Lady Jane Grey Read online

  According to Raviglio Rosso, the festivities were attended by ‘a great concourse of the principal persons of the kingdom’, but there were some notable absentees. Neither of the princesses had been invited and, although it had been announced that the king would be present, Edward was now in no condition to leave his bed. Nor were either the French or the Imperial ambassadors among the guests at Durham House on that Sunday morning to see Lady Jane Grey, her hair braided with pearls, being led, literally, as a sacrifice to the altar.

  This is not to say that the representatives of the two major Continental powers were not taking a close interest in the progress of events in London. On the contrary, English affairs in the first half of 1553 were of crucial importance to their masters. Throughout the sixteenth century pretty well every aspect of European politics was dominated by the struggle for supremacy between France and the Empire, between the rival houses of Valois and Hapsburg, between the Most Christian King Henri II and the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, and it was a battle of giants. France might be the largest national monarchy, her frontiers now extended almost to the Rhine and with ambitions in northern Italy, but the Hapsburgs ruled over Spain and the Netherlands, plus the German Empire, the duchy of Milan and the kingdoms of Naples and Sicily, not to mention Spain’s possessions in the New World. By comparison, England, that small offshore island, looked insignificant, and her international prestige was low. Nevertheless English friendship or, at the very least, neutrality, mattered a great deal to the Emperor. It was not merely that he had a personal interest just then – Mary Tudor was, after all, his first cousin – but by virtue of her strategic position, a hostile England – and especially a hostile England allied to France – would be perfectly placed to cut the vital sea-link between Spain and the Low Countries.

  Jehan de Scheyfve, not a man of outstanding ability, had begun to suspect as early as February that some kind of conspiracy was being planned against the princess, but Charles, who was an old man now, suffering acutely from gout and with the cares of half of Europe on his shoulders, made no immediate move. The king of France, on the other hand, had appointed a new ambassador to London and Antoine de Noailles arrived at the end of April to find the king was too ill to see him. However, on 7 May he and the retiring ambassador visited Greenwich and in a private conversation the duke of Northumberland apparently asked them what they would do if they were in his shoes, whereupon they gave him such advice as they considered to be ‘of favour and advantage’ to their master’s interests.7 To underline French eagerness to seize their opportunity, Claude de l’Aubespine, a secretary often employed by Henri II on high-level diplomatic missions, came over for a brief visit at the end of the month. Despite the secrecy that surrounded the purpose of his visit, de Scheyfve heard that he had come to offer the king of France’s services to Northumberland in the event of Edward’s death. De Scheyfve was convinced by this time that the duke and his party intended ‘to deprive the Lady Mary of the succession to the crown. … They are evidently resolved to resort to arms against her, with the excuse of religion among others.’8 He also believed that they were expecting the French to help them.

  Certainly the French had excellent reasons for wanting to prevent Mary from succeeding her brother – as the Emperor’s cousin she would naturally take her country back into the Spanish Hapsburg camp – and in the early 1550s the French happened to be exceptionally well placed for intervention in English affairs. As a result of gross mishandling of Scottish relations by both the late king and the Protector Somerset, the ‘Auld Alliance’ between France and Scotland had been revived and refurbished to the extent that Scotland was currently being governed by Mary of Guise very much as a province of France, with a strong French military presence established on the other side of England’s vulnerable land frontier.

  Henri II also held a potential ace in the person of the little queen of Scotland, now a pretty and promising ten-year-old being brought up at his court as the future wife of his son and heir, the dauphin François. Mary Stuart might have been arbitrarily excluded from her place in the English succession by the terms of her great-uncle’s will, but by all the commonly accepted rules of primogeniture her claim was unquestionably superior to that of her Suffolk cousins and, in the eyes of all orthodox Catholics, to that of her cousin Elizabeth who, as everyone knew, was a bastard born in the lifetime of King Henry’s first wife. A case could also be made out to show that the queen of Scots’ claim was superior to that of her cousin Mary Tudor, on whose legitimacy such grave doubts had been cast at the time of the Great Divorce. Their father’s will regardless, the point could reasonably be made that both the Tudor sisters were still illegitimate by Act of Parliament. The situation, in short, fairly bristled with nice points of canon and constitutional law and, for the French, it was fraught with interesting possibilities – always provided, of course, that the duke of Northumberland could be encouraged, even perhaps assisted, to organise another coup d’état.

