The Sisters Who Would Be Queen

by Leanda de Lisle

  After the feast the men and women were united for the dancing in a neighboring room. Underhill thought the Spaniards looked greatly put out because the English were clearly the better dancers, but as each were doing their own national dances his prejudice was probably the judge. After the party broke up Underhill displayed a last show of cheek, making off with a gigantic venison pie which he sent to his wife and friends to enjoy in London. The royal couple, meanwhile, retired to bed. If Queen Mary was nervous about what was to be her first sexual experience she never showed it, and a Spaniard observed simply that “the rest of the night may be easily imagined by those who have gone through it.” The next day the Queen refused to be seen by anyone—an English tradition on the first day of a honeymoon, it was said—but when she did emerge she looked joyful.

  Come mid-September the court was abuzz with news that she was pregnant. This wonderful news for Mary was spoilt only by the vicious rivalry between the English and the Spanish at court. Fights broke out frequently that autumn and even the court ladies quarreled. The Spanish noblewomen found they had no one to talk to, complaining angrily that “the English Ladies are of evil conversation.” How Frances, Katherine, and Mary behaved can only be imagined, their husband and father, respectively, having died in an effort to keep the Spanish out.

  Philip, however, was soon winning some personal support with his tact and generosity, and to everyone’s relief he encouraged the Queen to break the tedium of court life with lavish entertainments. There were several masques that winter, with the women taking center stage at Christmas as “amorous ladies” and cupids. Beyond the glamorous life of the winners at court, Philip was also careful, however, to listen to those cut off from his wife’s favor. He achieved pardons even for the four Dudley brothers who had been left in the Beauchamp Tower. Behind them, they left the name “Jane” carved in the stonework. Their freedom was a relief for Katherine and Mary Grey. The youngest brother, Henry, was still married to their cousin Margaret Audley, whom Katherine used to visit when her sisters were at Tilty in Essex with the Willoughby children. The reason Philip was showing the brothers kindness, however, was a troubling one for England. He wanted to build bridges with England’s young men so that they would later be prepared to fight in his father’s wars, and it was with this in mind that he invested in several sporting combats that winter, as well as the more innocent feasts and masques.

  The first combat display Philip put on was a traditional Spanish jeu de cannes, in which participants carried targets and hurled rods at one another. Katherine and her friends thought the spectacle pretty enough, with Philip in red and everyone else in multicolor, but they were used to watching the more thrilling and violent entertainments of the joust, and many of the ladies seemed bored. Philip tried next a fight on foot, in which he won a prize for swordsmanship; but again, the English seemed to find it dull, so from January he organized the combats on horse that they preferred. Some of the most dramatic jousts were held to celebrate the wedding of Frances’s seventeen-year-old niece, Margaret Clifford, the daughter of her late sister, Eleanor. Margaret had been the young princess to whom Northumberland had hoped to marry Guildford in 1552, and then his brother, Sir Andrew Dudley, in 1553. She had escaped both, but had kept the rich and fine fabrics Sir Andrew had sent for her bridal dress and she wore them for her wedding to Lord Strange, the heir of the Earl of Derby.

  The King and Queen had laid on a full day of celebration. There was a midday feast followed by jousting and a tournament on horse with swords, in which three of the Dudley brothers performed. Supper was then followed with a jeu de cannes, which the King played with such enthusiasm that the Queen sent word begging him not to expose himself to danger. She wanted to take no chances with their future. She had healed the breach with Rome. She was, she believed, six months pregnant, and to protect her child, her faith, and her country from the malice of her Protestant opponents, she had, against the advice of almost everyone around her, revived her father’s old heresy laws. England was to have its own Counter-Reformation.

