The Sisters Who Would Be Queen: The tragedy of Mary, Katherine and Lady Jane Grey

Notes (#litres_trial_promo)

Bibliography (#litres_trial_promo)

Index (#litres_trial_promo)

Other Books By (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Author

Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)

Family Trees (#ulink_712835d6-1081-5dfa-b732-af88f9e7844d)

The Descendants of Henry VII

The Grey Family Tree

The Dudley Family Tree Showing the claim of Henry, Earl of Huntingdon, to the English throne

The Seymour Family Tree

Prologue (#ulink_67f10909-8c18-5975-b482-2661031f8e8c)

God, the Prime Mover, brought peace and order to the darkness of the void as the cosmos was born. Everything, spirit or substance, was given its place according to its worth and nearness to God. Above the rocks, which enjoyed mere existence, were plants, for they enjoyed the privilege of life. Each plant also had its appointed rank. Trees were higher than moss, and oak the noblest of the trees. Superior even to the greatest tree were animals, which have appetite as well as life. Above the animals, mankind, whom God blessed with immortal souls, and they too had their degrees, according to the dues of their birth. This was the great Chain of Being, through which the Tudor universe was ordered, and at its top, under God, stood Henry VIII. It was a place he held convincingly. As he prepared for the joust on a spring day in 1524 he was still the man described by a Venetian ambassador as ‘the handsomest Prince in Christendom’. Tall and muscular with a fine complexion, the thirty-two-year-old monarch had ruled England for fifteen years and was in the prime of life. He had just had some new armour made and was looking forward to testing it at the tilt.

Henry was considered the finest jouster of his generation and the watching crowd had high expectations of the sport ahead. Attending the King on foot was his cousin, Thomas Grey, the 2nd Marquess of Dorset: his diamond and ruby badge of a Tudor rose testified to his skills as an athlete. Henry’s opponent, his brother-in-law, Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, was, however, still more renowned. His father had been killed in 1485, holding the standard of Henry VII at the battle of Bosworth Field, where the Tudor crown was won. He had been raised at court and had married Henry’s younger sister, Mary, the beautiful widow of Louis XII of France. But Suffolk was also the King’s closest friend. The two men even looked alike and at great court tournaments dressed often in identical armour.

As Henry reached his end of the tilt, Suffolk was informed that the King was in place. The duke, however, was having trouble with his new helmet. ‘I see him not,’ Suffolk shouted out; ‘by my faith for my headpiece blocks my sight.’ Thomas Grey of Dorset, hearing nothing above the stamping of the horses, then fatefully handed the King his lance. Henry’s visor was still fastened open as he readied himself, but Suffolk’s servant, mistaking the signal warned the duke, ‘Sir, the King is coming.’ Suffolk, blinded by his helmet, spurred his horse forward. Immediately the King responded, charging with his blunted spear down the sandy list. In the crowd people spotted the King’s bare face and there were desperate shouts of ‘Hold! Hold!’; but ‘the duke neither saw nor heard, and whether the King remembered his visor was up or not, few could tell’. The thundering of hooves was followed by the clap and crack of impact. Suffolk had struck the King on the brow and his shattered lance filled the King’s head-piece with splinters. As the horses pulled up, the King still in the saddle, some in the crowd looked set to attack the duke, while others blamed Dorset for handing the King his spear too soon. Henry, in response, protested loudly that no one was at fault and, taking a spear, ran a further six courses to prove he was unhurt. But the deepest fears of the spectators still lingered.

The battle of Bosworth had followed a long period of violent disorder, fuelled by rival claimants to the throne. The eventual victor, Henry VII, had ensured the peace England now enjoyed by bequeathing his crown to an adult son, Henry VIII, who was his undisputed heir. But what would have happened if that son, the King, was now killed, or died suddenly? The fear of a return to the violence of the past was visceral. It was believed that disorder had been brought into the universe when Lucifer, the Angel of Light, had rebelled against God, and into the world by sin, when that fallen Angel tempted Eve in the Garden of Eden. Ever since, Lucifer had remained watchful for any opportunity to set loose anarchy, intending eventually to engulf earth and the heavens in chaos of unimaginable horror and evil. In the shadow of Armageddon, the question of what would happen if the King died was of vital interest - and the answer was a troubling one. Henry’s only legitimate heir was a little girl, his still carefree eight-year-old daughter Mary. Under English law it was possible for a woman to inherit the crown. Her mother, Catherine of Aragon, assumed that one day she would. But England had not yet had a Queen regnant, who ruled in her own right, and it was uncertain one could survive long.

