The dominating presence of Henry VIII in this Holbein family portrait of the king with his long-dead parents, and the more recently deceased Jane Seymour, mother of his son Edward, is reflected in the words written on the central altar which boast that Henry VIII is greater than his father for ‘The presumption of Popes has yielded to unerring virtue and with Henry VIII bearing the sceptre in his hand, religion has been restored’.
Henry VIII is depicted looking straight at the viewer with the late Jane Seymour, and their son and heir, Edward. To the left and right are the princesses Mary and Elizabeth. It has been suggested that the view behind them hints at a possible life outside the royal palaces, with marriages and households of their own.
Katherine of Aragon.
Anne Boleyn’s daughter Elizabeth wore this ring after she became queen.
Jane Seymour by Hans Holbein.
Dress was important at the Tudor court with Anne Boleyn one of its most fashionably dressed women. By contrast the ugly German costume worn here by Anne of Cleves made her repulsive to Henry VIII.
The jewellery in this portrait has prompted historians to claim it is Katherine Howard, but it has also been suggested that it is a portrait of Margaret Douglas, and certainly it resembles portraits of her as an older woman.
Katherine Parr, attributed to Master John.
Mary Tudor by Master John. The physical similarities suggest the Tudor sisters have more in common than history has credited.
A portrait of Elizabeth in a crimson dress is listed in an inventory of Henry VIII’s possessions at his death so this picture may date from as early as 1546.
The infant Edward Tudor, dressed to mimic his father and offering an apparent blessing on the viewer like the Christ child. The Latin inscription urges him to imitate or even surpass the achievements of his father.
Edward VI, attributed to William Scrots. Behind the public image of the godly prince was a boy keen to please, prone to hero worship, anxious to do the right thing and fond of boyish pursuits.
This famous nineteenth-century painting of Jane Grey’s execution encapsulates the myth of Jane as an innocent virgin, sacrificed on the altar of adult political ambition. In reality Jane was a religious leader and no mere victim.
Mary I, already drawn and ill, is here wearing La Pelegrina, the largest pearl in the world at that time, and a gift from her husband Philip of Spain. It would later be bought by the actor Richard Burton for Elizabeth Taylor. Mary holds the red rose of the House of Lancaster from whom she and her husband both claimed descent.
The earliest known portrait of an English mother and her child, this depicts Lady Katherine Grey – the heir to Queen Elizabeth I under Henry VIII’s will – and her son, Lord Beauchamp, as Madonna and child.
Elizabeth I’s face is a mask of beauty and eternal youth, although when the Rainbow portrait was painted she was already an old woman, missing several teeth.
This portrait was sold in the nineteenth century as Lady Jane Grey/Dudley. The style of the costume, however, dates the portrait much earlier. If it is an English court lady, as is the current view (despite the style being French), then it may well be Margaret Douglas, which would fit with the sitter’s buttons marked with the initial D. Like her ancestress and namesake, Margaret Beaufort, whom she in many ways resembled, Margaret Douglas has suffered from the absence of authenticated portraits of her in her youth.
Funeral effigy of Margaret Douglas and four of her eight children.
When this limning of Mary, Queen of Scots was painted by Hilliard she had already been Elizabeth’s prisoner for over a decade.
James VI of Scotland, aged twenty.
The spoilt, vicious, doomed, Henry Lord Darnley – later King of Scots – and his brother Charles.
Arbella Stuart, child of Margaret Douglas’ son Charles Stuart, and Bess of Hardwick’s daughter, Elizabeth Cavendish.
This seventeenth-century family tree depicts the Tudor descent of James VI of Scotland and I of England.
