Lady Jane Grey Read online

  There was clearly no time to be lost and a muster was hurriedly ordered in Tothill Fields, the unusually high rate of pay offered, ten pence a day, being a measure of the regime’s concern. It had been intended to put the duke of Suffolk in command of the army, but when this information was conveyed to Queen Jane on the evening of 12 July she promptly burst into tears and begged that her father ‘might tarry at home in her company’. Jane seems to have forgotten that she had once thought it hell to be in her parents’ company – but she hadn’t known the Dudley family then.

  The assembled lords of the Council gazed thoughtfully at their weeping sovereign lady and then at one another, an idea forming (or, more likely, already formed) in their collective mind. This idea they propounded to the duke of Northumberland. It would surely be better, they suggested, if he took command himself. No other man was so well fitted for the task, especially since he had already successfully suppressed one rebellion in East Anglia and was therefore so feared in those parts that no one would dare to offer him resistance. Besides, was he not ‘the best man of war in the realm?’ Then there was the matter of the queen’s distress, and the fact that she would ‘in no wise grant that her father should take it on him’. So it was really up to the duke, remarked someone, a note of steel suddenly audible beneath the flattery and subservience; it was up to the duke to ‘remedy the matter’. And the duke gave way. ‘Since ye think it good,’ he said, ‘I and mine will go, not doubting your fidelity to the queen’s majesty which I leave in your custody.’34

  The fidelity of his associates to anything but their own best interests was, of course, highly doubtful, and it was a lively fear of what they might do as soon as his back was turned that lay behind John Dudley’s reluctance to take the field himself. He was well aware that he was being manoeuvred into the role of possible scapegoat, but there was no turning back now. Even as they sat talking round the council table in the summer dusk the sound of heavy wagons laden with weapons and supplies – ‘great guns and small, bows, bills, spears, morris-pikes, harness [armour], arrows, gunpowder and victuals, money, tents and all manner of ordnance’ – could be heard rattling eastward through the city streets ‘for a great army toward Cambridge’.35 The decision taken, Northumberland and the others waited on the Lady Jane to tell her of their conclusion, ‘who humbly thanked the duke for reserving her father at home and beseeched him to use his diligence’. ‘I will do what in me lies,’ he answered, looking down at the thin, redheaded slip of a girl, to whom he was now bound by the unbreakable kinship of mutual destruction.36

  Preparations continued throughout the next day. Early in the morning the duke called for his personal armour and saw it made ready, before appointing his own retinue to meet him at Durham Place. Then, his arrangements made, he returned to the Tower to address the assembled Council for the last time. After urging that reinforcements should be sent without fail to join him at Newmarket, he made a last attempt to assert the old dominant force of his personality. He and his companions, he said, were going forth to adventure their bodies and lives ‘amongst the bloody strokes and cruel assaults’ of the enemy, trusting themselves and their wives and children at home to the faith and truth of those they left behind. If anyone present were planning to violate that trust and ‘to leave us your friends in the briars and betray us’, let them remember that treachery could be a two-handed game. Let them also reflect on God’s vengeance and the sacred oath of allegiance they had taken ‘to this virtuous lady the Queen’s highness, who by your and our enticement is rather of force placed therein than by her own seeking and request’. There was, too, the matter of God’s cause. The fear of papistry’s re-entry had, after all, been the original ground on which everyone had agreed and ‘even at the first motion granted your goodwills and assents thereto, as by your hands’ writing evidently appeareth’. John Dudley could say no more but in this troublesome time to wish his hearers ‘to use constant hearts, abandoning all malice, envy and private affections … and this I pray you,’ he ended, ‘wish me no worse speed in his journey than ye would have to yourselves’.

  ‘My lord,’ said someone – it may have been Winchester, the oldest of the peers – ‘if ye mistrust any of us in this matter, your grace is far deceived; for which of us can wipe his hands clean thereof?’ While they were still talking the servants had come in with the first course of dinner and were laying the table, but Winchester (if it were he) went on: ‘If we should shrink from you as one that were culpable, which of us can excuse himself as guiltless? Therein your doubt is too far cast.’ ‘I pray God it be so,’ answered Northumberland abruptly. ‘Let us go to dinner.’

