Lady Jane Grey Read online

  The Admiral might have had the law on his side, at least until Jane reached the age of twenty-one, but as far as her marriage was concerned he was no nearer to getting his hands on Edward than he had ever been. Elizabeth, too, remained out of his reach. But in the princess’s household, now established at the old bishop’s palace at Hatfield, there was excited speculation about his intentions and a rumour had begun to circulate that the real reason why the Lord Admiral had kept Queen Katherine’s ladies together was to wait on the Lady Elizabeth after they were married. Rather less credibly, gossip was also linking his name with Lady Jane – a titbit which his lordship passed on to one of his cronies as a joke: ‘I tell you this merrily.’

  Other people, including the venerable and much-respected Lord Privy Seal, John Russell, tried to warn Seymour of the risks he was running – especially over his increasingly obvious interest in Elizabeth. Any man who sought to marry either of the princesses would undoubtedly ‘procure unto himself the occasion of his utter undoing’ declared Lord Russell, but Thomas Seymour, who was so closely related to the king, would be particularly vulnerable, for if one of his uncles married one of the heirs to his throne, Edward would be bound to think the worst, and ‘as often as he shall see you, to think that you gape and wish for his death’.30

  But Thomas Seymour, who, for whatever reason, apparently believed himself to be fireproof, persisted on his unwise chosen course. He was now making detailed enquiries into the state of Elizabeth’s finances. Thomas Parry, her steward or ‘cofferer’, came up to London shortly before Christmas and the Admiral took the opportunity to have several conversations with him. He wanted to know all about the size of the princess’s household staff; the whereabouts and value of her landed property; what terms she held them on; and, especially, whether or not her title to them had yet been confirmed by letters patent. She could get her lands exchanged for better ones, he told Parry, and wished they were situated in Wales or the West Country – significantly where most of his own strength lay. He went on to ask about her housekeeping expenses and to compare them with ‘what was spent in his own house’.31 He was also sending her friendly messages and even suggesting that he might come and visit her in the country, although when the Protector heard of this he threatened to clap his brother in the Tower if he went anywhere near the princess.

  The end of the year approached and with it came the end of the Lord Admiral’s enterprising career. The government had put up with a good deal from Thomas Seymour but by early 1549 the evidence of his various ‘disloyal practices’ had become too circumstantial to be disregarded any longer, and late in the evening of 17 January he was arrested at Seymour Place. Next day the Council’s agents began the business of rounding up his associates. The Lady Elizabeth’s governess and steward were taken away for questioning and Sir Robert Tyrwhit arrived at Hatfield with instructions to extract a ‘confession’ from the princess. This proved to be a thankless task. Elizabeth denied and went on denying that either she or her servants had ever at any time contemplated her marriage to the Admiral, or anyone else for that matter, without the consent of the king, the Council and the Lord Protector. Details of those early morning romps at Chelsea and Hanworth, even the shameful reason why Queen Katherine had had to send her away the previous year, were dragged out of Parry and Mrs Ashley but, although embarrassing, these were not evidence of conspiracy and no trick of the interrogator’s trade could trap the princess into making any damaging admissions. Even at fifteen Elizabeth Tudor knew how to look after herself.

  Gathering evidence of the Admiral’s other subversive activities presented fewer problems. William Sherington, who, in his capacity of vice-treasurer of the Bristol mint, had been supplying his lordship with cash derived from clipping the coinage and illicitly buying up and minting church plate, made a full confession, as did John Fowler of the Privy Chamber, who had been acting as Seymour’s private intermediary with the king. Even the king himself obligingly remembered certain conversations he had had with his uncle over the past two years, while the marquess of Dorset, in a series of self-exculpatory statements, was busy helping the government with its enquiries, explaining how he had been ‘seduced and aveugled’ against his better judgement into cooperating with Seymour’s plans for his daughter’s future. The only person who attempted to speak up for the Admiral was his friend John Harington, who deposed that he had heard his master say of the Lady Jane ‘that she should not be married until such time as she should be able to bear a child, and her husband able to get one’.32

