Tudor (42 page)

It paints a vivid picture of Jane before the great gates of the Tower closed behind her. Unfortunately, like so much about Jane's life and reign, Spinola's report is a clever mixture of fact and fiction. The description of a smiling girl was composed in 1909 by a historical novelist turned biographer called Richard Davey and has been slavishly quoted by historians ever since.
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In describing a teenager so small she has to wear stacked shoes to give her height, he paints a picture of innocence and vulnerability that chimes with myths concerning Jane Grey developed over centuries. They depict her in the appealing guise of a child victim who is never a player in her own fate. The real Jane was a far more interesting, as well as more ambivalent figure, than the idealised girl of this tradition.

On the eve of her coronation Jane Grey was less than two years younger than Henry VIII had been when he became king. She had not sought the crown that Edward had bequeathed her, but she believed that the Mass, for which Mary risked so much, was evil. Since only God could make a king, it can have been of little surprise to Jane that she had been chosen over Mary.
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The gathering crowd watching her procession were puzzled, however, not only that Mary (who had been accepted as Edward's heir for a decade) had been passed over, but so had Jane's mother, who was carrying her train. If Frances Brandon had transmitted her place in line of succession to a son this would have been understood and accepted – Margaret
Beaufort had transmitted her right to her son, Henry VII – but for Henry VIII's niece to serve her own daughter was a worrying reversal of the natural order.

At around four o'clock Jane and her glittering following disappeared behind the Tower's huge walls. The gates closed, trumpets blew and the heralds began to read the royal proclamation of ‘Jane, by the Grace of God, Queen of England, France and Ireland'. It explained that Edward had appointed Jane his heir in letters patent, signed by himself along with his nobles, councillors, judges and ‘divers other grave and sage personages'; that Mary and Elizabeth had been excluded as illegitimate and because they might choose a husband who would impose a foreign government, and bring a ‘free realm into the tyranny and servitude of the Bishop of Rome'. When the heralds had finished reading they again proclaimed ‘Jane, Queen of England' and cheered. In the crowd, however, people were shocked and some were also angry.

This was not yet a Protestant country. The break with Rome was recent in historical terms and had been deeply traumatic, while to the majority of Englishmen Protestantism remained an alien creed, begun in Germany.
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The proclamation also begged the question, what qualifications did Lord Guildford Dudley have to be a King of England? He had no royal blood. His grandfather was Henry VII's servant Edmund Dudley, remembered for running a virtual protection racket in London and executed for treason in 1510. His father, John Dudley, Duke of Northumberland, had been Lord President of a hated regime. When in the previous year he had tried to marry Guildford to Jane's cousin, Lady Margaret Clifford, there had been malicious rumours that he was aspiring to the crown. This was easier to believe now: after all, wives were expected to obey their husbands, and Jane's husband was his son.

When the proclamation was read again at Cheapside a boy cried out that Mary was the rightful queen. Not that this mattered much. Even the Imperial ambassadors judged that Queen Jane had achieved
a fait accompli. They advised Mary's cousin and most powerful ally, Charles V, to accept that she had been passed over, arguing that ‘All the forces of the country are in [John Dudley's] hands, and my Lady [Mary] has no hope of raising enough men to face him.' As for the common sort, ‘there are troops posted everywhere to prevent the people from rising in arms or causing any disorder'.
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Mary was, however, about to demonstrate that she was made of sterner stuff than the Imperial ambassadors.

Mary's reputation has, like Jane's, been shaped for centuries by a combination of sexual and religious prejudice. In Mary's case this is further complicated by the fact it is the heirs of her ideological opponents who have written her story. Even in the twenty-first century some popular historians continue to describe her as a hysterical, weak little woman, easily dominated by men. We are told ‘her upbringing . . . had not given her the skill of leadership' and that she had ‘none of the guile and shrewdness necessary to succeed in the fickle world of Tudor politics'.
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She is ever the dark, damp little cloud to her sister Elizabeth's glorious sun. Yet the truth is that Elizabeth had enjoyed far less useful training in the ‘skill of leadership' than Mary had.
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Mary had been raised as her father's heir until well into her teens and since 1543, aged twenty-seven, she had been her brother's heir. For the previous five years Mary had also been a great landed magnate, a role held almost exclusively by men, but one in which she had had the example of her childhood governess, Margaret Pole, Countess of Salisbury. The influence of Mary's mother, Katherine of Aragon, also remained important. The late queen had played up to gender expectations, but the same woman who had sewn the banners for the army at Flodden had been prepared to send James IV's head to her husband as a personal gift. Even Henry VIII had spoken with awe of Katherine of Aragon's fierceness in war. Mary, far from having ‘none of the guile and shrewdness necessary' for Tudor politics, knew very well the necessity of compromise and duplicity when playing for high
stakes, especially from a position of weakness. She was also capable of acting with extraordinary courage and ruthlessness.

