Bradgate remains one of the most romantic places in Leicestershire and deeply evocative of its Tudor past. If the house still stood it would surely be thick with the history of later times: eighteenth-century portraits of bewigged grandees, mementos of men who died in the Great War, fading photographs of children who have grown. Instead, there is little more than the crumbling brick the sisters would have known and the deer picking through the trees in the park, as quiet as ghosts.
EPILOGUE
IN THE AFTERLIFE OF THE GREY SISTERS HISTORY HAS MERGED with works of the imagination. The Stuarts had no wish for their onetime rivals to the English crown to be remembered, and so Katherine and Mary Grey disappeared into ephemera. But the fame of Lady Jane Grey has never dimmed. The Protestant martyr of 1554 has been cast and recast for successive generations as an ideal of girlhood and the embodiment of innocence offended. Her legend finds its apogee in Paul Delaroche’s nineteenth-century historical portrait The Execution of Lady Jane Grey, a painting that has all the erotic overtones of a virgin sacrifice. Jane, in white, feeling blindly for the block, represents an apotheosis of female helplessness: the rebellious and sharp-tongued adolescent of 1554 silenced in art, as she had been in life.
The many fictions about Jane in history begin at her beginning. Her most recent, twenty-first-century biographer, Faith Cook, repeats the old falsehood that she was born at Bradgate in October 1537, the same month as the future King Edward. The origins of these details are literary, rather than historical, a means of highlighting Jane’s supposed separateness from the worldly court and foreshadowing her fate as a victim of forces outside her control. Born under the same star as Edward, their fates are linked, with Edward’s dying decision to name her his heir the cause of all that follows.
The sixteenth-century Jane was a much more interesting and ambivalent figure than the traditional stories allow. As the heir of Henry VIII’s royal niece Lady Frances Brandon, Jane was, in reality, born into the heart of the court, and was raised to be what in the end she became: a leader on one side of a deadly ideological struggle. It was a period and place whose inhabitants were necessarily at once religious and worldly. There was no room for unbelief in Tudor understanding. Their universe was also strictly hierarchical, with the social order on earth reflecting the divine order. Jane was aware from early childhood that she was a significant representative of a great family on the national stage, and she learned to bear the responsibilities that this position carried.
As a young girl Jane liked music and pretty clothes, but as increasing demands were placed on her she found a refuge in her books. She became passionate about evangelical, religious ideals, and her parents and tutors encouraged her in this. After the quarrels of her early teens, she grew close to her parents, and by 1553 she was looked up to and admired by leading Protestant women, and sought out as a patron by Protestant clerics. Those around her had expressed the hope that she would one day marry Edward VI. Instead, in 1553, the dying king bequeathed her his crown. Jane made it clear to the Privy Council that she did not wish to be Queen, but did so because she shared her family’s concern that the duke of Northumberland planned to rule through his son, her husband, Guildford. Jane’s reluctance advertised her lack of “ambition,” an attribute seen in entirely negative terms in the sixteenth century. At the same time, and having accepted the crown with “many tears,” she announced her determination to rule “to God’s glory.”
As Queen, Jane described Mary as a bastard and raised armies to crush those who opposed her, signing the order to her lieutenants in the counties in her own hand. When Jane was overthrown she followed her mother’s lead in casting blame for her reign on the Dudley family, accusing her young husband of ambition. But while Guildford lived quietly as a prisoner Jane continued to oppose Queen Mary’s religious policy and demand that others do likewise. In the end Guildford proved willing to die a martyr’s death, as Jane acknowledged.
