The Sisters Who Would Be Queen Page 3

  Life at Bradgate was idyllic for the sisters. There were extensive gardens for them to play in, as well as the great park, which was the glory of the house. A medieval village had been destroyed to create the illusion of a perfect wilderness covering several square miles at the edge of Charnwood Forest. Here was a place “more free from peril than the envious court,” where you could find “tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, Sermons in stones, and good in everything.” The children could walk their father’s prize greyhounds, or accompany their mother and her friends as they hunted deer with longbow and arrows. On rainy days there were also other amusements inside.

  Dolls were popular toys of the period, and the types the sisters enjoyed are described in a later inventory of items in Jane’s possession. “Two little babies in a box of wood, one of them having a gown of crimson satin, and the other a gown of white velvet.” Their parents were careful, however, not to spoil them. Overindulgence was believed to make children physically and morally soft, with potentially disastrous results. Loving parents instilled discipline early, with good manners considered essential. The girls were taught to stand straight and show respect to their elders, to speak only when they were spoken to, and to respond promptly to commands. They had to eat nicely, observe the correct precedence at table, and show gratitude for any praise they were given. At night, if their parents were at home, they would go to them to say goodnight and kneel to ask their blessing.

  The duty of obedience was considered a particularly useful lesson for girls since they were expected to remain submissive to their husbands after they had left the care of their fathers. But the thinking on what women were capable of was changing. The Italian Baldassare Castiglione’s popular Book of the Courtier argued that women were as intelligent as men, and suggested that they could learn to control their “emotional” natures through the exercise of will and reason. A Grey family friend later translated the book into English. In the meantime, other Englishmen were promoting female education and for a brief period, which would end with the Grey sisters’ generation, the education of women remained fashionable. Both Frances and Dorset were determined that their daughters would be given the opportunity to develop practical and intellectual skills of the highest order.

  Of the former, the humble business of cooking and sewing remained important. Even noblewomen were expected to know something about the more expensive dishes created in their kitchen and to be able to make clothing. Frances sewed shirts and collars as New Year gifts for the King, and her friend Lady Lisle’s quince marmalade was among her best-received presents to Henry, who liked it “wondrous well.” As future courtiers the sisters also received regular lessons in dance and music: the lute, the spinet, and the virginal were all popular choices of instruments for girls destined for court. But it was in the sisters’ academic studies that Lady Jane Grey, in particular, was to excel, with strong encouragement from her father.

  Dorset had received a brilliant education in the household of the King’s illegitimate son, the late Henry Fitzroy, Duke of Richmond. He had learnt eloquent Latin from a pupil of Erasmus, and French from John Palsgrave, the greatest scholar of the language in England. It had left Dorset with a love of scholarship that was renowned during his lifetime and which he was determined to pass on to his children. As soon as his daughters had learned to read, write, and understand basic mathematics they made a start in French and Italian. Over half a century later, Lady Mary Grey still kept copies of Palsgrave’s French grammar and dictionary in her library, along with The Book of the Courtier and an Italian grammar. By the age of eight, Jane, and later Katherine, were also learning Latin and Greek, subjects that Aylmer was particularly well qualified to teach. A visitor to Bradgate, the radical cleric Thomas Becon, described him as “singularly well learned in both.”

  But Aylmer was much more than a mere language teacher. The point of education in the sixteenth century was not simply to learn to read, write, and understand ancient languages. It was about molding good subjects of God and the King. Jane and Katherine’s Greek and Latin were a means to help reinforce lessons of moral, social, and religious truth indoctrinated from the cradle—literally so. The visitor, Becon, insisted that as soon as a child was capable of speaking in sentences they should be taught phrases such as “Learn to die….” Years later, Jane would repeat the phrase in her last letter to Katherine and reflect on its meaning. This was to be a good Christian in this world, and so to achieve the reward of absolute happiness with God in the next. Unfortunately, what it was to be a good Christian, and where the path to eternal life lay, remained a matter of lethal debate. Since Jane’s birth, in 1537, new divisions had arisen between those, like the ideologue of the royal supremacy, Bishop Gardiner, who adhered to Henry’s Church but remained conservative in his core beliefs, and those who saw the King’s reformation as the gateway to more drastic change.

