Lady Jane Grey

by Plowden, Alison

  Elizabeth was not normally vindictive and once she felt satisfied that the Hertfords had thoroughly learned their lesson she might have responded to their frequent tear-stained appeals for mercy – indeed, hints to this effect had already been dropped. Unfortunately, though, in the spring of 1564 John Hales, an official in the Lord Chancellor’s department and extreme left-wing MP, which, in the Elizabethan context, meant militant Protestant activist, took it upon himself to publish a Discourse on the Succession in which he set out the superior claim of Katherine Grey over that of Mary Queen of Scots to be recognised as heir presumptive. ‘This dealing of his’, remarked William Cecil (who also privately supported Katherine Grey), ‘offendeth the Queen’s majesty very much.’29

  Hales’s crime did not merely consist of meddling in matters which were none of his business, or even his support of the Suffolk claim. More to the point was the fact that he had involved other people and had taken active steps to try to establish the legality of the Grey/Seymour alliance, consulting European jurists and procuring from them ‘sentences and counsels … maintaining the lawfulness of the Earl of Hertford’s marriage’. Lady Katherine, an Englishwoman born and bred and boasting an impeccable Protestant background, had always been first choice of heir among the influential Protestant establishment. If a viable case were now made out for the validity of her marriage, then, as the mother of two sons, her claim to be given precedence over the Stuart line would be immensely strengthened. It was not to be supposed that Mary Queen of Scots and her party would let this pass without strong protest, and the whole delicate balance of Anglo-Scottish relations – not to mention England’s relations with France and Spain – would be endangered at a time when international tension caused by the ideological Catholic versus Protestant conflict was being steadily heightened. Vexed beyond measure, Elizabeth clapped the officious Mr Hales into prison and ordered a full enquiry. She was not in the least appeased by his agitated assurances that his only thought had been to promote the Protestant Tudor line against the Catholic Mary Stuart. The succession was a matter which the queen regarded as being entirely within her own prerogative and over which she would not tolerate outside interference on any pretext.

  The dust raised by the Hales affair subsided slowly and Hales himself was released, but Katherine Grey remained under arrest. John Grey died in the autumn of 1564 and Katherine was transferred to the custody of Sir William Petre of Ingatestone, her prospects of ever being reunited with her ‘dear lord and husband’ looking as remote as ever. Then, in the summer of 1565, an element of black comedy entered the story of the Grey sisters.

  ‘Here is an unhappy chance and monstrous,’ wrote William Cecil to his friend Thomas Smith on 21 August. ‘The Sergeant Porter, being the biggest gentleman in this court, hath married secretly the Lady Mary Grey, the least of all the court. They are committed to several [separate] prisons. The offence is very great.’30 The current Spanish ambassador, Guzman da Silva, thought it worth while to pass on the news to King Philip, explaining that the queen had in her house a sister of Jane and Katherine Grey. ‘She is little, crook-backed and very ugly, and it came out yesterday that she had married a gentleman named Keys, sergeant porter at the palace. They say’, he added ominously, ‘the Queen is very much annoyed and grieved thereat.’31

  Little enough seems to be known about the background to this bizarre romance between the enormous gatekeeper, a middle-aged widower with several children, and the dwarfish nineteen-year-old Mary Grey. As a child, Mary had been briefly betrothed to her kinsman Arthur Grey of Wilton, but no other attempt had ever been made to arrange a marriage for her, and since Katherine’s disgrace it was obvious that none ever would be. Mary, who seems to have shared some, at least, of Jane’s intellectual interests as well as her stubborn independence of spirit, had therefore decided to make her own arrangements, apparently undeterred by the example of Katherine’s disastrous experience. Her attachment to Thomas Keys (whose name most probably derived from his office) is said to have begun about a year before their marriage which, as in the case of the late Lady Frances, was not quite so unequal as at first appeared, Keys being related to the highly respectable and royally connected Knollys family.

