by Jones, Nigel
Whether Northumberland’s renunciation of the Protestant religion and sudden conversion to Catholicism was genuine, expedient – in the hope of saving his own life and those of his family and friends or at least preserving his children’s inheritance – or, as seems most likely of all, merely desperate cannot be said with certainty. He would, however, have died with more dignity if he had stuck to the cause for which he had hazarded everything. In this respect the girl he had treated as his puppet – Jane herself, who watched from her window overlooking the Inner Ward as Northumberland demeaned himself at the chapel – set a more steadfast example of courage and fidelity than the man who had exploited her.
That night, his last on earth, Northumberland doggedly fought on for his life. The grovelling letter he wrote from the Bloody Tower to his old enemy Arundel, pleading for him to intercede with the queen, gives a measure of his desperation:
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 live 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, that I might but live and kiss her feet. Once your fellow and loving companion, but now worthy of no name but wretchedness and misery. J.D.
By the next morning, Northumberland had given up any slight hopes of a last-minute reprieve. As he mounted the scaffold on Tower Hill, almost exactly forty-three years after his father Edmund had died at the same bloody spot, he threw off his sand-coloured cloak, leant casually on the rail and addressed the crowd. He had been an ‘evil liver’, he confessed, who had been led astray by those Protestant pastors who had persuaded him to renounce the ‘Catholic faith and the true doctrine of Christ’. He blamed the nation’s turning away from Rome for all the ‘misery, sedition, division and rebellion’ that had troubled England ever since. Finally, as was customary, he thanked the monarch who was putting him to death for her ‘mercy’ in giving him the ‘time and respect’ to repent. Then, with a final prayer and a recital of the psalm De Profundis, he submitted to the executioner, who deftly removed his doublet and handed him a kerchief blindfold. Northumberland knelt at the block and lost his head in one blow.
The two men who died with him, Sir Thomas Palmer, whose defection from Somerset’s camp had been instrumental in bringing the ‘Good Duke’ down, and Sir John Gates, former captain of King Edward’s guard, offered contrasting studies in bravado and meekness in their last moments. Gates had been sought out by Northumberland that morning when they had attended their final Mass in the Tower, and exchanged mutual forgiveness, though both blamed each other for their predicament. Gates, with a soldier’s courage, refused a blindfold. A decision he may have regretted when the headsman botched his job and took three blows to decapitate him.
Palmer, by contrast, swaggered on to a scaffold already slippery with blood, cheerfully roaring, ‘Good morrow!’ to the crowd. He told them that he had had a vision of Christ sitting at God’s right hand while in ‘a little dark corner in yon Tower’; and his cheeriness was prompted by the knowledge that he was bound for heaven that very day. In contrast to the turncoat Northumberland, he said he died in the Protestant faith, and was happy to leave a vain world in which he had found ‘nothing but ambition, flattery, foolishness, vainglory, pride, discord, slander, boasting, hatred and malice’. Death was not to be feared, he affirmed: ‘Not even the bloody axe itself shall make me afraid.’ Greeting the executioner, Palmer jested, ‘Come on, good fellow, art thou he that must do the deed? I forgive thee with all my heart.’ Laying his neck in the slot on the block, he joked that it fitted perfectly, said a last prayer and, like Northumberland, lost his head in a single stroke. The three bodies were carted back to the Tower and buried at St Peter’s where they had worshipped less than an hour before.
We have an unusually detailed account of Jane Grey’s time in the Tower, thanks to Rowland Lee, an official of the Royal Mint who had access to her. Lee seems to have developed a crush on the spirited young ex-queen, and his pen portrait of her vividly conveys her personality. A week after Northumberland’s demise Lee dined with Jane and found her still regal, but full of praise for Mary’s ‘mercy’. She was indignant at Northumberland for abandoning the Protestant faith so easily. ‘As his life was wicked and full of dissimulation – so was his end thereafter.’ Jane promised that if and when she was in the same position she would not renounce her faith so lightly. She was as good as her word.
