Lady Jane Grey

by Plowden, Alison

  Mary made her state entry into London on 3 August, ‘being brought in with her nobles very honourably and strongly’. Wearing a gown of purple velvet over a kirtle ‘all thick set with goldsmith’s work and great pearl … with a rich baldrick of gold, pearl and stones about her neck, and a rich billament of stones and great pearl on her hood,’ King Henry’s daughter rode in triumph through newly gravelled streets, hung with banners and streamers and lined with cheering crowds, the trumpets sounding before her.8 Once she had been pretty: small and finely made with a delicate pink and white complexion and the Tudor family’s red-gold hair. Now she was painfully thin, indelibly marked by years of unhappiness and ill-health. Her cousin’s ambassadors described her as ‘middling fair’, but the pink and gold had long since faded, leaving a sandy-haired, tight-lipped little woman in her late thirties, with myopic grey eyes, no eyebrows and a surprisingly deep, gruff voice.

  When her procession reached the Tower, the guns thundering in salute, the new queen was greeted by four kneeling figures: the old duke of Norfolk, who had been living under a suspended sentence of death ever since 1547; Stephen Gardiner, who had spent most of Edward’s reign in prison on account of his unfashionable religious opinions; young Edward Courtenay, grandson of Katherine Courtenay, née Plantagenet, who had spent most of his life in prison for that reason alone; and Anne Somerset, widow of the late Protector. Mary raised the suppliants, kissed them, saying smilingly, ‘these are my prisoners’, and ordered their immediate release.9 Other, more recent prisoners were not in evidence on this happy occasion. The duke of Northumberland was quartered in the Garden Tower – later popularly christened the Bloody Tower. His sons were crowded together in the Beauchamp Tower, while Jane had now been moved into the Gentleman Gaoler’s house next door.

  No one, it appears, had made any attempt to intercede for Jane. If her mother had taken the opportunity to speak up for her when she saw the queen at New Hall on 30 July it was not reported, and Jane herself now proceeded to write to Mary. It was a long letter, the original of which has disappeared. It survives only in an Italian translation retranslated into English, and gives Jane’s own version of events from her marriage to Guildford Dudley to her early days in the Tower.

  She freely admitted having done very wrong in accepting the crown and having listened to the persuasions of those who appeared at the time to be wise, ‘not only to myself but also to a good part of the realm’, but who had since proved the contrary. Indeed, she knew her criminal want of prudence was so serious that, ‘but for the goodness and clemency of the queen’, she had no hope of pardon. Jane did, though, feel there were mitigating circumstances, ‘it being known that the error imputed to me has not altogether been caused by myself. Because, although my fault may be great, and I confess it to be so, nevertheless I am charged and esteemed guilty more than I have deserved. For whereas I might take upon me that of which I was not worthy, yet no one can ever say either that I sought it as my own, or that I was pleased with it.’10

  Mary believed her. She had always had a fondness for her little cousin in spite of her heresy and her blunt outspokenness. At least you always knew where you were with Jane, and Mary, transparently honest herself, appreciated that quality in others. In fact, while her brief, incredulous glow of happiness lasted, the queen was ready to call the whole world her friend, innocently believing that the country in general hated the new ways as much as she did and that the great mass of the people were only waiting for a lead to return thankfully to the fold of the true mother church. Living for so many years in rural retreat surrounded by her Catholic household, Mary had completely failed to realise just how strongly a nationalistic form of Protestantism had taken hold in London and the south-east during the past decade, and she had seriously misinterpreted the nature of the popular welcome she had received. The people might be happy to be rid of the Dudleys and genuinely pleased to see the true line of the Tudor succession re-established, but this did not mean they were necessarily prepared to submit once more to the authority of the Bishop of Rome.

