Tudor Queens of England (30 page)

Within weeks, Thomas was in trouble up to his neck, for reasons that had nothing directly to do with Jane and the Greys were, understandably, very worried. The Lord Admiral had been plotting a coup against his brother, whom he detested by this time, and boasting about how many armed men he could raise. At the same time, Sharrington had been fi ltering off money from the Bristol Mint, for which he had responsibility. The intention seems to have been to get the Lord Protector’s patent overturned by statute, but other, more direct action was also 158

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suspected. In January 1549, Lord Thomas Seymour was arrested, interrogated, and charged with treason. This charge was not derived from the plot against his brother, which would not have been treason because the latter was not the King, but from an alleged intention to marry the Princess Elizabeth. The Princess was also interrogated, and although she behaved with admirable self possession, the charge was deemed to be proved. Lord Thomas was condemned by Act of Attainder and executed on 20 March 1549.

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The Protector seems to have been genuinely perplexed as to what to do but his temper was not sweetened when he discovered that his brother had been endeavouring to sabotage his marriage plans for his son by continuing to dangle Jane before the King – a circumstance of which the Marquis of Dorset had not informed him. Jane’s reaction to the loss of her ‘kind father’ in such dramatic circumstances is not known but all Seymour’s property was forfeit by his attainder, so the ground was literally swept from under her. By the end of March, and still short of her twelfth birthday, she was back at Bradgate.

At such a distance from the Court there was no longer any question of her sharing the King’s lessons (if that is what had been happening), but the Greys decided to persevere with the quality of education that she had been receiving and engaged John Aylmer, the future bishop of London, as her tutor. Aylmer was a learned man, and strong Protestant, and in friendly correspondence with such leading continental reformers as Heinrich Bullinger and John ab Ulmis. Aylmer was hugely impressed with his charge and was soon encouraging her to correspond directly with his friends, who were equally impressed with her piety and her Latin.

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t seems clear that at this point, in the summer of 1549, Dorset still had more than an eye on Jane marrying Edward, and wanted to make sure that she would be a fi t companion for him. Like over-anxious parents in any period, the Marquis and his lady fretted over their eldest child, and according to her own account were ‘sharp and severe’ with her. Roger Ascham, who visited Bradgate that summer, declared that it was her parents’ ‘taunts, pinches, nips and bobs’ that caused her to seek solace in the company of Plato, and ‘gentle master’

Aylmer. Perhaps, but Ascham’s work was more than a little hagiographic and it may well be that Jane was not quite the humble and polite bookworm whom he portrayed. As one recent biographer has observed, she was probably ‘a priggish, opinionated teenager, contemptuous of her parents’. She knew what was expected of her but a taste for ‘playing, dancing and being merry’ can also be glimpsed through his record. The one thing that is quite clear is that she was formidably intelligent, a quality that she does not seem to have inherited directly from either of her parents. Her younger sisters, Catherine and Mary were much more truly their parents’ children in that respect.

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Jane stayed at Bradgate, or other Grey residences as appropriate, for the next four years. Her prospects changed as the political events of the reign unfolded but neither she nor indeed her father had much control over those events. The disturbances of July and August 1549 did not touch Bradgate, and the Marquis played no leading role in their suppression. Nor was he active in the coup that overthrew the Protector in October. What he did succeed in doing was to ingratiate himself with the man who effectively took over the Protestor’s position – John Dudley, Earl of Warwick. After the coup, Warwick was locked in a three-month battle with the religious conservatives on the Council, whose main motivation in getting rid of Somerset had been to check England’s progress towards Protestantism. Warwick’s own incentives had been quite different and he was happy to see the Reformation continue, but in order to secure control he needed allies in the Council, and that meant Protestants. That was where the Marquis came in. He may not have been a very shrewd politician, or even a good administrator, but he was a Protestant and he was sworn of the Council on 28 November 1549.

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This raised his political profi le substantially and he came to be regarded as one of Warwick’s closest and most reliable allies.

