On 15 July, as John Dudley and William Parr made for Bury St Edmunds to cut off Mary’s support in the Midlands, Jane received news that the five royal ships at sea off the Norfolk coast had mutinied, the sailors forcing the officers to go over to Mary’s side. Reports were also coming in that the tenants of noblemen loyal to Jane were refusing to serve against Mary – an extremely troubling development. It promised social unrest on a scale even more threatening than that of the rebellions of 1549, which had only been crushed with the help of foreign mercenaries.11
Mary pushed home her advantage with promises of reconciliation. On 18 July she issued a proclamation that avoided any mention of Edward’s Device for the Succession; Mary did not want to advertise the fact her brother had excluded her from the throne. Indeed the proclamation did not even name Jane. Instead Mary placed the focus on John Dudley, her ‘most false traitor’. The crisis was explained as the consequence solely of his ambition to make Guildford king, ‘by marriage of a newfound lady’s title’.12 Mary was signalling to the elite that she intended John Dudley be made the scapegoat for the crisis. They had not been able to bring the English people with them in following King Edward’s wishes to exclude Mary from the throne – and she was offering them a way out of their dilemma.
As the support of Jane’s councillors fell away, John Dudley and William Parr received ‘letters of discomfort’ from their friends in the Tower. Jane continued, however, to play her role as queen. While Mary was issuing her proclamation, Jane was raising troops against the Buckinghamshire rebels, naming William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke (the father-in-law of her sister Katherine Grey) as one of two commanders who would deliver ‘such punishment or execution as they deserve’.13
On the morning of the 19th a christening ceremony went ahead in the church on Tower Hill. Jane had been asked to stand as godmother to the infant son of a minor court figure called Edward Underhill, and one of her mother’s cousins stood in her place.14 By tradition, the godmother chose the child’s baptismal name, and Jane had chosen that of her husband, Guildford. Other proxies stood in for Jane’s father, who remained by her side in the Tower, and for William Herbert, who was at his London home, the former royal palace of Baynard’s Castle.
Herbert had claimed he was to meet the French ambassador to discuss bringing foreign auxiliaries from the Netherlands to aid Jane. In reality he was concerned that Mary’s promise to take the councillors’ actions ‘in gracious part’ would not apply to him if he led Jane’s troops into Buckinghamshire, and he was planning with others to desert Jane’s cause. That afternoon, the lord mayor arrived at Baynard’s Castle along with a number of councillors that Herbert had summoned. All were desperate for a peaceful resolution to the crisis. When the City aldermen were also gathered, William Herbert announced they were to ride together to Cheapside to proclaim Mary as queen. Several officials wept with relief. As the men rode towards Cheapside word of their intention spread and a huge, excited crowd gathered. Herbert read the document proclaiming Mary queen, and when he concluded by throwing a hat full of coins in the air, the crowd erupted. ‘From a distance the earth must have looked like Mount Etna’, the Imperial ambassador reported of the cheers and shouts; ‘the people are mad with joy’. To the ambassador’s amazement, Mary’s gamble had paid off. ‘Not a soul could have imagined the possibility of such a thing’, he recalled.
As the council’s soldiers arrived at the Tower, Jane’s father, Harry Grey, ordered his men to put down their weapons. He was informed the council’s soldiers had orders to arrest him if he did not leave willingly and sign the new proclamation. Reluctantly he did as he was asked. Jane’s cloth of state was taken down in the throne room and all the symbols of her reign defaced – ‘a sudden change!’, one of her shocked ladies commented.15 Jane now found herself a prisoner in the Tower from where she had reigned, as was Guildford and his mother.16 ‘Thus Jane was queen for only nine days and those most turbulent ones’, a friend of the Greys wrote to a Swiss divine.17 This referred to the number of days since Jane had been proclaimed at the Tower. In fact her reign, from the death of Edward VI, had lasted thirteen days. The sobriquet ‘the Nine Days’ Queen’ would stick nevertheless. Turning her reign into a mere ‘nine days wonder’ helped diminish its significance, and that was something from which both Mary and her Protestant opponents would benefit. Mary did not want it remembered that Jane had once had serious backing, while Protestants were later embarrassed by their treasonous support for Jane against the Tudor sisters – not just Mary but also Elizabeth; far better for everyone to treat Jane’s reign as a small aberration, engineered by Dudley alone.