  The term “Protestant” only began to be used in England in the mid-1550s. The more usual term for those we would now think of as Protestant was “evangelical.” They were so named because they wished to return to the “evangelium” or “good news” of the gospel, stripping away Church traditions they believed had no biblical basis in favor of a more fundamental reading of Scripture. There was no real orthodoxy within the English evangelicals, with individuals adhering to beliefs of varying degrees of radicalism, and people were careful not to express their views openly if they did not accord with the King’s. Dorset’s were later regarded, however, as being at the more radical end of the spectrum, and Frances shared her husband’s beliefs. The ground was being prepared for an ideological struggle in which the Grey sisters, members of the first generation to be raised as evangelicals, were being groomed to play a significant role.

  For Jane, being the eldest of three sisters did not mean merely doing things first. She was the most important in rank. It was Jane in whom the Dorsets invested the lion’s share of their time and money, and to whom everyone else paid the most attention. While Jane was growing up the younger sisters remained, therefore, in the shadows. They were at home playing with their pets and learning their prayers, waiting for their own turn in the spotlight, when Jane, at nine, took her first steps onto the great national stage that was the King’s court.

  In 1546, Jane’s mother was serving as a Lady of the Privy Chamber to Henry’s sixth wife, Catherine Parr. From time to time she could, therefore, bring Jane to court with her, to prepare her for a role as a Maid of Honor, serving the Queen. The court was the hub of political, cultural, and social life in England. For a young girl such as Jane, however, it must often have been a confusing place. She could never be sure what lay behind a smile, or if what was said was what was meant, but among the gossiping courtiers and scheming bishops, the Queen, at least, struck a sympathetic figure. Catherine Parr was warmhearted and intelligent, with a calm manner that invited confidence and respect. In her early thirties, she was also a highly sensual woman: the kind that most attracted Henry. She wore gorgeous scarlet silks, bathed in milk baths, scented her body with rose water and her breath with expensive cinnamon lozenges. Beside this delicious vision, the fifty-five-year-old King appeared monstrous. It must have been difficult for Jane to imagine Henry as the “perfect example of manly beauty” he had been described as in his youth. Pallid and obese, he was almost unable to walk on legs ruined by injuries acquired hunting and jousting. He spent most of his time in his private lodgings suffering fevers, but occasionally would emerge to be wheeled down the corridors of the royal palaces on chairs of tawny velvet, his eyes pinpoints of pain.

  Henry did not have long to live, and with Edward only in his ninth year, it was apparent that all the blood spilled to secure the future of the Tudor dynasty could prove wasted. In the end he had exchanged the unknown consequences of female rule only for the familiar weaknesses of a royal minority. A young boy could not hope to fill the shoes of the old tyrant. Others would wield power on Edward’s behalf when he became King, and a ferocious struggle for
that power had already begun. Although Jane was too young to grasp the subtleties of the shifting circles of interests maneuvering around her, she surely understood that the most important battle lines concerned her faith. She knew too that the Queen was the leading evangelical at court. Catherine Parr had been wed twice before to old men and she found in religion a passion that was absent in her marriages. She made energetic efforts to spread the new teaching in the universities, and every afternoon evangelical chaplains preached to her ladies and their friends at court. Afterward the women would sit with their guests and discuss what they had heard. There was a frisson of danger to this, for any divergence from the King’s beliefs risked accusations of heresy. And just how deadly that could be, Jane Grey’s family was soon to witness.

