James Haddon, that earnest professor of the gospel, was deeply saddened by the new turn of events. ‘Alas! what a severe loss have we sustained!’ he wrote to Henry Bullinger on 30 November. ‘Alas! how true religion is banished! Alas! how justly is the wrath of God stirred up against us! I dare not write more; you must understand the rest. … Pour forth your prayers, I entreat you, for me and those like me. … What will be the result, God knows, and whether this may not be the last letter that I shall be able to write to you. …’17
In fact, Haddon was soon to join the exodus of committed Protestants who took themselves and their consciences to the more congenial climates of Strasburg, Zurich and Geneva during what was to become known as the Marian Reaction. On the other hand Dr Harding, also once domestic chaplain to the Suffolk family, had ‘fallen from the truth of God’s most Holy Word’ and followed his more prudent brethren back into the shelter of the Roman fold, thus incurring the freely expressed censure of his former pupil. Jane wrote:
I cannot but marvel at thee and lament thy case, who seemed sometime to be the lively member of Christ, but now the deformed imp of the devil; sometime the beautiful temple of God, but now the stinking and filthy kennel of Satan; sometime the unspotted spouse of Christ, but now the unshamefaced paramour of AntiChrist; sometime my faithful brother, but now a stranger and apostate; sometime a stout Christian soldier, but now a cowardly runaway.18
Nineteenth-century biographers of Jane Grey had some difficulty with this sustained piece of invective, which does not exactly fit in with the received image of their heroine; and they made strenuous efforts to dissociate her from the ‘vulgar polemic’ of this ‘coarsely violent epistle’, refusing to believe that such unbecoming language could have issued from the mind or pen of an amiable young female. Jane’s own contemporaries took a more robust view and welcomed the Harding letter – which was later printed both as a popular pamphlet and in John Foxe’s best-selling Book of Martyrs – as proceeding from the zealous heart of a justly aggrieved Christian lady. The Elizabethans saw nothing unbecoming in such epithets as ‘sink of sin’, ‘child of perdition’ or even ‘white-livered milksop’ being applied to someone who had let the side down as badly as Harding had done.
‘Wherefore hast thou instructed others to be strong in Christ …’ demanded the aggrieved Christian lady ‘when thou thyself dost rather choose to live miserably (with shame) in this world, than to die gloriously and reign in honour with Christ to the end of all eternity? … Oh wretched and unhappy man what art thou but dust and ashes, and wilt thou resist thy maker, that formed and fashioned thee; wilt thou now forsake him that called thee … to be an ambassador and messenger of his eternal word? … How canst thou, having knowledge, or how darest thou neglect the law of the Lord and follow the vain tradition of men, and whereas thou hast been a public professor of his name, become now a defacer of his glory? Wilt thou refuse the true God, and worship the invention of man, the golden calf, the whore of Babylon, the Romish religion, the abominable idol, the most wicked mass? Wilt thou torment again, rend and tear the most precious body of our Saviour Christ with thy bodily and fleshly teeth, without the breaking whereof upon the cross, our sins and transgressions could else no way be redeemed? … Can neither the punishment of the Israelites … nor the terrible threatenings of the prophets, nor the curses of God’s own mouth, fear thee to honour any other god than him?19
Jane went on to batter her target with a barrage of texts from the Old and New Testaments, before exhorting him to repentance:
Disdain not to come again with the lost son, seeing you have so wandered with him: be not ashamed to turn again with him from the swill of strangers … acknowledging that you have sinned against heaven and earth. … Be not abashed to come again with Mary and to weep bitterly with Peter, not only with shedding of tears out of your bodily eyes, but also pouring out the streams of your heart, to wash away, out of the sight of God, the filth and mire of your offensive fall. Be not abashed to say with the publican, ‘Lord be merciful unto me a sinner’. … Last of all, let the lively remembrance of the last day be always before your eyes, remembering the terror that such shall be in at that time, with the runagates and fugitives from Christ … and contrariwise, the inestimable joys prepared for them that, fearing no peril, nor dreading death, have manfully fought and victoriously triumphed over all power of darkness, over hell, death and damnation through their most redoubted captain, Christ, who now stretcheth out his arms to receive you.20
