12.CSPS 9 pp. 46, 47.
13.Ives, The Reformation Experience, p. 181.
14.Stow, Survey of London, p. 54.
15.De Lisle, Sisters, p. 37.
16.Chronicle of the Grey Friars, p. 55.
17.J. L. McIntosh, From Heads of Household to Heads of State (2009), Appendix A. The following year, Henry VIII’s widow Katherine Parr told her Master of the Horse that all the lands given to supporters of the Protectorate should be returned to the king when he reached his majority: a conversation that suggests there were concerns about the morality of their actions.
18.Janet Arnold, ‘The Coronation Portrait of Queen Elizabeth’ in Burlington Magazine 120 (1978), pp. 727–41.
19.John Astley joined Elizabeth’s household before 1540. McIntosh, From Heads of Household, p. 89.
20.Original letters (ed Ellis), Vol. 2, p. 150.
21.Susan James, Catherine Parr: Henry VIII’s Last Love (2008), p. 323.
22.Katherine Parr’s chaplain, John Parkhurst, wrote her epitaph in Latin as if spoken by the little girl: ‘With what great travail/And at her life’s expense/My mother, the queen, gave birth/A wayfarer I, her infant child/lie beneath this marble stone/If cruel death had given me/A longer while to live/Those virtues of that best of mothers . . . Would have lived again as my own nature/Now whoever you are, farewell.’
23.Elizabeth, Selected Works (ed Steven May) (2004), p. 113.
24.Written by the seventeenth-century Italian writer Gregorio Leti.
25.Katherine Parr: Complete Works and Correspondence (ed Janel Mueller) (2011), pp. 623, 624, 625.
27Mary in Danger
1.February 1550.
2.Literary Remains of King Edward the Sixth (ed Nichols), p. 227.
3.CSPS 9 , 7 November 1549.
4.The date of this visit is often given as 1550. This is a misreading of the source. The following February is described as being in the fourth year of Edward’s reign – which began in January 1550, making the previous November, 1549. HMC Report on the Manuscripts of Lord Middleton preserved at Wollaton Hall, Notts. (London 1911), p. 520.
5.This description of Frances’ appearance is based on her tomb effigy and not the double portrait of the overweight Lady Dacre and her son which is still sometimes mistakenly referred to as a portrait of Frances and Adrian Stokes.
6.Queen’s College Oxford MSS 349.
7.Frances’ close relationship with her daughter was recorded by Jane’s Italian tutor, Michel Angelo Florio.
8.From the Latin ‘monstrare’ meaning ‘to show’: the monstrance is a stand, often with an elaborate sunburst design, and with a crystal or glass circular panel in the centre to display the host.
9.hrionline/i563 edition, Bk 12, p. 1,746.
10.De Lisle, Sisters, pp. 26, 27.
11.Edward VI referred to Henry Grey as Harry in his diary. I have done so simply to avoid referring to yet another Henry in the text.
12.CSPS 10, 14 January (1550–2). Elizabeth also found herself in difficulties with the new regime. John Dudley attempted to grab Hatfield, given to her in 1547 and which had belonged to her great-grandmother, Margaret Beaufort. He failed largely because at sixteen she had reached what was the age of majority for a woman, and had legal title to her estates.
13.Diarmaid MacCulloch, The Boy King: Edward VI and the Protestant Reformation (2002), p. 134. He bases this on ‘the extraordinarily small survival rates of known books’. The medieval donational books in the royal library were also ruthlessly weeded out.
14.British Library Add MSS 10169, f. 56v.
15.Henry Machyn, The Diary of Henry Machyn (ed J. G. Nichols) (1848), pp. 4, 5.
16.22 January 1552.
17.Lennox’s relations with the royal guest Mary of Guise were, however, rather trickier. Mary of Guise had been in France planning her return to Scotland as regent, and visiting her daughter who was betrothed to the dauphin. While she was there one of Lennox’s kinsmen was arrested for a plot to poison the little girl by lacing her favourite frittered pears. It was said that Lennox hoped killing Mary, Queen of Scots would clear the path for his becoming King of Scots. Lennox had been sufficiently embarrassed to offer to give up his claim to the Scottish throne altogether, and despite the tensions the dinner passed without incident. CSPS 10, June 1551, and England’s Boy King: The Diary of Edward VI, 1547–1553 (ed Jonathan North) (2005), n. 3 p. 82.
18.John Aylmer, An harbrowe for faithful and trew subjects (1559, reprinted 1972), margin ref: ‘The pomp of English ladies abated by the queen’s example.’
19.CSPV 1534–54, pp. 535–6.
20.CSPD 7 April 1552.
