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

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СКАЧАТЬ only the beginning of her misfortune. After the peace treaty with France six months later, in March 1550, the regime had less to fear from Mary’s protector, the Emperor Charles V, and was becoming increasingly radical. The religious changes Jane’s father, Dorset, was promoting were the most extreme England would witness before the Puritan Commonwealth a century later. Music was being expunged from churches; art was similarly attacked and tombs destroyed along with their exhortations to pray for the dead. A horrified visitor from Europe described the newly stark appearance of England’s churches, with ‘no images in relief, nor pictures, no crosses, no sepulchres raised above the ground…in place of the altar is a table set with a cloth but without candles’, on the white surfaces of the church walls were written passages from the Bible, ‘in the middle of which one sees the arms of the King’. In Oxford, bonfires were consuming nearly every book in the university library.² At the same time Mary found her right to have Mass said publicly in her own chapels was under attack.

      Dorset’s closest political ally, Parr of Northampton, had led the case against Mary within the Council, arguing that it had been agreed that ‘she alone might be privileged with but two or three of her women’. Northampton, described by Roger Ascham as ‘beautiful, broad, stern and manly’, was cut from similar cloth to Dorset. A sophisticated courtier, educated alongside Dorset in the household of the late Duke of Richmond, he shared Dorset’s passion for hunting, learning and, above all, religious reform. The two marquesses are linked in the sources from this period like Tweedle Dum with Tweedle Dee. Together they were always at the King’s side and Mary knew that Edward, like Jane, was already showing himself a fervent evangelical. Edward’s public note-taking during sermons and his recent striking out of the mention of saints in the oath of a new bishop, had all advertised his enthusiasm for the new religion. She must have feared that, like Jane, he too would attack the practice of her beliefs in her own house, in due course.

      By Christmas of 1550 the Council had ordered the arrest of Mary’s chaplains for saying Mass in her absence. But worse followed when Mary visited Edward for the seasonal celebrations. Her warm greeting for her thirteen-year-old brother was met with exactly the confrontation she had surely feared would soon come. With the two marquesses, Dorset and Northampton, standing by to witness her humiliation, Edward cross-questioned his older sister on whether she was having the Mass said publicly in her chapel. She burst into tears under his assault and, to the embarrassment of the two marquesses, the shocked boy then also began to cry. They wrapped up the meeting as quickly as they could, affirming ‘that enough had been said and…that the King had no other thought except to inquire and know all things’.³ But it was not to be the end of the matter.

      Mary’s household was a magnet for Catholic dissenters. The Masses she held attracted an important following at court and in the areas in which she lived, while even ‘the greatest lords in the kingdom were suitors to her to receive their daughters into her service’: amongst them the family of Edward’s old playmate, Jane Dormer.⁴ It was a problem that needed to be addressed, and Edward followed up what he had said to Mary with a letter demanding she obey his laws on religion.⁵ Despite his tears he had not relented. Mary, arguing he was still not of an age to overthrow his father’s religious settlement, continued to have Mass said, even laying on extra services ‘and with greater show’.⁶ But in March 1551 the young King informed Mary that he had suffered her stubbornness long enough and that henceforth she could only hear Mass in her private apartments.⁷ When she persisted in having her Mass said in the chapels there were consequences.

      At Easter 1551 several of Mary’s friends were arrested after attending Mass in her house. By July she feared she was on the point of being imprisoned or even murdered and considered fleeing abroad. In the end she decided that it was her duty to stay. It was August 1551, the month following the death of the Brandon brothers, with the Grey sisters all at Bradgate, when matters came to a head. Three of Mary’s servants were ordered to go to Beaulieu and prevent other members of the household from hearing Mass. They refused and were imprisoned for contempt. The King’s Council then sent their own men to carry out his orders. They arrived during the rising heat of the morning carrying Edward’s letters. Mary received them on her knees, in symbolic submission to the will of the King. As the papers were handed to her, she kissed them, ‘but not the matter contained in them,’ she said, for that, ‘I take to proceed not from his Majesty but from you, his Council.’ The silence while she read the letters was broken only by her exclaiming: ‘Ah! Good Mr Cecil took much pains here.’ Cecil, Katherine Suffolk’s friend, had survived the fall of his master Somerset to become Secretary of State. Only as the men left did Mary lose her composure, shouting through a window about the risk to their souls they were taking by their actions. But she knew that this was a battle she had lost. As she admitted, if the Council arrested her chaplains they could not say Mass and she could not hear it. She warned her brother, however, that she ‘would lay her head on a block and suffer death’ before she heard the Prayer Book service.⁸

      The imperial ambassador Jehan Scheyfve complained about Mary’s treatment, but to no effect. Warwick insisted it was the King’s will and that Edward’s orders had as much weight as if he were aged forty. It was Parr of Northampton, however, who articulated once again the most aggressive comment against Mary. He challenged the right of the ambassador to refer to her by the title ‘Princess of England’, insisting she be referred to only as the King’s sister. This had obvious implications for Mary’s right to the throne as Edward’s heir: a matter of particular concern that autumn. Edward was looking pale and thin after contracting a mysterious illness in the summer, from which he was still recovering. Suddenly, however, the aggressive attacks on Mary began to recede. She was still not allowed to hear Mass outside her private apartments, but Warwick, ever cautious, had reason to be reluctant to risk provoking her continental cousins, the Hapsburgs, further. The Emperor’s sister, Mary of Hungary, was threatening to invade England to rescue Edward from his ‘pernicious governors’, and Mary’s humiliating treatment was galvanising support for her in England too. Warwick had discovered, furthermore, that Somerset was hoping to take advantage of this and was plotting with the conservatives to bring him down, together with his radical evangelical ‘crew’.

      Warwick considered carefully how to manoeuvre Somerset to his destruction. He learned from one of the King’s teenage friends, Lord Strange, that Somerset had asked him to promote his daughter, Lady Jane Seymour, in the King’s affections by telling Edward how suitable a bride she would be. Only nine years old, but highly educated, Lady Jane Seymour, the niece of Henry VIII’s third wife, was already demonstrating a precocious intelligence. With two of her sisters she had celebrated the French peace treaty with the publication in Paris of 130 couplets of Latin verse composed for the tomb of the Queen of Navarre, who had died in 1549. She would one day become Katherine Grey’s closest friend. But in 1551 Somerset’s ambitions for his daughter threatened Dorset’s hopes for his own. None of this constituted treason, however, so Warwick needed to catch Somerset in some other, capital, offence. The answer, shortly arrived at, was to accuse him of planning to invite Warwick and Northampton to a feast and there ‘cut off their heads’.⁹

      Edward was told about the alleged murder plot during the second week of October. Simultaneously Warwick and his allies were empowered with promotions: Dorset became the Duke of Suffolk, the title having fallen into abeyance with the tragic deaths of the Brandon brothers; Warwick was made Duke of Northumberland.¹⁰ Northampton’s brother-in-law, Sir William Herbert, became Earl of Pembroke, while William Cecil was knighted. Five days later, Edward saw his uncle, Somerset, arrive at court at Whitehall ‘later than he was wont and by himself’. His journal recorded baldly that: ‘After dinner he was apprehended.’ СКАЧАТЬ