That morning a messenger from Mary had arrived at the Tower. When the message was read at Jane's council table, those who heard it were ‘greatly astonished and troubled'. It demanded their allegiance to her as their rightful queen, ‘by act of parliament and the last testament and will' of Henry VIII, and promised if they now returned to their duty, she would take their support for Jane thus far ‘in gracious part'. Mary needed the backing of the elite and this was her first bid to win back their loyalty. The shock for Jane's council was that this meant the peaceful transition of power they had expected was to be denied them. Jane would have to fight for her crown. Fear of a brutal and protracted struggle, such as the wars of the previous century that had ended in the extirpation of the houses of York and Lancaster, was even more profound than the personal fear that if they picked the losing side they would pay for it with their lives. When Jane's mother and mother-in-law were told of Mary's letter they burst into tears.
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Bloodshed was inevitable.

The next day Jane's proclamation was posted across London. It warned of severe punishment for those who opposed her and an example was set immediately with the boy who had cried out for Mary at Cheapside: he had his ears cut off. Jane now had to raise an army, and on Wednesday 12 July, Londoners were offered ten pence a day to fight in defence of her crown. It was not expected to be a long war. Jane announced that her coronation would be delayed for only two or three weeks and, in anticipation of her victory, she was brought the crown jewels to peruse.
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Yet worrying news was coming in by the hour. Mary had issued her own proclamation, declaring herself queen in Norfolk and parts of Suffolk, and it was evident she was using her tenants and wider affinity as the platform from which to launch her claim. Mary's household officers had been preparing for weeks, possibly months, for her exclusion from the succession, using her networks as the leading
Catholic in England, as well as those of a great landowner. Knights and gentlemen were reported to be rallying to her cause, along with ‘innumerable companies of the common people'.
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Something had changed in England: in 1501 when Henry VII was ill, his children were overlooked as his possible heirs, with people showing a preference for the de la Poles, children of Edward IV's sister, Elizabeth, Duchess of Suffolk, or Edward Stafford, Duke of Buckingham, senior descendant of Thomas of Woodstock. In 1519 – ten years after Henry VIII came to the throne – the Venetian ambassador reported a continuing preference for Buckingham, while the last de la Pole was still in Europe hoping for his chance. By 1525 these two men were dead, and at the end of Henry's reign the Tudors were being associated in the public mind not with their obscure Welsh antecedents, but as the family of the union rose, just as he had wished. In striking contrast to the fate of Edward V, the elder of the princes in the Tower, Edward VI had reigned for his natural lifespan, and now ordinary English people were rallying to a Tudor queen.

John Dudley, who had defeated the 1549 rebellion in Norfolk, was given the task of commanding Jane's army against Mary. He left London on 14 July at the head of ‘the fairest band of gentlemen and others that hath been lightly seen upon a sudden' and a ‘fearsome' artillery train. But as he headed north-east, to the west a gentry-led rebellion exploded in the Thames Valley. Jane's claim was a complex one, easily derided as no more than a clever fraud. Mary was soon being proclaimed in Buckinghamshire, while other counties were also turning against Jane as a ‘queen of a new and pretty invention'.
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It was in East Anglia, however, where the towns had been quick to proclaim Jane queen a few days earlier, that the rebel numbers were growing fastest. Mary had raised her standard at Framlingham Castle in Suffolk and even the Protestant elite of the region was being recruited to her cause.

