On 3rd August, the new Queen made her formal entry into London in a procession of nobles and courtiers to claim the Tower. Mounted on a horse trapped in cloth of gold to the ground, Mary wore a gown of violet velvet, the skirts and sleeves of which were also embroidered with gold. She was “of low stature … very thin; and her hair reddish.” A witness judged her to be also “more than middling fair,” but at thirty-seven the bloom of youth had faded and she had become lined by anxiety. Jane was not permitted to plead her case with the Queen as she entered the Tower, but Mary met those prisoners who were due for immediate release. The most prominent of these was Edward Courtney, a great-grandson of Edward IV. He had been in the Tower since 1538, when his father had been condemned to death for plotting to marry him to Mary. He was then only twelve, but had remained imprisoned during Edward’s reign as a continued source of possible danger. Now, however, all those who did not want to see the Queen marry a foreigner placed their hopes in a marriage with Courtney—and soon, if Mary was to stand a chance of bearing children.
Lady Katherine Grey. meanwhile, was to be divorced. Katherine had a very different character from her elder sister. Where Jane was passionate about ideas, Katherine’s passions were of the heart. She had grown very close to her young husband, Henry, Lord Herbert, during their traumatic weeks together. Both claimed desperately that the marriage had been consummated, in order to prevent an annulment, but it was a naïve gesture. Katherine was about to turn thirteen and her father-in-law, Pembroke, who had yet to live down his early role in Mary’s exclusion from the succession, could not afford to take any chance that she might become pregnant. Katherine was to be sent back home to live with her mother and sister, Lady Mary Grey, whose betrothal to the battle-scarred Lord Grey of Wilton was also dissolved, surely to the relief of them both.
After the Queen had spoken to Courtney and the other prisoners, she was taken to the royal apartments where she was shown the crown jewels, retrieved from Jane. They included a ducal coronet of precious stones that had, perhaps, been destined for Guildford. There was a picture of Jane’s grandmother, “the Lady of Suffolk,” in a yellow box, “a picture of Queen Catherine [Parr] that last died” and a small portrait of Edward—whose body still lay unburied at St. Peter’s Church, Westminster.
Through all the events of the past weeks, Edward’s coffin had stood on its trestle, watched over by twelve gentlemen, but without any candles to brighten the dark: they were considered papist. His funeral could now at last go ahead. It took place on 8 August, according to the reformed rituals. Mary had wanted her brother to be given a full Requiem Mass with prayers for his soul, but the imperial ambassadors feared it would appear confrontational, so she held a Mass for him in private and gave him the public service he would have wanted. Ten days later, Mary issued a conciliatory proclamation promising a settlement of religion “by common consent,” asking that in the meantime people live under the religion “they thought best.” And there was another crowd-pleaser: the trials of the traitors Northumberland and Parr of Northampton had begun.
Northumberland observed bitterly at his trial that several judges present had signed the oath backing Edward’s will. He reminded them also that he had done nothing without their authority and by warrant of Queen Jane under the Great Seal. To this, however, his judges replied that the seal of a usurper had no validity, and that they were not accused of treason. Northumberland and Northampton were then found guilty of this crime and condemned to die. The next day the same verdict and sentence was pronounced on Sir John Gates and Sir Thomas Palmer, who had been the key witness in the trial that had condemned the Duke of Somerset for attempted murder. It was said Northampton might be saved if he gave up his second wife, Elizabeth Brooke, and returned to his first, Anne Bourchier. Northumberland, meanwhile, had begged Mary to grant him the privilege of a beheading (instead of the usual traitor’s death of hanging, drawing and quartering), and for mercy for his children. But he had also indicated his continued hopes for a pardon with two additional requests. He asked for Councillors to visit him in order that he might pass on secrets of state, and that “I may have appointed to me some learned man for the instruction and quieting of my conscience.” It signalled a possible conversion of faith.
