Her Highness, the Traitor

by Susan Higginbotham

  In 1557, the surviving Dudley sons, Ambrose, Robert, and Henry, fought for King Philip at St. Quentin, where Henry was killed. Following this, the Crown reversed the attainders of Ambrose, Robert, and their sisters.

  The Dudley children and the Grey children fared very differently in Elizabeth’s reign. Robert Dudley became the Earl of Leicester. His volatile but enduring relationship with the queen, which ended only with his death in 1588, has fascinated readers for centuries. Elizabeth marked the final letter he sent to her before his death as “His Last Letter” and kept it for the rest of her life. Ambrose Dudley became the Earl of Warwick. He survived his younger brother Robert, to whom he was devoted, by two years, dying in 1590. Ambrose had no children.

  Mary Sidney and her sister Katherine Hastings (which I spelled “Katheryn” in my novel to distinguish her from the many other Katherines of her day) each attended Queen Elizabeth. Mary lived until 1586. Her firstborn son, Philip Sidney, gained fame as a poet and critic and as an embodiment of the chivalric ideal. His literary works are still studied today. Her daughter Mary, who eventually married Henry Herbert, the Earl of Pembroke, was both a poet and a literary patron. Katherine Hastings’s long marriage to Henry Hastings, who inherited his father’s earldom, was happy but childless. As Countess of Huntingdon, Katherine took many well-born young girls into her household and prided herself on her ability to “breed and govern young gentlewomen.” Widowed in 1595, she outlived her husband by a quarter of a century and was buried in 1620 at Chelsea’s Old Church alongside her mother.

  For Katherine and Mary Grey, Elizabeth’s reign was disastrous. Katherine Grey fell in love with Somerset’s son, the Earl of Hertford. Frances, approving of the match but recognizing the need to gain royal approval, drafted a letter to Elizabeth seeking permission for the couple to marry. Before she could send the letter, she died. Instead of seeking another means of gaining the queen’s approval, the couple secretly married in 1560 with the assistance of Hertford’s sister Jane. When their marriage came to light, both spouses were imprisoned in the Tower, where the pregnant Katherine gave birth to a son. Katherine spent the rest of her life in custody, first at the Tower and later in various private homes, though a sympathetic Tower guard had allowed the couple to meet, resulting in a second son. Katherine died in 1568, at about age twenty-eight. Hertford eventually was freed and was allowed custody of his two sons by Katherine. Having remarried, he died an octogenarian in 1621. Hertford and Katherine Grey were finally reunited that same year when their grandson, the new earl, moved Katherine’s body to Hertford’s tomb at Salisbury Cathedral.

  In 1565, Mary Grey likewise made a secret marriage, hers to Thomas Keyes, a widower who was a sergeant porter at court. The match also resulted in the couple’s imprisonment. Although the spouses were eventually freed, they were never allowed to resume living together as a married couple. Keyes died in 1571. Mary, who had set up her own household at Aldersgate, died in 1578. She was buried at Westminster Abbey in her mother’s tomb.

  Except for Mary Sidney’s letter to her mother and the letters mentioned by Katherine Hastings, all of the letters and other writings quoted in this novel are genuine, although I have modernized spelling and punctuation in some cases. Likewise, all of the execution speeches are taken from contemporary accounts, except for Guildford Dudley’s speech, the substance of which was not recorded.

  My depiction of the Lord of Misrule’s antics is based upon contemporary accounts of the festivities. The December 1551 celebration featured “an infamous tabernacle, a representation of the holy sacrament in its monstrance, which [was] wetted and perfumed in most strange fashion, with great ridicule of the ecclesiastical estate.” This is as good a place as any to make clear (if anyone is in doubt) that the religious bigotry expressed by various characters echoes their own beliefs, not mine.

  There is no evidence that Jane and Frances attended the trials or the executions I have depicted them as attending, but there is nothing putting them elsewhere at the time. Likewise, the execution-eve visits each woman makes to her husband are products of my imagination, but it is possible such visits were allowed. Mary’s refusal to give an audience to Jane Dudley in July 1553, and Frances’s arrival at Beaulieu at two in the morning to see Mary, are both recorded by contemporary sources.

