Crown of Blood

by Nicola Tallis

  Jane’s remorse was evident, but she could not stress enough that ‘no one can ever say either that I sought it as my own, or that I was pleased with it or ever accepted it’.24 The crown had been forced upon her, and she had been left with no option but to comply. Jane continued to place the blame for events squarely at Northumberland’s door, stressing ‘thus in truth I was deceived by the duke and the council, and ill treated by my husband and his mother’.25 Clearly she harboured no warm feelings either for Guildford or his family. As if that was not damning enough, in sentiments that echoed those of her mother, Jane continued to level an accusation of poison against her parents-in-law: ‘I know for certain that, twice during this time, poison was given to me, first in the house of the duchess of Northumberland, and afterwards here in the Tower, as I have the best and most certain testimony, besides that since that time all my hair has fallen off.’26 Her evidence for this claim is unclear, but it seems certain that in the first instance she was referring to the illness she had experienced following her marriage. Preposterous though such a claim was, given that Northumberland had needed Jane in order to validate his authority, it served as further fuel to blacken his name.27 More puzzling is the claim that she had lost her hair, but if that were partially true then this was perhaps due to the stress of the past few months.28 Having done all she could to exonerate herself in the eyes of the Queen by playing to her strength of the written word, Jane may have ended her letter with a powerful statement similar to that which she later made: ‘And all these things I have wished to say for the witness of my innocence and the disburdening of my conscience.’29

  Others, including Jane’s mother, had probably been made aware by now that Mary’s intention was to spare Jane. This may also have been communicated to Jane, in which case she had good reason to be hopeful that her letter would receive a favourable response from the Queen, and that she too would be granted the same mercy and freedom given to others. Mary was certainly sympathetic to Jane’s situation, and though she soon removed from the Tower to Richmond Palace without seeing her cousin, Jane was not forgotten. By 13 August it seems clear that Mary had received Jane’s letter, and that she had accepted her version of events. During their audience with her that day, the Imperial ambassadors reported that though the Queen made it clear that ‘she had not pardoned anybody yet’, and there were many who whispered in the Queen’s ear that ‘Jane of Suffolk deserved death according to English law’, Mary, conscious of their familial bonds and Jane’s tender age, could not bring herself to execute her cousin.30 It was evident that Mary believed in Jane’s innocence, for in words that almost echoed those in Jane’s letter, the ambassadors informed their master that Jane knew nothing of the plans in which she had become helplessly entangled, ‘nor was she ever a party nor did she ever give her consent to the Duke’s intrigues and plots’.31 This seems to indicate that Mary had indeed received Jane’s account, and she was firm in her decision to be merciful. The Queen’s conscience, the ambassadors continued, ‘would not permit her to have her put to death’, despite the fact that she had been warned by the use of an example from Roman history that it would be better to put Jane to death, ‘because of the scandal and danger that might have followed’.32 Jane’s life, it seemed, was safe. If Jane herself was not aware of this at this time then it seems likely that she would have received some indication shortly afterwards. Furthermore, Mary appeared to have decided on her ultimate fate, and had assured the Imperial ambassadors that ‘before setting the Lady Jane at liberty she would take the greatest possible care for the future’.33 The taste of future freedom was tantalizing, but for the time being, Jane was going nowhere.

  By contrast, for Jane’s father-in-law Northumberland, there was not a moment to be wasted. The date of his trial was set: on the morning of 18 August he left the Tower, destined for Westminster. He was to be tried alongside his eldest son, John, and William Parr, ‘Marquis of Northampton, who was generally held to be one of the guiltiest’.34 The fact that a trial for Jane was not arranged at the same time is indicative of Mary’s plans to forgive Jane, for had she wished to rid herself of her cousin then she had legitimate grounds to do so. The Imperial ambassadors had warned her that ‘even were she [Jane] married to an inferior, yet the title she had borne, though in itself insufficiently proved, yet had had some semblance of foundation, and thus might be revived again to trouble the succession to the Crown’, advice that Mary ignored.35 Jane was almost certainly aware that her father-in-law’s day of judgement had arrived, but her feelings towards him had not mellowed. Westminster Hall was the setting for high-profile trials, and was also the location for the banquet that traditionally took place following a monarch’s coronation. For Northumberland, this proved to be a cruel twist of fate; had his schemes succeeded he would no doubt have revelled in presiding over Jane’s coronation celebrations – now the hall would witness his astonishingly rapid demise, of which there was no question.

  As the fallen Duke arrived at the hall, with ‘a good and intrepid countenance, full of humility and gravity’, he was confronted by the site of his peers, many of whom ‘a few days ago he had commanded at his leisure’.36 His former colleagues now ‘beheld him with a severe aspect, and the greatest courtesy shown him of any was a slight touch of the cap’.37 The trial was presided over by the eighty-year-old Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk, as Lord High Steward, ‘an old man with one foot in the grave’.38 Recently released and restored from the Tower by the good graces of Queen Mary, Norfolk provided a tangible example of how fortune’s wheel could swiftly turn.