Northumberland’s execution was set for 21 August, and by eight that morning the axeman was in place and a crowd of up to ten thousand had gathered on Tower Hill. Suddenly, however, the guard left. At nine o’clock, Jane, looking through the window of her rooms in the Tower, saw the duke and the other condemned men going to the Tower’s chapel. Inside, the ancient rituals of the formerly banned Mass were again being performed. As the prisoners prepared to receive Communion, Northumberland turned to the congregation. “My masters,” he began, “I let you all to understand that I do most faithfully believe this is the very right and true way, out of which true religion you and I have been seduced these sixteen years passed, by the false and erroneous preaching of the new preachers.” The words electrified the chapel. Had not Northumberland been, with Northampton and Suffolk, the leading promoter of the evangelical religion in England for the past three years? The imperial ambassador Renard declared that his religious conversion was worth more than a month of sermons. But if Northumberland hoped it would save his life he was wrong. Hours later the Lieutenant of the Tower warned him that he should prepare himself for death the following morning. Gates and Palmer were given the same message. Northumberland wrote a frantic letter to Arundel asking him to plead with the Queen to allow him his life, “yea the life of a dog, that I might but live and kiss her feet.” As night fell, however, no word came from Mary. Despite his efforts to marry into the royal family, Northumberland remained an outsider. And so Parr of Northampton and Harry Suffolk, who had been as loyal to Jane as he, but belonged to the extended Tudor family, were to live and he to die, along with the more minor figures of Gates and Palmer.
The next morning, at nine o’clock, Northumberland was again processed into Mass with the other condemned prisoners and then returned briefly to his lodging. About three-quarters of an hour later, Gates emerged from the house of the Lieutenant of the Tower and sat at the gate to the garden awaiting his appointment at the scaffold. The guards then fetched Northumberland, who appeared dressed in a cloak of “crane coloured” gray damask; he was followed by Palmer.
Northumberland addressed Gates bitterly: “God have mercy on us, for this day shall end both our lives. And I pray you forgive me whatsoever I have offended; and I forgive you with all my heart, although you and your counsel were a great occasion thereof.” Gates had encouraged Northumberland to send his son Lord Robert to arrest Mary. Perhaps he believed that agreeing to do so had been his fatal error. It was later suggested by the Grey camp, however, that there was more to it than that: it was Gates who had persuaded Edward to change his will in June in Jane’s favor, excluding Frances as governor of England. “Well my Lord,” Gates retorted; “I forgive you as I would be forgiven; and yet you and your authority was the only original cause of all together; but the Lord pardon you and I pray you forgive me.” The men bowed, and Northumberland proceeded to the scaffold.
Standing by, watching, were the sons of the former Protector Somerset, the fifteen-year-old Hertford and his younger brothers. The previous day Northumberland had begged their forgiveness for his part in their father’s death, and they were now to witness justice being carried out. The waiting crowd was, again, enormous. “So many came on horseback and on foot that it was a sight to see,” a Spanish witness recorded. Having mounted the scaffold Northumberland leaned over the rails to deliver his last speech. He reiterated his offenses against Queen Mary and begged forgiveness. But he insisted that he was not alone in planning to alter the succession, or even “the original doer thereof … for there were some other which procureth the same, but I shall not name them, for I will hurt now no man.”
Who was Northumberland referring to? The Imperial ambassadors had been told that “three or four” unnamed Councillors h
ad forced the rest. The likelihood that Parr of Northampton was referred to, along with Northumberland and Gates, is suggested by the fact that he remained in the Tower. The judges who had been asked to ratify Edward’s will also recalled Parr of Northampton’s standing with Gates alongside the King, as Edward demanded their support. But Northumberland had hinted there were many people from the apex of the evangelical elite whom he now blamed for what had passed. He conceded also that greed and personal ambition had played a part in his decisions and understood that people would be cynical about his sudden conversion. With his executioner standing only feet from him, however, he countered this, declaring “as ye see I am in no case to say aught but the truth.” If he was lying and still hoping for a last-minute reprieve, he was taking an enormous risk. If the axe swung at that moment he believed he would be facing eternal judgment. Northumberland stripped off his doublet and took the blindfold proffered by the executioner. As he knelt down on the straw he made a sign of the cross on the ground—a Catholic gesture—and said his last prayers. He then knelt up to adjust the bandage around his eyes and threw himself flat upon the beam on the ground, clapping his hands together in a sign to the executioner. “Oh, my good lord, remember how sweet life is, and how bitter the contrary,” Northumberland had written to Arundel. With one blow his head fell. Sir John Gates was not so lucky. It took three blows to remove his head. Then, with the beam slippery with their blood, it was the turn of Sir Thomas Palmer.
