Lady Jane Grey Read online

  Mary had been avoiding the court deliberately, keeping her occasional visits as brief and as private as possible for fear that she would somehow be tricked or forced into attending one of the new services and so appear to be lending her countenance to the hated New Religion. But in March 1551 she had gone up to town to make a plea for brotherly tolerance and consideration. ‘The Lady Mary my sister came to me at Westminster,’ recorded Edward with characteristic terseness, ‘… where it was declared how long I had suffered her mass against my will [he later crossed these words out] in hope of her reconciliation, and how now … except I saw some short amendment, I could not bear it. She answered that her soul was God’s and her faith she would not change, nor dissemble her opinion with contrary doings. It was said I constrained not her faith, but willed her not as a king to rule, but as a subject to obey. And that her example might breed too much inconvenience.’15

  The king took his responsibilities as keeper of his people’s conscience with great seriousness, and yet it seems likely that the question of his sister’s awkward stance did not at that time worry him too extremely. Mary, by contemporary standards, was already middle-aged. To Edward, at thirteen, she must have seemed already old – she was, after all, more than old enough to be his mother – and her health was known to be poor. Edward, a notably unsentimental child, may well have reflected that the problem would surely soon go away of its own accord and, left to himself, he might well have been prepared, reluctantly, to let the matter rest.

  But unhappily for Mary, she was now once again heiress presumptive and her actions and beliefs consequently had political significance. John Dudley had found it expedient, for reasons not unconnected with his regime’s increasing financial difficulties, to form an alliance with the radical wing of the Protestant party. At the same time, he was aware that the conservative bulk of the English people disliked the noisy violence of the militant reformers and their spoliation of the parish churches, and that the silent majority agreed in their hearts with the Lady Mary when she wished aloud that everything could have remained as it was at the time of her father’s death. Her example and her influence were important and so, as once before, it was necessary to compel her submission and, as once before, Mary surrendered. By the end of the year mass was no longer being celebrated in her chapel where, of course, any of her neighbours who wished to come and worship in the old familiar way had always been welcome. Mary herself continued to seek the consolations of her religion, but in fear and secrecy behind the locked doors of her own apartments.

  Edward’s relations with his younger sister were uncomplicated by theological divergence, and Elizabeth was always ‘most honourably received’ when she came to court, in order, reported the Imperial ambassador, ‘to show the people how much glory belongs to her who has embraced the new religion and become a very great lady’.16 All the same, the great lady herself, who had by this time pretty well succeeded in living down the unfortunate effects of the Seymour scandal, was being careful to avoid obvious involvement with any factional interests and keeping her public appearances to a minimum. Her failure to greet Mary of Guise had probably had a good deal to do with the fact that the French were already beginning to insinuate that, as the late king’s bastard, she had no right to her place in the succession. Since his domestic policies had brought him into collision with the Emperor, the duke of Northumberland had been forced to cultivate the French and Elizabeth would naturally have been unwilling to run the risk of a snub. She therefore stayed at home, ostentatiously ignoring the interest in French fashions which the Regent’s visit had reawakened among her contemporaries. Elizabeth at this time affected a severely plain style of dress which had won her golden opinions among the reforming party. John Aylmer, among others, commented approvingly on her refusal to alter any of her ‘maiden shamefastness’ or to copy those noblemen’s wives and daughters who were going about ‘dressed and painted like peacocks’.17

  Elizabeth was, of course, setting a fashion to be copied by other high-born Protestant maidens. When Jane Grey received a gift from Mary of ‘goodly apparel of tinsel cloth of gold and velvet, laid on with parchment lace of gold’, she said: ‘What shall I do with it?’ ‘Marry’, said a gentlewoman standing by, ‘wear it.’ ‘Nay’, answered she, ‘that were a shame to follow my Lady Mary against God’s word, and leave my Lady Elizabeth, which followeth God’s word.’18 Jane was never exactly noted for her tact.

