The Sisters Who Would Be Queen
The Tragedy of Mary, Katherine & Lady Jane Grey
Leanda de Lisle

Dedication

For Peter, Rupert, Christian and Dominic, with love

Epigraph

‘Such as ruled and were queens were for the most part wicked, ungodly, superstitious, and given to idolatry and to all filthy abominations as we may see in the histories of Queen Jezebel’

THOMAS BECON 1554

Contents

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

Family Trees

Prologue

PART ONE Educating Jane

Chapter I Beginning

Chapter II First Lessons

Chapter III Jane’s Wardship

Chapter IV The Example of Catherine Parr

Chapter V The Execution of Sudeley

Chapter VI Northumberland’s ‘Crew’

Chapter VII Bridling Jane

Chapter VIII Jane and Mary

PART TWO Queen and Martyr

Chapter IX No Poor Child

Chapter X A Married Woman

Chapter XI Jane the Queen

Chapter XII A Prisoner in the Tower

Chapter XIII A Fatal Revolt

PART THREE Heirs to Elizabeth

Chapter XIV Aftermath

Chapter XV Growing Up

Chapter XVI The Spanish Plot

Chapter XVII Betrothal

Chapter XVIII A Knot of Secret Might

Chapter XIX First Son

Chapter XX Parliament and Katherine’s Claim

Chapter XXI Hales’s Tempest

PART FOUR Lost Love

Chapter XXII The Lady Mary and Mr Keyes

Chapter XXIII The Clear Choice

Chapter XXIV While I Lived, Yours

Chapter XXV The Last Sister

Chapter XXVI A Return to Elizabeth’s Court

Chapter XXVII Katherine’s Sons and the Death of Elizabeth

Chapter XXVIII The Story’s End

Epilogue

Author’s Note

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Other Books By

About the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

Family Trees

The Descendants of Henry VII

The Grey Family Tree

The Dudley Family Tree Showing the claim of Henry, Earl of Huntingdon, to the English throne

The Seymour Family Tree

Prologue

God, the Prime Mover, brought peace and order to the darkness of the void as the cosmos was born. Everything, spirit or substance, was given its place according to its worth and nearness to God. Above the rocks, which enjoyed mere existence, were plants, for they enjoyed the privilege of life. Each plant also had its appointed rank. Trees were higher than moss, and oak the noblest of the trees. Superior even to the greatest tree were animals, which have appetite as well as life. Above the animals, mankind, whom God blessed with immortal souls, and they too had their degrees, according to the dues of their birth. This was the great Chain of Being, through which the Tudor universe was ordered, and at its top, under God, stood Henry VIII. It was a place he held convincingly. As he prepared for the joust on a spring day in 1524 he was still the man described by a Venetian ambassador as ‘the handsomest Prince in Christendom’. Tall and muscular with a fine complexion, the thirty-two-year-old monarch had ruled England for fifteen years and was in the prime of life. He had just had some new armour made and was looking forward to testing it at the tilt.

Henry was considered the finest jouster of his generation and the watching crowd had high expectations of the sport ahead. Attending the King on foot was his cousin, Thomas Grey, the 2nd Marquess of Dorset: his diamond and ruby badge of a Tudor rose testified to his skills as an athlete. Henry’s opponent, his brother-in-law, Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, was, however, still more renowned. His father had been killed in 1485, holding the standard of Henry VII at the battle of Bosworth Field, where the Tudor crown was won. He had been raised at court and had married Henry’s younger sister, Mary, the beautiful widow of Louis XII of France. But Suffolk was also the King’s closest friend. The two men even looked alike and at great court tournaments dressed often in identical armour.

As Henry reached his end of the tilt, Suffolk was informed that the King was in place. The duke, however, was having trouble with his new helmet. ‘I see him not,’ Suffolk shouted out; ‘by my faith for my headpiece blocks my sight.’ Thomas Grey of Dorset, hearing nothing above the stamping of the horses, then fatefully handed the King his lance. Henry’s visor was still fastened open as he readied himself, but Suffolk’s servant, mistaking the signal warned the duke, ‘Sir, the King is coming.’ Suffolk, blinded by his helmet, spurred his horse forward. Immediately the King responded, charging with his blunted spear down the sandy list. In the crowd people spotted the King’s bare face and there were desperate shouts of ‘Hold! Hold!’; but ‘the duke neither saw nor heard, and whether the King remembered his visor was up or not, few could tell’. The thundering of hooves was followed by the clap and crack of impact. Suffolk had struck the King on the brow and his shattered lance filled the King’s head-piece with splinters. As the horses pulled up, the King still in the saddle, some in the crowd looked set to attack the duke, while others blamed Dorset for handing the King his spear too soon. Henry, in response, protested loudly that no one was at fault and, taking a spear, ran a further six courses to prove he was unhurt. But the deepest fears of the spectators still lingered.

The battle of Bosworth had followed a long period of violent disorder, fuelled by rival claimants to the throne. The eventual victor, Henry VII, had ensured the peace England now enjoyed by bequeathing his crown to an adult son, Henry VIII, who was his undisputed heir. But what would have happened if that son, the King, was now killed, or died suddenly? The fear of a return to the violence of the past was visceral. It was believed that disorder had been brought into the universe when Lucifer, the Angel of Light, had rebelled against God, and into the world by sin, when that fallen Angel tempted Eve in the Garden of Eden. Ever since, Lucifer had remained watchful for any opportunity to set loose anarchy, intending eventually to engulf earth and the heavens in chaos of unimaginable horror and evil. In the shadow of Armageddon, the question of what would happen if the King died was of vital interest - and the answer was a troubling one. Henry’s only legitimate heir was a little girl, his still carefree eight-year-old daughter Mary. Under English law it was possible for a woman to inherit the crown. Her mother, Catherine of Aragon, assumed that one day she would. But England had not yet had a Queen regnant, who ruled in her own right, and it was uncertain one could survive long.

Women were believed the weaker sex, not only in terms of their physical strength. More significantly, they were also judged to be, like Eve, morally frail - a belief so deeply held that it has underpinned attitudes to women and power into modern times. While reason and intellect were associated with the male, women were considered creatures of the body: emotional, irrational and indecisive. As such they ranked below men in the Chain of Being. Although a servant might owe obedience to his mistress by reason of her place in the social hierarchy, sisters took second place to their brothers in the inheritance of property, and wives were subject to their husbands in marriage. It did not seem fitting to Henry that a woman - by nature inferior to men - should sit at the apex of power, as a monarch did. Nor did he believe it really possible.

Henry feared that even if ambitious warrior nobles did not overthrow the unsoldierly Mary, her husband would be the true ruler. England might even be absorbed into a foreign empire through a marriage treaty. His wife’s Hapsburg relations were infamous for extending their territory by this means. And, in any case, what did it say about his virility that he could only provide his dynasty with second best: a girl?

Henry had accepted that, at thirty-eight, Catherine of Aragon was too old to have more children, and he stopped visiting her chambers that year. But as he considered the fate of his country, and his dynasty, Henry remained determined to settle his kingdom on a male heir. His pursuit of this goal would bring him more power than any of his medieval predecessors had possessed, but in doing so he would tear unwittingly into the myths from which royal authority was drawn. He broke with the Papacy in Rome to claim a royal authority over spiritual and temporal affairs, placing himself above English law and using Parliament to seize the right to nominate his heirs. But the breach with Rome placed the crown at the heart of a religious struggle, and in bringing Parliament into the divine process of the succession he had introduced the mechanism of consent. As the new Protestant beliefs brought fresh life to the old prejudices against women holding power, two generations of Tudor princesses and three Queens would struggle to survive the coming storms. Amongst them the granddaughters of the King’s two jousting companions: Lady Jane, Katherine and Mary Grey.

Dynastic politics, religious propaganda and sexual prejudice have since buried the stories of the three Grey sisters in legend and obscurity. The eldest, Lady Jane Grey, is mythologised, even fetishised, as an icon of helpless innocence, destroyed by the ambitions of others. The people and events in her life are all distorted to fit this image, but Jane was much more than the victim she is portrayed as being, and the efforts of courtiers and religious factions to seize control of the succession did not end with her death. Jane’s sisters would have to tread carefully to survive: Lady Katherine Grey, as the forgotten rival Queen Elizabeth feared most, and Lady Mary Grey, as the last of the sisters who were heirs to the throne. Each, in turn, would play their role in the upheavals of a changing world, and bear the costs of the continued demands for royal sons. It would be left to Katherine’s grandchild, the heir to a lost English dynasty, to see the circle close. Standing at Henry’s opened tomb he would bear witness to where the King’s determination to control the future ended, and how efforts to deny women the absolute power of the crown helped bury absolutism in England.

PART ONE Educating Jane

‘Is the Queen delivered? Say Ay and of a boy.’

‘Ay, ay my liege, And of a lovely boy: the God of heaven Both now and ever bless her: ’tis a girl Promises boys hereafter…’

Henry VIII, Act V scene i

William Shakespeare

Chapter I Beginning

Frances, Marchioness of Dorset, prepared carefully for the birth of her child. It was an anxious time, but following the traditions of the lying-in helped allay fears of the perils of labour. The room in which she was to have her baby had windows covered and keyholes blocked. Ordinances for a royal birth decreed only one window should be left undraped and Frances would depend almost entirely on candles for light. The room was to be as warm, soft and dark as possible. She bought or borrowed expensive carpets and hangings, a bed of estate, fine sheets and a rich counterpane. Her friend, the late Lady Sussex, had one of ermine bordered with cloth of gold for her lyingin, and, as the King’s niece, Frances would have wanted nothing less.

The nineteen-year-old mother-to-be was the daughter of Henry’s younger sister, Mary, Duchess of Suffolk, the widow of Louis XII and known commonly as the French Queen. She was, therefore, a granddaughter of Henry VII and referred to as ‘the Lady Frances’ to indicate her status as such. The child of famously handsome parents, she was, unsurprisingly, attractive. The effigy that lies on her tomb at Westminster Abbey has a slender, elegant figure and under the gilded crown she wears, her features are regular and strong.¹ Frances, however, was a conventional Tudor woman, as submissive to her father’s choice of husband for her as she would later be to her husband’s decisions.

Henry - or ‘Harry’ - Grey,² Marquess of Dorset, described as ‘young’, ‘lusty’, ‘well learned and a great wit’, was only six months older than his wife.³ But the couple had been married for almost four years already. The contractual arrangements had been made on 24th March 1533, when Frances was fifteen and Dorset sixteen.⁴ Amongst commoners a woman was expected to be at least twenty before she married, and a man older, but of course these were no commoners. They came from a hereditary elite and were part of a ruthless political culture. The children of the nobility were political and financial assets to their families, and Frances’s marriage to Dorset reflected this. Dorset came from an ancient line with titles including the baronies of Ferrers, Grey of Groby, Astley, Boneville and Harrington. He also had royal connections. His grandfather, the 1st Marquess, was the son of Elizabeth Woodville, and therefore the half-brother of Henry VIII’s royal grandmother, Elizabeth of York. This marked Dorset as a suitable match for Frances in terms of rank and wealth, but there were also good political reasons for Suffolk to want him as a son-in-law.

The period immediately before the arrangement of Frances’s marriage had been a difficult one for her parents. The dislike with which Mary, Duchess of Suffolk, viewed her brother’s then ‘beloved’, Anne Boleyn, was well known. It was said that women argued more bitterly about matters of rank than anything else, and certainly Frances’s royal mother had deeply resented being required to give precedence to a commoner like Anne. For years the duke and duchess had done their best to destroy the King’s affection for his mistress, but, in the end, without success. The King, convinced that Anne would give him the son that Catherine of Aragon had failed to produce, had married her that January and she was due to be crowned in May. It seemed that the days when the Suffolks had basked in the King’s favour could be over; but a marriage of Frances to ‘Harry’ Dorset offered a possible lifeline, a way into the Boleyn camp. Harry Dorset’s father, Thomas Grey of Dorset, had been a witness for the King in his efforts to achieve an annulment of his marriage to Catherine of Aragon. He had won his famous diamond and ruby badge of the Tudor rose at the jousting tournaments that had celebrated Catherine’s betrothal to the King’s late brother, Arthur, in 1501. In 1529, the year before Thomas Grey of Dorset died, he had offered evidence that this betrothal was consummated. It had helped support Henry’s arguments that Catherine had been legally married to his brother and his own marriage to her was therefore incestuous.⁵ Anne Boleyn remained grateful to the family, and Harry Dorset was made a Knight of the Bath at her coronation.

From Harry’s perspective, however, the marriage to Frances - concluded sometime between 28th July 1533 and 4th February 1534 - also carried political and material advantages to his family.⁶ His grandfather, the 1st Marquess, may have been Henry VII’s brother-in-law, but by marrying a princess of the blood he would be doing even better; and the fact he had only the previous year refused the daughter of the Earl of Arundel may be an early mark of his ambition. Through Frances, any children they had would be linked by blood to all the power and spiritual mystery of the crown. It was an asset of incalculable worth - though it would carry a terrible price.

Over three years later, it was sometime before the end of May, 1537, that Frances’s child was to be born.⁷ Harry Grey of Dorset was in London and Frances would surely have been with him at Dorset House, on the Strand.⁸ It was one of a number of large properties built by the nobility close to the new royal palace of Whitehall. There was a paved street behind and, in front - where the house had its grandest aspect - there was a garden down to the river with a watergate on to the Thames. Travelling by boat in London was easier than navigating the narrow streets and foreigners often commented on the beauty of the river. Swans swam amongst the great barges while pennants flew from the pretty gilded cupolas of the Tower. But there were also many grim sights on the river that spring. London Bridge was festooned with the decapitated heads of the leaders of the recent rebellion in the north, the Pilgrimage of Grace: men who had fought for the faith of their ancestors and the right of the Princess Mary to inherit her father’s crown. For all Henry’s concerns about the decorum of female rule, the majority of his ordinary subjects had little objection to the concept. That women were inferior as a sex was regarded as indisputable, but there was room for exceptions. The English were famous in Europe for their devotion to the Virgin Mary, the second Eve, born without the taint of the first sin, and who reigned as Queen of Heaven. It did not seem, to them, a huge leap to accept a Queen on Earth. Just as the Princess Mary’s rights were under attack, however, so were their religious beliefs and traditions.

When the Pope had refused to annul Henry’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon, he had broken with Rome and the Pope’s right of intervention on spiritual affairs in England had been abolished by an act of Parliament on 7th April 1533. With the benefit of hindsight this was a definitive moment in the history of the English-speaking world, but at the time most people had seen these events as no more than moves in a political game. Matters of jurisdiction between King and Pope were not things with which ordinary people concerned themselves, and the aspects of traditional belief that first came under attack were often controversial ones. Long before Henry’s reformation in religion there had been debate for reform within the Catholic Church, inspired in particular by the so-called Humanists. They were fascinated by the rediscovered ancient texts of Greece and Rome, and in recent decades Western academics had, for the first time, learnt Greek as well as Latin. This allowed them to read earlier versions of the Bible than the medieval Latin translations, and to make new translations. As a change in meaning to a few words could question centuries of religious teaching so a new importance came to be placed on historical accuracy and authenticity. Questions were raised about such traditions as the cult of relics, and the shrines to local saints whose origins may have lain with the pagan Gods. It was only in 1535 when two leading Humanists, Henry’s former Lord Chancellor, Thomas More, and the Bishop of Rochester, John Fisher, went to the block rather than accept the King’s claimed ‘royal supremacy’ over religious affairs, that people began to realise there was more to Henry’s reformation than political argument and an attempt to reform religious abuses. And even then many did not waver in their Catholic faith. These ‘Henrician’ Catholics included among their number the chief ideologue of the ‘royal supremacy’, the Bishop of Winchester, Stephen Gardiner. For the bishop, as for the King, papal jurisdiction, the abolished shrines, pilgrimages, and monasteries, were not intrinsic to Catholic beliefs.⁹ The Holy Sacraments, such as the Mass, remained inviolate and they argued that although the English Church was in schism in the sense that it had separated from Rome, it was not heretical and in opposition to it.¹⁰

Those who disagreed, and opposed Henry’s reformation, felt his tyranny to full effect, as the heads displayed at London Bridge and other public sites bore silent witness. One hundred and forty-four rebels from the Pilgrimage of Grace were dismembered and their body parts put on show in the north and around the capital. Even if Londoners avoided the terrible spectacle of these remains, they would not miss the other physical evidence of the King’s reformation. Everywhere the great religious buildings, that had played a central role in London life, were being destroyed or adapted to secular use. Only that month, the monks from the London Charterhouse who had refused to sign an oath to the royal supremacy, were taken to Newgate prison, where they would starve to death in chains.

Inside Frances’s specially prepared chamber at Dorset House, however, the sights, sounds and horrors of the outside world were all shut out. She was surrounded only with the women who would help deliver her baby. When the first intense ache of labour came it was a familiar one. Frances had already lost at least one child, a son who died in infancy, as so many Tudor children did. Nothing is recorded of his short life save his name: Henry, Lord Harington.¹¹ Contemporary sources focus instead on the children born to Anne Boleyn: her daughter, Elizabeth, born on 7th September 1533, at whose christening Dorset had borne the gilded salt;* and the miscarriages that had followed - the little deaths that had marked the way to Boleyn’s own, executed on trumped-up charges of adultery on 19th May 1536. The King’s second marriage was annulled and an act of Parliament had since declared both the King’s daughters, Elizabeth and Mary, illegitimate and incapable of succession.¹² This raised in importance the heirs of the King’s sisters in the line of succession, and both King and kingdom had already shown sensitivity to the implications. The rebels of the Pilgrimage of Grace had expressed their fear that England would pass on Henry’s death to the foreigner, James V of Scots, the son of his elder sister, Margaret. Meanwhile her daughter by a second marriage to the Earl of Angus, Lady Margaret Douglas, a favourite of the English court, was currently in prison for having become betrothed without the King’s permission. Her lover, Anne Boleyn’s uncle, Thomas Howard, would die in the Tower that October. But while Frances’s child would, inevitably, hold an important place within the royal family, the King remained determined his own line would succeed him. The pressure on her to produce a male heir was therefore of a different order to Henry’s wives. Dorset wanted a son, as all noblemen did, but he and Frances were still young and, when a girl was born, their relief that she was strong and healthy would have outweighed any disappointment in her sex.

A servant carried the newborn child immediately to a nearby room and handed her to a nurse. It was usual for fathers to be at hand when their children were born and Dorset would have been one of the first to visit the dimly lit nursery where his daughter was being fed and bound in swaddling, to keep her limbs straight and prevent her from scratching her face. Her spiritual welfare was of still greater concern to her parents and her christening was arranged as soon as possible, though this meant Frances could not attend. New mothers were expected to remain in bed for up to a month, and some did not even sit up for a fortnight. Frances played a role, however, in helping choose as her daughter’s godmother, the King’s new wife, Jane Seymour, after whom the little girl was named.¹³

With her pursed lips and sandy eyelashes, Jane Seymour seems a poor replacement for Anne Boleyn, whose black eyes, it was said, ‘could read the secrets of a man’s heart’, but like her predecessor, Jane Seymour was a ruthless seductress.¹⁴ Her betrothal to Henry was announced only the day after Anne was executed. Having got her king it was her performance as a brood mare that was now important. In this too, however, she was showing marked success. A pregnancy had been evident for weeks and on 27th May the rumours were confirmed with a Te Deum sung at St Paul’s Cathedral ‘for joy of the Queen’s quickening with child’.¹⁵ It remained to be seen whether Jane Seymour would give the King the son he wanted, but in choosing her as godmother to their new daughter, Frances and Harry Dorset had offered a vote of confidence, and although they could not know it, the Seymour family would remain closely linked to their own, one way or another, thereafter.

