by John Guy
Warwick, who created himself Duke of Northumberland a week before Somerset was sent to the Tower, now gave Elizabeth the freedom to come and go from the Court as she pleased. In March 1552, during a visit to Whitehall, she was allowed to lodge with Kat at St James’s Palace for the first time since her father’s death, and at government expense.31 And like Mary when she choreographed her retinue to carry their rosaries, Elizabeth meant to turn it into a spectacle. According to an eyewitness, as she rode through the streets of London, she was preceded by ‘a great company of lords and knights and gentlemen, and after her a great number of ladies and gentlewomen to the number of 200 on horseback.’32
Enjoying something of a political comeback, Elizabeth set about consolidating her influence. To do so, she began systematically recruiting advisers whom she felt she could trust and whom one day she could mould into a group of loyal councillors, for she would need them to help her manage her estates if nothing more.
In fact, she had been recruiting advisers less systematically for some time. Those she had so far identified had links to Thomas Parry, her devoted cofferer, and the circle of evangelical reformers around Sir Anthony Denny, a network that already included John Cheke, Roger Ascham and Thomas Cawarden, now promoted Edward’s Master of the Revels. After Denny died in September 1549, Cawarden, his close ally in the Privy Chamber, stepped forward as one of Elizabeth’s backstairs contacts at Court. Around 1552, she signed a letter to him, asking him to do her service, styling herself ‘Your loving friend’ and on her accession as queen in 1558, she would appoint him to the key position of lieutenant of the Tower.33
The linchpin of this evolving affinity was William Cecil. Educated at St John’s College, Cambridge, he was a long-standing friend of Cheke and Ascham and a secretary, in turn, to both Somerset and Northumberland. Blanche Parry, Elizabeth’s gentlewoman, was his cousin and Thomas Parry a more distant kinsman.34 His first wife was Cheke’s sister, Mary, who had died in childbirth in 1544.
As early as September 1549, Elizabeth had sent Cecil a message that shows he was already acting as her principal agent at Court. ‘I am well assured’, she ordered Parry the cofferer to say to him, ‘though I send not daily to him, that he doth not, for all that, daily forget me. Say indeed I assure myself thereof.’35
Elizabeth sealed the tie when she made Cecil surveyor of her estates in 1550. His father, Richard Cecil, was already joint keeper of several of her properties and the Cecil family’s own estate at Stamford in Lincolnshire was very close to one of Elizabeth’s own plum properties at Collyweston.36
The raison d’être of this evolving affinity, however, was a shared commitment to the reformers. Cawarden and his wife had narrowly escaped a charge of heresy in 1543. And when, in an undated letter of about 1548, Kat had urged Cecil to intervene with Somerset to negotiate the exchange of an English prisoner in Scotland, she reminded him that the bond between him and her mistress was rooted in their shared view of religion. Elizabeth was approaching him, she said, ‘being so much assured of your willing mind to set forth her causes to my Lord Protector’s grace, especially the matter being so godly’. Elizabeth then added a postscript in her own hand: ‘I pray you further this good man’s suit. Your friend, Elizabeth.’37
Shortly afterwards, Elizabeth wrote entirely in her own hand to ask Cecil to secure a preaching licence for one of her former chaplains, Hugh Goodacre. He was, she said, a man ‘long time known unto us to be as well of honest conversation and sober living as of sufficient learning and judgment in the Scriptures to preach the Word of God, the advancement whereof we so desire’.38
Her new chaplain, Edmund Allen, had much to do with shaping Elizabeth’s personal beliefs. Another Cambridge man, he had fled into exile in Germany to escape the Act of Six Articles, returning on Henry VIII’s death. Possibly Matthew Parker, the Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge, had recommended him, since a few days before her execution, Anne Boleyn, who had made Parker one of her own chaplains, committed her daughter’s spiritual care to him. Or perhaps Elizabeth had discovered Allen in Katherine Parr’s household, where he was one of a group of scholars the Dowager Queen had commissioned to translate Erasmus’s Paraphrases.39