  In spite of the growing religious divide, however, there was far more friendly intercourse between the Suffolk family and the Lady Mary than there was with Elizabeth. Mary Tudor and Frances Suffolk were very much of an age, sharing much the same childhood memories and seeing quite a lot of each other. For instance, it is recorded that in November 1551 Frances and all three of her daughters stayed with Mary for several weeks at the princess’s town house, the former Priory of St John of Jerusalem at Clerkenwell, and this may have been the occasion when Mary gave ‘my cousin Frances’ a pair of beads (that is, a rosary) of crystal trimmed with a tassel of goldsmith’s work, and ‘to my cousin Jane Gray’ a necklace of goldsmith’s work and small pearls and another ‘lace for the neck’ of small pearls and rubies, suitable trinkets for a young girl.19

  The duke and duchess, their three daughters and the duke’s younger brothers, Lord Thomas and Lord John Grey, spent that Christmas at Tylsey, or Tilty, in Essex, home of the Willoughbys of Woollaton. The duke’s aunt, Lady Anne Grey, had married Sir Henry Willoughby and on their deaths Suffolk had become guardian to their children. Also present, despite her recent bereavement, was Catherine, now strictly speaking the dowager duchess of Suffolk, although she was never referred to as such, but simply as ‘my lady of Suffolk’. Open house was kept at Tylsey throughout the twelve days of Christmas and beyond, with lavish quantities of food and drink laid on for all the neighbourhood, plus entertainment by tumblers and jugglers and singing boys – the local talent being supplemented by the earl of Oxford’s company of professional actors who performed several plays.20

  James Haddon, needless to say, disapproved profoundly of such ‘mummeries’, which seemed to him to serve the devil by imitating a pagan saturnalia, and he lamented the way in which uninstructed country folk regarded it as almost a part of their religion to make merry after this unwholesome fashion ‘on account of the birth of our Lord’. Although the nobility were now beginning to understand that it was not part of their duty so to conduct themselves, ‘yet partly from the force of habit, and a desire not to appear stupid, and not good fellows, as they call it, but partly and principally, as I think, from their not having yet so far advanced as to be able perfectly to hate the garment spotted by the flesh … they have no settled intention much less any desire, to conquer and crucify themselves’.21

  The godly Dr Haddon discoursed long-windedly on this head in a letter to Henry Bullinger, but appears to have had little or no success in persuading his own unregenerate flock to crucify themselves by giving up their accustomed Christmas revels. The party at Tylsey did not break up until 20 January, when the Suffolks went on to visit the duke’s sister, Lady Audley, at nearby Walden.

  It was two days after this that the king made a brief entry in his Journal: ‘The Duke of Somerset had his head cut off upon Tower Hill between eight and nine o’clock in the morning.’22 Edward’s apparent lack of any human feelings on this occasion have earned him a reputation for callous cold-heartedness. Certainly there is no evidence that he ever made any attempt to save the duke, or even that he took any very particular interest in the proceedings against him, but did he perhaps derive some secret satisfaction from the knowledge that he was surely the first child king so effectively to have turned the tables on uncles?

  Edward may have displayed no outward signs of distress over Somerset’s death, but the duke’s execution had been the scene of considerable public emotion. A large crowd of sympathisers assembled to witness his last moments, during which, unlike his brother, he behaved with impeccable dignity and Christian resig
nation, and after the deed was done there was a rush to dip handkerchiefs in his blood to be preserved as relics.

  What Jane Grey thought about the death of the ‘Good Duke’ is not recorded. Possibly the Christmas festivities at Tylsey had been rather too much for her. At least John Ulmer, writing to Henry Bullinger in February, reports that she was just recovering from ‘a severe and dangerous illness’. But she was still engrossed in her scholarly pursuits and was currently engaged ‘in some extraordinary production, which will very soon be brought to light’. Ulmer does not give any further details, but perhaps the ‘extraordinary production’ was connected with the recent discovery of ‘a great treasure of most valuable books – Basil on Isaiah and the Psalms in Greek; Chrysostom on the Gospels in Greek; the whole of Proclus, the Platonists etc. etc.’ – which had apparently been found in some parcels acquired for the duke of Suffolk from an Italian dealer.23 Jane was still corresponding with Bullinger herself and with other German-Swiss doctors of the so-called Genevan or Calvinist sect, and in the spring of 1552 sent a present of a pair of gloves to Bullinger’s wife. But although her enthusiasm remained as strong as ever, she had less time these days to devote to her intellectual interests. Her parents had never objected to them – they were fashionable and therefore desirable. All the same, now that Jane was growing up they expected her to take her place in society and not spend all her time immured in study. Learning and piety were all very well in their place, but the Suffolks had certainly not given up their hopes of exploiting their daughter’s dynastic potential by seeing her make a great marriage.