  Although Jane Grey’s marriage had signalled the first steps in opening moves to set aside the established line of succession, for some months before this Edward himself had been pondering ways and means of depriving his elder sister of her birthright. The king’s motives appear to have been quite straightforwardly ideological. He had, after all, been raised in the purest Cambridge school of advanced intellectual and evangelical Protestantism and believed, just as rigidly as Mary did, that his was the only way of salvation for both himself and his people, for whose salvation he had always been taught he was personally responsible under God. Convictions of this kind naturally overrode all considerations of earthly justice and legality, and once he began to realise that he might not live to provide heirs of his own body Edward would have known that if he valued his immortal soul he must take every possible precaution to guard against the overthrow of the true religion now established in his realm.

  In his famous Device for the Succession, a draft memorandum written in his own hand probably at the beginning of 1553, possibly even earlier, he had already fixed on the Suffolk line, and ‘for lakke of issu of my body’ bequeathed the crown to the Lady Frances’s (that is, the duchess of Suffolk’s) notional ‘heires masles’, then to the Lady Jane’s ‘heires masles’ and so on through the family. But as his condition began to deteriorate, and the fact had to be faced that neither his aunt Frances nor any of his so regrettably female cousins were going to produce heirs male in the immediate future, the king made a simple but radical change to his Device, leaving the throne to ‘the Lady Jane and her heires masles’.9

  Why he chose to exclude his Protestant sister, to whom he was supposedly devoted, as well as his Catholic one has never been fully explained. He may have felt it would be inequitable and impractical to deprive one of the princesses and not the other; he may have feared that Elizabeth, however good her intentions, might find herself obliged to marry some Catholic prince; or he may have sensed that she would have rejected any bequest based on such an obvious injustice. The official reasons, as set out in the letters patent for the Limitation of the Crown – the Device in its final form – were that the Ladies Mary and Elizabeth were ‘illegitimate and not lawfully begotten’, related to the king by half-blood only and therefore not entitled to succeed him, and liable to marry foreign husbands whose control of the government would inevitably ‘tend to the utter subversion of the commonwealth of this our realm’.10

  The question of whether or not either or both of Henry VIII’s daughters could properly be regarded as lawfully begotten was and remains debatable. The other grounds alleged for their exclusion from the succession were constitutionally merely frivolous and, in any case, no will, Device or letters patent issued by Edward could have any validity in law as long as the 1544 Act of Succession, 35 Henry VIII, remained on the Statute Book; nor, for that matter, could Edward, as a minor, make a valid will. But for the dying king, for the duke of Northumberland, now committed beyond the point of no return, for the king of France waiting hopefully in the w
ings, the legality of the scheme mattered far less than the speed and efficiency with which it could be put into effect.

  It was by this time becoming only too obvious that speed was likely to be of the essence. On 17 May Edward had finally been able to see the French ambassadors, who reported him to be weak and still troubled by a cough. De Scheyfve heard that their audience had only been granted to reassure the people ‘and that the doctors and physicians were persuaded to allow it for that reason’. At the end of the month he wrote that the king was wasting away daily and there was no sign or likelihood of any improvement. ‘Some’, he went on, ‘are of the opinion that he may last two months more, but he cannot possibly live beyond that time. He cannot rest except by means of medicines and external applications; and his body has begun to swell, especially his head and feet.’11 A fortnight later de Scheyfve was writing again to report that Edward had been attacked on 11 June ‘by a violent hot fever which lasted over 24 hours’ and which had recurred on the 14th, ‘more violent than before’. At this point the doctors had given him up, saying that he might die at any time, ‘because he is at present without the strength necessary to rid him of certain humours which, when he does succeed in ejecting them, give forth a stench. Since the 11th he has been unable to keep anything in his stomach, so he lives entirely on restoratives and obtains hardly any repose.’12 All the same, it was essential to keep the sufferer alive for a few more weeks and it may have been at this time that, according to Edward’s first biographer, the Council adopted the desperate expedient of dismissing his doctors and bringing in an unnamed ‘gentlewoman’ who had promised to cure him, provided ‘he were committed wholly to her hand’. She proceeded to dose the wretched boy with ‘restringents’ which probably included arsenic and which seem to have produced a temporary rally.13

  In order to give the Device for the Succession a cloak of respectability, it would be necessary to carry the Privy Council, the judiciary and the bishops, and consequently Sir Edward Montagu, Chief Justice of the Common Pleas, was ordered to appear at Greenwich on 12 June, bringing with him Sir John Baker, Chancellor of the Exchequer, Mr Justice Bromley, Edward Gryffyn the Attorney General, and John Gosnold the Solicitor General. They were brought into the king’s presence and Edward there and then ‘by his own mouth’ informed them of his intentions with regard to his successor and presented them with a signed copy of his Device commanding them ‘to make a book thereof accordingly with speed’.

  To do them justice the lawyers, led by Edward Montagu, did their best to resist. But when they tried to point out to the lords of the Council that the king was in effect asking them to commit treason, and that any attempt to execute his Device after his death would also be treason, the duke of Northumberland stormed into the council chamber ‘being in a great rage and fury … and called Sir Edward Montagu traitor, and further said that he would fight in his shirt with any man in that quarrel’. The lawyers were summoned to Greenwich again on the 15th when the king ‘with sharp words and angry countenance’ asked them why they had not ‘made his book according to his commandment’. He would listen to no legal arguments about the authority of parliament, ordering them to obey ‘upon their allegiance’, so that Edward Montagu, being ‘in great fear as ever he was in his life before, seeing the king so earnest and sharp, and the duke so angry … who ruled the whole council as it pleased him’ gave in and agreed to draw up the necessary documents.14

  The Limitation of the Crown passed the Great Seal on 21 June and by the end of the month it had been endorsed, more or less reluctantly, by the Lord Chancellor, the Privy Councillors, twenty-two peers of the realm, the Lord Mayor of London, the aldermen and sheriffs of Middlesex, Surrey and Kent, the officers of the royal household, the Secretaries of State (even that super-cautious individual William Cecil had been obliged to add his signature), the judges and the bishops, headed by Thomas Cranmer. Cranmer, like Montagu, had had serious reservations and believed that if he had been allowed to see the king alone, he might have ‘altered him from his purpose’. But more than anything else the compassionate archbishop wanted to see his much-loved godson die in peace, happy in the belief that he had ensured the survival of the true Protestant religion, and when he set his hand to the fatal document, he did so ‘unfeignedly and without dissimulation’.15

  He was only just in time. On 19 June de Scheyfve reported that the king’s state was such that he himself had given up hope, ‘and says he feels so weak that he can resist no longer, and that he is done for’.16 Five days later the ambassador wrote he had just been told ‘that the King of England’s present condition is such that he cannot possibly live more than three days … for he has not the strength to stir, and can hardly breathe. His body no longer performs its functions, his nails and hair are dropping off, and all his person is scabby.’17 Edward’s contemporaries believed that he was suffering from the same disease that had killed his illegitimate half-brother the duke of Richmond – that is, consumption, or pulmonary tuberculosis – and later historians have followed this hypothesis. However, recent medical opinion has suggested that his illness was more likely to have been a suppurating pulmonary infection, developing into ‘acute bilateral bronchopneumonia’ and finally the general septicaemia which would have killed him.18 Whatever the cause, there can be no doubt that his sufferings were terrible. His doctors had now been allowed back into the sickroom, but there was nothing they could do and the boy who had been born amid such joy and wondrous hope fifteen years and nine months ago longed only for release, which came between eight and nine o’clock on the evening of Thursday 6 July, when the last Tudor king died in the arms of his friend Henry Sidney.