  The actual wedding had taken place at nine o’clock at night on either 10 or 12 August in the porter’s rooms over the Watergate at Whitehall. As in the case of Katherine and Edward Seymour, the officiating clergyman, described as an old man, short and very fat, failed to leave his name and address, but there were a sufficient number of witnesses present able to testify that the ceremony had actually been performed. This time, though, the authorities were not taking any risks. The unfortunate Thomas Keys was incarcerated in the Fleet prison while Mary Grey was removed to a safe distance – to Chequers in Buckinghamshire and the custody of William Hawtrey Esquire, the first of a succession of unwilling gaoler hosts. As with Katherine, Mary appears to have been virtually destitute of both money and possessions, having nothing but an old feather bed, ‘all torn and full of patches, without either bolster or counterpane … an old quilt of silk, so tattered as the cotton of it comes out’ and ‘two little pieces of old hangings, both of them not seven yards broad’. Like Katherine, Mary pined. According to Charles Brandon’s widow, the second duchess of Suffolk, now also remarried to a member of her household staff and to whose custody Mary was transferred in 1567, ‘all she has eaten these two days is not so much as a chicken’s leg’.32 Like Katherine, too, she addressed repeated and equally unavailing tear-stained appeals for forgiveness.

  Katherine, though, was writing no more letters and showing no sign of interest in the outside world. She had, it seemed, long since given up all hope of pardon or release, much less of ever seeing her husband again. In February 1567 she was living at Gosfield Hall near Halstead in Essex, in the charge of Sir John Wentworth, and in September was moved again, to Cockfield Hall, home of Sir Owen Hopton and his wife, in the remote Suffolk village of Yoxford. She was by this time in the terminal stages of tuberculosis, and soon after her arrival Sir Owen was obliged to send for one of the royal physicians to visit her. But there was nothing left for Katherine now except to die as becomingly, if less dramatically, as her sister Jane had done, and in January 1568 Owen Hopton wrote to inform William Cecil that the end was not far off.

  It came on the morning of the 27th. Between six and seven o’clock she sent for Owen Hopton and begged him, and the others present, to bear witness that she died a true Christian, that she believed herself to be saved by the death of Christ and was one that he had shed his precious blood for. Katherine then begged Hopton that he would himself ask the queen, ‘even from the mouth of a dead woman’, that she would at last ‘forgive her displeasure towards me’ and went on to plead that Elizabeth would be good to her children and ‘not impute my fault unto them, whom I give wholly unto her majesty’. Finally there were ‘certain commendations and tokens’ for her husband: the ring with a pointed diamond which he had given her when they plighted their troth in Jane Seymour’s closet in the Maidens’ Chamber at Westminster seven years before, her wedding ring and another ring engraved with a death’s head and the motto ‘While I live yours’. She asked Hertford that as she had been a true and faithful wife, he would be a loving and natural father to their children and she sent her little sons her blessing. Owen Hopton, ‘perceiving her to draw towards her end’, gave orders for the passing bell to be rung and Katherine Seymour, born Katherine Grey, ‘yielded unto God her meek spirit at nine of the clock in the morning’, having given, at least according to the official account, the smoothly polished performance expected of persons of breeding and education as they stood on the brink of eternity.33 Katherine’s last moments, if less publicly impressive than those of her elder sister, seem to have been no less dignified or, in their own way, tragic. She was twenty-seven years old. She had spent the last six-and-a-half years in prison or under house arrest – and the whole of her life under the doom of her royal blood.

  For the earl of Hertfo
rd his wife’s death brought new hope of release and rehabilitation. He was then living comfortably enough with Sir John Spencer at Althorp but had to wait another two years before his freedom of movement was finally restored. He remained faithful to Katherine’s memory for nearly twenty years, eventually remarrying to a daughter of the powerful Howard clan, but he never gave up the fight to get his first marriage recognised and his sons’ legitimacy established. At last, in 1606, three years after the old queen’s death, perseverance was rewarded when the priest who had performed the ceremony at Canon Row half a century before was suddenly and miraculously resurrected. The earl lived on until 1621 and was to see his grandson re-enact his own story with almost uncanny precision by making a runaway marriage with Lady Arbella Stuart, another junior member of the royal house.

  Mary Grey was finally released some time in 1572, about a year after the death of her husband. She herself died in poverty and obscurity in the early summer of 1578. Lady Mary would have been thirty-two years old and with her death vanished almost the last remnant of the once-great House of Suffolk. But outcast though she had become, under the terms of her great-uncle’s infamous will, Mary Keys, widow, of the parish of St Botolph’s without Aldersgate, died heiress presumptive to the crown of England – that deadly legacy which had so poisoned the lives of the descendants of Mary Brandon, born Mary Tudor.

