The Sisters Who Would Be Queen

by Leanda de Lisle

  Mary Grey was careful, however, to avoid any personal involvement in controversial issues, either religious or concerning the succession, and in this respect she must have been amazed to see her mother’s former lady-in-waiting Bess Hardwick, the Countess of Shrewsbury, take her own child down the path she had seen the Greys follow so disastrously.

  In 1574 Bess had married her daughter Elizabeth Cavendish—Katherine Grey’s godchild—to Charles Stuart, brother to Mary Queen of Scots’ murdered husband, Henry, Lord Darnley. The marriage had plenty of witnesses and although the gamble never paid out the prize of a male heir, a daughter, Arbella Stuart, was born in 1575. Her English birth gave her, in some minds, a superior claim to that of her cousin James VI of Scots. Bess was very proud of “my jewell Arbell,” as she called her. But Mary must have shuddered for her future.

  By the end of 1577, Mary Grey was sufficiently rehabilitated at court to be appointed a Maid of Honor to Elizabeth. This was a very respectable position, but it was also a pointed comment on Elizabeth’s disinclination to acknowledge the marriage for which Mary had served seven years under lock and key. Mary spent that Christmas season at Hampton Court, the largest and grandest of Elizabeth’s palaces. “All the walls shine with gold and silver,” a foreign visitor reported, and “many of the large rooms are embellished with masterly paintings, writing tables of mother of pearl, and musical instruments.” There had been a few alterations during the period of Mary’s imprisonment. The ceiling in the Paradise Room at the end of the long gallery had been repainted and gilded, while in the Queen’s bedchamber a new window had been created overlooking the gardens. But it was still much as Mary had always known it. The Christmas celebrations that year were marked with the usual plays and masques. Most of them were held in the great hall, where elaborate scenery had been painted and daises constructed under its splendid hammer-beam roof with staging for Mary and the other court ladies to perform on. It looked magical with little oil lamps strung across the room on wires.

  At the New Year, Mary gave Elizabeth two pairs of gloves decorated with four dozen gold buttons, each studded with a seed pearl. She received in return a “cup with a cover.” Elizabeth was now in her forty-fifth year and beyond child-bearing age. When she became Queen, in 1558, Elizabeth had been associated with the iconography of the biblical prophetess Deborah, who had rescued Israel from the pagan King of Canaan. But Deborah had been a married woman, and while some still hoped Elizabeth would marry to serve England’s diplomatic interests, others, such as Hertford, preferred the status quo, hoping that, since she could not have children of her own, eventually she would name his sons her heirs, and not complicate matters with a husband. A new iconography was called for, and the phrase “the Virgin Queen” would be coined that August. It brilliantly co-opted England’s traditional devotion to the Virgin Mary, and her historical association with the Queen consorts of the late Middle Ages.

  But Elizabeth’s sobriquet was bought at a high personal price. Elizabeth had once said that Robert Dudley’s company was the only happiness she had ever known. In September, however, just weeks after her “virgin” title was first deployed, he would marry her younger cousin Lettice Knollys, whose resemblance to Elizabeth in her youth was a reminder of what might have been. Elizabeth had new favorites already and had honed a role as the unobtainable love object of her knights and nobles. The language of courtly love enabled them to pay their monarch homage in a way that reflected the traditional roles of men and women. But the plays and masques with their themes of love, youth, and fecundity all mocked what the Queen was becoming: the once young, passionately-in-love princess in modest Protestant attire tottering toward old age as decked out as a plaster Madonna on feast days.

  Mary Grey, who at thirty-three was over a decade younger than Elizabeth, was not, however, destined to witness the closing scenes of the Queen’s reign. A familiar shadow fell over England in the New Year of 1578: plague. In London it brought death even in the cold weather of January when the epidemics were at their weakest. By the spring the rate of deaths from it was increasing. The rich usually fled whatever areas the plague appeared in, but Mary Grey was at her house in St. Botolph’s when she became ill in April. Protestants could be fatalistic about death, believing God had decided before time began when they should die. But it is possible she thought she had special protection from a “mystic ruby.” It was said that this magical treasure was created by crystallization of the blood in very old, wise unicorns and was found at the base of their horns, forming a distillation of their very essence. A piece of unicorn’s horn was listed among Lady Jane Grey’s possessions in the Tower and Mary also owned one. A good stone was so bright it could shine through clothing, but it could also serve a useful, even vital, purpose. According to the medieval alchemist Albertus Magnus, mystic rubies would guard against plague. And perhaps Mary Grey was not dying of plague—its symptoms were variable, and in its pneumatic form almost nonexistent, so there is no way of knowing—but by 17 April, Mary certainly knew she did not have long left and she drew up her will.