  The Council met on 22 February to consider the matter and came to the conclusion that ‘the Lord Admiral was sore charged of divers and sundry Articles of High Treason … against the King’s Majesty’s person and his Royal Crown’. Thirty-three Articles or charges had been drawn up in the form of an indictment and since parliament was then in session it was agreed that any further proceedings should take the form of a bill of attainder – always a cheap and convenient method of dealing with troublemakers. This passed both Houses early in March and it now lay with the Protector to take the final decision on his brother’s fate. There was silence for nearly a week while, presumably, the unfortunate Somerset wrestled with his conscience. Then the earl of Warwick, who had been quietly waiting for the Seymour brothers to destroy each other, applied some discreet pressure on his fellow councillors, who waited on the king with a request that they might ‘proceed to justice’ without further troubling him or the Lord Protector. Edward, who did not greatly care for either of his uncles, raised no objection and the Admiral went to keep his appointment with the executioner on Tower Hill on 20 March.33

  There can, of course, be no reasonable doubt that Thomas Seymour had wanted to marry Elizabeth, that he would have liked to overthrow his brother’s government and that he had actively plotted to achieve both these objectives but whether the Imperial ambassador was right in assuming that ‘following the example of Richard III he wished to make himself king’ is another matter altogether. The younger Seymour was an unstable, irresponsible character who had allowed his personal jealousy and ambition to become obsessions, but such an inept conspirator scarcely represented a very serious danger to the state. He did, however, represent a serious nuisance which could no longer be safely tolerated.

  Jane Grey had played no part in any of these dramatic events. She had been hastily removed by her parents at the time of the Admiral’s arrest and was now back at Bradgate, well out of harm’s way. What her feelings were are not recorded, nor how much she knew of the details, but she would undoubtedly have heard all about the last moments of the man who had once been towards her a ‘loving and kind father’. It seemed that Thomas Seymour had died badly, refusing, as he stood on the scaffold, to exhibit the Christian contrition and resignation considered proper on such occasions. His execution, too, was badly botched and it took two strokes of the axe to kill him, but, as Hugh Latimer remarked in his funeral sermon, ‘when a man hath two strokes with an axe who can tell but that between two strokes he doth repent’. Bishop Latimer refused to speculate further, only saying, in a sermon not noticeably pervaded with the spirit of Christian charity, that he had died very dangerously, irksomely and horribly. It seemed, in fact, as if God had clean forsaken the Lord Admiral and the bishop felt the realm was well rid of him. ‘He was, I heard say, a covetous man: I would there were no more in England … a seditious man, a contemner of common prayer: I would there were no more in England. Well, he is gone: I would he had left none behind him!’34 But Tom Seymour had left his infant daughter behind him, an innocent and often forgotten victim of the whole sorry affair. Little Mary Seymour, orphaned at seven months, was, at her father’s request, handed over to the reluctant care of the duchess of Suffolk, once her mother’s dear friend, and is believed to have died about the time of her second birthday.35

  Down at Hatfield Elizabeth was already embarking on the campaign to clear her name, addressing one of her carefully crafted letters to the Lord Protector in which she asked
that a proclamation declaring that the tales being spread about her ‘were but lies’ should be issued to silence the gossip-mongers. The Protector was not unsympathetic but he had more serious concerns than the princess’s reputation on his mind in the summer of 1549, which was marked by widespread and increasing popular discontent. On Whit Sunday the first English Book of Common Prayer, the fruit of Thomas Cranmer’s labours over the past decade, became the only legal form of worship. Based on the traditional Sarum rite, the new liturgy remained something of a compromise between old and new, and was worded loosely enough, it was hoped, to be acceptable to all but the most entrenched conservatives. Nevertheless its launch led to angry rejection by clergy and parishioners in parts of the Home Counties, followed by a quite serious armed rebellion in the West Country, where the prayer book was ungratefully dismissed as no more than a ‘Christmas game’. Another, more serious, rising broke out in East Anglia in July. This was due less to religious outrage than to economic grievances connected with the enclosure of common land and aroused correspondingly serious alarm in the minds of the landowning classes.

