‘A man of high nobility by birth’, pronounced Holinshed’s Chronicle, ‘and of nature to his friends gentle and courteous, more easy indeed to be led than was thought expedient, of stomach nevertheless stout and hardy, hasty and soon kindled but pacified straight again … upright and plain in his private dealings.’19 But in public dealings he was shifty and deceitful, with an unerring instinct for picking the losing side. A weak man, irascible and unstable, and possessing the soul of a petty crook, Henry Grey paid the usual forfeit to the executioner on Tower Hill on Friday 23 February. Like his daughter, he was attended on the scaffold by a Catholic priest, but he died, so he assured the spectators, ‘in the faith of Christ, trusting to be saved by his blood only and by none other trumpery’. Holinshed also records that, at the last moment, someone in the crowd called out: ‘My lord, how shall I do for the money that you do owe me?’ And the duke said, ‘Alas, good fellow, I pray thee trouble me not now, but go thy way to my officers.’ Then he repeated the Lord’s Prayer and laid down his head on the block. ‘And the executioner took the axe and at the first chop stroke off his head, and held it up to the people, according to the common custom.’20 History does not relate whether the man in the crowd got his money.
Thomas Grey, who had been picked up at Oswestry near the Welsh border as he tried to make his way to the coast, was executed towards the end of April and was among the last of the Wyatt conspirators to suffer. By that time the queen was beginning to issue pardons to convicted rebels and London juries were beginning to return ‘not guilty’ verdicts. Lord John Grey, although tried and ‘cast’ as a traitor, was later pardoned and released, as were the surviving Dudley brothers. Edward Courtenay and the Princess Elizabeth also escaped with their lives – much to the irritation of Simon Renard, who did not hesitate to express his opinion that the queen had wasted a heaven-sent opportunity to rid herself of these two so obviously dangerous enemies of the state.
By May the prisons were emptying. Edward Courtenay was consigned to a period of house arrest at Fotheringhay Castle, whence he would presently be sent to travel abroad and would find his death from fever in Italy. Elizabeth, after her brief but well-publicised imprisonment in the Tower, was also dispatched to languish in a remote country house – the old royal hunting lodge at Woodstock in Oxfordshire – while Mary left for Richmond Palace to prepare for her wedding, which was expected to take place some time before the end of June. Gradually the rotting corpses and other depressing reminders of the winter of discontent were being tidied out of sight. It looked like the end of a chapter, and in Strasburg and Zurich there was mourning. ‘I hear nothing else from England, except that everything is getting worse and worse,’ wrote Peter Martyr to Henry Bullinger on 3 April. ‘Jane, who was formerly queen, conducted herself at her execution with the greatest fortitude and godliness, as did also her father and her husband. God be thanked that they persevered in the confession of the true faith!’21 Another correspondent, writing from London that spring, bewailed the overthrow and near extinction of the very noble family of Grey ‘on account of their saving profession of our Saviour, and the cause of the gospel’. Yet, he went on, ‘all godly and truly Christian persons have not so much reason to mourn over the ruin of a family so illustrious, as to rejoice that the latest action of her [Jane’s] life was terminated in bearing testimony to the name of Jesus; and the rather because those who rest with Christ in the kingdom of his father will not have to behold with their own eyes the wretched and lamentable overthrow of our nation’.22
The dukedom of Suffolk was now once more extinct, but it was not quite the end of the story. The widowed duchess consoled herself with even greater rapidity than once her father had done. Apparently undismayed by the violent deaths of her daughter, son-in-law, husband and brother-in-law, within a matter of weeks she had married again – to young Master Adrian Stokes, who is variously described as having been her groom of the chambers, steward or master of the horse. Adrian Stokes may possibly have been the son of John Stokes, the queen’s brewer, who supplied the Suffolks with wine and beer, but otherwise there seems to be little or no information about him, except that he was fifteen years younger than his bride, red-haired and with a flashy taste in dress. All the eighteenth-and nineteenth-century commentators were scathing about the match, both because of its unseemly haste and because of the social class of the bridegroom. Plainly the duchess had married beneath her, but it does not follow that Stokes was a mere illiterate yokel. On the contrary, there is some evidence to suggest that he was an educated man. Most likely he was one of those aspiring gentleman servants who swarmed in every great household; eager, resourceful young men drawn from the ranks of the rising professional and merchant classes who were looking for an opportunity to carve out a career in the service of an influential patron. In a society which saw nothing demeaning in the concept of personal service, this was a perfectly acceptable and well-recognised, if chancy, method of getting one’s start in life.
