The Sisters Who Would Be Queen Page 11

  Northumberland’s elder three children (all sons) were married. But his fourth son, Lord Guildford Dudley, was not. A later story that he was his mother’s favorite is a myth, and although the seventeen-year-old came from a handsome family, any personal attributes were by the way. In great families it was the eldest son who was important, followed by his sisters, who were given dowries and expected to form great alliances. Younger sons were worth no more than “what the cat left on the malt heap.” Guildford Dudley’s elder brother Lord Robert Dudley, the future Earl of Leicester, had married the daughter of a Norfolk squire because, as a third son, only a respectable union was expected of him. Guildford was even further down the pecking order; but nevertheless, Northumberland had a very ambitious marriage in mind for him.

  In 1552, Jane’s father would never have agreed to her marrying Guildford. But there was another royal who, like Jane, was an heiress of marriageable and childbearing age. The bride Northumberland had in mind was the fifteen-year-old Margaret Clifford, daughter of Frances’s late sister, Eleanor. She was, like the Grey sisters, a descendant of Henry VII through their mutual grandmother, Mary Brandon, Duchess of Suffolk. She was also the heir to vast estates in the north, where Northumberland hoped to become a great magnate. Unsurprisingly, Margaret’s father, the Earl of Cumberland, had no wish to marry his daughter to a fourth son and made a series of excuses as to why it was not possible. But Northumberland then asked the King to intervene. It was a mark of just how much influence he had with Edward that while he was with the army attending to disorders in the Northern Marches, the King was busy acting as his marriage broker.

  On 4 July, Edward sent an extraordinary letter to Cumberland “desiring him to grow to some good end forthwith in the matter of marriage between the Lord Guildford and his daughter; with licence to the said earl and all others that shall travail therein to do their best for conducement of it.” Cumberland was left to digest this royal command as Edward’s first summer progress began. It was to take him to the towns and palaces of the south, offering the first opportunity for people outside London to see their King. On 7 July they removed to the royal palace of Oatlands, then to Guildford and Petworth; then to the house of Sir Anthony Brown in Sussex, where the King thought they were over-feasted. Harry Suffolk, always at the King’s side, attended the monarch with twenty-five personal cavalrymen, riding under the Grey standard of a silver unicorn in a sunbeam of gold. We don’t know where the sisters were that summer, but their mother had been taken ill and they may have remained with her at Sheen, in Richmond, a former Carthusian monastery, granted to Harry Suffolk after Somerset’s trial and conviction. Come August, the citizens of Portsmouth, Southampton, and Salisbury were out in force to greet Edward’s arrival.

  The delighted crowds, cheering their King, saw a boy of almost fifteen in scarlet silks and jeweled caps who, despite being small for his age and slightly built, bore himself with all the gravitas of a Tudor monarch. It was a relief to all that Edward appeared happy and well. There had been a scare in April when he had fallen ill with measles and smallpox, but he was left unscarred and seemed to have recovered his health, as he had from his bout of illness the previous summer. For Harry Suffolk, anxiety focused instead on Frances. Her condition became so serious that around 25 August he was called home urgently. He wrote a note to Cecil on the 26th making his excuses for his sudden departure from court. “She has a constant burning ague and stopping of the spleen,” he told Cecil; “it is to be feared death must follow.”

  Happily, his prayers, and those of their children, were answered. Frances survived whatever it was that had ailed her. The King, however, despite appearances—enjoying himself, as he wrote to a friend, “in pleasant journeys, in good fare”—was already in Death’s grasp. The world of the Grey sisters was about to come crashing down.

