by G. J. Meyer
Edward’s sufferings came to an end on the evening of July 6. He died in the arms of a Dudley son-in-law, Sir Henry Sidney, who later reported that the “sweetness” with which the king had surrendered his spirit “would have converted the fiercest of papists if they had any grace in them of true faith in Christ.” Before losing the ability to speak, Sidney said, Edward “made a prayer to God to deliver this nation from that uncharitable religion of popery, which was the chiefest cause for his election of the Lady Jane Grey to succeed before his sister Mary … out of pure love to his subjects, that he desired they might live and die in the Lord, as he did.” The death was kept secret while Dudley made his arrangements to transfer the crown to his daughter-in-law. The Tower of London and Windsor Castle were put on alert, the Privy Council was assembled in the Tower, lords lieutenant in every part of the kingdom were instructed to be ready to muster their forces, and warships were deployed in the Channel to intercept any vessel attempting to carry Mary away. A Dudley daughter was dispatched to escort Lady Jane (not yet informed of the king’s death) from Chelsea (where she had gone to recover from what she believed to have been an attempted poisoning) to Syon House (which had been a great abbey until seized by Henry VIII, briefly became the property of Lord Protector Edward Seymour, and now belonged to the Dudleys). John Dudley himself, at the head of a delegation including the late Queen Catherine Parr’s brother and three earls, called on Lady Jane there and informed her on his knees that the king was dead and had named her as his successor. Jane, by her own later account, thereupon fell to the floor and began to weep, protesting that she was unprepared for and unworthy of the crown. In due course she was persuaded to accept God’s will and vowed to do her best. The next day, July 10, Jane’s elevation was proclaimed throughout London along with a declaration that neither Mary nor Elizabeth could inherit. Three reasons were given: Henry VIII’s daughters were bastards under the law, were merely half-sisters to the king, and might, if either became queen, jeopardize England’s autonomy by marrying some foreign, possibly Catholic, prince. The first and second arguments were, if they had an impact at all, counterproductive: the denial of Mary’s legitimacy was widely offensive, and not to the conservatives only. Jane was escorted to the Tower amid the celebratory firing of cannons and such other fanfare as Dudley and his associates could arrange. Behind the scenes, however, there were early signs of discord: when Dudley advised his daughter-in-law to declare her bridegroom king of England, he was immediately rebuffed. The crown, Jane declared with a firmness that must have taken her father-in-law aback, was “not a plaything for boys and girls.” In the great scheme of things it was a minor setback; at worst, it meant that the crowning of a Dudley king might have to be postponed a generation.
The duke had already overreached himself and was lucky to have been refused. People were reacting with sullen surprise to the news that someone called Jane was their new queen. Many would have been outraged to learn that a son of the unpopular upstart Dudley was being foisted off on them as king. In the streets of London the lack of enthusiasm for the new regime was painfully obvious. There were no cheers or demonstrations, no spontaneous lighting of bonfires, none of the effusions of joy with which the citizenry customarily welcomed the advent of a new reign. Still, Dudley’s position, and Jane’s, seemed unassailable. Dudley controlled the levers of power. He had even received assurances of support from Henry II of France, eager to help if he could to keep a cousin and protégé of Charles V from the English throne. Charles’s representatives in London, meanwhile, were reporting glumly that the English capital, government, and treasury were all in Dudley’s hands, that Queen Jane had already been officially recognized, and that Mary’s chances of reversing this fait accompli were virtually nil.