  Margaret Clifford’s glittering wedding took place in the aftermath of the first of the notorious burnings of Mary’s reign. They were intended to target those who spread heresy, and with this in mind John Rogers, a canon of St. Paul’s, had been executed at the stake three days earlier. The many deaths by burning that followed were truly terrible ones. If the fires were poorly built the prisoners died by inches, conscious and screaming, and many friends of the Grey family would burn in the months ahead, Archbishop Cranmer, Hugh Latimer, and Bishop Ridley among them. Some of them had overseen burnings in the past. Latimer had cracked jokes about the burnings of Catholic priests, which he had attended in King Henry’s time. But it was not what people expected from a once merciful princess. As the terror of the burnings took hold, the Spanish diplomats learned that another court wedding was in the offing. Some on the Privy Council were proposing that Frances Grey be married to Edward Courtney, who had been sent back to the Tower after the Wyatt revolt, but released in April. Perhaps the Councillors in question hoped that Mary might consider Frances a possible heir if Elizabeth was excluded. While the law proclaiming Mary illegitimate was rescinded, the stain was left on her sister. The recent efforts to overthrow Mary in favor of Elizabeth had soured the relationship between the Tudor sisters irreversibly and Queen Mary made clear she did not regard Elizabeth as her father’s daughter. She liked to tell her maids of honor that Elizabeth bore a strong resemblance to Mark Smeton, the attractive young musician whom Anne Boleyn was said to have kept in a “sweetmeat cupboard,” calling for marmalade when she wanted his sexual services. Queen Mary had indicated that her preferred choice as her heir was her Catholic cousin Margaret Douglas, Countess of Lennox, to whom she had given a prominent role at her wedding. There were doubts over the countess’s legitimacy too, however. That left Frances—but Frances did not want to do anything to put her children in further danger or to weaken Elizabeth’s position.

  Indication of the Grey family’s support for Elizabeth comes from Katherine Grey. Frances’s former lady-in-waiting Bess Hardwick and her husband Sir William Cavendish had picked Katherine as godmother to their newborn daughter in March. She had chosen the name Elizabeth for the child. In any event, the last thing Frances wanted was a royal marriage with the unstable Courtney, and the feeling was mutual. Courtney had told the Queen that he would rather leave the country than marry Frances. By the time Courtney left in May, Frances had, in any case, married another man. The Grey sisters’ new stepfather was one whose station was such that their mother would be precluded from any future calculations concerning the succession. Frances had seen how happy and successful Katherine Suffolk’s marriage to her Gentleman Usher had been, and had decided on a similar match. Her choice was her Master of the Horse, Adrian Stokes, of “Hogesdon Middlesex”—what is now Hoxton in Islington, a fashionable area at the time.

  There are various unpleasant, but apocryphal, stories about Frances’s marriage. One is that Frances married Stokes within three weeks of her husband’s execution, in early 1554. This tale may have arisen because of later confusion over the dating of the Tudor year: it ran from 25 March rather than 1 January, so any date up to 25 March 1555 would have been written as 1554. But the mistake looks deliberate. There is no reason to suppose Frances was married before May 1555, and the story is recognizably part of the process through which Frances was later transformed into the counterpoint to her “perfect” daughter Jane. Where Jane is described as gentle in these legends, Frances is depicted as brutal, and where Jane is chaste, Frances is lustful. A portrait by Hans Eworth of the hard-faced Lady Dacre and her beardless twenty-one-year-old son has, since 1727, often been described erroneously as being of Frances and Stokes. Popular historians have enjoyed making much of the resemblance of the female sitter to Henry VIII in his latter years, observing how it reflected on Frances’s supposedly cruel nature and sexual incontinence. Such writers depict the figure of the boy, described as Stokes, as a
vulgar youth, for whom Frances was transported by desire. Stokes was, in fact, a mature man of thirty-six (to Frances’s thirty-seven), a former soldier and a highly educated Protestant. That he was of a lower rank than Frances is without doubt, but the popular story describing the Princess Elizabeth sneering about Frances marrying her “horse keeper” is a reverse of the truth. Elizabeth is known to have expressed only envy at the happiness Frances found with Stokes.

  With her marriage, however, Frances did retire largely from court, with worsening health, and reportedly enduring a series of failed pregnancies. Her younger daughter, Mary, now ten years old, remained in her care. There is little about her in the sources until she was almost twenty years old, but Katherine, rising fifteen, was often at court, where she began to make her own life against the current of Queen Mary’s stormy last years.

  XV

  Growing Up

  KATHERINE, AS THE DAUGHTER OF THE QUEEN’S FIRST COUSIN, had her own room at court, as well as personal servants. She could even keep pets. Katherine loved toy dogs and, more exotically, small monkeys. But she was in no way isolated with her animals. There was something of a boarding-school atmosphere at court for the Queen’s young attendants and Katherine would sneak to the maids’ dormitory in her nightgown to gossip and play. There were complaints, years later, about maids keeping elderly neighbors up at night as they played noisy games, danced, and laughed, and there were many such carefree times for Katherine, even amid the intrigues and the unhappiness that overtook Mary’s court after the summer of 1555.

