The Sisters Who Would Be Queen Read online

  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 clever, cool-headed kinsman William Cecil, who was Secretary to the Protector Somerset, was giving Elizabeth advice—it would help explain the trust she demonstrated in him later, when it would allow Cecil to become the political colossus of her reign—but Elizabeth was never prone to lose her nerve.

  Jane was returned to Dorset Place, while her father, like the other witnesses, was called to the Council for an 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 an 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, but who complained angrily about 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. They were still with him on the morning of 20 March 1549 when he was taken to Tower Hill to die.

  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 that their sovereign would reign long and happily.

  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 among 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.” 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.

  * Under Queen Mary, Baker would forget his evangelical past and burn many of his former coreligionists, earning his nickname, “Butcher Baker.”

  VI

  Northumberland’s “Crew”

  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, 5 October 1549, however, 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 Whitsunday, 10 June, by the forced introduction of the new prayer book, the Book of Common Prayer, which was written in English for the first time. In those parts of Cornwall where Cornish Gaelic was still spoken, congregations could not understand what their priests were reading to them. In Devon, where they could, they declared the government’s service a parody. 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 an
d blood, in consecrated bread and wine. 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 11 June, he was warned only to prevent the gentlemen under his command behaving in a manner that might be considered confrontational. 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 2 July, the riots had spread across the Midlands; the Home Counties near London; Essex and Norfolk in the east; and Yorkshire in the north, while in the west Exeter was under siege. Within ten days, Norwich, the regional heart of the east, was also threatened, with an army of sixteen thousand 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 in the sermons: “No Man shall sleep in his house or bed unkilled.”

  From Bradgate on 17 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 two hundred men sent to aid Lord John Grey in the defense 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. 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 was a bloody business. Dorset’s kinsman Lord Grey of Wilton claimed he had never seen men fall so bravely as the rebels he faced in Devon on 28 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 twelve thousand professional soldiers and German mercenaries against Norfolk farm boys with few guns or blades, but hopes of “an equal share of things.” Three thousand men died outside Norwich at Dussindale on 27 August. There were, however, 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. 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 young 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 Seymour cousin Hertford had reached the armies in the west. Sir William Herbert, the third member of Somerset and Warwick’s “Tres Viri,” was immediately recognizable to the boy 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.” True or not, it says something of the man that such tales were easily believed of him. But Herbert was much more than a mere thug. His first language was Welsh, and ambassadors sneered that he could barely read English, let alone speak any European tongue, but he was clever, and sufficiently sophisticated to have married the elegant Anne Parr, sister of the late Queen dowager. It made him a member of the extended royal family. Unfortunately for Hertford this connection would not help his father. It was Herbert’s brother-in-law, William Parr of Northampton, whom Somerset had kicked off the Privy Council for divorcing his wife.

  As young Hertford soon discovered, Sir William Herbert had no intention of bringing the royal army to aid Somerset. The message the boy carried to Windsor on 9 October instead marked the end of the Protectorate. Herbert and his cocommander, Lord Russell, urged Somerset to step aside, “rather than any blood be shed.” Somerset had no option but to comply and he threw himself on the mercy of the Council. Soon afterward, Edward was obliged to order his uncle’s arrest. The former Lord Protector was lodged in the Tower on 14 October 1549. It was only two days past Edward’s twelfth birthday and not yet seven months since the execution of his younger uncle, Thomas Sudeley.

  It was a novelty for the three sisters to have a nine-year-old boy living among them at Bradgate. Katherine, in particular, must have enjoyed having a playmate her own age, one who shared the pleasures of the park, as well as the books that Jane always had her nose in. But Thomas Willoughby wasn’t with them for long. He left the family to join Katherine Suffolk’s two sons at Cambridge on 16 November. The sisters ended up seeing more of the younger siblings, Margaret and Francis. The Grey and Willoughby cousins were regularly in and out of each other’s houses that winter, sometimes at Bradgate, sometimes at the Willoughby seat, Wotton, in Nottinghamshire, and often they were all at George Medley’s house, Tilty in Essex, east of London. It was there the sisters headed as they set off fro
m Bradgate toward the end of November 1549—Mary and Katherine Grey still riding their horses with a servant sitting behind them, holding them tight so they didn’t fall when they tired; Jane treated as an adult, sitting sidesaddle with a footrest to keep her secure. Nurses, grooms, and gentlemen servants also rode in the train, while other servants were carried in carts along with the baggage and mail. It was a spectacular sight on the quiet roads, and bells rang in the villages and towns ahead to warn people of their arrival. Crowds came out to stare at the passing celebrities, or to offer fresh horses, food, and places to rest.

  The sisters enjoyed several days playing with their cousins at Tilty. Little Mary Grey, although much smaller than her friend Margaret, was equally strong-willed, and there must have been some impressive battling for dominance in their games. Then, after breakfast on 26 November, the sisters were mounted again on their horses, and traveled with their mother to the Princess Mary’s house Beaulieu, also in Essex. They recognized the turreted palace as it came in view, with its great gateway carved with King Henry’s arms in stone. The sisters had visited the princess many times before. Their grandmother, the French Queen, and Catherine of Aragon had been friends as well as sisters-in-law, while their mother had served in Mary’s household when Jane was a baby.

  The princess—small and of “spare and delicate frame”—was now thirty-three. She had suffered with menstrual problems and depression for years, and was regularly bled for them. But her fragile appearance belied a strong voice, “almost like a man’s,” and “piercing eyes.” She struck a formidable and unusually independent figure. It was rare for a woman of her age and wealth to remain unmarried, but she was simply too good a catch to be free to take a husband. Her father had executed men he feared were plotting to marry their sons to his daughter. He didn’t want Edward to have any dangerous rivals. Now, Edward’s Privy Council would have regarded anyone seeking her hand with similar suspicion, and they had the legal veto on any choice she might have made. So she remained alone, watching her youth pass, resting her love only in God.