The details of Mary’s victory reached John Dudley in Cambridge that night. The tears streamed down his face as he expressed the pitiful hope that ‘Queen Mary was a merciful woman, and that he doubted not thereof.’18 Edward’s entire Privy Council had signed the king’s will, and John Dudley’s confession later confirmed that William Herbert, William Parr and Harry Grey had all been involved in the decision to marry Jane to Guildford. But the Imperial ambassadors told the emperor, ‘it was thought best not to inquire too closely into what had happened’.19 On the eve of his execution in August John Dudley reconverted to Catholicism. He may have hoped it would save his life, but since he believed he was about to face the judgement of God it is more likely he felt misled and betrayed by those former Protestant allies who had now abandoned him. It was a propaganda coup for Mary, but would do nothing for his posthumous reputation. He died damned as a traitor by Catholics, and by his former allies as an apostate as well. For centuries afterwards the crisis of July 1553 would be ascribed to John Dudley’s ambition alone.
On 30 September Mary’s coronation procession through London began, with the Tudor queen carried on a litter in triumph. She was dressed in a ‘mantle and kirtle of cloth of gold’, and with ‘circlet of gold set with rich stones and pearls’ on her head.20 The next day, for the ceremonies in the abbey, she changed into the red velvet robes that would later become her state robes for the opening of Parliament. Carried out for a female monarch for the first time ever, the ceremonies followed closely the crowning of earlier kings, and it was as a king she intended to rule; a right soon confirmed by Parliament. Mary later announced in a speech to Londoners that if she had ‘been established and consecrated as your queen, by the Grace of God only’, so they would owe her ‘respect and due obedience solely on account of the holy unction’ of the coronation. Yet, she noted, ‘How much more entitled as I am now to expect all these things from you’ who had won the crown on the battlefield, and was also queen ‘by the Grace of God, by rightful law of succession, confirmed by your unanimous acclamations and votes’ in Parliament.
Mary was a warrior queen, established by God, by blood, and by law, and she had now ‘taken charge of the supreme authority and administration of the Realm of my forefathers’ as England’s first ruling queen.21
30
REVOLT
QUEEN MARY SAT UNDER HER CANOPY OF ESTATE AT WHITEHALL, A slight figure, with light-coloured eyes.1 Her cousin Margaret Douglas, and her half-sister Elizabeth, watched her from a gallery and enjoyed the music Mary had ordered for the feast. There were harps and choirboys to entertain the new Imperial ambassadors, who had just arrived that October 1553. People wondered if they had come to arrange a marriage for the queen. Aged thirty-seven, Mary had grown accustomed to spinsterhood and claimed she preferred the single life, but she would need to choose a husband, and soon, if she was to have children.
The popular choice of husband for Mary was a great-grandson of Edward IV called Edward Courtenay. Royal and English, he might have been the perfect candidate had he not been imprisoned in the Tower since 1538, the year his father, the Marquess of Exeter, had been executed by Henry VIII for his pro-papal loyalties. Courtenay had been only twelve then, and when he had emerged from the Tower in August, aged twenty-seven, he was a damaged man. Like Edward Plantagenet, Earl of Warwick, who had grown up in the Tower in the reign of Henr
y VII, Courtenay was childish and petulant. Mary did not appear at all interested in him as a husband, and so Courtenay began annoying Elizabeth instead, claiming there were ‘amourettes’ between them.2 What was not yet public knowledge was that Mary was already considering a marriage proposal she had received a few days earlier from Charles V’s son, her cousin Philip of Spain.3 Mary was concerned that her country was threatened by French ambitions, and while Courtenay was of ‘small power and authority’, she believed Philip would ‘be able from his own resources to prevent an enemy attack’.4 Before Mary would accept the proposal, however, she wanted Philip to agree that he would have no role in the government of her kingdom. This was an issue that the new ambassadors would have to grapple with, and indeed accept, before negotiations progressed. Meanwhile Mary was also considering who should succeed her if she proved unable to have children.
