Lady Jane Grey Read online

  Lady Jane’s formal education would most probably have begun about the age of four or five. It is possible that she would have learnt her alphabet – from letters printed on a horn book, a sheet of paper mounted on a wooden tablet and protected by a thin sheet of transparent horn – from her nurse Mrs Ellen, or from one of the waiting gentlewomen in the household. She may even have been taught to read by one of these ladies. Latin and religious instruction would have been the responsibility of Dr Harding, the domestic chaplain, and there would have been visiting masters for writing and possibly French. Music was important, as was dancing, both probably taught by members of the household, and, of course, needlework, at which every lady was expected to be proficient.

  The principal adult pastimes at Bradgate were hunting and hawking, but the Dorsets would certainly not have spent the whole year in Leicestershire. The marquess, a man ‘neither misliked nor much regarded’ by his fellows, was nevertheless one of the leading peers of the realm with political and social duties that would have brought him to London during the winter season, which lasted roughly from November to the beginning of Lent, and although he held no actual office of state under Henry VIII, there would certainly have been other times when it would have been wise for him to be at court. Frances Dorset, too, who was undoubtedly the dominant member of the partnership, liked to keep on the move, paying regular visits to friends and relations such as her cousin Princess Mary, her father and stepmother, now mostly living on their estates in Lincolnshire, or to Dorset’s sister Lady Audley or the dowager marchioness at Croydon. To what extent the children were included in these journeyings we do not know, but it seems pretty certain that their eldest daughter would have been introduced to her royal relations at the earliest possible moment. Frances was an ambitious woman, and although disappointed of sons – another daughter, Mary, was born in 1545 – even daughters could be useful in advancing family wealth and status.

  By the early 1540s it was looking increasingly unlikely that the king would survive until his son came of age, and already the factions were beginning to jostle for position in the next reign – manoeuvres which inevitably became inextricably involved in the religious and domestic convolutions of the current regime. The progressive party, led originally by Thomas Cromwell and Archbishop Cranmer, which favoured closer links with Lutheran Germany, had suffered a serious setback with the execution of Cromwell in the summer of 1540 – a misfortune usually attributed to Henry’s displeasure at being pushed into marriage with his fourth wife, the dowdy German princess Anne of Cleves. It was, of course, rather more complicated than that, but Cromwell, the hard-working, ruthlessly efficient parvenu, had acquired powerful enemies among the conservatives on the Council, led by the old duke of Norfolk and Stephen Gardiner, the right-wing bishop of Winchester, who were only waiting for an opportunity to pounce. The conservatives, too, received an additional stroke of luck just then in the shape of the king’s infatuation with Norfolk’s teenage niece Katherine Howard, and while her brief ascendancy lasted the Howards and their friends were riding high.

  Unhappily for Katherine tales were soon being told, not only of her various premarital sexual flings, but of her very probable adultery with one of the gentlemen of the bedchamber, and after little more than eighteen months as queen she had shared the fate of her cousin Anne Boleyn. The Howards retreated in temporary disarray and the progressives, who now included such up-and-coming men as Prince Edward’s uncle Edward Seymour, earl of Hertford, and John Dudley, Viscount Lisle, seemed once more to be enjoying royal confidence – especially since the king’s sixth and last wife, the widowed Lady Latymer of Snape Hall, better known by her maiden name Katherine Parr, was also known to favour the friends of the Gospel. But it was never wise to take the king’s favour for granted. As long as it seemed politically expedient he had encouraged (or, at any rate, had not seriously discouraged) a certain amount of progressive thinking and had given his blessing to a moderate programme of liturgical reform. He remained, nevertheless, a true conservative at heart and insisted on retaining all the basic elements of Catholicism in his new national Church. These had been set out in the Act of Six Articles, the so-called Whip with Six Strings, which went through parliament in 1539 and made it a capital offence to deny transubstantiation, or the Real Presence in the Eucharist. At the same time communion in one kind for the laity, the celibacy of the clergy, the permanence of vows of chastity, the continuance of private masses and auricular confession were all made mandatory.17 Henry had also begun to have doubts as to the wisdom of making the English Bible so generally available and another act, for the Advancement of True Religion, was passed in 1543, restricting its use to noblemen and gentlemen, substantial merchants and gentlewomen. This does not seem to have had very much effect for, two years later, in a speech to parliament, the king was ‘very sorry to know and hear, how unreverently that most precious jewel the word of God is disputed, rhymed, sung and jangled in every alehouse and tavern, contrary to the true meaning and doctrine of the same’.18 Generally speaking, though, his policy was to hold a balance between the rival factions and he would, with splendid impartiality, hang Catholics for treason and burn Protestants for heresy. All the same, during the mid-1540s the progressive party looked to be having things pretty much their own way. Very few prosecutions for heresy were brought in 1544 and 1545 and in London especially, the law was being openly flouted.

