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

Frances was unimpressed, however, by Sudeley’s assurances and Dorset, aware that Sudeley’s status had fallen with the death of Catherine Parr, agreed with his wife that it would be better if Jane now stayed at home. Dorset wrote thanking him for his care of Jane thus far, and then reminded his friend that Jane was very young, and while he regarded him as an excellent father figure, he could not also be a mother to her. With Catherine Parr dead, Sudeley could surely see that ‘the eye and oversight of my wife shall in this respect be most necessary’. Jane was on the cusp of adolescence, a crucial age for ‘the addressing of the mind to humility, sobriety and obedience’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Dorset concluded hopefully that he still intended to take Sudeley’s advice about Jane’s marriage.

Frances then wrote her own letter to Sudeley. As Jane’s guardian and the Queen dowager’s widower, Sudeley was a member of the family and Frances referred to him in her letter as her ‘good brother’ and to Jane as his ‘niece’. She also accepted that when it came to Jane’s marriage they would ask for his advice, as her husband wished. But she made it clear that she did not expect any marriage to take place for a good while yet. Having been married herself at sixteen, Frances did not want her daughter hurried into a husband’s bed. Frances concluded her letter expressing the hope that she could keep her daughter with his ‘goodwill’.

(#litres_trial_promo) It was not to be. Within days Sudeley was on the road to Leicestershire determined to change their minds. When the sisters and their parents greeted him at Bradgate he also had a friend at his side, Sir William Sharington, the Under Treasurer of the Royal Mint.

Jane had seen Sharington often at Seymour Place, and Katherine and Mary may have remembered him from the previous autumn, when he had accompanied Sudeley to Bradgate on another visit. A handsome, charming man, he had an elegant, aquiline nose, though his eyes were dark-ringed and prematurely lined. Sharington had used his position at the Mint to perpetrate extensive frauds.

(#litres_trial_promo) Sudeley knew what he had done and in exchange for his secrecy Sharington was providing him with money. This included the ready cash Sudeley needed to buy Jane’s wardship. But Sharington also had talents that Sudeley would make good use of at Bradgate. He could be extremely plausible. The previous autumn he helped persuade Dorset to vote with Sudeley against a bill in Parliament confirming Somerset’s letters patent as Lord Protector - Dorset had been the only peer to do so. Now Sharington had the task of persuading Frances to return her daughter to Seymour Place, while Sudeley worked on Dorset.

Sudeley knew his most effective leverage with Dorset remained the promise that he could deliver the King’s hand in marriage to Jane. And he had a piece of good fortune in this respect. Jane’s principal rival, the infant Mary Queen of Scots, had been sent to live in France so that she could be betrothed to the Dauphin, Francis. Sudeley assured Dorset that ‘if he might once get the King at liberty’ then he could immediately have Edward married to Jane. Dorset hummed and hawed, but, as he later recalled, Sudeley ‘would have no nay’. Sharington, meanwhile, was doing an excellent job at weakening Frances’s resolve, reassuring her that all her fears were misplaced. Eventually, ‘after long debating and much sticking’, she agreed that Jane should be returned to Sudeley’s care and her husband followed suit.

(#litres_trial_promo) It was a decision they would soon regret, as would Jane.

Life at Seymour Place that autumn of 1548 was not as Jane remembered it, despite the comforting presence of her old friends from Catherine’s Privy Chamber. The Queen dowager’s stabilising influence on Sudeley was gone and a part of him had not quite accepted she was dead.

Sudeley spoke often of promoting a parliamentary bill that would prevent people slandering Catherine Parr’s name over her decision to marry him so quickly after Henry VIII’s death. But there were also rumours circulating that he wanted to remarry. Some claimed Sudeley had his eye on the Princess Mary, others that he hoped to marry Lady Jane Grey. He laughed at that suggestion, but admitted to his former brother-in-law, Parr of Northampton, that there would be ‘much ado’ for Jane’s hand. His ward would be twelve in May and able to make a binding marriage contract under canon law. He believed the Somersets, in particular, ‘would do what they could to obtain her for [their son] Lord Hertford’.

Northampton asked Sudeley if his real intention might be to marry the Princess Elizabeth rather than Jane. Sudeley replied that ‘he had heard that the Protector would clap him in the Tower if he went to Elizabeth’,

(#litres_trial_promo) though he could see no other reason why he shouldn’t marry her, if she were willing. As he told other friends, it was far better that Elizabeth should marry within the kingdom than outside it. Elizabeth, however, had learned the lessons of the previous spring when Sudeley had embarrassed her with Catherine Parr. She was acutely aware that she could not marry without the permission of the King and the Privy Council, and refused even to see Sudeley without a warrant. But some of her servants were prepared to help him, believing, rightly or wrongly, that this was what Elizabeth truly wanted. Two or three weeks before Christmas, Jane noticed the familiar full face of Elizabeth’s cofferer, Thomas Parry, at Seymour Place. Parry, who as cofferer managed Elizabeth’s money, appeared several times, walking alone with her guardian in the gallery where, out of her earshot, they discussed the financial details of a possible marriage to Elizabeth.