Mary, however, had ideas of her own. Convinced that she was the rightful queen, willing to believe that it was her destiny to restore the true faith to her homeland, she had no intention of surrendering. She and Elizabeth had been at their country seats as Edward entered his final decline, keeping themselves as informed as they could about his condition. When they received instructions to come to the king at Greenwich, both sensed danger. Elizabeth claimed to be too ill to travel. Mary set out from her residence at Hunsdon, but proceeded so slowly that in two days she covered barely five miles and at the end of the second day was still at Hoddesdon on the outskirts of London. She would have entered the capital the next day, placing herself at the mercy of Dudley and the council, but during the night someone sent a message informing her of the king’s death. Within minutes, with members of her household struggling to keep pace, she was galloping off northward, away from London and toward her Kenninghall estate in East Anglia. Since her reconciliation with her father a decade before, she had been the owner of extensive East Anglian properties, and the local population was friendly. Dudley dispatched two of his sons, Henry and Robert, to find Mary and deliver her to London, but when the latter arrived at Hunsdon he found her gone. Word soon reached London that fighting men by the hundreds were rallying to Mary, and that she was receiving substantial financial support as well. When she moved on from Kenninghall, she and her followers were refused admittance to Norwich, a city that had fresh and painful memories of what was likely to happen to those who defied John Dudley. The town of Framlingham, however, threw open its gates.
In short order Mary found herself in command of tens of thousands of armed men. As word spread of what was happening, impressive demonstrations of support spread from London up the Thames valley into Oxfordshire. The fleet deployed to keep her from escaping across the Channel returned to port and declared for her. Still, Dudley continued to have the advantage. When Mary sent a messenger to the council demanding recognition as queen, an order to the lords lieutenant, supposedly from Queen Jane but actually written by Cranmer, instructed them to ignore any appeals from the “bastard doughter to our said dearest cousin and progenitor great unkle Henry the eight of famous memory.” When the clergy were told to preach against Mary, none did so more energetically than Nicholas Ridley, evangelical bishop of London. The congregations he addressed listened impassively while word reached the capital of the growing numbers of volunteers gathering around Mary in East Anglia.
Dudley knew that it was essential to confront Mary and disperse her supporters before things got out of hand. His troops, however, were all in or near London, and among his associates there was scarcely a man who was both capable of leading an army into battle and entirely trustworthy. By the same token he had no one he trusted to hold his party together in London if he went off to fight. He tried to send the Duke of Suffolk, Queen Jane’s father (not much of a soldier, but unlikely to defect), but she would not allow him to go. In the end Dudley had no choice except to assemble such troops as he could muster—not more than a few thousand probably—and lead them out of the city himself. Before departing he sent word to the nobles to join him as quickly as possible with as many men as they could muster.
Both in East Anglia and in the capital, Dudley’s situation quickly fell apart. He proceeded to Cambridge and from there toward Framlingham, but as his troops advanced they encountered increasing demonstrations of the population’s hostility. He reached Bury St. Edmunds in a state of thorough demoralization and, finding no support there, decided to turn back. In London, meanwhile, a frightened council had broken up into bickering factions and finally dissolved. On July 19 a number of the leading councilors, among them the earls of Shrewsbury, Bedford, and Arundel and the same Earl of Pembroke to whom Dudley had given Lady Catherine Grey as a daughter-in-law, broke ranks and declared for Mary. Jane’s own father pulled the cloth canopy of royalty from above his daughter’s head, announced that Mary was queen, and fled. Jane herself, nine days after being proclaimed queen, quietly withdrew to Syon House.
John Dudley’s years as the most powerful man in England ended with a whimper. His army having deserted and his cause lost, he stood alone in the market square at Cambridge and tearfully declared Mary Tudor his qu
een. In a forlorn attempt to demonstrate a joy he cannot have felt, he threw his cap into the air. The next day he was taken to London surrounded by guards who were needed less to keep him from escaping than to protect him from angry crowds.
Two weeks later, accompanied by her sister Elizabeth and Anne of Cleves, Queen Mary I entered London. This time the expressions of joy were loud and long and genuine.
Background
THE MAKING OF MARY
WHEN THE FIRST WOMAN EVER TO RULE ENGLAND TOOK the throne in 1553, she was already a tragic figure. For a quarter of a century she had been immersed in betrayal, loss, and grief. Her life had been blighted first by the egotism of a father who was quite prepared to destroy her, then by a young half-brother who regarded it as his sacred duty to save her from her own deepest beliefs and, when that could not be arranged, to save England from her.
