Behind the Palace Doors (4 page)

Given the king’s zeal, there was little room for dissent—even from Edward’s beloved sister Mary. Her tenacious adherence to the old religion created an ever-widening rift between the royal siblings, one that would eventually cause Edward to reject Mary’s right to succeed him.

“So far as lies in me, I will be to you a dearest brother, and overflowing with all kindness,” the nine-year-old king had written to Mary after the death of their father. As it turned out, that bounty of brotherly love was entirely contingent upon Mary’s obliging him.

Somerset had allowed Mary to quietly practice her faith, but after his downfall, King Edward began to insist that she conform to the dictates of the new faith. Mary refused. She believed the boy king was being led by wicked counselors who had made him a cipher for their extreme agenda. Edward, however, disabused her of that notion with a letter written in his own hand.
He
was the king and would no longer tolerate her disobedience.

“We have suffered it until now,” Edward wrote in January 1551,

Though the king was only thirteen at the time, he insisted that he would have known at age six when a subject was breaking the law, and that despite his youth, he had the same authority Henry VIII had, “without diminution of any sort, either culled from the Scriptures or drawn from universal laws.” Edward concluded his missive with an ominous warning to Mary: “Our natural love for you is great without doubt; therefore do not seek to diminish it.”

Mary was stunned by the force of Edward’s letter, writing back to the king that his words caused her “more suffering than any illness even unto death.” Still, she underestimated his fervor for religious reform. Mary acknowledged that Edward was “indeed gifted with understanding far beyond that possessed by others at your age,” but for all that he remained a child. She begged her brother to suspend all judgment on spiritual matters “until you reach riper and fuller years, and then with better knowledge and understanding Your Majesty will exercise your freedom to decide.”

Mary then went to court to plead her case in person but
found her brother unmoved. “I had suffered her mass against my will,” the king wrote in his diary, but now he “could not bear it.… Her example might breed too much inconvenience.”

The stalemate between siblings nearly became an international incident when the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V, threatened to invade England in order to preserve his maternal cousin Mary’s right to hear mass. The king’s counselors, frightened by the prospect of a war they could ill afford, urged the king to relent a little for the sake of peace and security. Edward remained adamant, however, declaring that he would “spend his life, and all he had, rather than agree and grant to what he knew certainly to be against the truth.” The emperor backed down; Edward never did.

While King Edward was in the process of subduing his sister, John Dudley was plotting to destroy the king’s uncle Somerset once and for all. The master manipulator had already assumed the highest offices in government, capping his climb by creating himself Duke of Northumberland—a reflection of the considerable power he now possessed. He had also won Edward’s total confidence by flattering the boy, encouraging him to exercise more royal authority, and especially by presenting himself as a passionate religious reformer. Now only Somerset stood in his way.

Though Somerset had been allowed to resume his place on the council, Northumberland (as Dudley was now called) deliberately provoked and marginalized him to such an extent that the former Protector sought to ally himself with the religiously conservative faction of peers and counselors, including the king’s sister Mary. It was a perfect trap. Though there is some evidence that Somerset and his allies plotted to bring down Northumberland, the extent of their plans remains murky. What is certain, though, is that Northumberland pounced, manufacturing evidence that Somerset had plotted to kill him and capture the king.

Somerset was tried and, though acquitted of treason, condemned for the felony of unlawful assembly. His nephew the king—probably under the influence of Northumberland—was convinced of his guilt and seemed indifferent to his fate. “Let the law take its course,” Edward reportedly remarked. He signed his uncle’s death warrant, and when the execution was carried out on January 22, 1552, he had very little to say about it in his journal: “The Duke of Somerset had his head cut off upon Tower Hill between eight and nine o’clock in the morning.”

The apparent lack of family feeling the young king showed over his uncle’s violent demise would be even more evident when he moved against his sisters.

Edward VI is often thought of as a sickly boy who barely made it through his six-year reign. In fact, though, he was quite vigorous, with a love of tennis, hunting, and other sports. It was not until January 1553 that the fifteen-year-old king began to ail significantly.

“He does not sleep except when he is stuffed with drugs,” one medical observer reported on May 28. “The sputum which he brings up is livid, black, fetid and full of carbon; it smells beyond measure.… His feet are swollen all over.”

With his body failing, King Edward was determined to preserve the religious revolution inaugurated during his reign. He cut his Catholic sister, Mary, out of the succession, and even his Protestant sister, Elizabeth, as well.
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The crown would descend instead upon his Protestant cousin Lady Jane Grey—granddaughter of Henry VIII’s younger sister Mary Tudor (see Tudor family tree,
this page
)—who was quickly married that May to Northumberland’s son Guildford. The daughters of Henry VIII, stripped of their birthright and declared bastards, were to “live in quiet order, according to our appointment.”

