The Sisters Who Would Be Queen

by Leanda de Lisle

  In November the rebels took Durham, where the Earl of Northumberland kicked the Protestant Communion table out of the city’s medieval cathedral rather than touch it with his hands. Once again the ancient rites of the Mass were said and Latin echoed under the great vaulting. But as the earls faced the risks of invading the south they lost their nerve. Within only six weeks the rebellion had fizzled out. If the rebels hoped for more mercy from a woman, in Elizabeth, than the Pilgrims of Grace had received at the hands of her father, Henry VIII, they were to be disappointed. Elizabeth’s revenge, guided by Cecil, was to be on a similar scale. She ordered that at least one man should be hung in every village involved in the revolt. The orders were muted by those asked to carry them out, but the bloodletting was sufficiently memorable that there would be no more such rebellions against the Queen in England. Elizabeth had been badly frightened, but to Cecil’s frustration she refused to blame Mary Queen of Scots for the Northern Rebellion. Mary Stuart thus remained imprisoned but alive, and Cecil wanted her dead. It was perhaps as a sop to Cecil and his allies that Hertford was now accepted back at court. There was good news also for Mary Grey. Her long-suffering husband, Thomas Keyes, had been released from the Fleet and given a post at Sandgate Castle, in his home county of Kent.

  Mary could imagine her husband together with his children, enjoying the salty taste of the sea air, and Keyes certainly thought often of Mary. In May he even summoned up the courage to ask Archbishop Parker to be “a means to the Queen for mercy, and that, according to the laws of God, he may be permitted to live with his wife.” But the Queen was still not of a mind to be merciful to her last Grey cousin. Another summer passed, and another winter came to Gresham House in London with no hint of any forthcoming pardon from the Queen. As the new year of 1571 dawned Sir Thomas determined to ask the Queen directly that Mary Grey be removed from his home, even if she was not to be freed. Elizabeth had accepted an invitation to dine with him in late January, when she was due to visit the commerce center he had created, known as the Exchange.

  Built three years earlier, the Exchange, on the junction of Cornhill and Threadneedle Street in the City, was a spectacular square building of brick and stone, two floors high, adorned at each corner with a grasshopper—the Gresham family crest. Inside were covered walkways, supported with marble pillars. Its shops, however, remained largely empty. Perhaps the idea of a shopping center was simply too novel for conservative Londoners; perhaps the grasshoppers put them off. Either way, a royal visit could change all that. In anticipation of the Queen’s visit Sir Thomas went twice to the Exchange and asked the few shopkeepers to fill the stores with as many goods as they were able, and to decorate the stalls with little wax lights. In return he promised he would charge no rent that year. When the date of the Queen’s visit came, 23 January, the scene was impressive.

  The day began with the Queen, attended by the nobility, riding on a litter in procession from Somerset House on the Strand into the City at Temple Bar, through Fleet Street, along Cheapside, by the north side of the Exchange and, finally, to Sir Thomas Gresham’s house in Bishopsgate. The socially ambitious Lady Gresham was beside herself with excitement and, with Lady Mary Grey safely locked away, a banquet was held for the Queen and a very dull play performed. Mary’s servants, who were free to come and go, were surely able to tell her all the details. The principal character in the play, who bore a close resemblance to Sir Thomas, spouted a fountain of flattery for the Queen, and since Elizabeth enjoyed nothing more than compliments it was a great success. After dinner Elizabeth duly visited the Exchange. Elizabeth explored every inch of the arcades, admiring “the finest wares in the City.” According to a poetic account written later in the century, Sir Thomas purchased a huge pearl at one store, crushed it to powder and drank it in a toast to the Queen. The day ended with Elizabeth calling for a herald and, to the blasts of a trumpeter, Sir Thomas Gresham’s shopping center was dubbed the Royal Exchange.

