Tudor (41 page)

According to Edward's Secretary of State, Sir William Cecil, it was William Parr's wife who suggested Frances' eldest daughter, Lady Jane Grey, be married to Dudley's fourth son, Lord Guildford Dudley.
⁹
William Parr had no legitimate children and Guildford was the elder of two unmarried sons available to Dudley.
¹⁰
The Lord President proved enthusiastic. Unlike the other leading figures in Edward's
regime – William Parr (brother of the late queen, Katherine Parr), William Herbert (the widower of Anne Parr, the late queen's sister) and Harry Grey (whose wife Frances was Henry VIII's niece) – John Dudley was not a member of the extended royal family. The previous year he had tried, and failed, to pressure Eleanor Brandon's widower, the Earl of Cumberland, into marrying his daughter Margaret Clifford to Guildford. He was delighted his son was to make this still greater match, and it was one to which Harry Grey soon agreed.

Lady Jane Grey, who was about to be sixteen, had matured into a remarkable young woman, only averagely attractive, but with far better than average brains. She spoke Latin, Greek, French, Italian and some Hebrew.
¹¹
She was a patron of the first pastor of London's ‘Strangers Church' for European Protestant exiles, and was admired amongst a circle of clever Protestant women that included William Cecil's intellectual wife, Mildred. There is no evidence to support the later romanticised gossip amongst Italians that Jane married at the ‘insistence of her mother and the threats of her father'.
¹²
It was usual for the daughters of the nobility to have an arranged marriage made around their sixteenth birthday, and even if Edward lived, Jane's marriage had great promise. When her father died his title, Duke of Suffolk, was likely to pass to Guildford, who was close to her age and remembered by contemporaries as a ‘comely, virtuous and goodly gentleman'.
¹³

Poor Edward, meanwhile, found his health was deteriorating once more. On 28 April 1553, as the Imperial ambassador recorded the news of Jane's betrothal, he also reported that every day Edward's agonising cough was growing 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.'
¹⁴
The symptoms and Edward's medical history suggest he had contracted tuberculosis in 1550. It was then suppressed by his immune
system and reactivated by the measles he suffered in the spring of 1552.
¹⁵
Mary's allies at court were keeping her informed of the developing situation – and so was John Dudley, who in a remarkable turnaround was also now emphasising Mary's right to her full arms as Princess of England.
¹⁶
In September 1551 Dudley's ally William Parr had told the Imperial ambassador not to refer to Mary as ‘princess' but merely as ‘the king's sister'. This had been followed by Somerset's attempt to ally with Mary's sympathisers against the Dudley regime. The ambassador suggested Dudley was now attempting to conciliate Mary in order to forestall further trouble – and indeed it appears this exactly explains Dudley's actions, for something else was also being done in that regard. Mary had been obliged to surrender lands to the Crown in December 1552, before the serious nature of Edward's illness was understood. In May, ostensibly in compensation for these, she received prime lands, castles and manors worth far in excess of what she had lost. They included the royal castle of Hertford and the manor castle of Framlingham, which had been the principal seat of Thomas Howard, 3rd Duke of Norfolk, before he was sent to the Tower in 1546.
¹⁷

John Dudley and his allies were confident Mary would accept the overthrow of her father's will by her brother, just as she had accepted those parts overthrown by the Protectorate in 1547, with land grants once again being used to sweeten the pill. As for Elizabeth, the Imperial ambassador heard that John Dudley's eldest son would be divorced so he would be free to marry her. But from Elizabeth herself there was silence. Like Mary she was playing her cards close to her chest, watching and waiting on events. Edward's Secretary of State, who also happened to be the surveyor of her estates, William Cecil, may have been her eyes and ears at court.

At Greenwich on 10 May there was a brief and brilliant distraction from the gloom cast over the court by Edward's illness. The Company of Merchant Adventurers had sent three ships down the river to Greenwich to salute the king before they headed to seek a north-west
passage to China. When news reached the palace of the ships' approach, ‘the courtiers came running out and the common people flocked together standing very thick upon the shore, the Privy Council they looked out of the windows of the court and the rest ran by to the tops of the towers'.
¹⁸
The ships were being towed by rowboats filled with sailors dressed in blue, while other sailors stood on the ships' decks waving to their friends. There was no sign of the king, however, and as the guns fired their salutes before the ships sailed away on their voyage of discovery, he continued to lie in agony in his rooms.

Two days later the Imperial ambassador reported that it was considered certain Edward would die, and to contain the rumours that this was the case, three people who were overheard talking of it had ‘their ears torn off'. The marriages or betrothals of all the royal women who were still single, and not passed over in Edward's will, were now to go ahead. The first were those of Lady Jane Grey and her pretty blonde sister, the twelve-year-old Katherine Grey. They took place during the last week in May, with Katherine's groom, the fifteen-year-old son of William Herbert, brought from his sickbed to the ceremony.
¹⁹
Edward sent gifts ‘of rich ornaments and jewels', but it was becoming rapidly evident that he would not live long enough to see Jane or Katherine bear a son.

About a week later Edward made a small but important change to his will. He drew a line through the provision that Frances would rule as governor if he died before any male heirs were born, and inserted two short phrases above the line. The throne was to pass to Frances' male heirs, but in the absence of such issue ‘before my death' the throne was to pass to Lady Jane Grey ‘and her' heirs male. Since Frances was not pregnant and had no sons, she was, effectively, ruled out as governor with the throne passing directly to Jane as queen regnant. The doctors suggested that Edward might live until September when Parliament was due to assemble, and his will could then be confirmed by statute. But since his survival for that length of time was
uncertain, Edward summoned his senior judges to ratify his will immediately.

