The Sisters Who Would Be Queen

by Leanda de Lisle

  The battle in London continued all day. At one point the royal troops at Charing Cross broke and at court there were shouts of “Treason!” Pembroke had changed sides, it was said, and there was “running and crying of ladies and gentlewomen, shutting of doors and such a shrieking and noise as it was wonderful to hear.” From the roof of the White Tower, Parr of Northampton watched the fighting rage below. He had been released from the Tower at the end of December only to be rearrested in the house of Wyatt’s mother. He kept his emotions in check as the battle ebbed and flowed, until late afternoon when it was clear that the rebels had been defeated. He then put on a great display of rejoicing.

  Neither Jane’s reaction, nor that of her husband, is recorded, but at 5 p.m. she and Guildford heard the cries and clanging of metal that heralded the arrival of new prisoners. They included Sir Thomas Wyatt, North ampton’s brother-in-law Thomas Brooke, and several other rebels, still dressed in mail and spurs. They were pulled, shoved, and abused as they were taken to their cells. Prisoners continued to arrive the next day until the Tower rooms were full. The warrant to execute Jane and Guild-ford had, however, not yet been signed. The Privy Council, including those who had proclaimed Jane in the summer, joined together with the imperial ambassadors to press Mary into doing so. It may not have been very difficult. Her signature was a mark of a new ruthlessness in the Queen. The executions were set for Friday, 9 February.

  To help Jane prepare for her death, and in the hope of cleansing her soul from the infection of heresy, Mary sent her personal chaplain, John Feckenham, to the Tower. A former Benedictine monk, Feckenham was a kindly, jovial man in his early forties. He had resisted the Edwardian reforms and had ended up in the Tower, so he knew well what it was like to be interred there. He was also extremely persuasive: Feckenham would later claim no less a figure than Edward VI’s tutor, John Cheke, as one of his converts. When he arrived at Jane’s rooms in the Tower, she took in briefly the priest’s stocky figure, round face, and high coloring. She told him she had been expecting him. It was still shocking, however, when he delivered the news that she was to die the next day. Jane, absorbing how little time she had left, must have looked pathetically young to Feckenham. But she was also stubborn. She told him there was no time now for them to debate theology. She had to prepare to die. When the priest returned to court he begged the Queen to grant Jane a few more days of life so that he could give her the instruction she had refused. It was possible, even, that if she converted to Catholicism her life would be spared. The rebels were Protestant and Jane had been an iconic figure to Protestants even before she had become Queen. If she accepted the Catholic Mass she would no longer pose a potential threat as such. Mary agreed to Feckenham’s request with the sentence of death commuted for Jane and Guildford from Friday until Monday, 12 February. Two days later, on Saturday, Jane’s father and her uncle Lord John arrived at the Tower, brought by Huntingdon with an escort of three hundred horse.

  The smell of mud and defeat was in the air once more, and Jane struggled with the fear of death. She had loved life, she recalled. But when Feckenham returned she was prepared for his visit. Among her writings in the Tower is a prayer she had said for the courage not to deny her beliefs in the hopes of keeping her life: “Lord, thou God and father of my life … be merciful unto me … lest I … being brought too low should despair and blaspheme thee … arm me, I beseech thee, with thy armour, that I may stand fast.” She was now wearing “the breast plates of righteousness”: it must have seemed that her whole life had led to this point.

  Jane had not forgotten Anne Askew, burned for heresy by Henry VIII in 1546, and whose arguments with her persecutors had been recorded for posterity. Jane intended to preserve the best of her exchanges with the priest so they could be used later to rouse Protestants against the reintroduction of Catholicism. Feckenham found Jane as cool and composed as she had been for her trial. He told her how sorry he was to see her in such a terrible situation, although he could see she bore her pain “with a constant and patient mind.” Jane retorted dryly that far from regretting her situation, she regarded it as a “manifest declaration of God’s favour towards me.” It was an opportunity to repent her sins, just as the execution of Thomas Seymour of Sudeley had been for him. As such she welcomed it. Feckenham then asked, “What is required of a Christian man?” and over the following hours the determined priest and the passionate sixteen-year-old debated the path to salvation: Jane for the Protestant view that faith alone was required, and Feckenham reiterating Catholic belief that people have a role to play in their fate and that acts of charity and other “good works” are also necessary. They debated too the Real Presence of Christ in consecrated bread and wine, with Jane attacking the Catholic Church as “the spouse of the devil” for its “idolatrous” interpretations. But then it was over, and they were back where they had begun.