About a fortnight after the christening, Frances had her first day out of bed and dressed in one of her finest nightgowns for a celebratory party. The royal tailor advised damask or satin, worn with an ermine-trimmed bonnet and waistcoat, allowing the wearer to keep warm as well as look good, for visiting female friends and relations. Frances had a younger sister, Eleanor, married to Lord Clifford, and an equally young stepmother. Frances’s mother had died on Midsummer’s Day in June 1533, and her father had wasted little time before remarrying. The bride he had chosen was his fourteen-year-old ward, the heiress, Katherine Willoughby. He was then forty-nine, and the muscles of the champion jouster, like those of his friend the King, had begun to turn to fat. Frances would doubtless have wished her father had waited longer and made a different choice: the new Duchess of Suffolk had been raised alongside her like a sister since the age of seven. But Frances had accepted what she could not change and remained close to her childhood friend, who was now pregnant with the second of Frances’s half-brothers, Charles Brandon. After the party was over, Frances could venture beyond her chambers to the nursery and other rooms in the house, until the lying-in concluded at last when Jane was about a month old with the ‘churching’ - a religious service of thanksgiving and purification that ended with Frances being sprinkled with holy water. ‘Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean,’ she prayed; ‘wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow.’ Frances then was ready to return to Henry’s court.¹⁶ Here, the care and blessings, showered on most new mothers, were in stark contrast to the treatment Henry had meted out to the Queens who had borne his children. If his third wife, Jane Seymour, had any fears about the future, however, there was little sign of them before her own lying-in began. She made her last public appearance on 16th September at Hampton Court. There was a grand procession into Mass at the royal chapel (which still survives, the ceiling a brilliant blue, studded with golden stars), and afterwards the court gathered in the vast space of the Watching Chamber (which also remains) to enjoy cold, spiced wine. There had been months of building work carried out in anticipation of the royal birth, and the heady scents of clove and cinnamon mixed with those of burnt brick and newly hewn wood. Once Jane Seymour disappeared to her chamber, however, so most of the court left the palace. There had been an outbreak of plague that summer and they were encouraged to go home.

There persists a myth that Lady Jane Grey was born during the subsequent three weeks of the Queen’s confinement, at the Grey family’s principal seat of Bradgate Manor in Leicestershire. Dorset’s mother, the dowager marchioness, was, however, installed at Bradgate until January 1538 and Frances was busy enjoying herself, not lying in bed. On 11th October 1537, when news reached her that Jane Seymour was in labour, she was being entertained at the house of a friend and her husband was on their estate at Stebbing in Essex.¹⁷ Dorset left immediately for London, where a procession was already being organised for priests and clerks, the mayor and aldermen, to pray for the Queen. It seemed their prayers were soon answered. At two o’clock the following morning, on the eve of the feast of St Edward, Henry VIII’s longed-for son, soon also to be christened Edward, was born. By 9 a.m. on that pivotal morning, Dorset was with the large crowd at the door of the medieval church of St Paul’s, singing the Te Deum. When the great hymn of thanks was finished volleys of gunfire were shot from the Tower and hogsheads of wine were set out for the poor to drink. The long-term security and peace of the nation hinged on having an undisputed succession and people of all religious persuasions now rejoiced at the birth of their prince.¹⁸

As the nation celebrated in the days ahead, Frances joined Dorset and together they made frantic efforts to arrange for permission to be at court for Edward’s christening. It was an event the entire nobility and royal family wished to attend, and Frances’s father had been invited to be godfather at the confirmation that followed immediately after the baptism. But, to their frustration, they found that they were not to be allowed back to Hampton Court. There had been several plague deaths in Croydon, where Dorset’s mother had a property. They hadn’t visited her recently, but no chances were being taken with the possible spread of disease to the palace.¹⁹

Such precautions would not save the Queen. Days later Jane Seymour suffered a massive haemorrhage, probably caused by the retention of part of the placenta in her womb. She was given the last rites two days after her son’s christening and died on 24th October. Frances was bequeathed several pieces of the Queen’s jewellery, pomanders and other trinkets,²⁰ and while she and Dorset had missed the royal baptism, they took leading parts in the state funeral in November. Dorset, his father-in-law the Duke of Suffolk, and four other courtiers, rode alongside the horse-drawn chariot that bore Jane Seymour’s coffin in procession to Windsor. It was surmounted by her effigy, painted to look lifelike and dressed in robes of state, with her hair loose, and rings on her fingers set with precious stones: the wooden dummy of a woman who had served her purpose. Riding immediately behind it, on a horse trapped in black, was the King’s elder daughter, the Princess Mary, who acted as chief mourner. The child who, thirteen years earlier, when her father was almost killed at the joust, had been his undisputed heir, was now a grown woman, twenty-one and pretty, with his pink and white complexion, and a painfully thin frame. She had seen her late mother humiliated in her father’s quest for a son, and Parliament brought into the divine process of the succession to deny her her birthright. But the vagaries of fate are uncertain. Under the Act of Succession of the previous year, Henry had been granted the right to nominate his heirs, and Mary knew she could yet be restored in line to the throne, despite having been declared illegitimate.

Behind Mary, sitting in the first of the chariots bearing the great ladies of the court, sat Frances, dressed in black and attended by footmen in demi-gowns.²¹ The procession then continued with the mourners in descending order of precedence so that at its very end even the servants walked according to the rank of their masters. ‘The heavens themselves, the planets and this centre, Observe degree, priority and place,’ Shakespeare wrote later in Troilus and Cressida;

Take but degree away, untune that string, And hark, what discord follows…Strength should be lord to imbecility, And the rude son should strike his father dead. This chaos, when degree is suffocate, Follows the choking. ²²

* Salt was used in Catholic baptism until the 1960s: a small amount was placed on a baby’s lips as a symbol of purity and to ward off evil.

Chapter II First Lessons

Some of Jane Grey’s first memories must have been of the magnificent family seat at Bradgate Manor in the Midlands, even if she was not born there.¹ It was the first unfortified house in Leicestershire, a palace of rose-red brick patterned in diamonds of deep lilac, that Dorset’s father and grandfather had built as an airy replacement for the ancient castle whose stones still lay nearby. The peace and order heralded with the advent of the Tudors meant everything about the house could be done with an eye to beauty or pleasure. In place of thick walls pierced by narrow openings, large mullioned windows let in the light and its towered wings marked the outer points of a welcoming U-shaped courtyard.

The family’s private rooms, including Jane’s bedchamber, and the cot she slept in as an infant, were in the west wing. There was a chapel where, as she grew older, she said her prayers, and a small kitchen. The west wing housed the servants’ hall, a bakery, brewery and the main kitchen, which was constantly busy. Her father entertained here generously and when he was in residence the house was packed with at least three dozen of his retainers as well as visitors and members of the extended family. For the most part the household ate together in the great hall, an 80-foot-long room in the centre of the house, kept warm by a large fireplace. There was a dais at one end, where the family ate in state and a gallery the other end where music was played.

Jane reached what was, in religious tradition, the age of reason, when she was seven. She was small for her age, but with a fiery character to match her reddish hair and a quick, articulate intelligence. She was said later by a contemporary to be her father’s favourite daughter.² She was certainly proving every inch his child. It was a time for her adult education to begin and a year later, in 1545, an impressive new tutor arrived to oversee her studies. John Aylmer had been introduced to Dorset when he was still only a schoolboy and the marquess had paid for his education until he graduated from Cambridge that year. He was a brilliant academic and had been picked by the marquess for his post over several other clever young men of whom he was patron.

Jane had also, by now, two younger sisters, whose adult education had yet to begin. The middle sister, Katherine, turned five that August, the same month their grandfather, Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, died.³ Affectionate and golden-haired, Katherine preferred her pets to Jane’s books, but she was the beauty of the sisters. In the limnings, or miniatures, painted by the court artist Lavina Teerlinc she resembles her lovely grandmother, the King’s late younger sister, Mary Tudor, the French Queen.

The youngest of the three sisters, Mary Grey, was still only a baby at this time and it may not yet have been apparent that there was anything wrong with her. But Mary was never to grow normally. As an adult she was described as the smallest person at court, ‘crook backed’ and ‘very ugly’. It has even been conjectured that she was a dwarf. Whatever the truth, Mary Grey had something of the best qualities of both her sisters, with Katherine’s warmth and Jane’s intelligence, as well as the strong spirit they all shared. If her parents were disappointed with her in any way, there is no record of it.⁴

Life at Bradgate was idyllic for the sisters. There were extensive gardens for them to play in, as well as the great park, which was the glory of the house. A medieval village had been destroyed to create the illusion of a perfect wilderness covering several square miles at the edge of Charnwood Forest. Here was a place ‘more free from peril than the envious court’, where you could find ‘tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, Sermons in stones, and good in everything’.⁵ The children could walk their father’s prize greyhounds, or accompany their mother and her friends as they hunted deer with longbow and arrows.⁶ On rainy days there were also other amusements inside.

Dolls were popular toys of the period and the types the sisters enjoyed are described in a later inventory of items in Jane’s possession. ‘Two little babies in a box of wood, one of them having a gown of crimson satin, and the other a gown of white velvet.’⁷ Their parents were careful, however, not to spoil them. Over-indulgence was believed to make children physically and morally soft, with potentially disastrous results. Loving parents instilled discipline early with good manners considered essential. The girls were taught to stand straight and show respect to their elders, to speak only when they were spoken to and to respond promptly to commands. They had to eat nicely, observe the correct precedence at table and show gratitude for any praise they were given. At night, if their parents were at home, they would go to them to say goodnight and kneel to ask their blessing.

The duty of obedience was considered a particularly useful lesson for girls since they were expected to remain submissive to their husbands after they had left the care of their fathers. But the thinking on what women were capable of was changing. Baldassare Castiglione’s bestselling Book of the Courtier argued that women were as intelligent as men, and suggested they could learn to control their ‘emotional’ natures through the exercise of will and reason. A Grey family friend later translated the book into English.⁸ In the meantime, other Englishmen such as Richard Hyrde were already promoting female education, and for a brief period that would end with the generation of the Grey sisters, the education of women remained fashionable.⁹ Both Frances and Dorset were determined that their daughters would be given the opportunity to develop practical and intellectual skills of the highest order.

Of the former, the humble business of cooking and sewing remained important. Even noblewomen were expected to know something about the more expensive dishes created in their kitchen and to be able to make clothing. Frances sewed shirts and collars as New Year gifts for the King and her friend Lady Lisle’s quince marmalade was amongst her best-received presents to Henry, who liked it ‘wondrous well’.¹⁰ As future courtiers the sisters also received regular lessons in dance and music: the lute, the spinet and the virginal were all popular choices of instrument for girls destined for court. But it was in the sisters’ academic studies that Lady Jane Grey, in particular, was to excel, with strong encouragement from her father.

Dorset had received a brilliant education in the household of the King’s illegitimate son, the late Henry Fitzroy, Duke of Richmond. He had learnt eloquent Latin from a pupil of Erasmus, and French from John Palsgrave, the greatest scholar of the language in England. It had left Dorset with a love of scholarship that was renowned during his lifetime and which he was determined to pass on to his children. As soon as his daughters had learned to read, write and understand basic mathematics they made a start in French and Italian. Over half a century later Dorset’s youngest daughter, Lady Mary Grey, still kept copies of Palsgrave’s French grammar and dictionary in her library, along with the Book of the Courtier and an Italian grammar.¹¹ By the age of eight Jane, and later Katherine, were also learning Latin and Greek, subjects that Aylmer was particularly well qualified to teach. A visitor to Bradgate, the radical divine Thomas Becon, described him as ‘singularly well learned in both’.

But Aylmer was much more than a mere language teacher. The point of education in the sixteenth century was not simply to learn to read, write and understand ancient languages. It was about moulding good subjects of God and the King. Jane and Katherine’s Greek and Latin were a means to help reinforce lessons of moral, social and religious truth indoctrinated from the cradle - literally so. The visitor, Becon, insisted that as soon as a child was capable of speaking in sentences they should be taught phrases such as: ‘Learn to die…’¹². Jane would, years later, repeat the phrase in her last letter to Katherine and reflect on its meaning. This was to be a good Christian in this world, and so to achieve the reward of absolute happiness with God in the next. Unfortunately, what it was to be a good Christian, and where the path to eternal life lay, remained a matter of lethal debate. Since Jane’s birth in 1537 new divisions had arisen between those, like the ideologue of the royal supremacy, Bishop Gardiner, who adhered to Henry’s Church but remained conservative in his core beliefs, and those who saw the King’s reformation as the gateway to more drastic change.

The term Protestant only began to be used in England in the mid-1550s.¹³ The more usual term for those we would now think of as Protestant was ‘evangelical’. They were so named because they wished to return to the ‘evangelium’ or ‘good news’ of the gospel, stripping away Church traditions they believed had no biblical basis in favour of a more fundamental reading of Scripture. There was no real orthodoxy within the English evangelicals, with individuals adhering to beliefs of varying degrees of radicalism, and people were careful not to express their views openly if they did not accord with the King’s. Dorset’s were later regarded, however, as being at the more radical end of the spectrum and Frances shared her husband’s beliefs. The ground was being prepared for an ideological struggle in which the Grey sisters, members of the first generation to be raised as evangelicals, were being groomed to play a significant role.

For Jane, being the elder of three sisters did not mean merely doing things first. She was the most important in rank. It was Jane in whom the Dorsets invested the lion’s share of their time and money, and to whom everyone else paid the most attention. While Jane was growing up - and until her death - the younger sisters remained in the shadows. They were at home, therefore, playing with their pets and learning their prayers, waiting for their own turn in the spotlight, when Jane, at nine, took her first steps on to the great national stage that was the King’s court.

In 1546, Jane’s mother was serving as a Lady of the Privy Chamber to Henry’s sixth wife, Catherine Parr. From time to time she could, therefore, bring Jane to court with her, to prepare her for a role as a Maid of Honour, serving the Queen. The court was the hub of political, cultural and social life in England. For a young girl such as Jane, however, it must have been often a confusing place. She could never be sure what lay behind a smile, or if what was said was what was meant, but amongst the gossiping courtiers and scheming bishops, the Queen, at least, struck a sympathetic figure. Catherine Parr was warm-hearted and intelligent, with a calm manner that invited confidence and respect. She was also a highly sensual woman: the kind that most attracted Henry. She wore gorgeous scarlet silks, bathed in milk baths, scented her body with rose water, and her breath with expensive, cinnamon lozenges. Beside this delicious vision, the fifty-five-year-old King appeared monstrous. It must have been difficult for Jane to imagine Henry as the ‘perfect example of manly beauty’ he had been described as in his youth. Pallid and obese, he was almost unable to walk on legs ruined by injuries acquired hunting and jousting. He spent most of his time in his private lodgings suffering fevers, but occasionally would emerge to be wheeled down the corridors of the royal palaces on chairs of tawny velvet; his eyes pinpoints of pain.

Henry did not have long to live, and with Edward only in his ninth year, it was apparent that all the blood spilled to secure the future of the Tudor dynasty could prove wasted. In the end he had exchanged the unknown consequences of female rule only for the familiar weaknesses of a royal minority. A young boy could not hope to fill the shoes of the old tyrant. Others would wield power on Edward’s behalf when he became King, and a ferocious struggle for that power had already begun. Although Jane was too young to grasp the subtleties of the shifting circles of interests manoeuvring around her, she surely understood that the most important battle lines concerned her faith. She knew too that the Queen was the leading evangelical at court. Catherine Parr had been wed twice before to old men and, still only in her early thirties she found in religion a passion that was absent in her marriages. She made energetic efforts to spread the new teaching in the universities and every afternoon evangelical chaplains preached to her ladies and their friends at court. Afterwards the women would sit with their guests and discuss what they had heard. There was a frisson of danger to this, for any divergence from the King’s beliefs risked accusations of heresy. And just how deadly that could be, Jane Grey’s family was soon to witness.

A group of religious conservatives on the Privy Council were plotting that summer to bring down their evangelical rivals. They intended to do so through an attack on their opponents’ wives. The means was to be a twenty-five-year-old gentlewoman called Anne Askew. A witty and articulate poet and evangelical, Askew had broken a taboo by disobeying her husband and quarrelling with him over religion. He had thrown her out, and she had subsequently been arrested for preaching that Christ was not really present in the consecrated bread and wine of the Mass. In June 1546 she had been condemned to death for heresy. But as Askew waited for sentence to be carried out, rumours leaked that she had allies in the Queen’s Privy Chamber. They were said to include the wives of leading evangelical Privy Councillors. According to an Elizabethan Jesuit, the conservatives learned that Askew had even been introduced to the Queen and the King’s ‘favourite nieces’, Frances Grey and her sister Eleanor.¹⁴ The most likely person to have achieved such a coup was Frances’s widowed stepmother and childhood friend, the young Katherine Suffolk.

Blonde, blue-eyed, and charming when she wished to be, Katherine Suffolk was one of the most remarkable women of her time. Her temper and caustic wit were legendary. One of her contemporaries called her rages, ‘the Lady Suffolk heats’.¹⁵ In the superficial world of the court, however, her contemporaries found her unusual directness and honesty both unnerving and attractive. She said what she thought, and what she thought was usually interesting and sometimes shocking. Although her Spanish mother had been Catherine of Aragon’s favourite lady-in-waiting, Katherine Suffolk despised the religion in which she was raised and was considered by foreign ambassadors to be ‘the greatest heretic in the kingdom’. She had huge influence with Catherine Parr and connections to Askew. The condemned woman’s brother-in-law, George St Poll, was a member of her household.

Askew was brought from Newgate to the Tower, where she was repeatedly tortured on the rack by two Privy Councillors in an effort to get her to name her court contacts. In the long and terrible history of the Tower no other woman is recorded as having been so treated. Askew was asked specifically about any connections she had to Katherine Suffolk, and it must have been a highly anxious time for the Grey family, as they wondered what Askew would reveal. But despite being torn apart ‘until the strings of her arms and eyes were perished’ Askew admitted only that a number of anonymous women had sent her money.¹⁶ The news that a gentlewoman had been put to the rack then reached the public. That a gentlewoman should have been tortured at all appalled people, but that Askew was already a condemned prisoner, outraged them. In an effort to calm the public mood Askew was offered the opportunity to recant her views and receive a pardon. She refused and on 16th July 1546 was brought to Smithfield for execution by burning. Her body was so badly broken by the rack she had to be tied to the stake in a chair. The Queen’s cousin, Nicholas Throckmorton and two of his brothers, were there to shout out their support for her as she burned and died. Most of the ordinary people looking on were horrified at the cruelty, but they saw it often enough, meted out both to traditional Catholics burnt for ‘treason’ and radical evangelicals - ‘heretics’ - such as she.

Jane, Katherine and Mary Grey would have all learnt eventually the details of Askew’s death. The gentlewoman’s links to Katherine Suffolk, their step-grandmother, made her death almost a family matter. Her writings and the story of her life were soon, in any case, to be immortalised in a new evangelical cult of martyrdom, and they would have become familiar with Askew’s recorded words and actions in her last months. It underpinned the lesson with which they were inculcated: ‘Learn to die…’.¹⁷ But it was Jane, being that much older, who was most deeply affected by Anne Askew’s example, and many of her later writings echoed Askew’s spirited and combative attacks on conservative beliefs.