  In it she described herself as “Lady Mary Grey … Widow.” She was obliged to use her maiden name at court, but the reference to her widowhood makes it clear she was determined to maintain the memory of her marriage to Mr. Keyes. Like her sisters, Mary also wished to advertise that she would be dying in the Protestant faith, trusting that her soul would be saved by Christ’s “death and passion only, without any other ways and means.” Her will then divided her modest possessions between her friends, relations, and servants. Her mother’s jewels she left to her step-grandmother Katherine Suffolk, along with the mystic ruby, asking the duchess to pass on something to the duchess’s daughter, Susan Bertie, the Countess of Kent. To her cousin Lady Arundell (her childhood friend Margaret Willoughby), she bequeathed her tankard of gold and silver. Adrian Stokes’s wife, the former Lady Throckmorton, was left a silver gilt bowl with a cover. To her servants Robert Saville and Henry Goldwell she gave her “black gelding and the bay,” respectively; to her stepdaughter, Jane Merrick, she left her bed, while the bulk of her money went to Merrick’s daughter, Mary—her godchild and her late husband’s grandchild. There was something even for a servant boy, for whom she sought an apprenticeship “to some good occupation.” Finally, Mary chose as her executors her kinsmen Mr. Edward Hall and Mr. Thomas Duport: modest, trustworthy Leicestershire and Lincolnshire esquires. “As for my body,” Mary instructed, “I commit the same to be buried where the Queen’s Majesty shall think most meet.” Three days later she died.

  Elizabeth ordered that Mary Grey should be buried in Westminster Abbey. The details of her funeral, lost for four centuries, were unearthed during research for this book at the College of Arms in London, where they were misidentified as the funeral details of an insignificant daughter of the Earl of Kent. The burial of the last of the Grey sisters took place on 14 May after Mary’s body was brought in procession to the abbey. A dozen poor women, dressed in black, led it at the front—the traditional bedesmen who, before the Reformation, would have prayed for the soul of their benefactor. The heralds had prepared banners of her arms, the symbols of her great lineage, and there were four pallbearers for the coffin on its chariot. Walking behind it, the chief mourner was Katherine Suffolk’s daughter, Susan, Countess of Kent, attended by four gentlemen, four gentlewomen, and four yeomen. The names of the other official mourners make up a roll call of individuals whose lives and whose families had been intertwined with those of the Grey sisters: Mistress Tilney—from the family of Elizabeth Tilney, who attended Lady Jane Grey at the scaffold; Lady Elizabeth Seymour, the twenty-eight-year-old sister of Katherine Grey’s husband Hertford; Katherine Grey’s last jailors, Sir Owen and Lady Hopton. There are also the names familiar from Mary’s will, Goldwell, Duport, Hall, Saville—and Lady Arundell, who had listened outside the door above Mr. Keyes’s rooms as he and Mary were married in 1565.

  Despite the antipathy of the male elite to rule by women, during most of
Mary’s life the English crown was dependent on women as heirs and the possible mothers of future Kings. It was as the latter that the Tudor princesses were most valued. But Elizabeth understood well the dangers and possible cost of their marrying, and the fear of making a divisive or wrong choice ensured, eventually, that she never did so. Instead she continued to enjoy the power to influence who others married, or if, indeed, they should marry. The last sight of Lady Mary was of her small coffin disappearing into her mother’s royal tomb. There she still lies in obscurity with no marker or monument, but unlike her sisters having achieved at the end of her life freedom and, perhaps, peace.