Mary confided to one of the Imperial ambassadors that she would not allow her current heir, Elizabeth, ‘to succeed [to the throne] because of her heretical opinions, illegitimacy and characteristics in which she resembled her mother’. Sitting in the gallery alongside Mary’s contemporary, Margaret Douglas, the twenty-year-old was a vision of shining youth, her hair the same corn gold as her late brother Edward’s, her long face, sallow skin and black eyes those of the mercurial, shamed, Anne Boleyn. Since Jane Grey’s imprisonment Elizabeth had become the new focus for the Protestant opposition and it was a role she seemed to flaunt. She continued to affect the plain dress she had worn during her brother’s reign, her servants were all Protestant, and Mary complained she ‘talked every day with heretics and lent an ear to all their evil designs’.5
Mary wanted to name Margaret Douglas as her heir in Elizabeth’s place, but she had been warned that overturning the Act of Succession would be extremely problematic. Although Elizabeth remained a bastard under parliamentary statute and canon law (as Mary did not), she was still King Henry’s daughter. The importance of that had been underscored by Mary’s own victory over Jane Grey.
Mary’s former rival remained in the Tower but, in contrast to her attitude to Elizabeth, Mary was putting the best possible complexion on all Jane’s former actions and a future pardon was expected. It was assumed Mary was acting from feminine instincts for mercy. In fact Mary’s motives were hard-headed. It remained important to Mary that people ascribe the attempt to exclude her from the throne to John Dudley’s ambitions, not Edward’s wishes, and that peace was re-established within the royal family. To this end the Grey family were cast almost as Mary’s co-victims. Harry Grey had been pardoned in July and although the Imperial ambassadors had dissuaded Mary from pardoning Jane too, she persisted in describing Jane as an innocent dupe.6 Mary had always claimed Edward was a puppet of the adults around him. If it were accepted that Jane had been a Dudley puppet, it would support her contention that Edward’s religious settlement and its abolition of the Henrician Mass had been illegal, since it was implemented when he was a minor and too young to know his own mind; and that his Device for the Succession, also written when he was a minor, was in reality John Dudley’s Device.
Venetian reports, later written up by three Italians, include what may be a garbled account of a deposition Jane made in the Tower, aimed at securing her pardon. These repeat the official line that Jane’s reign was all the fault of the Dudleys, with Jane forced to accept the throne with many tears. The French went so far as to claim that Jane had said all along that Mary was the rightful queen. Further stories circulated suggesting that when the crown jewels had been brought to Jane she had expressed shock that a crown was also to be made for Guildford, and when she had bravely insisted she would only make him Duke of Clarence, Guildford and his mother had continued to pressure Jane into having him declared king. This was all nonsense. It had been fully expected that Guildford would be granted the title of king, most likely in the September parliament (the two subsequent consorts of reigning English queens were both given the title).7 He had already been referred to as such. But there are no sources written before Jane’s overthrow that suggest she was under any pressure to pre-empt Parliament’s decision on this matter.
The Imperial ambassadors warned Mary that pardoning Jane would risk ‘scandal and danger’, but to Mary the new focus on Elizabeth suggested that Protestants saw Jane as a busted flush, and she had no wish to taint her reputation with the execution of a young girl. Jane was due to be tried for treason in November, and Mary intended that the trial play a role in the sixteen-year-old’s rehabilitation. In Tudor England treason trials were more about advertising guilt than establishing it, and since Jane clearly had committed treason she would certainly be found guilty. Mary intended to then pardon Jane in recognition that she had been manipulated and as a demonstration of royal mercy and power. These plans began to go awry, however, as the true nature of the Greys’ opposition to Mary resurfaced.
