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

In Jane’s first letter she expressed amazement that Bullinger could find the time, ‘to write from so distant a country, and in your declining age, to me’. Bullinger, at not quite forty-seven, seemed impossibly old to Jane. She was grateful for his ‘instruction, admonition and counsel, on such points especially, as are suited to my age and sex and the dignity of my family’. Jane complained she missed the advice she used to receive from the Strasbourg reformer Martin Bucer, who had died in February. Such religious exiles were the principal source of radical ideas in England, and Jane’s father, along with his friend Parr of Northampton, their leading patrons on the Privy Council. Jane assured Bullinger, she was now reading the Decades every day, gathering ‘as out of a most beautiful garden, the sweetest flowers’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Amongst these were Bullinger’s comments, in the dedication to her father, on the importance of reading the Old Testament in Hebrew, as well as reading the New Testament in Greek. She was now learning Hebrew, she said, and asked ‘if you will point out some way and method of pursuing this study to the greatest advantage’.

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Ulm was certain that Bullinger would be impressed with Jane’s ‘very learned letter’, but he had also heard some interesting gossip at Bradgate, which he passed on. ‘A report has prevailed and has begun to be talked of by persons of consequence, that this most noble virgin is to be betrothed and given in marriage to the King’s Majesty.’

(#litres_trial_promo) This claim was an extraordinary one. At that very moment, William Parr, Marquess of Northampton, was in France at the head of a diplomatic mission, with instructions to arrange the formal betrothal of Edward to Henri II’s daughter Elizabeth. Ulm, however, repeated what he had learned at Bradgate to other friends in Europe.

Uncertain that Bullinger would have time for the task of overseeing Jane’s Hebrew, and anxious that Jane’s language skills be developed by someone steeped in the theology of Switzerland, Ulm wrote to a professor in Zurich called Conrad Pellican, asking him to help teach Jane her Hebrew. By way of incentive he told Pellican that he had heard she was one day to be married to King Edward, and raved about Jane’s ‘incredible’ achievements thus far. These included, he noted, the ‘practice of speaking and arguing with propriety, both in Greek and Latin’.

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Jane, it seems, was being trained in the art of rhetoric: the mastery of language as a means to persuade, edify and instruct. It was an area in which a dynamic mind such as hers was likely to excel. But it was also considered suitable only for a woman being prepared for a significant role, such as that of a King’s wife. ‘Oh! If that event should take place, how happy would be the union and how beneficial to the Church!’ Ulm sighed.

(#litres_trial_promo) He admitted, however, that he nursed a fear that the brilliant religious leader being honed at Bradgate might yet be blasted by a ‘calamity of the times’. People were suffering the economic fallout of Warwick’s deflationary policies and there were major riots again in Leicestershire that summer. It was not revolt, however, but a natural disaster in July that provided the bitterest reminder of just how cruel fate could be. A mysterious disease known as the ‘sweating sickness’ was sweeping England. The epidemics, which vanished altogether after the sixteenth century, would arrive suddenly and disappear quickly. But, while they lasted, they brought illness and death with frightening speed.

Edward recorded in his journal that the sweat arrived in London on 9th July and immediately proved even more vehement than any epidemic he remembered. If a man felt cold ‘he died within three hours and if he escaped it held him for nine hours, or ten at most’. Seventy people died in London the next day, and on the 11th, the King reported, ‘120 and also one of my gentlemen, another of my grooms fell sick and died’.

(#litres_trial_promo) In Leicestershire, a Bradgate neighbour, Lord Cromwell, succumbed and, on the early morning of the 14th, it struck within the Grey family. In their rooms at Buckden, the former palace of the Bishop of Lincoln, Katherine Suffolk’s sons, Henry and Charles, awoke that morning with a sense of apprehension. It was the first symptom of the illness. The brothers were soon seized with violent, icy shivers, a headache and pains in the shoulders, neck and limbs. Within three hours the cold left them and their temperatures rose dramatically. It was then that the characteristic sweating began.

The boys’ mother rushed to her children’s bedside from her estate at Grimsthorpe in Lincolnshire as their pulses began to race and an incredible thirst took hold. But finally exhaustion brought an irresistible desire to sleep. The elder brother, Henry, Duke of Suffolk, was already dead when their mother arrived. The younger, Charles, followed before seven o’clock on the morning of 15th July. Katherine Suffolk was devastated by their loss. Henry, at fifteen, ‘stout of stomach without all pride’; Charles ‘being not so ripe in years was not so grave in look, rather cheerful than sad, rather quick than ancient’.

