by Derek Wilson
It is impossible to regard this device as springing from any mind that was in touch with political reality. It was the work of an adolescent zealot who saw matters in black and white and who believed that he had the autocratic power to bend people to his will. Edward’s councillors would have blenched if they had known the details of the document which it might fall to them to execute. It would have involved maintaining themselves in power as a regency council for some king who might at some future time be conceived. The device could very well become a testament, not for ensuring a peaceful succession, but for plunging the nation back into the dynastic chaos of the fifteenth century. If Edward did show it to Dudley or any of his colleagues they would probably have regarded it as one of those intellectual exercises the king enjoyed. Nor had it anything to do with bequeathing the Crown to one of the leading noble families. Even if it had been possible to put the device into effect it would have bypassed the husbands of all the king’s female relatives. Edward knew about the forthcoming marriages arranged by his councillors and, therefore, that all the unborn infants indicated in his device would be brought up in good evangelical homes. Nominating these phantom children was the only way that he could see of achieving that objective closest to his heart. It is also worth noting, in passing, that Edward’s elaborate scheme to ensure the Protestant succession is not unique in British history. The protracted negotiations which brought George, Elector of Hanover, to the English throne in 1714 were far more extreme. They passed over, purely on the grounds of religion, no less than fifty-four Catholics who had much stronger claims.
Whether or not the king had some intuitive recognition of the fact, he was seriously ill with a chronic pulmonary condition, probably tuberculosis. Through the early months of the year he experienced typical symptoms of that disease, persistent coughing, fatigue and general debility. There were also, as is common, temporary respites in his steady deterioration, which tended to give hope to those who anxiously watched his condition. No one watched more anxiously than John Dudley. For all the leaders of the regime everything depended on Edward’s survival. That meant that they required daily bulletins from the royal physicians and had to decide what to do with the information received. The first priority was secrecy. Any hint of concern about the king’s condition had to be kept away from the diplomatic community and from rumourmongers who might spread the idea that the government was on the point of collapse. Council members tried to give the impression of business as usual. Edward attended some meetings, his decisions were sought and petitions were presented to him. He fulfilled his public duties whenever he was up to it, although he was too unwell to open parliament, and the customary removal of the court to Greenwich in April had to be postponed for two weeks.
This understandable nervousness about the king’s health and the political consequences of its deterioration renders even more worthy of note that Dudley was scrupulous over keeping Elizabeth and Mary informed of their brother’s condition. In early February, at a time when Edward was actually too ill to receive visitors, a message was sent to the elder princess. She came immediately and was escorted to court by an honour guard led by Dudley’s eldest son. At Whitehall Dudley and his wife received her with a great display of respect and affection. Was this the behaviour of a man cynically indifferent to religion and hedging his bets in order to remain on the winning side? Or was it the behaviour of a politique, lulling Mary into a sense of false security as a prelude to ousting her from the succession and ensuring the continuance of a Protestant state with himself at the helm? One thing is clear; it cannot have been both, as popular legend has suggested. In point of fact, it was neither. The prospect of Mary’s accession was certainly anathema to him but not because it presented any threat to his own well-being. He had done nothing to merit reprisals from the future queen. Indeed, he had always made a point of treating her with the courtesy due to her station. The worst that could happen to him at the inauguration of a Catholic regime would be his expulsion from the political limelight and that, as we know, would not have struck him as an unmitigated disaster. As the spring passed, Dudley was not carefully calculating all his options; he was waiting on events, ready, as he doubtless would have said, to leave the future in the hands of the Almighty. Any other interpretation of his state of mind makes a nonsense of his complete failure to deal with the crisis that was about to burst upon him.
