Tudor

by Leanda de Lisle

  The scene in London remained confused, but there were no further attacks on the palace and in the late afternoon it became clear that the rebels were defeated. As the rooms in the Tower filled up with new prisoners the time came to make some hard decisions about those already there, amongst them Jane and her husband. Already condemned at their trials, Mary had signed their death warrant that morning. It was possible that Mary would, once again, show mercy and allow the warrants to lapse. Yet her long-advertised claims that the Greys were merely victims of Dudley ambition now looked foolish, as well as way off mark. Stories would emerge claiming Mary was persuaded only with difficulty to confirm the executions of the young couple. But then queens were expected to be merciful, and although Mary sent Jane her personal chaplain in the hopes of gaining her conversion, becoming a Catholic had not saved John Dudley.

  Jane was, in any case, set on martyrdom. The brave and passionate teenager wrote down her conversation with Mary’s chaplain so it might be used to stiffen Protestant resolve after her death. She also composed a farewell letter to her thirteen-year-old sister, Lady Katherine Grey, which she wrote on the blank pages of her Greek New Testament. Such books were treasured objects so it guaranteed the letter would be preserved and read as her last testament. The letter warned Katherine that if she accepted the Catholic faith, ‘God will deny you and shorten your days.’ The damnation of the apostate would await her. ‘As touching my death, rejoice as I do’, Jane continued, ‘for I am assured that I shall for losing a mortal life find an immortal felicity’; ‘Farewell dear sister’, her letter concluded, ‘your loving sister, Jane Dudley.’

  It fell on the Bishop of Winchester, Stephen Gardiner, to explain why the harshest punishment was necessary. That Sunday he preached a public sermon before the queen. After the death of Henry VIII, heresy had been preached in England, he reminded his congregation, and, against the Protestant doctrine of an elect predestined to heaven, he argued that God had given man free will and good works were a means to heaven. It was heretics, Gardiner reminded his listeners, who had threatened the queen in 1553. Mary had been merciful then, but from this ‘open rebellion was grown’. He asked ‘that she would now be merciful to the body of the commonwealth’ and that ‘the rotten and hurtful members thereof’ be ‘cut off and consumed’.17 As his congregation were invited to pray for Edward VI and the souls of the faithful departed – as only Catholics did – they were in no doubt that ‘sharp and cruel execution’ would follow.

  Jane composed a final note for her father in a prayer book she shared with Guildford. Her husband would be much maligned in later myth, but she describes him in her own hand to her father as one who would be in heaven with her, as a co-martyr: ‘though it has pleased God to take away two of your children, yet think not, I most humbly beseech your grace, that you have lost them, but trust that we, by losing this mortal life, have won an immortal life . . . Your grace’s humble daughter, Jane Dudley.’ There is no finger pointing at Guildford for anything in the past and Jane uses her married name.18 Just before ten in the morning of Monday 12 February 1554, Jane saw the ‘comely, virtuous and goodly gentleman’ she had married being led to the scaffold on Tower Hill.19 There was no priest to attend on Guildford, which suggests he had refused one. He simply said his prayers and laid himself flat on the block. It took one blow to take off his head.

  Jane had the misfortune to see Guildford’s body brought back in a cart, his head wrapped in a bloody cloth. Bravely Jane kept her composure as she walked behind the Lieutenant of the Tower, in the last procession of her life to the scaffold within the privacy of the Tower walls. Jane had donned the black dress she had worn to her trial and again she read from a prayer book. There was a final message for the lieutenant inscribed in it: ‘there is a time to be born, and a time to die; and the day of death is better than the day of our birth. Yours, as the Lord knows, as a friend, Jane Dudley.’20 Executions are always grim affairs, and the brutal killing of this brilliant young girl was particularly horrible. There was a terrible moment at the end when Jane, blindfolded and feeling desperately for the block, was heard crying out ‘What shall I do? Where is it?’ Eventually someone – possibly the executioner – stepped forward to guide her. As Jane died in a fountain of blood other scaffolds were already being built all over London. Further executions began the next day and Elizabeth was summoned to London.