(#litres_trial_promo) She sat alone in the dark, refusing food. The boys’ tutor Thomas Wilson worried as he saw his mistress lose weight, ‘your mind so troubled and your heart so heavy…detesting all joy and delighting in sorrow, wishing with [your] heart, if it were God’s will, to make your last end’. He begged her to be ‘strong in adversity’.

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Katherine of Suffolk’s friend and Lincolnshire neighbour, William Cecil, also wrote to her with words of comfort. Her letter to him replied miserably that nothing thus far in her life had made her so aware of God’s power. That she was being punished for her sins she was certain. The preacher Hugh Latimer had even told her which ones: it was her greed in enclosing land and depriving the poor of food. She could not bear to see anyone, she told Cecil. Although she was certain her children were with God and she knew she should rejoice, she found she could not. At Grimsthorpe she kept their clothes and possessions: black velvet gowns furred with sable, fashionable crimson hose, tennis rackets and the rings they practised catching with lances at the tilt. Her shock and dismay, if not her pain, was felt across the evangelical elite. Her sons were amongst the brightest hopes of their generation. The great Latinist, Walter Haddon, the brother of the Bradgate chaplain James Haddon, wrote a eulogy in their memory; the King’s tutor, John Cheke, composed an epitaph, while Wilson wrote a prose biography and several Latin poems, a volume of which was dedicated to Dorset.

(#litres_trial_promo) Jane’s place as a Godly leader, by example, for her generation was now more important than ever.

(#ulink_7daa3fac-bf68-5071-bcb8-c9dc4ec45315) The famous collected tales of love by the Italian author who had inspired Chaucer.

Chapter VIII Jane and Mary (#ulink_309a72f6-daba-592f-96ef-07afce7fdbc0)

The chapel at the Princess Mary’s palace of Beaulieu lay across the courtyard, opposite the great hall. Inside it had a distinctive layout, with a large ante chapel at right angles to the body of the main chapel. As Jane crossed by this ante chapel she noticed, to her irritation, a consecrated Host was placed on the altar in a golden receptacle known as a ‘monstrance’. In Catholic belief the Host was the transformed body of Christ, but to Jane its veneration was the idolatrous worship of a piece of unleavened bread. When Mary’s servant, Lady Anne Wharton, walking beside her, dropped to one knee and made the sign of the cross, Jane asked sarcastically whether ‘the Lady Mary were there or not?’ Lady Wharton replied tartly that she had made her curtsey ‘to Him that made us all’. ‘Why,’ Jane retorted, ‘how can He be there that made us all, [when] the baker made him?’

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Lady Wharton reported her exchange with Jane to Mary, who is said by the martyrologist John Foxe, to have ‘never loved her after’. There is no evidence of that, and Mary later showed fondness for the younger Grey sisters, particularly the affectionate and easy-going Katherine. But the princess had good reason to be both angry and concerned that Jane had insulted her religious beliefs in her own house. At the time of the Grey sisters’ last recorded visit to Beaulieu, in November 1549, Mary had guessed already that the fall of the Protectorship had marked only the beginning of her misfortune. After the peace treaty with France six months later, in March 1550, the regime had less to fear from Mary’s protector, the Emperor Charles V, and was becoming increasingly radical. The religious changes Jane’s father, Dorset, was promoting were the most extreme England would witness before the Puritan Commonwealth a century later. Music was being expunged from churches; art was similarly attacked and tombs destroyed along with their exhortations to pray for the dead. A horrified visitor from Europe described the newly stark appearance of England’s churches, with ‘no images in relief, nor pictures, no crosses, no sepulchres raised above the ground…in place of the altar is a table set with a cloth but without candles’, on the white surfaces of the church walls were written passages from the Bible, ‘in the middle of which one sees the arms of the King’. In Oxford, bonfires were consuming nearly every book in the university library.

(#litres_trial_promo) At the same time Mary found her right to have Mass said publicly in her own chapels was under attack.