It was all doubly sad because Mary’s life had begun so brilliantly. From earliest childhood she had been an ornament of the English court, a pretty little golden-haired princess doted on by her parents and by every noble, churchman, soldier, and diplomat eager for her parents’ favor. Her father would carry her about, proudly showing her off. Her mother had raised Mary as she herself had been raised: to become the wife and partner of a monarch. It was impossible to doubt that she would become exactly that. She was betrothed to the eldest son of Francis of France at age two, and to her cousin Charles V at five (when the emperor was twenty-one). Later there were discussions of her possible marriage to her Scottish cousin James V, to other princes of France, to a son of the Duke of Cleves, and to Francesco Sforza, Duke of Milan. One by one these possibilities faded as international alliances came and went, but there seemed no cause for hurry. Quite the contrary: the French ambassador, in reporting on the eleven-year-old Mary, told Francis that though she was “admirable by reason of her great and uncommon mental endowments,” she was also “so thin, sparse and small as to render it impossible for her to be married for the next three years.”
Meanwhile she continued to prepare for whatever great match lay ahead. She was tutored not only by leading English scholars but by respected humanists from the continent, and she wrote and spoke Latin fluently by age nine. She was equally proficient in French, shared her father’s love of music and dance and learned to play several instruments, and under her mother’s watchful eye was given a solid grounding in the classics and theology. In the Tudor pattern she was a dutiful child, eager to please, and throughout the first decade of her life she had no reason to think that either of her parents would ever want her to be anything other than a faithful and obedient daughter of Holy Mother Church. In England as in all of Europe’s greatest royal houses, conventional Catholic piety was taken for granted as integral to being female and royal.
At age ten Mary was set up with her own court at Ludlow Castle, the very place to which Catherine of Aragon and her first husband had been sent shortly after their marriage—the place where Prince Arthur met his early death. There Mary became a figurehead under whose banner a council of Cardinal Wolsey’s appointees managed Wales and the marches that bordered it. This was to be the beginning of her apprenticeship in government. It also made her, in effect if not by official proclamation, the first Princess of Wales. It was a signal that, in spite of the signs of favor that her father had recently showered on his illegitimate son Henry Fitzroy, she was his heir and rightful successor.
When Mary was recalled to court a year and a half later, however, she found everything changed in alarming ways. Her father and Wolsey, unhappy about the dominance that Charles V now enjoyed on the continent in the aftermath of his victory over the French at Pavia, were considering a treaty under which Mary would become the wife not of Francis I’s son but of Francis himself. Queen Catherine could only have been appalled, not only because of her wish for friendship between England and her imperial nephew but also because Francis, a thirty-three-year-old widower with voracious and wide-ranging sexual appetites, was hardly the husband that any loving mother would have chosen for her not-yet-grown child. Francis, in any case, had no interest in waiting for a girl who was still years short of the age at which cohabitation would become permissible under church law. Mary was betrothed to his second son, the Duke of Orleans, instead. Assuming that Mary was informed of any of this, she is unlikely to have taken it seriously; the volatility of her father’s relationship with Francis made this latest arrangement as implausible as those that had come before. (In fact, Francis would eventually repudiate his treaty with England and marry Orleans—the future King Henry II—to Pope Clement’s niece Catherine de’ Medici, who in the fullness of time would join the ranks of France’s most remarkable and ultimately tragic queens.)
It was not the bartering over possible marriages that caused life to turn dark for Mary, but the unmistakable evidence that her parents’ union was breaking down. By the spring of 1527, when she returned from Ludlow, the king was not only far advanced in his obsession with Anne Boleyn but raising questions about the validity of his marriage. In July Henry informed Catherine that they had never been married, and from that moment the two of them were at war. Mary regarded her mother as entirely innocent and grievously wronged, but like Catherine she was unable to blame Henry. Anne became the villain, responsible for the unhappy wreck that the royal family had become, and her understandable inclination to see Mary as a rival for Henry’s affection, and therefore as a mortal threat, was soon inflamed. As Mary entered adolescence, she found herself spurned by her father. Her mother, who had always been devoted and would remain so through all the misfortunes now descending upon them, was sent away, she and Mary forbidden to see each other. As Henry’s rejection of wife and child broadened into an attack on the church that both parents had always taught Mary to revere, the magnitude of the disaster must have become literally incredible in her eyes. Anne for her part became so ferociously hostile, swearing that Mary would be either reduced to servility or given to some lowborn husband, that people loyal to Mary feared for her life. Her health, which had always been good, began to fail under the strain.