  For a time Mary clung to her hopes of a peaceful reconciliation. She told the Council on 12 August that she did not wish to ‘constrain other men’s consciences’, trusting God would put a persuasion of the truth into their hearts, and shortly afterwards a proclamation was issued in which the queen expressed her desire that the religion she herself had professed from infancy would now be quietly and charitably embraced by all her subjects; but she was not minded to compel them – not at any rate until such time ‘as further order, by common consent, might be taken therein’. Meanwhile, she willed them to forbear ‘those newfound devilish terms of papist or heretic’. But if Mary was prepared to be patient and listen to those who were warning her to be cautious at first in matters of religion, there were some things over which her conscience would not allow her to be cautious. She had, for example, worried a good deal about Edward’s funeral, feeling it would be wrong to let her unhappy, misguided little brother go to his grave unhallowed by the rites of Holy Church. In the end she was persuaded to compromise. Archbishop Cranmer read the new English burial service over his godson in Westminster Abbey, while the queen attended a solemn requiem mass in the ancient Norman chapel in the White Tower. Mass, although still officially illegal, was now being regularly celebrated at court with the Privy Council (whose consciences were apparently as elastic as their loyalty) attending in a body, but within a month of Northumberland’s fall ominous signs of a Protestant backlash had begun to manifest themselves in the streets of the capital.

  The chances of establishing a lasting relationship between the Catholic queen and her independently minded subjects were not helped by Mary’s obvious, understandable but unwise reliance on Simon Renard (who was to take over officially as the Emperor’s resident ambassador in October) in preference to her English councillors. Renard’s real business, of course, was to see off the French and rebuild the Anglo-Imperial alliance by negotiating the Spanish marriage which, in the event, would not only poison the political atmosphere but also wreck Mary’s personal life beyond recovery. First, though, it was necessary to guide the inexperienced queen through the tricky opening weeks of her reign and Renard soon discovered she was quite unlike any ruler he had ever had dealings with before.

  As well as urging that his ‘good sister and cousin’ should be advised not to be over-hasty in reforming matters of religion, the Emperor was also anxious that, for the sake of England’s internal peace and quiet, Mary should, as far as possible, be magnanimous towards her enemies. ‘For God’s sake,’ he wrote on 29 July, ‘let her moderate the lust of vengeance that probably burns in her supporters who have received injuries from the other party. … Our cousin’s great prudence will tell her that the results might be most regrettable.’11

  But it appeared that Mary was only too ready to be magnanimous. Indeed, she would have been ready to pardon the duke of Northumberland himself if the Emperor had wished it. ‘As to Jane of Suffolk, whom they tried to make queen,’ wrote Renard, suppressing his exasperation with some difficulty, ‘she [Mary] could not be induced to consent that she should die.’ All the more so because Mary apparently believed that Jane’s marriage to Guildford Dudley was invalid, ‘as she was previously betrothed by a binding promise … to a servitor of the Bishop of Winchester’. The identity of this mysterious fiancé remains unclear, unless perhaps it was a mistake for the earl of Hertford, but in any case Mary was firmly convinced of Jane’s innocence of any complicity in Northumberland’s intrigues and plots. Her conscience, she declared, would not permit her to have a blameless young creature put to death.

  Horrified, the ambassador pointed out as forcefully as he dared that, although Jane might be morally innocent, the fact remained that she had actually borne the title of queen – a title which could always be revived at some later date to trouble the succession to the Crown. It was also necessary to remember that, unfortunately, ‘power and tyranny had sometimes more force, especially in affairs of Sta
te, than right or justice’ and Renard hastily dredged up an example from Roman history when the Emperor Theodosius had felt obliged to order the execution of Maximus and Victor his son, ‘notwithstanding his tender age’. But Mary was not to be moved. She did, though, promise to take ‘the greatest possible care for the future’ before setting the Lady Jane at liberty! Defeated, Renard could only shrug his shoulders and hope, without much conviction, that the queen would not soon have cause to regret her extraordinary clemency.12

