Inglorious Royal Marriages

by Leslie Carroll

  Angus spent the rest of his life in the law courts, fighting to reclaim the lands that James V had taken from him and given to others. He had resigned his earldom on August 31, 1547. With no aristocratic title anymore, known merely as Archibald Douglas, he died ten years later in January 1557, not on the battlefield, but in his bed at his beloved Tantallon Castle. He was buried in Perthshire in the collegiate church of Abernethy, of which he was a patron.

  In May 1541, Margaret Tudor’s third husband, Lord Methven, was appointed sheriff of Linlithgow. By 1545, he had taken a third spouse, Lady Janet Stewart, his mistress during the years he was married to Margaret. Methven and Janet had four children prior to their marriage; they were legitimized in 1551.

  During the minority of Mary, Queen of Scots, Methven sat on the Privy Council and participated in her mother Mary of Guise’s attempt to overthrow the Earl of Arran as the young queen’s regent. Yet both Arran and Mary of Guise employed Methven as an ambassador to England in 1544 and 1545. Three years later, Methven was master of the artillery, playing a major role in the siege of Haddington, one of a series of sieges begun in 1543 comprising “the War of the Rough Wooing”—England’s effort to literally force a marriage between Henry VIII’s son Edward, Prince of Wales, and Mary, Queen of Scots. In Scotland, it was known as the “Eight” or “Nine Years’ War.” By Haddington, in the summer of 1548, the teenage prince had ascended the throne as Edward VI, and five-year-old Mary was pledged instead to the dauphin of France.

  Not much is known about the end of Lord Methven’s life, including his date of death or the particulars surrounding his demise. In June 1553, he was recorded as making a payment to the crown, but the following April the wardship of his heir was assigned to the archbishop of St. Andrews, meaning that Methven had already gone to his maker. Janet Stewart, Lady Methven, survived him.

  If marital success is defined by one’s legacy, two of Margaret’s otherwise inglorious unions made an impact on world history. Her granddaughter—James V’s daughter (by his second wife, Mary of Guise) was Mary, Queen of Scots. And the progeny of Margaret’s second marriage—her only daughter, Margaret Douglas, Countess of Lennox—was the mother of Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley, who was the Scots’ queen’s fey, duplicitous, bisexual second husband. Darnley’s strange murder in 1567 set the wheels in motion for Mary’s imprisonment and judicial execution at the hands of her cousin, Queen Elizabeth I of England, the younger daughter of Henry VIII.

  Because Elizabeth had no children, the Tudor dynasty ended after 118 years. Her successor, the first of the Stuart monarchs, was a double great-grandson of Margaret Tudor: James VI of Scotland, who became James I of England as well. His great-grandson would become George I, the first Hanoverian king of England. How ironic that it is through Margaret Tudor’s decade-long union with James IV of Scotland and her subsequent rocky marriage to Archibald Douglas, 6th Earl of Angus, that the rest of England’s royal family descends and—despite some of their own ignominious pairings over the centuries—continues to thrive so gloriously.

  LADY JANE GREY

  AND

  GUILDFORD DUDLEY

  MARRIED: 1553–1554

  Lady Jane Grey and Guildford Dudley enjoyed the proverbial fifteen minutes of fame as Tudor teens, such footnotes to history that Jane is often omitted from lists of England’s monarchs, although she reigned during a rare “year of three kings.” There would not be another such year until 1936.

  This young duo was yoked together in wedlock because their families were desperate for power and glory. But Jane and Guildford’s inglorious marriage achieved the opposite result: dishonor and disgrace for all concerned. The pair were pawns on their parents’ chessboard, but to understand how and why they ended up being manipulated about the field, we must return to the king’s square in an earlier game.

  Henry VIII had moved heaven and earth in his desperate desire to perpetuate the Tudor dynasty and guarantee the security of the realm with a male heir. He broke with the Church of Rome, because it had refused to invalidate his marriage to his first wife, the devoutly Catholic Spanish princess Katherine of Aragon. Katherine had given Henry a daughter, the Princess Mary, but it was commonly believed that a female did not possess the mind or character necessary to rule, even though Renaissance princesses were scholarly women. Moreover, it was a martial era, and a monarch was expected to lead his troops into battle.

