A large number of rebels brought to Whitehall, their hands bound and nooses around their necks, had been pardoned as they knelt before the Queen. There was support at court for Suffolk and his brothers to be shown similar mercy. Lord Grey of Wilton, betrothed to little Mary Grey in the rash of royal marriages the previous year, remained a vocal friend. But, whatever Katherine and Mary hoped, their mother, Frances, knew their father would not be pardoned of treason twice. With her husband as good as dead, she focused her efforts instead on salvaging a future for her surviving children. Bradgate was forfeited to the crown along with the rest of her husband’s wealth and estates. She had to rescue what she could and pleaded successfully with the Queen that, if she could not pardon Suffolk, she would forgive him. This, at least, opened the possibility of rehabilitation at court and the restoration of some of the confiscated lands.
The night of 22 February 1554 was to be Suffolk’s last. Mary sent two of her own priests to the Tower, doubling the efforts she had made to save Jane’s soul, but “they were in no wise able to move him.” He spent his last hours reading the theological works of Heinrich Bullinger, whom he had encouraged to guide Jane’s spiritual development. She had been an obedient daughter to him in life, and one who in many ways was like him. But in the end it was he who followed her example.
At nine o’clock the following morning, Suffolk left the Tower under guard to Tower Hill. He was accompanied by one of the Queen’s chaplains, Hugh Weston, a fellow Leicestershire man. Perhaps that was why he was chosen. More likely, however, it was because he had spoken recently in a public debate on Eucharist doctrine against the Bradgate chaplain, James Haddon. As the crowd waited for the rituals of the execution to begin, Weston gave a sermon attacking Suffolk’s religious beliefs. The time when the Queen had invited people to follow their own religion was over. The doomed duke was so angry that when Weston began to climb the stairs of the scaffold behind him to minister to him in his last moments, he turned around and pushed the priest back. Weston grabbed on to him, and both fell to the bottom of the scaffold. There was an undignified struggle until Weston shouted out that it was the Queen’s wish that he follow. Suffolk then gave way. When the duke reached the top of the scaffold he regathered his dignity and addressed the crowd: “Masters, I have offended the Queen, and her laws, and am justly condemned to die.” He asked for the Queen’s forgiveness. Weston, standing by, then confirmed: “My Lord, her grace has already forgiven you and prays for you.” Suffolk defiantly now reiterated his Protestantism and, on his knees, said the Psalm of the persecuted, “In te, Domine, speravi”: the prayer of the just man under affliction.
… I have heard the blame of many that dwell round about. While they assembled together against me, they consulted to take away my life…. Deliver me out of the hands of my enemies; and from them that persecute me…. Let me not be confounded, O Lord, for I have called upon thee….
At last, Suffolk stood up and gave his cap and scarf to the executioner, who knelt to ask forgiveness. “God forgive thee and I do,” Suffolk told him, “and when thou dost thine office, I pray thee do it well, and bring me out of this world quickly, and God have mercy to thee.” At this desperate juncture, a man to whom the duke owed money, and who had managed to get a place on the scaffold, stepped forward. “My Lord,” he asked, “how shall I do for the money that you do owe me?” Aghast, Suffolk replied: “Alas good fellow, trouble me not now, but go thy way to my officers.” The man was bundled away while Suffolk took off his gown and doublet, tied a handkerchief around his face to cover his eyes, knelt down and recited the Our Father. Then he laid his head on the block and said, “Christ have mercy on me.” The axe swung and his head fell with one stroke.
The imperial ambassadors observed that it might be necessary to eliminate the entire male line of the Grey family if England was to be protected from rebellion and heresy. And on 9 March, Suffolk’s brother Lord Thomas Grey was also tried and “cast [to lose] his head.” It was rumored that he had carried messages from Suffolk to the Princess Elizabeth, and on Palm Sunday, 18 March, the fearful princess walked the drawbridge from the Tower Wharf into the fortress where it was now her turn to be imprisoned. In common with Jane she had generous accommodation—four rooms within the royal palace—and she too had servants to attend on her. But this was the palace (in the inner ward of the Tower to the southeast) that her mother, Anne Boleyn, had left for her execution, and Elizabeth had seen, on the green, the scaffold where Jane had died. She was interrogated closely, but was careful to give nothing away, and, in contrast to the period of Sudeley’s arrest, in 1549, her servants also held fast. Elizabeth could not be sure, however, what others might reveal in exchange for their lives.