  Feckenham observed sadly that they would never agree. “True,” Jane replied, “except God turn your heart.” She warned that unless he changed his opinions he would go to hell, “and I pray God, in the bowels of his mercy, to send you his Holy Spirit; for he has given you his great gift of utterance, if it pleased him also to open the eyes of your heart.”* Feckenham asked Mary again for a pardon for Jane, but Bishop Gardiner joined the opposing voices on the Council to undermine his efforts. That Sunday afternoon, Gardiner preached before the Queen in her private chapel. To the evangelicals he was a demonic figure, with “frowning brows, eyes an inch within the head” and “great paws like the devil.” They certainly had good reason to fear him. The bishop was about to declare that Protestantism and treason were one.

  Gardiner began by reminding the congregation of Catholic teaching. That God had given man free will, and that good works are necessary for redemption. Certain clerics, he continued, had betrayed the English Church after the death of King Henry by preaching heresy. Then he addressed Mary. Gardiner had a “boon of the Queen’s highness.” He recalled she had pardoned many traitors who had proclaimed Jane as Queen in July 1553. From this act of mercy, he argued, “open rebellion was grown.” He asked “that she would now be merciful to the body of the commonwealth” and that “the rotten and hurtful members thereof” be “cut off and consumed.” It was a chilling phrase, and afterward, as the congregation milled together, they were in no doubt that “there should shortly follow sharp and cruel execution.”

  That night was the last Jane had to compose her final letters. She knew her father was in great distress over her fate and his hand in it. She wanted to reassure him it was God who had brought her here, and that he was only God’s instrument. But she also intended to advertise her innocence of any ambition to be Queen. “Father,” she began,

  although it pleases God to hasten my death by one by whom my life should rather have been lengthened; yet can I so patiently take it, that I yield God more hearty thanks for shortening my woeful days, than if all the world had been given into my possession, with life lengthened at my own will. And albeit I am assured of your impatient dolours redoubled manifold ways, both in bewailing your own woe, and especially, as I hear, my unfortunate state; yet, my dear father (if I may without offence rejoice in my own mishaps), herein I may account myself blessed, that washing my hands with the innocence of my fact, my guiltless blood may cry before the Lord, “Mercy to the innocent!”

  She reminded her father that he knew, better than most, how she had been pressed to accept the crown in July 1553. Now she looked forward to escaping “this vale of misery” to a heavenly throne. “The Lord that hitherto has strengthened you, so continue you, that at last we may meet in heaven,” Jane concluded.

  No letters to Jane’s mother survive, or to her youngest sister, Mary. Frances may have destroyed them. She knew that in order to protect her younger children she would have to conform—or at least appear to do so, as their friend William Cecil and many others were doing. It is possible Jane understood this, although her letter to Katherine suggests otherwise. Written on blank pages
in a copy of the New Testament in Greek, it asked Katherine to prepare for martyrdom. It did not seem to matter to her that Katherine was only thirteen years old. Jane’s principal concerns were intellectual and religious. She wrote to Katherine as the sister who would inherit her mantle, and she did not, therefore, need to compose a similar letter to Mary Grey.

  I have sent you, good sister Katherine, a book, which, though it be not outwardly trimmed with gold, yet inwardly it is of more worth than precious stones. It will teach you to live it will learn you to die … Trust not that the tenderness of your age shall lengthen your life … for as soon as God will, goeth the young as the old. Labour always and learn to die. Deny the world, defy the devil, and despise the flesh.

  If Katherine was tempted to save herself by accepting the Catholic faith, then “God will deny you and shorten your days.” The damnation of the apostate would await her. “As touching my death, rejoice as I do,” Jane continued, “for I am assured that I shall for losing a mortal life find an immortal felicity.” She concluded her letter, “Farewell dear sister; put your only trust in God, who only must uphold you, your loving sister, Jane Dudley.”