Allen was with Elizabeth before the end of 1547, because the following February he was granted the benefice of Welford in Berkshire by Thomas Seymour at her request. In 1548, he wrote a catechism which, although decidedly evangelical in tone, contradicted the Swiss reformers’ more radical interpretation of the Eucharist, which fits very well with Elizabeth’s hostility to the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation on the one hand, and her beliefs, later expressed, that ‘God was in the sacrament of the Eucharist’ on the other.40 Although reformist, Elizabeth’s beliefs retained many traditional elements. Like Katherine Parr, she venerated the symbol of the cross, and after her accession, she would set up a crucifix in the Chapel Royal to the disgust of the more radical Protestants and veto all attempts to have it removed.41
Another likely influence was Roger Ascham, who in 1548 succeeded William Grindal as Elizabeth’s schoolmaster for two years until he was sent away in disgrace for flirting with her gentlewomen.42 Kat had recommended him for the post. As he wrote afterwards to her, ‘Your favour to Mr Grindal and gentleness towards me are matters sufficient to deserve more goodwill than my little power is able to requite’.43
Ascham had cultivated Elizabeth in a variety of ways, sending her a pen, an Italian book and a book of prayers, and he offered to have a broken pen mended. With his eye to the main chance, he also charmed his way into Edward’s circle. ‘Many times by mine especially good master Mr Cheke’s means’, he wrote to Cecil, ‘I have been called to teach the king to write in his Privy Chamber.’44
Under Ascham’s guidance, Elizabeth continued to read Latin and Greek together with the Bible, but the slant was evangelical, since he records that the religious authors she studied with him were only those ‘from whom she can drink in purity of doctrine along with elegance of speech’.45 He exaggerated when he boasted to his friend Johann Sturm that ‘she speaks French and Italian as well as she speaks English; her Latin is smooth, correct and thoughtful; frequently and voluntarily she has even spoken with me in Greek tolerably well.’46 Modern experts believe that her French was fluent, her spoken Italian more hesitant, her Latin translations competent but no more, and her Greek rudimentary.47
Ascham inflated his claims to float the idea that he was single-handedly transforming Elizabeth into an ‘exceptional’ woman, meaning a Christian woman of ‘exemplary’ virtue, one who—as a Protestant and the king’s sister—God had destined for higher things. It was, said Ascham, as much her energetic ‘study of the true faith’ as her other qualities that enabled her to realize her full potential ‘without a woman’s weakness.’48
By 1550, Ascham had introduced Elizabeth to the writings of some of the easier exponents of classical oratory, chiefly Cicero, Livy, Sophocles and Isocrates.49 These were among the authors that Vives had reserved for men—Edward had already started on Isocrates, despite using a crib in French—but the boundaries were becoming porous.50 Elizabeth, the Protestant John Bale reports, read the first and third orations of Isocrates to Nicocles, the young king of Cyprus.51 And at least one passage on the duties of rulers from the first oration stuck with her, to be quoted at critical moments in her life: ‘Throughout all your life show that you value truth so highly that a king’s word is more to be trusted than other men’s oaths.’52
She had quoted another maxim from this author when she sent her portrait to her half-brother. ‘I think that statues of bodies are fine memorials’, Isocrates had advised Nicocles, ‘but images of deeds and of character are worth much more.’53 In the letter accompanying the portrait, Elizabeth wrote, ‘For the face, I grant, I might well blush to offer, but the mind I shall never be ashamed to present. For though from the grace of the picture the colours may fade by time … yet the other nor time with her swift wings shall overtake, nor the misty clouds with their lowerings [i.e. sc
owling] may darken.’54
On 13 June 1552, while Edward was at Greenwich preparing for an extended summer progress, Mary paid him another visit.55 It lasted barely six hours and must have passed off without incident, as the young king fails to mention it in his journal. But it came a month or so after he had recovered from a severe attack of measles and marked the day after he completed his formal education.