21.Girolamo Cardano, who was much admired by Edward’s tutor, Sir John Cheke.
22.Diarmaid MacCulloch, Thomas Cranmer: A Life (1996), p. 509; Mark Nicholls, A History of the Modern British Isles 1529–1603 (1999), p. 138.
28The Last Tudor King
1.He stopped writing his diary at this time.
2.Barrett L. Beer, Northumberland: Political Career of John Dudley, Earl of Warwick and Duke of Northumberland (1974), p. 109; see also Gilbert Burnet, The History of the Reformation Vol. 1 (1841), p. 453.
3.Original Letters (ed Ellis), Vol. 2, pp. 145, 146n. The letter is undated. David Starkey argues it was written around Candlemas (February); Starkey, Elizabeth, p. 108. It may even have been marginally earlier: see England under the reigns of Edward VI and Mary (ed Patrick Fraser Tytler) (1839), Vol. 1, pp. 161, 162.
4.Diary of Edward VI (ed North), p. 128.
5.According to an anonymous French source, his evangelical tutor, Sir John Cheke, and his confessor, Thomas Goodrich, Bishop of Ely, urged him on in this.
6.‘The Vita Mariae Angliae Reginae of Robert Wingfield of Brantham’ (tr. and ed D. MacCulloch) in Camden Miscellany XXVIII, Camden fourth series, Vol. 29 (1984), p. 247.
7.Her symptoms suggest renal tuberculosis.
8.Edward envisaged that the mother of the future king would act as governor until her son reached the age of eighteen. She could do nothing, however, without the sanction of an inner core of the council, men whom Edward would appoint. When the king reached fourteen, his agreement would also be required. The will included a proviso that if there were no male children at the time of Edward’s death, Frances was to be appointed governor until such time as one was born. But he clearly did not think this a likely event, since he made no further mention of the council’s sanction.
9.The wife was Elizabeth Brooke. Conyers Read, Mr Secretary Cecil & Queen Elizabeth (1955), pp. 94, 95. John Dudley claimed during his later confessions that it had been a joint decision promoted by Harry Grey, Duke of Suffolk, William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke and William Parr, Marquess of Northampton.
10.His godfather Diego Hurtado de Mendoza was in England June 1537 to the end of August 1538. Mary Tudor played godparent to a Dudley son (perhaps Guildford) March 1537. It is likely Henry Dudley was a younger brother as he was married to a less prestigious bride.
11.She was said to be acquainted with another four.
12.Commendone, in C. V. Malfatti, The Accession, Coronation and Marriage of Mary Tudor as Related in Four Manuscripts of the Escorial (1956), p. 5; de Lisle, Sisters, pp. 68–70. This is one area where Eric Ives and I agreed.
13.Richard Grafton, Abridgement of the Chronicles of England (1563) in The Chronicle of Queen Jane, and of two years of Queen Mary (ed J. G. Nichols) (1850), p. 55.
14.CSPS 11, p. 35.
15.John Dudley had expressed mild concern about the king’s health that summer, and by the end of November he had stopped writing his diary.
16.CSPS 11, p. 35.
17.McIntosh, From Heads of Household, pp. 150, 151, 155. Strenuous efforts were also made to heal other quarrels. For example, the rift with Archbishop Cranmer that had opened at Somerset’s execution was addressed with plans to release the Protector’s widow from the Tower.
18.The Discovery of Muscovy, from the Collections of Richard Hakluyt (1889), openlibrary.org, pp. 17, 18.
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19.The list is a long and complex one, but worth recording: Harry Grey agreed to marry his second daughter, Katherine, aged twelve, to William Parr’s nephew, the fifteen-year-old Lord Henry Herbert, son of William Herbert, the Earl of Pembroke. The youngest, Mary Grey, a stunted child of nine, was betrothed to a middle-aged kinsman, Lord Grey of Wilton. A battle-scarred warrior, whose face had been disfigured by a Scottish pike thrust through the roof of his mouth in 1547, Grey of Wilton must have looked terrifying to the little girl. He was regarded, however, as ‘the best soldier in the kingdom’. John Dudley’s youngest son, Henry Dudley, was to marry Harry Grey’s only niece of marriageable age, the non-royal but very rich heiress, Margaret Audley. This would help further bind the two families. His daughter, Katherine Dudley – also aged twelve – was to marry Henry Hastings, the teenage son of the Greys’ neighbour the evangelical Earl of Huntingdon. The boy’s mother was descended from the daughter of Edward IV’s brother, the Duke of Clarence – and although not a Tudor he had the advantage of being male. A few weeks later one more marriage would also be arranged. The Earl of Cumberland had rejected Guildford Dudley for his royal daughter, Margaret Clifford, the previous summer. But mysteriously he now agreed to marry her instead to John Dudley’s aging older brother, Sir Henry Dudley.
