Tales From the Tower of London (14 page)
Both sides in the growing confrontation were now actively campaigning for their chosen candidate and doing their best to raise an army large enough to defeat the opposition. While there is no doubt that Mary was firmly in charge of her party, we have no way of knowing if Jane even understood the terrible implications of all this. As a teenage girl who had led a sheltered and privileged life, she can hardly have been expected to grasp the real gravity of her situation. What we do know is that the stress of the situation was already taking a horrible physical toll on the girl. Her hair had begun to fall out and her skin was peeling. Sleep became impossible.
When some of the ships of the Royal Navy stationed at Yarmouth mutinied and defected to Mary’s side, the already timorous ministers went into a panic and began looking for the quickest way out of the Tower and as far as possible from the teenage girl they had put on the throne. At around seven o’clock in the evening of the 16th, the tower warders, loyal to Jane, locked the Tower gates, preventing the ministers from leaving. The keys to the Tower were then handed to Jane.
Despite these precautions, by Tuesday the 18th virtually the entire council had abandoned Jane and the Tower, slipping away one at a time to meet at Baynard’s Castle where they unanimously declared the hated Northumber-land a traitor and asserted Mary’s right to the crown. To give weight to their action they drafted a letter to the Duke of Suffolk demanding that his daughter relinquish the throne which only nine days earlier she had tried so hard to refuse.
When a copy of the letter was delivered to Suffolk, who had remained in the Tower with his daughter, he rode immediately to Baynard’s Castle where he added his name to the proclamation acknowledging Mary as rightful queen. This done, he returned to the Tower to confront Jane whom he found sitting alone in her chair of state in the empty audience chamber. ‘Come down off there, child. That is no place for you’, he told her sadly, and proceeded to tear the canopy bearing Jane’s device from its place above the throne. Then he told her to remove her crown and royal robes.
Not surprisingly, Jane’s reaction was one of immeasurable relief. Exhausted beyond words, she is reported to have replied to her father, ‘I much more willingly put them off than I put them on. Out of obedience to you and my mother, I have grievously sinned. Now I willingly relinquish the crown.’ Finally, she asked him ‘May I go home now?’ Guilt-ridden, Henry Grey could not bring himself to answer his daughter. He and his wife had already decided they would leave the Tower, abandoning their daughter as a hostage to Mary, as a guarantee of their own future good behaviour.
Among those in the council who had actively plotted Jane’s downfall was the Earl of Arundel. When Northumberland left the Tower on his way to confront Mary’s army, Arundel had made a great show of support for the enterprise, insisting that he would gladly have gone along, but his age and duties at the Tower prevented it. In truth, only hours after Northumberland left London, Arundel had slipped away and was on his way to Cambridge to join Mary’s followers. There he would meet up with Northumberland on the afternoon of 20 July.
Even before Northumberland reached Cambridge he realised that his cause had virtually no popular backing. At best, the towns and villages the army passed through were indifferent; at worst, they were openly hostile to the duke and his men. By the time they arrived in Cambridge, Northumberland knew his cause was lost and he made a public announcement supporting Mary, saying, ‘Queen Mary is a merciful woman who will pardon me.’ Standing in the crowd that had gathered to hear him was none other than the Earl of Arundel. Stepping forward at the end of the speech, Arundel shouted, ‘Do not flatter yourself. [Even] if the Queen were inclined to pardon, those who rule her will destroy thee, whomsoever else be spared.’
Realising there was no escape, Northumberland and his army disarmed, most of them slipping away into the countryside, while Northumberland, the would-be kingmaker, and his closest followers were taken into custody and marched off to London.
Even as Northumberland was laying down his arms, Queen Mary was marching on London with an army more than ten thousand strong.
At thirty-seven years of age Mary Tudor was already a sour-tempered old woman who had grown to mistrust and dislike almost everyone, mostly as a result of the abuse she and her mother had received at the hands of her father. Mary’s only consolation, and the guiding force in her life, was her fanatically strong Catholic faith – which she clung to with an almost morbid devotion. When Mary entered the Tower, many of her old supporters, pillars of the Roman Catholic church, were brought out of the cells where they had been kept in confinement since her father reformed the church nearly fifteen years earlier. Casting her cold eyes over the sorry lot of bent and malnourished old men, Mary said ‘You are my prisoners!’ Then she kissed each one of them on the cheek, set them free and began plotting her revenge on everyone who had kept her off the throne and those who had supported her father’s new Church of England.
