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

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СКАЧАТЬ Somerset’s letters patent as Lord Protector - Dorset had been the only peer to do so. Now Sharington had the task of persuading Frances to return her daughter to Seymour Place, while Sudeley worked on Dorset.

      Sudeley knew his most effective leverage with Dorset remained the promise that he could deliver the King’s hand in marriage to Jane. And he had a piece of good fortune in this respect. Jane’s principal rival, the infant Mary Queen of Scots, had been sent to live in France so that she could be betrothed to the Dauphin, Francis. Sudeley assured Dorset that ‘if he might once get the King at liberty’ then he could immediately have Edward married to Jane. Dorset hummed and hawed, but, as he later recalled, Sudeley ‘would have no nay’. Sharington, meanwhile, was doing an excellent job at weakening Frances’s resolve, reassuring her that all her fears were misplaced. Eventually, ‘after long debating and much sticking’, she agreed that Jane should be returned to Sudeley’s care and her husband followed suit.⁸ It was a decision they would soon regret, as would Jane.

      Life at Seymour Place that autumn of 1548 was not as Jane remembered it, despite the comforting presence of her old friends from Catherine’s Privy Chamber. The Queen dowager’s stabilising influence on Sudeley was gone and a part of him had not quite accepted she was dead.

      Sudeley spoke often of promoting a parliamentary bill that would prevent people slandering Catherine Parr’s name over her decision to marry him so quickly after Henry VIII’s death. But there were also rumours circulating that he wanted to remarry. Some claimed Sudeley had his eye on the Princess Mary, others that he hoped to marry Lady Jane Grey. He laughed at that suggestion, but admitted to his former brother-in-law, Parr of Northampton, that there would be ‘much ado’ for Jane’s hand. His ward would be twelve in May and able to make a binding marriage contract under canon law. He believed the Somersets, in particular, ‘would do what they could to obtain her for [their son] Lord Hertford’.

      Northampton asked Sudeley if his real intention might be to marry the Princess Elizabeth rather than Jane. Sudeley replied that ‘he had heard that the Protector would clap him in the Tower if he went to Elizabeth’,⁹ though he could see no other reason why he shouldn’t marry her, if she were willing. As he told other friends, it was far better that Elizabeth should marry within the kingdom than outside it. Elizabeth, however, had learned the lessons of the previous spring when Sudeley had embarrassed her with Catherine Parr. She was acutely aware that she could not marry without the permission of the King and the Privy Council, and refused even to see Sudeley without a warrant. But some of her servants were prepared to help him, believing, rightly or wrongly, that this was what Elizabeth truly wanted. Two or three weeks before Christmas, Jane noticed the familiar full face of Elizabeth’s cofferer, Thomas Parry, at Seymour Place. Parry, who as cofferer managed Elizabeth’s money, appeared several times, walking alone with her guardian in the gallery where, out of her earshot, they discussed the financial details of a possible marriage to Elizabeth.¹⁰

      Such dabbling in a matter of high state caused considerable alarm with other servants in Elizabeth’s household. The princess’s tutor, Roger Ascham, was so appalled by Parry’s actions that he asked for permission to return to Cambridge for the entire Christmas season. Kate Astley’s husband John, equally concerned, argued furiously with his wife over the arrangements. One of these arguments was so heated that afterwards Elizabeth noticed bruising on her governess’s arms (Astley claimed that a doctor had been bleeding her to cure some ailment). The atmosphere at Seymour Place, meanwhile, was equally charged. Sudeley’s friends and servants desperately tried to dissuade him from his course. It was against all sense of decency and right order that a man without royal blood should align himself with an heir to the throne. ‘Beware,’ one warned Sudeley: ‘It were better for you if you had never been born, nay, that you were burnt to the quick alive, than that you should attempt it.’ Men had died already for attempting royal alliances during King Henry’s time and it would put Elizabeth’s life at risk.¹¹ They begged him instead to improve his relations with his brother. But Sudeley only blustered about how he would use Parliament to get the Governorship of the King’s Person in spite of the Protector, and seize his rightful share of power.