  As Sir Thomas had hoped, the Royal Exchange became an overnight success. The empty stores were soon filled with milliners and haberdashers, armorers and apothecaries, booksellers, goldsmiths, and glass-sellers. Rents doubled, then tripled and quadrupled. But there also seemed to be good news concerning Sir Thomas’s request that Mary Grey be placed elsewhere. In July 1571 he thanked Cecil (Baron Burghley since February) fulsomely for “the removal of the Lady Mary.” Unfortunately he wrote too soon. Come August she was still with him and he was still pleading with the new Lord Burghley to relieve him of his prisoner. Elizabeth had changed her mind. A possible reason may have been the exposure of the first of the so-called “Catholic plots” that Burghley fomented in order to expose and destroy enemies. As early as April 1571, the Warden of the Cinque Ports and Constable of Dover Castle, Lord Cobham, had secretly opened letters from a Florentine banker and double agent called Roberto di Ridolfi, before they passed out of the country. The letters described a plan to capture Elizabeth during her summer progress and, with the help of an invading army of six thousand Spaniards, place Mary Queen of Scots on the throne. Cobham later claimed that his brother, Thomas Brooke, had begged him to keep the letters secret from the Privy Council, “for he said they would otherwise be the undoing of the Duke of Norfolk and himself.” Cobham did keep them quiet, but the evidence suggests that he did so with the approval of Burghley, who wanted the correspondence to continue in order to gather evidence that would incriminate Norfolk and the Queen of Scots as well. Burghley’s trap was sprung on 5 September with the public “discovery” of the letters and Norfolk was put in the Tower on suspicion of treason. Mary Grey had known the duke since childhood. He had married two of her first cousins. John Foxe had produced his first English edition of the Book of Martyrs while living in Norfolk’s house. But while the drama of Norfolk’s coming trial was being played out on the public stage, Mary’s thoughts were elsewhere.

  Broken by ill health—the effects of his long confinement in the Fleet—and despairing of ever seeing his wife again, Thomas Keyes had died. Lord Cobham heard the news on 5 September, the same day as Norfolk’s arrest, and immediately wrote to Lord Burghley to ask if his brother could have Keyes’s old post. Mary, however, still knew nothing. Three days later her physician, Dr. Smith, arrived at Gresham House and told Sir Thomas of Keyes’s death. He had been sent so he could be on hand if Mary collapsed when she learned of it. As they had feared she took the news “grievously.” Mary begged Gresham to write to Burghley on her behalf, asking for the Queen’s permission to raise her husband’s orphaned children. She also wished to wear mourning, and Gresham asked Burghley if this might be permitted. He was not certain what the official status of her marriage was.

  Shortly afterward, Mary was moved out of London to take the air at one of Sir Thomas Gresham’s country properties, Osterley in Middlesex. It was a beautiful house, “a fair and stately building of brick,” set in a lovely park. There were calm ponds where she could watch swans, kingfishers, and a graceful heron that the family was especially proud of. But it took a month before Mary Grey was well enough to write personally to Burghley. She asked once again for her freedom and for the Queen to pardon her. But there was a bitter and even defiant note in Mary’s latest request that she be restored to royal favor: “God having now removed the occasion of her Majesty’s justly conceived displeasure towards her.” For the first time she signed herself “Mary Keyes.” It is notable that a portrait of Mary brandishing her wedding ring is dated 1571. Her anger made her an even more problematic prisoner, and over the following months Sir Thomas’s campaign to have Mary removed from his property became almost unhinged. He wrote to Burghley twice in one day in November 1571, and in January he begged for Mary’s removal specifically for the “quietness of his poor wife.” It seems Mary quarreled frequently with Lady Gresham. By March Sir Thomas was talking about “my wife’s suit for the removing of my Lady Mary Grey,” and the “bondage and heart sorrow she has had for these three years.” But it wasn’t until May 1572 that Elizabeth
finally agreed to release Mary Grey.

  Following the discovery of the Ridolfi plot the Queen was under tremendous pressure to execute the Queen of Scots and Norfolk for their supposed roles in it. Here, at least, was an act of mercy she could afford to make, and would please those who were baying loudest for the blood of her fellow Queen. But there were still a few practical details to be sorted out.