The Grey sisters, meanwhile, cleaved to their mother, Frances, who encouraged them to play the Catholic. This does not mean that she had forgotten Jane, or her Protestant beliefs, as was claimed after the eighteenth century. The Bradgate chaplain, James Haddon, describing Jane’s death to the Italian cleric Michel Angelo Florio, told him that Jane had inherited her piety from both her parents and had been close to her mother. Frances, however, had seen that the evangelical cause had been tarred with corruption and treason. It was best to stay silent and allow Jane’s example of Protestant piety and steadfastness to now rescue it from the mire into which it had fallen. An associate of James Haddon had already translated into Latin Jane’s angry missive to the former tutor, Harding, and the letter to her sister Katherine, so that an international audience could understand them. Soon they would be on their way to her old mentor Heinrich Bullinger in Zurich. Haddon was terrified what the consequences might be if they were published and later begged Bullinger to keep Jane’s letters secret. But he was wasting his ink. Someone had already delivered the handwritten originals, and a description of Jane’s conversation in the Tower with Feckenham, to an evangelical printer in Lincolnshire called John Day. It is likely that Frances was the source of the material. She would have had access to the original letters and Day’s press was hidden on the estate of their old family friend and kinsman Sir William Cecil. The subsequent pamphlet had the appearance of a martyrology, and a second edition, published later in the year, also included a detailed account of her execution, along with a prayer inspired by her death, written by John Knox. Taken together, Jane’s writings and her speech on the scaffold have been described as the most powerful contemporary attack on the reign of Queen Mary. But if Frances was involved with Day, she had to be very careful to cover her tracks. Her friend and stepmother, Katherine Suffolk, had already received threats from the Lord Chancellor, Bishop Gardiner.
Frances’s father had died of exhaustion and heart failure in August 1545, and her stepmother had not remarried until after she had lost her sons, seven years later. The husband she chose was a man who would not threaten her independence: her Gentleman Usher, Sir Richard Bertie. It was highly unusual to marry a servant, and frowned upon, but it was a love match and a very happy one. They had just had a daughter and she was recovering from the birth, when Gardiner had Bertie summoned to London. Katherine Suffolk had once been Gardiner’s favorite godchild, but their friendship and mutual affection had turned to bitter contempt as their beliefs had diverged. Gardiner recalled her quip when he was in the Tower, that it was “merry with the lambs now the wolf was shut up,” and, as he questioned Bertie on whether his wife intended to conform to the Queen’s religion, he asked chillingly: “doth she think her lambs now safe enough?”
As soon as Bertie returned home to Lincolnshire, plans were laid for the family to flee abroad—as many friends were doing already, including the chaplain James Haddon. That suited Gardiner: from his perspective the more potential troublemakers who left the country, the better. Exile was not an option for Frances and her children, however. The French, who were at war with the Queen’s cousin Charles V, would have given anything to have such useful pawns, but for that very reason any move they made to flee the country would be interpreted as treason. So they stayed, and Fr
ances waited for the storm of blood to pass.
Wyatt was beheaded on 11 April and on 24 April the sisters’ uncle Lord Thomas Grey, who had been sentenced to death in early March, was also executed. His body was buried at All Hallows, Barking, without its head, which was left on public display. People were growing tired of the killings, however, and, three days later, Sir Nicholas Throckmorton was found not guilty of treason at his trial—an almost unheard-of verdict. The public had decided that vengeance and justice had run its course and there was little chance that any jury would convict Elizabeth, whom Wyatt and Grey had refused to implicate. The princess was released from the Tower into house arrest on 14 May. Pardons followed for Suffolk’s half brother George Medley, and for several of the Grey family servants. Lord John Grey’s wife, the sister of the Catholic Viscount Montague, began also to make headway in her eventually successful petitions on her husband’s behalf.
