Lady Jane Grey Read online

  In normal circumstances the wedding of the king’s niece and the death of his sister might have attracted rather more public notice, but everyone’s attention just then was focused on the unfolding drama of his majesty’s own domestic problems, for in the spring of 1533 the bitter six-year battle for the divorce was reaching its climax. In spite of the fact that Queen Catherine was still stubbornly refusing to accept her relegation and that still no ruling had come from Rome, it was an open secret – in court circles at least that Henry and his lady had been married in a very private ceremony at the end of January, and most people now knew that Anne Boleyn was pregnant. No one, therefore, was surprised when, late in May, Thomas Cranmer, the newly enthroned Archbishop of Canterbury, pronounced the king’s first marriage to be null and void and his second good and lawful. Preparations were already well advanced for Queen Anne’s coronation, scheduled to take place on 1 June, with the duke of Suffolk acting as High Constable for the occasion and as Steward for the feast that would follow. Small wonder then that he had been able to spare so little time for visiting Westhorpe.

  As was customary, Charles Brandon did not attend his wife’s funeral but every detail of the ritual pomp and ceremony due to her exalted station was meticulously observed. The coffin lay in state at Westhorpe for nearly a month before being removed to the abbey of St Edmundsbury for committal. At the head of the cortège walked a hundred poor men in black hoods and gowns and carrying wax tapers. Then came the domestic chaplains with the Westhorpe chapel cross, escorted by a contingent of barons, knights and gentlemen and followed by the officers of the household, Garter and Clarenceux Kings of Arms, and a representative from the French College of Heralds, all mounted on horses trapped to the ground with black. The hearse, or funeral car, was drawn by six horses and draped in black velvet with the late queen’s motto, La volonté de Dieu me suffit, worked in fine gold, while over it was a rich canopy borne by four mounted knights. On the coffin itself lay an effigy of Mary arrayed in the state robes, the crown and panoply of a queen of France, while on either side hung banners painted with the proud escutcheons of her arms as a princess of England and queen dowager of France. Immediately behind the hearse and leading the family mourners rode Frances Grey, marchioness of Dorset, supported by her new husband and her eleven-year-old brother Henry, earl of Lincoln. There followed a cavalcade of noble ladies, each attended by a running footman, two mourning wagons or coaches and, bringing up the rear, the waiting women, yeomen and lesser servants on foot.

  The ‘right high and excellent princess and right Christian Queen Mary, late French Queen’ was laid to rest in the great abbey church at Bury St Edmunds on 22 July and a handsome alabaster monument was presently erected over her tomb. Both abbey and monument were to be destroyed during the period of the dissolution of the monasteries, when so much else of the world Mary had known dissolved into rubble and firewood and shards of broken glass, but her coffin was saved and re-interred in the nearby church of St Mary. In 1784, when it was moved to a new resting place in the north-east corner of the chancel, the coffin was opened and the embalmed corpse was found to be in an amazingly good state of preservation. The teeth were complete and undecayed and the hair, almost two feet in length, had retained its red-gold colour – so much so that ghoulish souvenir hunters hurried to cut tresses from it.13

  Mary Tudor, queen and duchess, had never been more than a minor figure on the historical stage and nothing in her life had affected the mainstream of great events. All she had ever asked for herself was a measure of personal happiness, and in that respect she had been more fortunate than most women in her position and century. Certainly the girl who had defiantly insisted on her right to be allowed to marry the man she loved never seems to have regretted it, and she can scarcely be blamed for failing to foresee the deadly inheritance, compounded of her own royal blood and her brother’s capricious favouritism, which she had created for her innocent posterity.

  The year 1533 continued to be an eventful one for both the Tudor and Brandon families. Barely two months after Mary’s death Charles Brandon had married again. Rapid remarriage by both sexes was not unusual, but the fact that the duke of Suffolk’s latest bride was the same age as his younger daughter – fourteen to his forty-eight or nine – and was already promised to his son gave the affair enough ‘novelty’, as one observer put it, to attract the attention of some political commentators.

