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

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СКАЧАТЬ some more physical exercise and entertainments, dinner and bed, with all its attendant rituals. But around the routines of this isolated royal schoolboy, the court had the feeling of an armed camp.

Warwick was extremely security-conscious. A new contingent of guardsmen and armed yeomen had been attached to the King’s Privy Chamber, as well as twelve bands of cavalry, of which Dorset commanded a hundred horse.^* Access to Edward was also severely restricted. Nothing could be presented to him that had not been approved by the Council and his tutors first. For the Grey sisters, however, conversation with Edward was easier to achieve than for most. Not only was their father constantly at Edward’s side, nearly all the King’s personal servants were either family friends or relations, or the clients of those who were. Catherine Parr’s brother, the Marquess of Northampton, was close at hand as Lord Chamberlain, and his brother-in-law, Sir William Herbert, as Edward’s Master of the Horse. Northampton’s cousin, Nicholas Throckmorton (who had shouted in support of Anne Askew as she was burned), was Edward’s favourite Gentleman of the Privy Chamber, one of the four men who dressed Edward each morning, and played games and sports with him. But the figure who dominated the court was the new Lord President, John Dudley, the Earl of Warwick.

      The Lord President, who would play a key role in Lady Jane Grey’s future, was a towering figure, albeit one who had emerged from the shadow of the scaffold. His father, Edmund Dudley, had been a faithful servant to Henry VII and a brilliant lawyer. On his master’s behalf he had squeezed the rich of their wealth until the pips squeaked. But when the first Tudor king died, the new monarch, the eighteen-year-old Henry VIII, had disassociated himself from his father’s unpopular policies. The young John Dudley saw his father set up on charges of treason and executed as a royal public relations exercise. It had made him a cautious man, as well as a ruthless one. People found Warwick physically intimidating, the sense of the soldier’s brute power all the more terrifying because he was so unusually controlled. He watched and waited before he made his moves and it was said that he ‘had such a head that he seldom went about anything, but he conceived first three or four purposes beforehand’.¹⁴

      It wasn’t long before Jane discovered that Warwick had plans for her. He was keen to avoid the mistakes of the Protectorship. That meant treating Edward as a maturing monarch, training him for a gradual introduction into matters of state, while also involving fellow Privy Councillors in important decision-making. Warwick even hoped to work again with Somerset, who was released from the Tower that month, in February, and invited to rejoin the Privy Council in May. It seemed to Warwick, however, that the best way to bind the new allies was the traditional means of inter-family marriages. Somerset agreed, and the marriages he most wanted for his children were with members of the Grey family. Just as Thomas Sudeley had suspected, Somerset wanted Jane for his son, the young Earl of Hertford. Through his mother Hertford was descended from Edward III. This did not give him any noteworthy claim to the throne, but his smidgen of royal blood raised his rank and made him a suitable match for Jane. Somerset asked also that his elder daughter Anne be married to Jane’s fourteen-year-old uncle, Henry Brandon, the Duke of Suffolk, who was being educated alongside the King.

      Jane’s step-grandmother, Katherine Suffolk, turned Somerset down flat. As she explained to Somerset’s secretary - her friend William Cecil, a kinsman of the Greys - she disapproved of child marriages. ‘I cannot tell what unkindness one of us might show the other than to bring our children into so miserable a state as not to chose by their own liking,’ she told him.¹⁵ Warwick was obliged to step into the breach and marry Anne Seymour to his eldest son, Lord Lisle. But if Somerset was still hoping to capture Lady Jane Grey he hoped in vain. Dorset was prepared to make vague promises about Jane’s future, but he declined to write anything down. If there had been any betrothal it would have emerged during government investigations into Hertford’s actual marriage in 1560. Dorset believed that he was in a stronger position than he had ever been to achieve the ultimate prize for his favourite daughter. A German client of Dorset called John of Ulm, who was writing to the chief pastor of the Zurich Church, Heinrich Bullinger, and outlining Dorset’s role in driving forward religious change, noted how carefully educated Jane was. Dorset was the ‘thunderbolt and terror of the papists’, he observed, while Jane was ‘pious and accomplished beyond what can be expressed’. She was to be the pious Queen of a Godly King, the rulers of a new Jerusalem that Dorset intended to help build.¹⁶

^* For this he received £2,000 a year: as much as he had agreed for Jane’s wardship.

       Chapter VII Bridling Jane

      It was late in the summer of 1550 when the Princess Elizabeth’s former tutor, Roger Ascham, arrived at Bradgate. He was en route to take up a post to the English ambassador at the court of Charles V. Ascham had come principally to say goodbye to his wife Alice, and the Astleys, Elizabeth’s former governess and her husband: all based at Bradgate since the break-up of Elizabeth’s household following Sudeley’s arrest. But Ascham also hoped to see Jane, to thank her for a letter of reference she had sent to his new employer. A prime purpose of Jane’s education was to coach her to perform on the public stage and the letter demonstrates she was already playing the role of a great patron. As Ascham would discover, however, the thirteen-year-old was finding the pressure intense.

Jane was expected to excel in all fields, including dance and Greek, manners and philosophy, but the duty of obedience was the lesson she was finding hardest to absorb. ‘Unless you frame yourself to obey, yea and feel in yourself what obedience is, you shall never be able to teach others how to obey you,’ her future nephew, Philip Sidney, would explain to his son.¹ The harder this lesson was taught, however, the more Jane struggled against it, and she had begun to avoid her parents’ company. When Ascham reached the house he was told that the entire household was hunting in the park, save for Jane who had chosen to stay behind. He found her alone in her chamber looking ‘young and lovely’. She had just broken off from reading Plato’s Phaedo, which describes the courage Socrates displayed in the face of death. ‘When I come to the end of my journey,’ Socrates says as he prepares to take hemlock from the executioner, ‘I shall obtain that which has been the pursuit of my life.’² Many lesser students struggled with the Greek and, perhaps, with its arguments for the immortality of the soul. But to Ascham’s amazement it was apparent that Jane read it ‘with as much delight as gentlemen read a merry tale in Boccacio’.^*

      Ascham chatted with Jane for a while, before summoning up the courage to ask why she was reading Plato instead of being in the park with everyone else? Jane smiled and replied that ‘all their sport in the park is but a shadow to that pleasure that I find in Plato! Alas! Good folk, they never felt what true pleasure meant.’ Ascham, oblivious to the authentic voice of the teenage know-it-all, was delighted to find a young woman with such a love of philosophy, and he wondered what might have drawn her to it ‘seeing not many women [and] very few men, have attained thereunto’. At that, however, Jane seized the opportunity to launch an attack on the wrongs she believed she was being dealt at the hands of her parents.

      I will tell you, and tell you a truth which perchance ye will marvel at. One of the greatest benefits that ever God gave me is that he sent me so sharp and severe parents and so gentle a schoolmaster. For when I am in presence of either father or mother, whether I speak, keep silence, sit, stand or go, eat, drink, be merry or sad, be sewing, playing, dancing or doing anything else, I must do it, as it were, in such weight, measure and number, even so perfectly as God made СКАЧАТЬ