Lady Jane Grey Read online

  The king’s stepmother had been left with no say in the government or in Edward’s further upbringing, but the queen dowager was generously provided for in her husband’s will. Katherine Parr was now an extremely wealthy lady, and until the king married she would remain the first lady in the land, taking precedence even over the two princesses. Once the coronation was over she moved out to the royal manor at Chelsea, one of her dower houses, a comfortable, up-to-date, red-brick building, convenient for London and pleasantly situated overlooking the Thames on the site of the present Cheyne Walk. She was accompanied by the thirteen-year-old Princess Elizabeth, and on an unrecorded date during that spring or early summer the establishment was also joined by young Jane Grey.

  The custom of ‘placing out’ – that is, of sending one’s children away to learn virtue and good manners in a family better circumstanced than one’s own – was an old one and much deprecated by foreigners who considered it to be yet another instance of English coldness and selfishness. It seems to have had its origins in the feudal practice of sending a boy to serve as a page in his lord’s household as the first step in his progression towards knighthood, while for girls, even if in some cases they paid for their keep by performing domestic duties or acting as ‘waiting gentlewomen’ to their hostesses, it offered a useful opportunity for acquiring extra accomplishments and social polish, as well of course as enhancing their chances of making a good marriage.

  For a girl of Jane Grey’s social status the only possible ‘place’ was the royal household and in normal times she would no doubt have joined the ranks of the queen’s maids of honour. As things were, the queen dowager’s household would have offered the next best thing. Edward was known to be very fond of his stepmother and although she had no share in the regency Katherine continued to command a great deal of influence and respect. For Jane herself the change in her circumstances brought nothing but good. She had not been happy at home and her parents, her mother in particular, never appear to have shown her any affection. Not that this was necessarily unusual, though the Dorsets do seem to have been rather more unfeeling than most – unless it is simply that their harshness has been better publicised. But the sixteenth century practised no sentimental cult of childhood. Even that enlightened scholar Luis Vives disapproved of ‘cockering’, or indeed of any outward display of maternal love, ‘lest the children become emboldened to do whatever they like’. He was of the opinion that daughters especially should be handled without cherishing, for while indulgence was bad for sons ‘it utterly destroyeth daughters’.4 It is unlikely that Frances Dorset, a buxom, hard-riding woman who, as she grew older, began to bear an unnerving resemblance to her late uncle Henry, had ever read Vives’s somewhat turgid manual on The Education of a Christian Woman, but she would certainly have agreed with this precept, and her daughters, at least, were never in danger of being destroyed by indulgence.

  The queen was a very different proposition. Katherine Parr, like Jane Seymour, came from a well-to-do landed gentry family but possessed neither royal nor noble blood. The Parrs were originally from Kendal in the remote and rugged northern border country of Westmorland, but by the time of Katherine’s birth in 1512 they had transferred themselves to the more congenial climate of the English midlands. Katherine’s parents were both closely connected with the court, her mother having been a lady-in-waiting and close friend of the unfortunate Catherine of Aragon, and it is possible, though by no means certain, that Katherine spent some part of her childhood at court and may even have been one of the hand-picked young girls who shared lessons with the Princess Mary. More likely she was brought up with her Parr cousins in Northamptonshire while her mother, widowed at twenty-two, was busy scheming to arrange suitable marriages for the three children she had been left to provide for. Most of the money went on securing an aristocratic bride for William, the only son, so that sixteen-year-old Katherine had to be content with Edward Borough of Gainsborough in Lincolnshire. It was a respectable if not very distinguished match and young Edward was said to be delicate. In fact the marriage lasted no more than about three years. Edward Borough died early in 1533 and Katherine found herself alone in the world at the age of barely twenty-one. Her mother was dead by this time, her brother still a minor and her younger sister still unmarried. Her in-laws showed no inclination to go on giving her a home and as a childless widow she had very little claim on them. It was not a comfortable situation to be in, but Katherine, intelligent, energetic and physically attractive, was soon able to move on and within a year had married again, this time to a kinsman of her father, John Neville, Lord Latymer, of Snape Castle in the North Riding of Yorkshire.