‘Thank God’, he wrote with feeling as he ended what was probably his last Greek exercise after eight hard years at his Latin and Greek.56 When he returned to Whitehall in October at the end of the progress, he would be 15. Although not officially ‘of age’ by the terms of his father’s will, he already considered himself to be a man.57 As Cheke advised him, ‘You are now coming to a government of yourself, in which estate I pray God you may always be served with them that will faithfully, truly and plainly give you counsel.’ To this end, Cheke recruited William Thomas, one of the clerks of the Privy Council, to introduce Edward to political essays on issues of state and assist him in drafting model state papers and agendas shadowing items of current business in which he could learn the techniques of kingship.58
And yet it was Edward’s determination to hunt, joust and excel in war like his father that most visibly marked his near-coming of age. For almost a year, Northumberland had allowed him to ‘shoot and run at [the] ring’ with his companions. ‘Running at the ring’ while mounted and wearing full armour was the way to learn how to joust. Participants took turns to ride along the barrier in the tiltyard that divided the contestants in a real-life tournament, before taking aim with their lance at a ring suspended from a post that replaced the opponent in a genuine contest. The winner would be whoever speared the ring with his lance the most times after a set number of courses.59
On his long summer progress in 1552, Edward spent whole days hunting like his father.60 On the outward part of his journey after leaving Hampton Court, he hunted ‘in the bear wood in the forest of Windsor and there did his grace kill a great buck.’61 And after inspecting the fortifications at Southampton and Portsmouth in August, he wrote excitedly to Barnaby Fitzpatrick to inform him that he had ‘devised’ two strong castles on either side of the mouth of Portsmouth Haven, since the existing defences were ‘ill flanked, and set in unmeet places, the town weak in comparison of that it ought to be.’62
Like his father, Edward became increasingly acquisitive, collecting and encouraging gifts of fine jewels, gold and silver plate, books and manuscripts, hawks, falcons, greyhounds, horses and mules.63 He wore the finest linen shirts. His satin doublets were worked with gold and studded with tiny gemstones. And he insisted on having matching hose. As to his gowns, he preferred highly decorated black or coloured examples, in silk for summer and velvet for winter, all embroidered and fringed with gold. On state occasions he wore a coat of purple or crimson cloth of gold, trimmed with silver and gold cord, or else a mantle of cloth of gold. Around his neck he wore a collar of rubies.
As in his father’s reign, he continued to wear a cap, usually of black velvet, sparkling with gold or jewels, and with a white Prince of Wales feather falling to the left in front (see Plate 5).64
If a story told at Blois by one of Charles V’s ambassadors is true, Edward also shared his father’s cruelty. Angry at the way Northumberland and his allies kept him on a string, he was said to have taken his prize falcon, which he kept in his Privy Chamber, and plucked it alive, tearing it into four pieces and saying as he did so that he likened himself to the falcon, whom everyone plucked, ‘but I will pluck them too hereafter and tear them in four parts.’65
Then, in February 1553, the teenager caught a feverish cold. With his immune system already weakened by measles, he succumbed around mid March possibly to tuberculosis, more likely to all the known symptoms of bronchopneumonia leading to pleural empyema, the same illness that had killed Fitzroy. His physicians, who specifically remarked on the fatal coincidence, advised that he be confined to his room, watched night and day. Northumberland informed Mary and began doing all he could to court her favour. But his shady manoeuvres during the coup against Somerset rankled with her and he soon realized that he would need to protect himself should Edward die.66
Edward, meanwhile, convinced himself (or was convinced by others) that his half-sisters should be excluded from the succession. Both women had been declared illegitimate by his father’s Parliaments, something he believed took precedence over his father’s will.67 And where religion was concerned, he came to think that not even Elizabeth could be trusted with his new Protestant settlement.
At the outset, Edward was as determined as his father not to be succeeded by a woman. When he first began to follow in his father’s footsteps and jot down his ideas for his own succession settlement in early April, his illness was briefly in remission. He still envisaged that, before his death, Lady Frances Brandon, whose husband Henry Grey had been created Duke of Suffolk in 1551 and whose children were the first residuary legatees to the throne by the terms of Henry VIII’s will, might have a son or that her eldest daughter, Lady Jane Grey, would marry and give birth to a son.
Since, however, Frances would shortly be approaching the menopause, it was more likely that Jane would marry and that her son (in Edward’s eyes) would be the rightful successor. To this end, Northumberland married his 19-year-old son Guildford to the 16-year-old Jane on 25 May, while on the same day her younger sister Katherine, who was just old enough to be legally wed, married Henry Herbert, son of the duke’s ally, the Earl of Pembroke.