  The papal nuncio Commendone recorded that Guildford also had a last message, which he sent to Jane. It was that “before dying, he wished to embrace and kiss her for the last time.” Jane, however, said that she did not want any distractions from her prayers and “she let him answer that if their meeting could have been a means of consolation to their souls, she would have been very glad to see him, but as their meeting would only tend to increase their misery and pain, it was better to put it off for the time being, as they would meet shortly elsewhere, and live bound by indissoluble ties.” They were words of affection, but not of passion. At light the next morning, the noise of hammering could be heard as the scaffold intended for Jane was erected, close by the White Tower. As a royal princess she would have the privilege of being executed in the privacy of the Tower grounds. The sound found its echoes throughout London as pairs of gallows were set up at every gate in anticipation of captured rebels, and also on Tower Hill, where Guildford was to die. Just before ten Jane saw her husband being led from the Beauchamp Tower.

  Guildford stopped at the main gate, where Sir Anthony Browne was standing, and grasped him by the hand. Sir Anthony was a Catholic, but he was also Lord John Grey’s brother-in-law: it made him family. Guildford asked Sir Anthony to pray for him before asking the same of the other gentlemen standing with him. Among them was Sir Nicholas Throckmorton’s brother John, who had drawn up Jane’s proclamation as Queen. Guildford walked through the gates; on the other side the sheriff waited to escort him to Tower Hill. Parr of Northampton was again on the roof, this time of the Devlin Tower, to watch the teenage boy meet his end. There was no priest to attend on Guildford, which suggests he had refused one. He simply said his prayers and laid himself flat on the block. It took one blow to take off his head. As Jane emerged from Partridge’s lodgings for the last walk of her life, Guildford’s body was being carried into the Tower’s chapel, his head wrapped in a bloody cloth. “Oh! Guildford! Guildford!” she exclaimed. But then she composed herself and addressed the body. The taste of death was bitter, but this was nothing, she announced, “compared to the feast that you and I shall this day partake of in heaven!” At that, looking “nothing at all abashed,” she followed the Lieutenant of the Tower, Sir John Bridges, toward the scaffold.

  Jane was dressed in the same black gown that she had worn for her trial and, as then, she carried an open prayer book. Her ladies, Mistress Allan and Elizabeth Tilney, “wonderfully wept,” but Jane’s eyes remained dry as she read her prayers. Having mounted the steps of the scaffold by the White Tower, she went to the rails and turned to the select audience. The traditional admission of guilt was to be a qualified one:

  Good people, I am come hither to die, and by a law I am condemned to the same. The fact, indeed, against the Queen’s Highness was unlawful, and the consenting thereunto by me: but touching the procurement and desire thereof by me or on my behalf, I do wash my hands thereof in innocence, before God, and the face of you, good Christian people, this day.

  At this she wrung her hands, still holding her prayer book.

  I pray you all, good Christian people, to bear me witness that I die a true Christian woman, and that I look to be saved by none other means, but only by the mercy of God in the merits of his only son, Jesus Christ and I confess when I did know the Word of God I neglected the same, loved myself and the world, and therefore this plague or punishment is happily and worthily happened unto me for my sins; and yet I thank God of his goodness that he has thus given me time and respect to repent.

  “While I am alive,” Jane continued, “I pray you to assist me with your prayers.” She wanted no words said for the dead, as Catholics had. As Jane knelt down she turned to Feckenham and, suddenly, he had a glimpse of the uncertain child behind the brave martyr: “Shall I say this psalm?” she asked as if he had been one of her father’s chaplains. “Yea,” he replied. And so she recited the heartbreaking Miserere mei Deus, in English:

  Have mercy on me O God, according to thy steadfast love; according to thy abundant mercy blot out my transgressions … the sacrifice acceptable to God is a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise.

  Jane then stood up, gave Elizabeth Tilney her gloves and handkerchief, and Thomas Bridges, the brother of the Lieutenant of the Tower, her prayer book. She had inscribed it inside for his brother: “Good master Lieutenant … Live still to die, that by death you may purchase eternal life … For, as the Preacher says, there is a time to be born, and a time to die; and the day of death is better than the day of our birth. Yours, as the Lord knows, as a friend, Jane Dudley.” But the time for statements was coming to an end, and the brutality of a beheading was growing closer.

