Inglorious Royal Marriages

by Leslie Carroll

  Inside the Tower of London, Jane busily signed letters to local authorities to suppress Mary’s rebellion, but on the eighteenth of July, several of the lords on the council quit the Tower like the proverbial rats fleeing a sinking ship. The following day, holed up at the Earl of Pembroke’s residence, they insisted that Northumberland had bullied them into accepting the Devise for the Succession and that in their hearts they believed Mary to be Edward’s true and rightful heir. In fact, they intended to proclaim her queen that very day in London!

  Yet, on the morning of July 19, the lords were not at all prepared to depose Jane. As far as they were concerned, she would remain queen. However, between five and six that evening at the cross in Cheapside, the very site where ten days earlier Jane’s accession had been announced, thirty-seven-year-old Mary Tudor was proclaimed the sovereign. Coins were thrown in the air; bonfires were lit. There was singing and dancing in the streets. The swiftness of the turnaround in public sentiment from being against Mary to supporting her was astonishing.

  During her exceptionally brief reign, Jane and her handlers had viewed Mary’s amassing of troops as a rebellion and Henry’s bastardized daughter as a usurper, but Mary had always seen herself as the true queen, and many of her subjects agreed with her. Many more of them were less pro-Mary than they were anti-Northumberland. They hated the duke, knew he had controlled King Edward’s government, and saw that they were in for more of the same with the underage Jane on the throne, especially because she was married to Northumberland’s son. Mary was not necessarily beloved, but the Dudley family was detested. In the county of Kent on July 19, the day that Jane Grey was deposed and Mary proclaimed throughout the land as queen, a group of Johnny-come-lately noblemen hopped onto Mary’s bandwagon, declaring that she was queen “as of right she is, as well as by descent of royal blood as by lawful succession granted, ratified and confirmed by the nobility and the whole realm”—a reference to the 1544 Act of Succession—at the same time denouncing Lady Jane Grey (curiously, they did not refer to her by her married name, Jane Dudley) as “a queen of new and pretty invention.”

  Jane may have heard the hoopla from the Tower and wondered what it was all about. Interrupting her supper, her own father broke the news: She had been deposed after only thirteen days on the throne, although she is known to posterity as the Nine Days’ Queen because she did not learn of her accession until three days after Edward’s death, and was not proclaimed queen until July 10.

  The Duke of Suffolk himself helped dismantle the cloth of estate, the canopy denoting Jane’s sovereignty, which hung above and behind her throne. Henry Grey then went out to Tower Green, where he vociferously proclaimed his support for Queen Mary before hastening home to Sheen.

  The Tower was both a royal residence and a prison in those days, and Jane went from queen to inmate in a matter of minutes. The following day, the Lord Treasurer demanded all of the jewels and finery he had so obsequiously bestowed upon Jane not ten days earlier, then went through Jane and Guildford’s possessions like a repo man. The wrangling over the whereabouts of a few items, including a box that once belonged to Henry VIII, containing, among other things, thirteen pairs of old gloves and “a square coffer covered with fustian of Naples,” would drag on into the autumn of 1553.

  Courtiers were defecting left and right to Mary. On July 21, Northumberland was arrested for treason by his former pal, the Earl of Arundel. The duchess and all of Dudley’s sons were placed under arrest as well, and confined to various quarters in the tower. Guildford’s mother was released fairly quickly and tried to intercede for her men, but Mary was not in a forgiving mood.

  Jane’s father was arrested at Sheen and brought to the Tower. Because her mother was not only Mary’s cousin, but her goddaughter, she was accorded a royal audience on July 30, and consequently, the Duke of Suffolk was incarcerated for only a few days. No record has been found of any effort by Frances Grey to request clemency for their daughter.

  After Mary made her entrance into London amid great pomp and pageantry, Jane was moved to the Gentleman Gaoler’s house. Guildford was confined with his brothers in the Beauchamp Tower.