  The climate began to show signs of change in the autumn of 1545. The duke of Suffolk had died in August and his death was held to have been a grievous loss to the reformers. While it is true that the duke had become closely associated with them in recent years, it is not easy to visualise Charles Brandon, that hardbitten old courtier-soldier, in the role of born-again Christian. More plausibly, the impetus behind his patronage of the New Religion can be seen as coming from the duchess. Although still only in her mid-twenties, Catherine Suffolk had developed into a personality to be reckoned with: ‘a lady of a sharp wit and sure hand to thrust it home and make it pierce where she pleased’.19 As well as her sarcastic tongue and a tendency to ‘frowardness’, much deplored by her masculine acquaintance, my lady of Suffolk possessed a good brain and a lively enquiring intellect, eagerly receptive of new ideas. Together with Margaret Radcliffe, countess of Sussex, Joan Denny, Anne Herbert, Lady Lane, Jane Dudley, Lady Hertford and other like-minded ladies, the duchess of Suffolk had joined an influential group at court which studied and discussed the Gospels and listened to discourses by avant-garde preachers such as Nicholas Ridley, Nicholas Shaxton and Hugh Latimer – a group which met under the sponsorship of the new queen, Katherine Parr.

  In spite of their privileged position, the queen and her friends were treading on dangerous ground. Stephen Gardiner and other hard-line bishops, such as Bonner of London, were by no means a spent force and they had an ally in the Lord Chancellor, Thomas Wriothesley. By the end of 1545 they were becoming increasingly disturbed by the spread of religious dissidence, especially in London and the south-east, and had no doubt who to blame for the growing strength of radical views in high places. A vigorous anti-heresy drive was under way by the spring, but Gardiner and Wriothesley remained convinced that the key to the situation lay with the queen, and that the way to bring down the progressives was to attack them through their wives. In the summer of 1546 a promising opportunity presented itself in the person of Anne Kyme, better known by her maiden name of Anne Askew, a notorious heretic already convicted and condemned, who was known to have close connections with the court. Two of her brothers were in the royal service and it seemed highly probable that she had attended some of the queen’s bible study sessions – she was certainly acquainted with some of the queen’s ladies. If it could be shown that any of these ladies – perhaps even Katherine herself – had been in touch with her since her arrest; if it could be proved that they had been supporting her, then the Lord Chancellor would have ample excuse for an attack on the queen.

  Anne was therefore transferred to the Tow
er and examined by Wriothesley and his henchman the Solicitor General, Richard Rich, about the identity of the other members of her ‘sect’ but, apart from admitting that she had received small gifts of money from servants wearing the liveries of Lady Denny and Lady Hertford, she told them nothing useful. Exasperated, Wriothesley ordered her to be ‘pinched’ on the rack. This was not only illegal without a warrant from the Privy Council, it was also counterproductive. Anne either would not or could not (probably could not) provide her tormentors with any further information and, as soon as the story of her ordeal got about, she became a popular heroine.