That Jane died a leader, and not merely a victim, became evident shortly after her death when her last letters and carefully choreographed actions were used as the basis of perhaps the most powerful contemporary attack against the reign of Queen Mary, in the pamphlets produced by John Day. By the time Elizabeth’s reign began, Jane’s words and a description of her death were ready to be immortalized in John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments, popularly known as his Book of Martyrs. But fictional accounts of her life and death were not long in coming. These early works included a ballad printed in 1560 and an elegy in Latin written around 1563. The ballad described Jane at the moment when she saw Guildford’s body brought back from the scaffold. She bemoans Guildford’s fate and her imminent execution, claiming the couple are co-victims of their fathers’ actions. Written when Guildford’s brother, Robert Dudley, was Queen Elizabeth’s great favorite, it drew on the memoir of the Protestant divine Michael Angelo Florio, who described (at second hand) Jane’s comment that Guildford has tasted, in death, a bitter breakfast, but that night they would dine together in heaven. The ballad suggests they were soul mates, and it would provide inspiration for later stories describing the couple as tragic lovers. The Latin elegy composed by Sir Thomas Chaloner also became influential in the development of the mythology of Lady Jane Grey.
Chaloner was a close friend of William Cecil and Walter Haddon (whose brother had been chaplain at Bradgate) as well as of Thomas Sackville, one of the authors of Gorboduc. Chaloner describes Jane as without equal in learning, fluent not only in Latin, Greek, French, and Italian, but Hebrew and Arabic, a woman beautiful in body and soul, comparable to Socrates in her steadfastness in the face of death. The reference to Socrates is interesting. It was then too—in 1563—that Roger Ascham completed his Book of the Schoolmaster, in which he recalled finding Jane at Bradgate, reading Plato’s Phaedo on the death of Socrates (although the book was not published for several years). Chaloner may have heard about Jane’s interest in Plato’s Phaedo through their network of friends.
But while Jane was highly intelligent and well educated, Chaloner made her almost superhuman. Jane’s learning, although impressive, was not unique among women of similarly high status. Jane’s first cousins the Catholics Lady Jane and Lady Mary Fitzalan not only studied Latin and Greek, they also produced remarkable work, including Jane Fitzalan’s translation of Euripides’ Iphigenia at Aulis, which is both the first translation of one of Euripides’ plays into English and the first piece of extant English drama by a woman. A process had begun with the careful pruning of unwelcome facts about Jane, the exaggeration of others, and the addition of the occasional outright lie, to create “history as based on actual events.” Notable in this respect is the suggestion, drawn erroneously from the elegy, that Jane was pregnant when she died. This invented detail, popularized in the seventeenth century, served to emphasize how unnatural and wicked the Catholic Queen Mary supposedly was.
Jane’s “innocence,” meanwhile, became equated increasingly with passivity, and the uncompromising Jane of Foxe’s Book of Martyrs began to be edited out of history. The first seventeenth-century abridgements of Foxe made a point of underplaying the erudition and arrogance of Protestant heroines such as Lady Jane Grey, while dramatists such as Thomas Dekker and John Banks turned Jane into a submissive romantic heroine, passionately in love with Guildford.
The following century and the age of the Enlightenment remained stubbornly unenlightened about women, with writers and historians continuing to reinforce the acceptable image of Jane as a weak and vulnerable victim. Even the historian David Hume claimed that it was only Guildford’s entreaties that made her accept the throne. Edward Young’s poem “The Force of Religion; or Vanquished Love” (1714) is suggestive, meanwhile, of the sexual element in depictions of the submissive, chaste Jane, with verses inviting the male reader to imagine the kneeling figure of “that lovely person” in her private closet and to ponder her exquisite purity. While the French ambassador de Noailles, who met Jane, described her merely as “well made,” and Bishop Francis Godwin,
who would have known people who knew her, remarked that she was “not admirable” (that is, striking), she was now always described as beautiful.
