The Sisters Who Would Be Queen

by Leanda de Lisle

  Mary Tudor was not unlike 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.” 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 Whitsunday 1549, when the new Prayer Book came into force, but then, 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 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 that she had broken no laws, unless they were new laws of their own making; and she did not recognize these since the King, her brother, was not yet of an age to make them. For the time being her Hapsburg cousin, 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.” Indeed, Dorset was at court, hoping that Warwick 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 their arrival, 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. 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. Nothing could be more important to Dorset than overthrowing “the vain traditions of men,” expressed through the ancient rites of the Catholic Church, in favor of the Truth expressed in the Word of the Bible—and Mary presented an obstacle.

  Within weeks of Dorset’s promotion, remaining conservatives on the Council were expelled. The imperial ambassador was expressing fears for the Emperor’s cousin Mary. He described Dorset, Northampton, and Herbert as the dominant figures in Warwick’s “crew,” and as men who would “never permit the Lady Mary to live in peace … in order to exterminate [the Catholic] religion.” 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 2 December, Katherine and Mary returned to Tilty, arriving with their attendants and “a great many gentlemen.” Katherine, in particular, was a lighthearted girl who enjoyed such parties, and little Mary Grey took her cue from her older sister in this regard. Jane happily joined them at Tilty on 16 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. 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 one another.

  By February 1550, as the immediate political situation stabilized, 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 Honors and Constable of Leicester Castle, as well as being granted lands, lordships, and manors in Leicestershire, Rutland, Warwickshire, Nottinghamshire, and the Duchy of Lancaster. This vast increase in wealth ensured that 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 with the same Gentlemen: 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 personal apartments, as well as cavalry, of which Dorset commanded a hundred mounted men.* 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 loyal to those who were. Catherine Parr’s brother, the Marquess of Northampton, was close at hand as Lord Chamberlain, in charge of the King’s private quarters, 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 favorite Gentleman of the Privy Chamber. But the figure who dominated the court was the new Lord President of the Privy Council, 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 with new taxes. 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.”

  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 treati
ng 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, 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 interfamily 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 the medieval King 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 eldest 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 clever secretary William Cecil—who was a kinsman of the Greys as well as a good friend—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. 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 favorite daughter. A German religious exile, John of Ulm, who was writing to the chief pastor of the Zurich Church, Heinrich Bullinger, 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.

  * For this he received two thousand pounds a year: as much as he had agreed on for Jane’s wardship.

  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 under the English ambassador at the court of Charles V. Ascham had come principally to say goodbye to his wife, Alice, whom he could not afford to take with him, and to his friends the Astleys, Elizabeth’s former governess and her husband. All were based at Bradgate following Sudeley’s arrest and the breakup of Elizabeth’s household. Ascham also hoped to thank Jane for help she had given him—perhaps a letter of reference to his new employer. A prime purpose of Jane’s education was to coach her to perform on the public stage, and it seems she was already playing the role of a 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. 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 attain that which has been the pursuit of my life.” 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 hunting 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, deaf to this note of teenage self-absorbtion, was delighted to find a young woman with a love of philosophy and 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.

  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 a straightforward 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 eroticized 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 colored 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 us
ually meant a rigorous, even harsh, educational regime.

  Jane’s favorite 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, and Ascham detested the physical chastisement commonly inflicted on Tudor schoolchildren such as she, 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] … all people are inclined to follow their own ways.” And he asked the advice of leading clerics on how best to “provide bridles for restive horses” such as this spirited girl.

  A still more revealing insight into the household at Bradgate is given in the contemporary letters of John of Ulm to Heinrich Bullinger. Although Ulm admired Dorset, and received an income from 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 (and wrongly) describe Frances as the dominant partner in the marriage, it is Dorset’s obsession with his royal connections that is 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.”