Frances, meanwhile, completed the rehabilitation of her family in stunning fashion. In April she had been regranted numerous former Grey manors in Leicestershire, including the lease of Beaumanor, near Bradgate, the old and new park, with “free warren and chase of deer and wild beast.” She hung it with portraits of Catherine Parr and of her Tudor mother, the French Queen, Mary Brandon. Then, in July 1554, Frances was invited to join the Queen’s Privy Chamber. Only six months after Jane’s death, Katherine and Mary were back at court with their mother. Without their father’s ambition and religious fervor driving the family, their future looked safe. And if they could not show their continuing grief there was satisfaction, at least, in the news that the Chief Justice Richard Morgan, who had condemned Jane, had gone insane. Foxe recorded the additional detail that he was haunted by her ghost and went to his grave screaming for “the Lady Jane” to be “taken away from him”—but this may be wishful thinking.
Katherine and Mary Grey soon grew used to the routines of court life. Queen Mary was an early riser and her ladies were all dressed and ready for their duties by nine. A livery was provided in russet or black cloth, with richer clothes for high days and holidays borrowed from the royal wardrobe. Opportunities for exercise were limited, but there was always the possibility of early morning “aerobics” for those who wanted to keep fit: “walk twenty paces,” one sixteenth-century manual advised; “jump of your tiptoes down backwards … stretch … your body.” Meals were at noon and at six. Much of the rest of the day might be spent whiling away the hours in sewing, making jellies and hot sweet drinks, gossiping, reading, playing music, and gaming. The Queen moved regularly between the royal palaces in and around London, but she did not go on progresses as Edward had over his last summer. Instead, she liked to disguise herself as an ordinary court lady and visit the poor in their houses to listen to their problems. This behavior was in stark contrast to the cruelty they had received from the Edwardian regime: perhaps deliberately so.
The high social point of the week came on Sundays when the public presented their petitions to the Queen as she processed into the royal chapel with her ladies following behind her. Katherine, in particular, could not easily forget Jane’s last letter to her with its dire warnings that she “defy the devil,” or be denied by God. There would soon be martyrs enough, however, and Katherine’s immediate objective was not for paradise in the next world, but an ordinary life in this one. Katherine had expected and wanted nothing more than to be a nobleman’s wife, and this was the role that she still intended to make hers. So she conformed, learned the rosary, and observed the Catholic fish days on Friday and holidays, when the tables at court were spread with seal, pike, and trout, porpoise, lobster, and shrimp.
Mary Grey’s friend and cousin, the orphaned eleven-year-old Margaret Willoughby, whose father was killed fighting the Norfolk rebels in 1549, often sat with the Grey girls at the long table where they dined in the Great Chamber of the royal palaces. Margaret had been in their uncle George Medley’s house in the Minories, close to the Tower, when Gardiner’s men had searched it during the recent revolt, and they later saw him taken to the fortress. When he had returned, in May, he was no longer in a state to care for Margaret or her younger brother. Frances had therefore arranged for Margaret’s little brother, her godson Francis, to go to school, and took Margaret in. Her husband’s former ward Thomas Willoughby, who was Katherine’s age, had been made the ward of a Councillor of notoriously low birth: Sir William Paget, the former ally of the Duke of Somerset, who had been stripped of his garter in 1552 as one who had no gentle blood on his mother or his father’s side. Thomas Willoughby was in due course to be married to his daughter. But Frances told friends that the bossy Margaret was already making an excellent impression at court, and hoped for better things for her.
