The House of Tudor (38 page)

Guildford was enjoying himself He made no pretence of loving his wife, but he was quite prepared to be polite to her in public in return for the golden stream of social and material benefits which would flow from her. Unfortunately these happy expectations were about to receive a severe set-back. No sooner was Jane installed in the royal apartments at the Tower than she was visited by the Lord Treasurer, the Marquis of Winchester, bringing a selection of royal jewels for her inspection. He also brought the crown itself although, as Jane was later careful to stress, she had not asked for it. Either in an ill-judged attempt to please her, or (more likely) to force her into committing herself beyond any possibility of return, Winchester urged her to put it on to see if it suited her. Jane recoiled in horror. The crown was the ultimate symbol of sanctified earthly power - to treat it as a plaything, a sort of extra special head-dress, would be tantamount to blasphemy. Winchester tailed to see the storm-signals. She could take it without fear, he told her, and added kindly that another should be made to crown her husband.

This was the final straw. It was perhaps only now that Jane realized, ‘with infinite grief and displeasure of heart’, exactly how she had been tricked. No one cared a snap of their fingers about fulfilling her dead cousin’s wishes, about maintaining the gospel and the Protestant faith, or whether the throne was rightfully hers. The plot was simply to use her and her royal blood to elevate a plebeian Dudley to a throne to which he had no shadow of right so that his father could continue to rule. Jane had her full share of Tudor family pride and now that pride was outraged. Small, stubborn, terrified and furious, she laid back her ears and dug in her heels. She would make her husband a duke but never, never would she consent to make him king. This naturally precipitated a full-scale family row. Guildford rushed off to fetch his mother and together they launched an all-out attack on their victim - he whining that he did not want to be a duke, he wanted to be King; she scolding like a fishwife. At last, finding Jane immovable, they stormed out of her presence, the Duchess of Northumberland swearing that her precious son should not stay another minute with his unnatural and ungrateful wife but would return immediately to Syon. Jane watched them go and then sent for the Earls of Arundel and Pembroke. Little though she wanted Guildford’s company, she had no intention of allowing him to put such an open slight on her. She ordered Arundel and Pembroke to prevent him from leaving. Whether or not he continued to share her bed, his place was by her side and there he must stay. Guildford sulked but he did as he was told.

While these domestic storms were raging inside the Tower, the heralds were going round the city proclaiming Queen Jane but, noted the Greyfriars Chronicle ominously, ‘few or none said God save her’. The sullenly silent crowds in Cheapside and Ludgate that summer evening set the pattern for the rest of the country. The English people knew nothing and cared less about Jane Grey; they had always had a soft spot for Mary Tudor and, even more to the point, they had come to loathe the whole tribe of Dudley for greedy, tyrannical upstarts. Richard Troughton, bailiff of South Walshen in Lincolnshire, hearing of Mary’s plight from his friend James Pratt as they stood together by the cattle drinking-place called hedgedyke, was moved to exclaim: ‘Then it is the Duke’s doing and woe worth him that ever he was born, for he will go about to destroy all the noble blood of England.’ John Dudley might control the capital, the Tower with its armoury, the treasury and the navy; he might have all the great lords in his pocket, meek as mice; but Richard Troughton spoke for England, and England had had more than enough of John Dudley and his like and was not prepared to stand idly by while King Harry’s daughter, poor soul, was cheated of her rightful inheritance.

Meanwhile, King Harry’s daughter had reached the comparative safety of Kenninghall and on 9 July had written defiantly to the Council, commanding them to proclaim her right and title in
her
City of London. Mary’s challenge was delivered just as the new Court was sitting down to dinner on that eventful Monday, lo July and caused the Duchesses of Suffolk and Northumberland to shed tears of alarm. The news that Mary was still at large and showing fight came as an unwelcome surprise to her enemies, ‘astonished and troubled’ as they read her letter, but not even the most optimistic of her friends dared to hope that she might stand a chance. At the Imperial embassy, where Jehan de Scheyfve had recently been reinforced by three envoys extraordinary, they were confidently expecting the worst and could only deplore my Lady’s obstinate refusal to accept defeat.