Jane Dudley was removed from the state apartments to the Gentleman Gaoler’s lodgings on Tower Green where she would be kept in relative comfort, but under close guard. Guildford Dudley was taken to the Beauchamp Tower to be joined there three days later, on 24 July, by Northumberland, his father and his three brothers, Robert, Ambrose and Henry. Three weeks later, on 18 August, the Duke of Northumberland was taken to trial at Westminster where he was immediately found guilty of treason, with the execution set for five days later. In an attempt to save his head, Northumberland converted to the Catholic faith and made a public statement enumerating all the troubles Protestantism had brought to England. It was a good ploy, but Mary was not fooled. Even on the morning of his execution, the wily duke played for every possible minute of time. The execution had to be delayed for nearly an hour when he demanded to hear mass. On the scaffold, the duke begged for his life, pleading that ‘even the life of a dog’ was better than death. Finally realising that there would be no reprieve, he wrung his hands crying ‘This must be!’ and lowered his head on to the block.
With Northumberland’s death, Mary relaxed the conditions of Jane’s confinement. She was allowed 93 shillings a week to spend, allowed to walk in the Tower gardens, occasionally going outside the Tower and as far as Tower Hill, but always under heavy guard. Occasionally she was allowed to share dinner with the Gentleman Gaoler, Mr Partridge, and his wife. It was at one such dinner eleven days after her father-in-law’s execution that she fell into conversation with another dinner guest, Rowland Lea. During their discussion, talk came around to her father-in-law, his plots and his humiliating end. According to Lea’s diary, Jane said, ‘He hath brought me and our stock in most miserable calamity and misery by his exceeding ambition.’ Of Northumberland’s eleventh-hour religious conversion, she said, ‘Perchance he thereby hoped to have his pardon . . . what man is there living, I pray you, although he had been innocent, that would hope of life in that case, being in the field against the Queen in person as General, and after being so hated and evil spoken of by the common [people]? Who was [to] judge that he should hope for pardon, whose life was so odious to all men? But . . . like as his life was wicked and full of dissimulation, so was his end . . . I pray God, I nor no friend of mine die so.’ Here was obviously a great personal statement of faith, because Jane knew that she, too, was about to go on trial for her life on charges of treason.
But even the hardened Mary could not believe that Jane Grey was a traitor; she had simply been a pawn in a massive game of power politics. To that end, the day before Jane’s trial, Mary called her to court and told her privately that although a verdict of guilty was certain, she and her husband would be pardoned and, as soon as possible, set free.
On 13 November, Jane and Guildford, along with two of his brothers, Ambrose and Henry, were sent to trial at the Guildhall surrounded by a guard of four hundred soldiers. They all pleaded guilty to the charge of treason, and the sentence of death was only a matter of form. True to her word, on the following day Queen Mary arranged their pardon.
Everything might have gone according to plan had Mary not made a proclamation in early December, announcing her intention to marry Prince (soon to be King) Philip of Spain. Hostility against her Catholic religion now overshadowed the public’s belief in her inherited right to the throne. Visions of Spanish rule and the Spanish Inquisition being imported into England sent waves of panic through the church and lay community alike.
Among the tens of thousands of incensed Englishmen was Sir Thomas Wyatt. Wyatt had never been particularly political, nor especially religious. Even his background was not notably auspicious; his father had been executed for committing adultery with Anne Boleyn. But the thought of England becoming a Spanish satellite was too much for Wyatt to bear and he began raising an army to oppose the queen and, if necessary, to drive her from the throne. One of those who flocked to Wyatt’s cause was the Duke of Suffolk, father of the captive Lady Jane. Undoubtedly, some of Suffolk’s patriotic fervour was spurred on by guilt for having manipulated, and then abandoned, his daughter. Whatever the case, by mid-January Wyatt and Suffolk had an army of more than four thousand men, which they led to Rochester, seizing the city and sending out a call for support from Londoners. Initially Wyatt’s chances looked good. When the Duke of Norfolk led an army into the field to subdue the rebellion, hundreds of his men deserted to join Wyatt’s cause.