  The only surviving representative of the junior branch of the Suffolk line, Eleanor Brandon’s daughter Margaret, married Henry Stanley, Lord Strange, in 1555 and became countess of Derby and queen in Man when her husband succeeded to the title in 1572. Her life, blighted by ill-health and family quarrels, was not a happy one, but she did at least avoid the worst of the calamities that befell her Grey cousins. In spite of chronic rheumatism and toothache, her husband’s infidelities and their acrimonious financial disputes, the countess of Derby raised a family of four sons and one daughter and lived on into the mid1590s. She seems to have been rather a silly woman, the historian William Camden saying of her that ‘through an idle mixture of curiosity and ambition, supported by sanguine hopes and a credulous fancy, she much used the conversations of necromancers and figure flingers’.34 An interest in the occult, although widespread among Elizabethans, could be a dangerous hobby; an interest in fortune-telling especially so for one in Margaret’s position on the periphery of the succession dispute, and on one occasion it earned her the queen’s serious displeasure and a spell of imprisonment.

  Her eldest son Ferdinando, Lord Strange, courtier, man of letters, friend and patron of poets and poet in a small way himself, stood out as a colourful and slightly sinister figure on the Elizabethan scene. He is best remembered for his interest in the theatre – Lord Strange’s men were among the foremost acting companies in the profession. When he succeeded his father, one of the richest peers in the country, in 1593, he became briefly the target of a more than usually optimistic Catholic plot which sought to exploit his ‘propinquity of blood’ to the royal house. But although well known for their Catholic sympathies, the earls of Derby had always remained conspicuously loyal and Ferdinando wasted no time in informing the government of the approaches being made to him.

  As always in the story of sixteenth-century England, so much comes back to the fatal Tudor inability to produce sons and asks so many ‘what ifs’. What if Henry VIII’s first wife had been able to give him a male heir? What if Edward VI had survived to perpetuate his line? But most poignant of all must be what if Jane Grey had lived? How would she have developed and how might she have influenced the history of her times? Whether we should today regard her ‘attainments in literature’ with quite such awe as her contemporary admirers is perhaps questionable. Her education was after the fashion of her times narrowly classical and would not have included any English or modern European history, geography or, of course, anything even faintly scientific. One thing, though, seems certain – Jane, alone among her Tudor cousins, was a true scholar who loved learning for its own sake and not as a means to an end. Could she, at any stage, have avoided her destiny? It seems unlikely, given the pressure exerted upon her. Or was she in some sense a willing victim, believing God must have chosen her as his instrument to maintain the true religion?

  Let Jane have the last word, in the lines she had written in Latin and Greek on the last page of the prayer book she carried with her to the scaffold: ‘Death will give pain to my body for its sins, but the soul will be justified before God.’ And in English: ‘If my faults deserve punishment, my youth at least and my imprudence were worthy of excuse. God and posterity will show me favour.’35