Our understanding of that crisis is hampered by insufficient evidence of the exact sequence of events during May and June. During these weeks there was an acceleration of activity, culminating in frenzy as the king’s death became imminent and his passionate determination to alter the succession became known. If we could be in no doubt about who knew what and when we would be better able to judge the motives of the lead players in what has become known, erroneously, as the tragedy of the ‘nine days’ queen’. There will always be room for disagreement about who was the driving force behind the plan to change the succession and who actively supported it. After its failure there was, inevitably, a rush of councillors and courtiers to extricate themselves from any taint of treason by insisting that their heartfelt loyalty to Mary was overridden by Dudley. In most cases it suited the new queen to accept these asseverations but there was a world of difference between what men did in June and what, in July, they claimed they had done in June. Actions, opinions and emotions during King Edward’s last days were confused and we are left to unravel them as best we may.
Hopes and fears ebbed and flowed during May as king-watchers detected, or thought they detected, improvements or deteriorations in Edward’s condition. Some of the key players were absent from the centre of affairs during the month. Cranmer’s relationship with Dudley had completely broken down in April and he had gone off in a huff, not to return till 6 June. He was, in any case, busy doing his utmost to hasten the process of reform by publishing and disseminating religious propaganda. Dudley’s attendance was, as always, erratic and he was present at less than fifty per cent of full Council meetings (though he was probably more assiduous about participating in sessions of the ‘council for the state’, the inner ‘cabinet’ where the real decisions were made). In May some of his energy was devoted to organizing the biggest social event of the year, the multiple weddings which took place on Whitsunday (21 May).
On that day, crowds gathered outside Durham Place, one of the most magnificent waterside mansions in the environs of London (commandeered by Dudley after Tunstall’s deprivation) to watch the ‘quality’ assembling for the celebration of weddings involving the families of Dudley, Grey, Hastings and Herbert. The celebrations continued till 25 May and during these days were joined in holy matrimony, as had been painstakingly arranged over recent months, Henry Hastings and Catherine Dudley, and Henry Herbert and Catherine Grey. There were two changes to the planned unions. The Clifford negotiations having broken down, Guildford Dudley was fatally united with Jane Grey. But the Clifford connection was not lost. Young Margaret’s father, who had balked at seeing her married to Guildford, was happy to betroth her to the young man’s uncle, Sir Andrew Dudley, who was thirty years her senior (the marriage never took place). This event occurred three weeks before Edward’s amended plans for the succession were revealed. The questions that need to be resolved are: When did Dudley become party to the king’s intentions? To what extent did he influence Edward? And did he deliberately try to grab the Crown for his own family?
Whoever occupied the throne, the Grey girls were fated to be significant pieces in the game of dynastic politics. It was important to the Edwardian regime to have them married off to ‘safe’ husbands who would not try to mount their own claims (Mary Grey, barely into her teens, was, at the same time, betrothed to Lord Grey de Wilton). They could not be left single to become prey to ambitious suitors or rebellious cabals. There is no evidence that anyone, even Dudley’s bitterest enemies, saw anything in the ceremony at Durham Place beyond a prudent tidying-up of the dynastic situation. Edward, as we know, had his own reasons to be
very satisfied with the marriages but no one outside his inner circle knew or even guessed what was in his mind. As late as 12 June Scheyfve the imperial ambassador reported a rumour that Dudley had some scheme in mind to keep Mary from the throne but he did not know what that scheme was. It seems that, for all his well-paid spy network at court, all he could do was repeat vague gossip, most of which was unreliable. He even reported, at one stage, that Dudley was poisoning the King. If there was no leak of the plan to disbar the princesses from the succession it seems very unlikely that many people knew about it, particularly as the secret of Edward’s terminal illness was out in early June. On 6 June a substantial grant of land was made to Princess Mary, which suggests that the Council were already looking to the future and seeking to ingratiate themselves with the lady who would soon be their mistress.
On the balance of evidence and of human psychology it seems right to deduce that Edward did not reveal his device until he had accepted the fact that he was dying. This happened in the first week of June. Dudley was informed by the royal doctors that the king had suffered a fatal relapse and either he or some other confidant broke the news to Edward. The devout young man now had nothing to do but render his account to God, who would want to know how he had used his stewardship of England to advance the Gospel. It was, therefore, a matter of the most intense personal importance to the dying boy that he would be able to lay before the judgement seat a realm delivered once and for all from the coils of Antichrist. Having accepted that his days on this earth were severely numbered, Edward had to make his will and it was in connection with that that he revealed to his closest advisers, probably for the first time, his intentions for the succession.