While in the Tower, as a noblewoman of royal blood, Jane was permitted to retain four attendants: two ladies, a manservant and her former nurse. The government paid a generous ninety shillings a week for her keep, plus twenty shillings for each of her servants. She was allowed liberty to stroll and enjoy the late summer in the gardens, as well as to read the books of her choice. Her companions in the Tower included the Protestant prelates Thomas Cranmer and Hugh Latimer, who took the places of the Catholic Bishops Gardiner and Bonner. Jane was not, however, permitted to meet her husband Guildford Dudley, who remained confined with his brothers in the Beauchamp Tower. A distant glimpse of Guildford as he stretched his long legs on the tower’s lead roof was the most that Jane was permitted.
Meanwhile the reaction against the Protestant Reformation was in full swing. Altars, vestments and other Catholic regalia were restored to the Tower’s two chapels. Jane displayed an icy fury at the backsliding of a minister, Dr Harding, once the Protestant chaplain to the Grey family who, a true Vicar of Bray, had prudently renounced his ‘heresy’ and returned to Rome. From the Tower, she wrote a stinging letter to him deploring that he, once the ‘lively member of Christ’ had become ‘the stinking and filthy kennel of Satan’. From a ‘stout Christian soldier’ he had become a ‘cowardly runaway’ and a ‘white-livered milksop’.
In late September, the customary coronation preparations for Queen Mary began at the Tower. She was accompanied by her half-sister Eizabeth, now a fiery redhead of twenty. Mary eyed Anne Boleyn’s daughter with grave suspicion. Not only did she regard her as a bastard of the woman who had displaced her mother; she was also a Protestant heretic. Mary strove dutifully to convert her heir apparent to Catholic orthodoxy, but the wily Elizabeth, while outwardly conforming to Catholic rites, would not be moved. She was sent into the country while her half-sister tried fruitlessly to find a way of excluding her from the succession.
Meanwhile, Mary attempted to solve the succession problem by producing an heir herself – with the most unsuitable and unpopular bridegroom she could find, none other than Philip II of Spain, son and heir of the Emperor Charles V. News of the marriage sparked outrage among English patriots who felt it would mean subservience to a foreign tyranny. Mary, half-Spanish herself, failed to understand the resentment even after a dead dog, dressed in Catholic vestments, was thrown into her own presence chamber.
On 13 November, Lady Jane Grey went on trial at London’s Guildhall with her husband Guildford and two other Dudley brothers, Henry and Ambrose. Arraigned alongside them was Thomas Cranmer. The spiritual father of the English Reformation had been replaced as Archbishop of Canterbury by Cardinal Reginald Pole – the arch-Catholic scion of the Yorkist dynasty whom Henry VIII and Cromwell had tried in vain to kill, and who had returned in triumph from decades of exile in Rome. All the prisoners were dressed in black – the colour of penitence and mourning – though Jane’s repentance was tempered by her holding a prayer book – a symbol of her Protestant faith. The inevitable death sentences were passed – in Jane’s case by burning, the automatic punishment for a woman convicted of treason. Few thought, however, that she would suffer such a fiery fate, as it was rumoured that Mary was minded to pardon her altogether.
The queen’s mind was changed by a popular revolt against her marriage to Philip. The revolt’s leaders included Edward Courtenay, Earl of Devon, who, although having been freed by Mary from the Tower where he had spent most of his life was disappointed not to have married her himself. Instead, the plotters in
tended him to be rewarded with Elizabeth’s hand. Fatally for Jane, her father Henry Grey, Earl of Suffolk, also joined the plot; as did Sir Thomas Wyatt, a Kentish squire whose father, the poet Sir Thomas Wyatt, and grandfather Henry, had all seen the inside of the Tower.
Wyatt was the only conspirator to get his rebellion off the ground. Though confined to Kent, it proved the most potent threat to Tudor rule since the Pilgrimage of Grace. The plan was for a coordinated rising in different parts of the country on Palm Sunday, 18 March 1554. Courtenay was to raise his native Devon; Jane’s father was to rise in the Midlands; another landowner, Sir James Croft, would raise the Welsh Marches; and Wyatt would lead the revolt in Kent – with their four armies converging on the capital. But in January the government learned about the rising from the loose tongue of one of the rebels, Sir Peter Carew. Bishop Gardiner quizzed Courtenay – his companion as a fellow Tower prisoner for several years – and the truth tumbled out.
