The Sisters Who Would Be Queen

by Leanda de Lisle

  Mary Grey may have convinced herself that Keyes’s modest rank would allow their marriage to be seen in a similar light to her mother’s marriage to the lower born Adrian Stokes: one that would not represent any threat to Elizabeth. She understood that the timing of any such marriage was crucial nevertheless, but to the lovers’ frustration the right moment never seemed to come. In the aftermath of Hales’s book on the succession, Elizabeth was in a vengeful mood and, while Katherine continued to endure the tedium and misery of her house arrest in Essex, life at court seemed to lurch from one crisis to the next.

  In the autumn of 1564, Elizabeth raised Dudley to the title Earl of Leicester to make him a more suitable spouse for Mary Queen of Scots. Confronted, however, with the possibility of losing his company forever, she then hesitated, and while she dithered, the Queen of Scots announced her intention to marry her Catholic cousin Henry, Lord Darnley. It was a disaster for Elizabeth’s hopes and appalled the Council. A Darnley marriage posed a threat arguably even greater than if Mary Queen of Scots married a Hapsburg or a Valois. It would allow the whole of Catholic Europe to unite behind her claim. Having been brought up in England, Darnley could even raise an English army from the Catholic north where he was born. This was no time for Lady Mary Grey and Mr. Keyes to announce their intentions to marry to the Queen, especially since Elizabeth had been irritated by a fresh request from the Council that she look more favorably on Katherine’s claim. But the couple were growing impatient with the length of their courtship, and love makes a fool of even the wisest, so while political attention remained focused on the marital intentions of Mary Queen of Scots, they began to make a few plans of their own. The date the lovers picked for their secret marriage was 16 July 1565, the day of a big court wedding due to take place at Durham House on the Strand. The match was a grand one, between Henry Knollys, a grandson of Mary Boleyn, and Margaret Cave, the heir of a fabulously rich courtier, Sir Ambrose Cave. Elizabeth was invited and Mary Grey and Keyes intended that, while the Queen and most of the court were at Durham House, they would stay at Whitehall with a few of their friends and enjoy a modest celebration of their own.

  Things did not go as expected, however, when the day of the great Durham House wedding came. Mary Grey and the other court ladies were waiting for the Queen in Whitehall’s Privy Gardens in order to attend on her as she left, when the Spanish ambassador, Don Diego Guzman de Silva, arrived. He was looking flustered and the gardens were soon abuzz with why this was. The ambassador said that he had been on the point of leaving his house for Whitehall, when the father of the bride, Ambrose Cave, appeared from the wedding (which was an all-day affair). He asked the ambassador if he could come to the wedding later that night, rather than arriving for the evening feast with the Queen. He explained that he had invited the French ambassador to dine at lunch, expecting him to leave afterward and so avoid any clashes over precedence. Each ambassador, as the representative of their King, would naturally demand to hold rank over their rival, so it was best not to have them both in the same room at the same time. The Frenchman was, however, now refusing to leave the party, De Silva replied to Cave angrily that he had no intention of giving way to a Frenchman. “Well,” Cave huffed, “If you do go I do not know how you will get rid of him unless you take him up in your arms and throw him out of the window.”

  It was possible that to avoid a diplomatic contretemps, the Queen would have to miss the party. But, as Mary Grey knew, Elizabeth was devoted to the mother of the groom, Lady Knollys, and would do everything she could to avoid that happening. As the Queen arrived in the garden Mary Grey saw her call the Spanish ambassador aside. She would be very sorry not to go to the party, Elizabeth explained. Lady Knollys was her first cousin, a daughter of her aunt, Mary Boleyn. De Silva would not be budged, so Elizabeth sent Cecil and Sir Nicholas Throckmorton ahead to persuade the French ambassador to leave the party. To Mary Grey’s immense relief they soon succeeded and the Queen set off for Durham House, with de Silva and most of the leading ladies of the court. The great wedding at Durham House lasted until 1:30 in the morning, with the feast followed by a ball, a tourney, and two masques. It left plenty of time for Mary Grey and Thomas Keyes to have their own wedding.

  While the stragglers were still leaving for the big party, Mary had supper in her chamber at Whitehall with three of her cousins. One was Margaret Willoughby, who, as a little girl, had been orphaned in the Norfolk rebellion of 1549 and had lived with the Grey sisters under their mother’s wing in 1554. She was now married to another, more distant cousin, Sir Matthew Arundell.* The other two were daughters of Lady Stafford, whose brother had supported Mary’s father’s 1554 revolt in the Midlands, and was executed following his “invasion” of Scarborough in 1557. After they had finished eating they chatted for about a quarter of an hour. Mary Grey then sent for a servant employed by Lady Knollys’s sister, Lady Howard of Effingham. She was a sweet country girl called Frances Goldwell, of whom Mary was fond. She intended her to be a witness to the wedding, a role that would have been much riskier for anyone of high rank. Goldwell was having supper with her friends when Mary’s call arrived. It must have seemed very romantic and exciting to Goldwell as she walked quickly along the rush-covered passageways to the room near the Council Chamber where she was to meet Mary. Knowing how much her mistress would have been angered by what she was about to do added to the thrill: one of her gentlewoman supper companions had recently been sacked by Lady Howard.

  The room by the Council Chamber had no candles lit. But the summer light had not yet gone, and Goldwell spotted Mary waiting, along with one of Keyes’s men, Jones. He was to carry the message that they were ready for Keyes to collect them. Shortly after the messenger delivered his news, the huge figure of Keyes loomed into the little room. He escorted the women along the gallery by the Lord Chamberlain’s chamber, down a winding stair to his private rooms over the Watergate. It was nine o’clock and about eleven friends and relations had gathered for the wedding, along with a short, silver-haired priest, wrapped in a black cloak. Mary greeted Keyes’s brother, and one of his sons, a friend of his from Cambridge and a servant of the Bishop of Gloucester. On Mary’s side there was Mrs. Goldwell and, outside the door, Margaret Willoughby, Lady Arundell. Seeing no evil she could suffer no evil, Margaret hoped. The giant Sergeant Porter and the diminutive Maid of Honor took their vows by candlelight and he gave her a tiny gold wedding ring. In about quarter of an hour they were married. The friends then celebrated with wine and banqueting meats, and when the party broke up Mary Grey and Thomas Keyes went to bed.

  Less than two weeks later, on 29 July, the other, more anticipated, royal wedding took place: Mary Queen of Scots married Darnley in her private chapel at Holyrood, Edinburgh. She assured Elizabeth that she and the King, her husband, would do nothing to enforce their dynastic claim, or to seek to overturn the laws, liberties, or religion of England. In return they asked to have the English succession settled in their favor, by an act of Parliament. Elizabeth knew, however, that the Parliament she had suspended would favor Katherine’s claim. The last thing Elizabeth wanted at this stage was any trouble from the Greys, but on 21 August, just as the Queen was absorbing the news from Scotland, gossip about Mary Grey’s marriage leaked out. “Here is an unhappy chance and monstrous,” Cecil informed a friend. “The Sergeant Porter, being the biggest gentleman of this court, has married secretly the Lady Mary Grey; the least of all the court … The offence is very great.”

  Elizabeth was incandescent and had ordered the couple be placed in separate prisons, in separate towns, with Mary in Windsor and Keyes in London. The imperious Lady Howard was meanwhile cross-examining her servant, Mrs. Goldwell. The country girl lied through her teeth about what she remembered, claiming that she hadn’t heard or understood what was going on. Fortunately Lady Howard had always thought her very stupid. Her only punishment was likely to be dismissal—and Mary Grey had many friends able to take care of her. It was she, and Mr. Keyes, who were in deeper tro
uble. As soon as Elizabeth had the details of their courtship and marriage they were condemned to languish in confinement as Katherine and Hertford had been.

  Mary’s jailor was at least to be a kindly one. It was the High Sheriff of Buckinghamshire, Sir William Hawtrey. He had just completed the rebuilding of his comfortable house at Chequers, northwest of London, and he had an emotional attachment to Mary’s family. He had been a friend of Margaret Willoughby’s explorer uncle, Hugh, who had died under tragic circumstances. Hugh Willoughby had left England on 10 May 1553, having been commissioned by a group of merchants to discover a northern sea route to the east. Mary remembered seeing the three ships under her uncle’s command. The whole court (except King Edward, who was too ill) had come out from Greenwich Palace to wave and cheer as they sailed down the Thames. The adventure had ended, however, when the ships grounded off the Russian coast. Hugh Willoughby had survived for weeks before eventually freezing to death along with almost the entire crew, but one captain made it to Moscow, and the subsequent trade with Russia had helped make Hawtrey a very rich man. Hawtrey was willing, therefore, to be as generous to Mary as he was able under the restrictions Elizabeth had imposed.