  While Henry appreciated the practical things the reformed religion could bring him—the concept that he could be head of the Church in his own kingdom and that the lands and revenues previously belonging to the Roman Church would now devolve to the crown—he had been a scholar of Catholic theology prior to his divorce from Katherine. Henry was never entirely comfortable with the new religion, slipping a bit backward when he wed his third and fifth wives, Jane Seymour and Kathryn Howard, who had both been raised Catholic.

  Henry did a lot of politically expedient waffling. He had his daughter Mary declared a bastard after the birth of his daughter Elizabeth by Anne Boleyn. When Jane Seymour bore his only son, Edward, both princesses were retroactively made illegitimate, so that only Edward stood in line to inherit Henry’s throne. Toward the end of his reign Henry was finally persuaded to restore his daughters to legitimacy and the succession. He ultimately stipulated in his will that Mary should succeed Edward “upon condition that she shall not marry without the written and sealed consent of a majority” of Edward’s surviving Privy Council, and that Elizabeth should succeed her. But Henry played a bit fast and loose with genealogy, stating that after Elizabeth’s eventual succession, the throne was to go to the heirs of his younger sister, Mary, rather than those of his older sister, Margaret, thereby eliminating Margaret’s granddaughter, the Catholic Mary, Queen of Scots, from the succession.

  On January 28, 1547, Henry died at the age of fifty-five, his numerous infirmities and morbid obesity finally gaining the better of him. His death was kept a secret for two days so that matters regarding the smooth succession of the nine-year-old Edward VI could be put in order. Although his late mother had been a Catholic, little Edward had been raised as a fervent evangelical Protestant by his governors. As king, he was a hard-liner, acting upon the advice of Archbishop Cranmer to cleanse the realm of the imagery and idolatry of the Catholic Church. By 1550, England’s rich and colorful history of medieval Christianity had been whitewashed, painted over, or destroyed entirely. A new era of austerity was ushered in; even cultural frivolities like holy-day pageants and maypole dances were abolished.

  So it could not have come as much of a surprise when the little prig of a king violated the terms of his father’s will in 1553 and removed his half sisters from the succession, not only because they might marry foreign princes and undermine “the laws of this realm” as well as “his proceedings in religion,” but because they also bore the “shame” of illegitimacy, despite the fact that their own father had officially removed that stigma before his death.

  According to the interpretation Edward and his ministers, lawyers, and clerics placed on the laws and statutes governing the royal succession, a bastard could not inherit the crown. Henry’s divorces from Katherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn had been duly ratified by “divers acts of parliament remaining in full force.” Therefore, argued Edward, it had been illegal for Henry to pass the crown to his daughters, whom his recognized divorces had rendered illegitimate; and his last will and testament could not override the law. Of course, the king’s subjects didn’t know that; nor would they understand the legal technicalities and loopholes.

  Edward’s new document, known as the “Devise” for the succession, went through a couple of iterations before it was finalized. Full of hypotheticals, as originally conceived, the crown would pass to Protestant males or, in their absence (and indeed there were none), to one of their mothers, who would rule as a governess of the realm, rather than as England’s queen, in conjunction with an appointed council of twenty men.
Then Edward reworked the draft of the Devise to specifically name as governess Frances, Duchess of Suffolk, the daughter of Henry VIII’s younger sister, Mary Tudor, by Mary’s second husband, Charles Brandon. Frances was the wife of the 1st Duke of Suffolk, Henry Grey. According to the terms of Edward’s Devise, her accession would be followed by her three daughters according to age: Jane, Katherine, and Mary. Next in line after Mary Grey would be Mary Clifford, the daughter of Frances Grey’s younger sister.

