She-Wolves: The Women Who Ruled England Before Elizabeth (58 page)

What, though, was that legitimate line? The births of Edward’s half-sisters Mary and Elizabeth had been a matter of public controversy for two decades. There could be no doubt, however, that they were the only surviving children of Henry VIII, and they had been named as his heirs, along with Edward himself, both by parliamentary statute and in the old king’s will. Jane’s claim, by comparison, seemed a work of invention. No grounds, after all, had been advanced to justify the decision that her right should precede that of her mother. And if the terms of the Act of Succession and Henry’s will were to be abandoned in order to disinherit Mary and Elizabeth, then – as the imperial envoys noted in some alarm – there were good grounds for arguing that the next heir was not Jane Grey but Mary Stuart, queen of Scots and dauphine
of France, the granddaughter of Henry’s elder sister rather than his younger.

Nevertheless, it was Mary Tudor, daughter of Henry VIII and his first, rejected wife Katherine of Aragon, who was popularly understood to stand next in line to her brother’s throne. Mary had been publicly accepted as heir presumptive to her father during the happy years of her childhood and adolescence, before the catastrophic collapse of her parents’ marriage; and, once her brother had become king, she was recognised by politicians and people alike as his heir unless or until he had offspring of his own. Just five months before his death she had been received at court with deferential magnificence, and as recently as April the duke of Northumberland had offered heraldic recognition of her status as ‘the second person in the realm’ when he ‘sent her her full arms as Princess of England’, the imperial ambassador Jehan Scheyfve reported, ‘as she used to bear them in the lifetime of her father the late king’.

It had been Mary’s sex, of course, that had compromised her standing as his heir in her father’s eyes, but, given the nature of the improvisation to which Edward had had to commit himself in order to establish his line of Protestant kings, the fact that she was female could hardly be used against her by supporters of Queen Jane. Great play was, however, made of the possibility that Mary might marry ‘any stranger born out of this realm’, as the proclamation of Jane’s accession declared, who might then seek

(Or, as the imperial envoys more laconically put it, ‘it was stated that the Lady Mary might marry a foreigner and thus stir up trouble in the kingdom and introduce a foreign government’.) But it was an argument that seemed unlikely to deal a fatal blow
to Mary’s claims in the eyes of her prospective subjects. Which, after all, was worse: this hypothetical apocalypse, or the alarming fact that Jane was already married to Guildford Dudley? Dudley was an Englishman, but one through whom the rule of his father Northumberland – a man much feared and not at all loved by the English people – would, disturbingly, become dynastic rather than merely ministerial.

Neither religion, nor birth, nor the probable direction of government policy therefore provided conclusive reason for the subjects of the English crown to repudiate Mary’s right to wear it as her brother’s heir. And, as a result, the process of putting his ‘device’ into effect was fraught with tension and danger. That much was clear from the fact that, despite Northumberland’s frantic efforts, it proved impossible to contain the seeping of information from inside the royal household about Edward’s intentions and his state of health. Jane herself was not aware of her cousin’s plans for her future until 9 July, three days after his death – although she later said that she had been forewarned by her mother-in-law and dismissed the information as fantastical nonsense – but Ambassador Scheyfve, a watchful presence on the margins of the court, had already learned the details of Edward’s ‘device’ five days earlier. When three more imperial envoys arrived to join Scheyfve in London on 6 July, they immediately heard the embargoed news that Edward had died that day, despite the council’s attempts to persuade them otherwise. (‘Sire, the king of England’s death is certain’, they wrote urgently to the emperor the following morning, adding that, ‘in answer to our demand for audience, the council have sent to tell us that they will speak to the king about it, fix a time according to his majesty’s condition, and let us know some time tomorrow’.)