  Like Katherine, Mary Grey was forbidden from seeing anyone and going anywhere: she could not go even into the garden more than was absolutely necessary for her health. Of her servants, she could keep only a groom and one waiting woman. Her basic expenses as prisoner were to be covered by the Queen, as Katherine’s had been. That meant prison food enough “for her sustenance and health without respect to her degree or place.” Now it was Mary’s turn to write to Cecil, as her sister had, asking for help in begging the Queen for a pardon. The first surviving letter is dated November 1565. It thanks Cecil for his endeavors thus far and begs him to continue. Another, written in December, expresses surprise that the Queen had not yet forgiven her. Could Cecil tell Her Majesty that if she got her favor back she would do nothing to lose it thereafter? “I am so unhappy a creature,” Mary wrote, praying that God put it “into her Majesty’s heart to forgive and pardon me my great and heinous crime.” Numerous others followed, each signed “Mary Graye,” as if she had never been married. She had heard that Cecil did not believe she was truly sorry for her offense—but she was, she promised. She would welcome death rather than the Queen’s further displeasure. Elizabeth’s anger showed no signs of abating, however.

  Mary Queen of Scots was now pregnant, and her enemies in England were more desperate than ever to oppose her claim to Elizabeth’s throne. A series of tracts concerning the succession were published. Like those written by the Protestant exiles during Queen Mary’s time, many threatened to undermine the authority of the monarchy and Elizabeth’s divine right to rule. They argued a monarch could be excluded on religious grounds; that England enjoyed a “mixed monarchy” with sovereignty rooted not only in the crown but also in Parliament—all arguments the absolutist Elizabeth abhorred. The Queen was a dynastic legitimist to her fingertips and the Grey sisters represented what she detested and feared: the encroaching power of Parliament. So the months passed, with Mary Grey confined in a twelve-foot-square room at Chequers, known still as “the prison room.” From its two windows, on the northeast corner of what is today the Prime Minister’s country residence, she could admire the fine elms and the beauty of the gardens that stretched into wide skies and rolling countryside. The gardens had evocative names like Silver Spring and Velvet Lawns, but she could only imagine what it would be like to wander freely in them. The faded remains of the inscriptions and the sketches she drew on the walls of the prison room are testimony to the dreary misery she endured. They include a crude figure whose arms appear to be turning into wings. Thomas Keyes, however, suffered still more severely.

  Keyes had held a position of trust on which the personal security of the monarch depended, and his betrayal was judged accordingly. Instead of a country house he was put in the Fleet, a notorious London prison built in 1197 on the eastern bank of the Fleet River in Farringdon, west of the City. The warden was ordered to place him in solitary confinement, and his huge frame was crushed into one of the prison’s small, cramped cells, putting him in constant agony. Keyes offered to agree to an annulment of the marriage if he might only be sent into retirement in his home county of Kent. Mary Grey may have suggested he do so, given that, unlike Katherine, she was signing letters using her maiden name. But, unfortunately for the couple, the Bishop of London found no grounds to declare their marriage invalid. Too many witnesses were their undoing, just as too few had been Katherine and Hertford’s. The bishop did feel sorry, however, for Keyes and asked “that the wretched man might be permitted to leave the noisome and narrow prison room he had inhabited for twelve months and depart into the country for change of air.” When this was refused the bishop suggested that he might be allowed to walk in the Fleet garden, “his bulk of body being such as I know it to be, his confinement in the Fleet puts him to great inconvenience.” The Queen agreed, but the permission was revoked after only a few weeks, and his torment continued.

  * Not to be confused with the Earl of Arundel, whose family name was Fitzalan.