All the plotters, apart from Wyatt, scattered in panic. Suffolk was arrested hiding in the woods after an abortive attempt to seize Coventry. Wyatt, however, had more luck in Kent. Wyatt’s own tenants were joined by a militia company of London-trained bands tasked by Mary to arrest him, who defected to the rebels. The octogenarian Duke of Norfolk, sent by Mary to repress the revolt, retreated before the rebel advance.
Having taken Rochester, Wyatt’s 3,000-strong rebel force pushed on to Dartford, intending to seize London and the queen, and forcibly prevent the marriage. Mary refused advice to retreat into the Tower, and remained defiantly at Westminster. Then, in a foretaste of her half-sister Elizabeth’s speech defying the Armada at Tilbury, the queen went to the Guildhall, proclaimed herself her ‘father’s daughter and her kingdom’s wife’ and appealed to Londoners to resist the rebels. The speech worked wonders. The crowds cheered Mary and vowed to die in her defence.
Two days later, Wyatt’s little army reached Southwark to find London Bridge barred against them. While his followers looted and torched Bishop Gardiner’s palace and shot dead a Tower boatman on the river, Wyatt dithered for three days before marching west, crossing the Thames at Kingston, and doubling back into the city from the west. But Mary’s resolution had united London against the rebels. Her popularity grew when it was reported that she had refused to order the Tower’s great guns to open fire on the rebels across the river, lest innocent civilians in Southwark be harmed. Wyatt’s diminishing force made its way into the heart of London through a Fleet Street lined with sullen, silent citizens, only to find the city gates at Ludgate barred. Turning back, Wyatt’s army was overwhelmed by royal forces at Temple Bar in a short and sharp fight which left forty dead. Wyatt himself, clad in full armour, was captured and brought to the Tower, whose cells rapidly filled with his followers. After a frightening fortnight, the revolt was crushed. Now followed the retribution.
Mary’s marriage and Wyatt’s rebellion spelled the death of Jane Grey. Mary was finally persuaded that so long as Jane lived, her throne was under permanent threat. Moreover, Jane’s father and uncles had been among the would-be rebel leaders, despite having pledged their undying loyalty to the queen only a fortnight before. Such brazen betrayal could merit only death. To underline the point, Bishop Gardiner demanded in his Lenten sermon that for the safety of the commonwealth it was necessary that the ‘rotten and hurtful’ rebel members should be ‘cut off and consumed’. Without more ado, Mary signed the death warrants of Jane and Guildford, but commuted Jane’s sentence of burning to beheading.
Suffolk joined his daughter in the Tower. Although father and daughter were not permitted to meet, Jane and Guildford Dudley managed to write encouraging messages to him concealed in a battered old prayer book kept for the use of prisoners. Guildford’s touching inscription read:
Your loving and obedient son wisheth unto your grace long life in this world, with as much joy and comfort as I wish to myself, and in the world to come life everlasting. Your humble son to the death, G. Dudley.
The book was then passed to Jane who wrote with a more cold-eyed realism than Guildford’s hopes for ‘long life in this world’. She knew they were all destined for martyrs’ deaths:
The Lord comfort your grace, and that in His Word wherein all creatures only are to be comforted. And though it has pleased God to take away two of your children, yet think not, I most humbly beseech your grace, that you have lost them, but that … we, by losing this mortal life, have won an immortal life.
Your grace’s humble daughter Jane Dudley.
Mary remained reluctant to execute Jane while she persisted in her Protestant ‘heresy’. She had decided what to do with her cousin’s little body, but was still trying to save her soul. The queen sent her chaplain, Abbot John Feckenham, to the Tower to try to persuade Jane to renounce her faith. Feckenham was an ideal choice. An ex-Benedictine monk, he was a warm, jovial, fatherly figure with a persuasive tongue. Moreover, he had himself been sent to the Tower by Archbishop Cranmer in Edward’s reign for resisting the Protestant Reformation.