In early November, Harry Grey led the parliamentary opposition in the Lords to the repeal of the Edwardian religious legislation, which he had done so much to promote. On 13 November Jane too chose to advertise her religious sympathies. That morning she left the Tower to walk in procession to the Guildhall where the trial was to take place. A man carrying an axe led the way, as a reminder that the prisoners were being tried for a capital crime. Guildford was dressed dashingly in a black velvet suit slashed with white satin. Jane, behind him, had chosen plain black, and, strikingly, she was carrying an open prayer book in her hands with another, covered in black velvet, hanging from her waist.8 It was a public statement of Protestant piety. Transcripts of Jane’s trial do not survive, but it was said she remained composed even as judgement was read and she was condemned to be burned at the stake – the default punishment for all women convicted of treason.9
Mary focused her anger on Harry Grey and, anxious to protect his daughter, he duly apologised for the trouble he had caused in Parliament. He also withdrew his vociferous opposition to the Spanish marriage, which, it had emerged, was to go ahead. The queen responded graciously and in December the conditions of Jane’s imprisonment were relaxed. But although Jane enjoyed walking in the Queen’s Garden in the Tower, the teenager was also horrified when, on 15 December, the Mass was re-established by royal proclamation. From the Tower Jane composed an open letter to a former tutor who had recently reconverted to Catholicism. The letter described him (and by implication all Catholics) as ‘the deformed imp of the devil’, and called on good people to make a stand against the Mass, which she described as no better than a form of satanic cannibalism. ‘Christ’, Jane reminded her readers, ‘came to set one against another’, and she exhorted them to ‘Return, return again unto Christ’s war.’10
Whether or not Jane intended a literal call to arms, her father was now plotting with a group of like-minded Protestant gentry to rebel against Mary, prevent the Spanish marriage and the legalisation of Catholic ceremonies. They did not plan to restore Jane as queen, however. They recognised the English people wanted a Tudor and intended that Mary should be replaced with Elizabeth, who was to be married to Courtenay. Mary I was right: her sister Elizabeth now posed a dangerous threat. Harry Grey may have feared for his daughter in the Tower, but he knew she could not be judged guilty of the revolt and believed that Mary’s pardon of his earlier crimes proved she was no ruthless Henry VIII. She would surely spare Jane. His allies also assured him that as soon as their revolt succeeded they would free his daughter and imprison Mary in her place.
Mary’s seventy-four-year-old Lord Chamberlain, and a few poorly armed members of the guard, were beyond the outer gates of St James’s Palace when they came under rebel attack.11 As they ran back to the palace the old man fell in the icy mud. His armour of steel plates sewn on to cloth weighed him down, but his men hauled him to his feet as they fled on.12 Mary, in the gallery by the gatehouse, could see them running back into the courtyard, and heard her ladies screaming ‘We shall all be destroyed this night!’ Her Guard battered at the doorway of the hall before running on through
the kitchen and back ways, slamming doors, and seeking their escape at the Watergate. Shouts of ‘Treason! Treason!’ punctuated the clatter as word spread that the royal commander, William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, had gone over to the rebels.13 Yet the porters, who were in charge of palace security, proved both loyal and brave, closing the gates under a shower of rebel arrows.
The planned revolt of Harry Grey and his allies, intended for March, had been exposed by 21 January. The risings had gone off early and Harry Grey’s attempt to raise the Midlands with the rallying cry ‘Resistance to the Spaniard’ had failed. But in Kent it had been a different story. The London militia had deserted en masse to Thomas Wyatt (son of the poet). The Privy Council had urged Mary to leave London. Instead, a week earlier, on 1 February 1554, she had given the speech of her life to City officials at London’s Guildhall. ‘I was wedded to the realm’, she had said in her deep, loud voice, ‘the spousal ring whereof I wear on my finger, and it ever has, and never shall be left off.’ Her subjects, she told the City worthies, were her children, and ‘if the subjects may be loved as a mother doth her child, then assure yourselves that I, your sovereign lady and your queen, do earnestly love and favour you’.14 If Parliament did not think her marriage to Philip of Spain beneficial she would not go through with it, she promised. The speech was greeted with loud cheers – but had it been enough?
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