Come the nineteenth century, Jane had also become enormously popular with a female readership to whom she was held up as an example of “all that is lovely in domestic life.” D. W. Bartlett’s Life of Lady Jane Grey encouraged American women to emulate her, while her virtues were enumerated by the American Tract Society and the American Sunday School Union. The historian Agnes Strickland had the courage to suggest that Jane’s education was among the attributes worth imitating. But even her Jane remained essentially sweet, gentle, and mild. A principal development during this century was the use of the Italian sources that quote the lost letter to Queen Mary from Jane, and some dubious variations of it. These were used to add another facet to Jane’s victim status, with her now being bullied by her husband, Guildford, and her mother-in-law, as well as her parents and the apostate Duke of Northumberland, on whose ambition Jane’s reign has traditionally been blamed, just as the Greys had hoped. Her childlike qualities were emphasized at the outset of the twentieth century by Richard Davey’s invented image of a freckle-faced, red-haired girl, and by the fraudulent story of her nurse “Ellyn,” a character designed to highlight the poignancy of a young girl locked in the Tower.
Parallel to the developing story of Jane as the idealized child-woman has been the reinvention of her mother. From the early eighteenth century, Frances became the archetype of female wickedness whose face is recalled best in the overweight features of Lady Dacre in the Eworth double portrait. Twentieth-and twenty-first-century depictions of Jane, whether in history, film, or fiction, have all drawn on it. In Faith Cook’s recent biography, Frances is described as she has been so many times before, as “a stronger character than her husband. Coarse and domineering [with] … much of her uncle Henry VIII’s determined opportunism.” It is a version of Frances that is very difficult to maintain through a study of the lives of her younger sisters, but Jane’s modern biographers only include a few pages on them. For the most part their lives were recalled in books that are long forgotten.
Lady Mary Grey has one work dedicated to her. The author, Flora Wylde, a granddaughter of Bonnie Prince Charlie’s rescuer, Flora MacDonald, composed a fictional memoir in the nineteenth century entitled The Tablette Book of Lady Mary Keyes. It is often listed under nonfiction, but its actual origins are apparent in its repetition of myths about Jane. Katherine Grey should have been the most significant of the sisters, as the mother to a royal dynasty, and her life offers one of the great love stories of English history. But it remains a reminder that the Stuarts inherited the throne illegally, and it is their descendant who wears the English crown today. Only a handful of romantic plays, poems, and popular histories have been written about the love affair between Katherine and Hertford. The focus of her story, furthermore, is not the significance of her marriage, but the supposed cruelty of Queen Elizabeth, who takes the role that Frances has been ascribed in the life of Jane.
It is striking how the masculine qualities with which the “powerful” and wicked Frances is associated have also been applied to Elizabeth. In the sixteenth century it was believed that women who exercised power over men could lose their femininity, rendering themselves barren. It was an idea inspired by the ancient Greek myth of the masculine women called the Viragoes, and one that has remained potent. In 1985 a Dr. Bakan went as far as to claim that Elizabeth suffered from testicular feminization and was actually genetically male—a diagnosis supported, he argued, by Elizabeth’s mental toughness. Thus a story that began with Henry VIII’s rejection of his daughter Mary as a future ruler of England continues to reflect our unease with women and power. The old prejudices survive without the ancient beliefs that once sustained them, and are often observed in commentary on modern female politicians.
The historical stories of the Grey sisters, stripped of literary debris, remain, meanwhile, as tragic and poignant as any fiction could make them: Jane, a Protestant Joan of Arc, calling up fresh troops to fight against Mary Tudor while her own generals betrayed her; Katherine, who risked her life to make love to “Ned” in the Tower, leaving him a ring inscribed “While I Lived, Yours;” and the diminutive Mary, who died in a modest house in London, but is buried surrounded by the Kings from whom she and her sisters were descended and the Queens whose rivals they were.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
THE SISTERS WHO WOULD BE QUEEN IS THE CULMINATION OF eight years’ work on the Tudor succession. My curiosity about the Grey sisters arose when I was researching After Elizabeth, my book on the struggle behind the accession of James VI and I, in 1603. Henry VIII’s pursuit of a male heir is well remembered. What is not fully appreciated, however, is the extent to which Tudor beliefs in the inferiority of women shaped events for the remainder of the Tudor period, the role this played in the future political character of the English nation, and even the attitudes to power of the Founding Fathers of the United States of America. The old Whig interpretation of history, in which Protestants and liberals fought in the vanguard of progress against the retrograde impulses of Catholics and conservatives, retains a strong hold over the Anglo-Saxon imagination. But no liberal impulses lay behind Henry’s break with Rome or subsequent efforts to continue to deny women the absolute power of his crown—efforts that were to sow the seeds of a constitutional monarchy. The Grey sisters and their Tudor cousins Mary and Elizabeth were protagonists in the development of a civic consciousness that arose in response to an unwelcome series of reigning queens. It proved problematic to the absolutist Stuart kings who followed them, as it would to George III, in his dealings with the American colonies denied representation in Parliament.