But the Duke knew how fragile were the foundations on which his power rested. Every day that Mary remained free would undermine them further and disquieting reports were beginning to come in about the support rallying to her. The Earl of Sussex and his son were on their way to Norfolk, while the Earl of Bath and men like Sir Thomas Wharton, Sir John Mordaunt, Sir Henry Bedingfield and Henry Jerningham, as well as other substantial gentlemen with their tenantry – not to mention ‘innumerable small companies of the common people’ - were already helping to swell the numbers at the little camp now established at Framlingham Castle, a stronger place than Kenninghall and nearer the coast. No cause yet perhaps for serious anxiety, but any hope of the swift, silent
coup
which John Dudley had been banking on was gone. He would have to mount a full-scale expedition ‘to fetch in the Lady Mary’ and ride out the consequent bad publicity as best he could.

Preparations began on the twelfth with a muster at Tothill Fields and that night wakeful citizens could hear carts laden with weapons and supplies ‘for a great army towards Cambridge’ rumbling eastward through the streets. Northumberland had intended to put the Duke of Suffolk in command of the army, but when this information was conveyed to Queen Jane, she burst into tears and begged that her father ‘might tarry at home in her company’ - the prospect of being left alone in a nest of Dudleys was altogether too much. The Lords of the Council looked uneasily at their weeping sovereign and then at each other, an idea beginning to form in their collective minds. This idea they presently propounded to Northumberland. It would be so much better, they suggested, if he took command himself No other man was so well fitted for the task, especially seeing that he had already suppressed one rebellion in East Anglia and was therefore so feared in those parts that no one would dare offer him any resistance. Besides, was he not the best man of war in the realm’ ? Then there was the matter of the Queen’s distress and the fact that she would ‘in no wise grant that her father should take it on him’. So it was really up to the Duke, murmured someone, a note of steel audible under the persuasion, it was really up to the Duke ‘to remedy the matter’. The Duke, sensing that control of events was beginning to slide out of his hands, gave way. ‘Since ye think it good’, he said, ‘I and mine will go, not doubting of your fidelity to the Queen’s majesty which I leave in your custody.’

The fidelity of his associates to anything but their own best interests was, of course, highly doubtful and it was the lively fear of what they might do as soon as his back was turned which lay behind John Dudley’s reluctance to take the field himself. He knew that he was being manoeuvred into the role of scapegoat, but there was no going back now.

Next day, all his arrangements made, he addressed the assembled Council for the last time, in a last effort to impress them with the hypnotic force of his personality. He and his companions, he said, were going forth to adventure their bodies and lives trusting to the faith and truth of those they left behind. If anyone was thinking of violating that trust, let them remember treachery could be a two-handed game; let them also remember God’s vengeance and the sacred oath of allegiance they had taken ‘to this virtuous lady the Queen’s highness’, whom they had all helped to entice into a position she had never asked for or sought. ‘My lord’, said someone -it may have been Winchester, the eldest of the peers - ‘if ye mistrust any of us in this matter, your grace is far deceived; for which of us can wipe his hands clean thereof?’ While they were talking the servants had come in with the first course of dinner and were laying the table, but Winchester (if it were he) went on: ‘If we should shrink from you as one that were culpable, which of us can excuse himself as guiltless? Therefore herein your doubt is too far cast.’ ‘I pray God it be so’, answered the Duke abruptly. ‘Let us go to dinner.’

After the lords had eaten, Northumberland went to take his leave of the Queen and receive from her his signed and sealed commission as Lieutenant of her army. Jane thanked him ‘humbly’ for allowing her father to stay at home and asked him to use all his diligence. ‘I will do what in me lies’, he said, looking down at the thin, red-haired slip of a girl to whom he had bound himself by the unbreakable kinship of mutual destruction. Early on the following morning, 14 July, he rode out of Durham Place in the Strand, his eldest son at his side, and took the road through Shoreditch - the way lined with silent, staring crowds.