According to the mid-sixteenth-century martyrologist John Foxe, however, the attempt to expose heresy in the Queen’s Privy Chamber was just a prelude to a direct attack on the Queen herself: and one in which Lady Jane Grey would, in the nineteenth century, be given a walk-on part. Foxe claimed that Bishop Stephen Gardiner, the new intellectual leader of religious conservatism, was desperate to get rid of Catherine Parr and end her influence with the King. He convinced Henry that her efforts to urge him to religious reform amounted to an attack on his place as head of the Church in England. Henry rose to the bait and, after a heated discussion with his wife on matters of religion, announced he wished to be rid of her, just as he had been rid of Anne Boleyn. Foxe described how articles for the Queen’s arrest were drawn up, but that as Henry’s temper cooled he allowed one of his doctors to warn Catherine she had stepped over the mark. Terrified, Catherine went to the King that night, ‘waited upon only by the Lady Herbert, her sister, and the Lady Jane [Grey] who carried the candle before her’.¹⁸ In the King’s chamber Catherine worked hard to soothe her husband, submitting herself to his will in a speech that strongly resembles that made later by Shakespeare’s Kate in The Taming of the Shrew. When Henry accepted her assurances that she only wished to be his good wife, Catherine knew she was safe - or so we are told. ‘Lady Jane’ is a Victorian misreading of ‘Lady Lane’, and there is very little truth even in Foxe’s original story.

There were rumours in 1546 that Henry had already tired of Catherine, but, contrary to Foxe’s account his disillusion had nothing to do with the Queen’s reformist fervour. It was believed that he wanted to replace her with the alluring young Katherine Suffolk, who could have become a more formidable opponent to the conservatives than Parr. Foxe’s version of the events of 1546 placed Catherine Parr close to the ranks of the martyrs he admired, and perhaps also helped counterbalance the most difficult elements of Askew’s story for sixteenth-century readers: her disobeying her husband, her preaching, and her arguing with her male superiors. The martyrologists liked their female saints weak and tender, like good children, if also brave and steadfast.¹⁹ Foxe’s picture of an unpredictable King and a court riven by deadly religious rivalries, however, is accurate enough, even if the details are not. And because we know something of what follows, the later image of Jane Grey on the cusp of the new reign remains a haunting one - a young girl walking into the darkness, carrying her candle before her.

Chapter III Jane’s Wardship

King Henry VIII’s death, at fifty-six, was announced on 31st January 1547. For over a fortnight afterwards, wherever Jane turned at court, she saw black. Thirty-three thousand yards of dark cloth and a further eight thousand yards of black cotton, shrouded the floors and ceilings of all the royal chapels, was hung throughout the royal apartments, over the royal barges, carriages and carts. But as soon as the King was interred in Jane Seymour’s tomb at Windsor, on Wednesday 16th February, the cloth was taken down, the rich unveiled tapestries and brilliantly painted walls heralding the reign of Edward VI, her cousin and contemporary.

That Sunday, the coronation began with the nine-year-old King processing before a cheering crowd from Whitehall to Westminster Abbey, the court following in line of precedence. Catholic ambassadors described Edward as ‘the prettiest child you ever saw’, and they had little reason to flatter him. A slight boy with corn gold hair and pink cheeks, he looked angelic - his father before the fall. Always anxious to please the adults around him, Edward managed not to stagger once under the weight of the heavy robes of red velvet and ermine. But the adults, concerned whether he could cope with the rigours of the day-long rituals, had taken care to shorten the ceremonies by several hours and arrangements had been made for rest periods. When he reached his throne on the dais in the church, Edward also found two extra cushions had been placed on it to give him extra height. His health and strength reflected the vitality of the new regime and it was important Edward not appear vulnerable.

Henry had appointed sixteen executors of his will, whom he had envisaged acting as co-rulers until Edward came of age, but these decrees had been buried even before he was. The executors had established themselves as the Privy Council on the same day as his death was announced, three days after Henry had drawn his last breath. The Council was traditionally a large administrative body (it had forty members by the end of Edward’s reign). At its core were the King’s advisers, currently the sixteen executors, who had promptly elected Edward’s elder uncle, the evangelical Edward Seymour as ‘Lord Protector of England’. A country so used to being governed by the will of one man was not ready for an oligarchy of sixteen. In line with his position, the Lord Protector had also been granted the title ‘Duke of Somerset’. The ambassadors were now invited to the coronation to witness the revolutionary political and religious programme the Protector, and his allies, intended.

Since 1375 the so-called Liber Regalis had laid down how Kings of England were to be crowned, and it dictated the format of the ceremonies ahead. But for Edward’s coronation several significant modifications were made. The first became apparent as the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer, presented Edward to the three estates - the Lords, Commons and bishops - in the congregation beneath him. Instead of asking their assent to his crowning, Cranmer demanded they swear their service to Edward. The significance of this became apparent in the coronation oath, which the archbishop had also rewritten. The ancient promise to preserve the liberties and privileges of the clergy was struck out, and Edward, instead of agreeing to accept laws presented by his people, swore that the people were to accept his laws: in reality the Council’s laws presented under his authority. Henry VIII had regarded his claimed ‘royal supremacy’ over religious affairs his greatest achievement. The arguments used in its support placed him above not only the Pope’s laws, but England’s also. He was the superior legislator who ‘gave’ the law and exercised his ‘imperium’, or ‘command’, over Church and state.¹ But this authority was now in the hands of politicians and prelates he had assumed were his lapdogs. Their power, through the boy King, was absolute and would be wielded for a specific purpose. Cranmer’s sermon explained that Edward was to be a new Josiah, the biblical king and destroyer of idols. It was a Year Zero in which a new religious ideology was to be imposed on his people and England’s Catholic past rooted out of his subjects’ hearts and churches.

At the conclusion of the rituals, Jane’s father, Dorset, and her young uncle, the eleven-year-old Henry, Duke of Suffolk, stepped forward. Together they helped Edward hold his sceptre and ‘the ball of gold with the cross’ and presented him to the congregation as their King.² Propped up like a living doll he represented more than anyone else the central place children now held in the brutal world of adult politics. But Jane, along with her teenage cousin the Princess Elizabeth, would soon join Edward as the tools of ambitious men.

The future for Lady Jane Grey and her sisters was to be dominated by one document: King Henry’s will. Parliament had given Henry the right to bequeath the crown by testament and when he had called for it, on 26th December 1546, he was prepared to use that power. Lying sprawled on the vast state bed at Whitehall, with its gilded frame and rich hangings, the ailing monarch had worked at his revisions for four days. The period between Christmas Day and New Year is a strange hiatus, a time caught between the past and the future, appropriate, perhaps, for the birth of such a document. The seasonal celebrations did not disturb him, but Henry’s councillors and confidants had buzzed around him like flies until, on the 30th, he approved the final changes.

The principal provisions of the will had been confirmed already under the third Act of Succession in 1544. Edward was bequeathed the throne followed by any children Henry had with Catherine Parr. The crown then passed to Edward’s illegitimate half-sisters, Mary and Elizabeth. At that point, however, there was a dramatic change in the line of succession. Just as Henry had ignored in 1544 the common laws on inheritance that excluded illegitimate children from the throne, so he had now refused to be bound by the tradition of primogeniture. The entire Stuart line of his eldest sister, Margaret of Scotland, was excluded from the succession. In the event of the death of his children without heirs, the crown was settled instead on the descendants of his younger sister, Mary Brandon, Duchess of Suffolk. At the stroke of his pen her granddaughters, Lady Jane, Katherine and Mary Grey were named the heirs to Elizabeth.

Henry never chose to explain why he had excluded the Stuarts in favour of the Brandon line. The Kings of Scotland had, however, been enemies of England for generations. Henry had hoped to find a solution to their centuries of warfare in betrothing the infant Mary Queen of Scots to Edward. When the Scots rebuffed him, Henry was faced with the prospect of their Queen being married to a European prince or a Scottish nobleman, and, either way, he did not want to risk England falling into foreign hands. It was to that end that he had made his daughters’ inheritance provisional on their taking a husband in accordance with the wishes of the Privy Council. Curiously, his will did not insist on a similar rule for the Grey sisters. Perhaps he assumed that Frances would have a son or grandson by the time his line was extinct. It would explain why her name was overlooked in the will. It is also possible, however, that Henry’s decision was influenced by his mistrust of her husband.

Harry Dorset was described by a contemporary, as ‘an illustrious and widely loved nobleman’, much admired for his learning and his patronage of the learned.³ But as the rich husband of a royal wife, Dorset did not need to work hard for the status he held, and he had grown lazy and uncompromising. Although he had fought for the King in the wars with France, he had done little more than the minimum required of a nobleman. He preferred to leave the business of fighting to his younger brothers, Lords John and Thomas Grey. Nor was he suited to the snake pit of court politics. Remembered in the seventeenth century as ‘upright and plain in his private dealings’, he hated the dissembling that was part of court life. He had all the arrogance of the ideologue and an imperial ambassador described him a few years later as being without sense. He was happiest with his books, or in the company of ‘good fellows’, men who enjoyed a day’s hunting and a game of cards. This was not the kind of man Henry respected and the new Protector Somerset had no more use for him than the late King had had.⁴

Somerset was a successful soldier-politician, on whom Henry had relied heavily in the last years of his reign. He was also emerging as a high-minded evangelical, and became known later as ‘the good duke’. Unfortunately this was how he saw himself. The portrait in which he sports a white suit and golden beard, like some heavenly princeling, encapsulates his self-image perfectly. Harry Dorset was not, however, the only member of the extended royal family, to resent Somerset’s power and arrogance. King Edward’s younger uncle, Thomas Seymour, was already looking to Dorset for a political alliance against his older brother. Described by his servant, Sir John Harington, as a fine soldier and a dashing courtier, Thomas Seymour had a magnetic voice, ‘strong limbs and manly shape’. Women fell for him, and men admired him: indeed, once they had succumbed to his charm they never forgot him. Even thirty years after his death his former entourage was bound in friendship by his memory, and ‘the best of them disdained not the poorest’.⁵ In common with the protagonists of Greek tragedy, however, Thomas Seymour also possessed a fatal flaw: greed and of the most dangerous kind - the greed for power. Somerset had tried his best to engage Seymour’s support for his Protectorship. The younger brother had been brought on to the Privy Council, given the title Baron Seymour of Sudeley, and made Lord Admiral. What the new Baron Sudeley had hoped for most, however, was the post of Governor of the King’s Person, which would have allowed him to share the power of the Protectorship. And in this he was thwarted. Few others wished to see such a division of authority, and so in March, a month after the coronation, Somerset took the post for himself. A furious Sudeley was now determined to block any further advance by his brother, while continuing to seek power for himself. But to achieve this he needed first to raise his profile within the royal family.

Since January Jane and her sisters had seen a new and increasingly regular visitor to Dorset House on the Strand. Jane would have recognised him as a man about court: he was Sudeley’s gentleman servant, John Harington. A landowner and man of considerable subtlety and intelligence, Harington had been sent to prepare the ground for what Sudeley called a ‘friendship’ with Dorset.

Sudeley, meanwhile, was wooing Henry VIII’s widow. Catherine Parr had been in love with Sudeley before she had married Henry and now she was free to make her own choice she clearly found him irresistible. Within weeks of the King’s death the handsome Lord Admiral had the Queen dowager ‘under the plummet [duvet]’ at her manor in Chelsea. They married in secret in May 1547, shortly after she was given the care of her stepdaughter, the Princess Elizabeth. Over the following weeks, as Sudeley saw the huge influence his new wife had over Elizabeth, it struck him that the wardship of the next in line to the throne, Lady Jane Grey, would also be valuable. Notably, Edward’s heirs were all female. The entire political system, the stability of England depended on a series of women and girls and, whether adult, like Catherine Parr and the Princess Mary, or children, like the Princess Elizabeth and Lady Jane Grey, they were, to Sudeley, beings to be used and manipulated.

Sudeley had often noticed Jane Grey about the court. She appeared rather small, but her dark brows and eyes, which were ‘sparkling and reddish brown in colour’, suggested a lively spirit. He now began to watch her with closer interest, observing her playing and talking with the new King. An audience with Edward was always a formal affair, but as Jane Grey’s cousin, Jane Dormer, recalled, it was still possible to spend many happy hours with him, ‘either in reading, playing or dancing’. Edward was universally considered ‘a marvellous, sweet child, of very mild and generous condition’, and Dormer recalled how he would call her ‘my Jane’, and, when she lost at cards, he would comfort her: ‘Now Jane, your king is gone, I shall be good enough for you.’⁶

As similar scenes were played out under Sudeley’s gaze, he realised that Lady Jane Grey, with her royal blood, could one day be more than a playmate for Edward. She could become the King’s wife, a possibility that served his purposes well. Sudeley knew, or suspected, that Somerset hoped to see Jane Grey married to his eight-year-old son, Edward Seymour, the Earl of Hertford.⁷ He hoped that if he could persuade Jane’s father to make her his ward, he would be able to thwart his brother’s ambitions in this regard and gain some control over whom Jane did marry. There would be many powerful people who would want her as a bride - all useful allies in the struggles ahead.

As Sudeley knew, Dorset had not been treated well by the Protector. When Catherine Parr’s courtly brother, William, had been made Marquess of Northampton it was said it had been done not so much to promote Northampton as to demote Dorset, who was, until Northampton’s election, the only marquess in England. This view appeared to be confirmed in March, when Northampton had been raised to the Privy Council, and Dorset had not. Harington was instructed to assure Dorset that, as the King’s second uncle, Sudeley was well placed to do him the favours the Protector denied him.⁸ When, during one of his subsequent visits to his London home, Dorset confirmed his willingness to be Sudeley’s friend and ally, Harington seized his opportunity. The most appropriate mark of this future friendship, he said, would be if Dorset were to send Jane to live in Sudeley’s household as his ward. At that, however, Dorset balked.

It was usual for aristocratic families to send a daughter approaching adolescence to live with a well-connected family. The tradition served a number of useful purposes, binding, as it did, parents as allies and children as friends. The contacts made were used often in the arrangement of a future marriage. For a girl of noble birth it was virtually unthinkable that her marriage should be left to chance, but Jane, at ten, was rather young to be ‘put out’, as it was termed. And there were other considerations. We do not know the precise timing of Harington’s visit, but if it took place before Sudeley’s marriage to Catherine Parr became public, Harington was asking Dorset to send his daughter to the household of an unmarried man. If, as is more likely, it took place after, then it was to a man whose marriage was considered a scandal. Catherine Parr had destroyed her reputation by marrying so soon after the King’s death. Virtue, in a woman, was associated almost entirely with chastity, that is, unimpeachable sexual morality and continence. It was believed that the female sex drive was stronger than the male (since women were creatures of feeling rather than reason) and therefore the likely explanation for Catherine Parr’s behaviour was assumed to be unbridled lust. Sudeley, meanwhile, was judged guilty of selfish ambition. If his wife became pregnant it would be uncertain whose child it was. This was potentially dangerous to the stability of the country. Since Henry VIII had introduced a law requiring the monarch’s assent to any royal marriage, their actions might even have been judged treasonous, had Sudeley not persuaded Edward to write a letter that made it appear the marriage was made at his suggestion.

Harington had anticipated that Dorset’s reaction to the proposed wardship might not be favourable and assured Dorset that Sudeley would see to it that Jane was placed in a most advantageous marriage. ‘With whom?’ Dorset demanded. ‘Marry,’ Harington replied, ‘I doubt not but you shall see him marry her to the King; and fear you not but he will bring it to pass.’ Dorset was stunned by Harington’s remark. He listened, however, as Harington continued, describing how Sudeley, watching Jane about court, had declared that she was ‘as handsome a Lady as any in Christendom, and that, if the King’s Majesty, when he came to age, would marry within the realm, it was as likely it would be there than in any other place’.⁹ Dorset began to consider the possibilities: maybe Sudeley’s idea was not an unrealistic one? Henry VIII had taken English wives. His daughter was an intelligent, highly educated, evangelical princess: the perfect bride for Edward. For the Greys, it would also be a better match than either his grandfather, or he himself, had made. Dorset agreed to discuss the matter of Jane’s wardship with Sudeley as soon as possible.

While the royal children played their innocent games, the adults began moving the pawns on the political chessboard. Within a week of Harington’s approaches, Dorset was at Seymour Place along the Strand, talking with Sudeley in the privacy of his garden. The banging and clattering of builders echoed across the hedges and herb beds. Next door, the Protector was clearing the local parish church of St Mary and the Holy Innocents to make way for a vast Italianate palace. It was the first building of its kind in England, a suitable monument to Somerset’s burgeoning status as alter rex (another king).¹⁰ Above the noise Sudeley repeated to Dorset that he believed Jane would make the King a fine Queen. But he offered also substantial proof of his friendship: several hundred pounds towards an eventual payment of £2,000 for Jane’s wardship. Dorset was impressed. Sudeley’s ‘fair promises’ and eagerness to be his friend were in stark contrast to the treatment he had received at Somerset’s hands. Convinced that an alliance with Sudeley was an honourable way forward he sent for his daughter immediately.

Dorset’s actions have since been characterised as those of a heartless parent selling his daughter for profit. As Jane watched her bags being packed and kissed her sisters farewell, this, however, was surely not how she saw it. It was usual for money to change hands in matters of wardship. Her father’s had been bought twice over, by the late Earl of Arundel and Duke of Suffolk, and for double the figure Sudeley was prepared to pay for Jane. It was not the money that had appealed to Dorset. By placing his daughter with Sudeley, he would open the greatest possible prospects for her, which in turn could bring glory to the family name. Jane would have understood this, for noble children were part of a family network that extended to kin and beyond, in which each was expected to play their part for the good of the whole. Jane’s mother, Frances, appears to have had her doubts, however, about the wisdom of the scheme. Her friend and stepmother Katherine Suffolk disapproved of Sudeley and was shocked by his hasty marriage to their friend, the Queen dowager, Catherine Parr. But although Frances later made strenuous efforts to keep Jane at home, away from Sudeley, she saw it as her duty to support her husband in his decisions - and from this time forward he was determined that his favourite child would one day be Queen.

The ten-year-old was installed with her guardian at Seymour Place as soon as the necessary arrangements had been made. Despite her mother’s possible misgivings it was to be one of the happiest periods of Jane Grey’s life.

Chapter IV The Example of Catherine Parr

It was only a short boat ride from Dorset House to Seymour Place, but Jane’s new home opened a more independent world for her. At the best of times large aristocratic households were not very good at giving girls the kind of closely supervised lives their parents would have liked. Guardians were often at court or staying with friends, and the girls were left in the care of servants who had less reason than their parents to watch their manners and behaviour.¹ Even an experienced stepmother like Catherine Parr sometimes neglected her duties. The Protector’s wife, Anne, Duchess of Somerset, was shocked to see Parr’s ward, the young Princess Elizabeth, unaccompanied, out in a barge on the Thames one night that summer. There were no such complaints about Sudeley’s care of Jane, but he was an indulgent guardian, with more pressing concerns than babysitting a ten-year-old girl. Jane, a confident child, must have enjoyed the novel sense of freedom this gave her, although she was never left entirely to her own devices.

When Jane wasn’t at Seymour Place she was attending the Queen dowager’s household with her guardian. In the last year of her life she would return to Catherine’s former house at the royal manor of Chelsea. Here, in the summer the garden boasted orchards of cherry and peach, velvety damask roses and the warm scents of lavender and rosemary. Inside the noise and bustle was greater even than Jane was used to at Bradgate. In addition to the Queen’s Privy Chamber and Maids of Honour, the household included upwards of 120 gentlemen and yeomen. At thirty-five Catherine Parr remained attractive; with a handsome husband she worked hard to stay beautiful, plucking her eyebrows with silver tweezers and dressing in the latest fashions. Children are always fascinated by the rituals of adult grooming and, to the later irritation of her tutor John Aylmer, Jane developed a similar fondness for carefully styled hair and fine clothes. She also grew to share the Queen dowager’s love of music. Catherine and her brother, William Parr of Northampton, were the greatest patrons of musicians at court. The most famous, the five Bassano brothers, provided the only permanent recorder consort known in England before the twentieth century. One brother, Baptista, instructed the Princess Elizabeth in Italian, as well as in playing the lute.