  Suffolk’s fourth wife was another of his wards, the daughter and heiress of Lord Willoughby of Eresby, an important landowner in Suffolk and Lincolnshire. The duke had invested some £2,500 in the wardship of young Catherine Willoughby, who had been living under his roof for the past five years or so, being educated with his own daughters. She was a good-looking girl, healthy, intelligent and high-spirited, and he may very likely have been fond of her, but his motive for marrying her was pretty certainly a financial one. Frances’s wedding had cost him over sixteen hundred pounds and Eleanor’s was still to come, while Mary’s outstanding debts to the Crown were yet to be finally settled. In the circumstances a rich wife (and the gossipy author of The Spanish Chronicle heard that the duchess of Suffolk, a baroness in her own right, was worth 15,000 ducats a year) would obviously be desirable. Young Catherine was conveniently ready to hand and the duke saw no reason to waste her on his son, who could be matched elsewhere easily enough. As it happened, Henry Brandon died the following spring, leaving the gossip-mongers to insinuate that his untimely end was due to grief at having been so heartlessly deprived of his fiancée.

  Suffolk appears to have survived this second bereavement with tolerable equanimity and his new marriage was proving a success, the duchess providing him with two healthy sons in the space of two years. The king’s domestic affairs, however, continued to be worryingly unsatisfactory. Henry had made powerful enemies both at home and abroad, and had ruthlessly manipulated the accepted laws of God and man in his determination to ensure that Anne Boleyn’s child – the child which, he had convinced himself, would surely be a son – was born in wedlock, and all he had got for his pains was another useless girl. The birth of Elizabeth Tudor in September 1533 was a black disappointment for both her parents, but a good face had to be put on it before the world. A solemn Te Deum for the queen’s safe delivery was sung in St Paul’s in the presence of the city dignitaries and the new princess was given a suitably grand christening in the Friars Church at Greenwich. The following spring parliament at Westminster passed an act making it a treasonable offence to question the validity of the king’s divorce and second marriage and settling the succession on the lawfully begotten children of his ‘most dear and entirely beloved wife Queen Anne’, while Mary, his elder daughter and ex-heiress presumptive, was in future to be regarded ‘but as a bastard’. Almost simultaneously the Pope in full consistory at Rome finally gave judgement on the matter of the royal divorce, pronouncing the marriage between Henry and Catherine of Aragon to have been good and lawful from the beginning.

  The Brandon and Grey families had continued publicly to support the king throughout his various marital difficulties – Suffolk had been present at Elizabeth’s christening and the dowager marchioness of Dorset officiated as one of the godmothers. The young Dorsets meanwhile were beginning their married life, dividing their time between London and the court and the family estates in Leicestershire. The 2nd marquess had begun to build a fine new mansion at Bradgate Park, three miles north-west of Leicester and about a mile and a half from the village of Groby on the edge of Charnwood Forest. The house, which was completed by his son, was a large, low, red-brick building, in the form of a square, decorated with turrets and an imposing gatehouse, and surrounded by a park six miles in circumference. John Leland, who visited Bradgate in the 1540s, remarked on its good and vigorous water supply and the well-wooded country round about; but for the Dorsets, who like most of their contemporaries were passionately addicted to field sports, its principal attraction was doubtless the abundance of game available on their doorstep.<
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  Unlike his father and grandfather, the 3rd marquess showed no inclination for a career in soldiering or public affairs, and this was perhaps just as well, for in the 1530s public affairs were a more than usually dangerous pursuit. The parliament of 1534 had enacted a programme of revolutionary change codifying the English Church’s breach with Rome and effectively privatising its enormous wealth, and in the spring of 1535 the king had officially assumed the title of Supreme Head of the Church of England with power to ‘reform and redress all errors, heresies and abuses in the same’. It now became high treason ‘maliciously’ to deny this startling addition to the royal style and that summer Sir Thomas More and John Fisher, bishop of Rochester, paid the price of refusing to recognise Henry Tudor as their supreme earthly authority on matters spiritual.