During the second week of October the young king was given the shocking news that his uncle Somerset was planning to murder Dudley and Katherine Parr’s brother, William Parr. Edward promptly empowered Dudley further, by creating him Duke of Northumberland, his ally Harry Grey, Duke of Suffolk, and William Parr’s brother-in-law, William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke. William Parr already had the great title of Marquess of Northampton. Five days later Edward saw his uncle arrive at court at Whitehall, noting in his diary that he was ‘later than he was wont and by himself’. Edward then added the chilling comment, ‘After dinner he was apprehended.’ The former Protector was returned to the Tower, and this time he would not be released. Somerset was to be executed early in the following year.16
Mary soon found she was again being invited to court. The pretext was a reception given in November for Mary of Guise, the widow of her cousin James V, who had died in 1542. Mary declined the invitation, perhaps because she feared being asked to attend a religious service with the king. Instead, Edward’s diary records that he sat on Mary of Guise’s right, under a shared cloth of state, while on the other side were his cousins Frances Brandon and Margaret Douglas. Frances was often at court, because her husband, Harry Grey, was regularly at the king’s side, but Margaret and her husband Lennox had also maintained cordial relations with Edward and his councillors. They were discreet about their conservative religious inclinations and Lennox was useful to Edward, running an effective network of spies in Scotland.17 The women dressed to flatter Mary of Guise, in the Scottish style with their hair loose, ‘flounced and curled and double curled’.
Strikingly, the princess Elizabeth was no more present at the reception than her elder sister, Mary. But she made her presence felt when she did appear at court, by dressing so plainly that it was ‘to the shame of them all’.18 Edward had recently received a work promoting modesty of dress in women, and Elizabeth was keen to remind him that, in contrast to Mary, she was the good Protestant princess her reformist governess had raised her to be, as well as (less convincingly) modest and chaste. It did her little good. While Edward noted Lady Jane Grey’s attendance at the reception, he made no mention of his half-sister’s presence on any of the days when Mary of Guise was being welcomed and entertained. It seems he was not encouraged to be any closer to her than he was to Mary.
That Christmas, after Mary of Guise had left, there were further entertainments to be enjoyed at court with plays, masques, tournaments and a tilt on the last day, 6 January, which Edward enjoyed enormously. John Dudley had ensured Edward had been taught to ride and handle weapons, and Edward had begun ‘arming and tilting, managing horses and delighting in every sort of exercise’, although he did not yet take part in the competitions.19 Dudley was extremely astute in his handling of Edward. According to the French ambassador, Edward revered Dudley almost as if he was his father. Yet Dudley was careful to emphasise that, as Lord President of the king’s council, he was only a senior member of a team working for Edward, whom he involved ever more deeply in matters of state.
In March a core of the king’s senior servants began to meet with him each Tuesday to brief him on policy matters. High on the agenda was the work that was about to begin on a new and more radical prayer book, which would rename the Eucharist the Lord’s Supper, have Communion tables brought into the church chancel or nave so people could stand around them as for a communal supper, and where they were given bread in their hands rather than unleavened wafers in their mouths. It would also rewrite the baptism and confirmation service, and remove all mention of prayers for the dead at burial services. Edward’s cousin Margaret Douglas remained at court, but in early April there was a measles and smallpox outbreak and on 7 April she asked permission to return to Yorkshire.20 Even Edward had fallen ill, but happily by the 12th, when Margaret was heading north, Edward was reporting that ‘we have shaken that quite away’, and in the summer Edward was hunting again.
That October, when Edward turned fifteen, a famous Italian astro
loger was invited to cast the king’s horoscope.21 He predicted Edward would reign a further forty years and would achieve much. The revised Book of Common Prayer, published in November 1552, was to be followed by the publication of forty-two articles of faith that would become the basis for the Elizabethan thirty-nine articles that today remain the founding beliefs of the Church of England.22 The future would not be untroubled: the country was suffering dire financial problems, stemming in part from the wars of the 1540s against France and then Scotland. Cranmer and Dudley had fallen out over the execution of Somerset and the push for a further confiscation of church assets. But the longer-term prospects were bright: it was, the astrologer assured Edward, all in the stars.