  The New Year of 1553 was heralded at Greenwich Palace with “sports and pastimes for the King’s diversion; which were in as great variety and pomp, as scarcely ever had been seen before.” At the traditional exchange of gifts Frances presented Edward with a purse of knit silver and gold containing forty pounds in half sovereigns. He in turn gave her three covered gilt bowls, a mark of his continued affection for the family. A more substantial gift followed a little later that month when Edward granted her husband yet another great property, the Minories, a former abbey near the Tower. Royal regard always carried with it significant material benefit, and their friend the “broad, stern and manly” Marquess of Northampton was also living in style in a new London residence. The fact that it was formerly Winchester House, the residence of the conservative bishop Stephen Gardiner, who was now in the Tower, must have made that success all the sweeter. “‘Tis merry with the lambs, now the wolf is shut up,” was Katherine Suffolk’s comment.

  Jane, while enjoying the festivities of the season, knew, however, that all was not well with her cousin the King. He seemed unable to shake off a nasty cough and had not had the strength to write in his journal since the end of November. As increasingly he struggled to clear his lungs, the imperial ambassador Scheyfve began to wonder if his cough was “a visitation and a sign from God.” Evidence from medical historians suggests that Edward had tuberculosis, contracted in the summer of 1551 and reactivated when he caught measles in April. According to a Spanish source, Mary had begun to pick up hints of plans to exclude her from the succession that summer, 1552. But while it was inevitable that Edward’s possible death and the issue of the succession would be considered when the King had been gravely ill, Northumberland and his allies would not have disbanded their private bands of cavalry, as they had done in November 1552, if they had appreciated then the severity of the King’s condition. A famous Italian astrologer had, at the end of the summer, cast the King’s horoscope and declared he would live for forty years. It was only now becoming apparent to the Councillors that the astrologer could be proven wrong.

  By the beginning of February, the King’s cough was causing him considerable pain and the Princess Elizabeth sensed a cooling in her relationship with her brother. She wrote a letter expressing concern about his health and querying gossip that she had lost his goodwill. Her sister, Mary, meanwhile, took a more aggressive stance and put on a demonstration of strength. She arrived in London on 6 February to see Edward, attended by a retinue of over two hundred. The regime responded with a great display of respect. Everyone was very aware that she was Edward’s heir under the terms of her father’s will and the last Act of Succession of 1544, which had been confirmed in Edward’s own Treasons Act of 1547. Northumberland’s eldest son, Warwick, was sent to greet her, while Frances joined the Duchess of Northumberland to ride in Mary’s train through the capital. This show of togetherness could not, however, disguise the threat that Mary’s possible succession posed to the regime and to the evangelical religion.

  Northumberland and his “crew” were unpopular in the country, which was impoverished and, in many areas, angry over the religious changes, while the poor continued to be denied social justice. Mary had good reason, furthermore, to resent them. There had been no letup in the ban on her Mass. The imperial ambassador believed that the coming Parliament would give the King his majority, and so enable him to write a legal will that would exclude Mary from the throne. Northumberland was concerned, however, that the Commons would be difficult to manage in the poor economic climate. A controversial subject like the succession risked unlocking debate on many sources of discontent, and the regime couldn’t afford to lose control of events with Edward now so obviously ill. Besides, it had been argued with success since 1551 that Edward’s orders had as much weight as if he were forty. Any will he wrote would, therefore, be binding.

  The pale and sickly King made a brief appearance in the ceremonies at the opening of Parliament on 1 March. Afterward, however, when the velvet and ermine robes were packed away again, he lay in his rooms, exhausted, and remained there for over a fortnight. The Venetian ambassador, who saw him, thought it clear he was dying. When
Parliament was dismissed at the end of the month nothing had been discussed concerning Edward’s majority or the succession. But the evidence suggests that as the weather grew warmer and the King enjoyed a brief revival in his health, it was put to him that he write a will. He proved able to do so in his own hand.