  The Protector’s possibly not-altogether-deserved reputation for sympathy with the poor and their troubles might have earned him the title of ‘the Good Duke’ among some sections of the populace, but it did nothing to endear him to his peers, who turned instead towards the earl of Warwick, a reassuringly tough and capable soldier, untroubled by any dangerous notions about social justice. Meanwhile, Somerset’s growing sense of isolation and insecurity was being reflected in a show of arrogance and intolerance of opposition – ‘great choleric fashions whensoever you are contraried’ – which had the effect of alienating his remaining support on the Council. His public image, too, had been badly damaged by his brother’s death, just as Warwick had known it would be. His outwardly unfeeling acceptance of the Admiral’s execution had repelled a lot of people who now, unfairly, stigmatised him as a fratricide, ‘a bloodsucker and a ravenous wolf’.

  In mid-September the earl of Warwick returned to London in triumph after successfully destroying the East Anglian rebels at Dussindale. As well as being the hero of the hour, he had a well-armed, experienced body of troops at his disposal and judged the moment was now ripe for an attempt to dislodge the Protector. Towards the end of the month the citizens were surprised to see the lords of the Council going armed about the streets with their servants ‘likewise weaponed, attending upon them in new liveries, to the great wondering of many’. There was much coming and going at Warwick’s house in Holborn and rumours that ‘the confederates in this matter’ were planning to seize the Tower went flying round the town.36

  Somerset was at Hampton Court with the king, trying ineffectually to raise some support in the neighbourhood, when he heard that the ‘London Lords’, as the opposition had become known, intended to pay him an unfriendly visit. On Saturday 6 October, between nine and ten in the evening, he got Edward out of bed and bundled him off to seek sanctuary at Windsor – an unnerving experience for which the king never really forgave him. But Warwick and his confederates pursued him there and a few days later the Lord Protector had surrendered and was conveyed under arrest to the Tower. It was not, as might have been expected, the final disaster. The ‘Good Duke’ still had quite a considerable popular following, both in London and elsewhere, and Warwick was far too astute to risk overreaching himself at this stage. Somerset was presently released, even temporarily regaining a seat on the Council, but his reign was over and his end merely postponed.

  The new strong man was in his late forties with a commanding presence and magnetic personality, whose career had followed the perfect pattern for the rise of the Tudor meritocracy. The Dudleys were a respectably old baronial family, deriving their surname from the castle and town in the West Midlands, but John was descended from a junior branch of the tree and his father Edmund, a clever lawyer with a first-class financial brain, had served Henry VII in the capacity of fiscal adviser rather too efficiently for his own good. One of the first acts of the young Henry VIII had been to offer Edmund Dudley, together with his colleague Richard Empson, as sacrifices on the altar of public opinion and both men were executed on charges which the government scarcely bothered to pretend were other than contrived to appease the outraged taxpayers of England. John Dudley, who was nine years old at the time, became the ward of his father’s friend Edward Guildford, a prosperous landowner in Kent and Sussex, and he later married his guardian’s daughter.

  A darkly handsome boy, gifted, forceful and ferociously ambitious, young John was clearly destined to be a high-flyer and by the early 1520s had begun to make a name for himself in military circles. He was knighted by the duke of Suffolk during the brief and not very glorious French expedition of 1523, while his spectacular feats of courage and skill in the tiltyard earned him royal esteem and the sort of glamour normally associated with a sporting superstar. By the next decade he had progressed to more serious things, proving that he could also offer a wide range of political, diplomatic and administrative talents in total commitment to the king’s service. In 1542 he was entrusted with the responsible job of Warden of the Scottish Marches and was raised to the peerage as Viscount Lisle – a title devolving from his mother, born Elizabeth Grey, aunt of that other Elizabeth Grey once briefly betrothed to Charles Brandon. (It is always useful to remember that the Tudor ruling class comprised a very small and intricately interrelated society.) During the remainder of the 1540s he continued to enhance his reputation as a first-rank military commander and his name had, of course, figured high on the magic list of executors of King Henry’s will.

