The Tudors (58 page)

But there was a joker in the deck, one that added a bizarre dynastic twist to the king’s plan and continues to complicate historians’ efforts to understand why the situation unfolded as it did. Shortly before Edward’s remission ended and the imminence of death became undeniable, a flurry of grand marriages and betrothals had been arranged by John Dudley. His youngest daughter was wed to the son and heir of the Earl of Huntingdon, who was of royal blood through the Pole family and an ally worth having. The duke’s brother Andrew Dudley was betrothed to Margaret Clifford, who was thirty years his junior but, as we have seen, a possible heir to the throne. The two younger Grey sisters were likewise dispensed to the advantage of the Dudleys: Catherine was affianced to the son and heir of the Earl of Pembroke, who owed his title and much of his wealth to his alliance with the Dudleys, Mary to the son of a somewhat lesser notable. Each of these unions served to tighten the duke’s connections to important families and factions—sources of support that might become a matter of life or death in case of serious trouble. Even when taken together, however, they were trivial in comparison with the wedding that formed the centerpiece of the celebrations that spilled out into the streets of London from John Dudley’s grand residence. On May 25 Lady Jane Grey, heir presumptive according to King Edward’s still-secret plan, was married to young Guildford Dudley (he was in his late teens, though his year of birth is not certain), fourth among the duke’s five sons.

Even if King Edward had not been dying, the wedding would have been a coup for the Dudleys. Quite apart from her royal blood, Jane as the eldest daughter of a sonless duke was a great dynastic prize. At one time she had been considered a possible bride for the king himself; probably they would have been a good match, being not only of almost exactly the same age but physically attractive, superbly educated, and devotedly evangelical. The Duke of Somerset, during his time as lord protector, had made preliminary arrangements to marry his son to Jane, but that opportunity was lost with the Seymour party’s fall from power. John Dudley’s success in bringing the girl into his family, combined with the altering of the succession, set the stage for Dudleys—possibly Guildford
himself, certainly any son that he and Jane succeeded in producing—to be kings of England. The question of whether the scheme originated with Edward or with the duke remains unresolved. Whatever the case, both were entirely committed to the project and had excellent reasons to be so. For the king it meant that the gospel could be preserved in England for all time—that his short life and shorter reign would have vast and eternal value. For the duke it meant not only deliverance from his many enemies—and the gruff Dudley, for all his courage and ability, was disliked by almost everyone except his own family and his king—but the opportunity to continue ruling England indefinitely through a daughter-in-law whom he undoubtedly expected to be the pliant instrument of his will.

Poor Edward, who could only listen from his deathbed as news was brought of the nuptials of the young woman who under other circumstances might one day have become his bride, was by June in a desperately bad state, weak and racked by fits of coughing, needing stimulants to remain focused. He knew that no scribbled statement of his desire to bypass his sisters in favor of Jane could be depended upon to alter the succession. Something more formal, more official, was needed. On June 12 he revealed his thinking to a group of the court’s legal officers, explaining why he regarded it as impossible to allow Mary to succeed him and instructing them to draw up whatever documents they deemed necessary to make Jane incontestably his heir. Two days later, in reporting to the Privy Council as the king had ordered them to do, the lawyers complained that if they followed Edward’s instructions they would violate Henry VIII’s final Succession Act and thereby commit treason. John Dudley, infuriated at being blocked in this way, arranged for the lawyers (among whom were the solicitor-general and attorney-general) to meet again with an equally dissatisfied king. They told Edward that the succession, having been established by statute, could not be changed except through passage of a new statute. This was a trenchant argument—a measure of the extent to which Parliament’s role in the making of law was taking firm root even in the midst of the Tudor autocracy—but entirely unacceptable to Edward, who could have no confidence of living long enough for a Parliament to be summoned and put through the necessary paces. He declared that he wanted the matter settled immediately by execution of a deed that the next Parliament could ratify when it met
in September, and he tried to assuage the fears of the lawmen by assuring them that it could not possibly be treason to obey a living king. After a good deal of bullying by various lords and members of the council, Sir Edward Montague, chief justice of the Court of Common Pleas, agreed to comply on two conditions. He wanted a written commission authorizing him to act—a document bearing the imprint of the Great Seal. And he wanted, in advance, a pardon freeing him from any future charge of treason. When this was granted, all the lawyers fell into line.