  31

  MARRIAGE AND SONS

  ELIZABETH ARRIVED AT WHITEHALL FROM HER HOUSE AT ASHRIDGE in Hertfordshire on the same day that Harry Grey was beheaded, 23 February 1554. He had confessed before he died that the rebels had intended to make Elizabeth queen. It had further emerged that his brother, Thomas Grey, had carried messages to her household outlining their plans, and a copy of one of Elizabeth’s letters was discovered in the diplomatic bag of the French ambassador.1 This was evidence that the rebels had friends at the heart of Elizabeth’s household, at the very least. Mary was not prepared to use an Act of Attainder against her sister; she had greater respect for the law than their father Henry VIII had shown. But Wyatt and other captive rebels were being interrogated for further incriminating evidence to be used against Elizabeth at her trial.

  Three weeks later Harry Grey’s widow, Frances Brandon, married her Master of the Horse: a zealous Protestant called Adrian Stokes.2 Marrying a commoner would ensure that Frances could not be accused of aspiring to the crown herself – and she had good reason to be fearful. The Spanish were talking of the necessity of wiping out the Greys in the male line to protect the Catholic faith. Frances’ brother-in-law, Thomas Grey, was sentenced to death on 9 March, the same day she married Stokes. It was one of almost a hundred executions that would follow the Wyatt revolt. She needed to distance herself from the rebels, not least in case it emerged that Jane’s letters and writings were being prepared secretly for publication – amongst them the letter to Frances’ second daughter, Katherine, who was in her care. As the Elizabethan William Camden later commented, the marriage was ‘to [Frances’] dishonour, but yet for her security’.3

  The tense nature of those weeks in March was underscored on the 17th when Elizabeth learned that she was to be placed in the Tower. The twenty-year-old princess wrote a frantic letter to Mary swearing she had no knowledge of any treasonous contacts and begged to see her. She told her sister that she had heard that the Protector Somerset had once observed that if he had seen his brother Thomas Seymour at the time of his arrest, he would have spared his life, but that others had convinced him that his life was at risk while his brother lived. ‘I humbly crave but one word of answer from yourself’, she pleaded with Mary, ‘Your highness’ most faithful subject that hath been from the beginning and will be to my end, Elizabeth.’ Mary did not reply, and was extremely angry that Elizabeth had been allowed to write to her.

  Mary’s anger was justified. The Seymour analogy Elizabeth had made in her letter carried an implicit threat. Thomas Seymour had been arrested after plotting with Elizabeth’s servants to marry her. Elizabeth was claiming that once again her life had been put at risk by actions taken by members of her household without her knowledge. But Elizabeth’s recollection of Thomas Seymour’s fate also offered a warning. Many believed that Somerset’s execution in 1552 was God’s punishment for the fratricide of Thomas Seymour in 1549, when he was condemned by Act of Attainder and beheaded. Did Mary really wish to travel down the same route and risk God’s wrath by executing her own sister? That was the subtext, and Mary would not have missed it.

  The next day Elizabeth was lodged in the same royal apartments in the Tower from which her mother had gone to her death. Her life, however, proved to be safe. Wyatt used his speech from the scaffold to exonerate her, and the Privy Council was divided on whether Elizabeth should be prosecuted for treason. The shocking execution of Jane Grey, aged only sixteen, would make it that much more difficult to get a conviction from a jury. Mary decided to hope that the worst of the danger Elizabeth had posed was past. On 19 May, Elizabeth was removed fr
om the Tower to house arrest at the Oxfordshire palace of Woodstock. In any case, she believed, Elizabeth would soon be rendered irrelevant: Mary was poised to marry Philip and with God’s blessing they would quickly have children.