Frances Grey was following a family tradition by marrying into a lower social stratum, but in her case there may also have been an element of self-preservation. She was now, after all, in a potentially quite dangerously exposed position: very close to the throne and an eligible widow (she was still only thirty-six) she might well find herself being used, just as her daughter had been, by some group of disaffected Protestants. The acquisition of such an obviously plebeian husband would offer some safeguard against any unwelcome attentions of that kind. The marriage does not seem to have affected her relationship with the queen. Frances continued to be in high favour at court and Mary was going out of her way to be kind to Katherine and Mary, perhaps in an attempt to make up for executing their father and sister. Frances gave birth to another child in November, eight-and-a-half months after her second marriage, but the infant, a girl, died the same day. Sad Mary Tudor died unlamented in November 1558 to be succeeded by the half-sister she had so bitterly resented. Frances was to die the following October after a long illness and ‘out of the great affection she bore the duchess and because of her kinship’ the new Queen Elizabeth gave her a royal funeral in Westminster Abbey. ‘The most noble and excellent princess, the Lady Frances, late Duchess of Suffolk’ was laid to rest in St Edmund’s Chapel under a pompous alabaster monument, paid for by Adrian Stokes – a stark contrast to that unmarked dishonoured grave under the stones in St Peter-ad-Vincula by Tower Green.
Katherine and Mary, now aged nineteen and fourteen, were still at court and still unspoken for – and their future, especially Katherine’s, was the subject of a good deal of speculation. If the controversial provisions of Henry VIII’s will were to be followed, Katherine had now inherited the position of heir presumptive and as such had become a figure of international political importance, but unhappily she possessed none of the qualities of tact, discretion or even basic common sense which might have helped her to survive in the political jungle. To make matters worse, she did not get on with the queen, telling the Spanish ambassador that she experienced ‘nothing but discourtesy’ from her cousin.
The fact that Elizabeth and Katherine Grey were on bad terms was soon being noticed in certain circles and during the second half of 1559 Thomas Challoner, the English ambassador in Brussels, warned the queen about rumours that the Spaniards were planning to kidnap Lady Katherine. Apparently the idea was to marry her to Don Carlos, Philip’s imbecile son, or ‘with some other person of less degree if less depended on her’, and then keep her as a possible counter-claimant to France’s Mary Queen of Scots should the occasion arise. Since Katherine was known to be of ‘discontented mind’ and not regarded or esteemed by the queen, it was thought there would be no difficulty in enticing her away.23
In fact, it is unlikely that Katherine even knew about any of these conjectural Spanish intrigues or that she took any interest in the ramifications of European politics. In 1559 she was interested only in her own plans to marry Edward Seymour, earl of Hertford, the same who had once been suggested as a bridegr
oom for her sister Jane. She would, of course, have known him since childhood, but it was during Queen Mary’s reign, when Katherine had been staying with the duchess of Somerset at Hanworth, that the two young people had first begun ‘to accompany together’ and to think about marriage. The idea of the match had been discussed in the Seymour and Grey families in the spring of 1559 and Katherine’s mother had agreed to approach the queen for her consent. But unfortunately the approach was never made. Frances became seriously ill in the summer and by November she was dead. The lovers now had no influential person to speak for them and the whole affair might well have died a natural death had not Hertford’s sister, Lady Jane Seymour, decided to take a hand.