  On August 12, Jane and Guildford were indicted. Since everyone wanted to wash their hands of Jane as quickly as they had rallied around her on July 9, she was left to plead her own case to her cousin, referring to herself as “a wife who loves her husband.” She admitted in her correspondence to Mary that accepting the crown had been a mistake, but that she had been persuaded to do so by older, wiser, and more experienced heads than her own, who had since proven themselves to be nothing of the kind. Jane acknowledged the gravity of her error, realizing that “but for the goodness and clemency of the Queen,” she hardly expected to be pardoned. However, she denied ever being a willing party to Northumberland’s conspiracy, explaining to Mary, “For whereas I might have taken upon me that of which I was not worthy, yet no one can ever say either that I sought it . . . or that I was pleased with it.”

  Mary believed her outspoken little cousin and was inclined to grant her clemency. She was less interested in avenging herself on the traitors than she was in reuniting a divided country under her sovereignty; however, her subjects would have to accept the fact that under her reign, Protestantism was out and Catholicism was back in.

  Mary’s most trusted confidant, Simon Renard, the imperial ambassador in England, tried to force her to remove the rose-colored glasses. According to Renard, “As to Jane of Suffolk, whom they tried to make Queen, she [Mary] could not be induced to consent that she should die.” Mary was all the more firm in her conviction, Renard claimed, because she believed that Jane’s marriage to Guildford Dudley was invalid, “as she was previously betrothed by a binding promise . . . to a servitor of the Bishop of Winchester.”

  Mary must have confused this mysterious fiancé for the Earl of Hertford, but in any event, this convenient legal loophole that could sever Jane from the traitorous Dudley family salved the queen’s conscience. However, toward the end of the summer, Mary was being persuaded to change her mind about leniency. Her imposition of heavy fines instead of death sentences was viewed as weakness, and as England’s first adult queen regnant (Jane had been a minor, and all other queens had been merely consorts), it was imperative to prove to her subjects that she was in control of her throne. Renard lamented, “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.”

  No one would laugh at what Mary did next. On September 19, she ordered “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.”

  Northumberland had already been executed for treason on August 22. Ten thousand people had gathered the day before to witness his dispatch, only to have the event delayed when Mary offered the condemned man the opportunity to recant his Protestant beliefs and embrace the old religion. What appalled Jane most about her father-in-law’s demise was his deathbed conversion to popery, perhaps in the mistaken hope of a royal reprieve. “Should I, who am young and in my few years, forsake my faith for the love of life?” the evangelical teen had exclaimed in horror. She had nothing but contempt for the man who “hath brought me and my stock [family] in most miserable calamity and misery by his exceeding ambition . . . for what man is there living, I pray you, although he had been innocent, that would hope of life in that case; being in the field against the queen in person as general, and after his taking, so hated and evil spoken of by the commons? . . . Like as his life was wicked and full of dissimulation, so was his end thereafter.”

  In November 1553, Jane and Guildford stood trial for high treason, charged with taking possession of the Tower. Guildford was also convicted of conspiring to depose Mary by sending troops to his father and by proclaiming and honoring Jane as queen. Jane was also found guilty of having signed a number o
f documents with the signature Jane the Queen. They both pled guilty and were duly condemned, as expected—Guildford to be beheaded, and Jane to be “burned alive on Tower Hill or beheaded as the Queen should please.” Yet Mary still remained inclined to spare them. And then Jane’s own father, who had already hedged his bets by converting to Catholicism, did the most boneheaded thing imaginable, something that left Mary with no choice but to execute them all: He participated in Wyatt’s Rebellion.

  Mary Tudor was, of course, half Spanish, her mother being Katherine of Aragon, so she had always been close to the various Spanish ambassadors. At the time, the king of Spain, Charles V, was also the Holy Roman Emperor, and Mary harbored intentions of wedding his son, Philip.

  In January 1554, Thomas Wyatt the Younger, whose father had been a poet and courtier in Henry VIII’s court, led an uprising of a dozen or more aristocratic coconspirators to protest Mary’s plans to wed Philip of Spain. They did not want England returned to Catholicism, nor a foreigner as their king. Although deposing Mary was not specified as part of their plot, their implied intention was to replace her with her Protestant half sister Elizabeth, daughter of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn.