  XXIII

  The Clear Choice

  KATHERINE AND HER THREE-YEAR-OLD SON, THOMAS, WERE moved from Ingatestone in Essex in May 1566, when her jailor, Sir William Petre, grew ill. They did not have to travel far, only a few miles northeast, to Gosfield Hall, the seat of a very old knight called Sir John Wentworth. Watching the changing scenery on her brief ride was a reminder for Katherine of the freedom she had lost, and when she arrived at Gosfield there was also a fleeting reminder of home. Her new country-house prison shared many similarities with Bradgate, with its courtyard and the wide windows that filled the house with light. The new west wing allowed plenty of room for Katherine’s little household. But the Queen’s instructions to Wentworth were to keep Katherine completely isolated.

  Wentworth told the Privy Council that at seventy-six and seventy-one, he and his wife were too frail to act as warders, and that his house was insecure. It would be easy, he warned, for men to come to the windows of any chamber in the house and talk to Katherine, “or deliver letters unto her, or if she were so disposed, she may either let them into her chamber, or go out to them at the loops of the windows they are so great and wide.” Fearful of the punishment that would be visited on his family if he failed in his duties, he said it would be better for him to “come up to London and yield myself prisoner, than to take upon me the charge to keep the said lady in such straight order as is prescribed unto me.” The old man’s appeals fell on deaf ears. Cecil may even have been pleased he could not be a very strict warder. And Wentworth began to relax as he found Katherine a quiet prisoner, save for her determination to maintain contact with her husband and elder son, which she could have managed through her servants without his knowledge.

  Her letters to Hertford went to the London house of Sir John Mason’s widow. Mason—the man who had suggested Hertford be taken before the Star Chamber for having sex with Katherine in the Tower—had died in April 1566. A new jailor had not yet been found, and so Hertford remained under house arrest in the care of Lady Mason. Hertford replied to Katherine’s letters with gifts, showering her with gold necklaces and other trinkets. The four-year-old Lord Beauchamp remained, meanwhile, with Hertford’s mother, the Duchess of Somerset, deprived of both his parents. He was a lively, affectionate child, very like Katherine in temperament, but his grandmother despaired of ever reuniting him with his parents. She had sent many letters to Cecil complaining “how unmeet it is that this young couple should thus wax old in prison,” but, as Cecil explained, he himself was “somewhat in disgrace for the part he had already taken as their advocate with the Queen.” Events, however, were about to place new pressures on Elizabeth to acknowledge the royal family that she had broken.

  On 19 June 1566, Mary Queen of Scots gave birth to a son, James, at Edinburgh Castle. It should have been a triumphant moment for the Stuart Queen, and on
a political level it was. But her twenty-one-year-old husband, Henry Darnley, had emerged already in all his venality: effete, vain, spoilt, and vicious. The strain of playing second fiddle to his wife had evidently proved too much for him, and in his anger and frustration he had allied himself with her enemies at the Scottish court. They had played on his sense of impotence, using her trust in her Italian Secretary, David Riccio, to make him jealous. One night in March, three months earlier, while the Queen was having supper in her private rooms with Riccio and the Countess of Argyle, Darnley had appeared with a group of men, and demanded that Riccio come with them. Mary had tried to prevent Riccio being taken away, but with a pistol pointed at her pregnant belly, Darnley prised Riccio’s fingers from her skirt, and held her back while Riccio was thrust out of the room. Fifty-five stab wounds were found in Riccio’s body, and Darnley’s dagger was left sticking in it. But Mary had since reconciled with her husband, at least in public. He was, as she reminded him, the father of her son.

  The news of James’s birth was greeted among Katherine’s supporters in England with dismay. But they knew Elizabeth was short of money and obliged to recall the prorogued Parliament of 1563 to raise financial subsidies. She had hoped that when this moment came, Mary Queen of Scots would be safely married to Leicester. But that hadn’t happened, and when her MPs reassembled it was probable that they would seek to get what they had been cheated of in 1563: a settlement of the succession issue. Elizabeth did what she could to prevent the inevitable. She asked her most loyal peers, William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke; Parr of Northampton; Norfolk; and Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, to use their powers of patronage to ensure that the MPs did not discuss the succession. She also ordered Cecil to prevent the grant of the subsidies from being linked to either the succession or her marriage. But her nobles and Councillors all considered it vital that the succession be settled, one way or another.