Jane Seymour was one of Katherine’s fellow maids of honour, an ambitious and forceful young woman, determined that her brother should not lose the chance of making such a brilliant match. It was Jane who brought the couple together again – they had quarrelled when Hertford began to pay attention to another, quite inferior girl – and it was almost certainly she who put the disastrous idea of a secret marriage into their heads. The three of them met in Lady Jane’s private closet at Whitehall some time in October 1560 and there Katherine and Edward Seymour plighted their troth. It was agreed that the wedding should take place at the earl’s house in Canon Row ‘the next time that the queen’s highness should take any journey’ and Jane undertook to have a clergyman standing by.
Opportunity came early in December when the queen decided to go down to Eltham for a few days’ hunting. Katherine pleaded toothache and Jane, who was already consumptive, was often ailing. As soon as Elizabeth was safely out of the way, the two girls slipped out of the palace and walked along the sands by the river to Canon Row. The marriage ceremony was performed in Hertford’s bedroom and afterwards, while Lady Jane kept guard in the next room, the newly married couple went to bed and had ‘carnal copulation’. They did not have long together – questions would be asked if Katherine failed to appear at dinner with the Controller of the Household – and after about an hour and a half they had to start scrambling back into their clothes.
Katherine might have achieved her immediate ambition, but her altered status made little practical difference to her circumstances. She and Hertford still had to be content with furtive meetings at Whitehall, Greenwich or Canon Row, odd hours snatched whenever they could manage it. How long they expected to keep their secret is impossible to say. Neither of them appears to have given any serious thought to the question of how they were going to break the news, but it was not long before events began to catch up with them. Jane Seymour died in March 1561 and without her help it was more difficult for them to meet. Then the queen decided to send the earl of Hertford abroad as a companion to William Cecil’s son, who was going to France to finish his education. This was an unexpected complication, to be followed by another, not so unexpected. Katherine thought she might be pregnant, but could not or would not say for certain. Her husband went abroad in April, probably rather relieved to escape, at least temporarily, from a situation that was rapidly getting out of hand, but promising to return if she wrote to tell him she was definitely with child.
Left alone, Katherine seems at last to have begun to realise the enormity of what she had done. The fact of her pregnancy could no longer be ignored and already some suspicious glances were being cast at her shape. In July she had to accompany the queen on a progress to East Anglia and at the beginning of August, while the court was at Ipswich, the secret finally came out.
The queen, understandably, was furious. She had never liked Katherine, but considered she had always treated her fairly. Now the girl had repaid her with ingratitude, deceit and perhaps worse. Anything which touched the succession touched Elizabeth on her most sensitive spot. She was never to forget her own experiences as ‘a second person’ in her sister’s reign, and the intrigues which inevitably surrounded an heir presumptive. Now, in the activities of Katherine Grey she had caught a sulphurous whiff of treason. Katherine’s choice of husband was also unfortunate. The Seymours had a reputation for political ambition and their connection with the royal family was uncomfortably close. If the young Hertfords were to produce a son, it would complicate still further an already sufficiently complicated dynastic situation. The new countess was therefore promptly committed to the Tower, where the earl soon joined her, and the government’s investigators proceeded to extract from them every detail of that hole-and-corner marriage in the house at Canon Row.24
On 24 September Katherine duly gave birth to a healthy son, who was christened after his father in the chapel of St Peter ad Vincula, in close proximity to the headless remains of both his grandfathers, two of his great-uncles and his aunt Jane Grey. The most exhaustive enquiries had failed to uncover any evidence of a plot involving the baby’s parents – although the queen was still not entirely convinced – and as it was no longer a treasonable offence per se for a member of the royal family to marry without the sovereign’s consent, Elizabeth was obliged to resort to the expedient of attacking the validity of the marriage. Since the only witness to the ceremony was now dead and the officiating clergyman had vanished without trace, this did not present much difficulty – especially as Katherine was predictably unable to produce the deed of jointure her husband had given her before he left for France. This document, she tearfully informed her interrogators, had been put safely away, but ‘with moving from place to place at progress time, it is lost and she cannot tell where it is become’. In short, although the couple agreed ‘on the time, place and company of their marriage’, they could not produce a scrap of evidence to prove that it had ever taken place. The queen, therefore, put the whole matter in the hands of the ecclesiastical authorities and on 10 May 1562 the archbishop of Canterbury gave judgement that there had been no marriage between the earl of Hertford and Lady Katherine Grey. He censured them both for having committed fornication and recommended a heavy fine and imprisonment during the queen’s pleasure.
