The House of Tudor (37 page)

Northumberland’s power would end with the King’s death - the best he could expect from Mary and her friends was political extinction, the worst an early appointment on Tower Hill - and since no one believed he would give up without a struggle, the Court and City seethed with nervous speculation. At the beginning of May John Dudley took the first steps towards securing his position by announcing the betrothal of Lady Jane Grey to his youngest and only remaining unmarried son, Guildford. Bearing in mind that Henry VIII had willed the crown to the so-called Suffolk line after his own children, the intention behind this move could hardly be mistaken.

At first the plan encountered some unexpected opposition from fifteen-year-old Lady Jane. After the arrest of Thomas Seymour, Jane had been reluctantly obliged to return home. Her only escape would be marriage but she disliked Guildford Dudley, a conceited, oafish youth and his mother’s darling, and she considered herself already promised to the young Earl of Hertford, son of the late Protector. Her protests did her no good. Her deplorable parents set on her in unison and the marriage duly took place at Durham House on Whitsunday, 21 May. At the same ceremony, Jane’s younger sister Katherine, now thirteen, was married to Lord Herbert, son and heir of the powerful Earl of Pembroke, and one of Northumberland’s daughters, another Katherine, to Lord Hastings, heir of the Earl of Huntingdon. This triple wedding, designed by John Dudley to forge a triple-strength chain of alliances, was ‘a very splendid and royal’ occasion, attended by ‘a great concourse of the principal persons of the kingdom’. It had been given out that the King himself would be there, but Edward was by now in no condition to leave his bed. According to de Scheyfve, writing on 11 June, he was now obliged to lie flat on his back all day. He could keep nothing on his stomach and was living ‘entirely on restoratives and obtaining little or no repose’.

By this time, in fact, the wretched Edward, suffering as much, if not more, from the remedies being inflicted on him as from his disease, was very near his end. But there was to be no merciful oblivion for England’s Treasure, or at any rate not yet. Somehow Northumberland had to keep him alive until their joint dispositions for the future were complete. Early in June the Duke had taken the unprecedented step of dismissing Edward’s doctors and bringing in a wise-woman, who undertook to cure the King if she was given a free hand. This woman, whose name is not recorded, proceeded to dose her helpless patient with ‘restringents’, which probably included arsenic and which had the immediate effect of producing a rally. In the long-term, her ministrations caused Edward’s limbs to swell, his skin to darken and his hair and nails to fall out; but while the temporary improvement lasted, he and John Dudley worked together over his Device for the Succession which was to disinherit Mary and Elizabeth, pass over Frances Suffolk and bequeath the crown directly to the Lady Jane and ‘her heirs male’.

Northumberland generally gets all the blame for this blatant attempt to set aside the direct line in order to further his own ambition, but Edward needed little urging to disinherit his elder sister - he was only too well aware that the Catholic Mary would lose no time in trying to undo all the work of godly reform carried out during the past five years. Elizabeth was rather different, but it would be difficult to remove one of the princesses without the other and Elizabeth, however good her intentions, might very well find herself obliged to marry a Catholic prince. Both the princesses, in fact, were liable to acquire foreign husbands who would gain control of affairs and ‘tend to the utter subversion of the commonwealth’.

As soon as everything was in readiness, Northumberland, who was not a deliberately cruel man, got rid of the quack and allowed the royal physicians back into the sickroom. Edward had now taken no solid food for nearly three weeks, his fingers and toes were becoming gangrenous and the boy, born in such joy and hope fifteen years and nine months ago, longed only for death. Release came during the late afternoon of 6 July, when the last Tudor king died in the arms of his friend Henry Sidney.