  A group of religious conservatives on the Privy Council were plotting that summer to bring down their evangelical rivals. They intended to do so through an attack on their opponents’ wives. The means was to be a twenty-five-year-old gentlewoman called Anne Askew. A witty and articulate poet and evangelical, Askew had broken a taboo by disobeying her husband and quarreling with him over religion. He had thrown her out, and she had subsequently been arrested for preaching that Christ was not really present in the consecrated bread and wine of the Mass. In June 1546 she had been condemned to death for heresy. But as Askew waited for the sentence to be carried out, rumors leaked that she had allies in the Queen’s Privy Chamber. They were said to include the wives of leading evangelical Privy Councillors. According to an Elizabethan Jesuit, the conservatives learned that Askew had even been introduced to the Queen and the King’s “favourite nieces,” Frances Grey and her sister, Eleanor. The most likely person to have achieved such a coup was Frances’s stepmother and childhood friend, the young Katherine Suffolk.

  Blonde, blue-eyed, and charming when she wished to be, Katherine Suffolk was one of the most remarkable women of her time. Her temper and caustic wit were legendary. One of her contemporaries called her rages “the Lady Suffolk heats.” In the superficial world of the court, however, her contemporaries found her unusual directness and honesty both unnerving and attractive. She said what she thought, and what she thought was usually interesting and sometimes shocking. Although her Spanish mother had been Catherine of Aragon’s favorite lady-in-waiting, Katherine Suffolk despised the religion in which she was raised and was considered by foreign ambassadors to be “the greatest heretic in the kingdom.” She had huge influence with Catherine Parr and connections to Askew. The condemned woman’s brother-in-law, George St. Poll, was a member of her household.

  Askew was brought from Newgate Prison to the Tower, where she was repeatedly tortured on the rack by two Privy Councillors in an effort to get her to name her court contacts. In the long and terrible history of the Tower no other woman is recorded as having been so treated. Askew was asked specifically about any connections she had to Katherine Suffolk, and it must have been a frightening time for the Grey family, as they wondered what Askew would reveal. But despite being torn apart “until the strings of her arms and eyes were perished” Askew admitted only that a number of anonymous women had sent her money. The news that a gentlewoman had been put to the rack then reached the public. That a gentlewoman should have been tortured at all appalled people, but that Askew was already a condemned prisoner outraged them. In an effort to calm the public mood Askew was offered the opportunity to recant her views and receive a pardon. She refused, and on 16 July 1546 was brought to Smithfield for execution by burning. Her body was so badly broken by the rack she had to be tied to the stake in a chair. The Queen’s cousin Nicholas Throckmorton and two of his brothers risked shouting out to support her as she burned and died. Most of the ordinary people looking on were horrified at the cruelty, but they saw it often enough, meted out both to traditional Catholics burnt for “treason” and radical evangelicals—”heretics”—such as she.

  Jane, Katherine, and Mary Grey would have all learnt eventually the details of Askew’s death. The gentlewoman’s links to Katherine Suffolk, their step-grandmother, made her death almost a family matter. Her writings and the story of her life were soon, in any case, to be immortalized in a new evangelical cult of martyrdom, and they would have become familiar with Askew’s recorded words and actions in her last months. It underpinned the lesson with which they were inculcated: “Learn to die….” But it was Jane, being that much older, who was most deeply affected by Anne Askew’s example, and many of her later writings echoed Askew’s spirited and combative attacks on conservative beliefs.

  According, however, to the mid-sixteenth-century author of a Protestant Book of Martyrs, John Foxe, the attempt to expose heresy in the Queen’s Privy Chamber was just a prelude to a direct attack on the Queen herself—one in which Lady Jane Grey would, in the nineteenth century, be given a walk-on part. Foxe claimed that Bishop Stephen Gardiner, the new intellectual leader of religious conservatism, was desperate to get rid of Catherine Parr and end her influence with the King. He convinced Henry that her efforts to urge him to religious reform amounted to an attack on his place as head of the Church in England. Henry rose to the bait and, after a heated discussion with his wife on matters of religion, announced that he wished to be rid of her, just as he had been rid of Anne Boleyn. Foxe described how articles for the Queen’s arrest were drawn up, but that as Henry’s temper cooled he allowed one of his doctors to warn Catherine she had stepped over the mark. Terrified, Catherine went to the King that night, “waited upon only by the Lady Herbert, her sister, and the Lady Jane [Grey] who carried the candle before her.” In the King’s chamber Catherine worked hard to soothe her husband, submitting herself to his will in a speech that strongly resembles that made later by Shakespeare’s Kate in The Taming of the Shrew. When Henry accepted her assurances that she only wished to be his good wife, Catherine knew she was safe—or so we are told. “Lady Jane” is a straightforward Victorian misreading of the name “Lady Lane” (a cousin of the Queen), but there is very little truth even in Foxe’s original story.

  Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, as it is commonly known, would do much to shape a sense of English Protestant national identity through his descriptions of the suffering of Protestants during King Henry’s reign and later. But while it helped to influence history, it cannot be relied upon also to tell history accurately and without prejudice. There were rumors in 1546 that Henry had already tired of Catherine, but, contrary to Foxe’s account, his disillusion had nothing to do with the Queen’s reformist fervor. It was believed that he wanted to replace her with the alluring young Katherine Suffolk, who could have become a more formidable opponent to the conservatives than Parr. Foxe’s version of the events of 1546 placed Catherine Parr close to the ranks of the martyrs he admired, and perhaps also helped counterbalance the most difficult elements of Askew’s story for sixteenth-century readers: her disobeying her husband, her preaching, and her arguing with her male superiors. Those who wrote the lives of the martyrs liked their female saints weak and tender, like good children, if also brave and steadfast. But Foxe’s picture of an unpredictable King and a court riven by deadly religious rivalries is accurate enough, even if the details are not. And because we know something of what follows, the Victorian image of Jane Grey on the cusp of the new reign remains a haunting one—a young girl walking into the darkness, carrying her candle before her.

  III

  Jane’s Wardship

  KING HENRY VIII’S DEATH, AT FIFTY-SIX, WAS ANNOUNCED ON 31 January 1547. For over a fortnight afterward, wherever Jane turned at court, she saw black. Thirty-three thousand yards of dark cloth and a further eight thousand yards of black cotton shrouded the floors and ceilings of all the royal chapels, and was hung throughout the royal apartments and over the royal barges, carriages, and carts. But as soon as the King was interred in Jane Seymour’s tomb at Windsor, on Wednesday, 16 February, the cloth was taken down, the rich unveiled tapestries and brilliantly painted walls heralding the reign of Edward VI, Jane’s cousin and contempora
ry.

  That Sunday, the coronation began with the nine-year-old King processing before a cheering crowd from Whitehall to Westminster Abbey, the court following in line of precedence. Catholic ambassadors described Edward as “the prettiest child you ever saw,” and they had little reason to flatter him. A slight boy with corn-gold hair and pink cheeks, he looked angelic—his father before the fall. Always anxious to please the adults around him, Edward managed not to stagger once under the weight of the heavy robes of red velvet and ermine. But the adults, concerned whether he could cope with the rigors of the day-long rituals, had taken care to shorten the ceremonies by several hours, and arrangements had been made for rest periods. When he reached his throne on the dais in the church, Edward also found two extra cushions had been placed on it to give him extra height. His health and strength reflected the vitality of the new regime and it was important that Edward not appear vulnerable.

  Henry had appointed sixteen executors of his will. To these men he had given the authority to act as corulers until Edward came of age—but his decrees had been buried even before he was. The executors had established themselves as the Privy Council on the same day as his death was announced, three days after Henry had drawn his last breath. A Privy Council was a large administrative body (this one had forty members by the end of Edward’s reign). At its core were the King’s advisers, currently the sixteen executors, who had elected Edward’s elder uncle, the evangelical Edward Seymour, as “Lord Protector of England”: the principle man in the country after the King. A country so used to being governed by the will of one man was not ready for an oligarchy of sixteen. In line with his superior position, the Lord Protector had also been granted the princely title Duke of Somerset. The ambassadors were now invited to the coronation to witness the revolutionary political and religious program this Protector, and his allies, intended.