  NOTES

  CHAPTER ONE

  1. William Dugdale, Baronage of England, 1716, vol. 1, p. 721.

  2. Polydore Vergil’s English History, ed. Sir Henry Ellis, Camden Society, no. 29, 1844, p. 203.

  3. Ibid., p. 214.

  4. S.J. Gunn, Charles Brandon, Blackwell, 1988, p. 28.

  5. Letters & Papers, Foreign & Domestic, of the Reign of Henry VIII, ed. J.S. Brewer, 1862, vol. II, pt i, p. xxxii.

  6. Letters & Papers … of the Reign of Henry VIII, ed. Brewer, vol. I, pt ii, p. 1422.

  7. Ibid., p. 76.

  8. Ibid., p. 73.

  9. Ibid., pp. 74–5.

  10. Ibid., p. 75.

  11. Ibid., p. xxv.

  12. Gunn, Charles Brandon, pp. 131–2.

  13. W.C. Richardson, Mary Tudor, The White Queen, Peter Owen, 1970, pp. 259–61 and 266.

  14. C.V. Malfatti, Two Italian Accounts of Tudor England, Barcelona, 1953, p. 37.

  15. Agnes Strickland, Lives of the Tudor Princesses, 1868, p. 96.

  16. Luis Vives and the Renascence Education of Women, ed. Foster Watson, 1912, pp. 41–2.

  17. G.R. Elton, The Tudor Constitution, Cambridge, 1972, p. 391.

  18. Edward Hall, Chronicle, ed. C. Whibley, 1904, vol. II, pp. 356–7.

  19. Conyers Read, Mr Secretary Cecil and Queen Elizabeth, Cape, 1965, p. 41.

  CHAPTER TWO

  1. Acts of the Privy Council, vol. II, pp. 4–5.

  2. Literary Remains of King Edward VI, ed. J.G. Nichols, Roxburghe Club, 1857, p. lxxxvii.

  3. Ibid., p. xcv.

  4. Luis Vives and the Renascence Education of Women, ed. Watson, p. 133.

  5. Agnes Strickland, Lives of the Queens of England, 1844, vol. V, p. 90.

  6. Sir John Hayward, The Life and Reign of King Edward VI, 1630, p. 196.

  7. Letters & Papers … of the Reign of Henry VIII, ed. Brewer, vol. XXI, pt ii, p. 634.

  8. Collection of State Papers … left by William Cecil, Lord Burghley, ed. Samuel Haynes, 1740, p. 83.

  9. P.F. Tytler, England Under the Reigns of Edward VI and Mary, 1839, vol. I, pp. 137–8.

  10. Lamentation of a Sinner, cited in Susan James, Kateryn Parr, Ashgate Publishing Ltd, 1999, pp. 199–200.

  11. Luis Vives and the Renascence Education of Women, ed. Watson, pp. 43–4.

  12. Burghley State Papers, ed. Haynes, p. 99.

  13. Hayward, The Life and Reign of King Edward VI, 1630, p. 197.

  14. Tytler, England under the Reigns of Edward VI and Mary, p. 149; Burghley State Papers, ed. Haynes, pp. 75–6.

  15. W.K. Jordan, Edward VI: The Young King, Allen & Unwin, 1968, p. 380; Jennifer Loach, Edward VI, Yale University Press, 1999, p. 57.

  16. Burghley State Papers, ed. Haynes, pp. 99–100.

  17. Ibid., p. 96.

  18. Henry Clifford, Life of Jane Dormer, ed. J. Stevenson, 1887, p. 86.

  19. Syllogue Epistolarum, ed. T. Hearne, Oxford, 1716, pp. 151 and 165–6.

  20. Tytler, England under the Reigns of Edward VI and Mary, p. 123.

  21. Burghley State Papers, ed. Haynes, pp. 103–4.

  22. Ibid., pp. 77–8.

  23. Ibid., p. 78.

  24. Ibid., p. 93.

  25. Tytler, England under the Reigns of Edward VI and Mary, p. 139; Burghley State Papers, ed. Haynes, p. 76.

  26. Tytler, England under the Reigns of Edward VI and M
ary, p. 133.

  27. Ibid., p. 140.

  28. Burghley State Papers, ed. Haynes, pp. 81–2.

  29. Ibid., p. 80.

  30. Tytler, England under the Reigns of Edward VI and Mary, pp. 144–5.

  31. Burghley State Papers, ed. Haynes, pp. 97–9.

  32. Ibid., p. 94.

  33. Acts of the Privy Council, vol. II, pp. 246–7 and 262.

  34. Sermons of Hugh Latimer, ed. John Watkins, 1926, vol. I,pp. 161–2; J. Strype, Ecclesiastical Memorials, 1822, vol. II, pt I, p. 199.

  35. James, Kateryn Parr, pp. 338–9.

  36. Holinshed’s Chronicle, 1807, vol. III, p. 1014.

  CHAPTER THREE

  1. Roger Ascham, The Scholemaster, ed. J. Mayor, 1863, pp. 33–4.

  2. Original Letters Relative to the English Reformation (Zurich Letters), ed. H. Robinson, vol. I, Parker Society, no. 23, 1846, pp. 282 and 286–7.

  3. R. Davey, The Nine Days’ Queen, Methuen, 1909, pp. 175–6.

  4. Original Letters, vol. I, pp. 6–7.

  5. Ibid., vol. II, p. 432.

  6. Ibid., vol. I, p. 280.

  7. Ibid., pp. 278–9.

  8. Ibid., p. 8.

  9. Ibid., pp. 9–11.

  10. Ibid., vol. II, p. 430.

  11. Diary of Henry Machyn, ed. J.G. Nichols, Camden Society, no. 42, 1848, p. 9.

  12. Literary Remains of King Edward VI (Journal), vol. II, p. 359.

  13. Ibid., p. 363.

  14. Cal. S.P. Spanish, vol. X, p. 212.

  15. Literary Remains of Edward VI, vol. II, p. 308.

  16. Cal. S.P. Spanish, vol. X, p. 215.