Jane’s visits to Chelsea, and the return visits to Seymour Place made by the Queen dowager, gave her the opportunity to get to know Elizabeth much better than she had hitherto, although she was acquainted already with some of the princess’s personal staff. Elizabeth’s governess Kate Astley and husband John were old friends of Jane’s family; John Astley would later write a treatise on horsemanship and may have given them both riding lessons.² But the thirteen-year-old princess, who would one day govern the destinies of Katherine and Mary Grey, did not grow close to Jane. A freshskinned adolescent, with her father’s red gold hair and her mother’s famous black eyes, Elizabeth was too old to wish to play with Jane, and was, in any case, unusually self-contained. This gave her a reputation for arrogance in some quarters, but what it reflected principally was anxiety.³ Elizabeth felt acutely the precariousness of her position.

In the first years of her life Elizabeth had gone from being her father’s heir and the daughter of his most beloved wife, to the bastard child of a traitor-adulteress. This had changed again in 1544, when she was restored in line of succession, but she remained illegitimate in law and was now an orphan, dependent on the goodwill of others. Although she loved Catherine Parr for the kindness she showed, Elizabeth was disgusted at her stepmother’s hasty remarriage and, as she observed to her half-sister, Mary, based in St James’s, she felt there was nothing they could say about it, without putting themselves in danger. Sudeley was the brother of the Protector, whom they had little reason to trust, and who had kept the lands and income Elizabeth’s father had left her, largely in his own control. Elizabeth, utterly powerless, was obliged to make the best of what was to her an uncomfortable situation at Chelsea - and Jane was not a particularly welcome presence in Elizabeth’s bleak and uncertain world. Under the terms of Henry’s will, Jane Grey was Elizabeth’s heir, and Elizabeth had seen already how one heir could leapfrog another, from one parliamentary statute to the next. As Elizabeth was notoriously vain, it also can’t have helped that Jane was proving more adept at her studies than either she or the King, both of whom were considered exceptionally intelligent.*

Jane’s quick mind was absorbing a curriculum of studies that shared similarities with those of Edward, who was now reading Justin the Martyr’s summary of Greek history and copying phrases from Cicero’s Offices and the Tusculan Disputations. This progress in Latin and Greek was matched by her religious education. Evangelicals were enthusiastic for women to be involved in the study of theology and Catherine Parr set Jane an impressive example. For years she had applied her knowledge of Scripture to the promotion of Church reform, and much of the autumn in Catherine’s household was taken up with her religious projects. The translation of Erasmus’s Paraphrases of the New Testament, which she had overseen (and to which the Princess Mary had contributed), was prepared for publication (and would prove a bestseller).⁴ But she was also completing an original work of her own, written when Henry was alive, and which she had not then dared make public. Entitled The Lamentation of a Sinner, it described her search for salvation. It was distinctly Lutheran in tone, and Henry had considered Luther a heretic, but Jane’s step-grandmother, Katherine Suffolk, helped persuade the Queen dowager the time was ripe for its publication.⁵

For the first time Jane had a sense of what it was like to be a member of a network of clever women, working together and propagating new and exciting religious ideas.⁶ The evangelical reformation, meanwhile, was proceeding apace all around her. The ambassador to the Hapsburg Emperor, Charles V, complained that the preachers giving the public sermons at court seemed ‘to vie with each other as to who can abuse most strongly the old religion’.⁷ By July they had asserted the evangelical belief that salvation was not attainable by man through his own efforts, such as charitable works, but was the gift of God for an elect few. By August the use of the rosary was abolished and the Mass was under attack, with ‘much speaking against the sacrament of the altar, that some called it Jack in the box, with divers other shameful names’.⁸ Stained-glass windows in churches were smashed and the carved figures of Christ torn down. The iconography of God was now idolatry, but that of the King and the nobility remained everywhere. Indeed the arms of the King were now being painted on church walls. Bishop Gardiner questioned the logic of this to the Privy Council. He also warned it was surely illegal to break Henry VIII’s religious settlement during Edward’s minority, but such pleas and arguments fell on deaf ears.

The Bible did not raise any objections to heraldic symbols, but to objects worshipped as God. Praying before a statue or image might not be to worship it, but it could appear close to it. As for the illegality of changing the national religious culture, Somerset and his allies believed that Edward would learn to applaud their actions before he came to his majority. Images of saints, with which Edward had been surrounded, were removed from his rooms, and his mind was being as cleansed of the past as his environment. Edward’s reformist tutor, the gaunt John Cheke, was ‘always at his elbow’ whispering to him in his chapel, ‘and wherever else he went, to inform and teach him’. Edward responded eagerly, but the evangelicals needed to project Edward as the font of reform, not merely as an obedient pupil. It was claimed, therefore, that his ability to absorb what he was taught was such that, ‘it should seem he were already a [spiritual] father’ rather than a boy, ‘not yet ten years old’.⁹ The radical Dorset would have liked to see still faster progress in religion than was being made, but he also had more earthly matters to consider. In particular he had concerns that Sudeley was proving unable to develop Jane’s friendship with the King.

Somerset had barred Catherine Parr and Sudeley from access to Edward. This was miserable for the boy. Catherine was the only mother Edward had ever known, his Mater Carissima, who, he had once said, held ‘the chiefest place in my heart’. In getting Edward to write a letter giving them permission to marry, however, Sudeley had proven how dangerous their access to the King could be. The ability to shape the King’s mind, to fill it with carefully coloured opinions and edited information that favoured one’s own interests and condemned one’s enemies, was central to the operation of politics in an autocratic monarchy. While the King’s mind was young and impressionable, as Edward’s was, it was all the more important to control access to him. Sudeley was therefore kept well away from him. But he assured Dorset that he nevertheless remained the King’s favourite uncle. Edward had complained, he said, ‘divers times’ that ‘his uncle of Somerset kept him very straight’ and would not let him have money when he asked for it.¹⁰ Sudeley explained he was thus able to earn Edward’s gratitude with gifts of £10, £20, even £40, slipped to him through John Fowler, one of the Grooms of the Privy Chamber. While Edward was fond of him, however, Sudeley knew that the truth was he had to place new and higher stakes if he was to achieve the power he wanted.

Katherine and Mary Grey were used to their sister leaving them to spend periods at court. But Jane’s leaving for Seymour Place was of a different order and surely more deeply felt. The ordinary memories of everyday life, such as the dancing horse, taken from Bradgate by one of the servants to entertain the townsfolk of Leicester, were less often shared.¹¹ For Frances also, it must have been hard. Jane was still very young and, no matter how commonplace it was to send a child away, she had to overcome her natural instincts to do what was considered best for her eldest daughter. Even when Frances was away at court, or staying with friends, she knew her children, whether at Bradgate or Dorset House, were being cared for in an environment she had some control over. Giving that up to a known womaniser like Sudeley was a cause for anxiety. But things were far worse at Seymour Place than she ever suspected.

If there was one thing that would have advanced Sudeley’s ambitions more effectively than marrying a King’s widow, it would be to have married a King’s daughter. Jane’s enquiring mind and sharp eyes could not fail to have noticed how especially friendly Sudeley was with the Princess Elizabeth. Whenever the Queen dowager and her stepdaughter visited them at Seymour Place he was always up first and, still in his nightshirt and slippers, he would breeze down the corridors to the door of Elizabeth’s chamber, look round and wish her good morning. Elizabeth’s governess Kate Astley warned Sudeley that it was ‘an unseemly sight to go to a maiden’s bedchamber barelegged’ and was causing gossip amongst the servants. But Sudeley retorted that he was doing nothing wrong. Soon he was going into Elizabeth’s room. Sometimes she was still in bed and he would ‘put open the curtains, and bid her good morrow, and make as though he would come at her’.¹² Elizabeth did not dare reprove him. She had not forgotten Sudeley was the brother of the Protector: as he made his advances she simply shrank under her covers.

Increasingly Elizabeth’s feelings towards her stepfather became confused. Having a powerful figure show her so much attention was exciting and, at just fourteen, it was not easy to distinguish predator from protector. There may have been an element too, of wanting to revenge herself on her stepmother for her betrayal of her father in marrying so quickly after his death. There is only one time, however, that Elizabeth’s emotions are recorded as having come to the surface, during this period. This was when, to her great distress, her young tutor, William Grindal, died of plague at the end of January. Sudeley and Catherine were anxious to choose his replacement, but here, outside the complex parameters of the adult, sexual arena, Elizabeth’s natural self-assurance could show through, and she insisted on making her own choice: a man she could trust. She picked the thirty-three-year-old Roger Ascham, who had taught Edward alongside John Cheke and been Grindal’s tutor at Cambridge.

Jane also liked Ascham. He was easy-going with a taste for good wine and gambling at cards. He got on particularly well with the Astleys, with whom he recalled enjoying ‘free talk, always mingled with honest mirth’, and Jane would later write a letter commending him to a future employer.* Outside the schoolroom, however, Sudeley’s reckless familiarity with Elizabeth was beginning to cause tensions in his marriage. Sudeley and Catherine enjoyed a passionate, but volatile relationship. He was a jealous lover and Catherine was sometimes frightened of his rages. But she was now pregnant and had her own anxieties. At thirty-six she was old for a first-time mother and feared Sudeley saw Elizabeth as a potential replacement, were she to die in childbirth. There were even rumours, which she may have heard, that Sudeley had expressed an interest in marrying the princess before he had begun to woo her.¹³

Kate Astley’s complaints about Sudeley’s behaviour with Elizabeth had resulted in the Queen dowager deciding to accompany Sudeley on his early morning perambulations. But she couldn’t be with him all the time. The final straw for Catherine came in May when she was six months pregnant. Elizabeth and Sudeley had disappeared and Catherine went looking for them. When she found them Elizabeth was in her husband’s arms.¹⁴ Catherine and Sudeley had a furious row. The embrace does not seem to have been overtly sexual, but Catherine later explained to a shocked Elizabeth the grave risk she had taken with her reputation. As the daughter of an infamous adulteress, Elizabeth had more reason than most to be careful with her good name. To prevent any further opportunity for scandal or for some misdeed on Sudeley’s part, Catherine suggested Elizabeth stay for a while with Astley’s sister, Joan Denny. The chastened Elizabeth left a week after Pentecost, ashamed and shaken by what had occurred.

It was Jane alone who accompanied Catherine Parr to her guardian’s Gloucestershire estate at Sudeley for the summer. The orphaned Elizabeth must have reflected bitterly that Jane would now replace her in Catherine’s attentions. If she had felt any malice towards Catherine, it had vanished and she felt remorseful that she had allowed herself to hurt a woman who had shown her nothing but warmth and generosity. For Jane, on the other hand, there was a danger Elizabeth’s leaving would encourage a sense of entitlement. While the illegitimate Elizabeth was banished, she, who was the apple of her father’s eye, took her place as the princess of the households. Sudeley, meanwhile, still didn’t acknowledge that he had behaved irresponsibly with Elizabeth. ‘Suspicion,’ as he wrote in one of his poems, ‘I do banish thee.’ He was a ‘master of noble blood…of manner good, And spotless in life.’ His behaviour was simply, ‘sporting’.¹⁵ He was now only looking forward to fatherhood. He liked to hear Catherine describe how his child was stirring in her womb and shared with her his hopes of a son who would grow up to avenge all the humiliations they endured at his brother’s hands. He had prepared a nursery at his house furnished for a prince. There were scarlet curtains of silk taffeta, a chair upholstered in cloth of gold, carved stools, rich hangings, carpets and a gilded salt. All the signs of the baby’s expected arrival were there, from the cradle where he would sleep, to the three feather beds and goblets for his nurse and servants.¹⁶

Jane had to get used to the noise of further extensive building works while she was at Sudeley House. Her guardian was spending a fortune on his Gloucestershire seat (although nothing like the £10,000 his brother spent that year alone on Somerset House). But it was a happy time for Jane, studying under the Queen dowager’s guidance and with a fine library of books to read. There were upwards of twenty-two volumes in Catherine’s personal collection, some in English, others in French or Italian. Only seven, however, were religious works: Catherine was losing her passion for theology. Sudeley even seemed bored by the twice-daily prayers given by the chaplains. Hugh Latimer, who was the spiritual adviser of Jane’s stepgrandmother, complained later he avoided them ‘like a mole digging in the dirt’.¹⁷ If Jane reflected on this she would have worried that he was tempting fate: God punished such behaviour, she was taught.

In August, when the baby was almost due, Jane’s father came to visit and she was able to catch up with family news. Her sister, Katherine, who had just turned eight, was now studying Greek with the new chaplain, Thomas Harding, a former Regius Professor of Hebrew at Oxford. She did not show the same aptitude for her studies as Jane, but she made up in charm what she lacked in intellectual drive. Everyone liked Katherine. Little Mary Grey was also doing well. Jane could imagine her dashing about, the long tippets sewn at her shoulders known as the ‘ribbons of childhood’ streaming behind her as she ran and played: a small, determined figure, as yet ignorant that she was not the beauty her sisters were said to be. There was news too, for Jane, of the extended family, and especially the sisters’ uncle, Lord John Grey, who was commanding cavalry in the war with Scotland. Somerset hoped to achieve what King Henry had failed to do and unite the two kingdoms, by marriage or force. The family was fearful for Lord John after the almost fatal injuries he had received at the battle of Pinkie in September 1547, but they thought his troops had cut a fine spectacle when they had left London in July, dressed in blue coats guarded in yellow, and he had, thus far, survived this campaign unhurt.¹⁸

Sudeley was anxious, however, to discuss other matters with Jane’s father and, when the adults were alone, Dorset found him full of plans. To Sudeley’s delight, his brother, the Protector, had begun to make enemies. There were those who felt the evangelical reformation was losing impetus. The radical preacher, John Knox, later complained that Somerset spent more time with his masons than he did with his chaplains. And the regal style of his Italianate palace irritated on a further account: it reflected the lofty attitude he held towards his colleagues. There were profound concerns about the expense of the war with Scotland and the high inflation the country was suffering, but Somerset was dismissive of the anxieties of his fellow Councillors and sometimes even appeared contemptuous of them. He had brutally expelled Sudeley’s brother-in-law, William Parr of Northampton, from the Privy Council for taking the novel step of divorcing his wife and marrying his mistress, the court beauty Elizabeth Brooke - an action that reflected, in turn, Somerset’s fears that parts of the country were restive over the religious changes already introduced.¹⁹

Sudeley outlined to Dorset, as he had already to Northampton, a future in which Edward had come of age and rejected the unpopular Protector in favour of his younger uncle. There was a danger, Sudeley explained, that his brother would not give up power without a fight. It was necessary, therefore, to prepare for the struggle ahead. Northampton had been advised to ‘set up house in the North Country’ where, on his core estates, surrounded by tenants and friends, he would be a powerful figure.²⁰ Dorset was also now given detailed instructions on how to build up an effective military following. Gentlemen had too much to lose to be trustworthy, Sudeley told him. It was better to gain the loyalty of yeomen for they were ‘best able to persuade the multitude’. Dorset was advised to ‘go to their houses, now to one, now to another, carrying with you a flagon or two of wine and a pasty of venison and to use a familiarity with them, for so shall you cause them to love you’.²¹ The talk of war seemed unreal to Dorset, but it was also fascinating. The aims were presented as altruistic: to protect the King from the overweening Somerset. But they coincided also with his personal interests. Dorset’s honour had been slighted by the Protector’s failure to recognise better his place within the royal family. As he returned to Bradgate he had to consider whether he should fight to protect it and whether the horrors of battle were justified by his duties to the King.

The Queen dowager’s confinement, meanwhile, was coming to an end and on 30th August 1548 she went into labour. Catherine had suffered a difficult and uncomfortable pregnancy, but she eventually delivered a healthy baby girl. Sudeley, despite his hopes for a son, was overwhelmed by the thrill of first-time fatherhood. His daughter was to be called Mary, after Edward’s elder half-sister, and he wrote to his brother, the father of many daughters, declaring his a most spectacular beauty. For a few days all seemed well and Jane Grey rejoiced with her surrogate family. Gradually, however, Catherine grew delirious: the fatal sign of puerperal fever. In her delirium she was tormented by her old fears about her husband’s desire to marry Elizabeth. ‘Those that be about me careth not for me,’ she confided to her servant Lady Elizabeth Tyrwhitt as Sudeley stood over her. ‘Why sweet heart, I would you no hurt,’ he reassured her. ‘No, my Lord, I think so,’ she replied, and whispered, ‘but my Lord you have given me many shrewd taunts.’ Sudeley lay down beside her on the bed and tried to comfort her. But she soon burst out with another accusation: she had not dared spend as much time with her doctor as she would like for fear of making him jealous.

Sudeley persisted in his efforts to reassure and soothe Catherine and, as it became clear she was dying, Jane and the other women read the Scriptures with her. They would have prayed also, as the chaplain arrived to perform the service for the Visitation of the Sick. The priest was expected to exhort Catherine to ask forgiveness for her sins and to forgive all those who had offended her, and before she died on 5th September, Catherine and Sudeley were reconciled. Her will left her husband everything she had, ‘wishing them to be a thousand times more in value than they were’.²² For his part, Sudeley was left stunned by his wife’s death. The happiness at the birth of his daughter had tapped into a deep well of feeling and now he was plunged into desperate grief. ‘I was so amazed I had small regard either to myself or to my doings,’ he later recalled. Politics were forgotten. He went with his baby daughter to his brother the Protector’s house, to recuperate, and ordered that his own household be broken up. Jane Grey was to be sent back to Bradgate. But he asked first that she fulfil the role of chief mourner at Catherine’s funeral.

The eleven-year-old Jane performed her first public role with great dignity. She walked behind the Queen’s coffin in the procession from the house to the chapel at Sudeley, her small figure erect in a black gown, the long train ‘borne up by a young Lady’. She was, perhaps, the fifteen-year-old Elizabeth Tilney, the younger sister of the favourite lady-in-waiting of Henry’s fifth wife Katherine Howard, and a friend who would accompany Jane on the last procession of her life.²³ The funeral ceremony in the chapel was modest and took only a morning, but it was of disproportionate historical significance. This was the first Protestant royal funeral in English history. The biblical translator Miles Coverdale conducted the service in English and gave the sermon. In it he stressed that the alms given for the poor at the funeral and the candles burned were not to profit Catherine’s soul but to honour her memory. In reformed teaching there was no purgatory, where in Catholic belief sinners may, after death, do penance for their sins while the living pray for their release: the elect went straight to heaven, while the rest went to hell. Jane did not pray for Catherine, therefore, although she surely remembered her distraught guardian and his motherless baby.

When the service was over, and Catherine buried, Jane returned home. The records of the towns she travelled through on the road to Bradgate record the expenses laid out to entertain their royal visitor. When she was a little girl, Jane often saw her parents going off to Leicester and other local towns before returning with gifts from the mayor and the aldermen’s wives. There would be strawberries, walnuts, pears and home-made treats such as the spiced wine, ippocras.²⁴ Now she was treated with similar deference. Jane’s mother was not getting back the child she had said goodbye to a year before, but a questioning, maturing girl with a strong sense of her own dignity.

* John Foxe, who knew Aylmer, claimed that Jane was a better student than Edward, and Elizabeth’s later tutor, Roger Ascham, recorded her superiority to Elizabeth. Neither had reason to exaggerate.

* The Dorsets also later employed his wife, Alice, and a cousin at Bradgate.