  No one ever suggested that Jane Grey had any foreknowledge of Wyatt’s plans or of her father’s intention to take part in them, but she had been vehemently opposed to the sheeplike acceptance of Catholicism by the English in the wake of Mary’s accession. Ever the fierce evangelical, even if her faith flew in the face of political pragmatism, what use, she fumed, was unity when it was the “unity of Satan and his members . . . thieves, murderers, conspirators, have their unity,” Jane raged, reminding the true believers of the reformed religion that Christ had come “to set one against another,” not to bring peace, but a sword. “Return, return again unto Christ’s war,” she urged. Therefore, Jane’s very existence as a fulcrum for Protestant discontent made it impossible for Mary to remain merciful.

  The executions of Guildford and Jane were originally scheduled for February 9, 1554, but Mary delayed them for three days in order to give her cousin a chance to convert to Catholicism in her final hours. If the queen couldn’t save Jane’s body, at least she could try to save her soul. Mary dispatched her chaplain, John Feckenham, to guide Jane from Protestantism to popery, but the queen should have known this was a lost cause; Jane’s religious convictions were as firm as her own. However, the condemned girl and Feckenham enjoyed three days of spirited theological argument. While Jane refused to allow him to sway her principles, she developed so much respect for the cleric’s intellect that she permitted him to accompany her to the scaffold.

  There had been a good deal of preparation for Jane’s appointment with her maker, perhaps more so than for her brief marriage. She had to choose her gown and select the witnesses to her execution, who would also be responsible for disposing of her body. She had written the requisite farewell letters, including one to her father, who had been returned to the Tower as a prisoner on February 10. Her note, written directly above Guildford’s sincerely affectionate farewell to his father-in-law, was intended to be one of comfort, but the outspoken Jane hastened to remind the Duke of Suffolk that the need for writing the letter in the first place was only because, thanks to him “by whom my life should rather have been lengthened,” her death was taking place sooner rather than later. Jane also sent a good-bye letter to her sister Katherine, written inside the pages of a Bible. None were penned to her mother and husband.

  Many biographers of the couple state that Guildford sent Jane a message on the day before their executions, asking to see her one more time, but she refused, replying that as it “would only . . . increase their misery and pain, it was better to put it off . . . as they would meet shortly elsewhere, and live bound by indissoluble ties.” Yet this may be a later imposition on their relationship. There never was any love or affection between these spouses, and it’s unlikely that Guildford had any interest in a tearful adieu.

  His turn to die came first. On the morning of February 12, he was taken from his rooms to the place of public execution on Tower Hill, where several gentlemen waited to shake hands with him. Jane watched the procession from the window. Guildford gave a brief, customary farewell speech to the crowd gathered about him, then knelt and prayed, looking up to God several times, asking the assembled witnesses to pray for him as well. One swift stroke of the ax and Guildford Dudley was dispatched. “Oh Guildford, Guildford!” Jane was heard to exclaim. She remained at the window until the straw-covered cart bearing her husband’s headless corpse clattered toward the Tower’s chapel of St. Peter ad Vincula.

  Guildford was probably only eighteen years old. His body was interred in the chapel, where Jane’s would soon lie. She had chosen the same black gown she had worn during her trial, and, dry-eyed and composed, an open prayer book in her hands, she was escorted from her quarters by the Lieutenant, Sir John Brydges. Following at a respectable pace were Jane’s tearful attendants, Mrs. Ellen and Mistress Elizabeth Tylney.

  Because of Jane’s royal status, if not as a deposed queen, then as the granddaughter of a princess, her execution was not held on Tower Hill, but rather on Tower Green, within the precincts of the fortress’s walls. It did not, however, take place indoors, as depicted in the famous nineteenth-century French painting by Paul Delaroche. Admitting in her speech to the witnesses that she had committed a crime against the queen’s highness by accepting the crown, she also stated that she was innocent of desiring that which constituted her crime.