An aging man, now in his fifties, Palmer leapt like a youth onto the scaffold. He freely confessed himself guilty of the lies that had helped send the Protector to the scaffold for attempted murder. But he was optimistic about the next life. He had learned more of God’s goodness, he said, “in one little dark corner in yonder Tower, than ever I learned by any travels in so many places as I have been. For there I say I have seen God, what he is, and how unsearchable his wondrous works are, and how infinite his mercies be.” He believed God had forgiven him. “And should I fear death, or be sad thereof? Have I not seen two die before my eyes and within the hearing of mine ears? No, neither the sprinkling of the blood or the shedding thereof, nor the bloody axe itself, shall not make me afraid.” He turned to the executioner, whose white apron was splashed red. “Come on good fellow,” he said, “art thou he that must do the deed? I forgive thee with all my heart.” His head was taken, like the duke’s, with one blow. Jane then watched their remains return in a wooden cart to the church where they had attended Mass.
It was common knowledge that Queen Mary remained determined that Jane’s life would be spared, and that she intended to grant Jane a pardon after her trial had run its course. The Grey camp had been feeding her arguments to give the imperial ambassadors that this would be a safe decision as well as the merciful one. On the eve of Northumberland’s trial Mary had assured the ambassadors Scheyfve and Renard that Jane had not been privy to the plans to usurp her throne until a late stage. They were told, for good measure, that Jane’s marriage to Guildford wasn’t valid because she had been betrothed already to a member of Bishop Gardiner’s household—a man of sufficiently low rank for her to be excluded as a possible rival Queen were they to be reunited. This was a suggestion that has Frances and Katherine Suffolk’s fingerprints on it (for reasons that become apparent later). The ambassadors were unimpressed, however, and no more was heard of the groom. So Jane’s situation remained precarious when, a week after Northumberland’s execution, she prepared to meet a Mr. Rowland Lee for dinner in the Tower.
It wasn’t every day Lee, an official at the Royal Mint, sat down to eat with a prominent and controversial royal figure. But their host was a friend of his, a Mr. Partridge, whose rooms were above those where Jane usually dined. Partridge had seen her there one day and invited her to eat with his wife and friend. He was, perhaps, Hugh, brother of Sir Miles Partridge, an old gaming companion of Thomas Palmer who had been executed in February the previous year as an ally of the Duke of Somerset. The family were radical evangelicals, naturally sympathetic to Jane, but also enemies of Northumberland, and Hugh may have been serving as a gentleman jailor to his brother’s executioners and former friends. When Lee arrived at Partridge’s rooms, Jane was already seated at the head of the table: a young girl with a poise and confidence beyond her years. Looking up, she raised her glass and drank to Lee, bidding him “heartily welcome.” He snatched at his hat, but Jane reassured him that she was happy for him to keep it on. Lee then acknowledged the Partridges at the table, Jane’s manservant, and her gentlewoman, who was introduced to him as Mrs. Jacob. Jane had at least three gentlewomen serving her in the Tower. Two were relations: her cousin Elizabeth Tilney (whose elder sister had served Henry VIII’s doomed fifth wife, Katherine Howard) and Mistress “Ellyn”—or possibly “Allan” in modern spelling. She is often described as Jane’s nurse, but this is one of Richard Davey’s inventions, as is his description of Mrs. Jacob as Jane’s “tiring woman,” that is, her dresser.
Jane boldly opened the meal with a toast to Mary: “The Queen’s Majesty is a merciful princess; I beseech God may she long continue, and send his bountiful grace upon her.” Jane still hoped for a pardon—a wish, reportedly, she had expressed more directly in the past few days in a letter she had sent to Mary. In the letter, recorded by the papal envoy Commmendone, she denied ever having wished to be Queen and gave an account of events that mirrors her mother’s accusations against North umberland. Jane accused Guildford of having pressed her for the title of King and the Duchess of Northumberland of having attempted to poison her in June. A close version of the letter, published forty years later by an Italian with English connections and links to Commendone, also accused those who had betrayed her in July—Pembroke, Arundel, and Lord Treasurer Winchester—of having been particularly unctuous toward her as Queen. The anger and confusion the letters express may well reflect Jane’s feelings that summer.
