The Sisters Who Would Be Queen: The tragedy of Mary, Katherine and Lady Jane Grey. Leanda Lisle de

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       Chapter IV The Example of Catherine Parr

      It was only a short boat ride from Dorset House to Seymour Place, but Jane’s new home opened a more independent world for her. At the best of times large aristocratic households were not very good at giving girls the kind of closely supervised lives their parents would have liked. Guardians were often at court or staying with friends, and the girls were left in the care of servants who had less reason than their parents to watch their manners and behaviour.¹ Even an experienced stepmother like Catherine Parr sometimes neglected her duties. The Protector’s wife, Anne, Duchess of Somerset, was shocked to see Parr’s ward, the young Princess Elizabeth, unaccompanied, out in a barge on the Thames one night that summer. There were no such complaints about Sudeley’s care of Jane, but he was an indulgent guardian, with more pressing concerns than babysitting a ten-year-old girl. Jane, a confident child, must have enjoyed the novel sense of freedom this gave her, although she was never left entirely to her own devices.

      When Jane wasn’t at Seymour Place she was attending the Queen dowager’s household with her guardian. In the last year of her life she would return to Catherine’s former house at the royal manor of Chelsea. Here, in the summer the garden boasted orchards of cherry and peach, velvety damask roses and the warm scents of lavender and rosemary. Inside the noise and bustle was greater even than Jane was used to at Bradgate. In addition to the Queen’s Privy Chamber and Maids of Honour, the household included upwards of 120 gentlemen and yeomen. At thirty-five Catherine Parr remained attractive; with a handsome husband she worked hard to stay beautiful, plucking her eyebrows with silver tweezers and dressing in the latest fashions. Children are always fascinated by the rituals of adult grooming and, to the later irritation of her tutor John Aylmer, Jane developed a similar fondness for carefully styled hair and fine clothes. She also grew to share the Queen dowager’s love of music. Catherine and her brother, William Parr of Northampton, were the greatest patrons of musicians at court. The most famous, the five Bassano brothers, provided the only permanent recorder consort known in England before the twentieth century. One brother, Baptista, instructed the Princess Elizabeth in Italian, as well as in playing the lute.

      Jane’s visits to Chelsea, and the return visits to Seymour Place made by the Queen dowager, gave her the opportunity to get to know Elizabeth much better than she had hitherto, although she was acquainted already with some of the princess’s personal staff. Elizabeth’s governess Kate Astley and husband John were old friends of Jane’s family; John Astley would later write a treatise on horsemanship and may have given them both riding lessons.² But the thirteen-year-old princess, who would one day govern the destinies of Katherine and Mary Grey, did not grow close to Jane. A freshskinned adolescent, with her father’s red gold hair and her mother’s famous black eyes, Elizabeth was too old to wish to play with Jane, and was, in any case, unusually self-contained. This gave her a reputation for arrogance in some quarters, but what it reflected principally was anxiety.³ Elizabeth felt acutely the precariousness of her position.

In the first years of her life Elizabeth had gone from being her father’s heir and the daughter of his most beloved wife, to the bastard child of a traitor-adulteress. This had changed again in 1544, when she was restored in line of succession, but she remained illegitimate in law and was now an orphan, dependent on the goodwill of others. Although she loved Catherine Parr for the kindness she showed, Elizabeth was disgusted at her stepmother’s hasty remarriage and, as she observed to her half-sister, Mary, based in St James’s, she felt there was nothing they could say about it, without putting themselves in danger. Sudeley was the brother of the Protector, whom they had little reason to trust, and who had kept the lands and income Elizabeth’s father had left her, largely in his own control. Elizabeth, utterly powerless, was obliged to make the best of what was to her an uncomfortable situation at Chelsea - and Jane was not a particularly welcome presence in Elizabeth’s bleak and uncertain world. Under the terms of Henry’s will, Jane Grey was Elizabeth’s heir, and Elizabeth had seen already how one heir could leapfrog another, from one parliamentary statute to the next. As Elizabeth was notoriously vain, it also can’t have helped that Jane was proving more adept at her studies than either she or the King, both of whom were considered exceptionally intelligent.^*

      Jane’s quick mind was absorbing a curriculum of studies that shared similarities with those of Edward, who was now reading Justin the Martyr’s summary of Greek history and copying phrases from Cicero’s Offices and the Tusculan Disputations. This progress in Latin and Greek was matched by her religious education. Evangelicals were enthusiastic for women to be involved in the study of theology and Catherine Parr set Jane an impressive example. For years she had applied her knowledge of Scripture to the promotion of Church reform, and much of the autumn in Catherine’s household was taken up with her religious projects. The translation of Erasmus’s Paraphrases of the New Testament, which she had overseen (and to which the Princess Mary had contributed), was prepared for publication (and would prove a bestseller).⁴ But she was also completing an original work of her own, written when Henry was alive, and which she had not then dared make public. Entitled The Lamentation of a Sinner, it described her search for salvation. It was distinctly Lutheran in tone, and Henry had considered Luther a heretic, but Jane’s step-grandmother, Katherine Suffolk, helped persuade the Queen dowager the time was ripe for its publication.⁵

      For the first time Jane had a sense of what it was like to be a member of a network of clever women, working together and propagating new and exciting religious ideas.⁶ The evangelical reformation, meanwhile, was proceeding apace all around her. The ambassador to the Hapsburg Emperor, Charles V, complained that the preachers giving the public sermons at court seemed ‘to vie with each other СКАЧАТЬ