  After the lords had eaten, the duke went to take his formal leave of the queen and receive from her his signed and sealed commission as Lieutenant of her army. Coming out through the council chamber he encountered the earl of Arundel, ‘who prayed God be with his grace; saying he was very sorry it was not his chance to go with him and bear him company, in whose presence he could find it in his heart to spend his blood, even at his foot’.37 Henry FitzAlan did not add that he, together with the earls of Shrewsbury and Pembroke, the Lord Privy Seal John Russell, Lord Cobham, John Mason and Secretary William Petre, would be having a private meeting with the Imperial ambassadors later that very day. But then nor was Northumberland advertising the fact that he had just dispatched his cousin Henry Dudley on an urgent mission to the king of France, offering, so it is said, to trade Ireland and Calais in exchange for immediate French military assistance.

  The situation was still highly volatile and, in an atmosphere thick with suspicion and distrust, rumour and counter-rumour bred and multiplied. Reports were now coming in that the gentry were proclaiming Queen Mary in Buckinghamshire, but the Emperor’s ambassadors, in a dispatch dated 14 July, continued to predict the likelihood of her imminent defeat, for the duke was raising men wherever he could and was strong on land and at sea. ‘So, as far as we can see,’ they went on, ‘none of the people who are secretly attached to the Lady Mary can or dare declare for her or rise, unless they hear that she is being supported by your Majesty.’ Meanwhile, Mary herself, who had now retreated to Framlingham Castle, a stronger place than Kenninghall and nearer the coast, had sent a courier with a verbal message that ‘she saw destruction hanging over her’ unless the Emperor helped her quickly.38

  Northumberland had succeeded in raising an army of around 3,000 horse and foot, and early on the morning of Friday 14 July he rode out from Durham Place, turning east down the Strand towards the Cambridge road and ‘towards the Lady Mary’s grace to destroy her grace’. But as his cavalcade passed through the village of Shoreditch, where the way was lined with silent, staring crowds, the duke turned to Lord Grey of Wilton, who was riding alongside him and observed grimly: ‘The people press to see us, but not one sayeth God speed us.’39

  During the next few days the faces of those left cooped up in the Tower grew steadily longer as word arrived that Mary had been proclaimed in Norwich and that the town, one of the largest and richest in the country, was sending her men and supplies. Colchester had also declared for her, and in places as far apart as Devon and Oxfordshire the leaders of the local community were following suit. More and more gentlemen ‘with their powers’ (that is, their tenantry and dependants) were voting with their feet by joining the growing camp at Framlingham, while the noblemen’s tenants showed ominous signs of refusing to serve their lords against Queen Mary, and the duke’s own army was being plagued by internal dissension and desertion.

  Then came a really shattering piece of news. The crews of the six royal ships sent to watch the port of Yarmouth and cut off Mary’s escape to the Low Countries had gone over to her in a body, taking their captains and their heavy guns with them. ‘After once the submission of the ships was known in the Tower,’ wrote an eye-witness, ‘each man then began to pluck in his horns’ – and when Northumberland wrote querulously from his command post in the old Brandon territory of Bury St Edmunds, complaining about the n
on-arrival of his promised and much-needed reinforcements, he received ‘but a slender answer’.40 This was hardly surprising, since from the moment of the navy’s defection it had been a question not of whether but of when the lords of the Council would follow the sailors’ example. Already certain individuals, notably the earl of Pembroke and Thomas Cheyne, Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports, were looking for an excuse to go out and ‘consult’ in London, and on the 16th there was an alarm at about seven o’clock in the evening when ‘the gates of the Tower upon a sudden was shut, and the keys carried up to Queen Jane’. It was given out that a seal had gone missing, but the author of The Chronicle of Queen Jane believed the truth of the matter was that her highness suspected the Lord Treasurer of some evil intent. Old Winchester had apparently sneaked out to his own house and had to be fetched back at midnight.41 The other lords were not risking any one of their number stealing a march at this stage.

