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

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СКАЧАТЬ passing the Vice-Chamberlain’s door was called in by John Piers to make a match at shooting and so taken. Likewise John Seymour and Davey Seymour were taken too.’ Their ruin had arrived during the banal routines of an ordinary day: with an invitation to a shooting match, a hand on their shoulder as they passed a door, or an encounter during an evening stroll.

      It was Harry Suffolk - as the King now called Dorset - who signed the order for Somerset to be sent to the Tower: a neat revenge for the Protector’s rival ambitions for the marriage of his daughter. The Duchess of Somerset joined her husband in the Tower the next day. She was blamed widely for all his troubles. Proud and beautiful, Anne Somerset had never been popular, and damning her served a useful purpose. It helped explain how the man who had helped introduce evangelical religion to England had fallen into wickedness: even the first man, Adam, was brought to sin by Eve, it would have been remembered. The first sign of Mary’s rehabilitation at court since she was deprived of her Mass was an invitation in November for the reception of Mary of Guise, the dowager Queen of Scots. She turned it down. It was, instead, Frances who sat on the Queen’s left on 4th November 1551, while Edward sat to her right under a shared cloth of state. Jane was also there, as Edward noted in his journal. Beside the funeral of Catherine Parr, it is the first time we know of Jane being present at a public reception.

      Jane had ridden with over a hundred other ladies and gentlemen, to escort the dowager Queen of Scots through London to Westminster. In the great banquet that followed she sat with the other court ladies in the Queen dowager’s great chamber, enjoying three courses of delicacies. The court women were all dressed ‘like peacocks’ in jewels and rich clothes, their hair loose as a compliment to the Scots style. There was no sign of the Princess Elizabeth, any more than of her half-sister Mary, but Elizabeth had met the Queen dowager earlier in the week and had left a memorable impression. While most guests had their long hair ‘flounced and curled and double curled’ on to silk-clad shoulders, Elizabeth had ‘altered nothing, but to the shame of them all kept her old maidenly shamefastness’.¹¹ Elizabeth had a natural gift for visual messages, and this one was designed to appeal to her brother.

The King’s tutor in political affairs, William Thomas, had presented his master recently with a work promoting modest and Godly dress in women. Elizabeth, whose reputation had been so tainted by her association with Sudeley, had cleverly stolen a march on Jane as the leading evangelical princess. But Jane’s father, together with her tutor Aylmer, were equally determined that the younger girl learn quickly from Elizabeth’s example. Just before Christmas a series of letters went out from the Grey family’s magnificent new home at Suffolk Place in Southwark, which Frances had inherited from the Brandon brothers. They were directed to the pastor of the Zurich Church, Bullinger. Jane’s father begged Bullinger to continue guiding his daughter in modesty and decorum, writing to her ‘as frequently as possible’.¹² Aylmer then wrote asking specifically that Bullinger should ‘instruct my pupil, in your next letter, as to what embellishment and adornment of person is becoming in a young woman professing Godliness’. He noted that despite Elizabeth’s example, and preachers declaring against fashionable finery, at court ‘no one is induced…to lay aside, much less look down upon, gold, jewels and the braiding of hair’. If Bullinger addressed the subject to Jane directly, however, he believed ‘there will probably, through your influence, be some accession to the ranks of virtue’.^*

      Aylmer need not have been so anxious about Jane. The enormous effort that had gone into her education had shaped by now a most determined evangelical, and she was not short of reminders of the futility of vanity. On every barge trip to Whitehall, Jane passed Seymour Place where Catherine Parr had lain with her ambitious husband. Next to it was Somerset House, the Renaissance palace that the former Protector had been building, and would never live to see completed. In December, Somerset was tried and condemned to death on the basis of the trumped-up murder plot, with the new Dukes of Suffolk and Northumberland - Grey and Dudley - his judges. Many evangelicals were horrified that the man who had introduced ‘true religion’ into England should die convicted of attempted murder. Harry Suffolk assured the German John of Ulm that the King was keen to spare his uncle’s life, and claimed Northumberland hoped this would be possible. But although the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer, begged Northumberland to show Somerset mercy, the Lord President’s principal concern was that the sentence be carried out with minimum disruption.

      Edward, the kindly child who had comforted his friends when they lost at cards, was to play the role of executioner of a second uncle. But first, a spectacular Christmas season was planned at Greenwich, providing a distraction from the grim task ahead. The great public spaces of the royal palaces were like bare stages when the King was not in residence and for weeks carpenters and painters, masons and joiners had been put to work. Furniture and tapestries were added to the public rooms and silver plate brought, along with any other props necessary, ‘to glorify the house and feast’.¹³ When Christmas arrived there were plays, masques, tournaments, and a Lord of Misrule. This pagan survival was vested on a courtier who presided over a world turned upside down. Even an execution could be parodied - and was. Misrule attended the decapitation of a hogshead of wine on the scaffold at Cheapside in January, and the red juice flowed to cries of laughter instead of dismay.¹⁴ At Suffolk Place, however, the twelve-day festivities enjoyed by the young Grey sisters were more determinedly decorous.

      The family chaplain, James Haddon, complained to Bullinger that the common people of England insisted on amusing themselves ‘in mummeries and wickedness of every kind’. But, he reported smugly, this was not the case with ‘the family in which I reside’.¹⁵ The austerity we associate with seventeenth-century Puritanism was already evident in the household. John Aylmer disapproved of music at home as well as at church, and the three Grey sisters were expected to limit the amount of time they spent playing or listening to it. Thus deprived, Katherine and Mary later showed no great interest in music that we know of. There was some friction, however, between the pious expectations of Aylmer and Haddon on the one side, and the great living expected of the nobility as a reflection of their status. The servants at Suffolk Place were banned from playing cards at Haddon’s insistence, but Frances and her husband continued to do so in their private apartments, and for money.

      Haddon put his employers’ bad behaviour down to ‘force of habit’ and ‘a desire not to appear stupid, and not good fellows, as they call it’. He had hoped to shame them into change by addressing their failings in a sermon to the household on the wickedness of cards, but was given short shrift for it. Even the Godly King Edward liked to gamble and Haddon confessed that the duke and duchess had told him he was ‘too strict’. It was hard, Haddon moaned to Bullinger, to persuade courtiers to ‘conquer and crucify themselves’.¹⁶ The eleven-year-old Katherine, who showed no signs of wanting to mimic Elizabeth in anything, must have been a particular concern. But Haddon’s frustration was alleviated somewhat by Jane. She had responded enthusiastically to Aylmer’s suggestion that she imitate Elizabeth’s plain style of dress, and in the process made a point of snubbing the Princess Mary. Aylmer later recalled that Mary had sent one of her ladies to Jane with a set of fine clothes of ‘tinsel cloth of gold and velvet, laid over with parchment lace of gold’. New Year was the traditional time for such gifts. But Jane, looking at the magnificent gown, asked the gentlewoman brusquely: ‘What shall I do with it?’ ‘Marry,’ the woman replied, ‘wear it.’ ‘Nay,’ snapped Jane, ‘that would be a shame to follow my lady Mary against God’s word, and leave my Lady Elizabeth who followeth God’s word.’¹⁷ Aylmer felt no small satisfaction over this incident, which he recorded after Elizabeth became Queen.

      With the Christmas season over, Londoners awoke early on the morning СКАЧАТЬ