  An eyewitness claimed that Jane “wrung her hands, in which she had her book,” asked those assembled to attest to the fact that she had died a good Christian, and exhorted them to pray for her. She then fervently recited Psalm 51, the Miserere, in English, while Feckenham repeated it in Latin after she had finished speaking.

  Jane handed her gloves and handkerchief to Mistress Tylney and offered the prayer book to Thomas Brydges, brother of the Tower’s Lieutenant. Then, as she began to unlace her gown, the masked executioner stepped forward. Uncomprehending, modest, and terrified, Jane jumped back, urging him to leave her alone, unaware that his victims’ outer garments were an executioner’s perquisite.

  Her ladies then removed her headdress and collar. The headsman asked her forgiveness, according to protocol, and Jane granted it, pleading, after seeing the straw and the block for the first time, “I pray you dispatch me quickly.” Then, referring to her head, she asked fearfully, “Will you take it off before I lay me down?”

  “No, madam,” replied the executioner.

  Jane blindfolded herself, but, her bearings lost, found herself groping for the block with her hands. “What shall I do? Where is it?” she cried, suddenly the frightened girl inside the fervent evangelical.

  After invoking Jesus’s last words according to Luke, “Lord, into thy hands I commend my spirit,” Jane was beheaded. The witnesses were so close to her body that they were spattered with her blood. For some reason, her corpse was not immediately removed. Hours later, the former queen’s headless body remained on the scaffold, the straw beneath it stained crimson with her blood. By the end of the day, Jane’s corpse was cast into the same pit within the chapel where Guildford’s body had been tossed. Their bones were eventually interred beneath the paving stones of St. Peter ad Vincula, between those of Anne Boleyn and Kathryn Howard, the two executed queens of Jane’s great-uncle Henry VIII.

  Her father, the Duke of Suffolk, was executed for treason eleven days later, on February 23, 1554. Jane’s mother eventually remarried, wedding Adrian Stokes, her Master of the Horse, in March 1555.

  There was no public outcry at Jane’s death from Protestant evangelicals; Mary was now queen, and Tudor tempers were legendary. But not too much time passed before both Jane Grey and Guildford Dudley were regarded as martyrs and their executions as judicial murders.

  In Grafton’s Abridgement of the Chronicles of England, published in 1563 when the Protestant Elizabe
th I was on the throne, the author, who had personally known the “comely” Guildford, insisted he “most innocently was executed, whom God had endowed with such virtues that even those that never before the time of his execution saw him, did with lamentable tears bewail his death.”

  Legend has it that after Jane’s death the oak trees in Bradgate Park where she spent her childhood were pollarded, meaning that the top branches were lopped off to allow for dense new growth. It was a symbolic gesture of arboreal defiance, as well as mourning for the estate’s native daughter. Also among the lore surrounding Jane’s demise is the story that when word of her beheading reached Leicestershire, the judge who had sentenced her became barking mad. Convinced he could see her spirit floating about him, he died raving, “Take the Lady Jane from me! Take away the Lady Jane!”

  What’s wrong with this picture, mythology aside, is that Lady Jane Grey, the scholarly prodigy who had so impressed Roger Ascham and the learned Lutherans of Germany and Switzerland, did not suffer a religious martyr’s death, burned alive in the center of a town square—although she may have viewed herself as a sacrifice on the altar of religion. Admitting she had done Mary a wrong, even though it had not been her idea to so transgress, the Nine Days’ Queen died a traitor’s death, beheaded at the pleasure of the sovereign whose place in the succession Jane had usurped, even though her accession had been neither of her making nor desire.

  Had Jane not been the daughter of a duke and the grandniece of Henry VIII, and therefore worth something to her parents on the marriage market, and had she not been of value to her dying cousin Edward VI as the standard-bearer for the reformed religion, she might have enjoyed a quiet existence with her books and theological tracts, perhaps even refusing to wed, if she thought she could get away with it. Had Jane been a Catholic, she might have made a terrific nun. She was an ideologue to the last, her own faith unswerving.