by David Loades
The damage that Catherine had done to Henry was severe, but not irreparable. In a sense she had done him a favour, because she had proved conclusively that he was not the man he had been, and that sort of realism was necessary. He lowered his sights, and did not make the same demands upon his sixth wife that he had attempted to make on all the others. Of the six, Catherine stands out because she was the only one to be actually guilty of serious misconduct. Unlike Catherine of Aragon or Anne Boleyn, she had no political presence of her own. In that respect she resembled Jane Seymour but there the similarity began and ended. Jane’s sexuality had been gentle and passive, Catherine’s was devious and manipulative. Unlike any of Henry’s other wives, she was the creation of a family faction, rather than the founder of one. The Boleyns and the Seymours would have had a presence at Court, even if their leading women had not shared the royal bed – the Parrs probably not. But neither the Boleyns nor the Seymours were powerful in the same sense as the Howards. Anne Boleyn had been more a councillor than a consort, but she had always been meticulous in her preservation of the King’s honour and even her alleged misdemeanours had produced anger rather than humiliation or depression. Like Anne, but in a completely different way, Catherine did not know how to be a consort. She accepted all the privileges and wealth of her position but gave nothing in return except a sexual complaisance, which turned out to be fraudulent. She is not known to have been the patron of any group, or of any particular style of piety, nor did she receive petitions soliciting her arbitration. Her time, admittedly was short, but then so was that 154
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of Jane, who was a conspicuous peacemaker in the royal family. Catherine was at daggers drawn with Mary, who seems to have suspected her motives from the start, and who was a dedicated spinster fi ve years her senior. Paradoxically the only member of the royal family with whom she seems to have been on good terms was her immediate predecessor, Anne of Cleves. It must have been an attraction of opposites because no two women could have been more different, except in one important respect – both were relatively uneducated, and when Anne was at court the Queen may have sought her company as a relief from the demands of her more learned compatriots. Judged by the standards normally applied to a consort, Catherine had almost no redeeming feature, and the fact that it took a major crisis to convince Henry of that fact is probably a better indication of his declining judgement than either the Boulogne campaign or the rough wooing, which as we shall see, was a seriously counterproductive policy.
8
The Queens who Never Were: Jane Grey and
Mary Stuart These women were both claimants or pretenders not to the role of consort but to the Crown in their own right. They therefore belong in a different league from the ladies we have so far considered. Mary was Queen of Scotland in her own right almost from birth, and for about 18 months was also Queen Consort of France. Her claim to the throne of England was by what was called ‘indefeasible hereditary succession’, a custom or rule recognized in both England and Scotland (but not in France) whereby the oldest legitimate descendant of the last monarch to produce offspring was recognized as heir. By this custom males took precedence over females, irrespective of seniority, but in the absence of men, the right of women to succeed was recognized. Mary was the daughter and only surviving child of James V of Scotland, born just a week before his death, and thus the granddaughter of Margaret Tudor, Henry VIII’s elder sister, who had married King James IV. If it was claimed – as it was in Catholic Europe – that both Henry VIII’s younger children were illegitimate, then the lawful Tudor line was represented on his death by his elder daughter, Mary, and after her by Mary of Scotland. The English, however, did not see it that way. As far as English law was concerned, Edward, Henry’s son was legitimate because Papal sanctions were not recognized, and he was the heir in 1547.
1 Mary also recognized his right, and did not put forward a claim. Although unchallenged, Edward’s position was nevertheless ambiguous, because he had also been declared the heir by his father’s last succession Act in 1544, and by the will which that Act had authorized. In other words an Englishman could choose whether he recognized Edward by hereditary right, or by statutory authorization. When Edward died childless, the issue returned, but was resolved, as we shall see, in favour of the statute. In neither of these situations was any claim by Mary of Scotland considered, but when Mary Tudor also died childless, the issue returned. In 1558 there were two possible claimants representing different principles of succession. Elizabeth represented the statutory policy laid down in 1544, 156
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whereas Mary of Scotland, whose claim had been ignored in the Succession Act, represented indefeasible hereditary right. At the time it was no contest, because Mary was betrothed to the Dauphin, and England was at war with France. Moreover the Succession Act was universally respected. The issue arose over who should be recognized as Elizabeth’s heir should she, like her siblings, die childless. As we shall see, that problem was to affl ict English politics for over twenty y
ears.2 By comparison, Jane Grey was a very short-term problem. She was not the direct heir by anyone’s standards, except those of Edward VI. Edward issued (or tried to issue) Letters Patent recognizing Jane as his successor when it became clear that he was mortally ill in the summer of 1553.
