The House of Tudor

by Alison Plowden

  The fact that Elizabeth and Katherine Grey were on bad terms was soon being noted with interest in certain circles, and during the second half of 1559 Sir Thomas Challoner, the English ambassador in Brussels, warned the Queen about rumours that the Spaniards were planning to kidnap Lady Katherine. Apparently the idea was to marry her to Don Carlos, Philip’s imbecile son, ‘or with some other person of less degree if less depended on her’, and then to keep her as a possible counter-claimant to France’s Mary Stuart should the occasion arise. Since Katherine was known to be ‘of discontented mind’ and not regarded or esteemed by the Queen, it was thought there would be no difficulty in enticing her away. Elizabeth reacted characteristically by reinstating her cousin as a lady of the Privy Chamber and telling a puzzled de Quadra that she regarded the Lady Katherine as her daughter and was thinking of formally adopting her.

  In fact, Katherine was not in the least interested in Spanish intrigues or in the ramifications of the European political scene. She was interested only in her own plans to marry Edward Seymour, Earl of Hertford, son of the former Protector Somerset. She must have known Edward Seymour since she was a child - he had been suggested as a bridegroom for her sister Jane - but it was during Queen Mary’s reign, when Katherine had been staying with the Duchess of Somerset at Hanworth, that the two young people had first begun ‘to accompany together’ and to think about marriage. The idea of the match had been discussed in the Seymour and Grey families, and in the spring of 1559 Katherine’s mother had agreed to approach the Queen for her consent. But unfortunately the approach was never made. Frances Suffolk, or Frances Stokes as she now was, became ill that summer and by November she was dead. The lovers now had no one to speak for them and the whole affair might well have died a natural death if Hertford’s sister. Lady Jane Seymour had not decided to take a hand.

  Jane Seymour was one of Katherine’s fellow maids of honour, an ambitious, energetic young woman determined that her brother should not lose the chance of making such a brilliant match. It was Jane who brought the couple together again (they had quarrelled when Hertford began to take an interest in another, quite inferior, girl); and it was almost certainly she who put the disastrous idea of a secret marriage into their heads. The three of them met in Lady Jane’s private closet at Westminster sometime in October 1560 and there Katherine and Edward Seymour plighted their troth. It was agreed that the wedding should take place at the Earl’s house in Cannon Row ‘the next time that the Queen’s highness should take any journey’, and Jane undertook to have a clergyman standing by.

  Opportunity came early in December, when the Queen decided to go down to Eltham for a few days’ hunting. Katherine pleaded toothache and Jane, who was already consumptive, was often ailing. As soon as Elizabeth was safely out of the way, at about eight o’clock in the morning, the two girls slipped out of the palace by the stairs in the orchard and walked along the sands by the river to Cannon Row. The marriage ceremony was performed in Hertford’s bedroom and afterwards, while Lady Jane kept guard in another room, the newly married couple went to bed and had ‘carnal copulation’. They had not long together - awkward questions would be asked if Katherine failed to appear at dinner with the Controller of the Household - and after about an hour and a half they had to start scrambling back into their clothes. This was a point on which they were later to be closely questioned. The authorities found it hard to believe that such gently nurtured young people could have performed the complicated feat of getting dressed unaided. They must, it was felt, have had assistance - and accomplices.

  Katherine had achieved her immediate ambition, but her altered status made little practical difference to her circumstances. She and Hertford still had to be content with furtive meetings at Westminster, Greenwich or Cannon Row - a few odd hours snatched whenever they could manage it. How long they intended to try and keep their secret, it is impossible to say. Neither of them appears to have given any serious thought to the problem of how they were going to break the news, but it was not long before events began to catch up with them. Jane Seymour died in March 1561 and without her help it became more difficult for them to meet. Then the Queen decided to send the Earl of Hertford abroad as a companion to William Cecil’s son, who was going to France to finish his education. This was an unexpected complication, to be followed by another, not so unexpected. Katherine thought she might be pregnant but could not, or would not, say for certain. Her husband finally went off to France in April, probably rather relieved to escape, at least temporarily, from a situation which was rapidly getting out of control, but promising to return if she wrote to tell him she was definitely with child.