In 1533, with the king’s marriage to Anne and the birth of their daughter Elizabeth, a separate household was established for the newborn at Hatfield House some seventeen miles from London. Mary’s household was shut down, and she was ordered to become a maid of honor to her infant half-sister. She was told also that she herself, being illegitimate, was not a princess and never had been and must stop using the title or expecting others to use it in addressing her. Mary accepted none of this; to do so would have seemed a gross betrayal of her mother. She said disingenuously that she did not understand what princess she was supposed to serve, dryly noting that “Madame de Pembroke” (a reference to the title that Henry had conferred on Anne before their marriage) could have no child of such exalted rank. The situation at Hatfield proved to be intolerable not only for Mary but for Anne, who visited with some frequency. Mary’s stubbornness sparked quarrels; most of the temper appears to have been on Anne’s side, while Mary maintained a coldly insulting disdain. Things only grew worse when Anne, attempting to make peace, offered to intercede with the king on Mary’s behalf if she would recognize her as queen. Mary replied that she recognized no queen except her mother. Anne retaliated in pettily vindictive ways, confiscating Mary’s clothing and jewelry. A low point was reached when the household was moving temporarily to another place so that Hatfield could be cleaned and aired out at the end of winter; Mary refused to go unless acknowledged as princess. In the end she had to be forcibly stuffed into a cart and hauled, complaining, away.
Henry held himself aloof from this latest mess of his own making, refusing to see Mary when he visited Hatfield, which he did rarely. One of the most poignant scenes of the whole Tudor story took place at the conclusion of one of his visits. On the morning of his departure, happening to look up as he mounted his horse, the king saw Mary alone on a terrace at the top of the house. She was on her knees, hands clasped before her, gazing down at her
father in silent supplication. He touched his hand to his cap in salute, but rode away without saying a word. He was angrier with Mary than she knew, seething at her refusal to accept her reduced state. Still scarcely more than a child, adoring her father as daughters are naturally inclined to do, she continued to lay all the blame for her troubles on Anne. Like her mother she clung to the barren hope that her father would recover his senses and return to his family.
This grotesque battle of wills went on unresolved for two and a half years; Mary fought back against what she could see only as malicious humiliation, and Anne was unable to avoid regular confrontations with an implacable little stepdaughter whose actions—whose very existence—were a challenge to her and her child’s place in the world. Their drama unfolded against a background of historic events: the bishops’ surrender of their ancient rights, the resignation of Thomas More, the start of Henry’s judicial murders. When Parliament’s passage of the first Act of Succession required everyone in the kingdom to take an oath acknowledging Anne as queen and Elizabeth as heir and both Catherine and Mary refused, Henry let it pass. Possibly he wished, out of some residuum of affection and respect, to spare them the penalty for high treason. It is at least as likely that he was simply being sensible. Nothing in the world would have been more likely to provoke his subjects than the trial or attainder—never mind the execution—of the admired woman most of them still regarded as their queen and her dutiful young daughter. The terms of Mary’s confinement were, however, made even more stringent. She was allowed no visitors except, occasionally, Charles V’s longtime ambassador Eustace Chapuys. By 1535 she and Chapuys were aware of rumors that the Boleyn party were planning to have her and her mother killed. (There is no evidence that any such thing was planned, but even the ugliest rumors had to be taken seriously now that Henry was killing old friends for refusing to accept his supremacy.) Soon Mary, her nerve failing along with her health, was begging Chapuys to help her escape to the continent. Nothing came of this, in part because Mary became too ill to flee (her physicians reported that she was immobilized by “grief and despair”), in part because the emperor Charles, short of money as usual, had no wish to assume responsibility for providing Mary with the kind of household appropriate to the princess that he himself declared her to be.
