Tudor_Passion. Manipulation. Murder. the Story of England's Most Notorious Royal Family

by Leanda de Lisle

  APPENDIX 3

  GUILDFORD AND JANE DUDLEY

  GUILDFORD DUDLEY’S PLACE IN THE MYTHS CONCERNING HIS WIFE Lady Jane Grey is a dark one. In some of the stories Guildford emerges as little better than a whining, spoilt, rapist. To clear his name it is worth recording the few facts we have concerning Guildford’s relationship with his young wife, drawn from sources predating 19 July 1553.

  The couple had an arranged marriage, as was the norm for children of the nobility, and at the usual age. There is no source written before Jane’s overthrow to support the oft-repeated Italian story that Jane resisted the marriage.

  It was 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 and Edward VI had already described Guildford as ‘born to achieve celebrity’ and a man from whom his subjects could expect ‘great things’.1 It seems doubtful Jane would have objected to this, later stories notwithstanding. Her European mentor and correspondent Heinrich Bullinger expressed the view that by the laws of nature and God a woman should not rule. Guildford was referred to sometimes as king while Jane was queen, but again there are no sources written before Jane’s overthrow that suggest she was under any pressure to pre-empt Parliament’s decision on the title. In the procession on the day Jane was proclaimed queen, Guildford was no more than her consort. His name was not mentioned in the proclamation that declared Jane the queen, and his signature does not appear alongside hers in the official documents she signed ‘Jane the queen’.

  Venetian reports, later written up by three different Italians, include what may be a garbled account of a petition Jane made in the Tower in the expectation of a pardon after 19 July.2 These cast the blame for the attempt to keep Mary I from the throne in July 1553 on John Dudley’s supposed ambition to make his son king. In these reports ‘Jane’ describes bitter arguments with Guildford and his mother over his expectation that he will be king. Despite this supposed ill feeling, the Italians also later relayed a story describing how Guildford asked to see Jane on the final night of their lives, and embrace her one last time. She was said to have rebuffed him, saying it would be too distressing for them both, and that it was better to prepare for what was to come with prayer. It paints a very Italian picture of a passionate young man thinking of fleshly matters, while the pious Jane focuses on God.

  It is impossible to know what stories, from these reports, originated with Jane and what did not, but it is worth comparing what we know with what we are told. We know that on the last day of her reign Jane named her godson, Guildford. This suggests she respected him, at the very least. Such positive feelings are confirmed in later comments concerning Guildford, which are written and signed in her own hand, and therefore carry more weight that any reported speech. They describe him as a co-martyr. It is also notable that her last letters are signed using her married name, Lady Jane Dudley.3

  English contemporaries described Guildford as a ‘comely, virtuous and goodly gentleman’ who ‘most innocently was executed’.4 On balance the evidence suggests his wife shared these views of him.

  APPENDIX 4

  THE MYTH OF FRANCES BRANDON THE CHILD ABUSER

  I BELIEVED I HAD SUCCESSFULLY DEMOLISHED THE VARIOUS MYTHS concerning Frances in my triple biography of her daughters Jane, Katherine and Mary Grey, but one piece of ‘evidence’ is still used to support the old tropes.

  The accusations of child abuse against Frances are built on a story, related about Jane almost a decade after she died, in a book called The Schoolmaster, written by Elizabeth Tudor’s one-time tutor, Roger Ascham. It describes the thirteen-year-old Jane reading the Phaedo of Plato in Greek at her family home at Bradgate in Leicestershire while the rest of the household are out hunting. Interrupted briefly from her quiet study, Jane explains that she loves learning because her lessons with her kindly tutor are a respite from the abuse of her parents, who pinch and nip at her if she doesn’t perform every task perfectly. ‘One of the greatest benefits that God ever gave me, is that He sent me so sharp, severe parents and so gentle a schoolmaster’, Ascham recalls her saying. Frances’ modern-day detractors refer to these as ‘Jane’s own words’. They are, of course, no such things. They are reported speech, written by Roger Ascham.

