Her Highness, the Traitor (36 page)

As for the Dudley son most affected by the king’s devise, little is known about Guildford Dudley’s personality. Jane Grey’s letter to Mary suggests he might have been a bit of a mother’s boy, but her account is hardly impartial and was written at a time when Jane had no reason to think kindly of her husband or his family. There is certainly no historical basis for depicting Guildford as dissolute, cruel, or cowardly, as he is characterized by many novelists. The gracious note he wrote to Jane’s father after Henry Grey’s ill-judged participation in Wyatt’s rebellion surely says something about Guildford’s character, as does the quiet dignity with which he went to the scaffold, according to an anonymous chronicler who was probably employed at the Tower. The chronicler Grafton, who may have known Guildford, wrote, “that comely, vertuous, and goodly gentleman the lorde Gylford Duddeley most innocently was executed, whom God had endowed with suche vertues, that even those that never before the tyme of his execution saw hym, dyd with lamentable teares bewayle his death.”

Finally, we come to Jane Grey and her family, a subject about which fiction has come to overlay fact so heavily that distinguishing between the two has become difficult if not impossible. In my own attempt to do so, I have been heavily influenced by the research of Leanda de Lisle and Eric Ives, who have done much to clear away the myths that permeate most modern works about Jane and those who brought her to the throne. I am indebted to their research for much of what I say below, though any errors I may have fallen into are of course my own.

There is a widespread notion, stated as a matter of fact in most modern accounts of Lady Jane, that Adrian Stokes was a pretty boy half Frances’s age. A friend of Adrian’s recorded his birth to the hour in a horoscope: Adrian was born on March 4, 1519, making him less than two years younger than Frances, born on July 16, 1517. A portrait of a stout, middle-aged lady and a much younger man, for centuries described as one of Frances and Adrian Stokes, was identified recently as a portrait of Mary, Lady Dacre, and her son, Gregory Fiennes.

Adrian Stokes is named variously as Frances’s steward and as her master of horse, but in either case, such a position in a noble household was a responsible one requiring a man of ability, not a sinecure for the decorative and vacuous. Indeed, privy council records show that in the 1540s, Adrian Stokes served in France as marshal of the garrison of Newhaven (now Ambleteuse), where he had command of ten men.

There is no evidence Frances’s match with Adrian offended Queen Mary or caused Frances’s daughters to be taken from her care, as is claimed by some authors. It seems to have been understood as a means for Frances to distance herself from the royal succession. Queen Elizabeth’s early biographer, William Camden, wrote that Frances’s marriage was “to her dishonor, but yet for her security.”

The most enshrined legend about Frances and, to a much lesser extent, her husband Henry Grey is that they were brutal parents who made young Jane Grey’s life a miserable one. This belief is based chiefly on Roger Ascham’s book
The
Schoolmaster
, written long after the deaths of Jane and her parents, in which Ascham recalled Jane complaining about the “pinches, nips, and bobs” she received from her parents, in contrast to the lessons she received from her kindly tutor, John Aylmer. Yet in a letter to John Sturm written a few months after the visit, Ascham commented only on his admiration for Jane’s command of Greek: “I was immediately admitted into her chamber, and found the noble damsel—Oh, ye gods!—reading Plato’s
Phaedro
in Greek, and so thoroughly understanding it that she caused me the greatest astonishment.” If anything disturbed Ascham about his recent encounter with Jane, he did not see fit to mention it to Sturm at the time.

Contemporary correspondence by those who knew Jane shows a father who took pride in his daughter’s intellectual accomplishments and who shared her religious views. In July 1551, Jane wrote to thank the reformer Heinrich Bullinger in Zurich for “that little volume of pure and unsophisticated religion” which he had sent to her and her father; both were reading it, she added. Earlier, in May 1551, while Jane’s father was in Scotland, John ab Ulmis wrote to Bullinger that he had been visiting Jane and her mother at Bradgate, where he had been “passing these two days very agreeably with Jane, my lord’s daughter, and those excellent and holy persons Aylmer and Haddon [Jane’s tutor and the family chaplain].” Ulmis went on to gush, “For my own part, I do not think there ever lived any one more deserving of respect than this young lady, if you regard her family; more learned, if you consider her age; or more happy, if you consider both.” The previous year, in December 1550, Ulmis noted Jane was translating a treatise “On marriage” from the Latin to the Greek as a New Year’s gift for her father, whom Holinshed described as “somewhat learned himself, and a great favorer of those that were learned.” Henry Grey himself wrote of Jane in December 1551 to Bullinger, “I acknowledge yourself also to be much indebted to you on my daughter’s account, for having always exhorted her in your godly letters to a true faith in Christ, the study of the scriptures, purity of manners, and innocence of life.” Robert Wingfield, in a contemporary account of Mary’s victory that is hostile to Henry Grey, described Jane as the duke’s “favourite daughter.”