Jane now led the dinner conversation. She wanted to hear what news they had on Mary’s religious policy. Who had preached at Paul’s Cross the Sunday before? Dr. Thomas Watson, Jane was told, the former private chaplain of Bishop Gardiner. There had been an incident the previous week when the preacher, Gilbert Bourne, had been stoned after talking in favor of the Mass, but Watson had taken no chances and preached surrounded by an armed guard of more than three hundred men. Jane wanted to hear more about the possible reintroduction of the Mass. “I pray you,” she asked, “have they the Mass in London?” “Yea for sure,” Rowland Lee replied, “in some places.”
Jane was appalled and, recalling that Mass was being said in the Tower chapel, expressed her astonishment at her father-in-law’s sudden conversion. “Who would have thought he would have so done?” she reflected. Her dinner companions told her that people were saying he had hoped for a pardon. “Pardon?” Jane exploded. “Woe worth him! He hath brought me and our stock in most miserable calamity and misery by his exceeding ambition.” How could he have dared hope for a pardon “being in the field [of battle] against the Queen in person as General”? Did he not understand he was a man “whose life was odious to all men? But what will ye more?” she continued, her fury unabated, “like as his life was wicked and full of dissimulation, so was his end thereafter. I pray God, I, nor no friend of mine, die so.” Jane then announced she would die before compromising her beliefs. “Should I who am young forsake my faith for the love of life? Nay, God forbid! Much more he should not. But life was sweet, it appeared; so he might have lived, you will say, he did [not] care how.” Quoting the Scriptures she concluded that he was damned: “Who so denies Him before men, he will not know him in his Father’s kingdom.”
Jane’s comments offer a telling commentary on the weeks since her fall, and her intentions for the future. She hoped for a pardon from the “merciful princess” Mary, in common with her mother blaming Northumberland for her situation and that of her family. If the Mass were to be introduced, however, she would make a stand against it, and accept death if that was the price of so doing
.
A fortnight later, on the 13th or 14th of September, Guildford’s imprisoned brothers were given permission to see their wives. It is doubtful, however, that Jane would have been allowed to see Guildford. The later story that she became pregnant that winter originates in a piece of anti-Marian propaganda, written in an elegy ten years later. But she may have spotted Guildford from her window, exercising with his brothers on the roof of the Beauchamp Tower, as the restrictions on them began to be relaxed. Certainly she had seen Parr of Northampton make his regular visits to Mass in the chapel, along with the Bishop of London, Nicholas Ridley. Jane was tormented by the thought of the numbers of people being drawn back to what she judged Catholic idolatry. And matters were only getting worse in this respect. Early in November, Parliament repealed all the religious legislation passed during the Edwardian period, which her father had done so much to promote. To Jane’s intense pride he was among the few who tried to prevent the repeal. But she intended to play her own part in defending her religion on the public stage of her trial on 13 November.
On that morning, she was led out of the Tower with Guildford; his brothers Ambrose and Henry; and the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer, to be brought on foot to the Guildhall. The procession made its way through the streets, led by a man carrying an axe: a reminder that the prisoners were being tried for a capital crime. The first prisoner in the line was Cranmer, then Guildford, dressed dashingly in a black velvet suit slashed with white satin. Jane was behind him, looking every inch the star prisoner. She had dressed in the deepest black as a symbol of penitence, her black cape trimmed and lined with black; even the detailing on her French hood was black. She held a prayer book open in her hands to broadcast her evangelical piety, while another, covered in black velvet, hung from her waist. Here was not so much penitence as defiance. Behind Jane came her ladies Mrs. Jacob and Elizabeth Tilney, and behind them Guildford’s brothers Ambrose and Henry. Transcripts of the trial do not survive, but Michel Angelo Florio, who had dedicated to Jane his Tuscan dictionary earlier that year, recorded that she remained cool and composed, from the clash of arms as she reached the Guildhall until judgment was read. The Chief Justice, Sir Richard Morgan, who had been one of those imprisoned under King Edward for attending Mass in Mary’s chapel, condemned her to be burned alive, the automatic sentence for any woman convicted of treason. As the procession returned, the axe was turned inward as a sign the death sentence had been passed and many in the crowd wept for Jane.
The Sisters Who Would Be Queen Page 15