  In 1536 Queen Anne Boleyn was tried on charges of committing adultery with ‘divers of the king’s familiar servants’, of incest with her brother George, of despising her marriage and ‘imagining’ the king’s death. The trial was, of course, a mere formality and Anne was duly convicted of treason and beheaded on Tower Green on 19 May. Not content with killing the woman who had once been his great love, Henry had insisted on obtaining a decree of nullity and Thomas Cranmer obediently pronounced their union to have been invalid from the start, thus bastardising and disinheriting the two-year-old Elizabeth in her turn.

  Within a matter of weeks the king had taken his third wife. A widower twice over – Catherine of Aragon having died at the beginning of the year – this marriage would be indisputably legal and Henry had every hope that the demurely respectable Jane Seymour, who came herself from a large family, would soon provide him with the male heir now so urgently needed. A second Act of Succession was passed in June ratifying the annulment of the Boleyn marriage and officially declaring Anne’s daughter illegitimate. The succession was therefore to be vested in the issue of the king’s third marriage but, just in case such issue were not forthcoming, it was enacted that Henry should be given the power to appoint an heir by will or letters patent – an extraordinary provision which indicates how acute the problem was becoming.

  The marquess of Dorset was not having much luck in begetting a male heir either. Frances had given birth to a son and a daughter who both died in infancy but in 1537 she was pregnant again and another daughter was born who seemed likely to survive. The actual date of Jane Grey’s birth is not recorded, although the month is said to have been October, but interest in the arrival of Lord and Lady Dorset’s daughter was naturally eclipsed by the excitement over the birth at Hampton Court in the early hours of 12 October of a son to the king and Queen Jane Seymour. Te Deums were sung in St Paul’s and every parish church in the city. Bells pealed, 2,000 rounds were fired from the Tower guns, bonfires blazed and everyone shut up shop and came out to celebrate. Impromptu street parties were organised as bands of musicians went about playing and singing loyal ballads in honour of the occasion and the prince’s health was drunk in the free wine and beer which flowed in profusion from the conduits and from hogsheads provided by the civic authorities and by other prominent citizens. All that day, through the night and well into the next day the capital rocked and clashed in a great crescendo of relief and thanksgiving that at long last England had a prince of Wales. Messengers were dispatched to ‘all the estates and cities of the realm’ to spread the glad tidings and the whole country became almost hysterical with joy. As Bishop Latimer wrote to Thomas Cromwell from his Worcester diocese: ‘Here is no less rejoicing in these parts from the birth of our prince, whom we hungered for so long, than there was, I trow, at the birth of John the Baptist … God give us grace to be thankful.’

  The christening of England’s Treasure, ‘Prince Edward that goodly flower’, took place three days after his birth in the chapel at Hampton Court amid scenes of suitable splendour. The dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk and Archbishop Thomas Cranmer were godfathers, the Lady Mary, godmother. The baby’s other sister was also present, bearing the ‘richly garnished’ chrysom, or christening robe. This burden proved rather too much for the four-year-old Elizabeth, so ‘the same lady for her tender age’ was carried in the procession by Queen Jane’s elder brother. The Grey family, however, was not represented. Old Lady Dorset had been appointed to carry the prince to his christening, but had been obliged to send her excuses because of sickness in the neighbourhood of her house at Croydon; and Frances Dorset was presumably still lying-in up at Bradgate with her husband in attendance. Their new daughter had been named in honour of the queen but she, poor soul, did not live to appreciate the compliment. A few days after Edward’s christening she became so ill that the last sacraments were administered. She rallied briefly but by 24 October she was dead, killed most probably by puerperal sepsis, the scourge of all women in childbed. She was given a state funeral at Windsor, with the Princess Mary officiating as chief mourner and this time both Dorsets were present, the Lady Frances, as she was still generally known, riding in a chariot with other noble ladies. As it turned out, Jane Seymour was the only one of Henry’s wives to be buried as queen and perhaps that was fair – she was, after all, the only one who had truly fulfilled her side of the bargain.