Chapter V The Execution of Sudeley

Jane’s younger sisters had endured their share of mourning at Bradgate. Their mother Frances, who had been fond of Catherine Parr and kept her portrait all her life, had lost her younger sister, Eleanor, Countess of Cumberland, the previous November. Eleanor was still only in her twenties and left a husband stricken with shock, as well as an only daughter.¹ Then, on 3rd January 1548, when the family were celebrating the Christmas season at Bradgate, Dorset had received news that his younger sister, Anne Willoughby, was also dying. This branch of the Willoughbys, kin of Katherine Suffolk, were based in Nottinghamshire, not far from Bradgate, and the two families were very close.

Katherine and Mary understood something of Jane’s grief, then, as they prepared to welcome her home after the Queen dowager’s funeral. The excitement of having their sister with them again and the hopes of exchanging confidences, soon gave way, however, to the awkwardness of readjustment. The three-year gap between Jane and Katherine seemed suddenly very wide. While Katherine and Mary Grey were both still of an age when they wanted to please their parents, Jane was more questioning. At eleven she was showing the same rebellious streak her father had had at her age. Dorset used to infuriate his Latin teacher, Richard Croke, by laughing at rude jokes about the clergy, and then, when Croke complained, by stirring up the other pupils against him.² Jane felt equally irritated by the restrictions and demands imposed on her at Bradgate. She had got used to a long rein at Seymour Place and resented her mother’s efforts to reassert her authority. Frances, in turn, was angered and worried by Jane’s defiance.

In Tudor thinking, to rule and to obey were the essential characteristics of an ordered society. Frances believed that, with discipline, Jane’s youthful wilfulness could be transformed into willpower and become a force for good. Without it, however, she would pursue only her own selfish appetites. That, Frances feared, was dangerous for Jane and for society. As the heiress of a noble house, and perhaps even a future Queen, Jane could do great things for her country, or great harm. Frances was furious that Sudeley had not done a better job of guiding her child, and to her horror, less than a fortnight after Jane’s return home, Sudeley asked for her to be sent back to him.

Sudeley’s grief over his wife’s death had passed rapidly through the early stages of numbness and denial that follows bereavement. He now grasped it as fact, with all its implications. Her wealth was being returned to the crown. This dealt a severe blow to his finances and status. That could not be helped, but returning Jane to her parents was an act of political self-mutilation that he could yet rectify. Sudeley had written on 17th September pleading with Jane’s father for her return. He anticipated that Frances, in particular, would be unenthusiastic and assured Dorset that he would be keeping on Catherine Parr’s gentlewomen, the unmarried Maids of Honour, ‘and other women being about her Grace in her lifetime’. Everyone, Sudeley swore, would be, ‘as diligent about [Jane], as yourself would wish’. His own mother would take charge of the house, and would treat Jane ‘as though she were her own daughter. And for my own part, I shall continue her half father and more.’³ Sudeley then wrote to Jane in a suitably strict, fatherly manner. Jane, picking up her cue, thanked him reverently. ‘Like as you have become towards me a loving and kind father, so I shall be always most ready to obey your godly monitions and good instructions,’ she replied.⁴

Frances was unimpressed, however, by Sudeley’s assurances and Dorset, aware that Sudeley’s status had fallen with the death of Catherine Parr, agreed with his wife that it would be better if Jane now stayed at home. Dorset wrote thanking him for his care of Jane thus far, and then reminded his friend that Jane was very young, and while he regarded him as an excellent father figure, he could not also be a mother to her. With Catherine Parr dead, Sudeley could surely see that ‘the eye and oversight of my wife shall in this respect be most necessary’. Jane was on the cusp of adolescence, a crucial age for ‘the addressing of the mind to humility, sobriety and obedience’.⁵ Dorset concluded hopefully that he still intended to take Sudeley’s advice about Jane’s marriage.

Frances then wrote her own letter to Sudeley. As Jane’s guardian and the Queen dowager’s widower, Sudeley was a member of the family and Frances referred to him in her letter as her ‘good brother’ and to Jane as his ‘niece’. She also accepted that when it came to Jane’s marriage they would ask for his advice, as her husband wished. But she made it clear that she did not expect any marriage to take place for a good while yet. Having been married herself at sixteen, Frances did not want her daughter hurried into a husband’s bed. Frances concluded her letter expressing the hope that she could keep her daughter with his ‘goodwill’.⁶ It was not to be. Within days Sudeley was on the road to Leicestershire determined to change their minds. When the sisters and their parents greeted him at Bradgate he also had a friend at his side, Sir William Sharington, the Under Treasurer of the Royal Mint.

Jane had seen Sharington often at Seymour Place, and Katherine and Mary may have remembered him from the previous autumn, when he had accompanied Sudeley to Bradgate on another visit. A handsome, charming man, he had an elegant, aquiline nose, though his eyes were dark-ringed and prematurely lined. Sharington had used his position at the Mint to perpetrate extensive frauds.⁷ Sudeley knew what he had done and in exchange for his secrecy Sharington was providing him with money. This included the ready cash Sudeley needed to buy Jane’s wardship. But Sharington also had talents that Sudeley would make good use of at Bradgate. He could be extremely plausible. The previous autumn he helped persuade Dorset to vote with Sudeley against a bill in Parliament confirming Somerset’s letters patent as Lord Protector - Dorset had been the only peer to do so. Now Sharington had the task of persuading Frances to return her daughter to Seymour Place, while Sudeley worked on Dorset.

Sudeley knew his most effective leverage with Dorset remained the promise that he could deliver the King’s hand in marriage to Jane. And he had a piece of good fortune in this respect. Jane’s principal rival, the infant Mary Queen of Scots, had been sent to live in France so that she could be betrothed to the Dauphin, Francis. Sudeley assured Dorset that ‘if he might once get the King at liberty’ then he could immediately have Edward married to Jane. Dorset hummed and hawed, but, as he later recalled, Sudeley ‘would have no nay’. Sharington, meanwhile, was doing an excellent job at weakening Frances’s resolve, reassuring her that all her fears were misplaced. Eventually, ‘after long debating and much sticking’, she agreed that Jane should be returned to Sudeley’s care and her husband followed suit.⁸ It was a decision they would soon regret, as would Jane.

Life at Seymour Place that autumn of 1548 was not as Jane remembered it, despite the comforting presence of her old friends from Catherine’s Privy Chamber. The Queen dowager’s stabilising influence on Sudeley was gone and a part of him had not quite accepted she was dead.

Sudeley spoke often of promoting a parliamentary bill that would prevent people slandering Catherine Parr’s name over her decision to marry him so quickly after Henry VIII’s death. But there were also rumours circulating that he wanted to remarry. Some claimed Sudeley had his eye on the Princess Mary, others that he hoped to marry Lady Jane Grey. He laughed at that suggestion, but admitted to his former brother-in-law, Parr of Northampton, that there would be ‘much ado’ for Jane’s hand. His ward would be twelve in May and able to make a binding marriage contract under canon law. He believed the Somersets, in particular, ‘would do what they could to obtain her for [their son] Lord Hertford’.

Northampton asked Sudeley if his real intention might be to marry the Princess Elizabeth rather than Jane. Sudeley replied that ‘he had heard that the Protector would clap him in the Tower if he went to Elizabeth’,⁹ though he could see no other reason why he shouldn’t marry her, if she were willing. As he told other friends, it was far better that Elizabeth should marry within the kingdom than outside it. Elizabeth, however, had learned the lessons of the previous spring when Sudeley had embarrassed her with Catherine Parr. She was acutely aware that she could not marry without the permission of the King and the Privy Council, and refused even to see Sudeley without a warrant. But some of her servants were prepared to help him, believing, rightly or wrongly, that this was what Elizabeth truly wanted. Two or three weeks before Christmas, Jane noticed the familiar full face of Elizabeth’s cofferer, Thomas Parry, at Seymour Place. Parry, who as cofferer managed Elizabeth’s money, appeared several times, walking alone with her guardian in the gallery where, out of her earshot, they discussed the financial details of a possible marriage to Elizabeth.¹⁰

Such dabbling in a matter of high state caused considerable alarm with other servants in Elizabeth’s household. The princess’s tutor, Roger Ascham, was so appalled by Parry’s actions that he asked for permission to return to Cambridge for the entire Christmas season. Kate Astley’s husband John, equally concerned, argued furiously with his wife over the arrangements. One of these arguments was so heated that afterwards Elizabeth noticed bruising on her governess’s arms (Astley claimed that a doctor had been bleeding her to cure some ailment). The atmosphere at Seymour Place, meanwhile, was equally charged. Sudeley’s friends and servants desperately tried to dissuade him from his course. It was against all sense of decency and right order that a man without royal blood should align himself with an heir to the throne. ‘Beware,’ one warned Sudeley: ‘It were better for you if you had never been born, nay, that you were burnt to the quick alive, than that you should attempt it.’ Men had died already for attempting royal alliances during King Henry’s time and it would put Elizabeth’s life at risk.¹¹ They begged him instead to improve his relations with his brother. But Sudeley only blustered about how he would use Parliament to get the Governorship of the King’s Person in spite of the Protector, and seize his rightful share of power.

Sudeley judged that Somerset’s political position was continuing to weaken as he persisted in his arrogant treatment of his colleagues. In this he was correct. Somerset often ignored advice and once slapped down a Privy Councillor in such a humiliating manner that the man was reduced to tears. Somerset’s most faithful ally on the Council, William Paget, was moved to write to him in the middle of Christmas night, to warn him of disaster ahead.¹² But not everything was going Sudeley’s way. Within the Privy Council it was Sudeley who was judged the immediate threat to national stability. Dorset, aware there was an impending crisis, demonstrated his usual poor political judgement by throwing in his lot with his friend. Whatever happened, Dorset promised Sudeley, he would ‘defend him against all men, save the King’. Night after night during the Christmas season, Katherine and Mary Grey saw their father leave Dorset House for Seymour Place, where Jane saw him arrive along with their great Leicestershire neighbour, Francis Hastings, Earl of Huntingdon. Sometimes Sudeley would leave them to go on forays to court. There were accusations later that Sudeley was planning to kidnap Edward and Elizabeth. Dorset may have hoped he would, believing Sudeley planned a double wedding, with Edward marrying Lady Jane Grey and he marrying Princess Elizabeth. If so it was an ominous portent for Jane of the danger in which her father was prepared to place her in pursuit of his ambitions.

The evidence suggests, however, that for the moment at least, Sudeley was merely picking up gossip from the King’s Groom, John Fowler. Sudeley would moan over a drink in the Privy Buttery to Fowler how he wished Edward were old enough to be independent of Somerset, a time too far off to do him any good. On 6th January, the feast of the Epiphany and the last day of Christmas, Sir William Sharington’s house, Lacock Abbey in Wiltshire, was searched on the orders of the Council and incriminating evidence of his fraud at the Royal Mint discovered. Sharington understood what was expected of him and to save his skin gave up all he knew about Sudeley’s ambitions, including his hopes of marrying Elizabeth. Others were then rounded up. The young Earl of Rutland, whom Sudeley had attempted to recruit as an ally, was called in for questioning at Somerset House in the middle of the night. Terrified, the twenty-one-year-old repeated what Sudeley had said about the need for those who loved the King to build up a following amongst ‘honest and wealthy yeomen who were ringleaders in good towns’. One of Sudeley’s servants had a brother in Rutland’s household and Sudeley learned what the earl had said before morning. He hoped, nonetheless, to brazen it out. The next day he went to Parliament as usual and left at dinnertime with Dorset, to whom he confided what Rutland had said. They ate at Huntingdon’s house and returned to Seymour Place with a group of friends. These included Jane’s youngest uncle, Lord Thomas Grey. In contrast to the brothers Sudeley and Somerset, her father and his brothers were close.

Jane must have known something was wrong from the nervous conversation of the servants. Behind closed doors, Sudeley was boasting that he had been called to see the Privy Council, but had refused to go. Lord Thomas was unimpressed, pointing out that the Council could simply arrest him. He advised Sudeley to trust his brother as ‘a man of much mercy’.¹³ Sudeley refused to contemplate it. In the palace next door, meanwhile, Somerset was proving more amenable to advice - the worse for Sudeley. His enemies were insisting to Somerset that his life would only be safe when his brother was dead. That night, the Clerk of the Privy Council, Sir Thomas Smith, and the Privy Councillor and lawyer, Sir John Baker, came to arrest Sudeley. Jane would have recognised the sickly Smith, even behind his long beard and heavy coat. He was a friend of her tutor John Aylmer. Baker, a man in his fifties, was distinguishable by his grey hair; he was old by the standards of the day, but ‘Butcher Baker’, as he came to be called, would send many young men to their graves before his time was up.* Sudeley accepted his arrest quietly, hoping that all would be well. Others, however, proved less sanguine.

When the Council’s men came for Elizabeth’s cofferer Parry, he ran up to his chamber, tearing off his chain of office and crying, ‘I would I had never been born, for I am undone.’ In the Tower the Astleys both gave full confessions, telling all they knew about Sudeley’s plans to marry Elizabeth and his visits to her bedchamber. Only the fifteen-year-old Elizabeth remained composed in her interviews. Faced with the danger she had long feared she defended her servants as well as herself, at times proving forgetful, at times angry over slurs that she was pregnant by Sudeley, but always consistent in her denials that she ever intended to marry anyone without the Council’s permission. It is possible that Parry’s kinsman, William Cecil, was giving Elizabeth vital advice - it would help explain the trust she later developed in him - but Elizabeth was never prone to losing her nerve.

Jane was returned to Dorset Place, while her father, like the other witnesses, was called to the Council for interview. Despite their testimony on Sudeley’s plans, there was no real evidence that Sudeley had ever intended to seize the King, as was claimed, or commit any treason. Ways, therefore, had to be found around the difficulties of a trial. Sudeley had hoped to use Parliament to bring an end to the autocracy of the Protectorate: instead Parliament was used to bring an end to his life. A bill was introduced condemning him for high treason. It was passed without dissension in the Lords. In the Commons there was fierce argument, but in March 1549 a packed House eventually passed the Act of Attainder. Edward was obliged to assent to his uncle’s death in words set down for him, and he did so with visible reluctance. Lady Jane Grey was then left to make sense of the fate of the family of which she had become part. By the end of the year they would all be dead - the baby Mary Seymour dying after illness in the house of Katherine Suffolk to whose care she had been bequeathed, and who resented the expense and inconvenience.

Jane was taught that misfortune came from God as a punishment for sins, but also as a warning to repent. In that sense it could be a blessing, for it gave the sinner the chance to clean the slate. This was how Sudeley saw events, as he explained in a poem composed in the Tower:

…God did call me in my pride Lest I should fall and from him slide For whom he loves he must correct That they may be of his elect.

It was not in Sudeley’s nature, however, to accept his end with passivity. He intended one final throw of the dice, last messages for Elizabeth and her half-sister, Mary, which he wrote in orange juice using a hook ‘plucked from his hose’. The letters were said by someone who saw them to tend ‘to this end, that they should conspire against my Lord Protector’. Sudeley hid his message in the soles of his velvet shoes.¹⁴ They were still with him on the morning of 20th March 1549 when he was taken to Tower Hill to die.¹⁵

Public executions were carefully choreographed and the rituals of a beheading followed a strict code. Prisoners gave a last speech in which they would pronounce themselves judged guilty by the laws of the land, and content to die, as prescribed by the law. It was a final act of obedience, one that acknowledged the supreme importance to society of the rule of law. They would then hold themselves up as examples of the fate of all those who sinned against God and King. If they were innocent of the crime for which they were convicted, they knew that God was punishing them for something, and also that, on some level, they had failed the society into which they had been born. They did not doubt that they deserved to die. Their speeches concluded with a request for forgiveness and the hope their sovereign would reign long and happily.¹⁶

We only have hints at how Sudeley behaved, but assuredly his execution did not follow this usual script. According to one account, as Sudeley laid his head on the block he was overheard asking a servant to ‘speed the thing that he wot [knew] of’. The messages to the princesses were then discovered and there appears to have been a struggle. A Swiss witness wrote to a friend saying that Sudeley had died most unwillingly.

What is also apparent is that the Council was extremely disturbed by whatever had occurred, and not surprisingly so. The regime was about to impose an evangelical Prayer Book on a largely unwilling population. Princess Mary, who remained stubbornly conservative in religion, was going even further than Bishop Gardiner in arguing that this was illegal, and that Henry’s religious settlement could not be overturned while Edward was still a minor. Hugh Latimer, Katherine Suffolk’s spiritual adviser, had articulated the government’s response in a sermon at court that Lent, arguing that Edward’s precocious Godliness meant that he wasn’t a ‘minor’ in the usual sense. But Sudeley’s messages had undermined this claim, suggesting that Edward, far from being a spiritual father, was the puppet of malign forces from which he needed protection. They had also hit another raw nerve: they reminded everybody that Mary was Edward’s heir under their father’s will. The obvious means to attack Mary’s claim was the 1536 Act of Succession, which had declared Mary illegitimate. It had, however, also declared Elizabeth illegitimate, making it nigh impossible to use the act against one sister without excluding the other. That risked proving divisive amongst evangelicals, since Elizabeth conformed to her brother’s religious decrees. If she had been executed along with Sudeley for arranging her marriage without the King’s permission, the problem would have been solved. But inconveniently, she remained alive.

The Council now needed to discredit Sudeley’s actions as forcefully as it could. Latimer was employed to give the sermon, and it proved excoriating. Sudeley was damned from his pulpit as ‘a man the farthest from the fear of God that ever I knew or heard of in England’, and one who had died, ‘irksomely, strangely, horribly’.¹⁷ It is not Latimer’s words, however, but the epitaph Elizabeth is said to have given Sudeley that is remembered. On hearing of his beheading she is reported to have said that he had died, ‘a man with much wit and very little judgement’. The same assessment could have been made of Jane’s father, who, despite his intelligence, had allowed himself to become so closely involved in Sudeley’s reckless plans. But he had survived Sudeley’s folly and the wheel of fortune was turning. His days in the political wilderness would soon be over, and those of his three daughters with him.

* Under Queen Mary, Baker would forget his evangelical past and burn his former co-religionists, earning his nickname, ‘Butcher Baker’.

Chapter VI Northumberland’s ‘Crew’

The ten-year-old Edward Seymour, Earl of Hertford, rode his horse hard. The skinny, long-limbed boy was the son that Somerset hoped to see married to Jane Grey. On this day, 5th October 1549, he knew, however, that his father’s status as Lord Protector, and perhaps his life, depended on the message he carried. There were two men with whom Somerset formed the ‘Mighty Tres Viri’ (triumvirate) of the Protectorate: one was John Dudley, Earl of Warwick. The previous day, however, he had marched through the city with members of the nobility and Privy Council, the early moves in an attempted coup against Somerset. The second, Sir William Herbert, commanded the royal army in Wiltshire along with Lord Russell. It was to them Hertford now rode for help. The forest of turrets and gilded weathervanes of Hampton Court soon disappeared from view as his horse raced west.

It was autumn, and the roads were quiet, but the tumultuous events of the summer had taken their toll on the standing of the Lord Protector. That June the country had been rocked by rebellions. The risings were triggered on Whit Sunday, 10th June, by the forced introduction of the new Prayer Book, which was written in English for the first time. In parts of Cornwall where little English was spoken, congregations could not understand what their priests were reading to them. In Devon, where they could, they declared the government’s service a ‘Christmas game’. Something that looked very like the Mass and could be called the Mass remained. But the new Communion service reflected the evangelical view that Christ was not present, body and blood, in consecrated bread and wine. To the Devon parishioners it seemed a parody. The following day, in the Devonshire village of Stamford Courtney, the congregation forced their priest to say the Mass once more. This defiance lit a tinderbox of anger against the ruling elite that spread rapidly, even in areas where the new religion had taken root.