  Sometime during that summer of her fifteenth year she went with her mother and father to stay with the Princess Mary at Newhall Boreham in Essex, Mary’s favourite country house, and it was there, according to the story handed down by Protestant tradition, that Jane once again displayed the sort of fearless honesty – or offensive bigotry, according to point of view – not calculated to endear her to her more politic elders. She was, so the story goes, walking through the chapel at Newhall with Lady Wharton, the wife of one of Mary’s officers and, naturally, a devout Roman Catholic. Seeing her companion curtsy to the altar, where the Host was exposed, Jane enquired guilelessly if the Lady Mary had come in. ‘No,’ answered Lady Wharton, ‘I made my curtsy to Him that made us all.’ ‘Why,’ said Jane, ‘how can that be, when the baker made him?’24

  This exchange was, of course, promptly reported back to Mary, who, according to John Foxe, ‘never after loved the Lady Jane as she had before’. But then the argument over the Real Presence in the Eucharist – whether the bread and wine miraculously assumed the substance of Christ’s body and blood at the moment of consecration, or whether they were merely the hallowed symbols of the communicant’s means of redemption – lay at the very heart of the ideological conflict which divided Catholic from Protestant. In Jane Grey’s world it was a fundamental point of principle for which thousands of committed men and women were ready to (and did) suffer martyrdom, and in this context her reaction to the tacit challenge offered by Anne Wharton was perfectly in character.

  During the past five years the revolution begun with the schism of 1535 had taken on a new momentum. The first parliament of Edward’s reign had seen an Act repealing the Henrician additions to the old treason laws, plus the medieval statute de Haeretico Comburendo and the Six Articles of 1539. As well as this, all restrictions on printing, reading or teaching the Scriptures were removed and a measure enabling the laity to receive communion in both kinds – that is, in both bread and wine – was passed. This session of parliament also saw the passage of an Act dissolving the chantries and religious guilds and brotherhoods. Chantries, which could perhaps be described as a form of spiritual insurance, were endowments – usually in real estate – intended to support a priest to say regular masses for the souls of the founder and others named by him, usually members of his family, in the hope of shortening the length of time they might expect to have to spend in purgatory. The king’s loving subjects assembled in parliament, however, considered this ‘devising and phantasing vain opinions of purgatory and masses satisfactory, to be done for them which be departed’ merely served to encourage the people’s ignorance ‘of their very true and perfect salvation through the death of Jesus Christ’.

  The chantry priests would sometimes keep a school as a sideline and it was therefore now proposed that their endowments might well be converted to ‘good and godly uses, as in erecting of grammar schools to the education of youth in virtue and godliness, the further augmentation of the Universities, and better provision for the poor and needy’.25 In fact, it appears that only a small proportion of the assets belonging to the chantries and other similar institutions which passed into the hands of the Crown in 1548 was ever put to ‘good and godly uses’, and most of the grammar schools which bear the king’s name owe their foundation to private benefactors.

  Having done away with the ancient ‘superstition’ of prayers for the dead and the false doctrine of purgatory, the authorities moved briskly on to overseeing the removal of images and stained glass from parish churches, particularly in London and the south-east, always the most radical areas. Popish survivals such as the lighting of candles, kissing and decking of images were already being actively discouraged if not forbidden. The familiar ceremonies associated with Candlemas, Ash Wednesday, Palm Sunday and Good Friday were discontinued, and Whitsun 1548 passed without the usual releasing of doves from the roof of St Paul’s. The 1549 prayer book had abolished much of the symbolism surrounding baptism, the blessing of the ring no longer formed part of the marriage service and the traditional cycle of feast and fast days was pared down to the major festivals of Christmas, Easter and Whitsun, with only a few saints’ days still allowed.