  With the three Grey sisters dead and Katherine’s sons declared illegitimate, their cousin Margaret Clifford, now the Countess of Derby, the only surviving child of Eleanor Brandon, became Elizabeth’s heir under the terms of Henry VIII’s will. But it wasn’t long before she too learned the price of such privilege. Within only weeks she was accused of employing a magician to cast spells to harm the Queen. The “magician” in question, a well-known physician called Dr. Randall, was tried and hanged. Margaret, who was suspected of having Catholic sympathies, was placed with a series of jailors, just as her cousins had been. She died eighteen years later, in 1596, having never been freed.

  XXVII

  Katherine’s Sons and the Death of Elizabeth

  BURGHLEY CONTINUED TO HOPE THAT ONE OF KATHERINE Grey’s sons would one day be King. Illegitimacy in law had not prevented Elizabeth’s accession. And whether they were, in fact, illegitimate was, in any case, questionable. But when Katherine’s eldest son, Lord Beauchamp, fell in love in the summer of 1581, it looked set to blight his chances of succeeding to the crown. He was nineteen, almost twenty, the same age his father, Hertford, had been when he fell in love with his mother. The setting was also the same: the Duchess of Somerset’s house, Hanworth. The woman Beauchamp fell in love with, Miss Honora Rogers, was a respectable kinswoman from a Puritan family, but not nearly grand enough for the wife of a future King of England. For Hertford the affair was a betrayal of Katherine’s memory and of his sons’ royal heritage. He referred bitterly to Honora as Onus Blowse—which loosely translates as that “tiresome tart”—and ordered Beauchamp to keep away from her.

  Beauchamp tried, at first, to reassure his father that his relationship with Honora was a mere flirtation. But at the same time as he was denying any serious interest in Honora he was writing to her, bemoaning their separation and hoping that “the common saying ‘out of sight out of mind’ shall not be applied to me.” By the following year he had thrown off all pretense that he was not in love with her. His father’s friends wrote letters to him, quoting from the Psalms and urging Beauchamp to follow his father’s wishes. Even Elizabeth’s spymaster, Sir Francis Walsingham, intervened to try to resolve the family breach, but without success. Hertford was so desperate that in August 1585 he had his errant son seized and brought to one of his houses. Beauchamp threatened to kill himself rather than be parted from Honora, and pleaded with the Queen to support their intention to marry. Elizabeth, handed the opportunity to do further damage to Beauchamp’s claim, willingly came to the rescue of the lovers—a most unusual move in a Queen who had gained a reputation for sexual jealousy. Hertford was then obliged to accept his son’s marriage, with Elizabeth sweetening the pill by allowing the forty-six-year-old earl to marry his mistress of the past decade, Frances Howard, the daughter of Lord Howard of Effingham.

  Burghley, by now white-bearded, was deeply disappointed by Beauchamp’s marriage, but there was always the younger brother to consider, and Burghley’s obsessive pursuit of the destruction of the Queen of Scots was, at last, making headway. Only the previous year, 1584, he and Walsingham had drafted a so-called Bond of Association, whose members agreed to have Mary murdered if Elizabeth’s life was threatened. Burghley hoped to follow this with a law, similar to that he had sought in 1563, that would bring a “Great Council” into effect on Elizabeth’s death with the power to choose her successor. This was neorepublican, for it imagined power being exercised in the absence of a monarch. Elizabeth put paid to the scheme. But the following year, 1586, Mary Queen of Scots was found to be in correspondence with a young Catholic traitor called Anthony Babington. In essence, Babington and his coconspirators were accused of planning a Catholic uprising, backed by an invading army financed by Spain and the Pope. It was the Ridolfi plot—which had ended in the Duke of Norfolk’s execution—all over again. This time, however, the Queen of Scots did not escape prosecution. She was tried and convicted for her involvement. Elizabeth, loath to allow the first regicide in England empowered by the state, tried to persuade her servants to murder her cousin under Burghley and Walsingham’s Bond of Association. Burghley thwarted Elizabeth, however, and had the death warrant delivered to the castle where the Queen of Scots was being held. As he once said, paraphrasing Mary Grey’s favorite author, Demosthenes, “counsel without resolution and execution is pure wind.”