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THE LAST TUDOR KING
EDWARD HAD A PERSISTENT COUGH IN JANUARY 1553 THAT HE WAS having trouble shaking off.1 The fifteen-year-old king recalled, however, that he had had a ‘grave sickness’ in the summer of 1550, and both measles and smallpox in April 1552. He would surely soon recover again.2 The cough had worsened when, on Saturday 7 February, Elizabeth wrote a letter to her brother, telling him that while on her way to see him on the Thursday, she had been stopped on the road and told he was too ill to give her an audience. She alluded to gossip that she had lost his favour. She was sure, she said, this was not true, and whatever others thought, Elizabeth noted, ‘your grace’s goodwill . . . I trust will stick by me’.3 There is no record of a reply.
Mary, who had arrived in London the previous day attended by a retinue 200 strong, had been better treated than Elizabeth. John Dudley had met her on the outskirts of the city along with a number of knights and gentlemen who had escorted her to Whitehall. There she was entertained with great magnificence, and a few days later her ailing brother had agreed to see her. Edward had maintained the ban on the Mass in Mary’s private chapels, despite the Imperial ambassador pleading with him ‘several times to let my sister Mary have her Mass’.4 Whatever passed between brother and sister that February he was determined not to change his mind on this, and may have tried, unsuccessfully, to change hers. On 21 February John Dudley called in one of her leading servants, for another dressing-down on the subject.
Edward began to feel better, at last, in April 1553 when the weather got warmer. Nevertheless, the time had come, he felt, to practise writing a will before drawing up a more formal document in the event that he should fall seriously ill again. Headed ‘My Device for the Succession’, his efforts covered barely more than one piece of paper, but its contents were explosive.
The first decision Edward made was to pass over the claims of his sisters, Mary and Elizabeth.5 Dynastic issues took second place for Edward to religious ideology and, as he later admitted, he feared Mary would undo the religious reforms of his reign, not least his replacement of the Mass with the Lord’s Supper and the destruction of images. Since there was no precedent for ignoring Mary’s claim on grounds of her Catholic faith, he chose to use her illegitimacy under the Act of Succession of 1536 as the legal basis for his actions. With Elizabeth described as illegitimate in the same Act, it was necessary that she also be passed over. But in any case, as Edward later reminded his lawyers, Elizabeth’s mother had died a traitor to his father.6
Edward then looked to other heirs of their Tudor grandfather, Henry VII. It was said that the first Tudor king had hoped that in the event of the failure of his son’s line England would look to the heirs of his daughter, Margaret of Scots. But Margaret Tudor’s senior heir, Mary, Queen of Scots, was a Catholic and betrothed to the French dauphin. The next in line, Margaret Douglas, was, if not a papal Catholic, then certainly no Protestant, and her husband had been a Scot and a Frenchman before he became an Englishman. Both had been ignored in Henry VIII’s will and so a precedent had also been set for ignoring them now, as Edward did. This left the heirs of his junior aunt, Henry VIII’s younger sister, the French queen, and her husband, Charles Brandon.
The French queen’s eldest daughter, Frances, was a staunch Protestant. But Henry’s will had bypassed her in favour of her daughters: Lady Jane, Katherine and Mary Grey. In any case, Edward wanted a male heir in line with the precedents for royal women transmitting their rights to their sons. Edward therefore left his throne to the sons Frances might yet have (she was thirty-five), followed by the sons of her daughters in line of succession. Failing the Grey line, the crown was to pass through Frances’ fifteen-year-old niece, Margaret Clifford, the sole heir of Frances’ younger sister, Eleanor, who had died in 1547.7 Having written the document, it must have seemed unlikely to Edward that it would ever see the light of day, but he was not yet well.
On 11 April Edward travelled by barge from Westminster to the airy rooms of Greenwich Palace, where he hoped he would continue his recovery. Those around him had to consider, however, what would happen if he did not. Under the terms of his will the throne would be vacant until a male heir was born, with Frances acting as governor.8 An empty throne was likely to attract the predatory attentions of the King of France, acting in favour of his future daughter-in-law, Mary, Queen of Scots, and of the emperor Charles V acting for his cousin, the princess Mary. As the Tudor claimant, and accepted as Edward’s heir for a decade, the princess was by far the stronger candidate, and if she became queen there was every reason to suppose she would revenge herself on those who had bullied her for years and overthrown the Mass. To prevent her accession a male heir was needed as soon as possible, and to this end all the women of royal blood would have to be married. Even if a son wasn’t born in time, the marriages could be used to bind the leading families of the regime to a common purpose: preventing Mary’s accession.