Frances attended the Queen as she ate in a neighboring room, under her canopy of state. Queen Mary had a particular taste for spicy food and her Ladies of the Privy Chamber were responsible for keeping the pepper she sprinkled on her food, as well as taking delivery of expensive imported items such as oranges and olives. The Queen had never seemed so happy to them, and her vibrant mood was reflected in her wardrobe. She had new gowns made of velvet, damask, and taffeta, in brilliant crimsons and rich mulberry reds. All her adult life her Catholic faith had been her comfort, and her cousin Charles V her protector. Now she was poised to marry the Emperor’s son, Philip, and she was certain God would give her children to secure the future for the Catholic religion in England and the souls of her subjects.
Mary’s confidence buoyed up the public mood. The people wanted desperately the stability an heir would provide, even if it was a Spaniard’s child. Her betrothed, Prince Philip, arrived in England on 20 July. He had been disappointed by the marriage treaty, which had given him no authority in England, and marrying a woman a decade older than he was promised to be more of a duty than a pleasure. But Philip was determined to make the best of the situation with which his father had presented him. He met Mary at Bishop Gardiner’s palace in Winchester, three days after his ship anchored at Southampton. The Queen was waiting in a private room, standing on a platform surrounded by her ladies, with music playing “very melodiously.” As Philip entered, Mary stepped down to greet him. It was ten o’clock at night, but Philip’s Spanish entourage saw, in the fading light, a dignified woman who looked older than they had expected, and was so fair that it appeared she had no eyebrows. She was wearing a black velvet gown, richly embroidered with pearls, and a girdle of diamonds in a style more French in taste than Spanish, and they felt it did not flatter her.
To the English, the twenty-eight-year-old Philip, by contrast, projected youth and confidence. Mary was delighted with the young man walking toward her, his muscular legs in white hose and his black cloak splashed with silver embroidery. He was handsome, “with a broad forehead and grey eyes, straight-nosed and manly countenance,” as well as a figure that was perfectly proportioned. They kissed at the door, and walked hand in hand to their chairs where they took seats under the canopy that framed them as Queen and King of England.
The royal marriage was celebrated at Winchester Cathedral on 25 July 1554. The cathedral was draped in cloth of gold, and Mary was also in gold, the great sleeves of her gown embroidered with diamonds. Another huge diamond that Philip had given her glittered on her chest, and as she stepped into the church, followed by her ladies, her white satin kirtle sparkled with silver embroidery and gold thread. Philip, walking at a “princely pace,” was dressed to complement his bride, in white leather embossed with silver and a mantle of fluted gold. Around his neck he wore the collar of the Garter he had been awarded as he arrived in England, along with priceless jewels belonging to the crown of Castile. The couple exchanged their marriage vows on a platform erected in front of the main altar. The wedding ring, a plain band of gold, was then laid on the Bible, and the prince added coins as a mark of faith. The Queen was expected to follow suit and her Catholic Stuart cousin the Lady Margaret, Countess of Lennox, opened the Queen’s purse—it was indicative of the diminishe
d status of the Greys that she should have been chosen for this task, rather than Frances. The Queen, smiling, took her coins from the countess and added them to Philip’s.
The wedding party that followed the marriage had at least one gatecrasher: the Greys’ friend Edward Underhill, whose son was christened “Guildford” on the last day of Jane’s reign. He had sneaked into the banqueting hall, despite the best efforts of the chief usher to keep him out, and blended in by helping take food to the tables of wedding guests: golden and silver platters of beef, lamb, and game wafting scents of cinnamon, thyme, and rosemary. There was an enormous tapestry hung on one side of the hall, and on the other a cupboard displaying over one hundred twenty large vessels in silver or gold. King Philip and Queen Mary were seated on a dais at the end of the room, the Queen in the place of precedence on the right. Below them, the guests were seated at long tables; the men and women, as was traditional, were divided on either side of the room, laughing and signaling at one another. The men included Katherine Grey’s former husband, Lord Herbert, who had been made a Gentleman of Philip’s Privy Chamber. Katherine often still spoke of him to her friends, and of the future that had been blighted the previous year.
The Sisters Who Would Be Queen Page 18