Dorset’s closest political ally, Parr of Northampton, had led the case against Mary within the Council, arguing that it had been agreed that ‘she alone might be privileged with but two or three of her women’. Northampton, described by Roger Ascham as ‘beautiful, broad, stern and manly’, was cut from similar cloth to Dorset. A sophisticated courtier, educated alongside Dorset in the household of the late Duke of Richmond, he shared Dorset’s passion for hunting, learning and, above all, religious reform. The two marquesses are linked in the sources from this period like Tweedle Dum with Tweedle Dee. Together they were always at the King’s side and Mary knew that Edward, like Jane, was already showing himself a fervent evangelical. Edward’s public note-taking during sermons and his recent striking out of the mention of saints in the oath of a new bishop, had all advertised his enthusiasm for the new religion. She must have feared that, like Jane, he too would attack the practice of her beliefs in her own house, in due course.

By Christmas of 1550 the Council had ordered the arrest of Mary’s chaplains for saying Mass in her absence. But worse followed when Mary visited Edward for the seasonal celebrations. Her warm greeting for her thirteen-year-old brother was met with exactly the confrontation she had surely feared would soon come. With the two marquesses, Dorset and Northampton, standing by to witness her humiliation, Edward cross-questioned his older sister on whether she was having the Mass said publicly in her chapel. She burst into tears under his assault and, to the embarrassment of the two marquesses, the shocked boy then also began to cry. They wrapped up the meeting as quickly as they could, affirming ‘that enough had been said and…that the King had no other thought except to inquire and know all things’.

(#litres_trial_promo) But it was not to be the end of the matter.

Mary’s household was a magnet for Catholic dissenters. The Masses she held attracted an important following at court and in the areas in which she lived, while even ‘the greatest lords in the kingdom were suitors to her to receive their daughters into her service’: amongst them the family of Edward’s old playmate, Jane Dormer.

(#litres_trial_promo) It was a problem that needed to be addressed, and Edward followed up what he had said to Mary with a letter demanding she obey his laws on religion.

(#litres_trial_promo) Despite his tears he had not relented. Mary, arguing he was still not of an age to overthrow his father’s religious settlement, continued to have Mass said, even laying on extra services ‘and with greater show’.

(#litres_trial_promo) But in March 1551 the young King informed Mary that he had suffered her stubbornness long enough and that henceforth she could only hear Mass in her private apartments.

(#litres_trial_promo) When she persisted in having her Mass said in the chapels there were consequences.

At Easter 1551 several of Mary’s friends were arrested after attending Mass in her house. By July she feared she was on the point of being imprisoned or even murdered and considered fleeing abroad. In the end she decided that it was her duty to stay. It was August 1551, the month following the death of the Brandon brothers, with the Grey sisters all at Bradgate, when matters came to a head. Three of Mary’s servants were ordered to go to Beaulieu and prevent other members of the household from hearing Mass. They refused and were imprisoned for contempt. The King’s Council then sent their own men to carry out his orders. They arrived during the rising heat of the morning carrying Edward’s letters. Mary received them on her knees, in symbolic submission to the will of the King. As the papers were handed to her, she kissed them, ‘but not the matter contained in them,’ she said, for that, ‘I take to proceed not from his Majesty but from you, his Council.’ The silence while she read the letters was broken only by her exclaiming: ‘Ah! Good Mr Cecil took much pains here.’ Cecil, Katherine Suffolk’s friend, had survived the fall of his master Somerset to become Secretary of State. Only as the men left did Mary lose her composure, shouting through a window about the risk to their souls they were taking by their actions. But she knew that this was a battle she had lost. As she admitted, if the Council arrested her chaplains they could not say Mass and she could not hear it. She warned her brother, however, that she ‘would lay her head on a block and suffer death’ before she heard the Prayer Book service.

