Tudor Women Queens & Commoners

by Alison Plowden

  The Lord Admiral was now actively considering his own marital future, and a rumour circulated briefly that he meant to marry Jane himself. Certainly he would not have been the first guardian to marry a wealthy or otherwise eligible ward - within two months of the death of his royal wife, the late Duke of Suffolk had married his ward, Katherine Willoughby, an heiress fully young enough to be his daughter- but the Admiral, it seemed, was setting his sights even higher. Gossip had already begun to link his name with the Princess Elizabeth, and it was being whispered that the real reason why he had kept Queen Katherine's maids together was to wait on the Princess once they were married.

  In Elizabeth's household, now established at Hatfield in Hertfordshire, there was much excited speculation about the widower's intentions and how soon he might be expected to come courting. Mrs. Ashley for one was already hearing wedding bells. She knew that the Admiral loved her princess 'but too well', and was he not 'the noblest man unmarried in this land'? But during those autumn months, while the Admiral conferred with her steward about the state of her finances, the number of servants she kept and the whereabouts of her landed property; while her governess sang his praises, and my lord sent her friendly messages at every opportunity, Elizabeth remained unresponsive. King Henry VIII might have failed in a father's first duty by leaving his daughters unbetrothed and unprotected against predators like Thomas Seymour, but even at fifteen years old Elizabeth Tudor could look after herself. The Admiral's flamboyant facade was convincing enough to deceive her steward and her governess, but Elizabeth knew or guessed just how flimsy that facade really was. She knew it was in the highest degree unlikely that the Protector and the Council would ever consent to her marriage with an adventurous younger son, and she knew that any attempt to marry without their consent would inevitably lead straight to disaster. In the privacy of the household she could not always conceal the warmth of her feelings for the Admiral - he was exactly the kind of bold, handsome fellow who would attract her to the end of her life - but in public her discretion was absolute, and she avoided all suggestion of a clandestine understanding with almost obsessive care.

  It was as well that she did, for in January 1549 Thomas Seymour was committed to the Tower, evidence of his numerous 'disloyal practices' having become too blatant to be condoned any longer. On the day after his arrest, the government's investigators arrived at Hatfield, and over the next few weeks the Princess was subjected to a gruelling ordeal by interrogation. She was told it was being said that she was with child by the Lord Admiral and was invited 'to consider her honour and the peril that might ensue'. Embarrassing details of those early morning romps round the bed-curtains at Chelsea were dragged into the open, even the shameful reason why Queen Katherine had had to send her away to Cheshunt, but Elizabeth denied and continued to deny that she had ever for a moment contemplated marrying the Admiral or anyone else against the wishes of the King and his Council. Katherine Parr's good sense and her own courage, self-control and inborn political acumen had saved her from a disgrace which would have ruined her good name for ever and perhaps cost her her place in the succession, but the episode had provided a salutary lesson. Elizabeth learned early that the world was a hard and unforgiving place, and that the way to survive was at all costs to keep one's mouth shut and one's feelings to oneself. It was a lesson she never forgot. 'Her mind has no womanly weakness,' Roger Ascham, the most famous of her tutors, wrote of her later that same year, 'her perseverance is equal to that of a man, and her memory long keeps what it quickly picks up.'

  Thomas Seymour was attainted of high treason and executed on 20 March, leaving behind one innocent and often forgotten victim of his delusions of grandeur. Little Mary Seymour, stripped of her inheritance by her father's attainder, was dumped on the Duchess of Suffolk, once her mother's dear friend. But my lady of Suffolk, who always believed in speaking her mind, took a notably unsentimental view of the penniless infant and complained bitterly that she was being beggared by the cost of maintaining 'the Queen's child and her company'. Her ladyship made repeated efforts to extract an allowance for the baby's keep from the Lord Protector - the Queen's child was, after all, his niece - but whether or not she was successful is not recorded. Mary Seymour herself disappeared from the record before she was a year old and is generally believed to have died young, although there is a tradition, preserved by Agnes Strickland in her biography of Katherine Parr, that she survived to become the wife of Sir Edward Bushel, a gentleman of the household of James I's wife, Anne of Denmark.