  But as Edward grew more frail from the pulmonary infection that would eventually claim his young life, he revised his views on the most appropriate candidate to replace him, to concentrate solely on his cousin Jane Grey, his spiritual sister, indoctrinated in the “godly learning,” as they called it, of the Cambridge-educated evangelicals. Only Jane Grey could be trusted to carry the banner of Edward’s Reformation and continue to instill its precepts in their subjects.

  Jane had been named after Edward’s mother, Jane Seymour. For years it was commonly accepted that she was born in October 1537, the same month and year as Edward, because the announcement of her birth was eclipsed by the news of Henry’s male heir; yet more recent scholarship posits that she may have been born sometime during the spring of that year. Jane’s parents, Henry Grey, Marquess of Dorset (a grandson of Edward IV’s queen Elizabeth Woodville by her first marriage), and the sturdy, florid, sporty, and self-important Frances, were both social climbers. Because of their daughters’ royal lineage, they wanted the best for them, especially Jane. During her childhood, Jane had been “placed out,” the term for children from middle-income families who were sent to live with members of the nobility, or the offspring of an aristocrat who were sent to the palace to learn the manners and customs of royalty, to better cement the family’s social connections and pave the way for a spectacular marriage. In exchange, the child became a ward, page, or lady-in-waiting.

  Jane Grey was placed out with the former queen, the evangelical Catherine Parr, and her husband, Thomas, Baron Seymour of Sudely, the younger brother of the late queen Jane Seymour. Dorset sold Jane’s wardship to Sudely in the expectation that she would be married well. After the fizzling of a proposed match with the Protector Edward Seymour’s eldest son, Lord Hertford, the assumption was that Jane would eventually wed Edward VI, her first cousin once removed.

  Catherine Parr died on September 5, 1548, a few days after giving birth to a daughter. Jane, who at ten years old was her chief mourner, had been happy under the dowager queen’s roof. The child’s piety and thirst for learning were encouraged and admired there, whereas her parents clearly didn’t appreciate or comprehend those passions. Far from being proud of Jane’s intellectual accomplishments, the Greys mocked and punished her for preferring to sit home alone with her books and finding genuine rapture in study, instead of being like other little girls who loved to play outdoors. In the summer of 1550, Jane confided in a houseguest, the noted scholar Roger Ascham, who found her reading Plato in the original Greek instead of hunting in the park with the rest of her family, “Alas! good folk, they never felt what true pleasure meant.” Unless she was exaggerating in order to elicit his sympathy, which seems out of character for such a serious child, it’s difficult not to sympathize with Jane when she went on to tell Ascham that her parents were physically cruel to her, and that she drew pleasure only from the gentle pedagogy of her tutor, Mr. Aylmer. “For when I am in presence either of father or mother, whether I speak, keep silence, sit, stand, or go, eat, drink, be merry or sad, be sewing, playing, dancing, or doing anything else, I must do it, as it were . . . even so perfectly, as God made the world, or else I am so sharply taunted, so cruelly threatened, yea, presently sometimes with pinches, nips and bobs and other ways (which I will not name for the honour I bear them) so without measure disordered, that I think myself in hell. . . .”

  There is much to consider in this remark, although Ascham was writing about the event twenty years later, so it may have been colored by anything from hazy recollection to hyperbole. Jane was receiving the humanist education that was popular for noblewomen of the era, but she was beyond precocious, reading mostly theological tracts, and she spoke several languages. She was even learning Hebrew so that she could read the Old Testament in the original text. Jane’s enormous intellect and remarkably rigid religious outlook for one so young must have seemed daunting to most adults, particularly to her less well-educated parents. Sparing the rod was not a staple of child rearing at the time. Nor were compliments and coddling, which were believed to engender too much independence, both in daughters and sons. Perhaps the exasperated Greys, who had sold Jane’s wardship for several thousand pounds in anticipation of the ultimate prize, sought perfection in her behavior because they were grooming her to wed the king.