The effect of this onslaught on Dr Harding does not appear to have been recorded but his regrettable defection was certainly not an isolated case. The great majority of parish priests seem to have reverted uncomplainingly, or with relief, to the familiar rituals of King Henry’s day, taking their flocks with them. In the more remote and rural parts of the country the drastic changes of the past five years had, after all, scarcely had time to take root, but in London it was different. The foreign congregations were already leaving and some of the more outspoken preachers had been arrested. The Revd Thomas Mountain, of St Michael’s Paternoster, got into serious trouble with the newly restored bishop of Winchester for having celebrated communion according to the 1552 Prayer Book on the Sunday following the coronation, and on 6 December, the day parliament rose, a dead dog, tonsured like a priest and a rope round its neck ‘with a scandalous writing attached to it, signifying that the priests and bishops should be hanged’, was thrown into Mary’s presence chamber. ‘The Queen’, wrote Simon Renard, ‘was displeased at this, and told Parliament that such acts might move her to a kind of justice further removed from clemency than she could wish.’21
Renard, who tended to see rebellious heretics behind every bush, was already worried that Mary’s insistence on following a policy of clemency and of substituting fines for executions was being interpreted as weakness. ‘Her authority has suffered from the pecuniary compositions for offences, and people have come to judge her actions so freely that they go so far as to laugh at them.’ It was for this reason, so he heard, that the queen had now decided to take a different course, ‘and to order the four sons of the duke of Northumberland, and Jane of Suffolk, to be tried and sentenced to receive capital punishment for the crimes they have committed’.22 This dispatch was dated 19 September, but it was mid-November before Jane finally stood trial, her co-defendants being her husband, two of his brothers, Ambrose and Henry, and Archbishop Thomas Cranmer.
The little procession, headed by the Archbishop, was escorted through the streets to the Guildhall by the Lieutenant of the Tower and a force of four hundred halberdiers, and preceded by the chief Gentleman Warder carrying the axe. Lady Jane was dressed entirely in black – black cloth gown, a cape lined and trimmed with velvet, a French hood, also black with a velvet billament or border, a prayer book bound in black velvet hanging from her girdle and another book of devotions held open in her hands – and walked behind her husband, her two women servants attending her. The proceedings, held before an impressive array of peers and judges, were brief and formal. The defendants pleaded guilty to the charges of high treason and sentence was duly pronounced by Richard Morgan, newly appointed Chief Justice of the Common Pleas: hanging, drawing and quartering for Cranmer and the Dudley brothers; burning or beheading at the queen’s pleasure for Jane. Then came the return journey to the Tower, the edge of the headsman’s axe now turned towards the prisoners.23 But it was still by no means certain when, or even whether, the sentence would be carried out. Already another fate was being reserved for Thomas Cranmer, while the general opinion remained that Lady Jane and the young Dudleys would be spared. ‘It is believed that Jane will not die,’ wrote Simon Renard on the day after the trial; and again, three days later: ‘As for Jane, I am told her life is safe.’24
The social position of the Grey family in the late autumn of 1553 must surely have been uniquely unusual. While her eldest daughter and son-in-law remained in the Tower, convicted traitors under sentence of death, albeit a suspended sentence, the
duchess of Suffolk was to be found preening herself at court, apparently in high favour. On at least one occasion that winter the queen had chosen to give her cousin Frances precedence over her sister Elizabeth, with whom she was on increasingly bad terms. In his eagerness to cut his connections with the Greys, the earl of Pembroke had repudiated his son’s marriage with the Lady Katherine and packed her off back to her parents; and Katherine – who was growing into a very pretty girl, the only one of the sisters to have inherited some of their Tudor grandmother’s famous beauty – was now at court with her mother, she and plain little Mary Grey having been admitted to the privileged ranks of the queen’s maids of honour. Even the duke of Suffolk, reported Renard on 17 November, had ‘made his confession as to religion’ and as a result had been let off (after paying a fine of £20,000) and reinstated in polite society by means of a general pardon.25 Although Renard continued to regard all the Greys with the deepest suspicion – almost as much as he did the sly and heretical Princess Elizabeth – it is hardly surprising that in the circumstances Lady Jane’s trial should have been regarded as little more than a formality and her release expected to be no more than a matter of time.