  There was, of course, no question of a pardon for the duke of Northumberland, and on 18 August he and his eldest son and the marquess of Northampton were tried and convicted by their peers in Westminster Hall. Next day another batch of lesser conspirators – Andrew Dudley, Sir John Gates, once Edward VI’s Captain of the Guard, his brother Henry, and Thomas Palmer, Northumberland’s instrument in the original attack on the Protector Somerset – were also tried and convicted, but only the duke, ‘the great wheel’ of the attempted coup, John Gates and Thomas Palmer actually suffered the penalty of high treason. Their execution date was fixed for Monday 21 August and all the preparations had been made when John Dudley suddenly announced that he wished to be reconciled to the Catholic faith. Whether this was from a genuine concern for his immortal soul, a desperate last-minute hope of pardon or, perhaps more likely, an attempt to save something from the wreck of his fortunes for his wife and children, the government was naturally anxious to make the most of such a valuable propaganda point, and sentence was respited for twenty-four hours to allow the duke to make his peace with God. So, at about nine o’clock on the morning of the 22nd, in a carefully staged public spectacle, Northumberland, together with the marquess of Northampton, Andrew Dudley, Henry Gates and Thomas Palmer, was escorted to the chapel of St Peter ad Vincula by Tower Green to attend mass, which, according to one rather scornful witness, was celebrated with all the elaborate business of elevation of the Host, pax giving, blessing, crossing, ‘breathing’, turning about, ‘and all the other rites and accidents of old time appertaining’. When the time came for the prisoners to receive the sacrament, Northumberland turned to the congregation, saying: “‘My masters, I let you all to understand that I do most faithfully believe this is the very right and true way, out of the which true religion you and I have been seduced this sixteen years past, by the false and erroneous preaching of the new preachers. … And I do believe the holy sacrament here most assuredly to be our Saviour and Redeemer Jesus Christ; and this I pray you all to testify, and pray for me.” After which words he kneeled down and asked all men forgiveness, and likewise forgave all men.’ The Lady Jane, added the chronicler, ‘looking through the window saw the duke and the rest going to the church’.13

  Northumberland had sent a frantic appeal to the earl of Arundel begging for his intercession:

  Alas, my good lord, is my crime so heinous as no redemption but my blood can wash away the spots thereof? An old proverb there is, and that most true, that a living dog is better than a dead lion. Oh! that it would please her good grace to give me life, yea the life of a dog, if I might but live and kiss her feet and spend both life and all in her honourable services. … Oh! good my lord, remember how sweet life is and how bitter the contrary. Spare not your speech and pains, for God, I hope, hath not shut out all hopes of comfort from me in that gracious, princely and womanlike heart.14

  But neither mercy nor comfort had been forthcoming and on 22 August, standing on the scaffold on Tower Hill, forty-three years almost to the day since his father had stood in the same place for the same reason, the duke repeated his solemn apostasy in the presence of a crowd of several thousand spectators and there were, it was thought, ‘a large number turned with his words’. John Dudley has always had a bad press from historians and he was undoubtedly a single-mindedly ruthless and none too scrupulous political operator but, at the same time, it should in fairness be remembered that in the bitterly faction-ridden atmosphere of the time it was the strong and the ruthless who survived. Northumberland had served two generations of Tudors faithfully and had, at his trial, gone out of his way to exonerate Jane from having aspired to the crown – rather she had ‘by enticement and force’ been made to accept it.15

  Not that Jane was grateful. Just a week after the duke’s beheading, on Tuesday 29 August the author of The Chronicle of Queen Jane (generally thought to have been Rowland Lee, an official of the Royal Mint living in the Tower) dropped in to dine at the house of his friend Partridge, the Gentleman Gaoler. There he found the Lady Jane, who had chosen to eat with the family that day, sitting in the place of honour ‘at the board’s end’, attended by her page and one of her gentlewomen. Gracious and self-possessed, Jane gave Master Partridge and his guest permission to remain covered in her presence, ‘commanding Partridge and me to put on our caps’, drank the visitor’s health and bade him ‘heartily welcome’.

  Talk at the dinner table turned naturally to current affairs. ‘The Queen’s majesty is a merciful princess,’ said Jane, who knew by this time that her life was to be spared. ‘I beseech God she may long continue, and send his bountiful grace upon her.’ After this, recorded the diarist, ‘we fell in discourse on matters of religion’. Jane wanted to know who had preached at Paul’s Cross the previous Sunday. Then she asked: ‘Have they mass in London?’ Yes, answered Lee cautiously, ‘in some places’. ‘It may be so,’ said Jane. ‘It is not so strange as the sudden conversion of the late duke, for who would have thought he would have so done?’ ‘Perchance he thereby hoped to have had his pardon,’ suggested someone and thus released the floodgates of Jane’s indignation. She cried out:

  Pardon! Woe worth him! he hath brought me and our stock in most miserable calamity and misery by his exceeding ambition. But for the answering that he hoped for life by his turning, though other men be of that opinion, I utterly am not: for what man is there living, I pray you, although he had been innocent, that would hope for life in that case; being in the field against the queen in person as general, and after his taking so hated and evil spoken of by the commons? and at his coming into prison so wondered at [reviled] as the like was never heard by any man’s time. Who was judge that he should hope for pardon, whose life was odious to all men? But what will ye more? like as his life was wicked and full of dissimulation, so was his end thereafter. I pray God, I, nor no friend of mine, die so. Should I, who am young and in my few years, forsake my faith for the love of life? Nay, God forbid! much more he should not, whose fatal course, although he had lived his just number of years, could not have long continued. But life was sweet, it appeared; so he might have lived, you will say, he did not care how. Indeed the reason is good; for he that would have lived in chains to have had his life, by like would leave no other mean [un]attempted. But God be merciful to us, for he sayeth, Whoso denieth him before men, he will not know him in his Father’s kingdom.

  ‘With this and much like talk the dinner passed away,’ wrote Rowland Lee, to whom we are indebted for a splendidly revealing account of Jane Grey in full and vigorous flow. The party ended in a polite exchange of compliments, Lee thanking Lady Jane for condescending to accept him in her company and Jane thanking Partridge for bringing ‘this gentleman to dinner’. ‘Well, madam,’ responded the Gaoler apologetically, ‘we were somewhat bold, not knowing that your ladyship dined below until we found your ladyship there.’ On this note of mutual courtesy the two men took their leave, Rowland Lee surely hurrying away to record his interesting experience while it was fresh in his mind.16

  As well as vividly illustrating Lady Jane’s opinion of the late duke of Northumberland and her own stern religious philosophy, Lee’s account makes it clear that the conditions of her imprisonment were not too disagreeable. She was permitted a staff of four attendants – two waiting gentlewomen, Mrs Tylney and Mrs Jacob, a manservant and her old nurse, Mrs Ellen – while the sum of ninety shillings a week had been allocated out of government funds for her board and lodging, with a further allowance of twenty shillings a week f
or each of the servants. Partridge and his wife were treating her with respectful consideration. She was allowed to walk in the queen’s garden. Nobody was bullying her and she no longer had to cope with the oppressive demands of her parents, her husband or her in-laws. She had books, peace and quiet and leisure for study, plus the queen’s assurance of life and eventual liberty. Jane would not have needed to be told that, all things considered, she had escaped exceedingly lightly. But her evident pleasure at seeing a new face at the dinner table indicates that she was beginning to suffer the boredom which is the inevitable lot of every prisoner and no doubt she missed the stimulus of intellectual companionship and conversation.

  Meanwhile the summer, which had been unusually hot and sultry, began to turn into autumn and life in the Gentleman Gaoler’s house continued on its uneventful course. In the Tower some prisoners were released on payment of hefty fines, among them King Edward’s old tutor the famous Greek scholar Sir John Cheke, and a couple of judges, Sir Roger Cholmley and Edward Montagu; while two prominent Protestant churchmen, Bishop Hugh Latimer and Archbishop Thomas Cranmer, were brought in. Some of the Dudley wives were given leave to visit their husbands, while the Dudley brothers were now being allowed to exercise on the leads – that is, on the roof of their prison. At the end of September there was a renewed flurry of activity in the royal apartments as the court came briefly back into residence preparatory to the queen’s coronation and the traditional eve-of-coronation Recognition Procession through the city to Westminster. None of this had anything to do with Jane. Her sixteenth birthday came and went and she remained, apparently forgotten, in her quarters overlooking Tower Green.

  The first parliament of the new reign met on 5 October and one of its first acts was to repeal the 1534 Act of Succession and declare the marriage of the queen’s parents to have been good and lawful after all. It also repealed all the religious legislation passed in her brother’s time, thus in effect returning the English church to the state in which Henry VIII had left it, which well suited all those members of both Houses who had done so nicely out of the general share-out of church property in the 1540s. By and large it also satisfied the silent majority who had disliked the desecration of their parish churches and the violence of the more militant reformers. It was less acceptable to the militants themselves and already there had been hostile demonstrations at the weekly sermons at Paul’s Cross.