While there, Feckenham had been visited by King Edward’s Protestant tutor, the Cambridge scholar John Cheke. The learned Cheke had fruitlessly tried to persuade him of the truth of Protestantism. At the end of Jane’s nine-day reign, Feckenham was freed, and Cheke himself arrested and put in the Tower. Cheke, a timid man, was released on condition that he went into exile. However, later during Mary’s reign he was abducted in Brussels on the orders of Philip of Spain, brought back to England and once again put in the Tower. In one of the ironical turns of fortune of the English Reformation, he was again visited there by his old sparring partner Feckenham. Terrified of being burned as a heretic, Cheke apparently succumbed to Feckenham’s honeyed words and agreed to convert to Catholicism – but the shock of the experience proved too much, and he died in 1557.
When the wheel of religious fortune turned once again and Catholic Mary was succeeded by Protestant Elizabeth, poor Feckenham was yet again arrested and sent to the Tower. He spent fourteen years there and in other prisons before being bailed to live in the Fens, where he became beloved because of his charity to the poor. His stubborn refusal to renounce his papist faith, however, saw him constantly jailed until he finally died in prison at Wisbech after a quarter of a century’s sporadic confinement. This was the kindly man repeatedly received by Jane in the Tower as she waited for death. At first Jane told the priest that she wanted to prepare for death rather than debate religion. Soon, however, the disputatious sixteen-year-old found she could not resist an intellectual wrestle with such a worthy opponent as Feckenham. Jane argued that her current dire situation – far from representing, as Feckenham believed, just punishment – was a divine test of her faith and ‘a manifest Declaration of God’s favour to me’. Jane warned Feckenham that he was bound for hell if he persisted in his ‘error’. He returned to Mary, vainly begging a pardon for the spirited girl.
Jane spent her last night, 8 February, writing letters to her family. To her father, who would soon follow her to the block, she offered the comfort that she would be exchanging the earthly crown that she had so briefly worn for a heavenly one – and she looked forward to meeting him there. To her nearest sister Katherine, she sent a New Testament:
A book, which, though it be not outwardly trimmed with gold, yet inwardly it is of more worth than precious stones. It will teach you to live. It will learn you to die. Deny the world, defy the devil, despise the flesh.
Jane herself had so far left worldly ties behind that she refused her husband’s request for a farewell meeting, writing that such a tryst could only ‘increase their misery and pain’, and it was better to put it off until they would ‘meet shortly elsewhere and live bound by indissoluble ties’. At dawn, the sounds of hammering from the White Tower told Jane that her scaffold was being erected – her royal blood ensuring that she would enjoy the ‘privilege’ of a private beheading within the Tower. The disturbance did not break her inner serenity, nor did the sight of her husband being led out of
the Beauchamp Tower to death on Tower Hill. Jane calmly watched him leave from her window in the Lieutenant’s Lodgings. Although he had cried like a child when told his sentence, Guildford Dudley died bravely. Having refused the services of a Catholic priest, his head was severed by a single stroke. Faithfully and courageously, Jane was still at her window when the cart carrying her husband’s body, its head wrapped in a bloody cloth, returned to the Tower for burial. She seemed, wrote an onlooker, ‘nothing at all abashed’ by the gruesome sight. Then it was her turn.
Escorted by the Tower’s lieutenant, Sir John Bridges, and wearing the same black dress and clutching the same prayer book that she had held at her trial, Jane descended the stairs and followed the route to the scaffold trodden by Anne Boleyn and Katherine Howard before her. The execution scene is imprinted on our minds, thanks to the nineteenth-century French romantic painter Paul Delaroche. His depiction (1834) accurately shows a blindfolded Jane struggling to locate the block and being gently helped to find it – but almost everything else in it is false. Jane is depicted dressed in virginal white rather than funereal black. The dark background suggests an interior location at midnight rather than the Tower’s Inner Ward on a crisp winter morning. Altogether, as Jane’s biographer Leanda de Lisle remarks, the painting, an undeniably powerful image, ‘has all the erotic overtones of a virgin sacrifice’. Jane’s moment of blind helplessness falsely pins her down as a victim rather than the determined, opinionated and brave young woman that she was.