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

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СКАЧАТЬ seemed impossibly old to Jane. She was grateful for his ‘instruction, admonition and counsel, on such points especially, as are suited to my age and sex and the dignity of my family’. Jane complained she missed the advice she used to receive from the Strasbourg reformer Martin Bucer, who had died in February. Such religious exiles were the principal source of radical ideas in England, and Jane’s father, along with his friend Parr of Northampton, their leading patrons on the Privy Council. Jane assured Bullinger, she was now reading the Decades every day, gathering ‘as out of a most beautiful garden, the sweetest flowers’.⁹ Amongst these were Bullinger’s comments, in the dedication to her father, on the importance of reading the Old Testament in Hebrew, as well as reading the New Testament in Greek. She was now learning Hebrew, she said, and asked ‘if you will point out some way and method of pursuing this study to the greatest advantage’.¹⁰

      Ulm was certain that Bullinger would be impressed with Jane’s ‘very learned letter’, but he had also heard some interesting gossip at Bradgate, which he passed on. ‘A report has prevailed and has begun to be talked of by persons of consequence, that this most noble virgin is to be betrothed and given in marriage to the King’s Majesty.’¹¹ This claim was an extraordinary one. At that very moment, William Parr, Marquess of Northampton, was in France at the head of a diplomatic mission, with instructions to arrange the formal betrothal of Edward to Henri II’s daughter Elizabeth. Ulm, however, repeated what he had learned at Bradgate to other friends in Europe.

      Uncertain that Bullinger would have time for the task of overseeing Jane’s Hebrew, and anxious that Jane’s language skills be developed by someone steeped in the theology of Switzerland, Ulm wrote to a professor in Zurich called Conrad Pellican, asking him to help teach Jane her Hebrew. By way of incentive he told Pellican that he had heard she was one day to be married to King Edward, and raved about Jane’s ‘incredible’ achievements thus far. These included, he noted, the ‘practice of speaking and arguing with propriety, both in Greek and Latin’.¹²

      Jane, it seems, was being trained in the art of rhetoric: the mastery of language as a means to persuade, edify and instruct. It was an area in which a dynamic mind such as hers was likely to excel. But it was also considered suitable only for a woman being prepared for a significant role, such as that of a King’s wife. ‘Oh! If that event should take place, how happy would be the union and how beneficial to the Church!’ Ulm sighed.¹³ He admitted, however, that he nursed a fear that the brilliant religious leader being honed at Bradgate might yet be blasted by a ‘calamity of the times’. People were suffering the economic fallout of Warwick’s deflationary policies and there were major riots again in Leicestershire that summer. It was not revolt, however, but a natural disaster in July that provided the bitterest reminder of just how cruel fate could be. A mysterious disease known as the ‘sweating sickness’ was sweeping England. The epidemics, which vanished altogether after the sixteenth century, would arrive suddenly and disappear quickly. But, while they lasted, they brought illness and death with frightening speed.

      Edward recorded in his journal that the sweat arrived in London on 9th July and immediately proved even more vehement than any epidemic he remembered. If a man felt cold ‘he died within three hours and if he escaped it held him for nine hours, or ten at most’. Seventy people died in London the next day, and on the 11th, the King reported, ‘120 and also one of my gentlemen, another of my grooms fell sick and died’.¹⁴ In Leicestershire, a Bradgate neighbour, Lord Cromwell, succumbed and, on the early morning of the 14th, it struck within the Grey family. In their rooms at Buckden, the former palace of the Bishop of Lincoln, Katherine Suffolk’s sons, Henry and Charles, awoke that morning with a sense of apprehension. It was the first symptom of the illness. The brothers were soon seized with violent, icy shivers, a headache and pains in the shoulders, neck and limbs. Within three hours the cold left them and their temperatures rose dramatically. It was then that the characteristic sweating began.

      The boys’ mother rushed to her children’s bedside from her estate at Grimsthorpe in Lincolnshire as their pulses began to race and an incredible thirst took hold. But finally exhaustion brought an irresistible desire to sleep. The elder brother, Henry, Duke of Suffolk, was already dead when their mother arrived. The younger, Charles, followed before seven o’clock on the morning of 15th July. Katherine Suffolk was devastated by their loss. Henry, at fifteen, ‘stout of stomach without all pride’; Charles ‘being not so ripe in years was not so grave in look, rather cheerful than sad, rather quick than ancient’.¹⁵ She sat alone in the dark, refusing food. The boys’ tutor Thomas Wilson worried as he saw his mistress lose weight, ‘your mind so troubled and your heart so heavy…detesting all joy and delighting in sorrow, wishing with [your] heart, if it were God’s will, to make your last end’. He begged her to be ‘strong in adversity’.¹⁶

      Katherine of Suffolk’s friend and Lincolnshire neighbour, William Cecil, also wrote to her with words of comfort. Her letter to him replied miserably that nothing thus far in her life had made her so aware of God’s power. That she was being punished for her sins she was certain. The preacher Hugh Latimer had even told her which ones: it was her greed in enclosing land and depriving the poor of food. She could not bear to see anyone, she told Cecil. Although she was certain her children were with God and she knew she should rejoice, she found she could not. At Grimsthorpe she kept their clothes and possessions: black velvet gowns furred with sable, fashionable crimson hose, tennis rackets and the rings they practised catching with lances at the tilt. Her shock and dismay, if not her pain, was felt across the evangelical elite. Her sons were amongst the brightest hopes of their generation. The great Latinist, Walter Haddon, the brother of the Bradgate chaplain James Haddon, wrote a eulogy in their memory; the King’s tutor, John Cheke, composed an epitaph, while Wilson wrote a prose biography and several Latin poems, a volume of which was dedicated to Dorset.¹⁷ Jane’s place as a Godly leader, by example, for her generation was now more important than ever.

^* The famous collected tales of love by the Italian author who had inspired Chaucer.

       Chapter VIII Jane and Mary

      The chapel at the Princess Mary’s palace of Beaulieu lay across the courtyard, opposite the great hall. Inside it had a distinctive layout, with a large ante chapel at right angles to the body of the main chapel. As Jane crossed by this ante chapel she noticed, to her irritation, a consecrated Host was placed on the altar in a golden receptacle known as a ‘monstrance’. In Catholic belief the Host was the transformed body of Christ, but to Jane its veneration was the idolatrous worship of a piece of unleavened bread. When Mary’s servant, Lady Anne Wharton, walking beside her, dropped to one knee and made the sign of the cross, Jane asked sarcastically whether ‘the Lady Mary were there or not?’ Lady Wharton replied tartly that she had made her curtsey ‘to Him that made us all’. ‘Why,’ Jane retorted, ‘how can He be there that made us all, [when] the baker made him?’¹

      Lady Wharton reported her exchange with Jane to Mary, who is said by the martyrologist John Foxe, to have ‘never loved her after’. There is no evidence of that, and Mary later showed fondness for the younger Grey sisters, particularly the affectionate and easy-going Katherine. But the princess had good reason to be both angry and concerned that Jane had insulted her religious beliefs in her own house. At the time of the Grey СКАЧАТЬ