Just as the great men were stripping the churches of gifts made by parishioners, but which they had condemned as idolatrous, so they were also expanding their estates at the expense of the rest. They had bought up farms, and enclosed the common land that saved the new landless peasants from starvation when paid work dried up. By the end of May huge crowds had been plundering the houses of unpopular gentry near Bradgate (where the Grey sisters were based), killing deer in parks and tearing down enclosures. Henry VIII would not have hesitated to crush these rebels without mercy, but when Harry Dorset, as the local nobleman, received his orders from the Council on 11th June, he was warned only to prevent the gentlemen under his command behaving in a manner that might be considered confrontational.¹ To Somerset it was self-evident that the big landowners were greedy and he believed that enclosures were contributing to inflation. In anticipation of a government investigation that would lay the issues to rest, and against the pleas of colleagues on the Council, he had negotiated with the rebels and granted pardons wherever he could. This, however, had been interpreted as weakness.

By 2nd July, the riots had spread across the Midlands, the Home Counties, Essex, Norfolk, Yorkshire, and Exeter was under siege. Within ten days Norwich was also threatened with an army of 16,000 at its gates. William Parr, the Marquess of Northampton, was sent to negotiate with them, but the rebels had attacked the government forces as they slept in the city. They fought the rebels through the darkened streets, outnumbered ten to one, before retreating with heavy losses. England was left on the brink of civil war.

Jane, Katherine and Mary had sat through sermons that summer explaining the terrible wickedness the rebellions represented, although only the elder two could understand anything of what was being said to them. The rebels, they were told, were sinning against God and King. The social order reflected the divine Chain of Being and if the demands of the King or the nobleman were unjust, the yeomen and peasants had, nevertheless, to endure their suffering, peaceably, accepting it as a punishment for their sins. To do otherwise was to overturn good order, and where ‘there is any lack of order’, observed one Tudor writer, ‘needs must be perpetual conflict’. Lucifer had brought disorder into the cosmos when he rebelled against God, and fear of chaos fed into horror stories of lawlessness during the Wars of the Roses. If the rebellions continued the gates would open ‘to all abuse, carnal liberty, enormity, sin and babylonical confusion’. The Grey sisters were warned: ‘No Man shall sleep in his house or bed unkilled.’²

From Bradgate on 17th August, Dorset had written to the Privy Council asking that they send his brother, Lord Thomas Grey, to help him keep order in the county. But more bad news had come by return of post. Lord Thomas could not be spared: the King of France, Henri II, had seized the opportunity offered by the crises to declare war. Lord Thomas was in command of 200 men sent to aid Lord John Grey in the defence of Ambleteuse in the Pale of Calais. The enemy was already advancing, Dorset was told. The town would, in fact, be lost before Lord Thomas had even arrived.³ With the seriousness of the situation by then apparent even to Somerset, the policy of pardoning rebels was abandoned. The government used foreign mercenaries to crush the rebel armies, and it had been a bloody business. Dorset’s kinsman, Lord Grey of Wilton, claimed he had never seen men fall so stoutly as the rebels he faced in Devon on 28th July. But fall, they had. Two and a half thousand were killed in the west. Then came the turn of the east.

John Dudley, Earl of Warwick, commanded an army of 12,000 professional soldiers and German mercenaries against Norfolk farm boys with hopes of ‘an equal share of things’. Three thousand men died outside Norwich at Dussindale on 27th August. But there were casualties on both sides.

Fighting under Warwick, Dorset’s brother-in-law, Sir Henry Willoughby, whose wife had died eighteen months earlier, was mortally wounded. His children, playmates of Katherine and Mary Grey, were now orphaned. Of all the deaths it was his that touched the Greys most, and the family took in his children. Thomas, the eldest, who was the same age as Katherine, had come to live at Bradgate as Dorset’s ward. The younger two Willoughby siblings, bossy Margaret, who was Mary Grey’s playmate, and the baby Francis, their mother’s godchild, were placed with Dorset’s half-brother, George Medley (his mother’s son by a first marriage). The dreadful slaughter in Norfolk marked the end of England’s last great popular revolt.⁴ But it had marked also a loss of faith in Somerset. The duke had ignored, and even insulted, his colleagues as he grew into his role as alter rex. He had involved the country in ruinous wars with Scotland and now France. His decisions had opened the gates to disorder and brought England to the brink of civil war. For that he would not be easily forgiven.

The night after Hertford had left carrying his father’s message to the army in Wiltshire, Somerset took King Edward from Hampton Court to the more secure location of Windsor Castle. It was dark and Edward, who had been told Somerset’s enemies could kill him, carried a little sword to defend himself. It was the night’s chill, however, that presented the most immediate danger, and by the time the eleven-year-old had arrived at Windsor he had caught a cold. As he shivered in the gloom of the castle, with few provisions and no galleries or gardens to walk in, his cousin young Hertford had reached the armies in the west. Sir William Herbert, the third member of Somerset and Warwick’s ‘Tres Viri’, was immediately recognisable by his red hair, and the high style of a great man at court.

Herbert had a reputation for violence. It was said that, in his youth, he had murdered a man in Bristol and that when the peasants had invaded his park at Wilton in the summer he had ‘attacked the rioters in person, and cut some of them in pieces’.⁵ True or not it says something of the man that such tales were easily believed of him. But Herbert was much more than a mere thug. His first language was Welsh, and ambassadors sneered that he could barely read English, let alone speak any European tongue; but he was clever, and sufficiently sophisticated to have married the elegant Anne Parr, sister of the late Queen dowager.⁶ It made him a member of the extended royal family. Unfortunately for Hertford this would not, however, help his father. It was Herbert’s brother-in-law, William Parr of Northampton, whom Somerset had kicked off the Privy Council for divorcing his wife.

As young Hertford soon discovered, Sir William Herbert had no intention of bringing the royal army to aid Somerset. The message the boy carried to Windsor on 9th October instead marked the end of the Protectorate. Herbert and his co-commander, Lord Russell, urged Somerset to step aside, ‘rather than any blood be shed’. Somerset had no option but to comply and he threw himself on the mercy of the Council. Soon afterwards Edward was obliged to order his uncle’s arrest. The former Lord Protector was lodged in the Tower on 14th October 1549. It was only two days past Edward’s twelfth birthday and not yet seven months since the execution of his younger uncle, Thomas Sudeley.

It was a novelty for the three sisters to have a nine-year-old boy living amongst them at Bradgate. Katherine, in particular, must have enjoyed having a playmate her own age; one who shared the pleasures of the park, as well as the books that Jane always had her nose in. But Thomas Willoughby wasn’t with them for long. He left the family to join Katherine Suffolk’s two sons at Cambridge on 16th November. The sisters ended up seeing more of the younger siblings, Margaret and Francis. The Grey and Willoughby cousins were regularly in and out of each other’s houses that winter, sometimes at Bradgate, sometimes at the Willoughby seat, Wotton, in Nottinghamshire, and often they were all at George Medley’s house, Tilty in Essex. It was there the sisters headed, as they set off from Bradgate towards the end of November 1549 - Mary and Katherine Grey still riding their horses with a servant sitting behind them, holding them tight so they didn’t fall when they tired; Jane treated as an adult, sitting side-saddle with a foot rest to keep her secure. Nurses, grooms and gentlemen servants also rode in the train, while other servants were carried in carts along with the baggage and mail. It was a spectacular sight on the quiet roads and bells rang in the villages and towns ahead to warn people of their arrival. Crowds came out to stare at the passing celebrities, or to offer fresh horses, food and places to rest.

The sisters enjoyed several days playing with their cousins at Tilty. Little Mary Grey, although much smaller than her friend Margaret, was equally strong-willed, and there must have been some impressive battling for dominance in their games. Then, after breakfast on 26th November, the sisters were mounted again on their horses, and travelled with their mother to the Princess Mary’s house Beaulieu, also in Essex.⁷ They recognised the turreted palace as it came in view, with its great gateway carved with King Henry’s arms in stone. The sisters had visited the princess many times before. Their grandmother, the French Queen, and Catherine of Aragon had been friends as well as sisters-in-law, while their mother had served in Mary’s household when Jane was a baby.

The princess - small and of ‘spare and delicate frame’ - was now thirty-three. She had suffered with menstrual problems and depression for years, and was regularly bled for them. But her fragile appearance belied a strong voice, ‘almost like a man’s’, and ‘piercing eyes’. She struck a formidable figure, and an unusually independent one. It was very unusual for a woman of her age and wealth to remain unmarried. But she was simply too good a catch to be free to take a husband. Her father had executed men he feared were plotting to marry their sons to his daughter. He didn’t want Edward to have any dangerous rivals. Now, Edward’s Privy Council would have regarded anyone seeking her hand with similar suspicion, and they had the legal veto on any choice she might have made. So she had to remain alone, watching her youth pass, resting her love only in God.

Mary Tudor must have seemed like a spinster aunt to the Grey sisters: intimidating, but also kindly. She enjoyed giving them presents of necklaces, beads and dresses. She gambled at cards with their mother, and played her lute for them all. It was said that Mary ‘surprised even the best performers, both by the rapidity of her hand and by the style of her playing’.⁸ Jane, who had learned so much about music from Catherine Parr, would have been impressed. But the Mass that the sisters had been taught to despise remained at the heart of Mary’s daily routine: she maintained no fewer than six Catholic chaplains in her household, in the face of government objections. Life had not been easy for Mary since Whit Sunday 1549, when the new Prayer Book came into force. But she had not expected it to be so. She had demonstrated her contempt for the government’s decree by having a high Catholic Mass said that day at her chapel at Kenninghall in Norfolk. The Council had tried subsequently to link her to the Devonshire rebels. When that had failed they demanded she cease having Mass said publicly in her chapels. She refused, arguing she had broken no laws, unless they were new laws of their own making: and she did not recognise these since the King, her brother, was not yet of an age to make them. For the time being her Hapsburg cousin, the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V (the nephew of Catherine of Aragon), protected her from retribution. But Mary was pessimistic about the future. Warwick had used conservative support to overthrow Somerset, and had looked to Mary for backing for his coup; but she had not, and did not, trust him. ‘The conspiracy against the Protector has envy and ambition as its only motives,’ she warned the imperial ambassador, François Van der Delft; ‘You will see that no good will come of this move.’⁹ Indeed, Dorset was at court, hoping that Northumberland would, in the end, prefer to side with evangelicals such as himself, who shared the developing religious beliefs of the King.

It may seem surprising that Frances maintained her closeness to Mary despite their religious differences. It was usual, however, for court women to keep open channels of communication between warring parties and sustain friendships across political and religious divisions. William Cecil’s fiercely evangelical sister-in-law, Anne Cooke, would serve in Mary’s household a few years later. Frances was simply performing a family duty in maintaining a good relationship with the heir to the throne. The cordial visits Frances and her daughters made to Beaulieu were, however, about to become more difficult. Three days after the Greys’ arrival at Beaulieu, the question of whether Warwick was going to base his regime with the religious conservatives was answered resolutely in the negative with Dorset’s appointment to the Privy Council. As the imperial ambassador observed, Dorset was ‘entirely won over to the new sect’. The most ‘forward’ of the evangelicals rejoiced at his success.¹⁰ But for Mary his appointment spelled real danger. Dorset’s ambitions for his daughter, Jane, were matched, or even exceeded, by his enthusiasm for religious reform. The rediscovery of the New Testament through Greek seemed to the evangelicals to mark the beginning of the breaking of a code through which Satan’s puppets in the Vatican had kept religious Truth hidden. Nothing could be more important to Dorset than overthrowing ‘the vain traditions of men’ expressed through the Church’s teaching, in favour of what God willed, as revealed through his Word - and Mary presented an obstacle.

Within weeks of Dorset’s promotion, remaining conservatives on the Council were expelled and the imperial ambassador was expressing fears for Mary. Dorset, Northampton and Herbert were the dominant figures in Warwick’s ‘crew’, he said, and all were men who would ‘never permit the Lady Mary to live in peace…in order to exterminate [the Catholic] religion’.¹¹ Mary would eventually be driven out of England, he believed, forced to change her faith, or even killed. While the political situation remained unsettled the Grey sisters continued to come and go from their father’s houses in London and Leicestershire to his half-brother’s house in Essex. On 2nd December, Katherine and Mary returned to Tilty, arriving with their attendants and ‘a great many gentlemen’. Katherine, in particular, was a light-hearted girl who enjoyed such parties, and little Mary Grey took her cue from her older sister in this regard. But the more serious Jane also joined them at Tilty, on 16th December, with her parents and uncle, Lord John Grey.

The family enjoyed a huge party at Tilty on Christmas Day and further celebrations on the 26th and 27th. The plays and festivities continued until almost the end of January 1550, broken only by a visit Katherine made to the sisters’ sole surviving aunt, Elizabeth, the widow of Lord Audley, at nearby Walden Abbey. Lady Audley’s only child, Margaret Audley, was a playmate, and also being raised as an evangelical.¹² There were no further journeys recorded to see the Princess Mary at Beaulieu that month. But it is probable the princess continued occasionally to welcome Frances and her daughters in the troubled years ahead. The cousins knew how quickly things could change in politics, and that the time could come when they might need the help of the other.

By February 1550, as the immediate political situation stabilised, the Grey sisters were settled at Dorset House on the Strand with their Willoughby cousins. For their father the rewards of office were already proving plentiful. Over the previous month he had been made Steward of the King’s Honours and Constable of Leicester Castle, as well as being granted lands, lordships and manors in Leicestershire, Rutland, Warwickshire, Nottinghamshire, and the Duchy of Lancaster.¹³ This vast increase in wealth ensured his wife and children could afford the finest new gowns for court functions where he was in daily attendance on the King.

Edward’s day was a busy one. He rose early and was dressed by his four Gentlemen of the Privy Chamber, who remained on their knees throughout. He then enjoyed some exercise: ball games, dancing, riding, shooting the bow or other sports. Breakfast was followed by a morning prayer, and then two hours’ tuition in Greek or Latin. Before and after lunch there could be meetings with Councillors. He would then have a lute lesson, an hour of French and then further Latin or Greek, before taking some more physical exercise and entertainments, dinner and bed, with all its attendant rituals. But around the routines of this isolated royal schoolboy, the court had the feeling of an armed camp.

Warwick was extremely security-conscious. A new contingent of guardsmen and armed yeomen had been attached to the King’s Privy Chamber, as well as twelve bands of cavalry, of which Dorset commanded a hundred horse.* Access to Edward was also severely restricted. Nothing could be presented to him that had not been approved by the Council and his tutors first. For the Grey sisters, however, conversation with Edward was easier to achieve than for most. Not only was their father constantly at Edward’s side, nearly all the King’s personal servants were either family friends or relations, or the clients of those who were. Catherine Parr’s brother, the Marquess of Northampton, was close at hand as Lord Chamberlain, and his brother-in-law, Sir William Herbert, as Edward’s Master of the Horse. Northampton’s cousin, Nicholas Throckmorton (who had shouted in support of Anne Askew as she was burned), was Edward’s favourite Gentleman of the Privy Chamber, one of the four men who dressed Edward each morning, and played games and sports with him. But the figure who dominated the court was the new Lord President, John Dudley, the Earl of Warwick.

The Lord President, who would play a key role in Lady Jane Grey’s future, was a towering figure, albeit one who had emerged from the shadow of the scaffold. His father, Edmund Dudley, had been a faithful servant to Henry VII and a brilliant lawyer. On his master’s behalf he had squeezed the rich of their wealth until the pips squeaked. But when the first Tudor king died, the new monarch, the eighteen-year-old Henry VIII, had disassociated himself from his father’s unpopular policies. The young John Dudley saw his father set up on charges of treason and executed as a royal public relations exercise. It had made him a cautious man, as well as a ruthless one. People found Warwick physically intimidating, the sense of the soldier’s brute power all the more terrifying because he was so unusually controlled. He watched and waited before he made his moves and it was said that he ‘had such a head that he seldom went about anything, but he conceived first three or four purposes beforehand’.¹⁴

It wasn’t long before Jane discovered that Warwick had plans for her. He was keen to avoid the mistakes of the Protectorship. That meant treating Edward as a maturing monarch, training him for a gradual introduction into matters of state, while also involving fellow Privy Councillors in important decision-making. Warwick even hoped to work again with Somerset, who was released from the Tower that month, in February, and invited to rejoin the Privy Council in May. It seemed to Warwick, however, that the best way to bind the new allies was the traditional means of inter-family marriages. Somerset agreed, and the marriages he most wanted for his children were with members of the Grey family. Just as Thomas Sudeley had suspected, Somerset wanted Jane for his son, the young Earl of Hertford. Through his mother Hertford was descended from Edward III. This did not give him any noteworthy claim to the throne, but his smidgen of royal blood raised his rank and made him a suitable match for Jane. Somerset asked also that his elder daughter Anne be married to Jane’s fourteen-year-old uncle, Henry Brandon, the Duke of Suffolk, who was being educated alongside the King.

Jane’s step-grandmother, Katherine Suffolk, turned Somerset down flat. As she explained to Somerset’s secretary - her friend William Cecil, a kinsman of the Greys - she disapproved of child marriages. ‘I cannot tell what unkindness one of us might show the other than to bring our children into so miserable a state as not to chose by their own liking,’ she told him.¹⁵ Warwick was obliged to step into the breach and marry Anne Seymour to his eldest son, Lord Lisle. But if Somerset was still hoping to capture Lady Jane Grey he hoped in vain. Dorset was prepared to make vague promises about Jane’s future, but he declined to write anything down. If there had been any betrothal it would have emerged during government investigations into Hertford’s actual marriage in 1560. Dorset believed that he was in a stronger position than he had ever been to achieve the ultimate prize for his favourite daughter. A German client of Dorset called John of Ulm, who was writing to the chief pastor of the Zurich Church, Heinrich Bullinger, and outlining Dorset’s role in driving forward religious change, noted how carefully educated Jane was. Dorset was the ‘thunderbolt and terror of the papists’, he observed, while Jane was ‘pious and accomplished beyond what can be expressed’. She was to be the pious Queen of a Godly King, the rulers of a new Jerusalem that Dorset intended to help build.¹⁶

* For this he received £2,000 a year: as much as he had agreed for Jane’s wardship.

Chapter VII Bridling Jane

It was late in the summer of 1550 when the Princess Elizabeth’s former tutor, Roger Ascham, arrived at Bradgate. He was en route to take up a post to the English ambassador at the court of Charles V. Ascham had come principally to say goodbye to his wife Alice, and the Astleys, Elizabeth’s former governess and her husband: all based at Bradgate since the break-up of Elizabeth’s household following Sudeley’s arrest. But Ascham also hoped to see Jane, to thank her for a letter of reference she had sent to his new employer. A prime purpose of Jane’s education was to coach her to perform on the public stage and the letter demonstrates she was already playing the role of a great patron. As Ascham would discover, however, the thirteen-year-old was finding the pressure intense.