Jane’s marriage greatly strengthened Northumberland’s hold on the dynasty, because Edward had the highest regard for Guildford, intriguingly describing him some time after the wedding to the councillors standing around his sickbed as ‘one of the sons of our guardian, the duke of Northumberland, and a man, unless I am mistaken, born to achieve celebrity; from him you may expect great things.’68
By the end of May, Edward knew he was dying. As his physicians reported, he had ‘a harsh, continuous cough, his body is dry and burning, his belly is swollen, he has a slow fever upon him that never leaves him.’ His sputum was ‘livid, black, fetid and full of carbon; it smells beyond measure. … His feet are swollen all over.’69
FIGURE 13 ‘My devise for the succession’: the original draft, also incorporating its first revision, of Edward VI’s proposed resettlement of the crown, which he altered to allow the direct succession of Lady Jane Grey.
With insufficient time to summon Parliament, Edward altered his earlier jottings. At first, he had ‘devised’ the crown ‘To the L[ady] Fraunceses heires masles’ and then ‘For lakke of such issu to the L[ady] Jane’s heires masles’. Now, he left it ‘To the L[ady] Fraunceses heires masles, if she have any such issu befor my death’ and then ‘To the L[ady] Jane and her heires masles’, followed—this in a subsequent revision (not illustrated)—by Jane’s sisters, Katherine and Mary, and their heirs male, and finally by the eldest son of their cousin, Margaret Clifford, daughter of Lady Eleanor Brandon by her marriage to Henry Clifford Earl of Cumberland, if all three Grey sisters died without heirs.70 How far the young king was Northumberland’s puppet in making his ‘Device for the Succession’ (as it is known) is hotly contested, but the original draft and its first revision are in Edward’s own handwriting throughout (see Figure 13).71
On 24 June, the bulletin from the sickroom was that Edward ‘has not the strength to stir and can hardly breathe. His body no longer performs its functions, his nails and hair are dropping off, and all his person is scabby.’72 He died on 6 July, by which time letters patent confirming his ‘Device’ had been signed by Cranmer, the Privy Council, the judges, the Lord Mayor and aldermen of London, and as many other notables as could be convened in a hurry.73
Before allowing news of Edward’s death to leak, Northumberland sent his allies to take control of the Tower and the royal treasury and to swear the head officers of the royal household and the guard to an oath of loyalty to Queen Jane.74
On
the 10th, Jane was proclaimed queen amid rumours that Edward had been poisoned.75 When told she had been chosen, she wept, but prayed to God for ‘such grace as to enable me to govern this kingdom with his approbation and to his glory.’76 A confident and assertive young woman whom Roger Ascham in a moment of indiscretion had hinted was a better scholar than Elizabeth, she saw herself as called by God to lead the Protestant cause.77 In his will, Edward insisted that his executors should ‘not suffer any piece of religion to be altered.’78 He would have known that he could trust Jane and Guildford on that score.
Northumberland, however, had allowed Mary to escape. On 3 July, while riding to visit Edward at Greenwich, she was secretly informed of his lapse into unconsciousness and of Northumberland’s plans to capture her.79 Considering herself to be the rightful heir under her father’s will, she fled to the heartland of her estates in Norfolk. On the 9th she began mobilizing her forces, which she mustered at one of her fortified houses, Framlingham Castle in Suffolk. Northumberland was sent with an army to defeat her, but when a naval squadron off the Norfolk coast defected and handed over its artillery to her, his troops melted away.
As late as the 18th, Jane was still sending out letters signed ‘Jane the Quene’ to sheriffs and magistrates, insisting that her rule was founded on ‘consent’ to Edward’s ‘Device’ and that she was queen ‘through God’s providence to the preservation of our common weal and policy’. It was she alone, not Mary, as one of these letters claimed, who could preserve the English crown ‘in the whole undefiled English blood.’80
Chaos, however, ruled in the localities. In Northampton, Jane and Mary were both proclaimed queen, causing a ‘great stir’ in the shire. In Sussex, Jane was rejected as ‘a queen of a new and pretty invention’. Northumberland found it difficult to win and hold gentry support and soon many of the southern counties were declaring themselves for Mary.81