  Elizabeth had not released Mary Grey’s full inheritance to her and she did not have enough money to support herself. As the impoverished prisoner reminded Burghley: “I have but forescore pounds a year of her majesty; of my own I have but twenty pounds; and as your lordship knows, there is nobody will board me for so little.” Her cousin Francis Willoughby spent far more than her annual income every month just running his house in Nottinghamshire. Sir Thomas Gresham suggested that Mary be sent to her stepfather, Adrian Stokes. But he had just remarried, to Anne Carew, the widow of Sir Nicholas Throckmorton: the man who was nearly lynched when he proclaimed Jane as Queen in a Midlands town in 1553. Mary Grey told Burghley she feared it would be too much of a financial burden for Stokes to take her on as well as all his new stepchildren. Elizabeth agreed reluctantly, therefore, to pay her cousin a modest further allowance. Mary left the Greshams a few days later, with “all her books and rubbish,” Sir Thomas wrote dismissively.

  Norfolk was executed on 2 June 1572. An anonymous polemic, associated with the defeated northern earls and known as the Treatise of Treasons, accused Burghley of having plotted Norfolk’s fate ever since he had abandoned the cause of the Grey girls in favor of the Queen of Scots. But he had played his own role, and all his wealth, youth, and popularity had not spared him the price that others before him had met, having involved themselves in royal marriages. For the widowed Mary Grey, however, after seven years of imprisonment, freedom had come at last.

  *i.e., lavatory.

  XXVI

  A Return to Elizabeth’s Court

  MARY GREY SPENT HER FIRST FEW MONTHS OF FREEDOM AT Beaumanor in Leicestershire with Adrian Stokes and his new family. It was the house where she had lived with Katherine and her mother in the aftermath of the executions of her father and sister Jane. Only a few miles from Bradgate, it was filled, as Bradgate had once been, with the sound of children’s laughter. Stokes had a nine-year-old stepdaughter, Bess (the spirited future wife of Sir Walter Raleigh), and no fewer than six stepsons. His wife, the widowed Lady Throckmorton, was the cousin who had stood in for Jane as godparent to Guildford Underhill, on the last day of her reign. She had known Mary since infanthood and lavished affection on her. Mary’s old bedchamber at Beaumanor was still referred to as “the Lady Mary’s room,” just as that of her sister Katherine was known by her name. But at age twenty-seven and having just secured her liberty, Mary found it hard to be dependent on others. Happily, by February 1573, she had raised enough money to run her own house, in the London parish of St. Botolph’s-Without-Aldgate.

  “Now that I have become a housekeeper,” Mary wrote proudly to her brother-in-law Hertford, “I would willingly meet with some trusty servant.” She hoped he had such a man in his employ. “I hear that Harry Parker, who was in my sister’s service and is true and honest, is still in yours. Please let me have him for my sister’s sake.” Hertford had shown no signs of wanting to remarry. Although there had been rumors that he had been interested in the widowed Lady Hoby when he was first accepted back at court in the aftermath of the Northern Rebellion, their intimate conversations were merely those of old friends who had much to reminisce about. She had been the hostess at a dinner party that he and Katherine had attended when Robert Dudley’s wife had been found dead. We don’t know if Katherine’s servant, Parker, joined Mary’s house, but we do know the names of several other servants she employed. The household included Katherine Duport, a cousin from Shepshed in Leicestershire, and Henry and Anne Goldwell, relatives of the Frances Goldwell who had attended her wedding. There was also a gentleman groom, Robert Saville.

  Mary’s modest new home was a long way from the grand life she had enjoyed at Bradgate, but she furnished it comfortably. She had a good feathered bed and bolster, covered stools, little nests of silver bowls, silver spoons and silver trenchers, a fine silver gilt saltcellar, a tankard, and a silver gilt bowl with a cover. It was barely enough to entertain with, but Mary often went out in her carriage to see her friends and relations. She still saw her step-grandmother, Katherine Suffolk, and her children, Peregrine Bertie and Susan, Countess of Kent. She also remained close to her old playmate Lady Arundell—once the bossy little Margaret Willoughby—and Lady Stafford, whose daughters had dined with her before her wedding to Thomas Keyes. Although she had been denied permission to raise her husband’s children, she grew very close to his daughter Jane Merrick and became godmother to Jane’s child, Mary. As she stayed in contact with Hertford, and his younger sister Lady Elizabeth Seymour, she was also kept informed about her nephews. Both were progressing well at Latin and arithmetic, but twelve-year-old Beauchamp could be lazy and was proving a disappointment to his music teacher. The man later complained that his brother, Thomas, “would learn two lessons to my Lord’s one, if I would teach him.”