Edward VI was the first committed Protestant King of England - a fact which unfortunately tended to overshadow everything else in the minds of his contemporaries - and the flood of eulogies on his godly wisdom and government, his zeal in abolishing ‘the deformities of popish idolatry’ and overthrowing ‘the tyranny of Anti-Christ’ have very largely succeeded in obscuring the reality of the living, breathing boy. Perhaps the most interesting, because disinterested, appreciation comes from an outsider, Girolamo Cardano, an Italian mathematician and physician, who saw and talked to the King in the autumn of 1552 when a trained observer could already discern ‘the mark in his face of death that was to come too soon’. Cardano could report at first-hand on Edward’s ‘singularly perfect’ knowledge of Latin and French and could easily believe that he was equally proficient in Greek, Italian and Spanish. ‘Neither was he ignorant in logic, in the principles of natural philosophy, or in music. There was in him lacking neither humanity, the image of our mortality, a princely gravity and majesty, nor any kind of towardness beseeming a noble king. Briefly, it might seem a miracle of nature to behold the excellent wit and forwardness that appeared in him being yet a child.’ And yet, Cardano insisted, he was not exaggerating. If anything ‘the truth is more than I do utter’. They met several times and discussed, among other things, astronomy and the causes of comets. Cardano was deeply impressed by his grasp of and interest in the liberal arts and sciences, his sagacity and his ‘amiable sweetness’. ‘By this little trial’, he wrote, ‘a great guess may be given what was in this King.’

Even allowing for a measure of exaggeration in all the tributes to his virtue and wisdom, there is no reason to doubt that Edward did have great natural intelligence, a real eagerness to learn and an enormous capacity for concentrated hard work. Nor is there any reason to doubt the utter sincerity of his religious convictions, even if they do make him seem priggish to a materialistic age. The coldly uncommunicative front he presented, especially in the early years of his reign, was probably a defence mechanism as much as anything and where his suspicions had been aroused his hostility could be implacable - witness his attitude towards his unfortunate Seymour uncles. But Edward could both give and inspire affection. His personal attendants were all devoted to him and Edward himself had formed a close and lasting friendship with Barnaby Fitzpatrick, the Irish boy who shared his childhood.

In his obstinacy, his streak of ruthlessness, his personal charm, his love of music and pageantry, and his addiction to physical exercise Edward was a very recognizable Tudor. It seems more than possible that he might have grown up to combine his father’s more attractive characteristics with his grandfather’s long-headedness and made England a very great king. But he had been able to give ‘a show or sight only of excellency’ and now:

Out of Greenwich he is gone.

And lieth under a stone.

That loveth both house and parke:

Thou shalt see him no more,

That set by thee such store.

For death hath pearced his hart.

Gone is our King,

That would runne at the ringe.

And oftentimes ryde on Black heath

Ye noblemen of chevalry,

And ye men of artillehe,

May all lament his death.

That swete childe is deadc,

And lapped in leade,

And in Westminster lyeth full colde

All hartes may rue,

That ever they him knew.

Or that swete childe did beholde.

Farewell, diamonde deare!

Farewell, christall cleare!

Farewell, the flower of chevalry!

The Lorde hath taken him,

And for his people’s sinne;

A just plague for our iniquitie.

The plague, just or otherwise, which Edward’s people now faced was that old recurring nightmare, a disputed succession, and in the summer of 1553 the outlook was particularly gloomy. With the royal house reduced to a handful of women and babies and the rightful heir a delicate ageing spinster, the way seemed wide open for the strong men to take over. Mary had been waiting out the last few months in ‘sore perplexity’ and increasing fear of the future. Northumberland sent her regular reports on Edward’s condition and he even sent her a present, a blazon of her coat of arms as Princess of England, but Mary and de Scheyfve believed these attentions were intended to lull her suspicions, that the moment Edward was dead the Duke meant to seize power for himself by proclaiming his new daughter-in-law Queen, and that Mary would then be in deadly danger. All the same, when a summons to her dying brother’s bedside reached her at Hunsdon, probably on 5 July, she obediently set out on the journey. She had not gone far - she was at Hoddesdon on the London road - before she received an anonymous warning, which can surely have come as no surprise, that Northumberland’s message was a trap.

The crisis which had been lying in wait for Mary all her adult life was now upon her. Now, if ever, she must forget her megrims, her nervous headaches, her self-doubts and hesitations and fits of weeping. Now, if she was to save herself, let alone her chances of becoming Queen, she must act with speed and decision. With only one possible course of action before her, Mary showed that she could rise bravely to an occasion. After sending a brief word to the Imperial embassy, she turned aside and, with no more than half a dozen loyal companions, rode hard and straight down the Newmarket road tor Kenninghall in Norfolk. She had friends in the eastern counties and there, if it came to the worst, she would be within reach of the coast and rescue.