(#litres_trial_promo)

Such dabbling in a matter of high state caused considerable alarm with other servants in Elizabeth’s household. The princess’s tutor, Roger Ascham, was so appalled by Parry’s actions that he asked for permission to return to Cambridge for the entire Christmas season. Kate Astley’s husband John, equally concerned, argued furiously with his wife over the arrangements. One of these arguments was so heated that afterwards Elizabeth noticed bruising on her governess’s arms (Astley claimed that a doctor had been bleeding her to cure some ailment). The atmosphere at Seymour Place, meanwhile, was equally charged. Sudeley’s friends and servants desperately tried to dissuade him from his course. It was against all sense of decency and right order that a man without royal blood should align himself with an heir to the throne. ‘Beware,’ one warned Sudeley: ‘It were better for you if you had never been born, nay, that you were burnt to the quick alive, than that you should attempt it.’ Men had died already for attempting royal alliances during King Henry’s time and it would put Elizabeth’s life at risk.

(#litres_trial_promo) They begged him instead to improve his relations with his brother. But Sudeley only blustered about how he would use Parliament to get the Governorship of the King’s Person in spite of the Protector, and seize his rightful share of power.

Sudeley judged that Somerset’s political position was continuing to weaken as he persisted in his arrogant treatment of his colleagues. In this he was correct. Somerset often ignored advice and once slapped down a Privy Councillor in such a humiliating manner that the man was reduced to tears. Somerset’s most faithful ally on the Council, William Paget, was moved to write to him in the middle of Christmas night, to warn him of disaster ahead.

(#litres_trial_promo) But not everything was going Sudeley’s way. Within the Privy Council it was Sudeley who was judged the immediate threat to national stability. Dorset, aware there was an impending crisis, demonstrated his usual poor political judgement by throwing in his lot with his friend. Whatever happened, Dorset promised Sudeley, he would ‘defend him against all men, save the King’. Night after night during the Christmas season, Katherine and Mary Grey saw their father leave Dorset House for Seymour Place, where Jane saw him arrive along with their great Leicestershire neighbour, Francis Hastings, Earl of Huntingdon. Sometimes Sudeley would leave them to go on forays to court. There were accusations later that Sudeley was planning to kidnap Edward and Elizabeth. Dorset may have hoped he would, believing Sudeley planned a double wedding, with Edward marrying Lady Jane Grey and he marrying Princess Elizabeth. If so it was an ominous portent for Jane of the danger in which her father was prepared to place her in pursuit of his ambitions.

The evidence suggests, however, that for the moment at least, Sudeley was merely picking up gossip from the King’s Groom, John Fowler. Sudeley would moan over a drink in the Privy Buttery to Fowler how he wished Edward were old enough to be independent of Somerset, a time too far off to do him any good. On 6th January, the feast of the Epiphany and the last day of Christmas, Sir William Sharington’s house, Lacock Abbey in Wiltshire, was searched on the orders of the Council and incriminating evidence of his fraud at the Royal Mint discovered. Sharington understood what was expected of him and to save his skin gave up all he knew about Sudeley’s ambitions, including his hopes of marrying Elizabeth. Others were then rounded up. The young Earl of Rutland, whom Sudeley had attempted to recruit as an ally, was called in for questioning at Somerset House in the middle of the night. Terrified, the twenty-one-year-old repeated what Sudeley had said about the need for those who loved the King to build up a following amongst ‘honest and wealthy yeomen who were ringleaders in good towns’. One of Sudeley’s servants had a brother in Rutland’s household and Sudeley learned what the earl had said before morning. He hoped, nonetheless, to brazen it out. The next day he went to Parliament as usual and left at dinnertime with Dorset, to whom he confided what Rutland had said. They ate at Huntingdon’s house and returned to Seymour Place with a group of friends. These included Jane’s youngest uncle, Lord Thomas Grey. In contrast to the brothers Sudeley and Somerset, her father and his brothers were close.