  Having failed with Anne Askew, the queen’s enemies were obliged to fall back on charges of a more general nature, such as the possession of banned books which they felt pretty certain would be found in her apartments, or which could always be planted there. A list of charges had, in fact, been drawn up by early July and the stage set for the queen’s arrest. But Henry, who had become sufficiently irritated lately by some of his wife’s freely expressed progressive views – she had on one recent occasion been unwise enough to forget that in any debate, especially theological debate, the king must always win hands down – that he had been willing to listen to hints being dropped about her dangerous opinions so ‘stiffly maintained’. Now, though, he evidently decided matters had gone far enough and he allowed Katherine to be warned of what was being prepared for her. She quickly seized her chance to explain that she had only been bold enough to seem to engage in argument with her lord and master in order to distract him from the pain of his ulcerated leg and also that she herself might profit from hearing his learned discourse. An affecting reconciliation followed and when Wriothesley arrived with forty yeomen of the guard at his back and a warrant for the queen’s arrest in his pocket, he was greeted with a tirade of royal abuse and sent packing with his tail between his legs. This at any rate is the traditional story, as related with much glee and a wealth of circumstantial detail by John Foxe in his best-selling Book of Martyrs (reference: John Foxe, Acts and Monuments, ed. S.R. Cattley and G. Townsend, Vol. V, 553–6).

  Although Anne Askew went to the stake for her beliefs, her martyrdom and the collapse of the plot against the queen marked the end of the brief conservative resurgence. By the autumn the reactionary Catholic party had suffered a virtual death blow with the disgrace of the duke of Norfolk, followed by the sudden removal of Bishop Gardiner from the list of executors of the king’s will. The ruin of the Howards seemed complete. Norfolk’s arrogant soldier-poet son, the earl of Surrey, was executed for the technical treason of quartering his arms with those of Edward the Confessor, and the old duke himself only escaped a similar fate by the skin of his teeth. As for Stephen Gardiner, Henry would give no reason for excluding him from the projected Council of Regency, except to say that ‘he was a wilful man and not meet to be about his son’.

  The motives behind this sudden, savage assault on the conservatives remain somewhat obscure, but one thing is certain – that the driving force came directly from the king. Henry may well have doubted whether either Norfolk or Gardiner, both old-fashioned Catholics at heart, could be trusted to be entirely sound on Royal Supremacy. This was a point on which the king was always ultra-sensitive and may account for the fact that in the closing months of his life he personally ensured that in his son’s reign the balance of power would be tilted in favour of those who advocated a more far-reaching programme of church reform than anything he had previously been prepared to countenance; but with men like the earl of Hertford and John Dudley in the driving seat there would at least be no danger of England returning to papal domination.

  Edward Tudor and Jane Grey both celebrated their ninth birthdays that autumn: the fair, pretty, clever little boy who would soon have to step into his father’s enormous shoes, and the freckle-faced, clever, solemn little girl who was about to become a pawn in the deadly game of power politics played in the grown-up world. For both children childhood was coming to an end and both, in their different ways, were to find the grown-up world a hard and bitter place.

  TWO

  AS HANDSOME A LADY

  AS ANY IN ENGLAND

  If I may once get the king at liberty, I dare warrant that his majesty shall marry no other than Jane.

  Thomas Seymour to Lord Dorset

  Henry VIII died at Whitehall at about two o’clock in the morning of Friday 28 January 1547 and at once a curtain of secrecy descended over the palace as a plan of action, privately agreed between Edward Seymour, earl of Hertford, and Secretary of State William Paget, was put into operation. In his will, a controversial and much-discussed document, the old king had provided for a council of sixteen executors, each ‘with like and equal charge’ to rule the country during his son’s minority – an arrangement so patently impractical that it had been set aside within a week of his death and at a meeting of the executors held on 31 January it was agreed that ‘some special man’ of their number would have to be preferred above the rest. The choice was an obvious one and the council proceeded to confer on Edward Seymour, earl of Hertford, ‘the name and title of Protector of all the realms and dominions of the King’s majesty that now is, and of Governor of his most royal person’.1