  7. LONG LIVE OUR GOOD QUEEN MARY

  During Edward VI's brief reign, his elder sister and heir presumptive played no part in public affairs. Neither Mary nor Elizabeth was involved in the coup d'etat which toppled the Lord Protector Somerset in the autumn of 1549 but, while Elizabeth paid regular visits to London to see the King, Mary avoided the Court. Under the new regent, John Dudley, Earl of Warwick, soon to become Duke of Northumberland, England was moving steadily to the left in religious matters. The Latin Mass had already been replaced by the new English communion service, and in 1552 a second and even more radical English Prayer Book came into use. To Mary, as to many others of her generation and temperament, the new ways were an abomination, and in the privacy of her household Mass continued to be celebrated. This led, inevitably, to confrontation. However much she tried to avoid the limelight, the Princess was a public figure and still a very popular one. Where she led, others would follow, and her conformity was therefore important.

  For Mary the distress of being refused the consolations of her religion was equalled by her wretchedness over the widening rift between her brother and herself. Nevertheless, she resisted bravely. In the last resort, she told Edward at one of their rare meetings, 'there are two things only, soul and body. My soul I offer to God, and my body to your Majesty's service. May it please you to take away my life rather than the old religion.' Embarrassed, the boy made a 'gentle answer', and one of the standers-by tried to lower the temperature by pointing out that the King had no wish to constrain his sister's faith but merely willed her, as a subject, to obey his laws.

  In the proceedings against the Princess, the Council, too, found themselves in a rather embarrassing position. Mary, like her mother, had powerful connections abroad, and already the Imperial ambassador was hinting at unpleasant consequences if his master's cousin were further molested in the private exercise of her religion. Since it was obvious that she could not be bullied into yielding and would positively welcome prosecution, John Dudley switched his attack. In April 1551 one of her chaplains was arrested for saying Mass, and in August her Comptroller and two other senior members of her household were also taken into custody for aiding and abetting their mistress in her defiance of the law. In a burst of temper, Mary told a government commission which visited her at the end of the month that, in the absence of her Comptroller, she was now obliged to do her own accounts and 'learn how many loaves of bread be made of a bushel of wheat'; but since her mother and father had not brought her up to baking and brewing, she would be glad to have him back. At the same time she flatly refused to accept the replacement offered by the Council. She would continue to appoint her own officers, and if anyone was forced upon her, she would go out of her gates, 'for they two should not dwell in one house'. When Nicholas Ridley, the new Bishop of London, reproached her for refusing to listen to God's word, she retorted: 'I cannot tell what ye call God's word; that is not God's word now, that was God's word in my father's days.' 'God's word', replied the Bishop unwisely, 'is one in all times; but hath been better understood and practised in some ages than others.' This was too much for Mary. 'You durst not, for your ears,' she cried, 'have avouched that for God's word in my father's days that now you do. And as for your new books, I thank God I never read any of them. I never did, nor ever will do.'

  But although the Princess usually had the last word in such encounters, the Council had won the battle. Her household had been manoeuvred into submission, and for the next t
wo years, if their mistress heard Mass, it was in fear and secrecy behind locked doors. This was the second time in her life that Mary had been defeated on a matter of principle, but at least she had gone down fighting, making it abundantly clear that she had only surrendered to superior force. No one could be in any doubt about the strength of her convictions, nor of what her attitude would be were she ever to succeed to the throne.

  By the early spring of 1553 this had become a matter of acute concern, for those in power could no longer conceal from themselves that Edward was mortally ill. The previous summer the young King had unfortunately succumbed to a sharp attack of measles, and now tuberculosis, which had already carried off three promising teenage Tudor boys, was taking its inevitable course. To John Dudley, Duke of Northumberland, that brilliant, unscrupulous soldier of fortune who had risen to power by ruthlessly exploiting the weaknesses of the late Lord Protector and who dominated the other members of the Council of Regency by the most hypnotic force of his personality, Edward's death threatened personal disaster. But the Duke did not intend to relinquish pride of place if he could help it, and he spent the spring and summer of 1553 working desperately to secure the future. His plan was a simple one. The King, like his father, would dispose of the Crown by Will, disinheriting both his half-sisters in favour of his cousin Jane Grey and, to ensure continued Dudley ascendancy, Jane would be married forthwith to Guildford, the youngest of Northumberland's brood of sons, who was fortunately still a bachelor.