  Mary met her twenty-seven-year-old prince at Winchester, four days after his ship had landed on 20 July. He was brought by torchlight to the house of the dean of the cathedral, ‘the lords going before him, and the queen’s guard in their rich coats standing all the way’. A servant of Margaret Douglas’ husband Lennox noted his appearance: ‘Of visage he is well favoured, with a broad forehead and grey eyes, straight-nosed, and manly countenance’ and ‘so well proportioned of body, arm, leg, and every other limb to the same, as nature cannot work a more perfect pattern’. After dinner, at ten o’clock, Philip was brought by ‘a private way’ to the queen, who ‘very lovingly, yea, and most joyfully received’ him. It was with a sense of duty rather than delight, however, that Philip met a bride who was eleven years his senior. Philip had accepted the marriage as his father Charles V’s wish, and it was clear Mary was a woman he could respect. ‘Not only is she brave and valiant’, a diplomat observed, she possessed ‘a wonderful grandeur and dignity, knowing what became a sovereign as well as any of the most consummate statesmen in her service’. Unfortunately the strain of the past twenty years was written in her face, which was ‘lined more by anxieties than age’.4 Philip showed no sign of disappointment, however, and went out of his way to charm everyone present, even speaking a few words of English. This was enough for him to be pronounced a prince of ‘a stout stomach, pregnant witted, and of most gentle nature’.5 Mary’s kingdom wanted a king, and although the notoriously xenophobic English would have preferred an Englishman of royal blood, Philip – a descendant of John of Gaunt – was far more acceptable than Guildford Dudley had been. Indeed he would remain well regarded in England, even if his compatriots were not.

  The marriage was celebrated at Winchester Cathedral on 25 July 1554, with the royal couple dressed in white and gold and glittering with diamonds. Music was a shared passion and the sung Mass was judged outstanding. But the most important details reported by observers were those concerning precedence. The marriage treaty with Spain had given no powers or land to Philip, and he could not inherit England if Mary died childless. Parliament had confirmed that Mary had the full rights of a king and at their marriage Mary stood on Philip’s right as a mark of her superior status. When the Bishop of Winchester, Stephen Gardiner, displayed the marriage treaty, he reminded the wedding congregation that it had been approved by Parliament. Mary was to be married in accordance with the wishes of the realm, as she had promised in her speech at the Guildhall during the Wyatt revolt. Now all she had to do was give her country, and her husband, the heirs they so wanted.

  Over the following weeks, a Spaniard recorded that Philip and Mary appeared ‘the happiest couple in the world, and more in love than words can say. His Majesty never leaves her, and when they are on the road he is ever by her side, helping her to mount and dismount.’6 In short, Philip continued to play the role expected of him to perfection. By November Mary was convinced she was pregnant. On the 27th, dressed in robes of velvet and ermine for the opening of Parliament she was processed to the Presence Chamber at Whitehall and sat ‘richly apparelled, and her belly laid out, that all might see she was with child’.7

  The future of Mary’s child and her kingdom was to lie within the Catholic Church. Edward’s reign had seen the Royal Supremacy fail to protect England from heresy. Now Cardinal Pole, a younger son of Mary’s former governess the Countess of Salisbury, had returned after twenty years in exile to help Mary achieve reunion with Rome, and this parliament was set to play a key role. On the 29th, both Houses of Parliament again presented themselves at Whitehall. With vigorous opponents of Mary’s Catholicism now silenced, a petition was presented to the king and queen asking that they intercede with Pole so that England might serve ‘God and your Majesties’ in ‘perfect obedience’ to the Apostolic See.8 When Pole accepted the petition the schism with Rome was over, ‘since the day of which’, one contemporary wrote, ‘all such things as were amiss or out of order here begin now to come to rule and square’.9

  The restoration was generally welcomed. In the provinces one parish quickly sold ‘the table which served in the church for the Communion in the wicked time of the schism’ and replaced it with an altar, while in others parishioners returned images and vestments they had hidden from state officials, or bought replacements.10 Choirs were set up again and processions taken up with enthusiasm. But the clock was not going back simply to the days of Mary’s youth. Mary was now to launch an English Counter-Reformation. With Mary’s support, Pole, as papal legate and later Archbishop of Canterbury, brought to life a humanist vision of a reformed Catholic Church in England. A new translation of the New Testament was commissioned, support was given for the printing of other religious texts in English as well as Latin, clerical education was encouraged and great attention was paid to beauty in worship, especially liturgical music.