  From the early 1550s the Edwardian Reformation was increasingly influenced by the arrival from Europe of men like Martin Bucer, Peter Martyr and John a Lasco, who brought with them ideas more advanced than anything yet sanctioned in England and who, by setting up their own ‘stranger churches’ in London, provided patterns for an ideal reformed church which did not, of course, include bishops. This was going rather too far, but the clergy were now permitted to marry, and the communion tables, already replacing altars in parish churches, were now to be ‘had down into the body of the church … and set in the mid-aisle among the people’, while the second Book of Common Prayer, introduced in 1552, completed the process of transforming the sacrifice of the mass into a communion or commemorative service. The words of the administration, which now ran ‘Take and eat this in remembrance that Christ died for thee, and feed on him in thy heart by faith with thanksgiving’, could no longer be interpreted, by even the most elastic conscience, as anything but an explicit denial of the Real Presence.

  In London, always a forcing-house of religious radicalism, numerous tracts, ballads and broadsheets dismissing the sacrament as no more than a Jack-in-the-Box and ridiculing Mother Mass or reviling her as the whore of Babylon had been circulating freely for some time, while rude rhymes, of the kind more often written up than written down, were sure of a success in the alehouses. A good example of the genre went as follows:

  A good mistress missa

  Shall ye go from us thissa?

  Well yet I must ye kissa

  Alack, from pain I pissa.26

  The use of the priestly vestments associated with the celebration of mass was now forbidden, only a surplice being required, and even the act of kneeling to receive the sacrament had become hedged about with anxious denials that any form of adoration was intended.

  This revised and simplified form of service also, of course, provided the government with all the excuse it needed for confiscating the vestments, plate and other valuables that were now regarded as popish and undesirable and that could be converted into urgently needed cash. In the spring of 1553, therefore, Commissions were sent round the country with instructions to have inventories made of all the church goods remaining in cathedrals and parish churches: />
  That is to say, all the jewels of gold and silver, as crosses, candlesticks, censors, chalices, and all other jewels of gold and silver and ready money, which should be delivered to the master of the King’s jewels in the Tower of London, and all copes and vestments of cloth of gold, cloth of tissue and cloth of silver, to be delivered to the master of the King’s wardrobe in London. … Reserved to every cathedral and parish church a chalice or cup, or more, with tablecloths for the communion board, at the discretion of the Commissioners.27

  In May 1551 the retiring Venetian ambassador wrote scathingly of the inconstancy of the English in matters of religion, ‘for today they do one thing and tomorrow another’. Daniel Barbaro believed that there was still a good deal of dissatisfaction with the new creed, ‘as shown by the insurrection of ‘49’ and thought that if these dissidents had a leader, they might well rise again. ‘On the other hand’, he went on, ‘the Londoners are more inclined to obedience, because they are nearer the Court. In short, the English err in their religion, and in their opinions about the faith, the ceremonies of the Church, and obedience to the Pope.’ The blame for all these evils in Barbaro’s opinion, should be laid at the door of Henry VIII and he proceeded to favour the Doge and Senate with a potted history of the late king’s remarkable matrimonial marathon. ‘In this confusion of wives, so many noblemen and great personages were beheaded, so much church plunder committed, and so many acts of disobedience perpetrated, that it may be said that all that ensued and is still going on (which to say the truth is horrible and unheard of) all, I say, is the penalty of that first sin.’ Barbaro reported that ‘detestation of the Pope is now so confirmed that no one, either of the new or old religion, can bear to hear him mentioned; and indeed in the litanies which they sing in church they say in English, “From the deceit and tyranny of the Bishop of Rome, Lord deliver us.”’ Altars, images, holy water, incense and other Roman ceremonies had disappeared and the whitewashed walls of the churches were now decorated only with ‘certain Scriptural sayings.’28