On 30 December 1602, while the court enjoyed the seasonal entertainments at Whitehall, a servant to the Countess of Shrewsbury (the former Bess Hardwick) arrived at Hertford’s house in Tottenham asking to see the earl alone. It was an unusual request from a servant, but Hertford suspected the reason behind it. Before Robert Cecil’s reconciliation with James VI, Hertford had considered a plan that centered on his eldest grandchild, Beauchamp’s teenage son, Edward Seymour. Hertford had hoped that while a poor marriage had damaged Beauchamp’s claim to the throne, a brilliant marriage would revive it for his grandchild. The bride decided on as the most suitable choice was the Countess of Shrewsbury’s granddaughter, Arbella Stuart. Arbella was a great-grandchild of Margaret of Scotland, the elder sister of Henry VIII, and since she, as well as both her parents, had been born in England, some judged her claim to be superior to that of her cousin, the Scottish-born King James. Her gender, however, counted against her.
While Elizabeth remained popular with the people, who had refused to rise in support of Essex in 1601, at court the many political and social ills of the decade were blamed on the fact that England was ruled by a woman, with the weaknesses of character this supposedly entailed. Foreign ambassadors were regularly told that England would not tolerate another Queen. This ruled out Arbella’s claim as Elizabeth’s heir. But the accession of a foreigner also held little appeal, and Hertford hoped that a marriage between Arbella and the young Edward Seymour, which would unite the lines of Henry VIII’s sisters, could create a joint candidacy capable of attracting widespread support. Hertford had dropped his plan only after Robert Cecil came to his accommodation with James VI, and, as he interviewed the servant who appeared at his house it became evident that Arbella knew about the proposed match.
Arbella Stuart had barely been seen for over a decade. Elizabeth had ensured she had spent her entire adult life, from the age of eighteen to twenty-eight, in the countryside, forbidden from coming to court. Hertford remembered a full-faced girl with dark blonde hair who was exceptionally well educated. Her parents had died when she was young and her grandmother had raised her as she had seen the Grey sisters raised. Living at Hardwick Hall in Derbyshire, however, Arbella was trapped in eternal childhood, with no prospect of a husband, and increasingly obsessed with the stories her grandmother had told of her parents’ secret marriage and of the marriage of her mother’s godparent, Katherine Grey. She was determined now to break free. Her message to Hertford—delivered by her grandmother’s servant—warned that her grandmother would do nothing without the Queen’s permission. Arbella suggested, however, that his grandson, Edward Seymour, should come to Hardwick disguised as the son or nephew of “some ancient grave man” who wished to sell land, or borrow money. As she had never met him she told the servant to ask Hertford that his grandson bring by way of identification, either a picture of Lady Jane Grey or something in Jane’s handwriting, both of which she was familiar with. Arbella suggested the Greek Testament that Jane had left Katherine Grey on her death. When the servant had finished relaying Arbella’s message, however, Hertford sent him under guard to Cecil.
When Elizabeth learned what had happened, the fears she had had when Katherine Grey had married Hertford over forty years earlier returned. Who was behind Arbella’s actions, she wanted to know? There had been rumors for months that a small number of courtiers, keen to prevent a Scot from inheriting the throne, were plotting a native Seymour-Stuart match. Sir Walter Raleigh, who had married Adrian Stokes’s stepdaughter Bess Throckmorton, was rumored to be one such. When Arbella was interrogated, however, only a few servants and close family were named, and her distress was such she seemed half-mad. Arbella stopped eating and wrote a series of paranoid, rambling letters to the Queen concerning the wickedness of Hertford and Robert Cecil, who she clearly felt had betrayed her.
Elizabeth, meanwhile, was also showing signs of mental illness. She had been deeply depressed since the execution of her favorite the Earl of Essex following his revolt in 1601. Her health was deteriorating, and she was increasingly anxious that any sign of weakness could lead to her overthrow. Her teeth had long been in poor condition, but it seems an infection had developed into a fatal condition called Ludwig’s angina. Elizabeth had been generally unwell for months. By mid-March, however, abscesses under the tongue and in the throat were making it difficult for her to swallow, speak, or breathe, and she feared that even now she might not be allowed to die peacefully.