The emotional impact must have been both devastating and complex. The device presented Dudley and his colleagues with several problems. In its existing form it was utterly unworkable. Even if it could, somehow, be made into a practical arrangement for passing on the crown would Edward’s will be accepted as legal? The political nation might reject it on two grounds: it was the work of a minor and it sought to set aside by mere royal fiat the line of succession laid down by Henry VIII and endorsed by parliament. In view of these valid objections, were the councillors grouped around Edward’s deathbed in that stuffy, closed chamber reeking of medicaments going to tell their royal master that they could not or would not deliver what he demanded of them with all the passion his wasted frame could muster? Only Cranmer ventured to express doubts in the king’s presence and he received a sharp dressing down for his temerity. Edward demanded to know whether his archbishop ‘would be more repugnant to his will than the rest of the Council were’.
As usual everyone looked to Dudley to give a lead and he cannot have found it easy to decide what to do. The simplest course of action would have been to promise to obey the king’s dying commands while secretly arranging for the peaceful transfer of power to Mary. Simple but not very honourable – and Dudley had a strict code of honour. Obedience to the sovereign was the basis of his political code, and Edward, though a boy, was still his anointed king. Duplicity had a strong smell of treason. Then, as he ruminated on what it was that Edward was proposing, it may well have struck him that it could be made to work. With a very slight change to the wording of the device the Crown could be handed to a living relative rather than some nebulous future infant. All that was necessary was to replace the phrase ‘the Lady Jane’s heirs male’ with ‘the Lady Jane and her heirs male’. Up to this point Dudley had faced the prospect of a Catholic, pro-imperial succession that would overturn all his work, the peace with France, the transfer of ecclesiastical wealth into the royal coffers, the bringing of the Reformation to a state of near completion. But now there was an alternative, and a very attractive one. England would have an intelligent young queen of impeccable evangelical convictions. Jane was young and healthy and, presumably, capable of bearing a new generation of royal princes. She would, of course, being a mere woman, need the guidance of an experienced politician, and who more obvious for that role than her father-in-law?
It may or may not have been Dudley who thought of this compromise, although people would assume, as many have assumed since, that he was the brains behind it and that his objective all along was to establish a Dudley royal dynasty. Whoever was responsible, the king still had to be persuaded to accept the qualification of his original device. It gave him an assured Protestant succession but at the cost of placing a woman on the throne. However, it was the religious issue that weighed more heavily with him and, on 17 June, he approved the complete draft of his will. In its final form it included additional clauses requiring the executors to defend the settlement of the church as it existed at the death of the testator.
But this was far from dealing with all Dudley’s doubts. There were still huge obstacles to be overcome. The duke was under no illusion about how the transfer of the Crown from Mary Tudor to Jane Dudley would be received. The princess had always enjoyed widespread public sympathy because of the way Henry VIII had treated her and her mother and it was by no means only Catholics who would be outraged at the thought of her claim being set aside. The Protestant courtier, Sir Nicholas Throckmorton, spoke for many when he observed,
And, though I liked not the religion
Which all her life Queen Mary had professed,
Yet in my mind that wicked notion
Right heirs for to displace I did detest.12
Even Bishop Hooper, who had once hailed Dudley as an ‘intrepid soldier of Christ’, took sides with Mary. The king’s will would have to be sold first to enough members of the political elite to provide the new regime with a secure base. Then, the government would have to be sure of the regional authorities and local JPs who would have to be on the alert for any expressions of pro-Mary sentiment. John Dudley, as we know, was painfully aware of his own unpopularity. It was likely, therefore, that the change of dynasty would have to be firmly imposed on the nation. There might have to be military action. Certainly the princesses would have to be kept under secure guard to prevent them becoming figureheads for internal revolution or foreign intervention.
