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

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СКАЧАТЬ accepted his arrest quietly, hoping that all would be well. Others, however, proved less sanguine.

      When the Council’s men came for Elizabeth’s cofferer Parry, he ran up to his chamber, tearing off his chain of office and crying, ‘I would I had never been born, for I am undone.’ In the Tower the Astleys both gave full confessions, telling all they knew about Sudeley’s plans to marry Elizabeth and his visits to her bedchamber. Only the fifteen-year-old Elizabeth remained composed in her interviews. Faced with the danger she had long feared she defended her servants as well as herself, at times proving forgetful, at times angry over slurs that she was pregnant by Sudeley, but always consistent in her denials that she ever intended to marry anyone without the Council’s permission. It is possible that Parry’s kinsman, William Cecil, was giving Elizabeth vital advice - it would help explain the trust she later developed in him - but Elizabeth was never prone to losing her nerve.

      Jane was returned to Dorset Place, while her father, like the other witnesses, was called to the Council for interview. Despite their testimony on Sudeley’s plans, there was no real evidence that Sudeley had ever intended to seize the King, as was claimed, or commit any treason. Ways, therefore, had to be found around the difficulties of a trial. Sudeley had hoped to use Parliament to bring an end to the autocracy of the Protectorate: instead Parliament was used to bring an end to his life. A bill was introduced condemning him for high treason. It was passed without dissension in the Lords. In the Commons there was fierce argument, but in March 1549 a packed House eventually passed the Act of Attainder. Edward was obliged to assent to his uncle’s death in words set down for him, and he did so with visible reluctance. Lady Jane Grey was then left to make sense of the fate of the family of which she had become part. By the end of the year they would all be dead - the baby Mary Seymour dying after illness in the house of Katherine Suffolk to whose care she had been bequeathed, and who resented the expense and inconvenience.

      Jane was taught that misfortune came from God as a punishment for sins, but also as a warning to repent. In that sense it could be a blessing, for it gave the sinner the chance to clean the slate. This was how Sudeley saw events, as he explained in a poem composed in the Tower:

      …God did call me in my pride Lest I should fall and from him slide For whom he loves he must correct That they may be of his elect.

      It was not in Sudeley’s nature, however, to accept his end with passivity. He intended one final throw of the dice, last messages for Elizabeth and her half-sister, Mary, which he wrote in orange juice using a hook ‘plucked from his hose’. The letters were said by someone who saw them to tend ‘to this end, that they should conspire against my Lord Protector’. Sudeley hid his message in the soles of his velvet shoes.¹⁴ They were still with him on the morning of 20th March 1549 when he was taken to Tower Hill to die.¹⁵

      Public executions were carefully choreographed and the rituals of a beheading followed a strict code. Prisoners gave a last speech in which they would pronounce themselves judged guilty by the laws of the land, and content to die, as prescribed by the law. It was a final act of obedience, one that acknowledged the supreme importance to society of the rule of law. They would then hold themselves up as examples of the fate of all those who sinned against God and King. If they were innocent of the crime for which they were convicted, they knew that God was punishing them for something, and also that, on some level, they had failed the society into which they had been born. They did not doubt that they deserved to die. Their speeches concluded with a request for forgiveness and the hope their sovereign would reign long and happily.¹⁶

      We only have hints at how Sudeley behaved, but assuredly his execution did not follow this usual script. According to one account, as Sudeley laid his head on the block he was overheard asking a servant to ‘speed the thing that he wot [knew] of’. The messages to the princesses were then discovered and there appears to have been a struggle. A Swiss witness wrote to a friend saying that Sudeley had died most unwillingly.

      What is also apparent is that the Council was extremely disturbed by whatever had occurred, and not surprisingly so. The regime was about to impose an evangelical Prayer Book on a largely unwilling population. Princess Mary, who remained stubbornly conservative in religion, was going even further than Bishop Gardiner in arguing that this was illegal, and that Henry’s religious settlement could not be overturned while Edward was still a minor. Hugh Latimer, Katherine Suffolk’s spiritual adviser, had articulated the government’s response in a sermon at court that Lent, arguing that Edward’s precocious Godliness meant that he wasn’t a ‘minor’ in the usual sense. But Sudeley’s messages had undermined this claim, suggesting that Edward, far from being a spiritual father, was the puppet of malign forces from which he needed protection. They had also hit another raw nerve: they reminded everybody that Mary was Edward’s heir under their father’s will. The obvious means to attack Mary’s claim was the 1536 Act of Succession, which had declared Mary illegitimate. It had, however, also declared Elizabeth illegitimate, making it nigh impossible to use the act against one sister without excluding the other. That risked proving divisive amongst evangelicals, since Elizabeth conformed to her brother’s religious decrees. If she had been executed along with Sudeley for arranging her marriage without the King’s permission, the problem would have been solved. But inconveniently, she remained alive.

      The Council now needed to discredit Sudeley’s actions as forcefully as it could. Latimer was employed to give the sermon, and it proved excoriating. Sudeley was damned from his pulpit as ‘a man the farthest from the fear of God that ever I knew or heard of in England’, and one who had died, ‘irksomely, strangely, horribly’.¹⁷ It is not Latimer’s words, however, but the epitaph Elizabeth is said to have given Sudeley that is remembered. On hearing of his beheading she is reported to have said that he had died, ‘a man with much wit and very little judgement’. The same assessment could have been made of Jane’s father, who, despite his intelligence, had allowed himself to become so closely involved in Sudeley’s reckless plans. But he had survived Sudeley’s folly and the wheel of fortune was turning. His days in the political wilderness would soon be over, and those of his three daughters with him.

^* Under Queen Mary, Baker would forget his evangelical past and burn his former co-religionists, earning his nickname, ‘Butcher Baker’.

       Chapter VI Northumberland’s ‘Crew’

      The ten-year-old Edward Seymour, Earl of Hertford, rode his horse hard. The skinny, long-limbed boy was the son that Somerset hoped to see married to Jane Grey. On this day, 5th October 1549, he knew, however, that his father’s status as Lord Protector, and perhaps his life, depended on the message he carried. There were two men with whom Somerset formed the ‘Mighty Tres Viri’ (triumvirate) of the Protectorate: one was John Dudley, Earl of Warwick. The previous day, however, he had marched through the city with members of the nobility and Privy Council, the early moves in an attempted coup against Somerset. The second, Sir William Herbert, commanded the royal army in Wiltshire along with Lord Russell. It was to them Hertford now rode for help. The forest of turrets and gilded weathervanes of Hampton Court soon disappeared from view as his horse raced west.

      It was autumn, and the roads were quiet, but the tumultuous events of the summer had taken their toll on the standing of the Lord Protector. That June the country had been rocked by rebellions. The risings were triggered on Whit Sunday, 10th June, by the forced introduction of the new Prayer Book, which was written in English for the first time. In parts of Cornwall where little English was spoken, congregations could not understand what their priests were reading to them. In Devon, where СКАЧАТЬ