  Mary did indeed make plans to escape from England in 1550, but her confiding her intentions to Frances is purely my invention.

  Jane Grey’s exact birth date is unknown, but Eric Ives convincingly places it in the spring of 1537 rather than the October date of tradition. The birthdates of the children of John and Jane Dudley are also unrecorded. An unnamed Dudley son was christened in March 1537, and Diego Hurtado de Mendoza, who was Guildford’s godfather, was in England from May 1537 to September 1538; I think it possible then that Guildford was the Dudley son born in March 1537 and that Diego served as his godfather, not at his christening, but at his confirmation on a later date. With the other Dudley children, I have followed the estimates of their ages given by Simon Adams, a specialist on Robert Dudley, or, failing that, those given in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

  Anne Seymour, born in 1538, was only twelve when she married Jack Dudley. I therefore think it likely her marriage had yet to be consummated when her husband was imprisoned in 1553.

  Robert Dudley’s marriage to Amy Robsart was later characterized by William Cecil as a “carnal” marriage, a love match, and that it was not a particularly illustrious match for an earl’s son is further evidence the couple married for love. That Mary Dudley’s marriage to Henry Sidney might have also been a love match is suggested by the fact that she had two wedding ceremonies: one at Esher, the other at Ely Place. It may be that the first was secret, the second public. Her marriage was certainly less distinguished than that of her younger sister, Katherine Dudley, who married the heir to an earldom.

  A supposedly contemporary description of Jane Grey’s physical appearance states she was thin and very small, with reddish-brown eyes and nearly red hair. As Leanda de Lisle has observed, however, this description may have been the invention of Richard Davey, a modern biographer of Jane, so I have not relied upon it. No portrait has been definitively identified as being an authentic one of Jane, but John Stephan Edwards makes a good case for a portrait at Syon House as being a true one of Jane. I have therefore followed that portrait, which shows an auburn-haired young woman with brown eyes, in my own novel.

  There is no historical evidence that Adrian Stokes suffered the loss of a fiancée. That is my invention.

  A “Mistress Ellen,” who is otherwise unidentified, accompanied Jane Grey to the scaffold. As Leanda de Lisle points out, the story about her being Jane’s nurse is a modern invention, possibly inspired by Juliet’s nurse. I supplied her with the first name of “Ursula.”

  Recently, several historians, including Eric Ives and Leanda de Lisle, have questioned the story that Frances married Adrian Stokes on March 9, 1554, just weeks after her daughter’s and husband’s deaths. It has been suggested the wedding actually took place in 1555 and there was confusion caused by the official practice of dating the New Year from March 25. In researching this book, however, I found in the United Kingdom’s National Archives a 1560 inquisition post mortem for Frances. To my dismay, it gave the March 9, 1554, wedding date as well as precise birth and death dates of Elizabeth Stokes, her place of birth and death, and the ages of Katherine and Mary Grey—and because it used regnal years, not calendar years, it was unlikely there was confusion over new style/old style dates. While it is possible this information is incorrect, as it sometimes is in inquisitions post mortem, it also seemed likely the dates could have come from Adrian Stokes himself, who would have known this information better than anyone else.

  There is, however, evidence that contradicts the March 1554 marriage date. A land grant to Frances dated April 10, 1554, makes no mention of Stokes. As late as April 21, 1555, France
s was still thought to be free to remarry: Simon Renard, the imperial ambassador, passed along the news that the Earl of Devon had been proposed as a husband for her. As Judith Field, a commenter on my blog, pointed out, however, these discrepancies could be readily explained if Frances kept her marriage secret for a time. After wrestling with the matter, I finally chose to use the March 1554 date as the historically more likely one, along with the scenario of a secret marriage.

  ***

  Several of the characters who have appeared in this novel have traditionally been treated harshly in historical fiction, as well as in history. The reader may wonder why I have chosen to treat them differently.