Edward could no longer hold down food and was weakened by a violent bout of fever. Nevertheless, when his judges arrived he gathered what strength remained to give them his instructions and secure his legacy of a Protestant England. The judges would later claim they only drew up the document after threats issued by John Dudley. But one way or another, they gave the will legal force, and Edward then summoned Frances to see him.
²⁰
She had little choice but to accept his decisions, as others would now be asked to do. On 21 June the nobility and leading officials were all asked to sign the document the judges had drawn up. It drew attention to the illegitimacy of Edward's sisters, who were, Edward noted, only of ‘the half blood', and gave stark warnings of the dangers of their marrying foreigners.
²¹
By contrast there was praise for the Grey sisters, described as ‘natural born here within the realm, and . . . very honourably brought up and exercised in good and godly learning, and other noble virtues'.
²²
The Privy Council, Archbishop Cranmer, the officers of the household, civic dignitaries, and twenty-two peers all signed it and swore a solemn oath to uphold its provisions.

Elizabeth's acceptance of the will was to be bought, as Mary's had been, or so Dudley believed. On 26 June he acquired a reversionary interest in several of Elizabeth's estates, including her largest land-holding at Missenden, Buckinghamshire; this gave him first refusal if the property became available either through the death of the owner or a proposed change of ownership, such as reversion to the Crown.
²³
Elizabeth would only have agreed to this if she had been promised something better in exchange. We don't know what this was, but her first biographer, William Camden, recalled she was offered ‘a certain sum of money and great possession of land' to accept Jane Grey as queen. Elizabeth had chosen to make the best of a bad situation.
²⁴

With the September parliament less than three months away, doctors and faith healers were ordered to do anything they could to
keep Edward alive. This included, reputedly, dosing him with arsenic, and Edward's subjects began saying that John Dudley was poisoning the king and intended to hand the country over to the French.
²⁵
It was clearly in France's interest that Charles V's cousin, Mary Tudor, not inherit, and the rumours grew after Dudley was seen entering the residence of the French ambassador.
²⁶
What he actually sought was the promise of French backing in the event that the emperor attacked England on Mary's behalf when Edward died. The French were happy to give it.

On Sunday 2 July the contents of the king's will were signalled to the public for the first time, with church services excluding the usual prayers for Mary and Elizabeth.

The following day, as Mary travelled to London to see her brother, she was warned Edward's death was imminent. On 5 July news reached John Dudley that Mary was heading away from court for her house, Kenninghall, at the heart of her estates in Norfolk. From there she could flee to Flanders and the emperor. Dudley was persuaded to play it safe and ordered his third son, Guildford's elder brother, Lord Robert Dudley, to pursue Mary with a small number of horsemen and bring her to London.

Edward was fading fast. Between eight and nine in the evening of 6 July he sighed ‘I feel faint.' Gathered into the arms of a gentleman servant, he began to pray: ‘Lord have mercy on me and take my spirit.' Edward's reputation is that of a cold boy, remembered for signing the death warrants of his uncles, and whose religious beliefs associate him with the dour Puritanism of the Commonwealth a century later. But what little we glimpse of Edward the boy, rather than Edward the king, is of an affectionate youth prone to hero worship, keen to do the right thing, and with a boyish enthusiasm for funny acrobats, exciting sports and adventure. As Edward drew his last breaths, far away in the North Sea two of the three ships that had fired their salutes in farewell in May had scattered in the winds; but one captain heading into the unknown held his course, until he ‘sailed so far that he came at last
to the place where he found no night at all, but a continual light and brightness of the sun shining on the mighty sea'.
²⁷
Edward's suffering was over and the last Tudor king was dead. But the Tudor women were not finished yet.

Part Three

SETTING SUN: THE TUDOR QUEENS

Let men that receive of women authority, honour, or office, be most assuredly persuaded, that in so maintaining that usurped power, they declare themselves enemies to God.

JOHN KNOX,
THE FIRST BLAST OF THE TRUMPET AGAINST THE MONSTROUS REGIMENT OF WOMEN
(1558)

29

NINE DAYS

A
T TWO O'CLOCK ON THE HIGH-SUMMER AFTERNOON OF
M
ONDAY
10 July 1553, Jane Grey's barge arrived at the Watergate near the Tower. A sparse crowd was gathering to watch her formal procession to the fortress, which she would claim as all monarchs did on the eve of their coronation. Her young husband Guildford Dudley was with her, along with her mother and ladies, while other members of the nobility followed behind in their barges. As Jane reached the top of the steps John Dudley and his fellow councillors greeted her. A famous account given by the Italian merchant and knight Baptista Spinola adds an intimate description of the sixteen-year-old as the procession gathered and began to make its way slowly and with due pomp down the streets:

This Jane is very short and thin, but prettily shaped and graceful. She has small features and a well-made nose the mouth flexible and the lips red. The eyebrows are arched and darker than her hair, which is nearly red. Her eyes are sparkling and light hazel. I stood so long near Her Grace, that I noticed her colour was good, but freckled. When she smiled she showed her teeth, which are white and sharp. In all, a
graziosa persona
and
animata
[animated]. She wore a dress of green velvet stamped with gold, with large sleeves. Her headdress was a white coif with many
jewels. She walked under a canopy, her mother carrying her long train, and her husband Guilfo [Guildford] walking by her, dressed all in white and gold, a very tall strong boy with light hair, who paid her much attention. The new queen was mounted on very high chopines [clogs] to make her look much taller, which were concealed by her robes, as she is very small and short. Many ladies followed, with noblemen, but this lady is very
heretica
and has never heard Mass, and some great people did not come into the procession for that reason.