  Although he was twice her age and himself twice widowed, being left with two children, Katherine’s second marriage seems to have been reasonably successful – at any rate for the first few years. Then in 1536 came the so-called Pilgrimage of Grace, in which various social and economic grievances connected with land title were combined with conservative resentment over religious change and the dissolution of the monasteries to produce the most serious challenge to central government yet seen in the Tudor century. Its effect on the family at Snape was calamitous, as the rebels first seized Lord Latymer as their hostage and spokesman and later, while he was in London protesting that he had been acting under duress against his will, they returned to threaten Katherine and the children. Although the authorities remained deeply suspicious of Latymer, who was known to have conservative sympathies, he escaped the fate of the other defeated rebels but he and his marriage never fully recovered from the experience.

  Katherine was now spending more and more of her time in London, where she had already begun to make friends among the ‘new-religionists’ as they were known – the term Protestant did not come into general use in England until the middle of the century – although she also renewed her childhood acquaintance with the unswervingly Catholic Princess Mary. Lord Latymer died in March 1543 and his widow was soon being courted by the king’s brother-in-law, the dashingly handsome Thomas Seymour. It was at this point that the king declared an interest and Seymour melted hastily into the background, leaving Katherine reluctantly to accept the fact that it was plainly God’s will that she should become queen of England.

  Reluctant though she may have been, Katherine Parr was to prove one of the most satisfactory of Henry’s wives. Certainly she was the most likeable, and gave the king loyal and sympathetic companionship during the last years of his life. At thirty-one she was still a pretty woman, but more to the point she was also a mature, well-educated and thoughtful woman, anxious to be a good stepmother as well as a good wife, taking a constructive and affectionate interest in the welfare of her husband’s oddly assorted brood. She and Mary were already friends – there was only four years’ difference in their ages – and the two younger children responded eagerly to her warmth and kindness. Little Prince Edward was soon writing to her as ‘dearest mother’ and no one was surprised when Elizabeth was entrusted to the queen’s care after her father’s death.

  Widowed for the third time, Katherine was at long last free to please herself, making no secret of her delight when, very soon after Henry’s death, Thomas Seymour renewed his attentions. ‘I would not have you to think that this mine honest good will toward you to proceed from any sudden motion of passion,’ she wrote to him from Chelsea, ‘for truly as God is God, my mind was fully bent, the other time I was at liberty, to marry you before any man I know.’5 Although she spoke rather half-heartedly about observing a decent period of mourning, Seymour, who had his own reasons for wanting to avoid delay, experienced very little difficulty in cajoling her out of her scruples, and they were married very privately probably no later than May 1547.

  Katherine certainly deserved a chance of happiness. The pity was that she had not made a better choice. Thomas Seymour was a fine figure of a man with a commanding presence and plenty of surface charm: ‘fierce in courage, courtly in fashion; in personage stately, in voice magnificent, but som
ewhat empty of matter’.6 He was also, unfortunately, a vain, greedy, selfish man, consumed with ambition but lacking any political judgement, obsessively jealous of his elder brother and currently labouring under an acute sense of grievance. As well as his peerage and a seat on the Council, he had been given the office of Lord Admiral, passed on to him by John Dudley, but he was very far from being satisfied. An arrangement which allowed one of the king’s uncles to enjoy all the fruits of their valuable relationship while leaving the other to be fobbed off with mere consolation prizes seemed to him highly unjust and he had every intention of redressing the balance as soon as he was in a position to do so. His marriage to Katherine had been a first step in this direction – although a rumour was already going round that if my lord ‘might have had his own will’ he would have married the Lady Elizabeth before he married the queen.

  His lordship also had his eye on Lady Jane Grey who, thanks to her great-uncle Henry’s will, had now become quite an important little girl. A third Act of Succession, passed in 1544, had confirmed the king’s right to dispose of the crown by will, but at the same time made it clear that should Edward die without heirs, and failing any children of the Katherine Parr marriage, the throne was to pass first to Mary and her children and then to Elizabeth, subject to certain conditions to be laid down by their father in his will. The will itself, which was to be a contributory cause of much grief, bitterness and confusion in time to come, recapitulated the provisions of the 1544 Act and went on to stipulate that if either Mary or Elizabeth (neither of whom, incidentally, had been re-legitimated) were to marry without the consent of their brother or his Council, they would forfeit their restored places in the succession. Should the direct line fail altogether, the crown was to come not to the descendants of Henry’s elder sister Margaret, who had married the king of Scotland, but instead ‘to the heirs of the body of the Lady Frances our niece, eldest daughter to our late sister the French Queen lawfully begotten; and for default of such issue of the body of the said Lady Frances, we will that the said imperial crown … shall wholly remain and come to the heirs of the body of the Lady Eleanor, our niece, second daughter to our said late sister the French Queen’.7

  Only if both Frances and Eleanor failed to leave surviving issue would the imperial crown ‘wholly remain and come to the next rightful heirs’, unspecified but presumably the royal Stewarts, currently represented by Margaret Tudor’s granddaughter Mary Queen of Scots, born in 1542. The motive for this deliberate and apparently perverse act of discrimination against the Scottish line has been attributed to Henry’s determination to prevent his realm from falling into the hands of the kings of Scotland. There was also, of course, the common law decree that no foreigner could wear the English crown, but there is not much doubt that the king had been heavily influenced by personal prejudice when drawing up his will. He had been on bad terms with his sister Margaret for several years before her death and in 1544 was still seething over the malice, perfidy and wicked ingratitude of the Scots in refusing to deliver their little queen into his hands as a bride-to-be for Prince Edward.

  In 1547, though, the various eventualities provided for in the old king’s will still looked reasonably remote. Everyone naturally hoped that Edward would grow rapidly to manhood and prove more fortunate than his father when it came to getting male heirs. Equally naturally any reference to the poor survival record of Tudor boys was taboo in polite society, where the new king was being hailed as a miracle of precocity, learning, gravity and wit, and the most immediate consequence of Henry VIII’s eccentric testamentary arrangements was the enhanced social and dynastic status conferred on the children of Frances and Eleanor Brandon. Neither sister had succeeded in raising a son. Like Frances, Eleanor had lost her boy babies and did not herself long survive her uncle, dying in November 1547 at the age of twenty-eight, leaving a seven-year-old daughter, Margaret Clifford, as her only posterity, so that Jane Grey now stood presumptively third in line for the throne. Although very small for her age, and no great beauty with her red hair and freckles, she was apparently quite healthy – a bright, promising child who had become an object of sudden interest to a predator such as Thomas Seymour.

  According to the testimony of John Harington, a trusted friend and confidential servant of the new Lord Admiral, he was sent to open negotiations with the marquess of Corset and use ‘all the persuasions he could’ to get Dorset to agree to put Jane’s future in his master’s hands, promising that the Admiral would see her placed in marriage much to her father’s comfort. When his lordship seemed ‘somewhat cold’ and asked for more details, Harington, at least according to his later recollection, replied discreetly that Jane was ‘as handsome a lady as any in England, and that she might be wife to any prince in Christendom’, and that, if the king’s majesty, when he came of age, should decide to marry within the realm, he was as likely to choose his cousin as anyone else. In any case, living in the Lord Admiral’s house, who was the king’s uncle, must surely increase her chances.8

  Lord Dorset was to remember the conversation rather differently, declaring that Harington had given him a firm guarantee that the Admiral would arrange to marry his daughter to the king – ‘fear you not but he will bring it to pass’ – and there seems no reason to doubt that it was on this understanding that a bargain was presently struck and ‘certain covenants’ entered into. Put crudely, the marquess agreed to sell his daughter’s wardship and marriage to Thomas Seymour for the sum of £2,000; the Admiral handed over a few hundred on account and Jane passed into his custody.

  It is not entirely clear when this transaction was concluded. According to Dorset, he was first approached ‘immediately after the King our late master’s death’,9 so it is possible that Jane was already the Admiral’s ward living in his town house, Seymour Place, at the time of his marriage to Katherine. Whatever the actual sequence of events, Jane’s own preferences were not likely to have been consulted, nor would she have expected them to be. Certainly she was not complaining, for under her new guardians’ roof she was enjoying the novel experience of being treated like a favoured guest, petted by the ladies, her ‘towardness’ openly discussed and admired, her brilliant prospects whispered over. In this congenial atmosphere she naturally began to blossom and to absorb the queen’s brand of evangelical Lutheranism with all the eager response to be expected from an intelligent, sensitive child previously starved of affection, encouragement and mental stimulus.

  Under the new regime Katherine was no longer obliged to conceal the distinctly left-of-centre religious convictions set out in her own words in her book Lamentation of a Sinner, published in the autumn of 1547, in which she confesses how once she had called superstition, godly meaning, and true holiness, error. But now she felt herself to have come, as it were, ‘in a new garment before God’, who had opened her eyes and made her see and behold Christ, the wisdom of God, the light of the world, ‘with a supernatural sight of faith’. All the pleasures, vanities, honors and riches of the world had begun to seem worthless as she came to perceive that Christ was her only saviour and redeemer, ‘and the same doctrine to be all divine, holy and heavenly, infused by grace into the hearts of the faithful, which can never be attained by human doctrine, wit, nor reason’.10

  While Jane was undoubtedly greatly influenced by the queen’s piety, she was also now being launched on a programme of studies which included Greek and modern languages as well as Latin. Dr Harding had been superseded by John Aylmer, a protégé of her father, who had paid for the young man’s university education and employed him at Bradgate as chaplain and tutor to the children. Aylmer had joined the household in about 1543, though it is not clear if he accompanied Jane when she first went to London. Very probably he did, but in any case Katherine would certainly have taken a close interest in her progress.

  The notion that girls as well as boys should be given the chance to benefit from a classical academic education was of comparatively recent origin, being a by-product of that great rebirth �
�� or renaissance – of intellectual curiosity which had first sprung to life in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Italy and spread slowly northward. Paradoxically the New Learning, as it became known in England, had its roots in a nostalgia for the past. Like most reformers the renaissance scholars wanted to go back to the beginning; to revive the classical culture of the ancient world and, as the movement gained strength in northern Europe, to return to the purity of the Apostolic Church. They turned to the study of Greek partly to rediscover the pre-Christian philosophers but also to be able to read the Gospels in their original form, so that the New Learning had helped to open the door to the New Religion. In England, too, the new wave of scholars had always shown a particular interest in education. Men like William Lily of Lily’s Latin Grammar, John Colet, founder of St Paul’s school, Thomas Linacre the physician, William Grocyn the Greek scholar and Thomas More the lawyer, who congregated in London and Cambridge in the early 1500s, were all eager to disseminate their ideas for the introduction of a wider and more liberal curriculum in the schools and universities, but it was Thomas More, using his own daughters as guinea pigs, who conducted the first serious experiment with the novel idea that girls could be educated too.

  By no means everyone was convinced that this was either wise or feasible. Even the great humanist scholar Desiderius Erasmus, More’s old friend and admirer, had been sceptical. But the Sage of Rotterdam was so impressed by the mini-Utopia of More’s household – ‘Plato’s Academy on a Christian footing’, as he described it, where the great man’s daughters studied Latin and Greek, logic, philosophy and theology, mathematics and astronomy – that he was quite won over and predicted that their example would be imitated far and wide. It was not, of course. Highly educated women remained in a small elite minority and even the most advanced educational theorists never dreamt of challenging society’s two basic assumptions: that a woman’s place was in the home and that a nice girl’s only ambition should be to make an honourable marriage and become a good wife and mother. Indeed, the educational theorists from Luis Vives downwards all attached great importance to the housewifely arts. Vives himself was insistent that girls should be taught to handle wool and flax, which were, in his opinion, the two crafts yet left of the old innocent world, and believed ‘in no wise that a woman should be ignorant of those feats that must be done by hand, no, not though she be a princess or a queen’.11