From the morning of 20 March until the night of the 22nd, the dying Queen sat on cushions in her Privy Chamber at Richmond Palace too afraid to go to bed. It was fully expected that civil war would break out on her death and many great houses, including that of Hertford, were reinforced with arms. Although Cecil and the Privy Council were united in support of the claim of James VI of Scots, the knowledge that Henry VIII’s will, sanctioned by Parliament and excluding the Stuart line, remained extant, weighed heavily on everyone. As the end of Elizabeth’s life approached, however, on Wednesday, 23 March, and she was at last in bed, the Council resolved to ask her one last time if she would nominate an heir. Elizabeth agreed to see them, but they found she could no longer speak. She attempted to sip some water to clear her throat, but seeing her in pain the Councillors suggested that she raise a finger when they named the heir “whom she liked.” According to a sixteen-year-old Maid of Honor, the silence was broken only once—and it was not to name her heir. When the Councillors asked if Katherine Grey’s son, Lord Beauchamp, should succeed her, Elizabeth croaked painfully: “I will have no rascal’s son in my seat but one worthy to be a King.” They are the last words she ever spoke.
Elizabeth never named James as one “worthy to be a King,” but as she had always hoped, the way was now clear for a Stuart succession. The following morning, a few hours after the sixty-nine-year-old Queen died in her sleep, Sir Robert Cecil stood on the green outside Whitehall and proclaimed James VI of Scots King of England. To the end Elizabeth was determined that dynastic legitimacy and a monarch’s divine right to rule would prevail over the secular power of parliamentary statute. To King James it seemed this had been achieved—but the clock could not be put back to 1533 and the break with Rome, when Henry VIII had declared he ruled beneath God but not the law, because he gave the law. Ideas had been born that could not be unimagined, and these ideas undermined the theoretical absolutism of the new King.
In 1558, when Elizabeth became Queen, her Protestant supporters had seen Henry VIII’s imperial monarchy vested already in the weak vessels of a boy King and two Queens. As his imperium or “command” over Church and state was seen as necessary to secure Protestantism, Elizabeth’s supporters among the political elite sought to re-identify it with something other than the person of a mere woman. They did so in 1559, by defining monarchical authority as “mixed,” with a female ruler constrained, or “bridled,” by the counsel of Godly men on her Privy Council and in Parliament. Elizabeth’s understanding, however, that even her closest supporters viewed her as a second-rate ruler (by reason of her gender), contributed to her subsequent failure to secure the future for Protestant England by marrying, or nominating a Protestant heir whom they might elect to replace her. Elizabeth’s willingness to see her crown inherited instead by a foreign Catholic encouraged in turn her most important subjects to develop a new, conservative form of republicanism. Burghley, his allies, and his political heirs were not consciously antimonarchical, but they had a sense of duty to the Protestant nation beyond the reign of a single monarch.
Despite appearances, when Elizabeth died James did not simply succeed under the traditional rules of primogeniture and according to the will of God. The Privy Council had assumed the power to offer the crown to the King they had chosen, as Burghley had often planned they should. Representative peers, gentry, and Councillors had all signed the proclamation that declared James King, on 24 March 1603. The procedure, which is followed to this day, has echoes of the signatures gathered in 1553, as Edward VI was dying, i
n support of Queen Jane. But James’s accession was confirmed when laws were passed in 1604 that laid aside Henry VIII’s will and the rules relating to foreigners inheriting the throne. The English political elite at last now had the adult male monarch they had wanted for so long, and with him sons and a male succession. James’s rule would, however, quickly prove a disappointment. Even before he was crowned, in July 1603, he had revealed many of the flaws for which he was to be remembered: his incontinence with money, his intemperate attraction to young men, his Scottish favorites and Scottish habits.
The political elite never learned to trust James and, in a few short years, the despised old Queen Elizabeth was forgotten and the ruffed, stuffed figure of Gloriana was brought out of the trunk of national memory, in costumes heavy with meaning and parable. The glorification of Elizabeth became a popular means of criticizing her Stuart successor, while the civic consciousness her reign as Queen had fostered set difficulties in the exercise of imperial kingship. James and his son Charles I would maintain rigorously Henry VIII’s assertion that the King was “under God, but not the law, because the King makes the law.” They would do so, however, to disastrous effect.