The culprits remained in the Tower but there were some compensations. The Lieutenant, Sir Edward Warner, was a kindly man. He allowed Katherine to keep her pet dogs and monkeys, in spite of the damage these quite unhousetrained creatures were doing to government property. He also, on occasion, allowed her to see her husband, turning a discreetly blind eye to unlocked doors, and during the summer of 1562 the Hertfords enjoyed the nearest approach to a normal married life they were ever to know. Then, in February 1563 came the inevitable sequel – Katherine had another baby, another healthy son.
This time the queen was really angry. She found it very difficult to forgive her cousin for her apparently cynical disregard for the authority and prestige of the Crown; for the fact that instead of showing contrition, or even any understanding of the nature of her crime, she had deliberately gone and done it again. To one of Elizabeth’s highly disciplined intelligence and acute political awareness it naturally seemed incredible that Katherine could simply have been following her natural urges rather than acting from premeditated malice or ambition.
The queen’s temper and the Hertfords’ prospects were not improved by the existence of widespread public sympathy for the young couple. Their romantic story had appealed to the imagination of the Londoners who felt that their inability to prove their marriage was more their misfortune than their fault, and in other parts of the country, too, ignorant folk were not hesitating to say openly that they were man and wife ‘and why should man and wife be let from coming together?’25 This attitude was not shared by the authorities who considered it was high time that the earl was made to realise just what it meant to have ‘so arrogantly and contemptuously offended his prince’.
Neither Hertford nor Katherine was to be left in any doubt in future as to what it meant to have offended their prince. (Nor was Edward Warner, who had been summarily sacked from his post and temporarily incarcerated in his own prison.) There were no more unlocked doors or stolen meetings, and a serious outbreak of plague in the capital that summer provide
d an excuse for separating the little family still more completely. The earl and the elder child were sent to live under house arrest with his mother at Hanworth, while Katherine and the new baby left in the opposite direction, to her surviving uncle Lord John Grey at Pirgo in Essex, with strict instructions that she was to be kept ‘as in custody’ and not allowed any unsupervised contact with the outside world.
There was no question now about Katherine’s contrition. John Grey reported that his erring niece was indeed ‘a penitent and sorrowful woman for the queen’s displeasure’ and Katherine herself wrote to Secretary William Cecil on 3 September, beseeching his help ‘for the obtaining of the queen’s majesty’s most gracious pardon and favour towards me, which with upstretched hands and down bent knees, from the bottom of my heart, most humbly I crave’.26
But no immediate signs of either pardon or favour were forthcoming and John Grey was soon writing again to remind Cecil of his promise of friendship and goodwill. The Lady Katherine, it seems, was pining away for the want of the queen’s favour. She was eating hardly anything and was permanently dissolved in tears: ‘I never came near her but I found her weeping, or else saw by her face that she had wept.’ Lord John was, in fact, becoming seriously worried about her health. ‘She is so fraughted with phlegm, by reason of thought, weeping and sitting still, that many hours she is like to be overcome therewith.’27 The wretched Katherine’s troubles were aggravated by the fact that she appears to have been virtually destitute. She had no money, no plate and, according to John Grey, was so poorly furnished that he was ashamed to let William Cecil have an inventory of her possessions. Lord John had reluctantly supplied the most glaring deficiencies, but he baulked at paying for his charge’s keep and when the queen complained about his expenses he retaliated by sending a detailed account to Cecil. The weekly rate for ‘my lady of Hertford’s board, her child and her folks’ amounted to £6 10s 8d. As this included eight servants and even five shillings to the widow who washed the baby’s clothes, it sounds reasonable enough, but Elizabeth, who was never averse to having things both ways, decreed that henceforward the earl of Hertford should be made responsible for Katherine’s maintenance and he was ordered to pay the sum of £114 to the Greys.28
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