Jane must have known something was wrong from the nervous conversation of the servants. Behind closed doors, Sudeley was boasting that he had been called to see the Privy Council, but had refused to go. Lord Thomas was unimpressed, pointing out that the Council could simply arrest him. He advised Sudeley to trust his brother as ‘a man of much mercy’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Sudeley refused to contemplate it. In the palace next door, meanwhile, Somerset was proving more amenable to advice - the worse for Sudeley. His enemies were insisting to Somerset that his life would only be safe when his brother was dead. That night, the Clerk of the Privy Council, Sir Thomas Smith, and the Privy Councillor and lawyer, Sir John Baker, came to arrest Sudeley. Jane would have recognised the sickly Smith, even behind his long beard and heavy coat. He was a friend of her tutor John Aylmer. Baker, a man in his fifties, was distinguishable by his grey hair; he was old by the standards of the day, but ‘Butcher Baker’, as he came to be called, would send many young men to their graves before his time was up.

(#ulink_70962937-5b64-52f5-aabb-1d76b032af8c) Sudeley accepted his arrest quietly, hoping that all would be well. Others, however, proved less sanguine.

When the Council’s men came for Elizabeth’s cofferer Parry, he ran up to his chamber, tearing off his chain of office and crying, ‘I would I had never been born, for I am undone.’ In the Tower the Astleys both gave full confessions, telling all they knew about Sudeley’s plans to marry Elizabeth and his visits to her bedchamber. Only the fifteen-year-old Elizabeth remained composed in her interviews. Faced with the danger she had long feared she defended her servants as well as herself, at times proving forgetful, at times angry over slurs that she was pregnant by Sudeley, but always consistent in her denials that she ever intended to marry anyone without the Council’s permission. It is possible that Parry’s kinsman, William Cecil, was giving Elizabeth vital advice - it would help explain the trust she later developed in him - but Elizabeth was never prone to losing her nerve.

Jane was returned to Dorset Place, while her father, like the other witnesses, was called to the Council for interview. Despite their testimony on Sudeley’s plans, there was no real evidence that Sudeley had ever intended to seize the King, as was claimed, or commit any treason. Ways, therefore, had to be found around the difficulties of a trial. Sudeley had hoped to use Parliament to bring an end to the autocracy of the Protectorate: instead Parliament was used to bring an end to his life. A bill was introduced condemning him for high treason. It was passed without dissension in the Lords. In the Commons there was fierce argument, but in March 1549 a packed House eventually passed the Act of Attainder. Edward was obliged to assent to his uncle’s death in words set down for him, and he did so with visible reluctance. Lady Jane Grey was then left to make sense of the fate of the family of which she had become part. By the end of the year they would all be dead - the baby Mary Seymour dying after illness in the house of Katherine Suffolk to whose care she had been bequeathed, and who resented the expense and inconvenience.

Jane was taught that misfortune came from God as a punishment for sins, but also as a warning to repent. In that sense it could be a blessing, for it gave the sinner the chance to clean the slate. This was how Sudeley saw events, as he explained in a poem composed in the Tower:

…God did call me in my pride Lest I should fall and from him slide For whom he loves he must correct That they may be of his elect.

It was not in Sudeley’s nature, however, to accept his end with passivity. He intended one final throw of the dice, last messages for Elizabeth and her half-sister, Mary, which he wrote in orange juice using a hook ‘plucked from his hose’. The letters were said by someone who saw them to tend ‘to this end, that they should conspire against my Lord Protector’. Sudeley hid his message in the soles of his velvet shoes.

(#litres_trial_promo) They were still with him on the morning of 20th March 1549 when he was taken to Tower Hill to die.

(#litres_trial_promo)

Public executions were carefully choreographed and the rituals of a beheading followed a strict code. Prisoners gave a last speech in which they would pronounce themselves judged guilty by the laws of the land, and content to die, as prescribed by the law. It was a final act of obedience, one that acknowledged the supreme importance to society of the rule of law. They would then hold themselves up as examples of the fate of all those who sinned against God and King. If they were innocent of the crime for which they were convicted, they knew that God was punishing them for something, and also that, on some level, they had failed the society into which they had been born. They did not doubt that they deserved to die. Their speeches concluded with a request for forgiveness and the hope their sovereign would reign long and happily.

(#litres_trial_promo)

We only have hints at how Sudeley behaved, but assuredly his execution did not follow this usual script. According to one account, as Sudeley laid his head on the block he was overheard asking a servant to ‘speed the thing that he wot [knew] of’. The messages to the princesses were then discovered and there appears to have been a struggle. A Swiss witness wrote to a friend saying that Sudeley had died most unwillingly.