But even before Jane stood in the Guildhall to hear verdict and sentence pronounced upon her, the chain of events that would lead to her death had begun its inexorable progression. ‘In the beginning of November was the first notice among the people touching the marriage of the Queen to the King of Spain,’ noted The Chronicle of Queen Jane, and as it became generally known that Mary intended to marry her cousin Philip, son and heir of the Emperor Charles V, rumbles of disapproval, ominous as distant thunder, were immediately audible. Some people, indeed, were moved to wonder if the late unlamented duke of Northumberland was going to be proved right after all, for Philip was not merely a foreigner and a Roman Catholic – he represented the most formidable Catholic power bloc in Europe.
No responsible person, of course, questioned that the queen should marry. The idea of a single woman attempting to govern a people so notoriously unruly as the English was not to be thought of. Obviously she must have a husband to guide, comfort and protect her and undertake, as Renard delicately put it, those duties which were ‘not within woman’s province’, but in the opinion of the great majority of her subjects her wisest choice of consort would have been Edward Courtenay, the last sprig of the white Plantagenet rose. Courtenay, now in his mid-twenties, had high birth, good looks, good manners and plenty of personal charm to recommend him: ‘Le plus beau et plus agreable gentilhomme d’Angleterre’, commented Antoine de Noailles approvingly.
Mary had released Courtenay from the Tower and created him earl of Devonshire – his only crime, after all, lay in being the great-grandson of Edward IV, and his parents had been among Queen Catherine of Aragon’s most devoted friends – but although she was quite prepared to be kind to him, she made it clear that she had no intention of marrying him – or any other Englishman for that matter. Tragically, nothing in her experience had ever given her cause to love or trust her own countrymen. Ever since her unhappy teens she had been forced to rely on her mother’s kin for advice and support, and now the fact that Philip of Spain, a widower at twenty-six, happened to be the most brilliant match in Europe undoubtedly weighed far less with her than the fact that he was also the grandson of her mother’s sister.
Mary had not reached her decision lightly. Renard had first broached the subject of marriage to her in a general way as early as the end of July and it had taken him three months of patient tactful persuasion, three months of slipping in and out of back doors and up the privy stairs for quiet late evening talks to reassure the nervous queen and overcome her maidenly shrinking, her self-doubts and fears that Philip was too young for her – or she too old for him – and that in her ignorance of ‘that which was called love’ she would not be able to satisfy him; for, as she shyly confessed, she had never ‘harboured thoughts of voluptuousness, and had never considered marriage until God had been pleased to raise her to the throne …’. If the prince ‘were disposed to be amorous’, she said on another occasion, ‘such was not her desire’, for she was of the age the Emperor knew of ‘and had never harboured thoughts of love’.26
Although one of the reasons publicly advanced in favour of the queen’s marriage was to secure an heir to safeguard the succession, not many people seriously believed that Mary, at her age and with her medical history, would ever bear a child. Mary herself was not so sure. God had already worked one miracle for her. Might he not be planning to work another, to give her a son – a future Catholic king of England? For with Philip at her side and all the might of the Holy Roman Empire behind her, surely nothing could prevent her from carrying out God’s manifest purpose of leading her country back into the arms of the true Church? When, therefore, at the end of October 1553, after weeks of heart-searching and prayer, the queen finally pledged her word to Renard in the presence of the Holy Sacrament that she would marry Philip and love him perfectly, it was done with desperate sincerity and in the conviction that her answer had been divinely inspired. The fact that, despite her protestations, after so many years of barren loneliness and rejection she also yearned on a very human level to love and be loved could not of course be admitted, perhaps least of all to herself.
Knowledge of the queen’s intentions was already causing consternation, both in parliament and among her councillors. Stephen Gardiner, now Lord Chancellor, and her old friends Edward Waldegrave and Francis Englefield came to see her to plead Courtenay’s cause. Gardiner based his argument on the assertion that as the country ‘never would abide a foreigner, Courtenay was the only possible match for her’. Englefield went so far as to point out that Philip had a kingdom of his own and would not wish to leave it to come to England, while Waldegrave said bluntly that a Spanish marriage would be bound to mean war with France.27
These were cogent, logical arguments but they had little effect on Mary, and she was equally unimpressed by a parliamentary deputation, led by the Speaker of the Commons, which waited on her in November to beg her to marry one of her own subjects. Her marriage was entirely her own affair, she told them sharply. Parliament, however well meaning, ‘was not accustomed to use such language to the kings of England, nor was it suitable or respectful that it should do so. … Moreover’, she went on in a burst of petulance, ‘to force her to take a husband who would not be to her liking would be to cause her death, for if she were married against her will she would not live three months, and would have no children, wherefore the Speaker would be defeating his own ends.’28
The deputation was silenced but the Commons continued to grumble among themselves. When someone mentioned that the nation could protect itself by the ‘bonds and covenants which this prince should enter into with the queen’, someone else stood up and asked a ‘smart question’. What would happen if the bands should be broken between the husband and wife, both of them being princes in their own country? ‘Who shall be their judges? and what shall be the advantage?’ To which the answer came: ‘None, but discord, dissension, war, bloodshed, and either extreme enmity, or else that one part must at length break or yield.’29
The only Englishman who might have been able to get Mary to see the sort of trouble she was storing up for herself was Stephen Gardiner but, again unhappily, there was little trust or ease of communication between them. Mary could not forget the part that Gardiner as bishop of Winchester had once played in helping her father to divorce her mother and Gardiner, faced with a stubborn, emotional woman who had already given her confidence elsewhere, seems to have lacked both nerve and stomach for doing battle. He could argue forcefully enough with Renard but to Mary could only object rather lamely that the people would not put up with a foreigner, who would make promises that he would not keep once the marriage had been concluded. The queen retorted that her mind was made up, and if her Chancellor preferred the will of the people to her wishes, then he was not keeping his promises. Stephen Gardiner, with his long and
bitter experience of Tudor temperament, retreated, saying the matter was too dangerous to meddle with. He was, in any case, handicapped by his known partiality for Courtenay, to whom he had become much attached while they were in the Tower together. As Mary rather unkindly remarked, was it reasonable to expect her to marry someone just because the bishop had made friends with him in prison, and, so Renard heard, she went on to speak of ‘the designs of the French, Courtenay’s small power and authority, and the poverty of the kingdom, until the Chancellor told her that it would not be right to try to force her in one direction or another, and that he would obey the man she had chosen’.30
Across the Channel the French were taking a deeply gloomy view of the situation. Faced with the prospect of seeing his good sister the queen of England married to his greatest enemy, King Henri II was not convinced by Mary’s assurances that she meant to continue to live in peace and amity with her neighbours no matter whom she married. As he remarked to her ambassador Nicholas Wotton in December: ‘It is to be considered that a husband may do much with his wife; and it shall be very hard for any wife to refuse her husband anything that he shall earnestly require of her.’ Wotton had been about in the world, the king went on, and knew how subtle and crafty the Spaniards were.31 Indeed, the danger that England would be dragged into war with France was one of the most serious and, as it turned out, well-founded objections to the Spanish match.
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