Women were believed the weaker sex, not only in terms of their physical strength. More significantly, they were also judged to be, like Eve, morally frail - a belief so deeply held that it has underpinned attitudes to women and power into modern times. While reason and intellect were associated with the male, women were considered creatures of the body: emotional, irrational and indecisive. As such they ranked below men in the Chain of Being. Although a servant might owe obedience to his mistress by reason of her place in the social hierarchy, sisters took second place to their brothers in the inheritance of property, and wives were subject to their husbands in marriage. It did not seem fitting to Henry that a woman - by nature inferior to men - should sit at the apex of power, as a monarch did. Nor did he believe it really possible.

Henry feared that even if ambitious warrior nobles did not overthrow the unsoldierly Mary, her husband would be the true ruler. England might even be absorbed into a foreign empire through a marriage treaty. His wife’s Hapsburg relations were infamous for extending their territory by this means. And, in any case, what did it say about his virility that he could only provide his dynasty with second best: a girl?

Henry had accepted that, at thirty-eight, Catherine of Aragon was too old to have more children, and he stopped visiting her chambers that year. But as he considered the fate of his country, and his dynasty, Henry remained determined to settle his kingdom on a male heir. His pursuit of this goal would bring him more power than any of his medieval predecessors had possessed, but in doing so he would tear unwittingly into the myths from which royal authority was drawn. He broke with the Papacy in Rome to claim a royal authority over spiritual and temporal affairs, placing himself above English law and using Parliament to seize the right to nominate his heirs. But the breach with Rome placed the crown at the heart of a religious struggle, and in bringing Parliament into the divine process of the succession he had introduced the mechanism of consent. As the new Protestant beliefs brought fresh life to the old prejudices against women holding power, two generations of Tudor princesses and three Queens would struggle to survive the coming storms. Amongst them the granddaughters of the King’s two jousting companions: Lady Jane, Katherine and Mary Grey.

Dynastic politics, religious propaganda and sexual prejudice have since buried the stories of the three Grey sisters in legend and obscurity. The eldest, Lady Jane Grey, is mythologised, even fetishised, as an icon of helpless innocence, destroyed by the ambitions of others. The people and events in her life are all distorted to fit this image, but Jane was much more than the victim she is portrayed as being, and the efforts of courtiers and religious factions to seize control of the succession did not end with her death. Jane’s sisters would have to tread carefully to survive: Lady Katherine Grey, as the forgotten rival Queen Elizabeth feared most, and Lady Mary Grey, as the last of the sisters who were heirs to the throne. Each, in turn, would play their role in the upheavals of a changing world, and bear the costs of the continued demands for royal sons. It would be left to Katherine’s grandchild, the heir to a lost English dynasty, to see the circle close. Standing at Henry’s opened tomb he would bear witness to where the King’s determination to control the future ended, and how efforts to deny women the absolute power of the crown helped bury absolutism in England.

PART ONE Educating Jane (#ulink_d5f1b2ab-d711-588c-b880-f16d3fd3e6ff)

‘Is the Queen delivered? Say Ay and of a boy.’

‘Ay, ay my liege, And of a lovely boy: the God of heaven Both now and ever bless her: ’tis a girl Promises boys hereafter…’

Henry VIII, Act V scene i

William Shakespeare

Chapter I Beginning (#ulink_233d4c79-61b4-547e-87fc-b4582047ee02)

Frances, Marchioness of Dorset, prepared carefully for the birth of her child. It was an anxious time, but following the traditions of the lying-in helped allay fears of the perils of labour. The room in which she was to have her baby had windows covered and keyholes blocked. Ordinances for a royal birth decreed only one window should be left undraped and Frances would depend almost entirely on candles for light. The room was to be as warm, soft and dark as possible. She bought or borrowed expensive carpets and hangings, a bed of estate, fine sheets and a rich counterpane. Her friend, the late Lady Sussex, had one of ermine bordered with cloth of gold for her lyingin, and, as the King’s niece, Frances would have wanted nothing less.

The nineteen-year-old mother-to-be was the daughter of Henry’s younger sister, Mary, Duchess of Suffolk, the widow of Louis XII and known commonly as the French Queen. She was, therefore, a granddaughter of Henry VII and referred to as ‘the Lady Frances’ to indicate her status as such. The child of famously handsome parents, she was, unsurprisingly, attractive. The effigy that lies on her tomb at Westminster Abbey has a slender, elegant figure and under the gilded crown she wears, her features are regular and strong.

(#litres_trial_promo) Frances, however, was a conventional Tudor woman, as submissive to her father’s choice of husband for her as she would later be to her husband’s decisions.

Henry - or ‘Harry’ - Grey,

(#litres_trial_promo) Marquess of Dorset, described as ‘young’, ‘lusty’, ‘well learned and a great wit’, was only six months older than his wife.