On 15 July, as John Dudley and William Parr made for Bury St Edmunds to cut off Mary's support in the Midlands, Jane received
news that the five royal ships at sea off the Norfolk coast had mutinied, the sailors forcing the officers to go over to Mary's side. Reports were also coming in that the tenants of noblemen loyal to Jane were refusing to serve against Mary – an extremely troubling development. It promised social unrest on a scale even more threatening than that of the rebellions of 1549, which had only been crushed with the help of foreign mercenaries.
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Mary pushed home her advantage with promises of reconciliation. On 18 July she issued a proclamation that avoided any mention of Edward's Device for the Succession; Mary did not want to advertise the fact her brother had excluded her from the throne. Indeed the proclamation did not even name Jane. Instead Mary placed the focus on John Dudley, her ‘most false traitor'. The crisis was explained as the consequence solely of his ambition to make Guildford king, ‘by marriage of a newfound lady's title'.
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Mary was signalling to the elite that she intended John Dudley be made the scapegoat for the crisis. They had not been able to bring the English people with them in following King Edward's wishes to exclude Mary from the throne – and she was offering them a way out of their dilemma.

As the support of Jane's councillors fell away, John Dudley and William Parr received ‘letters of discomfort' from their friends in the Tower. Jane continued, however, to play her role as queen. While Mary was issuing her proclamation, Jane was raising troops against the Buckinghamshire rebels, naming William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke (the father-in-law of her sister Katherine Grey) as one of two commanders who would deliver ‘such punishment or execution as they deserve'.
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On the morning of the 19th a christening ceremony went ahead in the church on Tower Hill. Jane had been asked to stand as godmother to the infant son of a minor court figure called Edward Underhill, and one of her mother's cousins stood in her place.
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By tradition, the godmother chose the child's baptismal name, and Jane had chosen that of her husband, Guildford. Other proxies stood in for Jane's father,
who remained by her side in the Tower, and for William Herbert, who was at his London home, the former royal palace of Baynard's Castle.

Herbert had claimed he was to meet the French ambassador to discuss bringing foreign auxiliaries from the Netherlands to aid Jane. In reality he was concerned that Mary's promise to take the councillors' actions ‘in gracious part' would not apply to him if he led Jane's troops into Buckinghamshire, and he was planning with others to desert Jane's cause. That afternoon, the lord mayor arrived at Baynard's Castle along with a number of councillors that Herbert had summoned. All were desperate for a peaceful resolution to the crisis. When the City aldermen were also gathered, William Herbert announced they were to ride together to Cheapside to proclaim Mary as queen. Several officials wept with relief. As the men rode towards Cheapside word of their intention spread and a huge, excited crowd gathered. Herbert read the document proclaiming Mary queen, and when he concluded by throwing a hat full of coins in the air, the crowd erupted. ‘From a distance the earth must have looked like Mount Etna', the Imperial ambassador reported of the cheers and shouts; ‘the people are mad with joy'. To the ambassador's amazement, Mary's gamble had paid off. ‘Not a soul could have imagined the possibility of such a thing', he recalled.

As the council's soldiers arrived at the Tower, Jane's father, Harry Grey, ordered his men to put down their weapons. He was informed the council's soldiers had orders to arrest him if he did not leave willingly and sign the new proclamation. Reluctantly he did as he was asked. Jane's cloth of state was taken down in the throne room and all the symbols of her reign defaced – ‘a sudden change!', one of her shocked ladies commented.
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Jane now found herself a prisoner in the Tower from where she had reigned, as was Guildford and his mother.
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‘Thus Jane was queen for only nine days and those most turbulent ones', a friend of the Greys wrote to a Swiss divine.
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This referred to the number of days since Jane had been proclaimed at the Tower. In fact her reign, from the death of Edward VI, had lasted thirteen days.
The sobriquet ‘the Nine Days' Queen' would stick nevertheless. Turning her reign into a mere ‘nine days wonder' helped diminish its significance, and that was something from which both Mary and her Protestant opponents would benefit. Mary did not want it remembered that Jane had once had serious backing, while Protestants were later embarrassed by their treasonous support for Jane against the Tudor sisters – not just Mary but also Elizabeth; far better for everyone to treat Jane's reign as a small aberration, engineered by Dudley alone.