On 3 February 1554, Wyatt’s army entered the outskirts of London, through the Southwark district and moved towards the Tower where they took up position across the river, demanding custody of both Queen Mary and Lady Jane Grey. It probably came as no surprise that their demand was rejected out of hand. Without hesitation, Wyatt and Suffolk began bombarding the Tower walls, irrespective of the danger their artillery might present to Jane Grey. But Wyatt’s guns were no match for the massive cannon and mortars mounted on the walls of the Tower. Within an hour, Wyatt began abandoning his position, slowly retreating through the streets of London. Suffolk stood his ground longer but, eventually, he too had to give up the fight. It wasn’t long before, Wyatt and nearly three hundred of his supporters, including Jane’s father, were captured by the queen’s forces near Temple Bar and hauled unceremoniously back to a Tower already overcrowded by the arrests made when Mary took the throne. Never in its long history had the Tower held so many prisoners at one time.
More than one hundred of Wyatt’s rebels would eventually be hanged or beheaded, forty-five of them on one day alone. Wyatt himself would be among the last to go. When his turn came, Wyatt was subjected to all the public humiliation and pain of the worst of medieval tortures: being hanged, drawn and quartered. But even with the deaths of Northumberland and Wyatt, Mary’s fears were not put to rest. So long as Jane Grey remained a focus of public sympathy, Mary would not rest easy. Jane Grey would have to die. Two days after Wyatt’s execution, Jane and Guildford were told that their pardon had been rescinded and they would go to the block in a matter of days.
On hearing the news, Jane’s ladies-in-waiting broke down in tears, but Jane tried to comfort them, saying ‘O faithful companions of my sorrows . . . are we not born into life to suffer adversity and even disgrace? When has the time been that the innocent were not exposed to violence and oppression? The quarrel is God’s, but undoubtedly the victory is ours.’
It would seem that even the hard-hearted Mary had no taste for killing her sixteen-year-old cousin and sent her personal confessor, Dr John Feckenham, to Jane with a message of hope. If she would convert to Catholicism, the execution might still be called off. On 8 February, Feckenham took the message to Jane and urged her to convert, but Jane told him that she did not have time for a religious controversy. Feckenham took her statement literally and reported to the queen that Jane needed more time to search her soul. Mary agreed to a three-day stay of execution. Excitedly, Feckenham rushed back to Jane with the news. Realising that he had completely misunderstood her intent, Jane said, ‘You are much deceived, sir, if you think I have any desire for longer life; for I assure you . . . my life has been so tedious to me that I long for nothing so much as death; and since it is the Queen’s pleasure, I am most willing to undergo it.’
Desperate to save the girl, Feckenham even proposed that he and Jane debate their respective beliefs publicly. Exhausted and frustrated, Jane answered, ‘This disputation may be fit for the living, but not for the dying. Leave me to make peace with God.’ When Feckenham replied that he was afraid that he would not see Jane again, she told him, ‘that is true, unless God . . . opens the eyes of your heart’. Implicit in this answer was Jane’s belief that Feckenham, as a Catholic, would not be accepted into heaven. It was a sentiment that was undoubtedly not lost on Feckenham.
Although he had failed to convert Jane to the Roman Catholic Church and thereby save her life, Feckenham had been deeply moved by the girl’s piety and strength of character. As a final gesture to Jane, he asked Queen Mary if he might accompany her young cousin to the scaffold. Probably hoping for a last-minute conversion, Mary gave her consent.
Even with the certainty of death hanging over her, Jane seems to have spent her last few days relatively composed, if not calm. She occupied her time writing in her diary, recalling the facts of her short, turbulent reign and sending letters to friends and family. Among those to whom she wrote was her cousin, the queen. Here, she admitted her guilt and explained the circumstances that led her to the end of her young life. ‘Although my fault be such that but for the goodness and clemency of the Queen, I can have no hope of finding pardon . . . [my own] lack of prudence . . . deserve[s] heavy punishment. . . . It being known that the error imputed to me had not been altogether caused by myself.’