Jane was expected to excel in all fields, including dance and Greek, manners and philosophy, but the duty of obedience was the lesson she was finding hardest to absorb. ‘Unless you frame yourself to obey, yea and feel in yourself what obedience is, you shall never be able to teach others how to obey you,’ her future nephew, Philip Sidney, would explain to his son.¹ The harder this lesson was taught, however, the more Jane struggled against it, and she had begun to avoid her parents’ company. When Ascham reached the house he was told that the entire household was hunting in the park, save for Jane who had chosen to stay behind. He found her alone in her chamber looking ‘young and lovely’. She had just broken off from reading Plato’s Phaedo, which describes the courage Socrates displayed in the face of death. ‘When I come to the end of my journey,’ Socrates says as he prepares to take hemlock from the executioner, ‘I shall obtain that which has been the pursuit of my life.’² Many lesser students struggled with the Greek and, perhaps, with its arguments for the immortality of the soul. But to Ascham’s amazement it was apparent that Jane read it ‘with as much delight as gentlemen read a merry tale in Boccacio’.*

Ascham chatted with Jane for a while, before summoning up the courage to ask why she was reading Plato instead of being in the park with everyone else? Jane smiled and replied that ‘all their sport in the park is but a shadow to that pleasure that I find in Plato! Alas! Good folk, they never felt what true pleasure meant.’ Ascham, oblivious to the authentic voice of the teenage know-it-all, was delighted to find a young woman with such a love of philosophy, and he wondered what might have drawn her to it ‘seeing not many women [and] very few men, have attained thereunto’. At that, however, Jane seized the opportunity to launch an attack on the wrongs she believed she was being dealt at the hands of her parents.

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, in such weight, measure and number, even so 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 shall 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 teaches 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 wholly misliking unto me. And thus my book hath been so much my pleasure, and brings daily to me more pleasure and more that in respect of it, all other pleasures, in very deed, be but trifles and troubles unto me.³

Years later, Ascham recorded this conversation in his memoir The Schoolmaster, and used it to support his thesis that pupils did better if their tutors treated them kindly. The passage has been misused since, however, as ‘proof’ of the cruelty of Jane’s parents - and especially of Frances - in contrast to the kindliness of Aylmer. Jane, like many girls her age, may well have preferred the world of books to that in which she was forced to engage with demanding adults, but Ascham’s image of a kindly Aylmer and bullying parents was never an accurate one, and has been used in a way that would surely have appalled him. The reason for the later slandering of Frances’s reputation, in particular, is shameful. Since the eighteenth century she has been used as the shadow that casts into brilliant light the eroticised figure of female helplessness that Jane came to represent. While Jane is the abused child-woman of these myths, Frances has been turned into an archetype of female wickedness: powerful, domineering and cruel. The mere fact that Frances was with the rest of the household in the park, while Jane read her book, became the basis for a legend that she was a bloodthirsty huntress. The scene in Trevor Nunn’s 1985 film, Lady Jane, in which Frances slaughters a deer on white snow, is inspired by it and establishes her early on in the film as a ruthless destroyer of innocents: a wicked Queen to Jane’s Snow White.

A letter Ascham wrote to Jane only a few months after his visit gives a more accurate idea of his feelings at the time than later recollections, which were coloured by subsequent events and the desire to promote his arguments on teaching. That Ascham thought Jane remarkable is evident in this letter. He told her that in all his travels he had not yet met anyone he admired more: he only hoped that Katherine, who at ten remained a beginner at Greek, would one day follow in her footsteps. He had nothing but good words, however, for both her parents, who, he noted, delighted in her achievements. Dorset had invested in Jane all the hopes a nobleman normally placed in a son, and in the sixteenth century that inevitably meant a rigorous, even harsh, educational regime.

Jane’s favourite writer, Plato, was well heeded when he said that children were born for their country, not for themselves - especially if they were destined for high position. Jane was suffering, certainly, but she endured no more than the standard lot of the elite of children and young adults destined to be England’s future leaders. The Brandon brothers, much loved by their mother, could not even eat lunch without also being obliged to feed their minds. Before they sat for their meals, the boys were expected to read passages of Greek, then, while ‘at meat’ they disputed philosophy and divinity in Latin. When the meal concluded, they had to translate the Greek passages they had read at the beginning. Jane chafed at such demands, but the supposedly ‘gentle’ Aylmer was in complete agreement with Jane’s parents that she needed discipline to flourish. As he observed, Jane was ‘at that age, [when] as the comic poet tells us, all people are inclined to follow their own ways’. And he asked the advice of leading divines on how best to ‘provide bridles for restive horses’ such as this spirited girl.⁴

A still more revealing insight into the household at Bradgate is given in the contemporary letters of exiled German divine, John of Ulm, to the Zurich pastor Heinrich Bullinger. Although Ulm admired Dorset, and was supported financially by him, Jane’s father emerges from this correspondence as a man of immense vanity. Dorset was forever showing off his ‘eloquent’ Latin, to learned men, ‘with whom he mutually compares his studies’. These included the family’s Cambridge-educated chaplain, James Haddon, and the preacher John Wullocke, who would later play a leading role in the Scottish Reformation. While Jane’s modern biographers frequently describe Frances as the dominant partner in the marriage, it is Dorset’s obsession with his royal connections that is also striking. ‘He told me he had the rank of Prince,’ Ulm confided in Bullinger, adding that, although Dorset didn’t wish to be so styled in public, he was content to be referred to as such in private. Ulm urged Bullinger to flatter Dorset with a dedication to a forthcoming theological work, the fifth part of his Decades, on Christian perfection. Ignoring Frances, despite her importance as Henry VII’s granddaughter, he added that Bullinger should also cultivate Jane, as the heir of the great ‘Prince’.

That autumn, as Ulm waited for Bullinger’s promised fifth Decade, he translated a portion of the pastor’s treatise on Christian marriage from German into Latin for Jane. She responded enthusiastically, retranslating it into Greek and presenting it to her father for the New Year of 1551. ‘I do not think there ever lived anyone more deserving of respect than this young lady, if you consider her family,’ mused Ulm, ‘[or] more learned if you consider her age; or more happy if you consider both.’⁵

It was in late April or early May of 1551 that the copies of Bullinger’s fifth Decade on Christian perfection at last arrived in England. As promised the dedication read: ‘[To] the most illustrious Prince and Lord, Henry Grey, Marques of Dorset…a vigorous maintainer of real Godliness’.⁶ Dorset had recently left for Berwick, on the volatile border with Scotland, where he served briefly as Warden of the Three Marches responsible for keeping order in the region. But Ulm followed. He reported back to Bullinger that Dorset had arrived in the north with numerous preachers, as well as 300 cavalry. Ulm had delivered the treatise to him and then headed for Bradgate, where ‘a most weighty and eloquent epistle’ had arrived for Jane, along with another copy of the Decades.

Ulm arrived in Leicestershire on 29th May, and spent the following two days, ‘very agreeably with Jane, my Lord’s daughter, and those excellent and holy persons Aylmer and Haddon [the chaplain]’. Katherine and Mary Grey were, it seems, elsewhere, as was their mother. The family owned properties from Cumberland in the north to Devon in the south-west and Essex in the east. They could have been visiting any of them, staying with friends or acting as the guests of local towns. Even the six-year-old Mary was now being given gifts from burghers seeking her goodwill. The Chamberlain’s accounts in Leicester that year record payment of ‘4sh and 4d’ for a ‘gallon and a half of wine, peasecod and apples’ for Mary, though the wine was surely destined for others.⁷

At Bradgate Ulm found Jane, who had just turned fourteen, anxious to show off her language abilities, and was shown a letter she had written in Greek to Bullinger. It fulfilled all the requirements of the formal style drawn from Greek oration and Ulm was impressed by its maturity. Jane was encouraged to write several further letters to Bullinger over the next two years. They resemble the correspondence of the famous Marguerite of Valois, the late Queen of Navarre, with her spiritual mentor, Bishop Briçonnet of Meaux. The Queen, who died in 1549, had been greatly admired for her brilliance and her piety, and she was the perfect model for a Tudor princess such as Jane. But while Jane’s letters are academically impressive, the selfabasement and expansive vocabulary of the high style are unsettling for the modern reader. ‘I entertain the hope that you will excuse the more than feminine boldness in me, who, girlish and unlearned as I am, presume to write to a man who is the father of all learning’, runs one letter from Jane to Bullinger: ‘pardon this rudeness which has made me not hesitate to interrupt your more important vocations with my vain trifles and puerile correspondence.’⁸ Happily, however, the young girl can, sometimes, be spotted through the thick verbiage.

In Jane’s first letter she expressed amazement that Bullinger could find the time, ‘to write from so distant a country, and in your declining age, to me’. Bullinger, at not quite forty-seven, seemed impossibly old to Jane. She was grateful for his ‘instruction, admonition and counsel, on such points especially, as are suited to my age and sex and the dignity of my family’. Jane complained she missed the advice she used to receive from the Strasbourg reformer Martin Bucer, who had died in February. Such religious exiles were the principal source of radical ideas in England, and Jane’s father, along with his friend Parr of Northampton, their leading patrons on the Privy Council. Jane assured Bullinger, she was now reading the Decades every day, gathering ‘as out of a most beautiful garden, the sweetest flowers’.⁹ Amongst these were Bullinger’s comments, in the dedication to her father, on the importance of reading the Old Testament in Hebrew, as well as reading the New Testament in Greek. She was now learning Hebrew, she said, and asked ‘if you will point out some way and method of pursuing this study to the greatest advantage’.¹⁰

Ulm was certain that Bullinger would be impressed with Jane’s ‘very learned letter’, but he had also heard some interesting gossip at Bradgate, which he passed on. ‘A report has prevailed and has begun to be talked of by persons of consequence, that this most noble virgin is to be betrothed and given in marriage to the King’s Majesty.’¹¹ This claim was an extraordinary one. At that very moment, William Parr, Marquess of Northampton, was in France at the head of a diplomatic mission, with instructions to arrange the formal betrothal of Edward to Henri II’s daughter Elizabeth. Ulm, however, repeated what he had learned at Bradgate to other friends in Europe.

Uncertain that Bullinger would have time for the task of overseeing Jane’s Hebrew, and anxious that Jane’s language skills be developed by someone steeped in the theology of Switzerland, Ulm wrote to a professor in Zurich called Conrad Pellican, asking him to help teach Jane her Hebrew. By way of incentive he told Pellican that he had heard she was one day to be married to King Edward, and raved about Jane’s ‘incredible’ achievements thus far. These included, he noted, the ‘practice of speaking and arguing with propriety, both in Greek and Latin’.¹²

Jane, it seems, was being trained in the art of rhetoric: the mastery of language as a means to persuade, edify and instruct. It was an area in which a dynamic mind such as hers was likely to excel. But it was also considered suitable only for a woman being prepared for a significant role, such as that of a King’s wife. ‘Oh! If that event should take place, how happy would be the union and how beneficial to the Church!’ Ulm sighed.¹³ He admitted, however, that he nursed a fear that the brilliant religious leader being honed at Bradgate might yet be blasted by a ‘calamity of the times’. People were suffering the economic fallout of Warwick’s deflationary policies and there were major riots again in Leicestershire that summer. It was not revolt, however, but a natural disaster in July that provided the bitterest reminder of just how cruel fate could be. A mysterious disease known as the ‘sweating sickness’ was sweeping England. The epidemics, which vanished altogether after the sixteenth century, would arrive suddenly and disappear quickly. But, while they lasted, they brought illness and death with frightening speed.

Edward recorded in his journal that the sweat arrived in London on 9th July and immediately proved even more vehement than any epidemic he remembered. If a man felt cold ‘he died within three hours and if he escaped it held him for nine hours, or ten at most’. Seventy people died in London the next day, and on the 11th, the King reported, ‘120 and also one of my gentlemen, another of my grooms fell sick and died’.¹⁴ In Leicestershire, a Bradgate neighbour, Lord Cromwell, succumbed and, on the early morning of the 14th, it struck within the Grey family. In their rooms at Buckden, the former palace of the Bishop of Lincoln, Katherine Suffolk’s sons, Henry and Charles, awoke that morning with a sense of apprehension. It was the first symptom of the illness. The brothers were soon seized with violent, icy shivers, a headache and pains in the shoulders, neck and limbs. Within three hours the cold left them and their temperatures rose dramatically. It was then that the characteristic sweating began.

The boys’ mother rushed to her children’s bedside from her estate at Grimsthorpe in Lincolnshire as their pulses began to race and an incredible thirst took hold. But finally exhaustion brought an irresistible desire to sleep. The elder brother, Henry, Duke of Suffolk, was already dead when their mother arrived. The younger, Charles, followed before seven o’clock on the morning of 15th July. Katherine Suffolk was devastated by their loss. Henry, at fifteen, ‘stout of stomach without all pride’; Charles ‘being not so ripe in years was not so grave in look, rather cheerful than sad, rather quick than ancient’.¹⁵ She sat alone in the dark, refusing food. The boys’ tutor Thomas Wilson worried as he saw his mistress lose weight, ‘your mind so troubled and your heart so heavy…detesting all joy and delighting in sorrow, wishing with [your] heart, if it were God’s will, to make your last end’. He begged her to be ‘strong in adversity’.¹⁶

Katherine of Suffolk’s friend and Lincolnshire neighbour, William Cecil, also wrote to her with words of comfort. Her letter to him replied miserably that nothing thus far in her life had made her so aware of God’s power. That she was being punished for her sins she was certain. The preacher Hugh Latimer had even told her which ones: it was her greed in enclosing land and depriving the poor of food. She could not bear to see anyone, she told Cecil. Although she was certain her children were with God and she knew she should rejoice, she found she could not. At Grimsthorpe she kept their clothes and possessions: black velvet gowns furred with sable, fashionable crimson hose, tennis rackets and the rings they practised catching with lances at the tilt. Her shock and dismay, if not her pain, was felt across the evangelical elite. Her sons were amongst the brightest hopes of their generation. The great Latinist, Walter Haddon, the brother of the Bradgate chaplain James Haddon, wrote a eulogy in their memory; the King’s tutor, John Cheke, composed an epitaph, while Wilson wrote a prose biography and several Latin poems, a volume of which was dedicated to Dorset.¹⁷ Jane’s place as a Godly leader, by example, for her generation was now more important than ever.

* The famous collected tales of love by the Italian author who had inspired Chaucer.

Chapter VIII Jane and Mary

The chapel at the Princess Mary’s palace of Beaulieu lay across the courtyard, opposite the great hall. Inside it had a distinctive layout, with a large ante chapel at right angles to the body of the main chapel. As Jane crossed by this ante chapel she noticed, to her irritation, a consecrated Host was placed on the altar in a golden receptacle known as a ‘monstrance’. In Catholic belief the Host was the transformed body of Christ, but to Jane its veneration was the idolatrous worship of a piece of unleavened bread. When Mary’s servant, Lady Anne Wharton, walking beside her, dropped to one knee and made the sign of the cross, Jane asked sarcastically whether ‘the Lady Mary were there or not?’ Lady Wharton replied tartly that she had made her curtsey ‘to Him that made us all’. ‘Why,’ Jane retorted, ‘how can He be there that made us all, [when] the baker made him?’¹

Lady Wharton reported her exchange with Jane to Mary, who is said by the martyrologist John Foxe, to have ‘never loved her after’. There is no evidence of that, and Mary later showed fondness for the younger Grey sisters, particularly the affectionate and easy-going Katherine. But the princess had good reason to be both angry and concerned that Jane had insulted her religious beliefs in her own house. At the time of the Grey sisters’ last recorded visit to Beaulieu, in November 1549, Mary had guessed already that the fall of the Protectorship had marked only the beginning of her misfortune. After the peace treaty with France six months later, in March 1550, the regime had less to fear from Mary’s protector, the Emperor Charles V, and was becoming increasingly radical. The religious changes Jane’s father, Dorset, was promoting were the most extreme England would witness before the Puritan Commonwealth a century later. Music was being expunged from churches; art was similarly attacked and tombs destroyed along with their exhortations to pray for the dead. A horrified visitor from Europe described the newly stark appearance of England’s churches, with ‘no images in relief, nor pictures, no crosses, no sepulchres raised above the ground…in place of the altar is a table set with a cloth but without candles’, on the white surfaces of the church walls were written passages from the Bible, ‘in the middle of which one sees the arms of the King’. In Oxford, bonfires were consuming nearly every book in the university library.² At the same time Mary found her right to have Mass said publicly in her own chapels was under attack.

Dorset’s closest political ally, Parr of Northampton, had led the case against Mary within the Council, arguing that it had been agreed that ‘she alone might be privileged with but two or three of her women’. Northampton, described by Roger Ascham as ‘beautiful, broad, stern and manly’, was cut from similar cloth to Dorset. A sophisticated courtier, educated alongside Dorset in the household of the late Duke of Richmond, he shared Dorset’s passion for hunting, learning and, above all, religious reform. The two marquesses are linked in the sources from this period like Tweedle Dum with Tweedle Dee. Together they were always at the King’s side and Mary knew that Edward, like Jane, was already showing himself a fervent evangelical. Edward’s public note-taking during sermons and his recent striking out of the mention of saints in the oath of a new bishop, had all advertised his enthusiasm for the new religion. She must have feared that, like Jane, he too would attack the practice of her beliefs in her own house, in due course.

By Christmas of 1550 the Council had ordered the arrest of Mary’s chaplains for saying Mass in her absence. But worse followed when Mary visited Edward for the seasonal celebrations. Her warm greeting for her thirteen-year-old brother was met with exactly the confrontation she had surely feared would soon come. With the two marquesses, Dorset and Northampton, standing by to witness her humiliation, Edward cross-questioned his older sister on whether she was having the Mass said publicly in her chapel. She burst into tears under his assault and, to the embarrassment of the two marquesses, the shocked boy then also began to cry. They wrapped up the meeting as quickly as they could, affirming ‘that enough had been said and…that the King had no other thought except to inquire and know all things’.³ But it was not to be the end of the matter.

Mary’s household was a magnet for Catholic dissenters. The Masses she held attracted an important following at court and in the areas in which she lived, while even ‘the greatest lords in the kingdom were suitors to her to receive their daughters into her service’: amongst them the family of Edward’s old playmate, Jane Dormer.⁴ It was a problem that needed to be addressed, and Edward followed up what he had said to Mary with a letter demanding she obey his laws on religion.⁵ Despite his tears he had not relented. Mary, arguing he was still not of an age to overthrow his father’s religious settlement, continued to have Mass said, even laying on extra services ‘and with greater show’.⁶ But in March 1551 the young King informed Mary that he had suffered her stubbornness long enough and that henceforth she could only hear Mass in her private apartments.⁷ When she persisted in having her Mass said in the chapels there were consequences.

At Easter 1551 several of Mary’s friends were arrested after attending Mass in her house. By July she feared she was on the point of being imprisoned or even murdered and considered fleeing abroad. In the end she decided that it was her duty to stay. It was August 1551, the month following the death of the Brandon brothers, with the Grey sisters all at Bradgate, when matters came to a head. Three of Mary’s servants were ordered to go to Beaulieu and prevent other members of the household from hearing Mass. They refused and were imprisoned for contempt. The King’s Council then sent their own men to carry out his orders. They arrived during the rising heat of the morning carrying Edward’s letters. Mary received them on her knees, in symbolic submission to the will of the King. As the papers were handed to her, she kissed them, ‘but not the matter contained in them,’ she said, for that, ‘I take to proceed not from his Majesty but from you, his Council.’ The silence while she read the letters was broken only by her exclaiming: ‘Ah! Good Mr Cecil took much pains here.’ Cecil, Katherine Suffolk’s friend, had survived the fall of his master Somerset to become Secretary of State. Only as the men left did Mary lose her composure, shouting through a window about the risk to their souls they were taking by their actions. But she knew that this was a battle she had lost. As she admitted, if the Council arrested her chaplains they could not say Mass and she could not hear it. She warned her brother, however, that she ‘would lay her head on a block and suffer death’ before she heard the Prayer Book service.⁸

The imperial ambassador Jehan Scheyfve complained about Mary’s treatment, but to no effect. Warwick insisted it was the King’s will and that Edward’s orders had as much weight as if he were aged forty. It was Parr of Northampton, however, who articulated once again the most aggressive comment against Mary. He challenged the right of the ambassador to refer to her by the title ‘Princess of England’, insisting she be referred to only as the King’s sister. This had obvious implications for Mary’s right to the throne as Edward’s heir: a matter of particular concern that autumn. Edward was looking pale and thin after contracting a mysterious illness in the summer, from which he was still recovering. Suddenly, however, the aggressive attacks on Mary began to recede. She was still not allowed to hear Mass outside her private apartments, but Warwick, ever cautious, had reason to be reluctant to risk provoking her continental cousins, the Hapsburgs, further. The Emperor’s sister, Mary of Hungary, was threatening to invade England to rescue Edward from his ‘pernicious governors’, and Mary’s humiliating treatment was galvanising support for her in England too. Warwick had discovered, furthermore, that Somerset was hoping to take advantage of this and was plotting with the conservatives to bring him down, together with his radical evangelical ‘crew’.