  There were, of course, plenty of precedents, albeit not all of them happy ones, for appointing the uncle of a child king as regent and guardian, and Edward Seymour had other qualifications. He was a man of proven ability, an experienced and successful soldier and diplomat, generally respected by his peers and trusted by the late king. But he was not of the blood royal, nor even of noble blood. The son of a Wiltshire landowning family, he owed his earldom in part to his own ability but rather more to the fact that his sister had had the good fortune to become queen and give birth to the longed-for male heir. His elevation now to vice-regal status would inevitably give rise to jealousy and faction, and it remained to be seen whether he possessed the qualities necessary to fight off competition and stay at the top of the heap.

  He had begun well. Guided by his friend and ally, that shrewd political operator William Paget, Seymour had left the palace before the old king’s body was cold. His destination was Hertford Castle, the current residence of the new king; his purpose to get possession of his nephew while Paget handled his interests in London. Largely thanks to Paget, the coup was so skilfully managed that by the time the executors met on the 31st they were simply rubber-stamping an already accomplished transference of power. That same day Seymour brought young Edward to the capital, and saw him safely installed in the fortress palace of the Tower, where his apartments had been ‘richly hung and garnished with rich cloth of arras and cloths of estate as appertaineth unto such a royal King’. On the following day came his formal introduction to ‘the most part of his nobility, as well spiritual as temporal’, who had gathered in the presence chamber to kiss his hand and hear the official promulgation of Seymour’s appointment.

  The assembled lords then declared they would be ready at all times ‘with their might and power’ to defend the realm and the king and finally ‘cried all together with a loud voice, “God save the noble King Edward!”’ After which, the noble King Edward took off his cap and recited his piece: ‘We heartily thank you, my lords all; and hereafter in all that you shall have to do with us for any suits or causes, you shall be heartily welcome to us.’2

  Preparations now began for the coronation, which was to take place on 20 February, and on the 18th there was a grand investiture as the new rulers of England made their first experiments in sharing out the sweets of power. The earl of Hertford was created duke of Somerset to emphasise the grandeur of his position; the queen’s brother, William Parr, became marquess of Northampton; John Dudley, Viscount Lisle, became earl of Warwick; and the younger Seymour brother, Thomas, became Baron Seymour of Sudeley. On the 19th Edward made the recognition procession from the Tower to Westminster. Dressed in white and silver, with the tall imposing figure of the new duke of Somerset at his side, the third Tudor king rode through gaily dec
orated, freshly gravelled streets lined with cheering crowds and surrounded by all the pomp and panoply amassed by his ancestors. The city had, as usual, put on a splendid show, with allegorical tableaux, singing boys and Latin orations at every corner; but as far as Edward was concerned, the high spot of the occasion was undoubtedly the Spanish acrobat who performed ‘masteries’ on a rope stretched above St Paul’s churchyard, and who delayed the king’s majesty with all his train ‘a good space of time’.3

  The coronation ceremony itself, performed by Edward’s godfather, Archbishop Cranmer, went without a hitch, though it was perhaps ironical that the first king of England to be crowned as Supreme Head of the Church, God’s vice-regent and Christ’s vicar within his own dominions should have been a child of nine. But if anyone in the congregation found anything even faintly ludicrous in the spectacle they were careful not to say so, and in sermon after sermon preached in the weeks following the coronation Edward was compared to such Old Testament heroes as David, Josiah and the young Solomon. The physical age of the spiritual father of the people was immaterial, his extreme youth a mere temporary inconvenience. What mattered was the fact that he was God’s anointed, divinely ordained to guide the people into the paths of righteousness. Edward certainly believed this. Whatever inner misgivings he may have felt were connected not with God’s purposes but with man’s.