  As I described in The Sisters Who Would be Queen, while Roger Ascham really did meet Jane, when he wrote to her referring to their meeting a few months later he commented only on her parents’ pride in her work.

  Her ‘gentle’ tutor, John Aylmer, was meanwhile writing letters to a Swiss theologian complaining that the teenager ‘was at that age [when] . . . all people are inclined to follow their own ways’, and asked how best to ‘provide bridles for restive horses’ such as this spirited girl.

  So why did Ascham tell this story? His book, The Schoolmaster, was intended to promote a kindlier method of teaching than the beatings commonly delivered to recalcitrant pupils. But it is also notable that Ascham began writing The Schoolmaster in 1563, the year Katherine Grey had her second son, and while the MP John Hales was writing his book supporting Katherine’s claim as Elizabeth’s heir. It was obviously helpful that the passage about Jane chimed with elegies and ballads that were being published and republished that year, also praising her virtues and blaming her execution for treason either on the ambition of her father and father-in-law, or on Mary I’s cruelty. Ascham recalled that it was William Cecil, that great protector of Katherine Grey’s claim, who suggested, that summer, that he write his book.

  The Schoolmaster was published (posthumously) in 1570, during the aftermath of the 1569 Catholic rising in favour of the rival claims to the throne of Mary, Queen of Scots. That same year a fraudulent letter appeared in a new edition of Foxe’s Martyrs, from ‘Jane’ to her father, blaming her death on his actions. A final point to make about the Ascham story is that, in common with an Italian story describing Jane being bullied by her parents into marrying Guildford (for more on which see the Appendix on Guildford), Frances is only ever mentioned in conjunction with her husband, not as the dominating figure she has become in modern literature, in which she has been used very much as Mary I has been used with Elizabeth I, that is as the shadow that throws the heroine into a more brilliant light.

  It is quite probable that Frances and her husband were strict – loving parents of this period were expected to be ‘sharp, severe, parents’. But Jane’s Italian tutor, Michel Angelo Florio, observed that Jane was particularly close to her mother and in 1559, when Frances died, both her remaining daughters were at her side.

  APPENDIX 5

  THE OBSCURE MARGARET CLIFFORD, HEIR TO THE THRONE 1578–96

  MARGARET CLIFFORD WAS THE ONLY CHILD OF HENRY CLIFFORD, Earl of Cumberland, and Eleanor Brandon, the younger daughter of Henry VIII’s sister, Mary, the French queen. Eleanor died young in 1547, leaving Cumberland so unhappy that his servants fed him on breast milk to keep him alive. Cumberland avoided court in King Edward’s time, and in 1552 he refused to marry his daughter to Guildford Dudley, even when Edward VI had pressed him to do so. The following year, when Edward VI was dying, he agreed – under who knows what pressure – to betroth her instead to Guildford’s aging uncle, Sir Andrew Dudley.

  With the overthrow of Jane Grey the betrothal was broken, and Margaret Clifford was married to Lord Strange, later Earl of Derby – a descendant of Henry VII’s stepfather. The wedding, which took place in 1555 and was attended by both Mary I and King Philip, provided some of the greatest court spectacles of the reign. Since it was evident Mary I did not want Elizabeth as her heir, Margaret Clifford hoped Mary I would name her, arguing that with the Grey sisters excluded by reason of their father’s treason, she was next in line under the terms of Henry VIII’s will.1

  Margaret Clifford’s sense of self-importance continued during the reign of Queen Elizabeth. Extravagant even by the standards of the higher nobility, Margaret Clifford fell out with her husband and they separated in 1
567. Elizabeth was highly sensitive to scandal at court and tried to patch up the marriage, but without success. Following the death of Mary Grey in 1578 – and with Katherine’s sons declared illegitimate – Margaret Clifford believed her place as Elizabeth’s heir under Henry VIII’s will was clear. Her position was strengthened by the fact she had at least two surviving sons of undoubted legitimacy.