      Sudeley judged that Somerset’s political position was continuing to weaken as he persisted in his arrogant treatment of his colleagues. In this he was correct. Somerset often ignored advice and once slapped down a Privy Councillor in such a humiliating manner that the man was reduced to tears. Somerset’s most faithful ally on the Council, William Paget, was moved to write to him in the middle of Christmas night, to warn him of disaster ahead.¹² But not everything was going Sudeley’s way. Within the Privy Council it was Sudeley who was judged the immediate threat to national stability. Dorset, aware there was an impending crisis, demonstrated his usual poor political judgement by throwing in his lot with his friend. Whatever happened, Dorset promised Sudeley, he would ‘defend him against all men, save the King’. Night after night during the Christmas season, Katherine and Mary Grey saw their father leave Dorset House for Seymour Place, where Jane saw him arrive along with their great Leicestershire neighbour, Francis Hastings, Earl of Huntingdon. Sometimes Sudeley would leave them to go on forays to court. There were accusations later that Sudeley was planning to kidnap Edward and Elizabeth. Dorset may have hoped he would, believing Sudeley planned a double wedding, with Edward marrying Lady Jane Grey and he marrying Princess Elizabeth. If so it was an ominous portent for Jane of the danger in which her father was prepared to place her in pursuit of his ambitions.

      The evidence suggests, however, that for the moment at least, Sudeley was merely picking up gossip from the King’s Groom, John Fowler. Sudeley would moan over a drink in the Privy Buttery to Fowler how he wished Edward were old enough to be independent of Somerset, a time too far off to do him any good. On 6th January, the feast of the Epiphany and the last day of Christmas, Sir William Sharington’s house, Lacock Abbey in Wiltshire, was searched on the orders of the Council and incriminating evidence of his fraud at the Royal Mint discovered. Sharington understood what was expected of him and to save his skin gave up all he knew about Sudeley’s ambitions, including his hopes of marrying Elizabeth. Others were then rounded up. The young Earl of Rutland, whom Sudeley had attempted to recruit as an ally, was called in for questioning at Somerset House in the middle of the night. Terrified, the twenty-one-year-old repeated what Sudeley had said about the need for those who loved the King to build up a following amongst ‘honest and wealthy yeomen who were ringleaders in good towns’. One of Sudeley’s servants had a brother in Rutland’s household and Sudeley learned what the earl had said before morning. He hoped, nonetheless, to brazen it out. The next day he went to Parliament as usual and left at dinnertime with Dorset, to whom he confided what Rutland had said. They ate at Huntingdon’s house and returned to Seymour Place with a group of friends. These included Jane’s youngest uncle, Lord Thomas Grey. In contrast to the brothers Sudeley and Somerset, her father and his brothers were close.

Jane must have known something was wrong from the nervous conversation of the servants. Behind closed doors, Sudeley was boasting that he had been called to see the Privy Council, but had refused to go. Lord Thomas was unimpressed, pointing out that the Council could simply arrest him. He advised Sudeley to trust his brother as ‘a man of much mercy’.¹³ Sudeley refused to contemplate it. In the palace next door, meanwhile, Somerset was proving more amenable to advice - the worse for Sudeley. His enemies were insisting to Somerset that his life would only be safe when his brother was dead. That night, the Clerk of the Privy Council, Sir Thomas Smith, and the Privy Councillor and lawyer, Sir John Baker, came to arrest Sudeley. Jane would have recognised the sickly Smith, even behind his long beard and heavy coat. He was a friend of her tutor John Aylmer. Baker, a man in his fifties, was distinguishable by his grey hair; he was old by the standards of the day, but ‘Butcher Baker’, as he came to be called, would send many young men to their graves before his time was up.СКАЧАТЬ