3 It looked at fi rst as though his wishes would be obeyed, but the superiority of Mary’s claim, both by hereditary right and by the Succession Act, was soon apparent. Jane was consigned to the Tower, and eventually to the block. She became a footnote to history. However, because her pretension came fi rst chronologically, and it was she rather than either of the Marys who can claim in a sense to have been England’s fi rst ruling Queen, Jane takes priority for consideration. Jane was the eldest of three daughters of Henry Grey, Marquis of Dorset, and his wife Frances Brandon. She was born at Bradgate Hall in Leicestershire in October 1537. Frances was the elder daughter of Mary, Henry VIII’s younger sister by her second marriage to Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, and by the Succession Act of 1544 was next in line to the throne should all Henry’s own offspring die childless. That was not the case in the summer of 1553, when both Mary and Elizabeth were very much alive. Frances was also alive, and indeed Edward’s ‘device for the succession’ had started by naming any son who might be born to her. Only when it was apparent that his time was very short did the young King switch his option to Jane, who should have had no claim by anyone’s standards. The reason for this implausible change was that Edward knew Jane and liked her. Her education and theological tastes matched his own and she was almost exactly his age. For several years there had been talk of a marriage between them and Jane seems to have been brought up with that in mind. Her early education at Bradgate was ordinary enough, except that she seems to have been taught Latin from the beginning, which was not normal for a girl. At the age of about 9 she went to live in the household of the Dowager Queen Catherine and for a year or so appears to have shared the education of the precocious Edward there, which elevated her onto an altogether new plane of learning
.4 For two or three months Mary, Elizabeth and Jane all continued in Catherine’s establishment. The latter’s controversial and somewhat hasty marriage to Lord Thomas Seymour prompted Mary to move out. She could afford to do so, since she was of age and the estates conferred upon her by the terms of Henry’s will
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were promptly assigned. Elizabeth and Jane stayed put. Elizabeth was 13 and her estates had not yet been assigned. Jane stayed by a special arrangement between the Marquis of Dorset and Lord Thomas Seymour, in the course of which Lord Thomas hinted broadly that he was in a position to arrange her marriage to the young king. ‘You will see’, one contemporary observed, ‘he will marry her to the king.
’5 Why he should have thought that – and still more why the Marquis should have believed him,
remain something of a mystery. Grey paid Seymour something like £2,000 for the privilege. In the summer of 1548, while Catherine was pregnant, she discovered the indiscreet Lord Thomas with his arms around Elizabeth. The girl was sent away in disgrace and, having nowhere obvious to go, retreated to the home of Sir Anthony and Lady Denny at Cheshunt. Then, early in September, Catherine died in childbirth, leaving Jane apparently unprotected in the household of a notorious womanizer. Lord Thomas, however, was not a child abuser and the Marquis appears to have continued to trust him. His fi rst thought was to break up the overlarge household that he had kept up while married to the Queen Dowager, and after a friendly exchange of correspondence, Dorset took his daughter back to Bradgate, where she arrived on about 20 September. Seymour, meanwhile had changed his mind, and decided for political reasons to retain a much larger establishment than he could really afford. Jane’s role in all this was obvious, so he opened negotiations with Dorset to get her back. The latter, meanwhile, may have grown sceptical of these ambitions because he had also opened a correspondence with the Lord Protector for a marriage between Jane and the Earl of Hertford, his eldest son. It is probable that Dorset was simply keeping his options open because, within a couple of weeks Lord Thomas had persuaded him to allow his daughter to return to Hanworth. On 1 October the girl herself wrote to Thomas, expressing her gratitude for his kindness and describing him as her ‘loving and kind father’. His charm seems to have been working overtime because at the same time her mother, Frances, also wrote to him as her ‘very good lord and brother’. It may have been Lord Seymour’s friend and associate Sir William Sharrington who got on so well with the Marchioness but relations between the two establishments could hardly have been more cosy.