  Throughout his career Warwick had made a careful study of Tudor psychology and he had become a particular favourite with the old king, especially after the death of Charles Brandon. His plan in the winter of 1549/50 seems to have been to use the still malleable Edward as a screen behind which further to consolidate his own position and secure the future of his numerous sons. In private life the earl was an affectionate family man with plenty of experience of bringing up boys, but he never made the mistake of treating Edward like a child. Instead he treated him as a king, who would soon be old enough to start taking an active part in the business of government, and Edward at just twelve years old responded eagerly to this carefully calculated form of flattery.

  The success of the second bloodless coup of the reign had been due largely to the Protector’s lack of tact and judgement, and his failure to foresee and control the social unrest resulting from religious change, economic hardship and the unpopular policy of enclosure; he also made the serious tactical mistake of giving Warwick the chance to take the credit for suppressing the rebels at Dussindale. In retrospect it all looks so easy, but it could just as easily have gone either way. If John Russell, who had just dealt successfully with the western rising, and the marquess of Northampton had sided with Somerset the outcome could well have been different. One thing though is surely not in question: the Lord Protector’s fall had made the tragedy of Jane Grey inevitable.

  THREE

  THIS MOST NOBLE VIRGIN

  It is incredible how far she [Jane] has advanced already, and to what perfection she will advance in a few years … unless perhaps she is diverted from her pursuits by some calamity of the times.

  John Ulmer to Conrad Pellican

  In the late summer of 1550 Mr Roger Ascham was travelling south from his Yorkshire home en route for the port of Billingsgate, where he was to embark for Germany on a diplomatic mission to the Emperor Charles V, but he broke his journey in Leicestershire in order to call at Bradgate and take his leave of Lady Jane Grey.

  Ascham was another Cambridge man, already in his mid-thirties enjoying a considerable reputation as a scholar with advanced ideas on the education of the young. He had been briefly a member of the household at Chelsea, winning the coveted post of tutor to the Princess Elizabeth after the death of William Grindal in January 1548, and had become a great admirer of John Aylmer’s star pupil. He found her tha
t August day ‘in her chamber, reading Phaedon Phaedonis in Greek, and that with as much delight as some gentleman would read a merry tale in Boccaccio’. When, ‘after salutation and duty done’, he asked why she was not with her parents and all the other ladies and gentlemen who were out hunting in the park, Jane answered with a smile that she knew all their sport was but a shadow to the pleasure she found in Plato. ‘Alas, good folk, they never felt what true pleasure meant.’ ‘And how came you, Madame,’ enquired Ascham, ‘to this deep knowledge of pleasure, and what did chiefly allure you unto it: seeing not many women but very few men have attained thereunto?’ Her answer was astonishing:

  I will tell you, and tell you a truth which perchance ye will marvel at. One of the greatest benefits that ever God gave me, is that he sent me so sharp and severe parents and so gentle a schoolmaster. For when I am in presence of either father or mother, whether I speak, keep silence, sit, stand or go, eat, drink, be merry or sad, be sewing, playing, dancing or doing anything else, I must do it, as it were, as perfectly as God made the world, or else I am so sharply taunted, so cruelly threatened, yea presently sometimes with pinches, nips and bobs, and other ways, which I will not name, for the honour I bear them, so without measure misordered, that I think myself in hell, till time come that I must go to Mr Aylmer, who teacheth me so gently, so pleasantly, with such fair allurements to learning, that I think all the time nothing whilst I am with him. And when I am called from him, I fall on weeping, because whatever I do else but learning is full of grief, trouble, fear and whole misliking unto me. And thus my book hath been so much my pleasure and more, that … all other pleasures, in very deed, be but trifles and troubles unto me.1