  Jane had been buried and her son and her namesake baptised according to the familiar rites of the Catholic Church, but both these children were born on the cusp of that great social and spiritual upheaval known to history as the English Reformation, which was destined profoundly to affect the course not only of their lives but those of every other man, woman and child in the country. To say that had the Pope not been so disobliging over the matter of the king’s divorce from his first wife there would have been no break with Rome is greatly to over-simplify the situation, but although Henry may not have intended to start a revolution that, in effect, is what he had done. There was in England a long tradition of anti-clerical feeling and smouldering religious radicalism going back to John Wyclif and the Lollards of the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, which in the 1520s had received fresh impetus from Lutheran doctrines coming in from Germany, so that the king’s Great Matter and the consequent schism served as the catalyst for a chain reaction that was to prove unexpectedly difficult to control. It is sometimes said that Henry’s church remained Catholic without the Pope, but that is another over-simplication.

  Changes were made, and some new ideas considered and experimented with. In 1537 the first English Bible, the so-called Matthew Bible, went on sale, followed in the spring of 1539 by the better known Great Bible, based on the translations of Tyndale and Coverdale. This quickly became a best-seller, running through six further editions in the next two years, and its effect on an increasingly literate and sophisticated public was electric. To the average concerned and educated citizen it meant that he and, for that matter, she were now, for the first time, in a position freely to study and interpret the word of God for themselves, which led in turn to the exhilarating realisation that it was possible for an individual to hold direct communion with God without having to depend on a priest to act as intermediary; and a conviction was growing among thoughtful men and women that priests could offer no scriptural authority for their claim to be the only channel through which the laity could hope to receive divine grace.

  These revolutionary ideas took time to penetrate rural Leicestershire where little Jane Grey and her younger sister Katherine, born in 1539, were receiving the early training proper for children of their rank. Life at Bradgate when the family was in residence was lived on a grand scale. When Lord and Lady Dorset dined in public the Great Hall could accommodate some 200 persons and the meal would be served with almost as much ceremonial as that observed at court – each course being brought in to a flourish of trumpets. Foreign tourists were always amazed at the amount of food and drink the English seemed able to put away. ‘They eat very frequently, at times more than is suitable,’ remarked an Italian visitor, ‘and are particularly fond of young swans, rabbits, deer and sea birds. They often eat mutton and beef, which is ge
nerally considered to be better here than anywhere else in the world.’14 Nursery fare, however, would not have included the rich treats available to the grown-ups and consisted mainly of broths, jellies, custards, omelettes and other so-called ‘white meats’. Nor would the little girls have had much share in their parents’ social life. They do not seem to have accompanied their mother when she paid her ceremonial visits to the town of Leicester, where she would be received as befitted her status. There are entries in the town books recording the expenditure of 2s 6d by the mayoress and her sisters ‘for strawberries and wine for my lady’s grace’. On another occasion 4s was paid for ‘a gallon of Ippocras, that was given to my lady’s grace by mistress mayoress and her sisters, the wives of the aldermen of Leicester, who gave besides wafers, apples, pears and walnuts at the same time’.15

  Although the Dorsets were regarded as princes by their neighbours, and certainly expected to be treated as such, little or nothing is known about their daughters’ early years, which must be assumed to have followed the usual pattern for young noblewomen. The Ladies Jane and Katherine would have learned all the basics of good manners, and the feminine virtues of docility, passivity and obedience would have been inculcated at a very early age. When encountering their parents they would be expected to kneel and ask a blessing, and their parents’ word was law. In the opinion of Luis Vives, the Spanish scholar invited by Catherine of Aragon to draw up a plan of studies for the Princess Mary, it was vitally important that a young girl’s upbringing should be ‘pure and chaste’. As soon as she was able to talk and run about, her companions should be other girls of her own age, and they should be supervised either by mother or nurse who could rule their play and pastimes and ‘set them to honesty and virtue’. A young girl, too, must be allowed no opportunity to learn any ‘uncleanly words, or wanton, or uncomely gesture when she is yet ignorant what she doth, and innocent’ lest she should do the same when she was grown bigger and of more discretion; and parents must be careful never to allow any ‘uncomely deed’ to pass uncorrected, for it was in these first years that a child’s character was formed.16