Within weeks, Thomas was in trouble up to his neck, for reasons that had nothing directly to do with Jane and the Greys were, understandably, very worried. The Lord Admiral had been plotting a coup against his brother, whom he detested by this time, and boasting about how many armed men he could raise. At the same time, Sharrington had been fi ltering off money from the Bristol Mint, for which he had responsibility. The intention seems to have been to get the Lord Protector’s patent overturned by statute, but other, more direct action was also 158
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suspected. In January 1549, Lord Thomas Seymour was arrested, interrogated, and charged with treason. This charge was not derived from the plot against his brother, which would not have been treason because the latter was not the King, but from an alleged intention to marry the Princess Elizabeth. The Princess was also interrogated, and although she behaved with admirable self possession, the charge was deemed to be proved. Lord Thomas was condemned by Act of Attainder and executed on 20 March 1549.
6 The Protector seems to have been genuinely perplexed as to what to do but his temper was not sweetened when he discovered that his brother had been endeavouring to sabotage his marriage plans for his son by continuing to dangle Jane before the King – a circumstance of which the Marquis of Dorset had not informed him. Jane’s reaction to the loss of her ‘kind father’ in such dramatic circumstances is not known but all Seymour’s property was forfeit by his attainder, so the ground was literally swept from under her. By the end of March, and still short of her twelfth birthday, she was back at Bradgate. At such a distance from the Court there was no longer any question of her sharing the King’s lessons (if that is what had been happening), but the Greys decided to persevere with the quality of education that she had been receiving and engaged John Aylmer, the future bishop of London, as her tutor. Aylmer was a learned man, and strong Protestant, and in friendly correspondence with such leading continental reformers as Heinrich Bullinger and John ab Ulmis. Aylmer was hugely impressed with his charge and was soon encouraging her to correspond directly with his friends, who were equally impressed with her piety and her Latin.
7 It seems clear that at this point, in the summer of 1549, Dorset still had more than an eye on Jane marrying Edward, and wanted to make sure that she would be a fi t companion for him. Like over-anxious parents in any period, the Marquis and his lady fretted over their eldest child, and according to her own account were ‘sharp and severe’ with her. Roger Ascham, who visited Bradgate that summer, declared that it was her parents’ ‘taunts, pinches, nips and bobs’ that caused her to seek solace in the company of Plato, and ‘gentle master’ Aylmer. Perhaps, but Ascham’s work was more than a little hagiographic and it may well be that Jane was not quite the humble and polite bookworm whom he portrayed. As one recent biographer has observed, she was probably ‘a priggish, opinionated teenager, contemptuous of her parents’. She knew what was expected of her but a taste for ‘playing, dancing and being merry’ can also be glimpsed through his record. The one thing that is quite clear is that she was formidably intelligent, a quality that she does not seem to have inherited directly from either of her parents. Her younger sisters, Catherine and Mary were much more truly their parents’ children in that respect.
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Jane stayed at Bradgate, or other Grey residences as appropriate, for the next four years. Her prospects changed as the political events of the reign unfolded but neither she nor indeed her father had much control over those events. The disturbances of July and August 1549 did not touch Bradgate, and the Marquis played no leading role in their suppression. Nor was he active in the coup that overthrew the Protector in October. What he did succeed in doing was to ingratiate himself with the man who effectively took over the Protestor’s position – John Dudley, Earl of Warwick. After the coup, Warwick was locked in a three-month battle with the religious conservatives on the Council, whose main motivation in getting rid of Somerset had been to check England’s progress towards Protestantism. Warwick’s own incentives had been quite different and he was happy to see the Reformation continue, but in order to secure control he needed allies in the Council, and that meant Protestants. That was where the Marquis came in. He may not have been a very shrewd politician, or even a good administrator, but he was a Protestant and he was sworn of the Council on 28 November 1549.