  Headed boldly “My Device for the Succession,” Edward’s subsequent testament covered barely more than one side of a sheet of paper. The fifteen-year-old was certain he was on the mend, and his will explored the succession in the manner of an academic exercise rather than an urgent legal document. The first and most important decision Edward made was to exclude his half sisters, Mary and Elizabeth, from any right to the crown. According to an anonymous French source, Edward’s pious tutor, Sir John Cheke (knighted in 1552), and his confessor, Thomas Goodrich, Bishop of Ely, urged him on in this. But it is unlikely they needed to. Cheke’s tutorage had shaped Edward’s mind, and although Edward later justified his actions on the grounds of his sisters’ illegitimacy, it was the need to protect the religion in which he had been raised that dominated his thinking. Edward feared, he admitted, that Mary would undo his religious program. He had not forgotten, furthermore, that Elizabeth’s mother had died a traitor to his father and an adulteress, hardly the ideal beginning for a Godly dynasty. Having excluded his sisters, Edward then bypassed the Stuart line, as his father had done. The explanation he outlined was a nationalist one. The leading representative of the Stuart line, Mary Queen of Scots, was foreign born (and, it was later argued, therefore excluded under a law dating back to the reign of Edward III). The next in importance, her aunt Lady Margaret Douglas, had three strikes against her: she was of questionable legitimacy, married to a Scot (Matthew Stuart, Earl of Lennox) and her sons were being raised as Catholics. That left Frances, the senior representative of the Brandon line, next in line to the throne. Edward, however, still more than his father, believed that only a man should wield the full authority of the crown. Henry VIII’s objections to female rule had been pragmatic ones, and reasons of personal and dynastic vanity; but for Edward antipathy to female rule had a religious basis. The campaigns against idolatry had expunged all that was sacred and feminine from churches. The crowned figures of the Virgin were destroyed along with those of ordinary female saints and mystics. There was no longer a Queen of Heaven, and according to the evangelicals’ reading of Scripture, rule by women on earth was also ungodly, being against the divine order. Edward left his throne, therefore, not to a woman, but to the sons Frances might have, followed by the sons her daughters might have and after them those of her niece, Margaret Clifford. He then considered the implications of another male minority. Though Edward had not had a mother to watch over his interests during his minority, he was aware of historical cases of women ruling as regents on behalf of their underage sons. He declared therefore that Frances—or whoever proved to be the mother of the heir—could be “governor” until her son reached the age of eighteen. To ensure that this didn’t break any biblical injunctions against female rule, he added a proviso that the regent could do nothing without the sanction of an inner core of the Privy Council, and when the boy reached fourteen, his agreement would also be required (an indication that Edward believed he personally had passed a significant birthday). As yet, of course, there were no male children in the Brandon line, but Edward decreed that if this remained the case on his death, then Frances was to be appointed governor until such time as one was born. He clearly did not think this a likely event, however, since he made no further mention of the Council’s sanction for her rule.

  By 11 April, Edward was still well enough to leave the gloom of Westminster and travel by barge to the airy rooms of Greenwich Palace. The guns on the Tower and the ships on the Thames fired their salutes in farewell, the great booms sounding a somber note to those traveling with the dying King. His will had left the throne, on his death, an empty chair. He had named only those female vessels through which heirs might be born. Of these Frances alone was married, and her husband was not considered an impressive politician or soldier. He had lasted only a few months in his post of Warden of the Northern Marches in 1551. If he could not cope with a few Scottish raiders and criminal families, how could he be trusted to keep England from civil war during a regency? Furthermore, although at thirty-five Frances was still of childbearing age, no child of hers had survived since Mary Grey had been born nine years earlier, and she had been so ill the previous summer that she had nearly died. As the implications of this dawned on those who had most to lose from Mary Tudor’s possible accession, it seemed clear that the only answer was to marry off the next generation of royal princesses. The Grey sisters, and their cousin Margaret Clifford, had to be lined up for a race to the birthing stool, and married in a manner that would bind the most effective and ruthless members of the regime against Mary Tudor’s cause.