  Standing at the bar, Northumberland ‘used great reverence towards the judges, and protesting his faith and obedience to the queen’s majesty, whom he confessed grievously to have offended’, claimed that he had no wish to speak in his defence, but declared that he had acted merely on King Edward’s instructions.39 He did, however, declare ‘his earnest repentance’, and ‘then he fell on his knees and appealed to the Queen for mercy, saying that all he had done was by the advice, consent and command of the Council’.40 It was not enough.

  The verdict was a foregone conclusion: Northumberland was guilty of high treason, and must die. When the sentence was pronounced, ‘he asked the Court to mitigate the punishment and the form of the execution and also to be merciful towards his sons, as their fault was due to their youth and ignorance in obeying him’.41 According to the nineteenth-century antiquarian Nicholas Harris Nicolas, he also took the opportunity to declare that ‘Lady Jane herself was so far from aspiring to the Crown, “that she was by enticement and force made to accept it”’.42 No contemporary source makes any reference to such an assertion, however, and it seems more probable that the Duke’s concerns were for the welfare of his own children. Jane was not his problem. Having done all that he could to exonerate his sons from blame, his only thoughts were for himself, as he further requested ‘the appointment of a religious and learned man, with whom he could discharge his conscience before death’.43

  Northumberland’s son John and the Marquess of Northampton were both condemned beside him, and the three men were returned to the Tower, there to await execution: Northumberland’s day of reckoning had been scheduled for 21 August. Jane, meanwhile, though informed of her father-in-law’s impending death, was more concerned by the reports that reached her in regard to his religion. For Northumberland had been serious in his desire to meet with men of learning, and through them had made a momentous decision: to abandon the Protestant faith – the faith for which all of his actions had striven to retain – and embrace the old religion of Catholicism that had once been so loathsome to him. His motivation was evident, and in a last-ditch attempt to try and earn a reprieve from the Queen, on the morning of Monday 21 August,

  [i]t was appointed the duke with other should have suffered, and all the guard were at the Tower; but howsoever it chanced he did not; but he desired to hear mass, and to receive the sacrament, according to the old accustomed manner. So about 9 of the clock the altar in t
he chapel was arrayed. And each thing prepared for the purpose; then Mr Gage went and fetched the Duke.44

  ‘The lady Jane looking through the window saw the duke and the rest going to the church’ as they proceeded to the Chapel of St John in the White Tower.45 The Duke’s conversion was a wonderful piece of propaganda for the new Marian regime, already intent on reversion to the old religion, and they played it for all it was worth.

  Jane’s disgust at Northumberland’s abandonment of Protestantism and her general hatred of him were unsurprising. For most of her short life she had found herself at the centre of plots engineered by ambitious men eager for power, and as a result she had learned not to trust them. The will of her great-uncle, Henry VIII, had transformed her position and heightened her importance in the vicious circle of Tudor politics, and Northumberland had not been the first to notice it. After all, Jane had previously been used as a pawn in the power games of Sir Thomas Seymour – a strategy that had almost resulted in disaster.

  As Jane absorbed the news of her father-in-law’s religious betrayal, she had time to consider his decision, but it remained utterly incomprehensible to her. Her feelings towards those who converted were made plain in a letter that she later wrote to her first tutor, Dr Harding, upon hearing that he too had reverted to Rome: ‘And wilt thou honour a detestable idol, invented by Romish popes, and the abominable college of crafty cardinals?’46 ‘Fight manfully, come life, come death: the quarrel is God’s, and undoubtedly the victory is ours’, Jane had urged Harding.47 In her mind it was evident that she believed that her faith was her salvation, and that she could not understand those who thought otherwise – even those on the point of death. She believed that conversion to Catholicism led to nothing but the damnation of the soul, and eternal doom. It was a fate she believed that her father-in-law was about to come face-to-face with.

  Jane understood Northumberland’s motivation for converting, later telling Rowland Lea that ‘he hoped for life by his turning’, and acknowledging that ‘though other men be of that opinion, I am utterly not’.48 It was a choice that she herself could never imagine making. She believed that the Duke’s hope was even more incredulous given his crime, for as she told Lea, ‘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?’49 She was quite right.

  ON THAT SUMMER morning, 22 August, from her room in Master Partridge’s lodgings, Jane would have been able to hear, maybe even see, the guards as they marched towards St Thomas’s Tower, there to lead the fallen Duke of Northumberland from his prison. His scheming, plotting, ruthless ambition, and ultimate betrayal of the Protestant faith had all culminated in this. He had been hopeful that his conversion to Catholicism would save him, but it did not. His actions had merely delayed his end by a single day.50 Northumberland was led out from the Tower for the final time ‘under a strong guard’, amid the vast and hostile crowd that had gathered to witness his final moments, and his death.51 Indeed, ‘the whole town of London concurred to attend to the spectacle’, and Jane, as well as the Duke’s incarcerated sons, would almost certainly have heard the noise and commotion from the rowdy Londoners who were baying for his blood.52 Behind him came Sir John Gates and Sir Thomas Palmer, his former supporters who, like Northumberland, had been condemned to die.53 Northumberland was the first to mount the scaffold; the same scaffold that, in an ironic twist of fate, ‘was first put up for his father, who lost his head at the same place and on the same day forty-five years ago, for similar crimes and ambition’.54