  Outside the family, Mary was close to an old friend of her parents, her “gossip,” or godmother, Mrs. Morrison. She was careful also to cultivate her court contacts, however, especially her former friends among the Ladies of the Queen’s Bedchamber. Kate Astley had died in 1565—two days after Mary had married Keyes—but Mary remained friends with Blanche Parry, who had served Elizabeth since she was a baby. A few good words from Parry could facilitate a return for Mary to royal favor, and that this might be achieved was hinted at in the New Year of 1574 when the Queen accepted Mary’s gift of “a pair of bracelets of pomander and agate beads.” The following year her income from her mother’s former lands was increased and she was able to invest in fashionable court dress. She had inherited only a few of the jewels that had belonged to her mother, such as a pretty pair of bracelets with reddish-orange jacinth stones. Now she could also afford a fine girdle of goldsmiths’ work set with pearls and gold buttons, set off beautifully against a black velvet gown.

  There were, however, some lapses of judgment in this regard. Mary owned a brilliant yellow kirtle, which she wore (as intended) as an outer petticoat, but, teamed with her black gowns the diminutive princess must have been in danger of resembling a bumblebee. Perhaps wisely, she usually kept to black kirtles and restricted exuberant displays of color to hidden red cotton petticoats guarded in black velvet and embroidered with gold lace, which flashed as she raised her skirts and stepped into her carriage.

  If Mary’s spirit was far from extinguished, so her mind remained as lively and curious as it had ever been. A war was being waged on England’s stubborn Catholics. In the aftermath of the Northern Rebellion of 1569, and with Philip II no longer willing to protect her, Pope Pius V had excommunicated Elizabeth and released her subjects from their obedience to her. The consequences were disastrous for Catholics, however, and were remembered in the Vatican centuries later when Pope Pious XII was warned of the possible effects of making public statements against Hitler. Once Elizabeth was condemned from Rome, Catholics could be treated as traitors by reason of their faith alone, and their persecution, which would continue for over two hundred fifty years, had already begun. Mary’s library included at least two books by William Fulke, who propagated an apocalyptic interpretation of the Reformation as the final struggle between Christ and the anti-Christ. In this war on evil it seemed to men like Fulke fully justified that Catholic priests and their supporters should be castrated and disembowelled in public, as they would be before the decade was out. And Cecil saw to it that the latest two-volume edition of Foxe’s Book of Martyrs (a copy of which Mary owned) was placed in every parish as a reminder of Protestant suffering under Catholic rule.

  Mary’s most intense concerns, however, lay in theological debates between the “forward” Protestants, who came to be known derisive
ly as Puritans, and the conservatives the Queen favored. The debates had been triggered by the publication in 1572 of the so-called “Admonition to Parliament,” which attacked Elizabeth’s religious settlement. Mary acquired several works by the Presbyterian Thomas Cartwright, who endorsed and amplified the “Admonition,” as well as owning a defense of the status quo written by the future Archbishop of Canterbury, John Whitgift. Mary’s own religious sympathies are suggested by her interest in some of the radical London preachers. She owned, for example, a collection of Edward Dering’s celebrated “Lectures upon the Hebrews,” delivered at St. Paul’s in 1572. Elizabeth loathed Dering, who had castigated her for allowing the corruption he saw in the English Church. Mary also owned a book of Readings by the Puritan John Knewstub, who helped set forth the developing English version of Calvinist theology on God’s “Elect.”

  Several old family friends took the conservative side, however. Among them, and perhaps most surprisingly, was Lady Jane Grey’s former tutor, John Aylmer. The man remembered as Jane’s kindly guide had discovered secular ambition. He had turned his back on old colleagues from Bradgate days in order to “creep into favour” with the Queen and Church conservatives. Paraphrasing St. Paul, he said of the views he had inculcated in Jane Grey, “When I was a child, I spake as a child … but when I became a man, I put away childish things.” In 1577 he became de jure Bishop of London. It was a post in which he was to gain notoriety for greed, ill-temper, and the vicious treatment he meted out to religious dissidents, Puritan as well as Catholic. Burghley too would become more conservative in his Protestantism with time.