  Despite the barefaced illegality of the scheme, Edward needed little persuading to fall in with it. Wholly committed to the new religion, he was as anxious as Duke Dudley to exclude Mary, knowing that she would strive to bring back the idolatry of the Mass and undo all the godly work of the past five years. The same objection could not be urged against Elizabeth but, as Northumberland pointed out, it would be difficult to pass over one princess and not the other. In any case, both had been declared bastards by Act of Parliament and both might marry foreign princes, who would take control of the government 'to the utter subversion of the commonwealth'. Equally important, Elizabeth would be no more amenable than Mary to Dudley control. Jane Grey, on the other hand, was still only fifteen; she had been strictly brought up and would do as she was told. Her parents, too, could be relied on to play their part. The Dorsets - or the Suffolks as they now were, since her late father's dukedom had devolved upon Frances Brandon - had been disappointed of seeing their daughter married to the King; the prospect of seeing her become a Queen in her own right was guaranteed to entrance them.

  After the arrest of Thomas Seymour, Jane had gone back to live at home, but her relations with her mother and father had not improved. She told Roger Ascham -

  When I am in presence of either father or mother, whether I speak, keep silence, sit, stand or go, eat, drink, be merry or sad, be sewing, playing, dancing or doing anything else, I must do it .. . even as perfectly as God made the world - or else I am so sharply taunted, so cruelly threatened, yea, presented sometimes with pinches, nips and bobs [blows] and other ways - which I will not name for the honour I bear them - so without measure misordered, that I think myself in hell.

  Not surprisingly, Jane sought solace in her studies under the sympathetic guidance of her tutor, John Aylmer. When Ascham visited the family at Bradgate, their Leicestershire estate, in the winter, of 1550, he found her deep in Plato's Phaedo, reading it 'with as much delight as if it had been a merry tale of Boccaccio'. At fourteen she was conducting a learned correspondence (in Latin, naturally) with a group of Calvinist divines in Switzerland and seeking their advice on the pursuance of her Hebrew studies, so that she could read the Old Testament in the original.

  Jane's only escape from the tyranny of her parents would, of course, be through marriage, but when Guildford Dudley was presented to her as her future husband, she refused him - or tried to do so. She seems to have disliked and feared all the Dudleys - feelings which many people shared - and besides, she considered herself to be already contracted to the Earl of Hertford, son of the former Protector. Her resistance, though, was useless. According to a contemporary Italian account, her parents fell on her with blows and curses, and the wedding duly took place amid much pomp and ceremony on 25 May 1553.

  The marriage of Jane Grey to Guildford Dudley remains the most famous example in Tudor times of a reluctant bride forced to the altar by an ambitious or mercenary family; but how often a similar fate overtook other, less important, less well-documented young ladies, is difficult to say. Certainly forced marriages were frowned upon by society at large. The Church insisted on the 'full and free consent' of both parties as an essential pre-condition for entering into the holy estate, and all writers on the subject were of the same opinion. Parents and guardians grievously offended by compelling their sons and daughters to be married to such as they hated, without any consideration of age, love, condition and manners, declared Henry Cornelius Agrippa in his Commendation of Matrimony. Another authority described forced marriage as 'the extremest bondage there is'. While yet another, Thomas Heywood, made the point that such marriages were bound to be self-defeating. 'How often', he enquired, 'have forced contracts been made to add land to land, not love to love? And to unite houses to houses, not hearts to hearts? which hath been the occasion that men have turned monsters, and women devils.'

