Mary Tudor (43 page)

FIVE DAYS AFTER
Wyatt’s surrender, Lady Jane Grey and her husband were put to death. Although neither Jane nor Guildford Dudley had taken part in Wyatt’s rebellion, they were now too great a threat to live. Both had been found guilty of high treason and condemned in November the previous year, but then Mary had protested Jane’s innocence and maintained that her conscience would not permit her to have Jane put to death.
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Now the involvement of Jane’s father, the duke of Suffolk, who was also to be executed, sealed his daughter’s fate.

At ten o’clock on Monday, February 12, Guildford Dudley was beheaded on Tower Hill. The seventeen-year-old Lady Jane watched as her husband departed from his prison in the Beauchamp Tower for the scaffold and then afterward as “his carcass, thrown into a cart and his head in a cloth,” was brought back for burial in the chapel in the Tower precinct. It was, as the London chronicler described, “a sight to her no less than death.”
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An hour later, Jane was collected by Sir John Brydges, lieutenant of the Tower, and, dressed in black, led out to the scaffold on Tower Green. She prayed as she went. Two gentlewomen accompanied her, both weeping as they approached the gallows.

At the block Jane addressed the crowd before her: “Good people, I am hither to die, and by a law I am condemned to the same.” She confessed her guilt for her part in Northumberland’s attempted coup but denied her involvement in Wyatt’s rebellion, claiming to be “innocent before God, and the face of you, good Christian people, this day.” After removing her headdress, gloves, and gown, she bent down, begging the executioner to “despatch me quickly,” and asking him “Will you take [my head] before I lay me down?” The hangman answered, “No, madame.” After tying a handkerchief around her eyes, she groped for the block. Panicking, she called out, “What shall I do? Where is it?” Taking pity on the young woman, one of the bystanders led her to it. She laid her head on the block and said, “Lord, into thy
hands I commend my spirit.” The ax fell; with one sweep her head was removed.
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AS THE EXECUTIONS
continued, attention turned to Elizabeth, in whose name the rebels had acted. On January 26, the day after Wyatt had raised his standard at Rochester, Mary had written to her sister, requesting that she come to court:

Elizabeth had excused herself from the queen’s summons, citing ill health. Now, with the rebellion quashed, the government acted. On February 9, three councillors were sent to Elizabeth’s residence at Ashridge in Hertfordshire, charged with bringing her to court. The two royal doctors who had been sent ahead to report on her condition concluded that she was fit to be moved, despite her protestations. Three days later she left Ashridge, bound for London.
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On the same day, February 12, Edward Courtenay, the man the rebels had hoped to place on the throne with Elizabeth, was taken to the Tower as a prisoner.

After a slow journey to London, which took eleven rather than the five days planned due to Elizabeth’s apparent illness, she arrived in the city in an open litter, dressed in white to proclaim her innocence. From Smithfield and Fleet Street she proceeded to Whitehall, passing the
gallows and city gates decorated with severed heads and dismembered corpses, and followed by great crowds of people. A hundred horsemen in velvet coats rode in front of her; another hundred behind in scarlet cloth trimmed with velvet.
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Renard wrote, “She had her litter opened to show herself to the people, and her pale face kept a proud, haughty expression in order to mask her vexation.”
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Upon her arrival at Whitehall, Mary refused to see her. She was lodged in a remote and secure part of the palace, adjacent to the Privy Gardens, from which neither she nor her servants could go out without passing through the Guard. Renard made clear what he thought should happen to Elizabeth: “The Queen is advised to send her to the Tower, since she is accused by Wyatt, named in the letters of the French ambassador, suspected by her own councillors, and it is certain that the enterprise was undertaken in her favour … if now that the occasion offers, they do not punish her and Courtenay, the Queen will never be secure.”
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Meanwhile, as more leaders of the rebellion were arrested and questioned, the evidence against Elizabeth mounted. It emerged that Sir James Croft had stopped at Ashridge on his way to raise the Marches and that he and Wyatt had advised Elizabeth to move to Donnington, her castle two miles north of Newbury. Her servant Sir William St. Loe, who had been sent with a letter to Wyatt, was subsequently found with two of the rebel leaders at Tonbridge. Equally incriminating was the fact that a copy of Elizabeth’s letter excusing herself from the queen’s summons to court had been found in the seized dispatches of the French ambassador, Noailles. Elizabeth had, at the very least, been in contact with the conspirators, though as yet there was no evidence that she had approved of their designs or known of their plan. In the Tower, Gardiner pressed Wyatt to confess concerning Elizabeth, but the rebel leader would disclose nothing. At his trial, Wyatt admitted only that he had sent her a letter advising her to get as far away from London as she could, to which she had replied, though not in writing.