  Perhaps he was still hoping for the sight of a messenger bringing a last-minute reprieve from the Queen. If this was his hope, then it was in vain. Nevertheless, with just moments to live, his last words were spent on professing his devotion to the Catholic Church to which he had so recently converted, and advising the people to obey the Queen, ‘whom I have intolerably offended’.55 Unsurprisingly, he made no mention of Jane, or of his wife and children. Having uttered his final words he knelt down on the straw. Simon Renard, one of the Imperial ambassadors who became close to Queen Mary, rather exuberantly reported that after making the sign of the cross, ‘[Northumberland’s] head was cut off in the presence of over fifty thousand people’ who clamoured in approval as his severed head was held up by the executioner.56

  From her room, Jane would have been able to hear the deafening roar of the assembled crowd as her father-in-law’s head was struck from his body. But to Jane’s mind his punishment had only just begun, for in consequence of his abandonment of Protestantism, he was now destined to burn in the raging flames of Hell. She was unperturbed; for her, death at the hands of the headsman’s axe was a fate with which she was already chillingly familiar: four years earlier her guardian, Sir Thomas Seymour, had lost his head at the same site on which Northumberland had drawn his last breath.

  Though Northumberland’s widow was distraught at the loss of her husband, and his children too doubtless mourned him, his violent death did not mellow Jane’s feelings towards him.57 On Tuesday 29 August, Northumberland had been dead for a week. That same evening, Rowland Lea paid a visit to his friend Master Partridge in the Tower. As he arrived at Partridge’s house near Tower Green to dine with his friend and his wife, he discovered that Partridge’s charge, Lady Jane, was also joining them. Jane had already placed herself at the head of the table as her rank demanded, and was accompanied by one of her ladies and her manservant.58 Lea recalled that Jane, perhaps eager to restore an element of normality to the situation, insisted that he and Partridge ‘put on our caps’, and ‘once or twice drunk to me and bade me heartily welcome’.59 Jane, it seems, was enjoying the company, and in the long days of her lonely imprisonment, human communication was more precious to her than ever. As she chatted, in a peak of gratitude towards her royal cousin she cried, ‘the queen’s grace is a merciful princess; I beseech God she may long continue and send his bountiful grace upon her’. 60 This confirms that Jane had been informed of the Queen’s intentions to spare her life, and perhaps one day her freedom. Her relief at the mercy shown to her by Mary was genuine, and heartfelt. As the conversation continued, the subject fell upon ‘matters of religion’.61 On 18 August Mary had issued a proclamation in which she claimed that she would make no attempt to enforce Catholicism on her people until Parliament met, but Jane knew that ‘the Queen is so Catholic that it is held for certain that her Highness will have no regard to heretical knaves’, and was therefore wary of Mary’s ultimate intentions.62 Perhaps with this in mind Jane continued to enquire as to what had been preached at St Paul’s Cross recently.63 ‘I pray you,’ she asked, ‘have they mass in London?’ Lea replied that ‘in some places’ the Mass, so closely associated with Catholicism and banned by King Edward, had indeed been restored.64 Jane answered that she was not so surprised by that, as by the conversion of Northumberland to that faith. ‘Perchance he thereby hoped to have had his pardon,’ Lea responded. On hearing this, Jane’s feelings spilled over into angry words and she made no attempt to hide her fury. ‘Pardon? Woe worth him!’ she exclaimed. ‘He hath brought me and our stock [family] in most miserable calamity and misery by his exceeding ambition.’65 Even his death had not mellowed Jane’s feelings towards her father-in-law, and the intensity of her dislike became clear as she continued:

  Like as his life was wicked and full of dissimulation, so was his end thereafter. I pray God, I, nor no friend of mine, die so. Should I, who (am) young and in my few years, forsake my faith for the love of life? Nay, God forbid! Much more he should not, whose fatal course, although he had lived his just number of years, could not have long continued.66

  The message was simple: in Jane’s mind, her father-in-law had risked his immortal soul for the preservation of his earthly body. It was unforgivable in the eyes of God, for as she continued, ‘“Whoso denieth him before men, he will not know him in his Father’s kingdom.”’67 He
r words, spoken with such conviction, astonished her fellow diners; here was a girl aged seventeen who proclaimed that her devotion to her faith was so profound that she would rather die than forsake it. More than that, she abhorred anyone who was not prepared to do the same, and was becoming increasingly intolerant of those with opposing religious views. For Jane, her religion was her life, and Northumberland’s betrayal was, in her eyes, an abominable mistake from which there could be no redemption. If ever the opportunity arose, she was determined to show as much dedication to her religious beliefs as her idols had done.

  Though, at present, death seemed like an unlikely conclusion for Jane, Mary was still under immense pressure to have both her and Guildford executed. Thus far she had spared their lives, but Jane was still referred to as ‘the usurper’.68 It remained to be seen whether Jane would escape from the Tower’s clutches alive.