Warwick considered carefully how to manoeuvre Somerset to his destruction. He learned from one of the King’s teenage friends, Lord Strange, that Somerset had asked him to promote his daughter, Lady Jane Seymour, in the King’s affections by telling Edward how suitable a bride she would be. Only nine years old, but highly educated, Lady Jane Seymour, the niece of Henry VIII’s third wife, was already demonstrating a precocious intelligence. With two of her sisters she had celebrated the French peace treaty with the publication in Paris of 130 couplets of Latin verse composed for the tomb of the Queen of Navarre, who had died in 1549. She would one day become Katherine Grey’s closest friend. But in 1551 Somerset’s ambitions for his daughter threatened Dorset’s hopes for his own. None of this constituted treason, however, so Warwick needed to catch Somerset in some other, capital, offence. The answer, shortly arrived at, was to accuse him of planning to invite Warwick and Northampton to a feast and there ‘cut off their heads’.⁹

Edward was told about the alleged murder plot during the second week of October. Simultaneously Warwick and his allies were empowered with promotions: Dorset became the Duke of Suffolk, the title having fallen into abeyance with the tragic deaths of the Brandon brothers; Warwick was made Duke of Northumberland.¹⁰ Northampton’s brother-in-law, Sir William Herbert, became Earl of Pembroke, while William Cecil was knighted. Five days later, Edward saw his uncle, Somerset, arrive at court at Whitehall ‘later than he was wont and by himself’. His journal recorded baldly that: ‘After dinner he was apprehended.’ Quickly and without fuss Somerset’s allies were rounded up: ‘Sir Thomas Palmer was taken on the Terrace, walking there. Hammond passing the Vice-Chamberlain’s door was called in by John Piers to make a match at shooting and so taken. Likewise John Seymour and Davey Seymour were taken too.’ Their ruin had arrived during the banal routines of an ordinary day: with an invitation to a shooting match, a hand on their shoulder as they passed a door, or an encounter during an evening stroll.

It was Harry Suffolk - as the King now called Dorset - who signed the order for Somerset to be sent to the Tower: a neat revenge for the Protector’s rival ambitions for the marriage of his daughter. The Duchess of Somerset joined her husband in the Tower the next day. She was blamed widely for all his troubles. Proud and beautiful, Anne Somerset had never been popular, and damning her served a useful purpose. It helped explain how the man who had helped introduce evangelical religion to England had fallen into wickedness: even the first man, Adam, was brought to sin by Eve, it would have been remembered. The first sign of Mary’s rehabilitation at court since she was deprived of her Mass was an invitation in November for the reception of Mary of Guise, the dowager Queen of Scots. She turned it down. It was, instead, Frances who sat on the Queen’s left on 4th November 1551, while Edward sat to her right under a shared cloth of state. Jane was also there, as Edward noted in his journal. Beside the funeral of Catherine Parr, it is the first time we know of Jane being present at a public reception.

Jane had ridden with over a hundred other ladies and gentlemen, to escort the dowager Queen of Scots through London to Westminster. In the great banquet that followed she sat with the other court ladies in the Queen dowager’s great chamber, enjoying three courses of delicacies. The court women were all dressed ‘like peacocks’ in jewels and rich clothes, their hair loose as a compliment to the Scots style. There was no sign of the Princess Elizabeth, any more than of her half-sister Mary, but Elizabeth had met the Queen dowager earlier in the week and had left a memorable impression. While most guests had their long hair ‘flounced and curled and double curled’ on to silk-clad shoulders, Elizabeth had ‘altered nothing, but to the shame of them all kept her old maidenly shamefastness’.¹¹ Elizabeth had a natural gift for visual messages, and this one was designed to appeal to her brother.

The King’s tutor in political affairs, William Thomas, had presented his master recently with a work promoting modest and Godly dress in women. Elizabeth, whose reputation had been so tainted by her association with Sudeley, had cleverly stolen a march on Jane as the leading evangelical princess. But Jane’s father, together with her tutor Aylmer, were equally determined that the younger girl learn quickly from Elizabeth’s example. Just before Christmas a series of letters went out from the Grey family’s magnificent new home at Suffolk Place in Southwark, which Frances had inherited from the Brandon brothers. They were directed to the pastor of the Zurich Church, Bullinger. Jane’s father begged Bullinger to continue guiding his daughter in modesty and decorum, writing to her ‘as frequently as possible’.¹² Aylmer then wrote asking specifically that Bullinger should ‘instruct my pupil, in your next letter, as to what embellishment and adornment of person is becoming in a young woman professing Godliness’. He noted that despite Elizabeth’s example, and preachers declaring against fashionable finery, at court ‘no one is induced…to lay aside, much less look down upon, gold, jewels and the braiding of hair’. If Bullinger addressed the subject to Jane directly, however, he believed ‘there will probably, through your influence, be some accession to the ranks of virtue’.*

Aylmer need not have been so anxious about Jane. The enormous effort that had gone into her education had shaped by now a most determined evangelical, and she was not short of reminders of the futility of vanity. On every barge trip to Whitehall, Jane passed Seymour Place where Catherine Parr had lain with her ambitious husband. Next to it was Somerset House, the Renaissance palace that the former Protector had been building, and would never live to see completed. In December, Somerset was tried and condemned to death on the basis of the trumped-up murder plot, with the new Dukes of Suffolk and Northumberland - Grey and Dudley - his judges. Many evangelicals were horrified that the man who had introduced ‘true religion’ into England should die convicted of attempted murder. Harry Suffolk assured the German John of Ulm that the King was keen to spare his uncle’s life, and claimed Northumberland hoped this would be possible. But although the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer, begged Northumberland to show Somerset mercy, the Lord President’s principal concern was that the sentence be carried out with minimum disruption.

Edward, the kindly child who had comforted his friends when they lost at cards, was to play the role of executioner of a second uncle. But first, a spectacular Christmas season was planned at Greenwich, providing a distraction from the grim task ahead. The great public spaces of the royal palaces were like bare stages when the King was not in residence and for weeks carpenters and painters, masons and joiners had been put to work. Furniture and tapestries were added to the public rooms and silver plate brought, along with any other props necessary, ‘to glorify the house and feast’.¹³ When Christmas arrived there were plays, masques, tournaments, and a Lord of Misrule. This pagan survival was vested on a courtier who presided over a world turned upside down. Even an execution could be parodied - and was. Misrule attended the decapitation of a hogshead of wine on the scaffold at Cheapside in January, and the red juice flowed to cries of laughter instead of dismay.¹⁴ At Suffolk Place, however, the twelve-day festivities enjoyed by the young Grey sisters were more determinedly decorous.

The family chaplain, James Haddon, complained to Bullinger that the common people of England insisted on amusing themselves ‘in mummeries and wickedness of every kind’. But, he reported smugly, this was not the case with ‘the family in which I reside’.¹⁵ The austerity we associate with seventeenth-century Puritanism was already evident in the household. John Aylmer disapproved of music at home as well as at church, and the three Grey sisters were expected to limit the amount of time they spent playing or listening to it. Thus deprived, Katherine and Mary later showed no great interest in music that we know of. There was some friction, however, between the pious expectations of Aylmer and Haddon on the one side, and the great living expected of the nobility as a reflection of their status. The servants at Suffolk Place were banned from playing cards at Haddon’s insistence, but Frances and her husband continued to do so in their private apartments, and for money.

Haddon put his employers’ bad behaviour down to ‘force of habit’ and ‘a desire not to appear stupid, and not good fellows, as they call it’. He had hoped to shame them into change by addressing their failings in a sermon to the household on the wickedness of cards, but was given short shrift for it. Even the Godly King Edward liked to gamble and Haddon confessed that the duke and duchess had told him he was ‘too strict’. It was hard, Haddon moaned to Bullinger, to persuade courtiers to ‘conquer and crucify themselves’.¹⁶ The eleven-year-old Katherine, who showed no signs of wanting to mimic Elizabeth in anything, must have been a particular concern. But Haddon’s frustration was alleviated somewhat by Jane. She had responded enthusiastically to Aylmer’s suggestion that she imitate Elizabeth’s plain style of dress, and in the process made a point of snubbing the Princess Mary. Aylmer later recalled that Mary had sent one of her ladies to Jane with a set of fine clothes of ‘tinsel cloth of gold and velvet, laid over with parchment lace of gold’. New Year was the traditional time for such gifts. But Jane, looking at the magnificent gown, asked the gentlewoman brusquely: ‘What shall I do with it?’ ‘Marry,’ the woman replied, ‘wear it.’ ‘Nay,’ snapped Jane, ‘that would be a shame to follow my lady Mary against God’s word, and leave my Lady Elizabeth who followeth God’s word.’¹⁷ Aylmer felt no small satisfaction over this incident, which he recorded after Elizabeth became Queen.

With the Christmas season over, Londoners awoke early on the morning of 22nd January to find a curfew in place. The streets were full of soldiers. Somerset’s execution was about to take place on Tower Hill. As was so often the case with state killings, efforts to veneer the crude business of taking a man’s life were disrupted by moments of farce. Somerset was making a dignified final speech from the scaffold when it was interrupted by the arrival of two horsemen clattering on the cobbles. A cry went up: ‘A pardon, a pardon, God save the duke!’ and hats were cast into the air. But Somerset realised before most in the crowd that the horsemen had come to witness the execution. He begged them to be quiet so that he could prepare to die. It was not yet 8 a.m. when he tied his handkerchief around his eyes. He admitted he was afraid and as he laid his head on the block there was a sudden flush in his cheeks. But he was ready for the end. Unfortunately the executioner was not. The collar of Somerset’s shirt covered part of his neck. The headsman asked Somerset to stand up again and move it. He did so and when the axe fell at last it struck cleanly, cutting off his head with one blow. The duke’s corpse was then thrown into a cart and returned to the Tower for burial.¹⁸

Somerset’s ten children - some no more than infants - were left parentless. Their mother remained in the Tower; their father’s property was attainted and returned to the crown. The twelve-year-old Hertford, who had tried to save his father in 1549 by galloping to Wiltshire to beg for help in defence of the Protectorship, lost his title along with much of his inheritance. It was as plain Edward Seymour that he was placed as the ward of Northumberland’s elder son, the Earl of Warwick. The earl was married to Hertford’s sister, Anne, but she could not easily console him. She suffered a physical collapse after the execution. His younger sister, the nine-year-old Lady Jane Seymour, whom Somerset had wished to marry to the King, was left in a kind of limbo until May. She was then placed in the care of the widowed Lady Cromwell in Leicestershire, not far from Bradgate, from where Harry Suffolk could keep an eye on her. For Somerset’s royal nephew, meanwhile, the belief that his uncle’s fate was God’s work, and he was only God’s instrument, may have assuaged the agony and guilt of signing the death warrant. But some later remembered that he used to cry in his rooms, and another contemporary story survives that hints at emotional turmoil.

An Italian, visiting England shortly after Somerset’s execution in 1552, witnessed a grim incident that took place during a boating trip in the presence of the court. Edward asked to see a falcon, which he had been told was the best he had. He then demanded it be skinned alive. The falconer did as the King ordered. As Edward then looked on the bird’s gruesome remains, he commented: ‘This falcon, so much more excellent than the others, has been stripped, just as I, the first among all the others of the realm, am skinned.’¹⁹ Brutally deprived of his mother’s family, his loneliness must have felt raw indeed. Several of Somerset’s allies were also executed, although Somerset’s old friend, Sir William Paget, who had written desperately in the middle of Christmas night 1548, warning him of the folly of his arrogance, was more fortunate. He was merely accused of fraud and humiliated by having the Garter taken from him as one who had no gentle blood on his mother or his father’s side. All that now remained was for Northumberland’s ‘crew’ to turn on each other, as their children were pushed ever further into the already blood-soaked political arena.

* It is likely that, like the Queen of Navarre, Jane would have used her mentor’s letters in her spiritual meditations.

PART TWO Queen and Martyr

‘…you would not be a queen?’

‘No, not for all the riches under heaven.’

Henry VIII, Act II scene iii

William Shakespeare

Chapter IX No Poor Child

In May 1552 Jane turned fifteen, the same age at which her mother had been betrothed, and she had no serious rivals left as Edward’s future bride. Lady Jane Seymour was now the daughter of an executed criminal. Plans for Edward to marry the daughter of the French King, Henri II, had also fallen through in March, when Edward had formally declined to ally against the Emperor, Charles V. Increasingly, furthermore, Jane was being treated as the leading evangelical woman in England. She was being sought out as a patron by such figures as Michel Angelo Florio, the first pastor of the Stranger’s Church for religious exiles in London, and was looked up to and admired by pious, female intellectuals, as Catherine Parr had once been.¹

An anonymous letter in Greek written to Jane at about this time, and believed to be from Sir William Cecil’s wife, Mildred Cooke, enclosed with it a gift. It was a work by Basil the Great, the fourthcentury Bishop of Caesarea, whom Lady Cecil had translated and with whose greatness Jane was now compared. ‘My most dear and noble Lady,’ the letter began. Basil the Great had excelled ‘all the bishops of his time both in the greatness of his birth, the extent of his erudition, and the glowing zeal of his holiness’; yet Jane was his match, ‘worthy both in consideration of your noble birth, and on account of your learning and holiness’. The gift of this book was only ‘ink and paper’, but it was expected that the profit Jane would gain from it would be more ‘valuable than gold and precious stones’.² The phrase would stick in Jane’s mind. It referred to the Old Testament axiom that wisdom was worth more than rubies, and this was something she passionately believed to be true.³ Jane remained in regular correspondence with the theologian and pastor Heinrich Bullinger, and sent his wife gifts, including gloves and a ring. But she was also widening her circle of contacts in Europe. Jane was keen particularly for Bullinger to introduce her to Theodore Biblander, who had translated the Koran, as well as being a famous scholar of Hebrew. It was said later that she had even begun to learn Arabic.⁴

Jane hoped her pretty sister Katherine would follow in her footsteps, not just in the study of Greek, but also in piety. Katherine was still not yet showing many signs of having a serious nature, and little Mary had not yet begun to study classical languages, but both were very young, and much could be expected of them in the future.

Watching, meanwhile, as Jane continued to step confidently forward on the public stage, her father surely hoped that it would now not be long before his ambitions for her to be a Queen consort were fulfilled. Edward, like Jane, was maturing fast. The King had been attending Council meetings since August 1551 and much was being made of the fact that he had passed his fourteenth birthday. It was at this age that his late cousin, James V of Scotland, had come into his majority and Edward had insisted his orders no longer needed to be co-signed by the full Council. Such self-assurance gave the regime confidence in facing down the charge that it was illegal to make changes to the national religion during his minority. Edward was ‘no poor child, but a manifest Solomon in Princely wisdom’, trumpeted the polemicist John Bale, as a radically revised Prayer Book was prepared for publication.⁵ This book was everything Harry Suffolk hoped for.

Strongly influenced by Bullinger and other Swiss reformers, the new Prayer Book was to sweep away all the half measures of 1549, damning the ‘fables’ of the Mass and offering a reshaped funeral service that removed all prayers for the ‘faithful departed’. The sense of a connection between the living and the dead, central to medieval religion, was finished. One of the Grey sisters’ family chaplains, a man called Robert Skinner, was also working with their friend Cecil on a new statement of doctrine, forty-two articles of faith that would take the English Church closer to the Swiss model.⁶ But while the revolution continued at brisk pace, there were growing divisions within its ranks. Archbishop Cranmer would never forgive Northumberland for the execution of the ‘Godly Duke’ of Somerset and was concerned by the increasing radicalism on the Privy Council, led by Harry Suffolk, Parr of Northampton and Northumberland. Cranmer refused to abolish kneeling for communion in the new Prayer Book and was furious when the Council allowed a final coda, a ‘black rubric’, inspired by the radical John Knox, that explained kneeling was permitted only to add dignity to the service.

Meanwhile, others within the elite had more secular concerns. The King’s coffers were empty, and there were many who were envious and afraid of the influence Northumberland wielded over Edward. Having engaged the King’s trust with his enthusiastic support for religious reform, Northumberland had sealed it by maintaining a close relationship with the boy. He had become a father figure: according to a servant of the French ambassador, the Sieur de Boisdauphin, Edward revered Northumberland almost as if he were the older man’s subject, rather than the other way round. Periodically, there were even accusations that Northumberland wished to be King himself. Only one man stood out as a potential rival to Northumberland’s position, his fellow soldier-politician, William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, and the Welshman’s position at court was looking increasingly shaky.

Pembroke had benefited hugely from his marriage to Anne Parr, sister of the late Queen dowager, Catherine. It had made him a member of Edward’s extended family, while Northumberland remained an outsider. But when Anne Parr died in February 1552, Northumberland moved quickly to take advantage of Pembroke’s weakened position. Within two months Pembroke had been sacked from his role as Master of the Horse, which had given him close access to Edward, and replaced with Northumberland’s elder son, the young Earl of Warwick. There is some evidence that Pembroke intended to retrieve his position by marrying his son Henry, Lord Herbert to Katherine Grey. His wife had been an old friend of Frances, dating back to their days in Catherine Parr’s Privy Chamber, and a betrothal may have been discussed, or even arranged, before she died.⁷ In any event, the next logical move for Northumberland was to secure a royal relative of his own.

Northumberland’s elder three children (all sons) were married. But his fourth son, Lord Guildford Dudley, was not. A later story that he was his mother’s favourite is a myth,⁸ but Guildford was a handsome youth of seventeen, tall and fair-haired - personal attributes that were all by the way. In great families it was the eldest son who was important, followed by his sisters, who were given dowries and expected to form great alliances. Younger sons were worth no more than ‘what the cat left on the malt heap’. Guildford Dudley’s elder brother, Lord Robert Dudley, the future Earl of Leicester, had married the daughter of a Norfolk squire because, as a third son, only a respectable union was expected of him. Guildford was even further down the pecking order; but nevertheless, Northumberland had a very ambitious marriage in mind for him.

Jane’s father would never have agreed to her marrying Guildford. But there was another royal, who like Jane was an heiress of marriageable and childbearing age. The bride Northumberland had in mind was the fifteen-year-old Margaret Clifford, daughter of Frances’s late sister, Eleanor. She was, like the Grey sisters, a descendant of Henry VII through their mutual grandmother, Mary Brandon, Duchess of Suffolk. She was also the heir to vast estates in the north, where Northumberland hoped to become a great magnate. Unsurprisingly, Margaret’s father, the Earl of Cumberland, had no wish to marry his daughter to a fourth son and made a series of excuses as to why it was not possible. But Northumberland then asked the King to intervene. It was a mark of just how much influence he had with Edward that while he was with the army attending to disorders in the Northern Marches, the King was busy acting as his marriage broker.

On 4th July, Edward sent an extraordinary letter to Cumberland ‘desiring him to grow to some good end forthwith in the matter of marriage between the Lord Guildford and his daughter; with licence to the said earl and all others that shall travail therein to do their best for conducement of it’.⁹

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