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The imperial ambassador Jehan Scheyfve complained about Mary’s treatment, but to no effect. Warwick insisted it was the King’s will and that Edward’s orders had as much weight as if he were aged forty. It was Parr of Northampton, however, who articulated once again the most aggressive comment against Mary. He challenged the right of the ambassador to refer to her by the title ‘Princess of England’, insisting she be referred to only as the King’s sister. This had obvious implications for Mary’s right to the throne as Edward’s heir: a matter of particular concern that autumn. Edward was looking pale and thin after contracting a mysterious illness in the summer, from which he was still recovering. Suddenly, however, the aggressive attacks on Mary began to recede. She was still not allowed to hear Mass outside her private apartments, but Warwick, ever cautious, had reason to be reluctant to risk provoking her continental cousins, the Hapsburgs, further. The Emperor’s sister, Mary of Hungary, was threatening to invade England to rescue Edward from his ‘pernicious governors’, and Mary’s humiliating treatment was galvanising support for her in England too. Warwick had discovered, furthermore, that Somerset was hoping to take advantage of this and was plotting with the conservatives to bring him down, together with his radical evangelical ‘crew’.

Warwick considered carefully how to manoeuvre Somerset to his destruction. He learned from one of the King’s teenage friends, Lord Strange, that Somerset had asked him to promote his daughter, Lady Jane Seymour, in the King’s affections by telling Edward how suitable a bride she would be. Only nine years old, but highly educated, Lady Jane Seymour, the niece of Henry VIII’s third wife, was already demonstrating a precocious intelligence. With two of her sisters she had celebrated the French peace treaty with the publication in Paris of 130 couplets of Latin verse composed for the tomb of the Queen of Navarre, who had died in 1549. She would one day become Katherine Grey’s closest friend. But in 1551 Somerset’s ambitions for his daughter threatened Dorset’s hopes for his own. None of this constituted treason, however, so Warwick needed to catch Somerset in some other, capital, offence. The answer, shortly arrived at, was to accuse him of planning to invite Warwick and Northampton to a feast and there ‘cut off their heads’.

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Edward was told about the alleged murder plot during the second week of October. Simultaneously Warwick and his allies were empowered with promotions: Dorset became the Duke of Suffolk, the title having fallen into abeyance with the tragic deaths of the Brandon brothers; Warwick was made Duke of Northumberland.

(#litres_trial_promo) Northampton’s brother-in-law, Sir William Herbert, became Earl of Pembroke, while William Cecil was knighted. Five days later, Edward saw his uncle, Somerset, arrive at court at Whitehall ‘later than he was wont and by himself’. His journal recorded baldly that: ‘After dinner he was apprehended.’ Quickly and without fuss Somerset’s allies were rounded up: ‘Sir Thomas Palmer was taken on the Terrace, walking there. Hammond passing the Vice-Chamberlain’s door was called in by John Piers to make a match at shooting and so taken. Likewise John Seymour and Davey Seymour were taken too.’ Their ruin had arrived during the banal routines of an ordinary day: with an invitation to a shooting match, a hand on their shoulder as they passed a door, or an encounter during an evening stroll.

It was Harry Suffolk - as the King now called Dorset - who signed the order for Somerset to be sent to the Tower: a neat revenge for the Protector’s rival ambitions for the marriage of his daughter. The Duchess of Somerset joined her husband in the Tower the next day. She was blamed widely for all his troubles. Proud and beautiful, Anne Somerset had never been popular, and damning her served a useful purpose. It helped explain how the man who had helped introduce evangelical religion to England had fallen into wickedness: even the first man, Adam, was brought to sin by Eve, it would have been remembered. The first sign of Mary’s rehabilitation at court since she was deprived of her Mass was an invitation in November for the reception of Mary of Guise, the dowager Queen of Scots. She turned it down. It was, instead, Frances who sat on the Queen’s left on 4th November 1551, while Edward sat to her right under a shared cloth of state. Jane was also there, as Edward noted in his journal. Beside the funeral of Catherine Parr, it is the first time we know of Jane being present at a public reception.

Jane had ridden with over a hundred other ladies and gentlemen, to escort the dowager Queen of Scots through London to Westminster. In the great banquet that followed she sat with the other court ladies in the Queen dowager’s great chamber, enjoying three courses of delicacies. The court women were all dressed ‘like peacocks’ in jewels and rich clothes, their hair loose as a compliment to the Scots style. There was no sign of the Princess Elizabeth, any more than of her half-sister Mary, but Elizabeth had met the Queen dowager earlier in the week and had left a memorable impression. While most guests had their long hair ‘flounced and curled and double curled’ on to silk-clad shoulders, Elizabeth had ‘altered nothing, but to the shame of them all kept her old maidenly shamefastness’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Elizabeth had a natural gift for visual messages, and this one was designed to appeal to her brother.