20.CSPS 11, p. 55. How willingly the judges gave their agreement is a matter of debate. The judges in question later recalled that they agreed that, aged fifteen, he was still a minor and his father’s will therefore remained valid. They insisted they gave way only after Edward promised pardons under the Great Seal for any treason they might commit in obeying his instructions. But after Mary became queen they had good reason to wish it to appear they had been pressurised.
21.Under English law half-siblings could not inherit off each other. See n. 23, http://www.somegreymatter.com/rossoenglish.htm. However, as Eric Ives informed me, this applies only for assets pertaining to the parent from which the half-sibling in question has no blood connection. This would not apply to Elizabeth and Mary as children of Henry VIII. Edward was on safer ground in excluding them as bastards.
22.www.tudorplace.com.ar/documents/EdwardWill.htm.
23.McIntosh, From Heads of Household, p. 162.
24.Ibid., p. 163.
25.CSPS 11, p. 70.
26.The aristocrat, Antoine de Noailles.
27.The Discovery of Muscovy, from the Collections of Richard Hakluyt, openlibrary.org, p. 23. I was inspired here by a passage in Edith Sitwell’s The Queens and the Hive.
Part Three
SETTING SUN: THE TUDOR QUEENS
29Nine Days
1.No one has ever seen the manuscript he refers to, and I discovered he gives a different description of Jane in a book published a year later. See, for example, Leanda de Lisle, ‘Faking Jane’ in New Criterion (September 2009), the paperback UK edition and US hardback of de Lisle, Sisters.
2.There is no source dating from Jane’s reign, or before it, that she had said, on hearing of Edward’s decision, that she believed Mary was the rightful ruler, as her French allies later claimed she had.
3.Its chief ‘captains’ under Edward VI were the foreigners John Calvin, Peter Martyr, Heinrich Bullinger ‘and such other rutterkyns [crafty creatures]’, one pamphleteer noted, adding of these, ‘I would to God thou hadst [stayed] drunk with Hans and Jacob in Strasbourg . . . I would to God thou hadst remained in Switzerland.’ Duffy, Saints, Sacrilege, Sedition, p. 19.
4.CSPS 11, 7 and 10 July.
5.Tracy Borman, Elizabeth’s Women: The Hidden Story of the Virgin Queen (2009), p. 133.
6.Elizabeth’s tutor Roger Ascham would later claim that he had long prepared Elizabeth for rule, but Ascham played up the achievements of a number of evangelical women (Jane Grey is another) while ignoring the achievements of conservatives. One example is the young aristocrat Lady Jane Fitzalan. This relative unknown was the first person to translate one of Euripides’ plays into English and in doing so composed the earliest piece of extant English drama by a woman. On Elizabeth’s and Mary’s education, see Aysha Pollnitz, ‘Christian Women or Sovereign Queens? The Schooling of Mary and Elizabeth’ in Tudor Queenship: The Reigns of Mary and Elizabeth (ed Anna Whitelock and Alice Hunt) (2010), p. 136.
7.CSPS 11, 11 July.
8.CSPS 11, p. 83; the Lord Treasurer William Paulet, Marquess of Winchester, brought the jewels to her on 12 July (British Library Harleian MSS 611, f. 1a).
9.Wriothesley, Chronicle, Vol. 2, p. 87.
10.Alan Bryson, ‘“The speciall men in every shere”: The Edwardian regime, 1547–1553’, PhD diss., St Andrews (2001), p. 280.
11.The Protestant John de Vere, Earl of Oxford, was persuaded by his common servants to imprison his own pro-Grey gentlemen. Amongst them were several members of the Golding family, one of whom later witnessed Mary Grey’s marriage to Thomas Keyes. See Oxford Dictionary of National Biography for the Earl of Oxford, and de Lisle, Sisters, for Mary Grey’s marriage.
12.There are echoes here of Jane as the ‘queen of a new and pretty invention’. Oxburgh Hall, Bedingfield MSS in Porter, Mary Tudor, pp. 208, 209.
13.De Lisle, Sisters, p. 121.
14.Lady Throckmorton. Her father, Sir Nicholas Carew, had been an ally to Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, and as a widow she would later marry Frances’ widower, Adrian Stokes.
15.Lady Throckmorton.