8 This raised his political profi le substantially and he came to be regarded as one of Warwick’s closest and most reliable allies. Meanwhile, Jane’s matrimonial prospects were ebbing away. One of the obstacles in the way of her union with the King had always been the fact that he was supposed to be committed to Mary of Scotland by the treaty of Greenwich of 1543. However the Scots had repudiated that treaty and numerous English attempts to resurrect it had fi nally ended in failure in 1548 when Mary was betrothed to the Dauphin, Francis. War with France had followed, from August 1549 to March 1550, and with the peace that ended that war came talk of a matrimonial alliance. Negotiations proceeded for over a year and were fi nally concluded in June 1551, whereby a marriage was agreed but was not to take place until Elizabeth, Henry II’s eldest daughter, had passed the age of 12 (she was, at that point, 6) which was the minimum canonical age for co-habitation.
9 The marriage never took place because Edward died when Elizabeth was 8, but he was considered to be committed, and that shut off Jane’s chances – if they had ever existed. Similarly, relations with Edward Seymour chilled noticeably after Dorset’s choice in October 1549. He became so close to the Earl of Warwick that when the latter had himself raised to the Dukedom of Northumberland on 11
October 1551, he caused the Marquis to be created Duke of Suffolk at the same time. Shortly after the Duke of Somerset was arrested, and with his execution for felony in February 1552, his title was extinguished and his property forfeit. The Earl of Hertford disappeared into limbo and another matrimonial option was closed.
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The dukedom of Suffolk brought further wealth to the Greys and by the summer of 1552 they had moved their main centre of operations from Bradgate to the former Carthusian monastery of Sheen, in Surrey. There J
ane seems to have lived until her ill-fated marriage to Lord Guildford Dudley in June 1553. Guildford was the Duke of Northumberland’s last unmarried son, and his father’s intentions had not originally focused on Jane at all. He had been negotiating for some time for the hand of her cousin, Margaret Clifford, the daughter of her Aunt Eleanor, Frances’s sister, and Henry Clifford, Earl of Cumberland. His purpose seems to have been to establish a fi rm link with one of the northern peerage families, but Clifford was having none of it.
10 As early as July 1552 the Privy Council had written to both peers to ‘grow to some good end’, concerning the marriage, which was probably Northumberland’s way of putting pressure on his colleague – but to no avail. Frustrated in his quest, Northumberland turned to his complaisant ally, the Duke of Suffolk, and on 21 May 1553 effected a series of prestigious marriages. His daughter Catherine was married to Henry Hastings, heir to the Earl of Huntingdon, Jane’s sister, also Catherine, to Henry Herbert, son of the Earl of Pembroke, and Jane herself to Guildford Dudley. This appears to have been an act of parental oppression on the Greys’ part, because all the indications are that Jane loathed her spouse and was only compelled to sleep with him by ‘the urging of her mother and the violence of her father, who compelled her to accede to his commands with blows’. Jane had become a bluestocking, perhaps as much by force of circumstances as by taste, and some of her stilted, elaborate letters to Heinrich Bullinger testify both to her accomplishments and her ambition. At the age of 16 she was fl uent in Latin, profi cient in Greek and anxious to learn Hebrew. In an earlier generation she would have been a natural candidate for the cloister, an abbess in the making. As it was, she was forced into bed with Guildford Dudley. It has been argued that this marriage was part of a deep-laid plot by the Duke of Northumberland to divert the Crown into the Dudley family, but at the time even the suspicious Jehan Scheyfre, the Imperial ambassador, merely noted that Jane was a cousin of the King’s. It is likely that, in late May, Northumberland did not even know of that schoolboy exercise on the succession, known as the ‘King’s Device’. Edward had been ill since February, but the nature of his ailment was not understood, and in late May he was in remission. It was only about a week into June that his condition deteriorated alarmingly, and the physicians who had been glibly talking of a complete recovery, suddenly decided that his death was not only cer