In London the King’s death was being kept a close secret, or as close as it was possible to keep a secret in any royal household, but when he heard that Mary had slipped through his fingers, Northumberland could wait no longer - for him, too, speed was of the essence. He despatched a party of three hundred horses under the command of his son Robert with orders to pursue and capture the Lady Mary and on Sunday, 9 July, he finally showed his hand. The Bishop of London, preaching at St. Paul’s Cross, referred to both the princesses as bastards and fulminated especially against Mary as a papist who would bring foreigners into the country. Also on that Sunday the Lady Jane was officially informed of her new status.

The six weeks since her marriage had not been happy ones for Jane. She seems to have feared and disliked the whole Dudley family, particularly her husband and his mother, to such an extent that even her own mother’s company was preferable and immediately after the wedding she had gone back first to Suffolk Place and then to her parents’ house by the river at Sheen. But the Duchess of Northumberland, who did not get on with the Duchess of Suffolk, soon became impatient. She told Jane that the King was dying and that she ought to be ready for a summons at any time, because he had made her his heir. According to Jane, this information, flung at her without warning, caused her the greatest stupefaction, but she put it down to ‘boasting’ and an excuse to separate her from her mother. She probably said so, for the result was a furious Tudor-Dudley quarrel - the Duchess of Northumberland accusing the Duchess of Suffolk of deliberately trying to keep the newly-weds apart and insisting that whatever happened, Jane’s place was with her husband. This argument was unanswerable and, in the end, Jane was forced to join Guildford at Durham House where, apparently, the marriage was consummated. But the reluctant bride stayed only a few days with her in-laws. She had become ill -probably some form of summer complaint aggravated by nervous strain - and, with curious lack of logic, was convinced that the Dudleys were poisoning her. In fact, of course, her health and wellbeing were of vital concern to the Dudleys just then and they sent her out to Chelsea, with its happy memories of Katherine Parr, to recuperate. She was still there on the afternoon of 9 July when Northumberland’s daughter, Mary Sidney, came to fetch her to Syon House - another of the Duke’s residences. At Syon she found her parents, her husband, her mother-in-law, and the Lords of the Council headed by Northumberland himself These distinguished personages greeted her with ‘unwonted caresses and pleasantness’ and, to Jane’s acute embarrassment, proceeded to kneel before her and do her reverences which she considered most unsuitable to her state. Northumberland then broke the news of Edward’s death and went on to disclose the terms of the King’s ‘Device’; how he had decided for good and sufficient reasons that neither of his sisters was worthy to succeed him and how - ‘he being in every way able to disinherit them’ - he had instead nominated his cousin Jane as heir to the crown of England.

Jane’s partisans have always maintained that this was the first she knew of her deadly inheritance, but it is hard to believe that a girl pf so much brilliant, highly-trained intelligence can have failed to grasp the significance of her hasty forced marriage to Guildford Dudley, or that she had not at least guessed what was being planned for her. Not that prior knowledge in any way affected the helplessness of her position. Half-fainting, she managed to gasp out something about her ‘insufficiency’ and a hasty prayer that if the crown was rightfully hers, God would help her govern the realm to His glory. In present circumstances, God looked like being her only friend.

On the following afternoon, the new Queen was taken in state by water from Syon to the Tower and a Genoese merchant, one Baptista Spinola, who was standing in a group of spectators outside the fortress to see the procession disembark, took the trouble to describe her appearance in detail. ‘This Jane’, he wrote, ‘is very short and thin (all the Grey sisters were diminutive, Mary, the youngest, being almost a dwarf), but prettily shaped and graceful. She has small features and a well-made nose, the mouth flexible and the lips red. The eyebrows are arched and darker than her hair, which is nearly red. Her eyes are sparkling and reddish brown in colour.’ Spinola was standing so close to Jane that he noticed her complexion was good but freckled and her teeth, when she smiled, white and sharp. She was wearing a gown of green velvet stamped with gold, while Guildford, ‘a very tall strong boy with light hair’ resplendent in white and silver, preened himself at her side and ‘paid her much attention’.