16.Narratives of the days of the Reformation (ed J. G. Nichols) (1859), pp. 151, 152, 153, 226; Estienne Perlin, Description des Royaulmes D’Angleterre et D’Escosse 1558 (1775), pp. vi, vii; CSPS 11, p. 113; CSPD, Edward VI and Mary I (ed C. S. Knighton) (1998), p. 344.
17.Julius Ternetianius to Ab Ulmis; Original Letters Relative to the English Reformation (ed Hastings Robinson), Vol. 1 (1846), p. 367.
18.N. P. Sil, Tudor Placemen and Statesmen: Select Case Histories (2001), p. 86.
19.CSPS 11, 4 September.
20.Elizabeth would wear the same costume for the same procession – a strong indication that Mary wore what the contemporary recorders described. J. R. Planché, Regal Records: or a Chronicle of the Coronations of the Queen Regnants of England (1838), p. 6. The story of her wearing a huge heavy crown that she had to hold on her head is later anti-Marian propaganda.
21.Malfatti, The Accession, Coronation and Marriage of Mary Tudor, p. 67.
30Revolt
1.CSPS 11, 19 October 1553.
2.Ibid.
3.On 10 October; see Porter, Mary Tudor, p. 276.
4.Anna Whitelock, Mary Tudor: England’s First Queen (2010), p. 224.
5.CSPS 11, 28 November 1553.
6.The case for the Grey family’s ‘innocence’ was made in Robert Wingfield’s Vita Mariae Angliae Reginae. This ignored the religious basis of the attempt to exclude Mary from the throne. Instead Frances is said to have opposed Jane’s marriage in May 1553, but John Dudley persuaded her husband, nevertheless, to agree to it by promising ‘a scarcely imaginable haul of great wealth and honour to his house’. In other words he had been bought off, just as the regime had tried to buy Mary off. It was further claimed that after the wedding, John Dudley had tried to poison Harry Grey, just as he had supposedly poisoned Edward. Doing so would have cleared the way for Guildford to be crowned in a joint ceremony with Jane, thus achieving Dudley’s supposed ambition to make his son king (De Lisle, Sisters, pp. 126, 127).
7.Prince Philip of Spain and William of Orange.
8.A girdle prayer book from this period, which by tradition belonged to Elizabeth, and was passed by descent through her Boleyn relatives, contains a ‘manuscript copy of the last prayer of Edward VI’: the sort of thing Jane’s might also have contained. The book had gold enamelled covers, with a classical head (not black velvet), and had belonged to the Carey family – Henry Carey, the elder son of Mary Boleyn was at this time a gentleman in Elizabeth’s household. Hugh Tait, ‘The Girdle Prayer Book or “Tablet”’ in Jewellery Studies 2 (1985), p. 53.
9.It wasn’t often carried out, but Henr
y VIII burned a gentlewoman for treason in 1537, and in 1538 James V burned an aunt of Margaret Douglas.
10.De Lisle, Sisters, p. 139. The Catholic convert in question was Thomas Harding.
11.The Lord Chamberlain was Sir John Gage.
12.A. F. Pollard, Tudor Tracts (1903), p. 190.
13.The Chronicle of Queen Jane (ed Nichols), p. 49.
14.John Foxe, Acts and Monuments (ed Stephen Reed) (1838), Vol. 6, Bk 10, pp. 1,418–9.
15.Narratives of the days of the Reformation (ed Nichols), p. 161.
16.Pollard, Tudor Tracts, p. 190.
17.The Chronicle of Queen Jane (ed Nichols), p. 49; John Ponet, A Shorte Treatise of Politike Pouuer (1556) in Winthrop Hudson, John Ponet (1942), p. 134.
18.Nor does she cast any blame on her father for her death. This contrasts with a fraudulent letter which appeared in 1570, published by John Foxe. In this Jane proclaims her innocence and implies her father is responsible for her fate. In the prayer book Guildford had also composed a farewell to Jane’s father, although the optimism concerning his fate suggests it was written before the Wyatt revolt failed, and after Guildford’s conviction for treason in November. It reads ‘your loving and obedient son wisheth unto your grace long life in this world with as much joy and comfort as ever I wished to myself, and in the world to come joy everlasting, your most humble son to his death GDudley’. I am not convinced by Janel Mueller’s contention that the flourish that follows is an ‘r’ for ‘rex’ as a) Rex would have been done with a capital R, b) he would have signed it Guildford R, and c) he would surely not have signed it thus after 19 July. Thank you to Dr Andrea Clarke of the British Library for her advice and comments on the transcription. Mueller also points out the interesting detail that the prayer book contains prayers already written in the Tower by the Catholic martyrs Thomas More and John Fisher.
Tudor_Passion. Manipulation. Murder. the Story of England's Most Notorious Royal Family Page 50