During the next few days the faces of those left behind in the Tower grew steadily longer as word arrived that Mary had been proclaimed in Norwich and that the town had sent her men and weapons. Even more worrying were the reports of desertions and dissension in Northumberland’s forces. Then came a shattering piece of news - the crews of the six royal ships sent to Yarmouth to cut off Mary’s escape route had gone over to her in a body, taking their captains and their heavy guns with them. ‘After once the submission of the ships was known in the Tower’, wrote an eyewitness, ‘each man then began to pluck in his horns.’ It was now a question not of whether, but when they would follow the sailors’ example. Already certain individuals were looking for ways of escaping from the stifling confines of the fortress ‘to consult in London’, and on the sixteenth there was a sudden alarm at about seven o’clock in the evening when the main gates of the Tower were locked and the keys carried up to Queen Jane. It was given out that there was a seal missing, but the same anonymous eyewitness believed the truth of the matter was that the Queen suspected the Lord Treasurer of some evil intent. Old Winchester had sneaked out to his own house and had to be fetched back at midnight.

But Jane could not hope to stem the tide - she had neither the experience nor the authority - and two days later she was forced to allow Arundel, Pembroke and about a dozen others to leave on the excuse that they had urgent business to discuss with the French ambassador. But, on the following afternoon, it was the Imperial embassy which received a visit from a deputation of councillors. They had come to explain how reluctant they had been to subscribe to King Edward’s ‘Device’, but really they had had no choice for they had been so bullied by the Duke and treated ‘almost as if they were prisoners’. Of course they all believed in their hearts that Mary was the rightful Queen and they were going to proclaim her that very day.

And so they did, between five and six in the evening of 19 July at the Cross in Cheapside amid scenes of hysterical excitement. People with money in their purses flung it out of their windows into the cheering, yelling crowds - the Earl of Pembroke was seen to throw a whole capful of gold angels and no doubt regarded it as a good investment. Sober citizens wrenched off their gowns and capered in the streets like children. The church bells rocked and crashed in a forest of steeples. Bonfires were lit on every corner and all that night the people of London sang and danced and feasted, drinking the health of the rightful Queen and destruction to her enemies.

Faint echoes of the general rejoicing could be heard in the Tower where, so it was said, the Duke of Suffolk broke the news to his daughter and with his own hands helped to tear down the cloth of estate over her head. Then he went out on to Tower Hill and proclaimed the Lady Mary’s grace to be Queen of England before scuttling away to Sheen. Jane was left alone in the stripped and silent rooms to listen to the distant pealing of the bells - for her there was no going home.

At Framlingham, Mary’s first act as Queen had been to order the crucifix to be set up again in the parish church where a Te Deum was sung. To her friends, to all those conservative gentlemen who had risked their lives and fortunes to come to her aid, to the hundreds of thousands of ordinary people who believed in the rule of law because it was their only protection, her victory against all the odds seemed like a miracle. To Mary there was no question about it. She had been vouchsafed a clear and obvious sign that God was prepared to give her a second chance, a chance to expiate an old festering sin, a chance to lead her people back into the light.

11: THE RULE OF THE PROUD SPANIARDS

The rose that cheerfully doth showe,

At midsomer her course hath shee;

The lilye white after doth growe,

The columbine then see may yee;

The gillyflower, in fresh degree;

With sundrie more then can be tolde,

Though they never so pleasaunt be,

Yet I commende the Marigolde…

To Marie our queene, that flower so sweete,

This Marigolde I doo apply;

For that the name doth serve so meete,

And propertie in each partie.

One of the first people to congratulate the new Queen on her triumphant accession was her sister Elizabeth. Elizabeth had contrived to avoid becoming involved with John Dudley’s machinations by the simple expedient of taking to her bed. She, like Mary, had received a summons to Edward’s deathbed but had promptly given out that she was ill – much too ill to travel – and was prepared to send a doctor’s certificate to prove it. She had, however, followed the course of events with anxious attention. If Northumberland won, her own future was likely to have been as problematical as Mary’s and the news of his downfall can only have come as an enormous relief. Elizabeth had made no public gesture of solidarity with her sister while Mary stood alone – gestures of that kind were for those who could afford to commit themselves – but she wasted no time in sending a message of loyal good wishes on the occasion of this famous victory for the family. Nor did she lose any time in presenting herself in person. On 29 July she rode into London handsomely attended by a thousand horsemen in green and white Tudor liveries. She spent a couple of nights at Somerset House, the mansion built by the Lord Protector and now appropriated by Elizabeth as a town residence, before riding out again through Aldgate ‘towards the Queen’s highness’.