How carefully he weighed up all the pros and cons we can only speculate, but the disastrous aftermath of his decision to back the king’s will to the hilt can only be explained with reference to what was going on in his mind. Why did his usual tactical skill desert him at the critical moment? All observers believed that the ‘coup’ he attempted after Edward’s death would be successful. He controlled the capital and he only had to bring the princesses there to prevent any rising. Yet he not only failed, but failed miserably. This suggests a degree of confusion leading to fatal inertia. The sort of man who could have carried the day would have been a ruthless, clear-headed, determined, Machiavellian schemer, something John Dudley never was. Emotion and reason became fatally mixed in him during those awful days when he had to watch his royal protégé wasting away to death.
First there was the family motto, droit et loyal, that he had been brought up to live by. In his letters Dudley frequently protested his utter devotion to the Crown. ‘You and others may witness of my care for all that pertains to his highness . . . I trust I shall be found ready to serve the king, whatever his pleasure, with my life.’13 So he had written as late as January and we should not be so sceptical as to dismiss such asseverations. He was certainly about to prove his willingness to do Edward’s bidding, whatever his pleasure, and to stake his life upon it. He – and the same is true for most of his Council colleagues – had formed the habit of obedience to the king’s will. They had spent years grooming him to take important decisions. It was difficult now to defy their monarch in his last pitiable extremity.
Something else that will certainly have influenced Dudley was the dazzling prospect of becoming the progenitor of England’s ruling dynasty. The more the ancient nobility looked down on him as an arriviste; the more the rumours spread that his father was only the son of a Midlands carpenter; the more sniggering critics reminded each other that
Edmund Dudley had died an ignominious traitor’s death, the more satisfying it was to Northumberland to show that he had climbed to the very top of the heap. He had never been warped by ambition but now, with the greatest of all prizes dangling before him, it would have taken gargantuan self-denial to refuse it.
Then there was the desire to preserve all that had been achieved since the death of the old king. He might have fallen out with Cranmer and some of the more outspoken evangelical preachers but in all the essentials they were still on the same side. Moreover the task of creating a godly commonwealth was still unfinished and Dudley was as aware as the archbishop of work yet to be done. It would not have been difficult for him to persuade himself (as probably the king also attempted to persuade him) that his endeavours had the blessing of God, blessing he might well forfeit if, having put his hand to the plough, he should now turn back. Nor was religion the only area of national life where there were government programmes to be seen through to completion. The Council had just begun to turn around the financial situation. They had sponsored overseas ventures which might open exciting commercial prospects. Dudley had provided England with a standing navy that would change the conduct of foreign affairs as well as mercantile endeavour. Finally, the realm had been given a period of peace and he must have been looking forward to building on this foundation. So there was much to play for in attempting to carry Edward’s will into effect.
All these rational and emotional weights tipped the scales in favour of action but the legal difficulties and the knowledge that the majority of right-thinking people were against him still weighed heavily on the other side of the balance. These considerations were urgent enough to prod that self-doubt to which Dudley was always prone and to stir confusion in his mind. The aggression, even violence, he displayed in his attempts to create a consensus suggests a man as desperate to convince himself as others. In mid-June a series of meetings took place involving leaders of government, Church and judiciary. Most of the Council were with Dudley but others had to be bullied into compliance. The lawyers, led by Sir Edward Montague, pointed out that they could not draw up the will the king wanted because it went counter to the existing statute. Dudley flew into a rage, threatening the penalties of treason for refusing a royal command. For him this seemed like yet another example of pernickety quibbling over details. The lawyers were as bad as the theologians; always ready to indulge the luxury of arguing over niceties when there was action to be taken. The law men left in confusion, only to be ordered back by the king a few days later and instructed to come in a more amenable frame of mind. They set to work on the document, Montague comforting himself with a nice legal sophism: to draw up a document on which one had no intention of acting could not be construed as treason. Cranmer, also, as we have seen was unhappy about the will. He asked for permission to reason with Edward in private but this was denied him and, faced by a determined and reproachful king, he gave way. On 21 June all the notables of court and capital were summoned to Greenwich to set their names to a document confirming the change to the succession. Several of them must have had their fingers firmly crossed behind their backs as they did so.