And by then, most damagingly of all for Northumberland and his colleagues, too much information had already reached Mary, the heir they were trying to displace. A tense game of brinkmanship between council and princess had been in play in the last weeks of Edward’s illness. Mary had moved to Hunsdon, the Hertfordshire manor that was her closest home to London, in the effort to
keep abreast of the rumours emanating from her brother’s bedside. She needed to be poised to assert herself as England’s queen the moment confirmation came that the king was dead – but not an instant sooner, for fear that she might be denounced as a traitor should she claim the throne before it was vacant. Meanwhile, timing was of the essence, too, for Northumberland: he needed Mary securely under lock and key, but that had to be achieved quietly and calmly, without protest or incident that might precipitate any general convulsion in his current control or his future plans. Much depended on exactly how long the dying boy in the Greenwich bed might cling to life, but the prognostications of his doctors were more art than science, and this calculation – like all the others Northumberland was making – was a finely calibrated risk.

At last, in the first week of July, the duke summoned the princess to her brother’s deathbed, a message laced with duplicitous reassurance, it seems, that her presence in London was required because she was his heir. By then, however, the sinister whispers escaping from Greenwich’s walls had alerted Mary to the danger in which she stood. ‘She was warned by a friend yesterday that she had better go further away into the country’, ran Scheyfve’s encrypted report on 4 July; and three days later, on the morning after the king’s death, when Northumberland finally sent his son Robert Dudley with three hundred armed men to seize Mary at Hunsdon, it was to find the great house empty and his quarry long gone on the dusty road into Norfolk.

At the first hurdle, then, Northumberland’s coup had faltered. But the duke saw no reason yet for serious alarm. Mary, after all, was a woman alone. Certainly, she had servants and counsellors within her household and tenants on her estates, but the formidable mechanisms of the Tudor state – the great bureaucracy of government directed by the powerful men of the Privy Council, and the consequent capacity to mobilise strong arms holding stronger weapons – lay under the duke’s command. Even Mary’s retreat in the direction of the East Anglian coast seemed, in the light of her recent history, to offer Northumberland encouragement as
much as disquiet. The princess had lived her entire adult life under intense pressure, both political and emotional, and just three years earlier, as her brother’s attempt to force her to give up the Catholic mass began to intensify, she had shown signs of buckling under the strain. In the spring of 1550, exhausted by the confrontation in which she was currently embroiled and frightened by the uncertainty of her future as the Catholic heir to a Protestant king, she had sent secretly to her cousin, the emperor, asking for rescue. Imperial warships appeared off the coast of Essex, waiting to spirit her away; but Mary havered in frantic indecision – according to the imperial secretary, repeatedly asking the agonised question ‘What will become of me?’ – before baulking at the last minute at the tantalising but irreversible prospect of escape.

For Northumberland, it was a heartening precedent: either vacillation or flight on Mary’s part would serve his purposes well. And he was not alone in his assessment of the weakness of the princess’s position. The French ambassador, Antoine de Noailles, had no hesitation in passing on to his royal master the duke’s private assurance ‘that they had provided so well against the Lady Mary’s ever attaining the succession, and that all the lords of the Council were so well united, that there is no need for you, Sire, to enter into any doubt on this score’. That was, of course, exactly what Henri II wanted to hear, given how little he wished to see the English throne taken by the cousin of his enemy Charles V, and given, too, the enticing prospect that he might press the rival claim of his daughter-in-law Mary Stuart once Mary Tudor was out of the way.

More disturbing for Mary herself was the fact that her own allies were equally unconvinced of her chances of upholding her rights as her brother’s heir. ‘We see small likelihood of being able to withstand the duke’s designs,’ reported the imperial envoys on the morning after Edward’s death;