  One thing that is often glossed over by scholars who seek to portray Jane as a bit of a drip is her referral to several enjoyable pursuits in the lament to Ascham. Despite her overwhelming passion for doctrine and theology, she did dance and play. There were days when she was merry. Although she was hardly frivolous, she was not an ascetic. Yet, according to her twentieth-century biographer Alison Plowden, Jane complained about the Greys’ mistreatment of her to anyone who would listen, and there may have been some exaggeration in her insistence that her parents made her life a living hell. Perhaps every teenager feels that way at some point.

  Known for her outspokenness, Jane was rather arrogant about her remarkable intellect; the recognition and praise from international theologians had gone to her head. Jane did believe she was all that, which had not only made her headstrong, but her dismayed tutor fretted that his prize brainiac was also displaying too many tendencies typical of adolescent girls, focusing undue attention on her hair and jewelry, clothes and music. A discussion ensued among the pedants on how to best rein in their pious little pupil before they lost her to the world of prideful vanity.

  After the execution of Thomas Seymour, Baron Sudely, for treason and the subsequent fall of his older brother, the Lord Protector Edward Seymour, the aspirational Greys—as of 1551 elevated to the titles of Duke and Duchess of Suffolk—threw their support behind the king’s new chief minister, John Dudley, Duke of Northumberland. The families’ mutual ambitions would become a literal marriage of convenience as they jockeyed two of their children into position to claim the throne.

  The king was at death’s door now, and he had reordered the succession not only to eliminate his half sisters, but to leapfrog over Frances Grey, Henry VIII’s niece, who was one genealogical step nearer the throne than her children, nominating instead her eldest daughter, Edward’s kindred spirit Jane.

  And so the Devise for the Succession was altered yet again, at first to favor “Jane’s heirs masles” and finally reworded to give the crown directly to “Jane and her heirs male” after Edward’s imminent demise. The rewrite had evidently taken place soon after Guildford Dudley was married to Jane on Whitsunday, May 21, 1553 (according to the Julian calendar). It bears noting that current scholarship reveals a discrepancy in their wedding date. Some sources list it as May 25, but in 1553 that date was a Thursday on the Julian calendar, and on the Gregorian calendar (which was not adopted in England until centuries later), May 25 falls on a Monday. So it would appear that the viable date for a Whitsunday wedding is May 21.

  Fully aware that with Edward’s death his role as the de facto king of England would end, and his input, if any, in the governance of the realm would be greatly reduced, the Duke of Northumberland had sought to retain his power in every way possible. If he could not control England’s king, why not its next queen, who was also merely a teenager?

  The extent to which Northumberland used, or perhaps abused, his position to influence Edward’s decision to revise the Devise for the Succession has been debated for centuries. On the scaffold he admitted that he had “done wickedly . . . against the Queen’s Highness,” but added that he had not been “alone the original doer thereof,” although he
declined to name his confederates. Yet a pair of unimpeachable eyewitnesses confirmed the duke’s role in the proceedings: Sir John Gosnold, solicitor-general of the court of augmentations, and Sir Edward Montagu, chief justice of the common pleas. On June 21, when King Edward was on his deathbed, Northumberland charged both men to personally authenticate the Devise under letters patent.

  Crucial to the story of Jane and Guildford Dudley’s marriage is the timing of the final revision. It was generally assumed that by the spring of 1553, the king was not going to live much longer. Although still in his minority, Edward was fifteen years old and mature enough to know his own mind and will. When the chief justice, Montagu, informed Edward on June 14, 1553, that he was flouting his late father’s wishes and that “the execution of this device after the king’s decease” would be treasonable, Edward “with sharp words and angry countenance” commanded him and the other judges to accept it. Covering his bases, Montagu agreed to ratify it only after first securing the dying king’s pardon, aware that because Edward was still a minor he could not write a valid will, and that only Parliament could overturn Henry VIII’s Third Succession Act of 1544. Men had been executed for worse, and Montagu wanted to make certain he would not end up hanged, burned, or beheaded after Edward’s death for following the young king’s orders.

  Edward fervently believed he was saving the realm by nominating Lady Jane Grey to succeed him. But what benefits would the Duke of Northumberland derive from the Devise? The answer was full control of the government. John Dudley could never be king himself, but perhaps he could be a king’s father.