  For centuries, John Dudley, Duke of Northumberland, was viewed as one of history’s villains, whose insatiable ambition led him to destroy the innocent Somerset and to manipulate the hapless Edward VI. In the past few decades, however, historians have taken a much more balanced view of this man. As Susan Brigden and other historians have pointed out, there is evidence that Somerset was involved in some sort of plot against Northumberland in 1551, even if its actual details were exaggerated by the government. Far from ruthlessly engineering the downfall of Somerset, Northumberland arranged for the marriage of their children and restored the duke to his position on the council, although his attempt at reconciliation failed.

  It continues to be debated whether the plan to alter the succession originated with Edward VI himself or with Northumberland, but it is beyond question the young king held rigidly Protestant views and made it clear to Mary he disapproved of her Catholic practices, berating her in person on occasion. Certainly once his “devise” was revealed, Edward VI himself demanded his councilors put it into effect. Thomas Cranmer would later tell Mary it was not Northumberland, but other members of the council and Edward, who pressured him into supporting Jane as queen. He wrote that the king himself required him to sign the document supporting the king’s will. Furthermore, while the devise certainly benefited the Dudley family, it should be noted that Northumberland’s first choice of a bride for Guildford Dudley had not been Jane Grey, but Margaret Clifford, who was much further from the throne than her cousin Jane. William Cecil indicated that the idea of a match between Guildford and Jane originated with the Marchioness of Northampton.

  As Edward VI sickened, rumors swirled that Northumberland, hated by many because of his role in executing the popular Somerset and because of his suppression of Kett’s rebellion, was poisoning him. (Even Frances alleged that Northumberland had poisoned her husband, and Jane claimed to have been “envenomed” in the Duchess of Northumberland’s house.) The charges against Northumberland at his trial did not include regicide, and modern historians give the rumors of poison little credence, although it may be that a wise woman was called upon when conventional physicians failed to cure the king. An associated story, which still is repeated today, even had it that the duke switched Edward VI’s body with that of a youth murdered for that purpose. This story is most improbable. The merchant John Burcher, the only contemporary source to record this particular rumor, was residing in Strasburgh at the time and did not name his informant. Edward VI was buried on August 8, long after Northumberland had been imprisoned in the Tower. Had there been doubts the body was the king’s, it would have been simple for Mary’s government to ascertain the truth.

  Northumberland’s private life does not support the notion of him as a scheming, coldhearted man. Jane, his wife, loved him deeply, as her letter to Lady Paget pleading for his life, and her will, make heartbreakingly apparent. In a revealing letter, the duke, ailing and depressed, wrote, “Surely, but for a few children, which God has sent me, which also helps to pluck me on my knees, I have no great cause to desire to tarry much longer here.” He was indulgent to his son John when he ran into debt, telling him to inform him of his bills so they could be paid. Facing execution, he begged for the lives of his children, and though his motives for his last-minute conversion to Catholicism will likely never be known, it has been speculated that he did so in hopes of saving his sons from his fate.

  As for the Dudley son most affected by the king’s devise, little is known about Guildford Dudley’s personality. Jane Grey’s letter to Mary suggests he might have been a bit of a mother’s boy, but her account is hardly impartial and was written at a time when Jane had no reason to think kindly of her husband or his family. There is certainly no historical basis for depicting Guildford as dissolute, cruel, or cowardly, as he is characterized by many novelists. The gracious note he wrote to Jane’s father after Henry Grey’s ill-judged participation in Wyatt’s rebellion surely says something about Guildford’s character, as does the quiet dignity with which he went to the scaffold, according to an anonymous chronicler who was probably employed at the Tower. The chronicler Grafton, who may have known Guildford, wrote, “that comely, vertuous, and goodly gentleman the lorde Gylford Duddeley most innocently was executed, whom God had endowed with suche vertues, that even those that never before the tyme of his execution saw hym, dyd with lamentable teares bewayle his death.”

  Finally, we come to Jane Grey and her family, a subject about which fiction has come to overlay fact so heavily that distinguishing between the two has become difficult if not impossible. In my own attempt to do so, I have been heavily influenced by the research of Leanda de Lisle and Eric Ives, who have done much to clear away the myths that permeate most modern works about Jane and those who brought her to the throne. I am indebted to their research for much of what I say below, though any errors I may have fallen into are of course my own.