Mary, then, was being written off. As a woman, she could not fight for her rights at the head of her own troops. She was also – in a pattern of political interaction that her forebear Matilda would have recognised only too well – declining to follow advice that was offered to her, and finding that her judgement was questioned as a result. Mary had come to the conclusion, Scheyfve and his colleagues told the emperor, that she should proclaim herself queen as soon as Edward’s death was confirmed. This was necessary, she believed, partly to stake her claim in so immediate and public a manner that it could not be suppressed without challenge, and partly to raise a standard around which all those who supported her or opposed Northumberland could rally. ‘My lady has firmly made up her mind that she must act in this manner, and that otherwise she will fall into still greater danger and lose all hope of coming to the throne,’ the envoys wrote with regretful disapproval, and more than a hint of condescension. ‘We consider this resolution strange, full of difficulties and danger …’ Not only were the military cards stacked high against her, but her plan was hopelessly misconceived because the English would not offer spontaneous support for the claim of a Catholic; ‘and to proclaim herself without hope of immediate success would only jeopardise those chances that remain to her …’

On this if on nothing else, had they but known it, the governments of England, France and the Empire were agreed. Mary could not hope to prevail without the backing of imperial troops. Foreign intervention of that kind would compromise her support within England, and in any case (as imperial politicians, but not French or English, were aware) it would not come, because Charles V’s military machine was already over-committed in his continental campaigns against Henri II. (‘Our hands are full with France,’ he wrote wearily.) His envoys in England were therefore told to do what they could to safeguard the princess’s person rather
than to press her claim at all costs. The consensus of heavyweight opinion was overwhelming: the first woman to test the bounds of female sovereignty in England would be the reluctant fifteen-year-old in a gilded cage at the Tower, not the thirty-seven-year-old princess contemplating her limited options from the midst of the East Anglian countryside.

That this was a misjudgement on an extravagant scale began to become apparent on the very day Jane was proclaimed queen. That afternoon, an elderly servant of Mary’s was ushered into the council chamber, grey with tiredness after the long ride from Norfolk, to present a letter from his lady declaring that the crown was hers and demanding that the council acknowledge her as queen. Northumberland, it was suddenly clear, had failed to remember that the frightened princess who had almost abandoned her country in 1550 was also the resolute woman who had ridden into London eight months later with a train of 130 velvet-clad gentlemen and ladies, every one of them holding a set of rosary beads in ostentatious defiance of her brother’s religious laws. And the imperial ambassadors – so confident in the superiority of their diplomatic insight – had utterly misread the dynamics of English politics, of which Mary now showed her mastery. She was the daughter of Henry VIII, the father she idolised despite the abuse and humiliation he had heaped upon her, and she was the rightful heir to her brother’s throne. She was not seeking, as the council had assumed she would, ‘either to flee the realm or to abide there some foreign power’. Instead, with the able support of her household officers, she sent letters and messengers flying along the roads of Norfolk and Suffolk and westward into the midlands and the Thames valley to summon her subjects to their queen’s defence.

They answered her call in their thousands. Support for her cause was by no means unanimous, but in eastern England there were many landowners whose sympathies lay with the old religion, who were convinced of her claim to the throne, and who had looked to Mary as the greatest magnate of their region ever since she had been granted estates forfeited by the disgraced duke of
Norfolk six years earlier. As these gentlemen gathered their armed tenants in the deer park of Mary’s great moated castle at Framlingham in Suffolk – to which she moved for her muster because its defences were still as formidable as when it was built four hundred years earlier – their confidence in the justice of their mission was palpable.

The same could not be said of their opponents. The duke of Northumberland was an able man, a shrewd politician and an experienced soldier, but he was hated by many, and loved by no one other than his wife. Meanwhile, Queen Jane had had no chance to inspire any personal loyalty in the handful of days since she had been so dramatically plucked from aristocratic obscurity. Supporters of the reformed religion, who might have backed the new regime, were torn between fear of Mary’s allegiance to Rome and their own loyalty to the lineage of Henry VIII. And in these circumstances – where one side was sustained by deep convictions, both political and religious, and propelled by spontaneous momentum, while the other relied on the conduct of business as usual in the service of radical change imposed entirely from above – the structures of governmental control on which Northumberland’s power depended began to disintegrate.