It needs to be remembered that Tudor standards of child-rearing were very different from our own: the smart-mouthed children lording it over their hapless parents who are staples of modern television and film would have been regarded with horror by Jane’s contemporaries. The humanist Juan Luis Vives, who had been asked by no less a personage than Catherine of Aragon to advise her on her daughter Mary’s education, wrote, “Never have the rod off a boy’s back; specially the daughter should be handled without any cherishing. For cherishing marreth sons, but it utterly destroyeth daughters.” Even John Aylmer, the tutor whom Ascham recalled Jane speaking of so fondly, wrote letters indicating his belief that the adolescent Jane needed a firm hand.

Frances Grey is a much more shadowy figure than her husband and Jane, but contemporary sources do not support her portrayal as a vicious and rabidly ambitious woman who terrorized her hapless daughter. Though she is often depicted as a dominant figure in making her daughter queen, at least one source, the Marian sympathizer Robert Wingfield, wrote that she was “vigorously opposed” to the match of Jane and Guildford Dudley. Significantly, she never spent any time in prison for her role in the succession crisis of 1553, an indication, perhaps, that she was believed by Mary’s government to have been a reluctant participant. There is no evidence she shared her daughter’s or her husband’s intellectual interests, but there is equally no evidence she discouraged her daughter’s intellectual development or that she resented her because she was not a boy, although she certainly must have grieved for the loss of her infant son. (For that matter, despite the prevailing notion that Frances spent most of her time slaying sad-eyed does when not beating her daughter, there’s no evidence she particularly enjoyed hunting, other than her one recorded absence on a hunting excursion on the day Ascham showed up at Bradgate.) Unlike Anne Seymour, Duchess of Somerset, whose difficult personality elicited negative comments from everyone from Catherine Parr on down, none of Frances’s contemporaries are on record as disliking her. When Sir Richard Morison groused about “Lady Suffolk’s heats” in May 1551, he was referring to the sharp-tongued and quick-tempered Katherine Brandon, not to Frances, who did not bear the Suffolk title at that time.

It is often stated that Frances’s callousness toward her daughter is shown by her failure to plead with Mary for her release and by her remarriage just weeks after the death of Jane and Henry Grey. As we have seen, however, a near-contemporary believed Frances married for her own security. As for the former charge, it is recorded that Frances successfully pleaded with Mary to free her husband in 1553, but it does not necessarily follow that Frances did not plead for her daughter on that occasion or she did not plead for Jane’s life in 1554. There is no evidence Frances visited her daughter in the Tower, but there is likewise no evidence the Duchess of Northumberland, whose desperate attempts to save her husband and her sons are well documented, visited her imprisoned children, either. It may simply be that permission for such visits was denied.

Before her death, Jane wrote a message to her father in her prayer book (Eric Ives has suggested that a purported second letter to Henry Grey, stylistically different from the one in the prayer book, may not be genuine) and another one to her sister Katherine. No letter to Frances survives, but Michelangelo Florio, Jane’s erstwhile tutor in Italian, stated that Jane wrote to her mother. It is quite possible the letter has been lost or Frances destroyed it, perhaps because it was purely of personal, not of religious, value. The absence of a surviving letter, then, does not indicate that Jane and her mother were estranged at the time of Jane’s death.

What of the story that Jane refused to marry Guildford until being beaten into submission by her parents? As Dr. John Stephan Edwards has written in his dissertation, no contemporary English source records Jane’s reaction to her marriage. Giovanni Commendone, a papal nuncio from Italy who arrived in England in August 1553, wrote that Jane was “compelled to submit [to the Dudley marriage] by the insistence of her Mother and the threats of her Father.” As Ives notes, the story of an actual beating appears only five years later, in a pirated account by Raviglio Rosso, another Italian, and the official 1560 text by the same writer mentions no beating. Notably, Jane, in her letter to Mary, made no claim that she was compelled to marry Guildford Dudley by physical force, although it would have been to her advantage to emphasize that she was a reluctant bride. While Jane may not have been happy about her marriage, there is little reason to suppose she was treated differently from other noble girls, who were expected to marry in accordance with their parents’ wishes. Frances herself made her arranged marriage before she was sixteen.

It may well be, of course, that Jane’s parents were strict disciplinarians—as indeed, Tudor parents were expected to be. It may be that they were perfectionists. It may also be that Jane, as an unusually intelligent girl, resented being treated as an ordinary daughter from whom misbehavior or slacking off would not be tolerated. But to damn Jane’s parents as cruel and unloving based on a single outburst by a teenage girl, recalled by a listener years after the fact and after an aura of martyrdom had already settled around Jane, is hardly fair to them—or, for that matter, to Jane, who in later life might have regretted her youthful comments had she been spared her tragic death on the scaffold.

For more about the historical figures in this novel, please see my website,
www.susanhigginbotham.com
, and my blog, History Refreshed, at
www.susanhigginbotham.com/blog
.

Adams, Simon.
Leicester and the Court: Essays on Elizabethan Politics
. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2002.

Beer, Barrett.
Northumberland: The Political Career of John Dudley, Earl of Warwick and Duke of Northumberland
. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1973.

Berkhout, Carl T. “Adrian Stokes.” Notes and Queries, March 2000.

Bridgen, Susan.
London and the Reformation
. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989.

Edwards, John.
Mary I: England’s Catholic Queen
. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2011.