  The six weeks which had passed since her marriage had not been happy ones for Lady Jane Dudley and she seems to have developed such an aversion to her husband’s family that even her own mother’s company was preferable. Apparently she had been promised that she could continue to live at home for a time after the wedding and immediately after the ceremony she had gone back first to Suffolk House at Westminster and then to her parents’ grand new suburban residence, converted from the former Carthusian monastery on the Thames at Sheen. But the duchess of Northumberland, who did not get on with the duchess of Suffolk, soon became impatient with this foolishness. She told Jane that the king was dying and that she must hold herself in readiness for a summons at any moment, because he had made her the heir to his dominions.

  According to Jane’s own account, this was the first she had heard of the seriousness of Edward’s illness and the news, flung at her without warning, caused her the greatest agitation and alarm, but she did not take it seriously, putting it down to ‘boasting’ and an excuse to separate her from her mother. Being Jane, she probably said as much, for the result was a furious quarrel, with the duchess of Northumberland accusing the duchess of Suffolk of trying to keep the newly-weds apart and insisting that, whatever happened, Jane’s place was with her husband. This argument was unanswerable and Jane was forced to join Guildford at Durham House where, possibly, the marriage was consummated.

  But the reluctant bride stayed only two or three nights with her in-laws. She had fallen ill – probably with some form of ‘summer complaint’ aggravated by nervous strain – and, with a surprising lack of logic, became convinced that the Dudleys were trying to poison her. In fact, of course, her health and well-being were vital to the Dudleys just then, and they sent her out to Chelsea, with its happy memories of Katherine Parr, to rest and recuperate. She was still there on the afternoon of 9 July when her sister-in-law, Northumberland’s eldest daughter Mary Sidney, came to fetch her to go to Syon House – another former convent on the banks of the Thames which had been commandeered by the duke – in order to receive ‘that which had been ordered for me by the king’. She told me, says Jane, ‘with extraordinary seriousness, that it was necessary for me to go with her, which I did’.

  At Syon Jane found her parents, her mother-in-law, the marquess and marchioness of Northampton, the earls of Hunt
ingdon, Arundel and Pembroke, and the Duke of Northumberland in his capacity of Lord President of the Council. These distinguished personages greeted her with ‘unwonted caresses and pleasantness’ and, to her acute embarrassment, proceeded to do her ‘such reverence as was not at all suitable to my state, kneeling down before me on the ground, and in many other ways, making semblance of honouring me’. Northumberland then broke the news of Edward’s death, declaring ‘what cause we had all to rejoice for the virtuous and praiseworthy life that he had led, as also for his very good death. Furthermore he pretended to comfort himself and the by-standers by praising much his prudence and goodness, for the very great care that he had taken of his kingdom at the very close of his life.’ The exact nature of his late majesty’s care was now officially disclosed to his heiress, as the duke announced the terms of the king’s Device, how he had decided for good and sufficient reasons that neither of his sisters was worthy to succeed him and how – ‘he being in every way able to disinherit them’ – he had instead nominated his cousin Jane to follow him on to the throne of England.

  It has generally been accepted that this was the first Jane knew of the deadly inheritance thrust upon her, and certainly she had taken no part in the internecine manoeuvrings of the past few months. But at the same time it is difficult to accept that this highly intelligent, highly educated young woman can really have been so unworldly as not to have grasped the underlying significance of her hastily arranged marriage; or that she had not at least guessed something of what was being planned for her. Not, of course, that prior knowledge would in any way have affected the helplessness of her position. On the contrary, Jane’s nightmare lay in her awareness that she had become the prisoner of a power-hungry, unscrupulous junta, led by the man she had come to fear above all others. As she was later to call on those present to bear witness, she fell to the ground overcome by shock and distress, half fainting and weeping very bitterly, while the lords of the Council knelt before her, solemnly swearing to shed their blood in defence of her right. She managed to gasp out something about her ‘insufficiency’ and muttered a hasty prayer that if to succeed to the throne was indeed her duty and her right, God would help her to govern the realm to his glory. God, on that traumatic Sunday evening, looked like being her only friend.19