  As Jane began to untie her gown the executioner stepped forward to help her. Revolted, she ordered him to leave her alone and turned toward her two women. They took the gown and helped her remove her headdress and neckerchief. The executioner knelt and asked her forgiveness, which she gave “most willingly,” as prisoners traditionally did. He asked her then to stand on the straw. It was at that moment that she saw for the first time the rough beam of wood that served for the block. “I pray you dispatch me quickly,” she asked. But then, as she knelt, she was suddenly anxious that her request meant the blow could come at any time. “Will you take [my head] before I lay me down?” “No, madam,” the executioner replied.

  Jane tied her handkerchief around her eyes. Blinded she had to feel for the block and in a rush of panic she realized she couldn’t find it. “What shall I do? Where is it?” she asked. Everyone standing there now saw the child that Feckenham had heard, looking for reassurance and help. Appalled, one of them guided her to the block. She laid her head upon the beam, stretched out her body and said: “Lord, into thy hands I commend my spirit!” There was a fountain of blood, “and so” a witness recorded, “she ended.”

  * The priest was not to convert as Jane hoped. Feckenham died in the infamous Elizabethan prison at Wisbech, rather than give up his religion.

  PART THREE

  HEIRS TO ELIZABETH

  “I swear, ‘tis better to be lowly born,

  And range with humble livers in content,

  Than to be perk’d up in a glist’ring grief

  And wear a golden sorrow.”

  Henry VIII, ACT II SCENE III

  WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

  XIV

  Aftermath

  ON THE GREEN, WITHIN THE WALLS OF THE TOWER, THE SCENE on the scaffold resembled that of the butchery of an animal in a farmyard. It was still possible, however, to recognize the remains on the straw as those of a slightly built girl. Surveying the gore, a French diplomat was amazed that something so small could produce so much blood. Jane’s head had been cast into the same pit in the Tower chapel as that of Guildford. Whether her body was later buried with it, we cannot be sure
. The graves were redug and moved in the nineteenth century. Her bones, along with those of Anne Boleyn and other executed traitors, now lie jumbled together in a grave behind the north wall, to the left of the altar, although some anonymous bones are still found beneath the chapel floor.

  But while the dead show no weakness, know no temptation to compromise, for Jane’s younger sisters the messy business of living continued. Katherine and Mary were ages thirteen and nine, respectively, and their immediate situation was a terrifying one. Jane’s and Guildford’s deaths marked only the beginning of Bishop Gardiner’s “cruel and sharp” executions. On the same day, the Princess Elizabeth received a troubling request for her presence at court, and the pairs of gallows being built at every London gate were completed. On the Wednesday the hangings of the traitors began. At Cheapside there were six; at Aldgate one (hung, drawn, and quartered, his intestines removed and genitals cut off while he was still alive). At Leadenhall there were three; at Bishopsgate one (also drawn and quartered), and at Charing Cross four. Three were hanged in chains at Hyde Park Corner, and so the carnage across London continued. The dozens of screaming, dying rebels included a royal footman and members of the guard. But the Grey family also had blood left to spill.

  Jane’s sisters had little time to mourn her before their father faced his trial. On Saturday, 17 February 1554, just five days after Jane had died, Harry Suffolk was escorted from the Tower to Westminster Hall under heavy guard. The great scaffold where Guildford had died had been made ready for his execution, though he faced the coming ordeal before his judges “cheerfully enough.” The charge was high treason “for levying war in the county of Leicester;” for posting proclamations opposing the entry to England of the Queen’s betrothed, Prince Philip of Spain; “for compassing the death and final destruction of the Queen;” and finally, for unsettling the crown. Suffolk pleaded innocent to all charges, arguing that it was not treasonable for a peer to defend his country from strangers. But Suffolk’s own supporters had said, “My Lord’s quarrel was well known as God’s quarrel.” His judges took the view that Protestantism, rather than patriotism, lay behind his actions, and found him guilty on all counts. His former brother-in-law Arundel delivered the sentence of death. Suffolk was then returned by barge to the Watergate at the Tower. The river ran black in the shadow of the fortress and as he got out of the boat his expression was described as “very heavy and pensive.” He asked the men standing about to pray for him, and five days later his daughters were given a ray of hope that he might yet live.