  Church attendance and vocations to the priesthood had dropped dramatically under Henry VIII and still more under Edward VI. The Marian reforms brought a new sense of energy. Far from being backward-looking, Mary’s English Catholic renewal anticipated measures not formally adopted in the wider church until the Council of Trent’s final sessions in 1562–3 after Mary’s death.11

  At court too there was vigour and life. With King Philip at Mary’s side there were masques and sporting combats to enjoy. Mary had never lived surrounded solely by pious Catholics, as is sometimes claimed.12 She soon welcomed even the return of the Greys to court, placing Jane’s sister, Lady Katherine Grey, in her Privy Chamber. Amongst other former enemies were Guildford Dudley’s brothers, who competed in some of the combats. All, however, were expected to conform to the religion of the state. Those who were incorrigible were encouraged to go into exile. Those who did not leave, or could not do so, were dealt with under the heresy laws revived in January 1555. The queen expected a few exemplary punishments of heretics to follow, but this proved wide of the mark. Although Protestants remained a minority there was a strong Protestant commitment, in the south-east of England in particular, where people had embraced the Edwardian reforms and iconoclasm with enthusiasm.13 284 people, most of them ordinary men and women, stood bravely by their beliefs and were burned at the stake during Mary’s reign. It would earn her the late seventeenth-century sobriquet, ‘Bloody Mary’, that has come to define her.14

  To those of us for whom capital punishment is barbarous, it remains difficult to appreciate the mindset of this earlier age. In the sixteenth century it was commonplace to be hanged for theft. The promotion of heresy was considered a worse crime, for it was, potentially, to steal souls. Several of those Mary burned had themselves overseen burnings under Henry VIII. Amongst the most remembered deaths under Mary is that of Hugh Latimer, the Bishop of Worcester. Burned alongside the Bishop of London, Nicholas Ridley, he spoke the famous, if apocryphal, last words, ‘Play the man, Master Ridley; we shall this day light such a candle, by God’s grace, in England, as I trust shall never be put out.’ Yet it was Latimer who had overseen the execution of the Observant Franciscan suspended in chains over a ‘slow fire’ fuelled by a famous effigy of a Welsh saint during the reign of Henry VIII. It had taken two hours for the monk to die, during which time he was mocked by his executioners as Latimer stood by.15 Anabaptists (who believed in adult baptism and would not bear arms or take oaths) had been burned even under Edward VI, and would be burned under Elizabeth I too.16 Nevertheless, the numbers Mary burned are striking: they were unprecedented in England and unmatched in Europe.17

  The queen’s actions were in the past ascribed to those of a bigoted woman in thrall to priests, an act of revenge, or born of sheer desperation. In truth she was behaving as the ruthless Tudor monarch she was. The burnings began in February 1555 when she was at the height of her power, and her reasons concerned the futur
e, not the past. She wished to eliminate a destabilising minority that had grown exponentially during her brother’s reign. Reaction varied. In some areas people would hide wood to thwart the authorities as they built the stake and bonfire, in other areas people sold strawberries amongst a cheerful crowd. The image, however, of those burning pyres still haunts the imagination, along with the stories of the lowly who died: an old man hobbling to the stake ‘willingly, angrily and pertinaciously’, and behind him a young blind boy, also put to death.

  It was Mary’s baby that was most crucial, however, in securing the future she envisaged, and in April there were whispers that it was not proceeding normally, even that she was bewitched. It was decided that a close eye should be kept on Elizabeth, and Mary called her sister to Hampton Court, where a superficial reconciliation followed, with Elizabeth falling on her knees swearing she was a true subject.

  The twenty-two-year-old princess had matured into a young woman described as ‘attractive rather than handsome’, ‘well formed with a good skin, although olive’.18 This was in stark contrast to her sister Mary, who looked unwell and old. In May it emerged that Elizabeth’s household had employed the magician John Dee to cast the queen’s horoscope. He was arrested. Rumours sprang up in the same month that Mary had delivered a son, and there was an explosion of joy with street parties set up across London. Then it emerged that the expected birth date had passed without any sign of a child and new whispers began that Mary was not pregnant at all, merely ill. Mary clung on to her hopes of impending motherhood until August, when at last she accepted there was no baby.19