It was the flimsiest of evidence, but for the Council it was enough. On Friday, March 16, Elizabeth was formally charged with involvement in Wyatt and Carew’s conspiracies. The following day, she would be imprisoned as a suspected traitor.

WHEN THE MARQUESS
of Winchester and the earl of Sussex arrived to take Elizabeth by barge to the Tower, she begged to be given more time and the opportunity to write to Mary, a request the commissioners granted.
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Addressed “To the Queen,” her letter sought to secure her freedom and save her life:

More than half of her second sheet of paper was left blank; she scored it with diagonal lines so that no words could be added and attributed to her, and then she added a final appeal:

By the time she had finished her plea, the tide had risen and it was too late to depart. Her imprisonment would have to wait for the following
day. Mary raged at Sussex and Winchester for granting her permission to write: “They would never have dared to do such a thing in her father’s lifetime,” and she “only wished he might come to life again for a month.”
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At nine the following morning, Palm Sunday, Elizabeth was conducted downstream to the Tower, the place where her mother had met her death. At first Elizabeth refused to land at Traitor’s Gate, saying she was not a traitor but came “as true a woman to the Queen’s majesty as any is now living, and thereon will I take my death.”
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She was given no choice and entered the Tower across the drawbridge, passing the scaffold on which Lady Jane Grey had been executed. She was taken to the royal palace within the Tower precinct, where the councillors left her, turning the keys in the door as they went.
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Days later, Elizabeth was formally examined by the Council. Questioned as to her contact with Sir James Croft and her proposed move to Donnington, Elizabeth stalled, saying “she did not well remember any such house,” but then declared, “Indeed, I do now remember that I have such a place, but I never lay in it in all my life. And as for any that hath moved me thereunto, I do not remember.” When Croft was brought before her, Elizabeth recovered her memory: “And as concerning my going unto Donnington Castle, I do remember that Mr Hoby and mine officers and you Sir James Croft, had such talk,” but, she added defiantly, “what is that to the purpose my lords, but that I may go to mine houses at all times?”
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On April 3, Renard relayed to the emperor the queen’s assurances that “fresh proof is coming up against her [Elizabeth] every day, and there are several witnesses to assert that she had gathered together stores and weapons in order to rise with the rest and fortify a house in the country [Donnington] whither she had been sending her supplies.”
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In her first Parliament, Mary had restored the ancient constitutional law by which overt or spoken acts of treason had to be proved before any English person could be convicted as a traitor. Mary could not convict Elizabeth on the evidence of intercepted letters because they were written in cipher and could be forgeries. She told Renard that she and her Council were laboring to discern the truth but insisted that the law must be maintained.

WYATT WENT TO
the block on Tower Hill on April 11. Upon the scaffold, he addressed the crowd: “Whereas it is said and whistled abroad, that I should accuse my lady Elizabeth’s grace and my lord Courteney; it is not so, good people … as I have declared no less to the Queens Council.”
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Having made his confession, he knelt down upon the straw and laid his head on the block. He then sat up again to tie the handkerchief around his eyes, raised his hands, and then returned to the block. At one stroke the hangman beheaded him. His corpse was taken to Newgate to be parboiled, after which it was cut into four pieces and each quarter displayed in a different part of the city.
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His head, placed on top of the gibbet at St. James’s, was stolen within a week.