  There is a widespread notion, stated as a matter of fact in most modern accounts of Lady Jane, that Adrian Stokes was a pretty boy half Frances’s age. A friend of Adrian’s recorded his birth to the hour in a horoscope: Adrian was born on March 4, 1519, making him less than two years younger than Frances, born on July 16, 1517. A portrait of a stout, middle-aged lady and a much younger man, for centuries described as one of Frances and Adrian Stokes, was identified recently as a portrait of Mary, Lady Dacre, and her son, Gregory Fiennes.

  Adrian Stokes is named variously as Frances’s steward and as her master of horse, but in either case, such a position in a noble household was a responsible one requiring a man of ability, not a sinecure for the decorative and vacuous. Indeed, privy council records show that in the 1540s, Adrian Stokes served in France as marshal of the garrison of Newhaven (now Ambleteuse), where he had command of ten men.

  There is no evidence Frances’s match with Adrian offended Queen Mary or caused Frances’s daughters to be taken from her care, as is claimed by some authors. It seems to have been understood as a means for Frances to distance herself from the royal succession. Queen Elizabeth’s early biographer, William Camden, wrote that Frances’s marriage was “to her dishonor, but yet for her security.”

  The most enshrined legend about Frances and, to a much lesser extent, her husband Henry Grey is that they were brutal parents who made young Jane Grey’s life a miserable one. This belief is based chiefly on Roger Ascham’s book The Schoolmaster, written long after the deaths of Jane and her parents, in which Ascham recalled Jane complaining about the “pinches, nips, and bobs” she received from her parents, in contrast to the lessons she received from her kindly tutor, John Aylmer. Yet in a letter to John Sturm written a few months after the visit, Ascham commented only on his admiration for Jane’s command of Greek: “I was immediately admitted into her chamber, and found the noble damsel—Oh, ye gods!—reading Plato’s Phaedro in Greek, and so thoroughly understanding it that she caused me the greatest astonishment.” If anything disturbed Ascham about his recent encounter with Jane, he did not see fit to mention it to Sturm at the time.

  Contemporary correspondence by those who knew Jane shows a father who took pride in his daughter’s intellectual accomplishments and who shared her religious views. In July 1551, Jane wrote to thank the reformer Heinrich Bullinger in Zurich for “that little volu
me of pure and unsophisticated religion” which he had sent to her and her father; both were reading it, she added. Earlier, in May 1551, while Jane’s father was in Scotland, John ab Ulmis wrote to Bullinger that he had been visiting Jane and her mother at Bradgate, where he had been “passing these two days very agreeably with Jane, my lord’s daughter, and those excellent and holy persons Aylmer and Haddon [Jane’s tutor and the family chaplain].” Ulmis went on to gush, “For my own part, I do not think there ever lived any one more deserving of respect than this young lady, if you regard her family; more learned, if you consider her age; or more happy, if you consider both.” The previous year, in December 1550, Ulmis noted Jane was translating a treatise “On marriage” from the Latin to the Greek as a New Year’s gift for her father, whom Holinshed described as “somewhat learned himself, and a great favorer of those that were learned.” Henry Grey himself wrote of Jane in December 1551 to Bullinger, “I acknowledge yourself also to be much indebted to you on my daughter’s account, for having always exhorted her in your godly letters to a true faith in Christ, the study of the scriptures, purity of manners, and innocence of life.” Robert Wingfield, in a contemporary account of Mary’s victory that is hostile to Henry Grey, described Jane as the duke’s “favourite daughter.”

  It needs to be remembered that Tudor standards of child-rearing were very different from our own: the smart-mouthed children lording it over their hapless parents who are staples of modern television and film would have been regarded with horror by Jane’s contemporaries. The humanist Juan Luis Vives, who had been asked by no less a personage than Catherine of Aragon to advise her on her daughter Mary’s education, wrote, “Never have the rod off a boy’s back; specially the daughter should be handled without any cherishing. For cherishing marreth sons, but it utterly destroyeth daughters.” Even John Aylmer, the tutor whom Ascham recalled Jane speaking of so fondly, wrote letters indicating his belief that the adolescent Jane needed a firm hand.