  Left alone, Katherine seems at last to have begun to realize the enormity of what she had done. The reality of her pregnancy could no longer be ignored and already the matrons of the Court were casting suspicious glances at her shape. She wrote to Hertford, begging him to come back and support her, but could not be sure that her letters were reaching him. In July she had to accompany the Queen on the East Anglian progress and at the beginning of August, while the Court was at Ipswich, the secret finally came out.

  The Queen, understandably, was furious. She had never liked Katherine but had always treated her fairly. Now the girl had repaid her with ingratitude, deceit and perhaps worse. Anything which touched on the succession touched Elizabeth on her most sensitive spot. She was never to forget her own experiences as a ‘second person’ during Mary’s reign and of the intrigues which inevitably surrounded an heir presumptive. In the activities of Katherine Grey she had caught a sulphurous whiff of treason. Katherine’s choice of husband was also unfortunate. The Seymours had a reputation for being politically ambitious and their connection with the royal family was too close for comfort. If Katherine and Edward Seymour were now to produce a son, it would complicate still further an already complicated dynastic situation. The new Countess of Hertford was therefore promptly committed to the Tower, where her husband soon joined her, and the government’s investigators proceeded to extract from them every detail of that hole-and-corner marriage in the house at Cannon Row.

  On 24 September Katherine duly gave birth to a healthy son, who was christened after his father in the chapel of St. Peter-ad-Vincula and in close proximity to the headless remains of both his grandfathers, two of his great-uncles and his aunt Jane Grey. The most exhaustive enquiries had failed to uncover any evidence of a plot involving the baby’s parents, although the Queen was still not entirely convinced. But the Hertfords resolutely denied that anyone, apart from the strong-minded Jane Seymour, had ever ‘advised, counselled or exhorted them to marry’, and since it was no longer a treasonable act to marry a member of the royal family without the sovereign’s consent, the sovereign was obliged to fall back on the expedient of attacking the validity of the marriage.

  As the only witness to the ceremony was now dead and the officiating clergyman had disappeared without trace, this did not present much difficulty - especially as Katherine was predictably unable to produce the one piece of documentary evidence she had possessed. Before he left for France, her husband had given her a deed, signed and sealed with his own hand, assuring her of an income of a thousand pounds a year in the event of his death. This deed, Katherine tearfully informed her interrogators, she had put away in a safe place, but ‘with removing from place to place at progress time, it is lost and she cannot tell where it is become.’ The Queen put the whole matter in the hands of the ecclesiastical authorities and on lo May 1562 the Archbishop of Canterbury gave judgement that there had been no marriage between the Earl of Hertford and Lady Katherine Grey. He censured them for having committed fornication and recommended a heavy fine and imprisonment during the Queen’s pleasure.

  The culprits remained in the Tower, but there were some compensations. The Lieutenant, Sir Edward Warner, was a kindly man. He allowed Katherine to keep her pet monkeys and dogs, in spite of the damage these quite un-housetrained creatures were doing to government property, and
he also allowed her to see her husband, turning a discreetly blind eye to unlocked doors. Warner later justified himself by explaining that having once been over-persuaded, he thought there was no point in continuing to keep his prisoners apart and during the summer of 1562 the young Hertfords enjoyed the nearest approach to a normal married life they were ever to know. Then, in February 1563 came the inevitable sequel - Katherine had another baby, another healthy son.

