, Mary Brandon, Duchess of Suffolk. She was also the heir to vast estates in the north, where Northumberland hoped to become a great magnate. Unsurprisingly, Margaret’s father, the Earl of Cumberland, had no wish to marry his daughter to a fourth son and made a series of excuses as to why it was not possible. But Northumberland then asked the King to intervene. It was a mark of just how much influence he had with Edward that while he was with the army attending to disorders in the Northern Marches, the King was busy acting as his marriage broker.

On 4th July, Edward sent an extraordinary letter to Cumberland ‘desiring him to grow to some good end forthwith in the matter of marriage between the Lord Guildford and his daughter; with licence to the said earl and all others that shall travail therein to do their best for conducement of it’.9

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