XXVIII
Standing at King Henry’s Opened Tomb
IT MAY, PERHAPS, HAVE BEEN NOTHING MORE THAN A DESIRE to right the wrongs of the past that led Hertford, in 1608, to seek out, and somehow find, the anonymous clergyman who had married him to Katherine Grey forty-eight years before. But King James agreed only reluctantly to give their heirs the right to inherit the title Earl of Hertford, and was careful not to remove the stain of illegitimacy. This proved a wise decision. Two years later Beauchamp’s younger son, the twenty-two-year-old William Seymour, married Arbella Stuart without royal permission.
Arbella had been invited back to court after the death of Elizabeth, but in the words of the Venetian ambassador, she was kept “without mate and without estate.” The marriage to William Seymour was her riposte. Her husband’s motives can only be guessed at, but, in any event, the fact that they had married was soon discovered. Predictably, James placed Arbella under house arrest and William Seymour was put in the Tower. Less predictably, he escaped and fled to France, but Arbella was caught on her way to join him. She died in the Tower in 1615. It is believed she starved herself to death, as Katherine is said to have done in 1568.
William Seymour remained in exile, supported financially by his grandfather until the following year, 1616, when he returned to England. Gradually he was rehabilitated at court, but he had not received any significant degree of royal favor from King James before the old Earl of Hertford died in 1621 at the then remarkable age of eighty-two. William, as his only surviving male heir, inherited the title and promptly had his grandmother Katherine Grey disinterred from her grave in Yoxford, Suffolk, and brought to Salisbury Cathedral to be buried with her husband. Their magnificent tomb still stands in the easterly corner of the south choir aisle. The long-legged and refined figure of Hertford lies on his sarcophagus with Katherine above him, as a mark of her royal status. The inscription, in Latin, celebrates the lovers, reunited at last:
Incomparable Consorts,
Who, experienced in the vicissitudes of changing fortune
At length, in the concord which marked their lives,
Here rest together.
The new Earl of Hertford never demonstrated any further ambitions for the crown, if, indeed, that is what his marriage to Arbella was about. What he did show after Charles I became King, in 1625, was a consistent commitment to the rule of law and constitutional propriety against Charles’s increasingly autocratic rule. William Hertford was among the signatories of the “twelve peers’ petition” that begged the recall of Parliament in 1640, after eleven years of the King’s rule without it. As other signatories became increasingly radical, however, William rallied to the monarch’s more moderate supporters. In gratitude King Charles raised him to the rank of Marquess of Hertford and, when civil war broke out, he chose the Royalist side, while the Greys took the opposite course.
The family had been restored to Bradgate late in Elizabeth’s reign. But four days after the opening of the civil war was signaled, with King Charles raising his standard at Nottingham on 22 August 1642, Royalist forces ransacked the house. In the battles that followed, the head of the family, Henry Grey, Earl of Stamford—a descendant of the uncle to the Grey sisters Lord John Grey of Pirgo—now served as a Parliamentarian officer. Tens of thousands died in the fighting, and tens of thousands more of disease, leaving a generation devastated. There was mass destruction of property and an explosion of radical ideas, some of which attracted Stamford’s son Thomas, Lord Grey of Groby. When the wars ended with the Royalist defeat and Charles’s trial for treason, Thomas was the only elder son of a peer to sign the King’s death warrant. His signature “Tho Grey” appears second, between the names of John Bradshawe and Oliver Cromwell. William Hertford, having tried through the war to mediate between King and Parliament, witnessed Charles’s execution on 30 January 1649. Of his people, Charles said on the scaffold:
Truly I desire their liberty and freedom as much as anybody … but I must tell you that their liberty and freedom consists in having of government those laws by which their life and their goods may be most their own. It is not for having a share in government, Sirs; that is nothing pertaining to them. A subject and Sovereign are clear different things … it was for this that now I am come here.