Meanwhile, Jane’s matrimonial prospects were ebbing away. One of the obstacles in the way of her union with the King had always been the fact that he was supposed to be committed to Mary of Scotland by the treaty of Greenwich of 1543. However the Scots had repudiated that treaty and numerous English attempts to resurrect it had fi nally ended in failure in 1548 when Mary was betrothed to the Dauphin, Francis. War with France had followed, from August 1549 to March 1550, and with the peace that ended that war came talk of a matrimonial alliance. Negotiations proceeded for over a year and were fi nally concluded in June 1551, whereby a marriage was agreed but was not to take place until Elizabeth, Henry II’s eldest daughter, had passed the age of 12 (she was, at that point, 6) which was the minimum canonical age for co-habitation.

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The marriage never took place because Edward died when Elizabeth was 8, but he was considered to be committed, and that shut off Jane’s chances – if they had ever existed. Similarly, relations with Edward Seymour chilled noticeably after Dorset’s choice in October 1549. He became so close to the Earl of Warwick that when the latter had himself raised to the Dukedom of Northumberland on 11

October 1551, he caused the Marquis to be created Duke of Suffolk at the same time. Shortly after the Duke of Somerset was arrested, and with his execution for felony in February 1552, his title was extinguished and his property forfeit. The Earl of Hertford disappeared into limbo and another matrimonial option was closed.

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The dukedom of Suffolk brought further wealth to the Greys and by the summer of 1552 they had moved their main centre of operations from Bradgate to the former Carthusian monastery of Sheen, in Surrey. There Jane seems to have lived until her ill-fated marriage to Lord Guildford Dudley in June 1553. Guildford was the Duke of Northumberland’s last unmarried son, and his father’s intentions had not originally focused on Jane at all. He had been negotiating for some time for the hand of her cousin, Margaret Clifford, the daughter of her Aunt Eleanor, Frances’s sister, and Henry Clifford, Earl of Cumberland. His purpose seems to have been to establish a fi rm link with one of the northern peerage families, but Clifford was having none of it.

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As early as July 1552 the Privy Council had written to both peers to ‘grow to some good end’, concerning the marriage, which was probably Northumberland’s way of putting pressure on his colleague – but to no avail. Frustrated in his quest, Northumberland turned to his complaisant ally, the Duke of Suffolk, and on 21 May 1553 effected a series of prestigious marriages. His daughter Catherine was married to Henry Hastings, heir to the Earl of Huntingdon, Jane’s sister, also Catherine, to Henry Herbert, son of the Earl of Pembroke, and Jane herself to Guildford Dudley. This appears to have been an act of parental oppression on the Greys’ part, because all the indications are that Jane loathed her spouse and was only compelled to sleep with him by ‘the urging of her mother and the violence of her father, who compelled her to accede to his commands with blows’. Jane had become a bluestocking, perhaps as much by force of circumstances as by taste, and some of her stilted, elaborate letters to Heinrich Bullinger testify both to her accomplishments and her ambition. At the age of 16 she was fl uent in Latin, profi cient in Greek and anxious to learn Hebrew. In an earlier generation she would have been a natural candidate for the cloister, an abbess in the making. As it was, she was forced into bed with Guildford Dudley.

It has been argued that this marriage was part of a deep-laid plot by the Duke of Northumberland to divert the Crown into the Dudley family, but at the time even the suspicious Jehan Scheyfre, the Imperial ambassador, merely noted that Jane was a cousin of the King’s. It is likely that, in late May, Northumberland did not even know of that schoolboy exercise on the succession, known as the ‘King’s Device’. Edward had been ill since February, but the nature of his ailment was not understood, and in late May he was in remission. It was only about a week into June that his condition deteriorated alarmingly, and the physicians who had been glibly talking of a complete recovery, suddenly decided that his death was not only cer

tain but imminent.11 This desper
ate news concentrated minds, not only Northumberland’s but also the King’s, and caused the school exercise to be brought out. When he had written it, Edward had been obsessed with the male