  The sense of optimism that had followed the news of the Queen’s pregnancy in September had leached away as the period of the lying-in drew to a close at Hampton Court. When the expected birth date, 9 May, passed, the Queen expressed the opinion that the baby had been due in June. But when no baby appeared that month, rumors began to circulate that she was not pregnant, but ill. It was only in August, however, when even the optimistic Venetian ambassador was saying that “the pregnancy will end in wind,” that Queen Mary accepted she was not pregnant. Nothing was said of this, however, and no official announcement was made to explain the nonarrival of the expected heir: there was just an embarrassed, horrified silence. Philip left England shortly afterward.

  Bishop Gardiner died that November knowing it was only a matter of time before Elizabeth would be Queen. He also knew that he was, in part, responsible for this. He was, in King Henry’s time, one of the principal ideologues of the royal supremacy, which had placed the King above the laws of Church and State. He had believed that England could remain Catholic after the English Church was cut loose from papal authority. But this assumption had been rudely disproved when the Edwardian Council used the royal supremacy to bring “heresy” into England. According to one Elizabethan Catholic account, Gardiner spent his last hours listening to the gospel narrative of Peter’s betrayal of Christ, weeping bitterly. All was now lost. Only Queen Mary still believed it was possible she could yet have a child. The ladies and gentlewomen of the Privy Chamber watched her writing desperate letters to her husband, pleading for his return so they could try again for an heir. When eventually he replied, however, he demanded an impossible price. He wanted a coronation, believing that if he was anointed King of England it would give him the power that the marriage treaty had denied him. Mary knew Parliament would never agree to it, and had to refuse him. Philip then demanded something that was personally repugnant to her: that Elizabeth, as her heir, be married to a yet-to-be-chosen imperial ally as soon as possible. After reading one such letter, Mary angrily threw her mirror across the room.

  The Queen had grown pale, almost shriveled, from being bled constantly to ease her depression. By contrast, the twenty-three-year-old Elizabeth, brought to Hampton Court during the confinement, was a vision of youth and health: “Short, slender, straight and amiably composed,” her hair “inclined to pale yellow, her forehead large and fair,” “her nose somewhat rising in the midst; the whole compass of her countenance somewhat long, but yet of admirable beauty.” Mary could not bear to plan for the daughter of Anne Boleyn to be Queen, not even for her beloved husband and for her God.

  Katherine’s cousin Lady Margaret Strange—the girl whom Northumberland had wanted to marry to Guildford in 1552—hoped that she might be nominated as the Queen’s heir. It would be difficult to exclude Elizabeth as illegitimate without also excluding Lady Margaret Douglas, the Countess of Lennox, whose father had a wife living at the time her mother was “married” to him. Since Mary Queen of Scots, as the likely bride of the French Dauphin, was acceptable to no one, only the heirs of Mary Brandon, Duchess of Suffolk, were left. Of these, Lady Margaret argued, the Greys were excluded because their line had been tainted by Jane’s treason and that of Suffolk, leaving Margaret, as the daughter of Frances’s late younger sister, Eleanor, the Queen’s heir. It was an argument that would come back to haunt Margaret years later, but for the moment she was just regarded as a spoilt and silly girl, whom no one took seriously. The gentry were learning to use Parliament to prevent what they did not want—such as Philip’s coronation and the Queen’s wish to exclude Elizabeth by statute. Elizabeth would therefore be Queen; everyone knew it, and in Europe, the Protestant exiles were hoping to hurry Mary to her end.

  It had always been considered a deadly sin to revolt against lawful authority. Katherine Grey remembered the sermons given during the rebellions of 1549. Katherine Suffolk’s spiritual adviser, Hugh Latimer, burned the previous October, had preached that men should endure tyrants and leave their punishment to God: to rebel was to attack the divine Chain of Being. But some Protestant exiles were now developing new theories of resistance, arguing that the Queen’s “idolatry” made her authority unlawful and that it was therefore not only allowable to overthrow her, but a moral duty.