  Mary Queen of Scots was beheaded on 3 February 1587, thirty-three years to the month after Lady Jane Grey. Like Jane she had cast herself in the role of martyr, but for the Catholic cause. Her death marked a watershed in Elizabeth’s reign. Mary Queen of Scots’ son, James VI of Scots, was a Protestant. With Elizabeth no longer favoring a Catholic over a Protestant heir, but instead standing against a Spanish invasion attempt, her courtiers were able to cast her in a new role as Gloriana, the great icon of English, Protestant nationalism with which she remains associated. Burghley, however, aware that James VI blamed him for his mother’s execution, continued to support the Seymour claim, his hopes vested in Katherine Grey’s younger son, the twenty-four-year-old Lord Thomas Seymour. In 1589, Thomas appealed against the decision that had rendered him illegitimate, advertising the fact his parents had declared their marriage under interrogation before he was conceived in the Tower. His appeal was soon rejected, but it was clear as the new decade began that his generation, who had grown up during Elizabeth’s reign, were impatient for change. Those who played out the rituals of courtly love knew the lined face behind Gloriana’s divine mask, and their prejudices against female rule were sharpened by the commonplace contempt the young have for the old—and especially for old women. Elizabeth’s virginity began to be ascribed to a physical impediment rather than virtue, as her appearance increasingly inspired revulsion in her courtiers. And this was something Hertford intended to take advantage of.

  In 1591, Hertford was invited to host the Queen during her summer progress at one of his minor manor houses, Elvetham in Hampshire. As men were set to work on Hertford’s estate in anticipation of the royal visit, a fantastic landscape was created. It included a huge artificial lake, built in the shape of a perfect half moon, on which model ships floated around an island large enough to hold a ruined fort twenty feet square. Dozens of temporary rooms were erected around it. There was a state room hung with tapestries and covered “with boughs, and clusters of ripe hazel nuts,” as well as dining rooms set with tables up to twenty-three yards long. Elizabeth arrived at the edge of the estate on 20 September to be met by Hertford and an army of three hundred mounted retainers. Each wore chains of gold, and yellow and black feathers in their hats—a display of princely wealth and power dressed up as a mark of respect. The themes of the planned entertainments, winter and spring, sexual desire and fecundity, were projected similarly as flattery while acting as a reminder, on a magnificent scale, that Elizabeth was a sterile old spinster. The shows, banquets, and fireworks that unfolded over the following three days were surpassed during Elizabeth’s reign only by those organized by Robert Dudley, the Earl of Leicester, at Kenilworth Castle in July 1575. Hertford was careful, furthermore, to advertise the themes of the shows far beyond those who actually witnessed them. They were described in detail in a book he had printed and emblazoned with his arms, sending his message about the passing of the old and the coming of the new to a wide audience.

  Within a few months of the famous Elvetham e
ntertainments, Hertford’s younger son, Thomas Seymour, had reinitiated his appeals on the validity of his parents’ marriage. When these were no more successful than his earlier attempts, more direct measures began to be considered. It was expected that the old Queen could die at any time, and there were deepening divisions over the succession. Burghley’s own younger son, his political heir, the dwarfish Sir Robert Cecil, and Elizabeth’s handsome last favorite, Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, acted as the leading figures of the opposing Seymour and Stuart factions. In 1594, the only son of Margaret Clifford, the thirty-five-year-old Ferdinando, Earl of Derby, grandson of Eleanor Brandon, died after a violent bout of vomiting. Some believed the Cecils had poisoned him as a rival to Lord Beauchamp and Thomas Seymour. Then, in the autumn of 1595, Sir Michael Blount, the Lieutenant of the Tower, was caught secretly stockpiling weapons for Hertford and the earl found himself behind the Tower’s walls once more. The Cecils worked hard for Hertford’s release, which came after only a few weeks, but the will to take huge risks in pursuit of the crown for his heirs had begun to desert Hertford. In 1598, Lord Burghley, his father’s former servant and the most lethal enemy of the Stuart cause, died. In 1600, his son Lord Thomas Seymour also predeceased him, aged only thirty-seven. The final blow to his ambitions came, however, in 1601, when Essex was executed following a failed revolt to force Elizabeth to name King James her heir. It left Robert Cecil free to achieve a secret rapprochement with James VI, and by Christmas 1602, when Elizabeth’s health was in sharp decline, Hertford and the large majority of the most powerful men at court were all supportive of King James’s future accession. There was, however, to be a final act in the drama of the Grey sisters and the hopes for a native dynasty.