Parliament chose St. George’s Chapel, Windsor, for the King’s burial—a place far from London, safely behind castle walls and one that would not easily become a Royalist rallying point. On the night of 7 February 1649, William Hertford and three other peers who were to attend the funeral searched the chapel for a suitable tomb where Charles could be laid to rest. They stamped the floor of the choir in their leather boots and tapped with sticks until they heard a hollow sound. When they opened the tomb they discovered that it contained the bodies of Henry VIII and his Queen Jane Seymour, the marquess’s great-great-aunt. Edward VI had requested in his will that his father’s tomb be made up, but the daughters Henry VIII had bastardized, Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth, never did so, and the Stuarts had no reason to. The coffins Hertford and the others found in the simple vault were covered with perfectly preserved velvet cloth and one was described as “very large.” There could be no doubting whose that was.
Under the will of Henry VIII, backed by Henrician statute, it was William, Marquess of Hertford, the grandson and heir of Katherine Grey, who should have been King, not King James’s son, Charles I, the decapitated Stuart monarch that Hertford was about to entomb, his head crudely stitched back onto his body in an effort to give him dignity in death. This, however, was where the story of the Tudor succession was to end, and the universe into which Henry Tudor had been born to vanish: with a King tried, executed, and buried by his subjects.
The following day, 8 February 1649, was lit with the eerie white of newly fallen snow. It continued thick and fast as William Hertford, walking in step with his fellow peers, held the black velvet pall over the coffin borne by soldiers from the garrison at Windsor. Following behind, Bishop Juxon led a short procession of the King’s servants the short distance from St. George’s Hall to the Royal Chapel. As they entered the chapel the velvet pall was already covered in snow, and witnesses later remembered that Charles had been crowned in white, just as he was now to be buried. As the mourners gathered by the open tomb no words were said. The bishop had been refused permission to read from the banned Stuart Book of Common Prayer. Elizabeth’s attraction to a conservative form of Protestantism had gained converts within the English Church by the end of her life, and under the Stuarts they had triumphed over those who had been more forward in religion. But it was the hotter sort, the Puritans, who had proved victorious in the war. It was in silence, therefore, that Charles’s coffin was lowered into the tomb to lie with that of Henry VIII and Jane Seymour.
Over the following years there were a number of
Royalist conspiracies in support of the exiled Charles II. William Hertford’s eldest son was involved in one, taking command of the Royalist “Western Association” formed in May 1650. Government agents infiltrated it soon after, however, and in April 1651 he was imprisoned in the Tower. His father (formerly imprisoned in the Tower for his marriage to Arbella Stuart) declared miserably that the fortress appeared to have been entailed to his family, “for we have now held it five generations.” His son was released in September 1651, but never recovered from the experience and died in March 1654. William Hertford lived long enough, however, to be among the peers to welcome Charles II back to England to restore the monarchy on 26 May 1660. That September he was restored the title Duke of Somerset, last held in the family by his great-grandfather, the Protector.
William, already a sick old man, died only a few weeks after he had been granted the dukedom, in October 1660. His younger son, the 3rd Duke of Somerset, died without issue in 1671: this left William’s granddaughter, Anne, the heir to Katherine Grey. Her inheritance included “a rich bed that was Queen Jane Seymour’s”—a gift to her father from Charles I. Lady Anne married Thomas, the 2nd Earl of Ailesbury, in 1676. Their descendants remain the senior heirs to the line of Mary Tudor, Duchess of Suffolk.
Of the Greys, Thomas, the regicide, had not lived to see the restoration of Charles II. His father, the Earl of Stamford, had, however, and was included in the general Act of Pardon. He was succeeded as earl by his grandson, another Thomas, who spent time in the Tower for his involvement in the rebellion led by Charles II’s illegitimate son, the Duke of Monmouth, against the King’s Catholic heir and brother, James II. The family fortunes appeared to change at the so-called Glorious Revolution of 1688, when James II was overthrown and replaced with his daughter, Mary, and her Protestant Dutch husband, William of Orange, who became William III of England. The earl lavishly entertained William at Bradgate in November 1694, but the King (who had been crowned in a dual monarchy that Philip II of Spain would have envied) did not restore the power and wealth of the Greys. The earl was described in 1705 as “very poor,” and under subsequent generations the house suffered fire and abandonment until only the ruins that are there today were left.
The Sisters Who Would Be Queen Page 33