(#litres_trial_promo) But the couple had been married for almost four years already. The contractual arrangements had been made on 24th March 1533, when Frances was fifteen and Dorset sixteen.

(#litres_trial_promo) Amongst commoners a woman was expected to be at least twenty before she married, and a man older, but of course these were no commoners. They came from a hereditary elite and were part of a ruthless political culture. The children of the nobility were political and financial assets to their families, and Frances’s marriage to Dorset reflected this. Dorset came from an ancient line with titles including the baronies of Ferrers, Grey of Groby, Astley, Boneville and Harrington. He also had royal connections. His grandfather, the 1st Marquess, was the son of Elizabeth Woodville, and therefore the half-brother of Henry VIII’s royal grandmother, Elizabeth of York. This marked Dorset as a suitable match for Frances in terms of rank and wealth, but there were also good political reasons for Suffolk to want him as a son-in-law.

The period immediately before the arrangement of Frances’s marriage had been a difficult one for her parents. The dislike with which Mary, Duchess of Suffolk, viewed her brother’s then ‘beloved’, Anne Boleyn, was well known. It was said that women argued more bitterly about matters of rank than anything else, and certainly Frances’s royal mother had deeply resented being required to give precedence to a commoner like Anne. For years the duke and duchess had done their best to destroy the King’s affection for his mistress, but, in the end, without success. The King, convinced that Anne would give him the son that Catherine of Aragon had failed to produce, had married her that January and she was due to be crowned in May. It seemed that the days when the Suffolks had basked in the King’s favour could be over; but a marriage of Frances to ‘Harry’ Dorset offered a possible lifeline, a way into the Boleyn camp. Harry Dorset’s father, Thomas Grey of Dorset, had been a witness for the King in his efforts to achieve an annulment of his marriage to Catherine of Aragon. He had won his famous diamond and ruby badge of the Tudor rose at the jousting tournaments that had celebrated Catherine’s betrothal to the King’s late brother, Arthur, in 1501. In 1529, the year before Thomas Grey of Dorset died, he had offered evidence that this betrothal was consummated. It had helped support Henry’s arguments that Catherine had been legally married to his brother and his own marriage to her was therefore incestuous.

(#litres_trial_promo) Anne Boleyn remained grateful to the family, and Harry Dorset was made a Knight of the Bath at her coronation.

From Harry’s perspective, however, the marriage to Frances - concluded sometime between 28th July 1533 and 4th February 1534 - also carried political and material advantages to his family.

(#litres_trial_promo) His grandfather, the 1st Marquess, may have been Henry VII’s brother-in-law, but by marrying a princess of the blood he would be doing even better; and the fact he had only the previous year refused the daughter of the Earl of Arundel may be an early mark of his ambition. Through Frances, any children they had would be linked by blood to all the power and spiritual mystery of the crown. It was an asset of incalculable worth - though it would carry a terrible price.

Over three years later, it was sometime before the end of May, 1537, that Frances’s child was to be born.

(#litres_trial_promo) Harry Grey of Dorset was in London and Frances would surely have been with him at Dorset House, on the Strand.

(#litres_trial_promo) It was one of a number of large properties built by the nobility close to the new royal palace of Whitehall. There was a paved street behind and, in front - where the house had its grandest aspect - there was a garden down to the river with a watergate on to the Thames. Travelling by boat in London was easier than navigating the narrow streets and foreigners often commented on the beauty of the river. Swans swam amongst the great barges while pennants flew from the pretty gilded cupolas of the Tower. But there were also many grim sights on the river that spring. London Bridge was festooned with the decapitated heads of the leaders of the recent rebellion in the north, the Pilgrimage of Grace: men who had fought for the faith of their ancestors and the right of the Princess Mary to inherit her father’s crown. For all Henry’s concerns about the decorum of female rule, the majority of his ordinary subjects had little objection to the concept. That women were inferior as a sex was regarded as indisputable, but there was room for exceptions. The English were famous in Europe for their devotion to the Virgin Mary, the second Eve, born without the taint of the first sin, and who reigned as Queen of Heaven. It did not seem, to them, a huge leap to accept a Queen on Earth. Just as the Princess Mary’s rights were under attack, however, so were their religious beliefs and traditions.