What is also apparent is that the Council was extremely disturbed by whatever had occurred, and not surprisingly so. The regime was about to impose an evangelical Prayer Book on a largely unwilling population. Princess Mary, who remained stubbornly conservative in religion, was going even further than Bishop Gardiner in arguing that this was illegal, and that Henry’s religious settlement could not be overturned while Edward was still a minor. Hugh Latimer, Katherine Suffolk’s spiritual adviser, had articulated the government’s response in a sermon at court that Lent, arguing that Edward’s precocious Godliness meant that he wasn’t a ‘minor’ in the usual sense. But Sudeley’s messages had undermined this claim, suggesting that Edward, far from being a spiritual father, was the puppet of malign forces from which he needed protection. They had also hit another raw nerve: they reminded everybody that Mary was Edward’s heir under their father’s will. The obvious means to attack Mary’s claim was the 1536 Act of Succession, which had declared Mary illegitimate. It had, however, also declared Elizabeth illegitimate, making it nigh impossible to use the act against one sister without excluding the other. That risked proving divisive amongst evangelicals, since Elizabeth conformed to her brother’s religious decrees. If she had been executed along with Sudeley for arranging her marriage without the King’s permission, the problem would have been solved. But inconveniently, she remained alive.

The Council now needed to discredit Sudeley’s actions as forcefully as it could. Latimer was employed to give the sermon, and it proved excoriating. Sudeley was damned from his pulpit as ‘a man the farthest from the fear of God that ever I knew or heard of in England’, and one who had died, ‘irksomely, strangely, horribly’.

(#litres_trial_promo) It is not Latimer’s words, however, but the epitaph Elizabeth is said to have given Sudeley that is remembered. On hearing of his beheading she is reported to have said that he had died, ‘a man with much wit and very little judgement’. The same assessment could have been made of Jane’s father, who, despite his intelligence, had allowed himself to become so closely involved in Sudeley’s reckless plans. But he had survived Sudeley’s folly and the wheel of fortune was turning. His days in the political wilderness would soon be over, and those of his three daughters with him.

(#ulink_fc5f1804-43e5-5c68-8d86-ed2a483b2cdb) Under Queen Mary, Baker would forget his evangelical past and burn his former co-religionists, earning his nickname, ‘Butcher Baker’.

Chapter VI Northumberland’s ‘Crew’ (#ulink_dbe8c30e-f19a-5cc2-8274-e742969ab0f5)

The ten-year-old Edward Seymour, Earl of Hertford, rode his horse hard. The skinny, long-limbed boy was the son that Somerset hoped to see married to Jane Grey. On this day, 5th October 1549, he knew, however, that his father’s status as Lord Protector, and perhaps his life, depended on the message he carried. There were two men with whom Somerset formed the ‘Mighty Tres Viri’ (triumvirate) of the Protectorate: one was John Dudley, Earl of Warwick. The previous day, however, he had marched through the city with members of the nobility and Privy Council, the early moves in an attempted coup against Somerset. The second, Sir William Herbert, commanded the royal army in Wiltshire along with Lord Russell. It was to them Hertford now rode for help. The forest of turrets and gilded weathervanes of Hampton Court soon disappeared from view as his horse raced west.

It was autumn, and the roads were quiet, but the tumultuous events of the summer had taken their toll on the standing of the Lord Protector. That June the country had been rocked by rebellions. The risings were triggered on Whit Sunday, 10th June, by the forced introduction of the new Prayer Book, which was written in English for the first time. In parts of Cornwall where little English was spoken, congregations could not understand what their priests were reading to them. In Devon, where they could, they declared the government’s service a ‘Christmas game’. Something that looked very like the Mass and could be called the Mass remained. But the new Communion service reflected the evangelical view that Christ was not present, body and blood, in consecrated bread and wine. To the Devon parishioners it seemed a parody. The following day, in the Devonshire village of Stamford Courtney, the congregation forced their priest to say the Mass once more. This defiance lit a tinderbox of anger against the ruling elite that spread rapidly, even in areas where the new religion had taken root.

Just as the great men were stripping the churches of gifts made by parishioners, but which they had condemned as idolatrous, so they were also expanding their estates at the expense of the rest. They had bought up farms, and enclosed the common land that saved the new landless peasants from starvation when paid work dried up. By the end of May huge crowds had been plundering the houses of unpopular gentry near Bradgate (where the Grey sisters were based), killing deer in parks and tearing down enclosures. Henry VIII would not have hesitated to crush these rebels without mercy, but when Harry Dorset, as the local nobleman, received his orders from the Council on 11th June, he was warned only to prevent the gentlemen under his command behaving in a manner that might be considered confrontational.