One last thing could be done, short of parliamentary ratification, to give a patina of legitimacy to Edward’s plan. The deed that Montague and the others now hastened to complete for the king’s signature could be endorsed by every personage of importance in the kingdom. The collection of signatures, and of the seals of the individuals doing the signing, therefore became a matter of urgency. Generally there was little difficulty: the Privy Council and Crown offices had, over the preceding few years, been packed with men of Dudley’s choosing, and there remained few bishops or nobles with reason, doctrinal or financial or otherwise, to want the throne to pass to an adherent of the Roman church. Cranmer proved more difficult than most, complaining that he could not sign without violating the oath he had sworn to Henry VIII. Ultimately, however, he showed himself to be as willing to conform to the will of the son as to that of the father. His signature became the last of the 101 affixed to the formidable document declaring Jane Grey to be Edward’s rightful heir.

It came none too soon. The bright and earnest young king, as yearned-for a prince as had ever been born in England, was at the end of his resources. His final days, horrible to behold, must have been far more horrible to undergo. “He has not the strength to stir, and can hardly breathe,” the imperial ambassador reported. “His body no longer performs its functions, his nails and hair are falling out, and all his person is scabby.” Another courtier reported that the king’s body was riddled with “ulcers,” probably a reference to bedsores. In any event he was no longer capable of anything more than waiting, preparing, and perhaps hoping for death. The fulfillment of his last great wish was going to depend, and depend entirely, on John Dudley.

Dudley understood that, no matter how many signatures and seals were affixed to a piece of vellum, success was not assured. He controlled
the government and all its instruments, but by this point it was a weak government not only financially but militarily, the sorry state of the treasury having made it necessary to disband the mercenary troops, Italian and German mainly, used in suppressing the risings of 1549. Dudley himself was a charmless, graceless figure, resented at court for his rough style and for having risen so high after beginning as the son of an attainted traitor. (In all of England there were currently only three dukes, one of whom had been languishing in prison since before the death of Henry VIII, and Dudley was the first in history without even a trace of blood connection to the royal family.) To the common people he had always seemed a distant and threatening figure, the bad duke who had destroyed their friend the good Duke Somerset and crushed them for seeking redress of their grievances. Nothing if not practical and hardheaded, Dudley is unlikely to have harbored many illusions about the number and quality of his friends.

The central issue, however, proved to be not Dudley’s popularity but the strength of Lady Jane’s claim versus that of Mary Tudor. Jane was in fact a person of rather lofty character for a sixteen-year-old, dignified, serious about serious matters, to all appearances utterly without personal ambition. But few people outside the court had ever heard of her, and almost no one knew anything about her. It was hard to believe—it was inconceivable, actually—that her sudden emergence as monarch was going to be greeted with widespread enthusiasm. Mary, by contrast, had been born and raised a public figure, a mighty king’s eldest daughter and therefore generally recognized as the rightful successor once his only son was gone. She was a woman against whom no bad thing could be said except by those who regarded her religion as intolerable. Great sympathy had been aroused by the humiliations to which she and her mother had been subjected over a quarter of a century. She was a formidable threat to everything Edward had planned, and would have to be dealt with.