When the Pope had refused to annul Henry’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon, he had broken with Rome and the Pope’s right of intervention on spiritual affairs in England had been abolished by an act of Parliament on 7th April 1533. With the benefit of hindsight this was a definitive moment in the history of the English-speaking world, but at the time most people had seen these events as no more than moves in a political game. Matters of jurisdiction between King and Pope were not things with which ordinary people concerned themselves, and the aspects of traditional belief that first came under attack were often controversial ones. Long before Henry’s reformation in religion there had been debate for reform within the Catholic Church, inspired in particular by the so-called Humanists. They were fascinated by the rediscovered ancient texts of Greece and Rome, and in recent decades Western academics had, for the first time, learnt Greek as well as Latin. This allowed them to read earlier versions of the Bible than the medieval Latin translations, and to make new translations. As a change in meaning to a few words could question centuries of religious teaching so a new importance came to be placed on historical accuracy and authenticity. Questions were raised about such traditions as the cult of relics, and the shrines to local saints whose origins may have lain with the pagan Gods. It was only in 1535 when two leading Humanists, Henry’s former Lord Chancellor, Thomas More, and the Bishop of Rochester, John Fisher, went to the block rather than accept the King’s claimed ‘royal supremacy’ over religious affairs, that people began to realise there was more to Henry’s reformation than political argument and an attempt to reform religious abuses. And even then many did not waver in their Catholic faith. These ‘Henrician’ Catholics included among their number the chief ideologue of the ‘royal supremacy’, the Bishop of Winchester, Stephen Gardiner. For the bishop, as for the King, papal jurisdiction, the abolished shrines, pilgrimages, and monasteries, were not intrinsic to Catholic beliefs.

(#litres_trial_promo) The Holy Sacraments, such as the Mass, remained inviolate and they argued that although the English Church was in schism in the sense that it had separated from Rome, it was not heretical and in opposition to it.

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Those who disagreed, and opposed Henry’s reformation, felt his tyranny to full effect, as the heads displayed at London Bridge and other public sites bore silent witness. One hundred and forty-four rebels from the Pilgrimage of Grace were dismembered and their body parts put on show in the north and around the capital. Even if Londoners avoided the terrible spectacle of these remains, they would not miss the other physical evidence of the King’s reformation. Everywhere the great religious buildings, that had played a central role in London life, were being destroyed or adapted to secular use. Only that month, the monks from the London Charterhouse who had refused to sign an oath to the royal supremacy, were taken to Newgate prison, where they would starve to death in chains.

Inside Frances’s specially prepared chamber at Dorset House, however, the sights, sounds and horrors of the outside world were all shut out. She was surrounded only with the women who would help deliver her baby. When the first intense ache of labour came it was a familiar one. Frances had already lost at least one child, a son who died in infancy, as so many Tudor children did. Nothing is recorded of his short life save his name: Henry, Lord Harington.

(#litres_trial_promo) Contemporary sources focus instead on the children born to Anne Boleyn: her daughter, Elizabeth, born on 7th September 1533, at whose christening Dorset had borne the gilded salt;

(#ulink_f28a58c9-6b22-573f-9c29-e33149348ecf) and the miscarriages that had followed - the little deaths that had marked the way to Boleyn’s own, executed on trumped-up charges of adultery on 19th May 1536. The King’s second marriage was annulled and an act of Parliament had since declared both the King’s daughters, Elizabeth and Mary, illegitimate and incapable of succession.

(#litres_trial_promo) This raised in importance the heirs of the King’s sisters in the line of succession, and both King and kingdom had already shown sensitivity to the implications. The rebels of the Pilgrimage of Grace had expressed their fear that England would pass on Henry’s death to the foreigner, James V of Scots, the son of his elder sister, Margaret. Meanwhile her daughter by a second marriage to the Earl of Angus, Lady Margaret Douglas, a favourite of the English court, was currently in prison for having become betrothed without the King’s permission. Her lover, Anne Boleyn’s uncle, Thomas Howard, would die in the Tower that October. But while Frances’s child would, inevitably, hold an important place within the royal family, the King remained determined his own line would succeed him. The pressure on her to produce a male heir was therefore of a different order to Henry’s wives. Dorset wanted a son, as all noblemen did, but he and Frances were still young and, when a girl was born, their relief that she was strong and healthy would have outweighed any disappointment in her sex.

A servant carried the newborn child immediately to a nearby room and handed her to a nurse. It was usual for fathers to be at hand when their children were born and Dorset would have been one of the first to visit the dimly lit nursery where his daughter was being fed and bound in swaddling, to keep her limbs straight and prevent her from scratching her face. Her spiritual welfare was of still greater concern to her parents and her christening was arranged as soon as possible, though this meant Frances could not attend. New mothers were expected to remain in bed for up to a month, and some did not even sit up for a fortnight. Frances played a role, however, in helping choose as her daughter’s godmother, the King’s new wife, Jane Seymour, after whom the little girl was named.