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succession and his order started with any son who might be born of the Lady Frances (the Duchess of Suffolk), followed by any son who might be born to Jane. There was much more in the same vein but the important thing was that it ignored the Succession Act of 1544 and excluded both Mary and Elizabeth as being not only female but also illegitimate. After that, its provisions followed the Act in excluding the Scots, and including the ‘Suffolk line’. However, in the emergency that had now arisen, it was not much use. Frances had not conceived for years, and was probably passed what was known at the time as her ‘climacteric’. Jane was newly married but had scarcely had time to get pregnant, even if the will had been there. Reluctantly, therefore, the King altered his ‘Device’, settling the Crown upon ‘the Lady Jane and her heirs male’, by a simple insertion in the te

xt.12

It was clearly Northumberland’s intention to get this ‘Device’, which had no legal status, confi rmed by Parliament, which in so doing would have repealed the Succession Act – but there was no time. As June advanced the terminal nature of the King’s illness became more apparent and he ordered that his

‘Device’ be embodied in Letters Patent. There was much resistance to this, the lawyers pointing out that an Act of Parliament could not be overruled by Letters Patent and that, in any case, the King was a minor who could not even make a valid will. Edward, however, insisted and, put upon their allegiance, his council all swore to uphold his wishes.

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On 6 July the King died and Jane’s eccentric claim was put to the test. Bearing in mind that it could not be treason to obey the personal commands of a king, they could have felt uncommitted and free to obey the law as it then stood. Northumberland, however, thought differently. Whether out of loyalty to his late master, or out of family interest, he persuaded (or forced) the Council to follow its oath, and Jane was duly proclaimed. The King’s death was kept secret for two days (a standard precaution), and on 8 July revealed to the Mayor and Aldermen of London, who were sworn to Queen Jane. A contemporary observer wrote: ‘The 10 of July, in the afternoon about 3 of the clocke, lady Jane was conveyed by water to the Tower of London, and there received as Queene …’
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A couple of hours later the King’s death was publicly announced, and ‘how he had ordained by his letters patent … that the lady Jane should be heire to the Crowne of England.’ The news was received in ominous silence and there were protests. It was pointed out that the King had been solely motivated by his desire to preserve his ‘godly reformation’ against the threat of Mary’s known conservatism but even that (which was true up to a point) could not move the citizens. If the largely Protestant city of London could not be persuaded to support so Godly a claimant, what chance was there in the rest of the country?

Jane’s ‘rule’ lasted just nine days. She had no time to appoint offi cers of State, 162

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and the Council of Edward VI simply carried on.

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By 12 July it was clear that Mary was ‘making a power’ in East Anglia and that military action against her would be necessary. Letters were sent out in Jane’s name to the Commissions of the Peace, urging loyalty to the Queen, and the suppression of Mary’s pretensions. In some places these letters were taken seriously but events were moving too fast. The Council’s fi rst thought was to send the Duke of Suffolk against Mary, but the Queen ‘with many tears’ asked that he be allowed to remain with her, so Northumberland went instead. This turned out to be a fatal mistake. Northumberland was a better soldier than Suffolk but as soon as his dominating presence was removed from London, the Council began to split. By 16 July the split had become open and Mary’s adherents were in the majority. On 19 July Mary was proclaimed in London with general rejoicing and Northumberland, stuck at Cambridge with a dwindling force, was left out on a limb. The Duke of Suffolk himself took down the canopy of state under which Jane had sat, and infor
med her that she was no longer Queen.16 I
nstead, she and her father and all their adherents were prisoners. She was removed from the royal apartments to the Keeper’s lodgings. The hapless girl had had no time to rule and we have no idea what sort of a job she would have made of it. She did, apparently, indicate very fi rmly that she had no intention of conferring the Crown Matrimonial upon her husband and if that had ever come to an issue it would have been a revolutionary move. She appears to have been a mere pawn in a power game that the Duke of Northumberland played, and lost, with Mary. What might have happened if she had been a boy is a fascinating but pointless speculation. Whichever way the issue had gone in July 1553, England would have had its fi rst ruling Queen. As soon as Mary reached London on 3 August, the wheels of political justice began to turn. Stephen Gardiner, the Bishop of Winchester, the Duke of Norfolk and Edward Courtenay were released from the Tower. The Duke of Northumberland and his sons replaced them. In due course all were arraigned and condemned to death, although in the event only the Duke suffer
ed.17
Two of his followers suffered with him, but the delicacy of the political balance that had brought Mary to the throne was refl ected in the outcome. Jane, it is clear, was not rigorously confi ned. She had her servants and was allowed to move around within the Tower. An anonymous chronicler recorded how on 29 August: