Roger Ascham was so deeply impressed by this remarkable outburst, all the more so because it was to be the last conversation they were ever to have, that he remembered and later preserved it for posterity in his famous manual The Scholemaster. Ascham used Jane’s situation as yet another argument to further his constant plea for the adoption of more humane teaching methods, while generations of Protestant propagandists and hagiographers have used it to illustrate both her praiseworthy addiction to learning and her parents’ undeservedly abusive treatment of her. It is only quite recently that biographers have begun to question the received image of gentle Jane, meek and mild – an image largely created for the edification of pupils in Victorian schoolrooms. At thirteen the real Jane Grey was a stubborn, unusually bright, articulate and opinionated adolescent, who apparently did not hesitate to inform sympathetic visitors that she found her parents’ company hellish and whose youthful self-righteousness must often have profoundly irritated her father and mother.
Like all their set the Dorsets were compulsive gamblers, playing for high stakes at both cards and dice, a practice much deplored by the godly. James Haddon, the resident chaplain at Bradgate, fought a long losing battle with his employers over this issue, for although quite prepared to forbid their domestics to risk money on amusements of this sort, my lord and his lady with their friends reserved the right not only to play in their private apartments, but to play for money, pointing out, reasonably enough, that the game lost all its interest without a stake, and they turned quite nasty when Haddon reproved them publicly from the pulpit.2 If, as seems likely, the chaplain was supported by Aylmer and Lady Jane, this would have done nothing to lessen the tensions of family life.
All this time Jane’s intellectual and spiritual horizons were continuing to widen and Roger Ascham, with fond recollections of the ‘so divine a maid’ he had found engrossed in the Phaedon of Plato, wrote urging her to: ‘Go on thus, O best adorned virgin, to the honour of thy country, the delight of thy parents, the comfort of thy relatives, and the admiration of all.’ Ascham was feeling very much out of his element in a quarrelsome Germany, where ‘all places and persons are occupied with rumours of wars and commotions’, and was frankly envious of Aylmer. ‘O happy Aylmer! to have such a scholar and to be her tutor. I congratulate both you who teach and she who learns.’3
Ascham himself had taught Elizabeth by his famous method of double translation, presenting her with passages of Demosthenes or Cicero to be turned first into English and then back into their original languages. It seems probable that Aylmer followed a similar plan and Jane would have read all the most approved classical authors plus, of course, the Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles in Greek and the works of the Fathers of the Church such as Cyprian, Jerome and Augustine. Ascham, who had already challenged Jane to write to him in Greek and told his friend John Sturm, the Protestant Rector of Strasburg University that her skill in writing and speaking the language was ‘almost past belief’, now suggested that if she herself were to take the trouble to write a letter in Greek to Sturm, neither she nor Aylmer would regret it.
Roger Ascham is also sometimes credited with first bringing Jane to the notice of Henry Bullinger, chief pastor of the radical church of Zurich, but her connection with the Continental reformers was actually initiated in the spring of 1550 by John ab Ulmis or Ulmer, an impecunious Swiss student who had come over to England to seek his fortune and contrived to ingratiate himself with the marquess of Dorset, ‘the protector of all students and the refuge of foreigners’. This noble personage, Ulmer informed Bullinger, had a daughter, ‘pious and accomplished beyond what can be expressed’, to whom he intended to present a copy of Bullinger’s book on the holy marriage of Christians, and so began a correspondence conducted, naturally, in Latin, which continued sporadically over the next two-and-a-half years.
In July 1551 Jane is thanking Bullinger for sending her father and herself his treatise on Christian Perfection – that little volume of ‘pure and unsophisticated religion’ from which she is daily gathering the sweetest flowers, as out of a beautiful garden. Her most noble father, she added hastily, would have written himself had he not been so busy with public affairs and will do so as soon as he has leisure from his other weighty engagements. She herself is now beginning to learn Hebrew and would be greatly obliged if Bullinger would point out ‘some way and method of pursuing this study to the greatest advantage’.4
John Ulmer, who was determined to keep his toehold on the comforts to be enjoyed at Bradgate, had also written to Conrad Pellican, another Swiss reformer, extolling the virtues of his patron’s daughter: ‘I do not think that among all the English nobility for many ages past there has arisen an individual who to the highest excellence of talent and judgement has united so much diligence and assiduity in the cultivation of every liberal pursuit.’ The Lady Jane, it seemed, was not only conversant with the more polite accomplishments and ordinary acquirements, but had also ‘so exercised herself in the practice of speaking and arguing with propriety, both in Greek and Latin, that it is incredible how far she has advanced already, and to what perfection she will advance in a few years; for well I know that she will complete what she has begun, unless perhaps she is diverted from her pursuits by some calamity of the times’.5
Aylmer and Haddon, meanwhile, had begun writing to Bullinger themselves. In a series of letters, which forms a small part of the vast bulk of his correspondence – the so-called Zurich Letters – they poured out their hopes and fears for their prize pupil and asked for help in the anxious task of guiding her in the paths of learning and piety and away from those temptations of the world, the flesh and the devil, so dangerous for any high-born young girl, but especially one who, for all her rare qualities and virtues, was just a little inclined to be headstrong. ‘Although she is so brought up, that there is the greatest hope of her advancement in godliness,’ wrote Haddon, Bullinger’s exhortations would afford her valuable encouragement, ‘and at the same time have their due weight with her, either as proceeding from a stranger, or from so eminent a person as yourself’.6 At one time Aylmer seems to have been afraid that the teenage Jane was showing signs of taking rather too much interest in her appearance – such unworthy matters as dress, jewels and ‘braidings of the hair’ – and of spending too much time on her music. ‘It now remains for me to request’, he wrote solemnly to the middle-aged Swiss pastor, ‘that you will instruct my pupil in your next letter as to what embellishment and adornment of the person is becoming in young women professing godliness. … Moreover, I wish you would prescribe to her the length of time she may properly devote to the study of music.’7
Communication between Leicestershire and Zurich was slow and further impeded by a shortage of reliable messengers, but in another letter from Jane to Bullinger, dated from Bradgate in the summer of 1552, she speaks of the debt of gratitude she owes him. She had read his latest letter twice over and feels she has derived as much benefit from his ‘excellent and truly divine precepts’ as from her daily study of the best authors. ‘You exhort me to embrace a genuine and sincere faith in Christ my Saviour,’ she went on, with characteristic cautious honesty. ‘I will endeavour to satisfy you in this respect, as far as God shall enable me to do; but as I acknowledge faith to be his gift, I ought therefore only to promise so far as he may see fit to bestow it upon me. I shall not however cease to pray, with the apostles, that he may of his goodness daily increase it in me. … Do you meanwhile, with your wonted kindness, make daily mention of me in your prayers. In the study of Hebrew I shall pursue that method which you so clearly point out.’8
Despite the gulf of age, background and geographical distance which separated them, this curious penfriendship continued to flourish. ‘Were I indeed to extol you as truth requires, I should need either the oratorical powers of Demosthenes, or eloquence of Cicero,’ wrote Jane in the third and last of her surviving letters. She herself was painfully conscious of her own inadequacy.
In writing to yo
u in this manner I have exhibited more boldness than prudence: but so great has been your kindness towards me, in condescending to write to me, a stranger, and in supplying the necessary instruction for the adornment of my understanding and the improvement of my mind, that I should justly appear chargeable with neglect and forgetfulness of duty, were I not to show myself mindful of you and of your deservings in every possible way. Besides, I entertain the hope that you will excuse the more than feminine boldness of me, who, girlish and unlearned as I am, presume to write to a man who is the father of learning; and that you will pardon that rudeness which has made me not hesitate to interrupt your more important occupations with my vain trifles. … My mind is fluctuating and undecided; for while I consider my age, sex and mediocrity, or rather infancy, in learning, each of these things deters me from writing; but when I call to mind the eminence of your virtues, the celebrity of your character, and the magnitude of your favours towards me, the higher consideration yields to the inferior; a sense of what is becoming me gives way to your worth, and the respect which your merits demand usually prevails over all other considerations. … As long as I shall be permitted to live, I shall not cease to offer you my good wishes, to thank you for the kindness you have showed me, and to pray for your welfare. Farewell, learned sir. Your piety’s most devoted, Jane Grey.9
Much of the flattering interest shown in Jane by the European reformers stemmed from their hopes that she and Edward might yet make a match of it. ‘A report has prevailed … that this most noble virgin is to be betrothed and given in marriage to the king’s majesty,’ John Ulmer told Bullinger with more optimism than accuracy in May 1551. ‘Oh, if that event should take place, how happy would be the union and how beneficial to the church!’10 But as the noble virgin approached her fourteenth birthday and with it the end of childhood, she was still unspoken for – since the fall of Protector Somerset nothing more had been heard of a marriage between Jane and his son – and negotiations were currently well advanced for the betrothal of the king of England to the French (and popish) Princess Elisabeth.
In July 1551 tragedy struck the Suffolk Brandons when the two young sons of Charles Brandon by Catherine Willoughby, then undergraduates at Cambridge, died within hours of one another of the sweating sickness. This mysterious disease had first appeared in England in 1485, brought, so it was said, by the French mercenaries who came over with Henry VII, and remained a scourge throughout the first half of the Tudor century, when it suddenly vanished or mutated. The ‘sweat’, with its symptoms of chills, high fever, severe headache, backache and vomiting, sounds like a virulent form of influenza, but was probably caused by a virus unconnected with any modern strain. It was notorious for the terrifying speed of its onset – a victim could sit down to dinner apparently in the best of health and be dead by suppertime. Nor was it any respecter of persons. On the contrary, the comfortable classes seem to have been most at risk. The deaths of the sixteen-year-old duke of Suffolk and his younger brother, who both appear to have been particularly attractive and promising boys, was a devastating blow to their mother and their loss was widely regarded as a blow to society. As Henry Machyn, the London funeral furnisher, commented in his Diary: ‘It was great pity of their death, and it had pleased God, of so noble a stock they were, for there is no more left of them.’11
Society’s loss, however, was to prove the Grey family’s gain when, on 4 October 1551, the now-extinct dukedom of Suffolk was recreated as a new peerage and conferred on the marquess of Dorset jure uxoris, that is, in right of his wife, the sole surviving heir to the Brandon estates. That October was a crowded month. To no one’s great surprise the duke of Somerset was rearrested on the 16th, charged with plotting to overthrow the government of his successor, who now felt sufficiently confident to proceed with Somerset’s final disposal. John Dudley had wisely eschewed the title of Protector. England’s new strong man was more interested in the realities of power than its trappings but he did now feel the time was ripe to petition the king for a step in rank, and on 11 October he was created duke of Northumberland, making him the first Englishman having no ties either of blood or marriage with the royal family ever to bear a ducal title.
The Greys and the Dudleys had both received their promotion by the time Mary of Guise, the widowed mother of Mary Queen of Scots and Regent of Scotland, on her way home from seeing her young daughter at the French court, became stormbound at Portsmouth and sent word to the king that she would continue her journey overland and wanted to take the opportunity to visit him. The dowager travelled up to Hampton Court, where she was met by an impressive delegation of nobility and gentry, headed by the marquess of Northampton, who escorted her to the palace to be greeted by ‘ladies and gentlewomen to the number of threescore, and so she was brought to her lodging on the queen’s side, which was all hanged with arras, and so was the hall, and all the other lodgings of mine in the house, very finely dressed’. This was the first state visit which Edward had hosted and he was clearly determined to show that he knew how such things should be done, recording the details minutely in his Journal. That night and the next day, he went on, ‘all was spent in dancing and pastime, as though it were a court, and great presence of gentlemen resorted thither’.12
After ‘perusing’ Hampton Court and seeing some deer coursing, Mary continued up to London where she was lodged in the bishop of London’s palace. This time the welcoming party was headed by the duke of Suffolk, who brought a message from the king that ‘if she lacked anything she should have it, for her better furniture’, while the ladies appointed to salute her included the Lady Frances, duchess of Suffolk, ‘the Lady Jane daughter to the Duke of Suffolk’, and the duchess of Northumberland. On the following day, 4 November, a grand dinner and reception was held in her honour at Westminster. ‘In the hall I met her with all the rest of the lords of my council … and from the outer gate up to the presence chamber, on both sides, stood the guard,’ recorded the fourteen-year-old monarch, a touch complacently. At dinner the Queen Regent sat under the same cloth of estate on the king’s left hand, while further down the table were ‘my cousin Frances and my cousin Margaret [Douglas]. … We were served by two services, two sewers, cupbearers, carvers and gentlemen. Her maistre d’hotel came before her service, and mine officers before mine. There were two cupboards [of plate], one of gold four stages [in] height, another of massy silver six stages. … After dinner, when she had heard some music, I brought her to the hall, and so she went away.’13
The Regent’s visit had marked Jane’s debut in grown-up society and also seems to have been the only time that Edward mentioned her name in his Journal. For all the optimistic talk of their likely marriage in Protestant circles abroad, there is absolutely no indication that Edward himself, or Jane for that matter, ever considered it even as a remote possibility. Edward, indeed, is said to have declared that his future bride should be a foreign princess ‘well stuffed and jewelled’.
Although the Suffolks had been much in evidence at the Westminster banquet it was noticeable that neither of the Ladies Mary and Elizabeth were among those present and indeed the king’s half-sisters played hardly any part in the life of his court. Mary Tudor, now in her mid-thirties, had suffered bitterly as a result of her parents’ divorce and still bore the scars of those sufferings. Forcibly separated from her much-loved mother – she had not even been allowed to go to her in her last illness, viciously humiliated by her father’s second wife and finally bullied by her father into signing a document repudiating the Bishop of Rome’s ‘pretended authority’ and acknowledging her own illegitimacy, Mary had, not surprisingly, developed into a nervous, unhappy, dyspeptic woman with little taste for socialising. In any case, by the autumn of 1551 the unfortunate princess was once again at loggerheads with the authorities over her religious beliefs.
Trouble had begun in the spring of 1549 with the introduction of Thomas Cranmer’s prayer book, replacing the ancient Latin mass with some newfangled communion service. Faced with the t
hreatened proscription of the Catholic faith which had long been her only consolation, Mary had appealed to her powerful kinsman, the Holy Roman Emperor himself, and Charles had responded by demanding a written undertaking from the duke of Somerset that his cousin should be allowed to continue to practise her religion unmolested. This was refused, but Somerset did reluctantly agree that Mary might do as she thought best in the privacy of her own house, at least until such time as the king came of age. But then came the October coup and early in 1550 Mary was warned that her breathing space would soon be over. During that summer a warrant was issued for the arrest of one of her chaplains and by the autumn the battle of the Lady Mary’s mass was fairly joined, the government maintaining that any promises made by the former Lord Protector had been strictly temporary and provisional and, in any case, applied only to the princess herself. Certainly the fifty-odd members of her household staff could claim no privileges and must obey the king’s law or suffer the consequences. By the following January the king himself had taken a hand in the affair, adding a postscript to one of the Council’s hectoring letters: ‘Truly, sister,’ he wrote, ‘I will not say more and worse things, because my duty would compel me to use harsher and angrier words. But this I will say with certain intention, that I will see my laws strictly obeyed, and those who break them shall be watched and denounced.’14
This unequivocal statement of Edward’s position would have come to Mary as a bitter revelation of the gulf which lay between them. Until now she had been able perhaps to comfort herself with the belief that her little brother was only a helpless tool in the hands of men like John Dudley and his cronies – that it was they, not he, who were her enemies. But in the king’s letter the echo of their father’s voice was too unmistakable to be denied.
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