  According to William Cecil, it was Northampton’s second wife, Elizabeth Brooke, who came up with the idea that Jane Grey be married to Northumberland’s fourth son, Lord Guildford Dudley. Five years earlier the Protector Somerset had thrown Northampton off the Council for living with Brooke as his wife. Since he had become a leading member of Northumberland’s “crew,” however, a private bill had been passed through Parliament that declared his childhood marriage to Lady Anne Bourchier void and that to Elizabeth Brooke valid, “as if the said lady Anne had been naturally dead.” It meant Northampton could keep control of the vast Bourchier estates, as if he were a widower, as well as allowing his marriage to Brooke to be recognized. If Mary became Queen, however, all this would be reversed: there was no question of her allowing divorce, for she regarded marriage as a sacrament that could not be broken. Brooke had good reason, therefore, to want to prevent Mary becoming Queen—just as her husband did.

  Parr of Northampton has been despised by generations of historians as a second-rate political player—but incompetence does not equate to a lack of ambition. He had proved himself already an inveterate plotter, both in his involvement in the schemes of Thomas Seymour and subsequently in the overthrow and eventual execution of the Protector Somerset. He had powerful reasons to wish to keep Mary out and he knew that a marriage between Guildford Dudley and Jane Grey would ensure that John Dudley, Duke of Northumberland, did not switch sides.

  Northumberland’s evangelical beliefs had shallower roots than those of Northampton and Harry Suffolk. When he was plotting the fall of the Protectorate he had demonstrated a willingness to consider working with religious conservatives. There was a danger he would do so again. Brooke, or her husband, appears to have broached the marriage plans first to her former brother-in-law, Pembroke, who hoped to marry Katherine Grey to his son. Pembroke in turn then approached Northumberland. The duke proved enthusiastic. It was a royal marriage greater than the one he had failed to secure for Guildford the previous year, when he had pursued the match with Margaret Clifford. The Greys, however, would take more convincing than Northumberland did. Frances claimed later she had vigorously opposed the match between Guildford and Jane, and it is quite possible that she did so. She had previously indicated that she did not want Jane to marry while very young. Her husband may also have had political concerns about the proposal. If Jane married Guildford and had a son, control of the crown would slip from the Greys to the Dudleys, and in particular to the intimidating figure of Northumberland, whose sons were devoted to their father.

  This would explain why Northumberland was driven reportedly to use threats and promises to get Harry Suffolk’s consent. The marriage was the King’s wish, Suffolk was told, and would gain him a “scarcely imaginable haul of immense wealth and great honour to his house.” Jane was then obliged to accept the decision, although it was later claimed she too did so only reluctantly. She must have known that there had been hopes that she would marry the King. A junior grandson of the executed traitor Edmund Dudley was surely a disappointing replacement, and the speed with which the marriage was arranged gave Jane little time to be reconciled to
it.

  A few days later, on 28 April 1553, the imperial ambassador recorded news of Jane’s betrothal and of the King’s deteriorating condition. Every day he grew thinner and his agonizing cough worse. “The matter he ejects from his mouth is sometimes coloured a greenish yellow and black, sometimes pink, like the colour of blood,” the ambassador noted. “His doctors and physicians are perplexed and do not know what to make of it. They feel sure the King has no chance of recovery unless his health improves in the next month.”

  As the King’s health failed, Northumberland remained assiduous in his treatment of Mary, hoping not to raise her suspicions of the plans being laid against her. In stark contrast to 1551, when Parr of Northampton had insisted that Mary not be referred to as a princess, Northumberland now emphasized her right to her full arms as a “Princess of England.” “This all seems to point to his desire to conciliate the said Lady and earn her favour, and to show that he does not aspire to the crown,” the imperial ambassador observed. He added, however, that the news of Jane’s betrothal to Guildford looked suspicious, and he was not alone in this assessment. Rumors that the King was dying had reached the public, and in the taverns and markets the marriage was “much murmured at.” Those who were wise kept their views to themselves, but the foolish openly expressed concerns for the King’s well-being, and several men and women had their ears cut off for spreading such stories.