  This time the Queen was really angry. She found it very difficult to forgive her cousin for her apparently cynical disregard for the authority and prestige of the crown; for the fact that instead of showing contrition, or even any understanding of the nature of her offence, she had gone and done it again. To one of Elizabeth’s highly disciplined intelligence and acute political awareness, it naturally seemed incredible that Katherine’s behaviour stemmed rather from sheer thoughtlessness, a complete inability to grasp the realities of her position, than from deliberate contempt. At all events, the Queen was now determined that both the Hertfords should be made to realize, beyond possibility of mistake, just what it meant to have ‘so arrogantly and contemptuously’ offended their prince. There were no more stolen meetings and during the summer an outbreak of plague in the capital provided an opportunity to separate the little family more completely. The Earl and the elder child were released into the custody of the Duchess of Somerset, while Katherine and the baby Thomas were sent down to Pirgo in Essex to her uncle Lord John Grey.

  There was no question now about Katherine’s contrition. John Grey reported that ‘the thought and care she taketh for the want of her Majesty’s favour, pines her away’. She was eating hardly anything and was so permanently dissolved in tears that her uncle became seriously worried about her health. Katherine’s troubles were aggravated by the fact that she appears to have been virtually destitute. She had no money, no plate and, according to John Grey, was so poorly furnished that he was ashamed to let William Cecil have an inventory of her possessions. Lord John reluctantly supplied the deficiencies but he baulked at paying for his charge’s keep and the Queen was soon complaining about his expenses. Lord John retaliated by sending a detailed account to Cecil. The weekly rate for ‘my lady of Hertford’s board, her child and her folks’ amounted to £6 16s 8d. As this included eight servants and even five shillings for the widow who washed the baby’s clothes, it seems reasonable enough but Elizabeth, who was never averse to having things both ways, decided that henceforward the Earl of Hertford should be made responsible for Katherine’s maintenance and he was ordered to pay a sum of over a hundred pounds to the Greys.

  The Queen was not normally vindictive and once she felt satisfied that the Hertfords had thoroughly learnt their lesson, she might have responded to their frequent tear-stained appeals for mercy-indeed, hints to this effect had already been dropped. Unfortunately, though, in the spring of 1564 John Hales, a clerk in the Lord Chancellor’s Office, was tactless enough to publish a treatise supporting Katherine Grey’s claim to be recognized as heir presumptive and maintaining that her marriage was a valid one. ‘This dealing of his’, remarked William Cecil (who also privately supported Katherine Grey), ‘offendeth the Queen’s majesty very much.’ The succession was a matter which Elizabeth regarded as being entirely her own business and over which she would not tolerate outside interference on any pretext. She was not in the least appeased by Hales’s assurance that his only thought had been to promote the Protestant Tudor line against the Catholic Mary Stuart; nor was her temper improved by the knowledge that there was widespread public sympathy for the imprisoned Katherine and considerable public support for her dynastic claims. She was, after all, an Englishwoman, a staunch Protestant and had already only too effectively proved her ability to bear sons.

  In the summer of 1565 an element of black comedy entered the story. On 21 August William Cecil wrote tersely to his friend Sir Thomas Smith: ‘Here is an unhappy chance and monstrous. The sergeant-porter, being the biggest gentleman in this court, hath married secretly the Lady Mary Grey, the least of all the court. They are committed to separate prisons. The offence is very great.’ The current Spanish ambassador, Guzman de Silva, passing on the news to King Philip, recorded that Mary Grey, who was little, crookbacked and very ugly, had married a gentleman named Keys, sergeant-porter at the palace. ‘They say’, he added, ‘the Queen is very much annoyed and grieved thereat.’

  In fact, this grotesquely pathetic attachment between dwarfish, nineteen-year-old Mary Grey and the enormous gate-keeper, a middle-aged widower with several children, was the last straw as far as Elizabeth was concerned. Both the Grey sisters were now under strict house arrest and Katherine had given up all hope of release. She died in January 1568 at the age of twenty-seven of a mixture of tuberculosis and a broken heart. Two years later Hertford was at last allowed to go free, although the Queen never really forgave him. The Earl remained faithful to Katherine’s memory for nearly thirty years, eventually marrying again to a daughter of the powerful Howard clan. But he never gave up the fight to have his first marriage recognized and his sons’ legitimacy established - a fight he finally won in 1606. He lived on until 1621 and was to see his grandson maintain the family tradition by trying to elope with Lady Arbella Stuart, another member of the royal house.