It was an act “both remarkable and revolutionary,” wrote Chris Skidmore. “Edward was abandoning his family, turning against the traditional laws of inheritance and his late father’s wishes. Instead, he would create a new dynasty, one founded upon the one true faith.”

Having completed this betrayal of Mary and Elizabeth, Edward VI died on July 6, 1553, mostly likely of tuberculosis. One queen succeeded him as his disease-wracked corpse moldered unburied; another was in for the fight of her life.

Although she was called “queen,” Lady Jane Grey was never anointed as such, nor recognized by the majority of the people
.

As King Edward VI lay gasping his final breaths, the Duke of Northumberland scurried to seize power. He had already forced the marriage of his son Guildford to the king’s designated successor, Lady Jane Grey. Now he tried to coax the legitimate queen, Edward’s sister, Mary, back to London. The duke sent word that Mary’s place was by her dying brother’s side. But it was a trap, for while Northumberland’s words were soothing, his intent was lethal. “It is to be feared that as soon as the king is dead they will attempt to seize the princess,” reported the imperial ambassador.

Mary heeded the warning about the duke’s plans for her destruction. Instead of going to attend to her brother at Greenwich, she headed north to her estate at Kenninghall, barely escaping before her home was raided by Northumberland’s son Robert. The duke was incensed, declaring that Mary had “gone towards the provinces of Norfolk and Suffolk, being the coast opposite Flanders, with intent to involve the kingdom in
troubles and wars, and bring in foreigners to defend her pretensions to the crown.”

While one queen fled Northumberland’s clutches, another squirmed miserably within them. Poor Jane Grey had no desire to rule England, or right. “Her nightmare lay in her awareness that she had become the prisoner of a power-hungry, unscrupulous junta, led by the man whom she feared above all others,” wrote biographer Alison Plowden. The frightening father-in-law who had been foisted upon her would now complete his unscrupulous rise to power by seeing her crowned.

The teenaged girl was horrified to find her parents, once tyrannical figures in her life,
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now kneeling in obeisance among other powerful personages. This seemed to make real her inescapable fate. Queen Jane was then taken to the Tower, where English monarchs traditionally held court before their coronations. Baptista Spinola, a Genoese merchant, recorded the scene:

Reaction to the news of Jane’s accession had indeed been decidedly cool, though not because she was Protestant. Mary was simply the rightful queen. “No one present showed any sign of rejoicing” when Jane was proclaimed, an imperial envoy reported, “and no one cried ‘Long Live the Queen!’ except the herald who made the proclamation and a few archers who followed him.” Any dissension was ruthlessly crushed by Northumberland’s henchmen. One young barman named Gilbert Pot was arrested “for speaking of certain words of Queen Mary, that she had the right title.” He was then set upon a pillory and had his ears lopped off.

Jane herself was painfully aware of how illegitimate her rule was, and that she was Northumberland’s puppet. Even so, since she had been used for her Tudor bloodline, she was not about to share power with her nonroyal spouse. “I sent for the earls of Arundel and Pembroke,” Jane later wrote to Queen Mary, “and said to them, that if the crown belonged to me I should be content to make my husband a duke, but would never consent to make him king.”

This decision of Jane’s, which seems to have dominated most of her brief two-week reign, infuriated not only Guildford Dudley, with all his kingly pretensions, but also his mother, the grasping Duchess of Northumberland, who, Jane wrote, “persuaded her son not to sleep with me any longer as he was wont to do.” After that, she related, “I was compelled to act as a woman who is obliged to live on good terms with her husband; nevertheless I was not only deluded by the Duke and the Council, but maltreated by my husband and his mother.”

While Queen Jane was preoccupied with her pouty husband and nasty in-laws, Queen Mary was a fugitive with few prospects. Even the envoys of her powerful ally and cousin, Emperor Charles V, believed her cause to be hopeless. The Duke of Northumberland seemed invincible.

“Dudley had with him some three thousand mounted men and foot soldiers, thirty cannon from the Tower, and as many cartloads of ammunition,” wrote Mary’s biographer Carolly Erickson. “He controlled the capital, the government, the treasury, and the queen. No commander was superior to him in experience or skill; he seemed to have every advantage.”

But, for all that, the people hated him. To most he was a wicked upstart, mad with power. Mary, on the other hand, was Henry VIII’s own daughter—a princess who had endured much pain and heartbreak, and who was now being denied her birthright by a monster. In a steady procession, people began to rally to her banner. It was a spontaneous eruption of support by a people unwilling to see their rightful queen displaced.

Mary had been reminded by the council that she had been “justly made illegitimate and uninheritable to the Crown Imperial of this realm,” and warned not to bother the loyal subjects of “our Sovereign Lady Queen Jane.” Now Northumberland was preparing to answer her impudence.