(#litres_trial_promo) To Somerset it was self-evident that the big landowners were greedy and he believed that enclosures were contributing to inflation. In anticipation of a government investigation that would lay the issues to rest, and against the pleas of colleagues on the Council, he had negotiated with the rebels and granted pardons wherever he could. This, however, had been interpreted as weakness.

By 2nd July, the riots had spread across the Midlands, the Home Counties, Essex, Norfolk, Yorkshire, and Exeter was under siege. Within ten days Norwich was also threatened with an army of 16,000 at its gates. William Parr, the Marquess of Northampton, was sent to negotiate with them, but the rebels had attacked the government forces as they slept in the city. They fought the rebels through the darkened streets, outnumbered ten to one, before retreating with heavy losses. England was left on the brink of civil war.

Jane, Katherine and Mary had sat through sermons that summer explaining the terrible wickedness the rebellions represented, although only the elder two could understand anything of what was being said to them. The rebels, they were told, were sinning against God and King. The social order reflected the divine Chain of Being and if the demands of the King or the nobleman were unjust, the yeomen and peasants had, nevertheless, to endure their suffering, peaceably, accepting it as a punishment for their sins. To do otherwise was to overturn good order, and where ‘there is any lack of order’, observed one Tudor writer, ‘needs must be perpetual conflict’. Lucifer had brought disorder into the cosmos when he rebelled against God, and fear of chaos fed into horror stories of lawlessness during the Wars of the Roses. If the rebellions continued the gates would open ‘to all abuse, carnal liberty, enormity, sin and babylonical confusion’. The Grey sisters were warned: ‘No Man shall sleep in his house or bed unkilled.’

(#litres_trial_promo)

From Bradgate on 17th August, Dorset had written to the Privy Council asking that they send his brother, Lord Thomas Grey, to help him keep order in the county. But more bad news had come by return of post. Lord Thomas could not be spared: the King of France, Henri II, had seized the opportunity offered by the crises to declare war. Lord Thomas was in command of 200 men sent to aid Lord John Grey in the defence of Ambleteuse in the Pale of Calais. The enemy was already advancing, Dorset was told. The town would, in fact, be lost before Lord Thomas had even arrived.

(#litres_trial_promo) With the seriousness of the situation by then apparent even to Somerset, the policy of pardoning rebels was abandoned. The government used foreign mercenaries to crush the rebel armies, and it had been a bloody business. Dorset’s kinsman, Lord Grey of Wilton, claimed he had never seen men fall so stoutly as the rebels he faced in Devon on 28th July. But fall, they had. Two and a half thousand were killed in the west. Then came the turn of the east.

John Dudley, Earl of Warwick, commanded an army of 12,000 professional soldiers and German mercenaries against Norfolk farm boys with hopes of ‘an equal share of things’. Three thousand men died outside Norwich at Dussindale on 27th August. But there were casualties on both sides.

Fighting under Warwick, Dorset’s brother-in-law, Sir Henry Willoughby, whose wife had died eighteen months earlier, was mortally wounded. His children, playmates of Katherine and Mary Grey, were now orphaned. Of all the deaths it was his that touched the Greys most, and the family took in his children. Thomas, the eldest, who was the same age as Katherine, had come to live at Bradgate as Dorset’s ward. The younger two Willoughby siblings, bossy Margaret, who was Mary Grey’s playmate, and the baby Francis, their mother’s godchild, were placed with Dorset’s half-brother, George Medley (his mother’s son by a first marriage). The dreadful slaughter in Norfolk marked the end of England’s last great popular revolt.

(#litres_trial_promo) But it had marked also a loss of faith in Somerset. The duke had ignored, and even insulted, his colleagues as he grew into his role as alter rex. He had involved the country in ruinous wars with Scotland and now France. His decisions had opened the gates to disorder and brought England to the brink of civil war. For that he would not be easily forgiven.

The night after Hertford had left carrying his father’s message to the army in Wiltshire, Somerset took King Edward from Hampton Court to the more secure location of Windsor Castle. It was dark and Edward, who had been told Somerset’s enemies could kill him, carried a little sword to defend himself. It was the night’s chill, however, that presented the most immediate danger, and by the time the eleven-year-old had arrived at Windsor he had caught a cold. As he shivered in the gloom of the castle, with few provisions and no galleries or gardens to walk in, his cousin young Hertford had reached the armies in the west. Sir William Herbert, the third member of Somerset and Warwick’s ‘Tres Viri’, was immediately recognisable by his red hair, and the high style of a great man at court.

Herbert had a reputation for violence. It was said that, in his youth, he had murdered a man in Bristol and that when the peasants had invaded his park at Wilton in the summer he had ‘attacked the rioters in person, and cut some of them in pieces’.