  Mary Grey - or rather Mary Keys, for the legality of her improbable marriage never seems to have been challenged - spent about six years as the involuntary house-guest of various unwilling hosts, but was released after her husband’s death; she at least had never compounded her offence by having children. The last sad little remnant of the once great house of Suffolk died in poverty and obscurity in the summer of 1578; but outcast though she had become, under the terms of her great-uncle’s will Mary Keys died heiress to the throne of England - that deadly legacy which had ruined the lives of the descendants of Mary Brandon, born Mary Tudor.

  14: WHEN HEMPE IS SPUN

  The trivial prophecy which I heard when I was a child, and Queen Elizabeth was in the flower of her years, was,

  ‘When hempe is sponne England’s done’

  whereby it was generally conceived, that after the princes had reigned which had the principal letters of that word ‘hempe’ (which were Henry, Edward, Mary, Philip, and Elizabeth), England should come to utter confusion; which, thanks be to God, is verified only in the change of name; for that the king’s style is now no more of England but of Britain.

  Francis Bacon

  By 1568, after ten years on the English throne, Elizabeth Tudor had matured into a vigorous, elegant, self-confident woman in her mid-thirties, who, by intelligent statecraft and good housekeeping, had lifted her country out of its mid-century doldrums and won the respect, if not always the approval, of her fellow monarchs. Any misgivings which her subjects may once have felt about embarking on another experience of petticoat government had long since vanished and the love affair between Queen and people - foundation and cornerstone of the whole astonishing Elizabethan epic – was already a vital part of the national ethos. As a relationship it is something unique in history and, like most love affairs, defies too close an analysis. Probably it was best and most succinctly described in two verses of the popular ballad – A Song Between the Queen’s Majestie and Englande – first printed in 1571, but written quite early in the reign.

  I am thy lover fair,

  Hath chosen thee to mine heir;

  And my name is merry Englande;

  Therefore, come away,

  And make no more delay,

  Sweet Bessie! Give me thy hand.

  Here is my hand.

  My dear lover Englande,

  I am thine both with mind and heart,

  Forever to endure,

  Thou mayest be sure,

  Until death us two do part.

  ‘Until death us two do part’...The fear that Elizabeth might die with the succession still unsettled haunted all politically conscious Englishmen, who were only too well aware that their present
peace and prosperity depended, quite literally, on the slender thread of the Queen’s life. The terrifying ease with which that thread might be cut was demonstrated in the autumn of 1562, when Elizabeth caught a virulent strain of smallpox and did very nearly die. Not surprisingly, this scare led to a renewed onslaught on the Queen to name her successor and to get married. When Parliament met in January 1563, the Speaker of the Commons wasted no time in presenting a petition referring to ‘the great terror and dreadful warning’ of the Queen’s illness. He went on to paint a gloomy picture of the ‘unspeakable miseries’ of civil war, foreign interference, bloodshed and destruction of lives, property and liberty which lay in wait for the country if she were to die without a known heir. A few days later, the House of Lords presented another, similar petition which begged the Queen to dispose herself to marry ‘where it shall please you, to whom it shall please you, and as soon as it shall please you’.

  The Queen received these impassioned pleas graciously enough, but she would not be stampeded into action she might later regret. She knew she was mortal, she told the Commons, and asked them to believe that she, who had always been so careful of her subjects’ welfare in other matters, would not be careless in this, which concerned them all so nearly. But, because it was a matter of such importance, she would not make any hasty answer. In fact, she would defer making any answer at all until she had been able to consider it further. ‘And so I assure you all’, she ended, ‘that, though after my death you may have many step-dames, yet shall you never have a more natural mother than I mean to be unto you all.’