  Inside the Tower they were still going through the motions. Jane was still solemnly signing letters addressed to the sheriffs and justices of the peace requiring them to take steps to suppress the ‘rebellion’ of the Lady Mary, but there was of course no question of her being able to stem the tide; she had neither the experience nor the authority, nor did her father command the respect of his peers. By 18 July the earls of Arundel, Bedford, Pembroke, Shrewsbury and Worcester, Lords Paget and Cobham and about half a dozen others were ready to move, leaving the Tower en masse on the not very convincing excuse of having urgent matters to discuss with the French ambassador. Instead, they assembled for a conference at Baynard’s Castle, Pembroke’s house on the riverbank below Ludgate Hill, and the following afternoon it was the Imperial embassy which received a visit from the earl of Shrewsbury and Sir John Mason. They came to explain to the Emperor’s representatives how reluctant they and their fellow councillors had been to subscribe to King Edward’s Device for the Succession, but really they had had no choice, for they had been so bullied by Northumberland and treated almost as if they were prisoners. Of course they had always believed in their hearts that Mary was the rightful queen and they were going to proclaim her in London that very day.42

  And so they did, between five and six o’clock in the evening of Wednesday 19 July at the Cross in Cheapside amid scenes of wild popular rejoicing. People with money in their pockets flung it out of windows into the cheering, yelling crowds below. The earl of Pembroke was seen to throw a whole capful of gold angels and no doubt regarded it as a good investment. Sober citizens tore off their gowns and capered in the streets like children. Church bells rang a joyful peal from a forest of steeples and Te Deum was sung at St Paul’s. Bonfires blazed up on every corner and all that night the people of London sang and danced and feasted, drinking the health of the rightful queen, God bless her! and destruction to her enemies. All observers agreed that such scenes of rejoicing had seldom if ever been known and ‘what with shouting and crying of the people, and ringing of the bells, there could no one hear almost what another said, besides banqueting and singing in the street for joy’.43

  FIVE

  JANA NON REGINA

  Although my fault be great, and I confess it to be so, nevertheless I am charged and esteemed guilty more than I have deserved. For whereas I might take upon me that of which I was not worthy, yet no one can ever say either that I sought it as my own, or that I was pleased with it.

  Jane Grey

  Faint echoes of the rejoicing in the city could be heard even inside the Tower, where, so it is said, the duke of Suffolk presently came to break the news to his daughter as she sat at supper, and with his own hands helped to tear down the cloth of estate above her head. Then, ordering his men to leave their weapons behind, he went out on to Tower Hill, saying helplessly, ‘I am but one man,’ and proclaimed the Lady Mary’s grace to be queen of England, before scuttling away to his house at Sheen.1 Jane was left alone in the stripped and silent rooms to listen to the distant clamour of the bells. For her there would be no going home. When Lady Throckmorton, one of the ladies of the household who had gone out that afternoon to stand as proxy godmother for Jane at a christening, returned to her post she found the royal apartments deserted; on asking for the queen’s grace, she was told that the Lady Jane was now a prisoner detained in the Deputy Lieutenant’s house.

  It was there, the next day, that Jane suffered another visit from the marquess of Winchester, now peremptorily demanding the return of all the jewels and other ‘stuff’ she had received from the royal stores during her nine days’ reign. The Lord Treasurer went through her and Guildford’s wardrobes with a cold pawnbroker’s eye, confiscating jewellery, furs, hats, a velvet and sable muffler and all the money in their possession. In spite of this, a peevish interdepartmental correspondence concerning the disappearance of ‘a square coffer covered with fustian of Naples’, a leather box marked with Henry VIII’s broad arrow and containing, among other things, thirteen pairs of worn leather gloves, and another box labelled ‘the Queen’s jewels’ dragged on into the autumn.2