Edward’s sufferings came to an end on the evening of July 6. He died in the arms of a Dudley son-in-law, Sir Henry Sidney, who later reported that the “sweetness” with which the king had surrendered his spirit “would have converted the fiercest of papists if they had any grace in them of true faith in Christ.” Before losing the ability to speak, Sidney said, Edward “made a prayer to God to deliver this nation from that uncharitable
religion of popery, which was the chiefest cause for his election of the Lady Jane Grey to succeed before his sister Mary … out of pure love to his subjects, that he desired they might live and die in the Lord, as he did.” The death was kept secret while Dudley made his arrangements to transfer the crown to his daughter-in-law. The Tower of London and Windsor Castle were put on alert, the Privy Council was assembled in the Tower, lords lieutenant in every part of the kingdom were instructed to be ready to muster their forces, and warships were deployed in the Channel to intercept any vessel attempting to carry Mary away. A Dudley daughter was dispatched to escort Lady Jane (not yet informed of the king’s death) from Chelsea (where she had gone to recover from what she believed to have been an attempted poisoning) to Syon House (which had been a great abbey until seized by Henry VIII, briefly became the property of Lord Protector Edward Seymour, and now belonged to the Dudleys). John Dudley himself, at the head of a delegation including the late Queen Catherine Parr’s brother and three earls, called on Lady Jane there and informed her on his knees that the king was dead and had named her as his successor. Jane, by her own later account, thereupon fell to the floor and began to weep, protesting that she was unprepared for and unworthy of the crown. In due course she was persuaded to accept God’s will and vowed to do her best. The next day, July 10, Jane’s elevation was proclaimed throughout London along with a declaration that neither Mary nor Elizabeth could inherit. Three reasons were given: Henry VIII’s daughters were bastards under the law, were merely half-sisters to the king, and might, if either became queen, jeopardize England’s autonomy by marrying some foreign, possibly Catholic, prince. The first and second arguments were, if they had an impact at all, counterproductive: the denial of Mary’s legitimacy was widely offensive, and not to the conservatives only. Jane was escorted to the Tower amid the celebratory firing of cannons and such other fanfare as Dudley and his associates could arrange. Behind the scenes, however, there were early signs of discord: when Dudley advised his daughter-in-law to declare her bridegroom king of England, he was immediately rebuffed. The crown, Jane declared with a firmness that must have taken her father-in-law aback, was “not a plaything for boys and girls.” In the great scheme of things it was a minor setback; at worst, it meant that the crowning of a Dudley king might have to be postponed a generation.

The duke had already overreached himself and was lucky to have been refused. People were reacting with sullen surprise to the news that someone called Jane was their new queen. Many would have been outraged to learn that a son of the unpopular upstart Dudley was being foisted off on them as king. In the streets of London the lack of enthusiasm for the new regime was painfully obvious. There were no cheers or demonstrations, no spontaneous lighting of bonfires, none of the effusions of joy with which the citizenry customarily welcomed the advent of a new reign. Still, Dudley’s position, and Jane’s, seemed unassailable. Dudley controlled the levers of power. He had even received assurances of support from Henry II of France, eager to help if he could to keep a cousin and protégé of Charles V from the English throne. Charles’s representatives in London, meanwhile, were reporting glumly that the English capital, government, and treasury were all in Dudley’s hands, that Queen Jane had already been officially recognized, and that Mary’s chances of reversing this fait accompli were virtually nil.

Mary, however, had ideas of her own. Convinced that she was the rightful queen, willing to believe that it was her destiny to restore the true faith to her homeland, she had no intention of surrendering. She and Elizabeth had been at their country seats as Edward entered his final decline, keeping themselves as informed as they could about his condition. When they received instructions to come to the king at Greenwich, both sensed danger. Elizabeth claimed to be too ill to travel. Mary set out from her residence at Hunsdon, but proceeded so slowly that in two days she covered barely five miles and at the end of the second day was still at Hoddesdon on the outskirts of London. She would have entered the capital the next day, placing herself at the mercy of Dudley and the council, but during the night someone sent a message informing her of the king’s death. Within minutes, with members of her household struggling to keep pace, she was galloping off northward, away from London and toward her Kenninghall estate in East Anglia. Since her reconciliation with her father a decade before, she had been the owner of extensive East Anglian properties, and the local population was friendly. Dudley dispatched two of his sons, Henry and Robert, to find Mary and deliver her to London, but when the latter arrived at Hunsdon he found her gone. Word soon reached London that fighting men by the hundreds were rallying to Mary, and that she was receiving substantial financial
support as well. When she moved on from Kenninghall, she and her followers were refused admittance to Norwich, a city that had fresh and painful memories of what was likely to happen to those who defied John Dudley. The town of Framlingham, however, threw open its gates.