  At New Year 1579, the traditional time for the exchange of presents, Margaret received the most expensive of all the gifts the queen had made to her ladies. This recognised her as second only to Elizabeth at court in terms of royal blood. But she suffered a spectacular fall from grace that summer. In August Elizabeth’s proposed groom the Duke of Anjou spent several days with the queen at Greenwich Palace in great secrecy, but the news was leaked. Those judged responsible were Margaret Clifford and ‘a daughter of the Earl of Bedford’.2 As the Spanish ambassador noted, it was Margaret Clifford, as a senior heir to the crown, whose name was the more significant; she was arrested and held at a gentleman’s house in London.

  Margaret Clifford was known to be close to Robert Dudley, and her partner in crime may have been his brother Ambrose’s wife, Anne, whose father was the Earl of Bedford. But what were her motives? It is possible, given the religious conservatism with which the Cliffords were linked, that Margaret’s actions represented an unholy alliance between Dudley’s Puritan faction and Catholic opponents of the Anjou marriage, who feared it would weaken the Hapbsurgs in the Low Countries.3 But her will indicates she later died a Protestant.4 In any event, it seems her primary motives had little to do with religion at all, but rather with her hopes of one day being queen.

  When Margaret Clifford’s servants were questioned, one of them described how she had a horoscope cast to discover how long Elizabeth had to live.5 Margaret insisted that the supposed ‘magician’ was merely her doctor, and that he had been employed since May to rub potions on her aching limbs. The doctor was executed for witchcraft and Margaret Clifford was never to return to royal favour.6 Margaret Clifford’s sons heeded the warning of their mother’s fate and would never involve themselves in any plots concerning the succession. In this they had their mother’s belated support. In 1593, when her eldest son was approached by a Catholic exile concerning the issue, she advised him to hand the man over to the authorities – which he did.7 She died in 1596 the last surviving great-grandchild of Henry VII.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  HIDDEN IN THE CLOSED ARCHIVES OF BELVOIR CASTLE IS A mysterious Tudor codex. This book bears no title. You open it to find sixty double pages of names and titles linked with inky black lines. In timescale these genealogies stretch back to the mythological last King of the Britons. In reach there are royal names, and those of mere gentry. Odd details stand out: a traitor highlighted, a monarch ignored. It reads like a puzzle waiting to be solved.

  Why is Elizabeth Tudor’s father unnamed? Her mother, Anne Boleyn, features, and under her name is written in Latin, ‘Queen of England, wife of Henry VIII, decapitated’. Everyone of the period knew Anne’s execution was followed with a parliamentary statue declaring Elizabeth illegitimate in law. Is this why she is not listed in the Tudor line, but only in her maternal grandmother’s? Surely no one would have dared place her outside the royal family after she became Queen? Yet under Elizabeth’s name it states she is ‘regina angliae presens’: ‘The present Queen of England’.

  The author may have copied information from earlier herald scrolls, updating details as he did so. This would explain why the bastardized Mary Tudor is not mentioned at all, although her husband, Philip of Spain, is listed as ‘King of England’. But what was the purpose of this codex? The lines connecting different families read like a political map, navigating the bloodlines of those with power, status, land, and the precious royal blood of the family chosen by God to rule. It is likely that whoever commissioned this codex wanted to see how they fitted into it. Here was the basis of their self-esteem. Seeing themselves as part of a line with a past and a future they boosted their intense loyalty to family and to the land on which their wealth and power was based. The man (and in a patriarchal society it was almost always a man) at the head of a great family was steward of his estates, which it was his duty to pass on to his heirs. It was also for him to assert the family honour, and maintain the authority of his line.