The reason the Grey sisters were important in the sixteenth century is that Henry VIII had excluded the Stuart line from the English throne. Under the terms of his will, Elizabeth’s heir in 1603 was the son of Lady Katherine Grey. Her life, like that of her younger sister, Mary Grey, was in part a romantic tragedy, a story of lovers divided. It is also, however, one that exposes this forgotten past and with it an Elizabeth dramatically at odds with the image of the Protestant, nationalist Madonna with which we are familiar. In beginning to research this book, I hoped that the well-known life of the iconic teenage Queen, Lady Jane Grey, would provide an introduction to the since forgotten “other Grey girls,” but suspected that there would be little new to say about Jane herself. As I moved from biographies of Jane’s life to contemporary sources, however, I realized that I had underestimated the scale of the story and that little that has been written about Jane or her parents can be trusted. The life of Jane Grey that most of us know is an accumulation of myths and frauds, from the deliberate error of an October 1537 birth date to her death attended by her nurse. I was the first historian to discover the distortions and misunderstandings that destroyed the posthumous reputation of the mother of the Grey sisters, and I describe here for the first time how the famous description of Jane Grey being processed to the Tower as Queen was written not in 1553 but in 1909, by one Richard Davey. We don’t know anything about Jane’s coloring, or the condition of her teeth, information so often used in academic debates over lost portraits. Davey’s supposed source for these details, Baptista Spinola, is a fiction inspired in part by a real merchant called Benedict Spinola, who was himself the basis for the character Baptista Spinola in Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew, and whom Davey further confuses with a soldier called Baptista Spinola. Davey is a fraudster of the type who faked the Hitler diaries, giving people what they wanted where history did not supply it. Some details in the Spinola letter Davey had gathered from primary sources—for instance, Jane’s mother was indeed carrying her train. Others, however, he embroidered from tidbits offered by the Victorian historian Agnes Strickland. She quotes a dubious Italian source describing Jane as small, and records that Isaac D’Israeli claimed that Jane wore chopines (a platform shoe fashionable in the sixteenth century in Venice). Most of
Davey’s description was, in fact, made up, as was his invention of Jane’s nurse and tiring woman. His dishonesty was made easier by four hundred years of fictional detail prompted by sexual, religious, and political prejudices. Separating myth from truth was a vital process, for the major events of Jane’s life had an enormous impact on the culture and politics of not only Queen Mary’s reign, but also Elizabeth’s, and help to explain her attitudes to Katherine and Mary Grey, and the consequences of those attitudes.
I reveal also previously unpublished details from love letters and transcripts of interviews concerning Katherine’s marriage to Edward Seymour, Earl of Hertford, son of the Protector Somerset, and give new information on Hertford’s ties to the authors of the first English play in blank verse, along with its role in efforts to pressure Elizabeth to settle the succession. In this continued struggle, Cecil emerges as far from the dull, loyal servant of tradition, and his efforts to gain control over Elizabeth’s decisions on the future of the crown reflect the development of highly significant ideas about royal authority and the importance of Parliament. It was the misfortune of the Grey sisters to remain caught in the net of these great events. Only Lady Mary Grey would, in the end, achieve a measure of freedom from the burden of her royal birth.
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