  In March 1556 a plot to invade England from France was exposed when a conspirator informed on his friends. The intention of the plotters, it emerged, was to use Mary “as she used Queen Jane,” and to replace her with Elizabeth, who was to be married to Edward Courtney. Although the plot is now an obscure one, it was better financed than the revolts of 1554, and several senior members of the gentry were involved. Ten were executed. Courtney escaped by remaining in Europe, only to die later in the year, poisoned by Philip’s agents, it was said. But Mary was left shattered by the revelations. The Venetian ambassador reported that she aged ten years under the strain, and the atmosphere at court was left rank with paranoia. Once again the heretics had tried to overthrow and kill her. The corridors of the royal palaces were filled with the clatter of armed men, and in the towns men and women were burned in increasing numbers. Mary had intended to target only the clerics who spread heresy, but the fires were sweeping now over ordinary Protestants. An Italian Catholic described watching a man of seventy hobbling to the stake that year, “willingly, angrily and pertinaciously,” while behind him followed a young blind boy, also put to death.

  Katherine Grey, like her mother and sister, maintained her old friendships with Protestant friends, but these friends, like the Greys, disguised their true beliefs. As Jane’s writings were republished in Geneva that summer, Frances rented a house from the Earl of Rutland, who had been one of the most stalwart supporters of Jane’s brief reign. Her charge Margaret Willoughby had, meanwhile, been sent to join Elizabeth’s household at Hatfield. Katherine kept company with Elizabeth Brooke, the abandoned second wife of Parr of Northampton. But she was enjoying particularly the friendship of Lady Jane Seymour, the clever daughter of the Protector Somerset, who had been her sister’s rival for King Edward’s hand. The two girls were close in age, at fourteen and sixteen, respectively. They had known each other for most of their lives and shared the burden of having seen their fathers executed. Sometimes Katherine would clamber into Jane’s bed at night to keep warm and the teenagers could then talk about their dreams. Katherine still hoped desperately that she might one day remarry Lord Herbert, if only the Queen would allow it.

  There
was a flutter of anticipation that the glamorous days of masques and feasts would return when Philip came back to England in March 1557. Instead of opportunities for romance, however, there was talk of war. A second plot involving the Protestant exiles and the French was uncovered only shortly after Philip’s arrival. A group of between thirty and a hundred exiles had “invaded” the northeastern port of Scarborough from a French ship. Their leader was an incompetent fantasist called Thomas Stafford, whom Katherine and Mary Grey knew well. He had supported their father’s rising in the Midlands in 1554 and his sister, Dorothy, would remain a lifelong friend of Mary Grey’s. Stafford and his followers were promptly rounded up and twenty-five of them, including Stafford, executed. It has been suggested that the invasion was prompted by an agent provocateur, as their action succeeded in breaking the back of the peace party—those on the Queen’s Council who wished to stay out of the Emperor’s wars—freeing her to declare war with France in June. Despite all the care taken with the marriage treaty, England was now aligned with the imperial cause.

  Katherine saw many friends leave to fight in Europe that summer, when she and Mary were at home with their mother. Some, such as Henry Dudley, the youngest of the Dudley brothers, would never return, and, despite their sacrifices, in January 1558 Calais fell to the French. It was to prove a bleak beginning to one of the most terrible years in English history—one that saw the arrival of a mass killer: influenza. A population weakened by successive harvest failures began to die in the thousands and then tens of thousands. Against this holocaust Queen Mary cut a desperate figure. The red damask gowns of her early years had given way to gloomy black velvets, cut loosely in the Spanish style, over her swollen belly. Mary had imagined she was pregnant again during the winter, but it had proved another sad illusion. Elizabeth was already meeting with William Cecil, the Surveyor of her estates, and former Edwardian Secretary of State, to plan their moves were Mary to die. Philip had gone again, and the sickness ravaging the country soon reached the court. Several of the maids and gentlewomen of the Privy Chamber fell ill and had to be sent home. They included Katherine’s friend Lady Jane Seymour, who was escorted to her mother’s house, Hanworth, in Middlesex, in a horse-drawn litter. Katherine was allowed to accompany her and stayed with the Seymour family for the summer, while her friend slowly regained her strength.