According to Edward’s Secretary of State, Sir William Cecil, it was William Parr’s wife who suggested Frances’ eldest daughter, Lady Jane Grey, be married to Dudley’s fourth son, Lord Guildford Dudley.9 William Parr had no legitimate children and Guildford was the elder of two unmarried sons available to Dudley.10 The Lord President proved enthusiastic. Unlike the other leading figures in Edward’s regime – William Parr (brother of the late queen, Katherine Parr), William Herbert (the widower of Anne Parr, the late queen’s sister) and Harry Grey (whose wife Frances was Henry VIII’s niece) – John Dudley was not a member of the extended royal family. The previous year he had tried, and failed, to pressure Eleanor Brandon’s widower, the Earl of Cumberland, into marrying his daughter Margaret Clifford to Guildford. He was delighted his son was to make this still greater match, and it was one to which Harry Grey soon agreed.
Lady Jane Grey, who was about to be sixteen, had matured into a remarkable young woman, only averagely attractive, but with far better than average brains. She spoke Latin, Greek, French, Italian and some Hebrew.11 She was a patron of the first pastor of London’s ‘Strangers Church’ for European Protestant exiles, and was admired amongst a circle of clever Protestant women that included William Cecil’s intellectual wife, Mildred. There is no evidence to support the later romanticised gossip amongst Italians that Jane married at the ‘insistence of her mother and the threats of her father’.12 It was usual for the daughters of the nobility to have an arranged marriage made around their sixteenth birthday, and even if Edward lived, Jane’s marriage had great promise. When her father died his title, Duke of Suffolk, was likely to pass to Guildford, who was close to her age and remembered by contemporaries as a ‘comely, virtuous and goodly gentleman’.13
Poor Edward, meanwhile, found his health was deteriorating once more. On 28 April 1553, as the Imperial ambassador recorded the news of Jane’s betrothal, he also reported that every day Edward’s agonising cough was growing worse. ‘The matter he ejects from his mouth is sometimes coloured a greenish yellow and black, sometimes pink, like the colour of blood’, the ambassador noted. ‘His doctors and physicians are perplexed and do not know what to make of it. They feel sure the king has no chance of recovery unless his health improves in the next month.’14 The symptoms and Edward’s medical history suggest he had contracted tuberculosis in 1550. It w
as then suppressed by his immune system and reactivated by the measles he suffered in the spring of 1552.15 Mary’s allies at court were keeping her informed of the developing situation – and so was John Dudley, who in a remarkable turnaround was also now emphasising Mary’s right to her full arms as Princess of England.16 In September 1551 Dudley’s ally William Parr had told the Imperial ambassador not to refer to Mary as ‘princess’ but merely as ‘the king’s sister’. This had been followed by Somerset’s attempt to ally with Mary’s sympathisers against the Dudley regime. The ambassador suggested Dudley was now attempting to conciliate Mary in order to forestall further trouble – and indeed it appears this exactly explains Dudley’s actions, for something else was also being done in that regard. Mary had been obliged to surrender lands to the Crown in December 1552, before the serious nature of Edward’s illness was understood. In May, ostensibly in compensation for these, she received prime lands, castles and manors worth far in excess of what she had lost. They included the royal castle of Hertford and the manor castle of Framlingham, which had been the principal seat of Thomas Howard, 3rd Duke of Norfolk, before he was sent to the Tower in 1546.17
John Dudley and his allies were confident Mary would accept the overthrow of her father’s will by her brother, just as she had accepted those parts overthrown by the Protectorate in 1547, with land grants once again being used to sweeten the pill. As for Elizabeth, the Imperial ambassador heard that John Dudley’s eldest son would be divorced so he would be free to marry her. But from Elizabeth herself there was silence. Like Mary she was playing her cards close to her chest, watching and waiting on events. Edward’s Secretary of State, who also happened to be the surveyor of her estates, William Cecil, may have been her eyes and ears at court.
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