  While Winchester was busy covering his tracks, Mr Secretary Cecil was doing the filing, methodically endorsing the office copy of a letter signed ‘Jane the Quene’ with the words ‘Jana non Regina’, and the earl of Arundel and William Paget were riding hard for Framlingham to lay the allegiance and excuses of the lords of Council at Mary Tudor’s feet. Mary accepted them both. She had no choice, for, like it or not, she was going to have to rule the country with their help, and on Friday 21 July Arundel and Paget went on to Cambridge to arrest the duke of Northumberland in the queen’s name. ‘I beseech you, my lord of Arundel, use mercy towards me, knowing the case as it is,’ said John Dudley to the man who, barely a week before, had wished he might die at his feet. ‘My lord,’ answered Arundel, ‘ye should have sought for mercy sooner. I must do according to my commandment.’3

  Meanwhile, in London the foreign diplomats were watching the progress of events with astonishment verging on incredulity. At the Imperial embassy they had at first been afraid that this sudden change of front might conceal some dastardly plot ‘to induce my Lady to lay down her arms and then treacherously overcome her or encompass her death’; but as the days passed and they began to believe that the Lady Mary really was going to come to the throne after all, they could only ascribe her success to a miracle ‘and the work of the Divine Will’.4 Antoine de Noailles could only agree. ‘The atmosphere of this country and the nature of its people are so changeable’, he wrote, ‘that I am compelled to make my dispatches correspondingly wavering and contradictory … I have witnessed the most sudden change believable in men and I believe that God alone has worked it.’5

  More prosaically, it seems that Mary’s success was due, at least in the first instance, to her unexpectedly well-organised support among the conservative and predominantly Catholic gentry of East Anglia and the Thames Valley, to her own obstinate courage and perhaps most of all to Northumberland’s surprising failure to make sure of getting his hands on her before announcing Edward’s death. Other factors, of course, included his own personal unpopularity, the half-hearted attitude of the other councillors and a widespread, instinctive distrust of any tampering with the rightful line of succession – especially when that tampering was so obviously for the advancement of the Dudley family. Richard Troughton, bailiff of South Walshen in the county of Lincoln, who was told of Mary’s plight by his neighbour James Pratt, as they stood together by the new-scoured cattle drinking place called hedgedike, had cried aloud that it was the duke’s doing ‘and woe worth him that ever he was born, for he will go about to destroy all the noble blood of England’. And he drew his dagger and ‘wished it at the villain’s heart … and desired God’s plague upon him, and that he might have a short life: and prayed God to save the queen’s majesty, and to deliver her grace from him’.6

  Richard Troughton may well have expressed the view of the silent majority and his prayers were certainly answered in a most satisfactory manner, for the duke’s downfall could ha
rdly have been more complete, as the Emperor’s ambassadors, who witnessed his return to London on 25 July, were able to report. Armed men had been posted all along the streets to prevent the people, ‘greatly excited as they were’, from attacking him, and his escort had made him take off the conspicuous red cloak he wore, but he was quickly recognised and cursed as a traitor to the Crown. ‘A dreadful sight it was, and a strange mutation, for those, who, a few days before, had seen the duke enter London Tower with great pomp and magnificence when the Lady Jane went there to take possession, and now saw him led like a criminal and dubbed traitor.’7

  The entire family, the duke, the duchess and their five sons, were now safely under lock and key, but the duchess of Northumberland was released after a few days – ‘sooner than expected’, wrote Simon Renard – and, like the devoted wife and mother she was, immediately hurried off to meet the queen ‘to move her to compassion towards her children’. But this was being too optimistic and Mary ordered her back to London, refusing to let her approach closer than five miles. The duchess of Suffolk was more fortunate. Although Suffolk had been arrested at Sheen and returned to the Tower on 28 July, the queen readily granted her cousin Frances a private audience and the duke suffered no more than a token spell in detention.