  Fulminations of this kind show that forced contracts were by no means unknown but, at the same time, it's probably fair to assume that they were uncommon. Not many parents were heartless enough to drive unwilling daughters into the arms of men they really detested or found physically repugnant and, although the concept of romantic love found little place in the normal run of sixteenth-century marriage negotiations, it was generally accepted that there should be 'liking' and a reasonable amount of compatibility between an engaged couple. In any case, sensible parents - and the majority of parents were sensible people - could see the force of Thomas Heywood's warning. An unhappy, discontented wife could quickly poison not only her husband's life but her in-laws' as well. The quarrels of an unhappy, ill-matched couple would inevitably spill over on to their respective families, sides would be taken and bad feeling spread through the small, tightly-knit community of town or village.

  Some parents were more enlightened than others in this respect. The Dowager Duchess of Suffolk, when discussing the possibility of a marriage between one of her sons and the Duke of Somerset's daughter, had been very reluctant to bind the children to an engagement before they were old enough to judge the matter for themselves. She personally was all in favour of the alliance but, she wrote, 'no unadvised bonds between a boy and girl can give such assurance of good will, as hath been tried already'. T cannot tell', she went on, 'what more unkindness one of us might show the other, or wherein we might work more wickedly, than to bring our children into so miserable a state, as not to choose by their own liking such as they must profess so strait a bond, and so great a love to, forever.' As the Duchess pointed out, once they realized they had married only to please their parents, or out of obedience, and had lost their 'free choice', neither of them would 'think themselves so much bounden to the other, a fault sufficient to break the greatest love'. If, later on, the young people were to 'make up the matter themselves', well and good. If not, then 'neither they nor one of us shall blame another'. As it happened, the matter never was made up, for the bridegroom elect died of the sweating sickness while still in his teens.

  In practice, sons could expect to exercise fuller and freer consent than daughters. Trained from earliest childhood to obedience and passivity, to believing that her parents knew best, it took considerable courage and strength of will on the part of any well-brought-up girl to withstand family pressure in the matter of her marriage - and family pressure did not have to include physical violence to be compelling. Even the best-brought-up girl had a right to object if her father was proposing a dishonourable or unequal marriage - if, for example, the bridegroom were noticeably beneath her in social sta
tus or so much older that he would be unlikely to be able to give her children; but to reject an otherwise eligible suitor on the grounds that he was a bore, picked his nose or laughed at his own jokes, would be considered perverse and ungrateful by even the most indulgent father. So very many young women - especially those without a great deal to offer in the way of beauty or dowry - resigned themselves to accepting their parents' choice and prepared to make the best of it, hoping their mothers were right in their earnest assurances that love would follow marriage.

  There were love matches too, of course. No one had anything against love, providing the price was right, and plenty of youthful romances flourished with parental approval. The great Duke of Northumberland himself had allowed his son Robert to marry for love, although the fate of that particular marriage rather justified those spoil-sports who maintained that a union founded on carnal love alone all too often ended in sorrow.

  King Edward had been a guest at the wedding of Robert Dudley and Amye Robsart in June 1550, but he did not grace the marriage of Lady Jane Grey and Guildford Dudley. In May 1553 Edward was nearing the end of his sufferings, while alone in the country Mary waited in 'sore perplexity' and increasing fear of the future. Northumberland had become more conciliatory towards her in recent months, sending her bulletins on the King's condition, and when she last visited London in February had received her with greater courtesy than on previous occasions. But Mary was not deceived. She knew the Duke to be her enemy who would destroy her if he could, but as long as Edward lived, there was nothing to be done but wait.

  Towards the end of the first week in July, both Mary and Elizabeth received urgent summonses to their brother's bedside. Elizabeth promptly took to her bed - too ill to travel, she declared, and ready with a doctor's certificate to prove it. Mary, then at Hunsdon, set out hesitantly on the journey but got no further than Hoddesdon on the London road before she was met by an anonymous messenger, a goldsmith of the City says one account, who told her that Edward was already dead and Northumberland's summons a trap. Pausing only to send a hasty word to the Imperial embassy, Mary turned aside and, accompanied only by two ladies and six loyal gentlemen of the household, made for her manor of Kenninghall in Norfolk. She had friends in the eastern counties, and there, if the worst happened, she would be well placed for flight to the Low Countries and sanctuary.