The King’s tutor in political affairs, William Thomas, had presented his master recently with a work promoting modest and Godly dress in women. Elizabeth, whose reputation had been so tainted by her association with Sudeley, had cleverly stolen a march on Jane as the leading evangelical princess. But Jane’s father, together with her tutor Aylmer, were equally determined that the younger girl learn quickly from Elizabeth’s example. Just before Christmas a series of letters went out from the Grey family’s magnificent new home at Suffolk Place in Southwark, which Frances had inherited from the Brandon brothers. They were directed to the pastor of the Zurich Church, Bullinger. Jane’s father begged Bullinger to continue guiding his daughter in modesty and decorum, writing to her ‘as frequently as possible’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Aylmer then wrote asking specifically that Bullinger should ‘instruct my pupil, in your next letter, as to what embellishment and adornment of person is becoming in a young woman professing Godliness’. He noted that despite Elizabeth’s example, and preachers declaring against fashionable finery, at court ‘no one is induced…to lay aside, much less look down upon, gold, jewels and the braiding of hair’. If Bullinger addressed the subject to Jane directly, however, he believed ‘there will probably, through your influence, be some accession to the ranks of virtue’.

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Aylmer need not have been so anxious about Jane. The enormous effort that had gone into her education had shaped by now a most determined evangelical, and she was not short of reminders of the futility of vanity. On every barge trip to Whitehall, Jane passed Seymour Place where Catherine Parr had lain with her ambitious husband. Next to it was Somerset House, the Renaissance palace that the former Protector had been building, and would never live to see completed. In December, Somerset was tried and condemned to death on the basis of the trumped-up murder plot, with the new Dukes of Suffolk and Northumberland - Grey and Dudley - his judges. Many evangelicals were horrified that the man who had introduced ‘true religion’ into England should die convicted of attempted murder. Harry Suffolk assured the German John of Ulm that the King was keen to spare his uncle’s life, and claimed Northumberland hoped this would be possible. But although the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer, begged Northumberland to show Somerset mercy, the Lord President’s principal concern was that the sentence be carried out with minimum disruption.

Edward, the kindly child who had comforted his friends when they lost at cards, was to play the role of executioner of a second uncle. But first, a spectacular Christmas season was planned at Greenwich, providing a distraction from the grim task ahead. The great public spaces of the royal palaces were like bare stages when the King was not in residence and for weeks carpenters and painters, masons and joiners had been put to work. Furniture and tapestries were added to the public rooms and silver plate brought, along with any other props necessary, ‘to glorify the house and feast’.

(#litres_trial_promo) When Christmas arrived there were plays, masques, tournaments, and a Lord of Misrule. This pagan survival was vested on a courtier who presided over a world turned upside down. Even an execution could be parodied - and was. Misrule attended the decapitation of a hogshead of wine on the scaffold at Cheapside in January, and the red juice flowed to cries of laughter instead of dismay.

(#litres_trial_promo) At Suffolk Place, however, the twelve-day festivities enjoyed by the young Grey sisters were more determinedly decorous.

The family chaplain, James Haddon, complained to Bullinger that the common people of England insisted on amusing themselves ‘in mummeries and wickedness of every kind’. But, he reported smugly, this was not the case with ‘the family in which I reside’.

(#litres_trial_promo) The austerity we associate with seventeenth-century Puritanism was already evident in the household. John Aylmer disapproved of music at home as well as at church, and the three Grey sisters were expected to limit the amount of time they spent playing or listening to it. Thus deprived, Katherine and Mary later showed no great interest in music that we know of. There was some friction, however, between the pious expectations of Aylmer and Haddon on the one side, and the great living expected of the nobility as a reflection of their status. The servants at Suffolk Place were banned from playing cards at Haddon’s insistence, but Frances and her husband continued to do so in their private apartments, and for money.

Haddon put his employers’ bad behaviour down to ‘force of habit’ and ‘a desire not to appear stupid, and not good fellows, as they call it’. He had hoped to shame them into change by addressing their failings in a sermon to the household on the wickedness of cards, but was given short shrift for it. Even the Godly King Edward liked to gamble and Haddon confessed that the duke and duchess had told him he was ‘too strict’. It was hard, Haddon moaned to Bullinger, to persuade courtiers to ‘conquer and crucify themselves’.