  In the fifteenth century the head of a family was owed not only the service and fidelity of his servants and tenants, but also his kin, who would follow him onto battle – as Owen Tudor’s bastard son, Sir David Owen, did for his half nephew, Henry VII. A century later, kin were no longer bound to act in blood for the head of the family, especially against the crown. But family still represented an ideal of stability, which had a spiritual and well as a worldly dimension. In the early period knights were buried in tombs mounted with their effigy on armour, and where prayers were said regularly for their souls. And even after the Reformation, when the prayers had stopped, families still had heraldic symbols engraved where they were buried. These are masculine symbols, but for women family honour and authority was as important as it was for the men, and their role also significant, particularly in the protection and promotion of their sons.

  With Elizabeth I time was running out for the Tudor line. This, my third book on the Tudor succession and the culmination of fifteen years of research, attempts to record their story, amongst the secrets and behind the riddles. My last two books cover later Tudor history and it was intimidating to consider how I might approach the earlier reigns. It was something David Starkey wrote in his biography of the young Henry VIII – Virtuous Prince – that encouraged me to begin before Bosworth: ‘The story of how Henry Tudor [(i.e. Henry VII)] survived against the odds, and won his throne and his bride against even greater odds, is one of the world’s great adventure stories.’ It sounded irresistible, and indeed how could one understand the king, if you only began his life in 1485?

  As I began my research in 2008 I came across another inspiring piece of writing: an article written in the TLS by the eminent historian Cliff Davies. It said, essentially, that there was no such thing as the Tudors, and the word was hardly used or known during the Tudor period. You might think that given I was writing a big, fat book on the Tudors I might not be too thrilled by that, but I read further articles he had written on this and found them all fascinating. I believe the Tudors did have a strong sense of family – even if they did not exactly boast about their humble Welsh origins – but Cliff Davies helped me shift perspective, to examine more closely not how we see the Tudors from our end of the telescope, but how they saw themselves. The Tudors constantly looked to the past as a guide to their actions. To understand what they did and why, we have to know that past. It helped me answer why the princes in the Tower were ‘disappeared’ in 1483, and why Henry VII didn’t investigate their disappearance in 1485 – the source of so many conspiracy theories. It helped explain why Anne Boleyn was beheaded with a sword (clue: Henry VIII was not wondering how she would like to die); it also led me to discover what Henry is really supposed to have quarrelled about with his niece Margaret Douglas in 1547.

  As with my last book I found that separating later comment on the lives of Tudor women from their actual lives was very revealing. Women of this period were often later depicted as either useless, or suspiciously successful, in which case somewhere along the line it is suggested they are ‘unnatural’ or a bit mad. Like Frances Brandon, Margaret Beaufort has been much maligned, as has Mary Tudor, and while I don’t sugar-coat their actions I hope I have helped further erase their old caricatures. I was also very interested in the life of Margaret Douglas. The importance of her place in the succession issues and family politics of the 1560s helped add another dimension to what I already knew about that decade from the work I had done on Katherine Grey for my biography of the Grey sisters – but it is the whole sweep of Margaret’s life that is so extraordinary, from the dramatic circumstances of her birth, to her years at Henry
VIII’s court, to her plotting her son Darnley’s marriage to Mary, Queen of Scots, and, after her death, her grandson, James, becoming King of England. Where I cover the Greys again I have tried to add material to my earlier biography of the sisters; it was looking at Jane from Mary’s perspective, for example, that led me to conclude that it is (ironically) with Mary that the legend of the Innocent Traitor originates.

  This may seem difficult to believe, but I have endeavoured to keep names to a minimum. Many well-known figures don’t get a mention. Those people who do get named are sometimes referred to by their title and sometimes not: the choice depends on what I think will be easier for the reader to remember. If, for example, they change title in the space of a few pages or chapters, or follow hard on the heels of someone else by the same title, or share the same title (like Jasper Tudor and William Herbert) I will stick to their name to avoid confusion. Stewarts and Stuarts are all spelled Stuart – although there was no ‘Stuart’ spelling before Mary, Queen of Scots, it is simply easier to grasp they are the same family when they are spelled the same way. Since I focus on family members, readers may also find the family trees helpful. I have not gone into detailed arguments over every contentious area in the text, but I hope that the Notes will answer most queries.