Gunn, S. J. “A Letter of Jane, Duchess of Northumberland, in 1553.”
English Historical Review
, November 1999.

Ives, Eric.
Lady Jane Grey: A Tudor Mystery
. West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009.

James, Susan E.
Kateryn Parr: The Making of a Queen
. Aldershot and Brookfield: Ashgate, 1999.

de Lisle, Leanda.
The Sisters Who Would Be Queen: Mary, Katherine, and Lady Jane Grey
. New York: Ballantine Books, 2008.

Loach, Jennifer.
Edward VI
. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1999.

Loades, D. M.
Two Tudor Conspiracies
. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965.

Loades, David.
John Dudley, Duke of Northumberland, 1504–1553
. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996.

———.
Mary Tudor: A Life
. Cambridge, Mass., and Oxford: Blackwell, 1989.

Porter, Linda.
The First Queen of England: The Myth of “Bloody Mary.”
New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2007.

Skidmore, Chris.
Edward VI: The Lost King of England
. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2007.

Whitelock, Anna.
Mary Tudor: Princes, Bastard, Queen
. New York: Random House, 2009.

Websites of Interest

The Lady Jane Grey Internet Museum

www.bitterwisdom.com/ladyjanegrey/

This site, by Sonja Marie, has an extensive gallery showing how Jane has been depicted by artists throughout the centuries. It is also an invaluable resource for finding books about Jane and the rest of the Tudors.

Some Grey Matter by John Stephan Edwards

www.somegreymatter.com/

Maintained by a historian who did his doctoral dissertation on Lady Jane, this site offers a rich array of materials about Jane, including a listing of primary and secondary sources, a transcription of Jane’s prayer book, and a discussion of the various contemporary portraits alleged to be of Jane.

1. Frances overhears Jane’s famous “nips and bobs” speech to Roger Ascham but decides not to confront her daughter. Would you have done so?

2. In begging Lady Paget to intercede for her in saving her husband’s life, Jane Dudley frankly admits that her husband is more dear to her than are her sons. Did her admission make you think less of her?

3. Frances tries to reconcile the kind and charitable Mary she knows with the queen’s burning of heretics. Nearly three hundred people would be burned to death on Mary’s orders before her reign ended. Do you believe Mary was psychologically damaged, or was she merely acting in accordance with the values of her time, which did not look favorably on religious tolerance?

4. Desperate to save her family, Frances tells Mary what she knows are dubious stories about Edward VI being poisoned and encourages Jane Grey to do the same. Did this make her a less sympathetic character to you?

5. Prisoners facing execution in Tudor England were expected to express their penitence on the scaffold and to profess their loyalty to the monarch, even if the prisoner believed his sentence was unjust. Most of the people executed in this novel dutifully follow this convention. Could you have done this?

6. Despite his misgivings, John Dudley carries out the dying Edward VI’s wishes and puts Jane Grey on the throne. Setting aside for the moment the hindsight that informs us of the disastrous consequences of his decision, do you believe he was right to do so? Or should he have honored the provisions of the dead Henry VIII’s will?

7. Though Henry VIII is dead when
Her Highness, the Traitor
opens, he casts a shadow over the novel. In what ways does the king continue to influence events?

8. Frances tells her stepmother that her relationship with the Lord is no different no matter whether she goes to mass, and Jane Dudley readily changes her religion in hopes of seeing her sons freed. Others choose to die for their religious beliefs. Are there principles, religious or otherwise, that you would never compromise?

9. Certain characters in this novel, especially Frances Grey and John Dudley, have traditionally been depicted hostilely by novelists and by popular historians. Were you surprised to see them treated differently here? What about the depiction of Jane Grey, who has often been depicted as meek and helpless?

10. What sort of ruler do you think Jane Grey would have been if Mary had not claimed the throne?

11. Mary promises to spare Jane’s life but executes her after Henry Grey participates in Wyatt’s rebellion. Was her action necessary to prevent future rebellions, as she tells Frances? As a ruler, would you have spared Jane’s and Guildford’s lives?

12. At the end of her life, Jane Dudley writes, “For whoever trusts to this transitory world as I did, may happen to have an overthrow as I did.” How, if at all, does Jane’s reversal of fortune change her? What about Frances’s reversal of fortune?

13. Which heroine did you prefer, Frances Grey or Jane Dudley? Did your feelings about them change as the novel progressed?

14. Most of the writings in this novel, such as Jane Grey’s letters, Northumberland’s last letter, Somerset’s prayer composed on the eve of his execution, and Jane Dudley’s letter to Lady Paget and her will reflect the actual words of the historical figures involved. Likewise, Somerset’s, Northumberland’s, and Jane Grey’s execution speeches are drawn from contemporary reports. Did you find that this brought you closer to the characters?

15. Henry Grey loves his daughter Jane dearly but puts her life—and his own—at risk by joining Wyatt’s rebellion. Do you believe that he willfully blinded himself to the consequences of his actions, that he underestimated Mary’s strength of will, or that he was simply naïve?

16. Frances Grey has often been criticized for her hasty marriage to Adrian Stokes. Did you find the motives given here to be convincing? Do you think she found happiness in her second marriage?