Transcriber’s Note
Cover created by Transcriber, using an illustration in this book, and placed in the Public Domain.

ROMANTIC HISTORY
General Editor: Martin Hume, M.A.

THE NINE DAYS’ QUEEN

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

The Pageant of London
The Sultan and his Subjects

LADY JANE GREY

FROM THE PAINTING BY LUCAS DE HEERE AT ALTHORP

THE
NINE DAYS’ QUEEN

LADY JANE GREY
AND HER TIMES

BY
RICHARD DAVEY

EDITED, AND WITH INTRODUCTION, BY
MARTIN HUME, M.A.

WITH TWELVE ILLUSTRATIONS

METHUEN & CO.
36 ESSEX STREET W.C.
LONDON

First Published in 1909

TO
MY DEAR WIFE
ELEANORA DAVEY

AUTHOR’S NOTE

My object in writing this book has been to interest the reader in the tragic story of Lady Jane Grey rather from the personal than the political point of view. I have therefore employed, more perhaps than is usual, what the French historians term le document humain in my account of the extraordinary men and women who surrounded Lady Jane, and who used her as a tool for their ambitious ends. The reader may possibly wonder why in several of the earlier chapters Lady Jane Grey plays so shadowy a part, but I deemed it impossible for any one who is not very familiar with our History at this period to understand, without having a complete idea of the chain of conspiracies that preceded and rendered possible her proclamation, how a young Princess, not in the immediate succession to the Crown, came to be placed, if only for nine days, in the towering position of Queen of England. These conspiracies were four in number. The first was that of the Howards and the Catholic party against Queen Katherine Parr. The second, the conspiracy of the Seymours against the Howards, which ended in the downfall of the great House of Norfolk, whereby Edward Seymour was enabled to proclaim himself Lord Protector of the Realm. The third plot was that of Thomas Seymour to cast down his brother Edward from his high station, and, if possible, to usurp the same for himself—a strange story of folly and intrigue and overvaulting ambition which ended in one of the most terrible fratricidal tragedies to be found in the history of the nations. Fourthly, the removal of the brothers Seymour from the scene enabled John Dudley, Duke of Northumberland, to work his own will and to prepare the way, during the last days of Edward VI, for his daughter-in-law, much against her will, to usurp the throne.

I have consulted every available document, as well in our national archives and private libraries as in those of foreign countries, concerning Lady Jane and her friends and foes, the better to paint as vivid a picture as possible of the times in which they lived.

I need scarcely add how greatly I appreciate the honour Major Martin Hume has conferred upon my work by his scholarly Introduction, which gives so succinct and deeply interesting an account of our foreign politics at a most momentous period of English history. To him, to Dr. Gairdner, to Earl Spencer, to Earl Stamford and Warrington, and to many other gentlemen and friends, including the officials at the State Paper Office and the British Museum, I beg to tender my sincere thanks for their courtesy and for the valuable information with which they have helped me to complete my picture of one of the most interesting periods in our national history.

I cannot, moreover, allow this opportunity to pass without recording, with sincere gratitude and affection, the aid which I received, when I first thought of writing this life of Lady Jane Grey, from the kindness of my old valued and lamented friend, Dr. Richard Garnett.

RICHARD DAVEY

200 Ashley Gardens, London, S.W.
5th September 1909.

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

INTRODUCTION

The tragedy of Lady Jane Grey is unquestionably one of the most poignant episodes in English history, but its very dramatic completeness and compactness have almost invariably caused its wider significance to be obscured by the element of personal pathos with which it abounds. The sympathetic figure of the studious, saintly maiden, single-hearted in her attachment to the austere creed of Geneva, stands forth alone in a score of books refulgent against the gloomy background of the greed and ambition to which she was sacrificed. The whole drama of her usurpation and its swift catastrophe is usually treated as an isolated phenomenon, the result of one man’s unscrupulous self-seeking; and with the fall of the fair head of the Nine Days’ Queen upon the blood-stained scaffold within the Tower the curtain is rung down and the incident looked upon as fittingly closed by the martyrdom of the gentlest champion of the Protestant Reformation in England.

Such a treatment of the subject, however attractive and humanly interesting it may be, is nevertheless unscientific as history and untrue in fact. An adequate appreciation of the tendencies behind the unsuccessful attempt to deprive Mary of her birthright can only be gained by a consideration of the circumstances preceding and surrounding the main incident. The reasons why Northumberland, a weak man as events proved, was able to ride rough-shod over the nobles and people of England, the explanation of his sudden and ignominious collapse and of the apparent levity with which the nation at large changed its religious beliefs and observance at the bidding of assumed authority are none of them on the surface of events; and the story of Jane Grey as it is usually told, whilst abounding in pathetic interest gives no key to the vast political issues of which the fatal intrigue of Northumberland was but a by-product. To represent the tragedy as a purely religious one, as is not infrequently done, is doubly misleading. That one side happened to be Catholic and the other Protestant was merely a matter of party politics, and probably not a single active participator in the events, except Jane herself, and to some extent Mary, was really moved by religious considerations at all, loud as the professions of some of the leaders were.

Mr. Davey has given in the vivid pages of this book a striking picture of the Society in which the drama was represented and of the persons who surrounded Lady Jane Grey in the critical period of her unhappy fate; and this of itself enables a wider view than is usual to be taken of the subject. But, withal, I venture to think that an even more extended prospect of it may be attained and the whole episode fitted into its proper place in the history of England, if supplementary consideration be given to international politics of the time, and especially to the part which England aspired to take in the tremendous struggle for supremacy which was then approaching the end of its first phase on the Continent of Europe; a struggle in which not only the two most powerful nations in Christendom were engaged and the two greatest monarchs in the world were the leaders, but one in which the eternally antagonistic principles of expansion and repression were the issues.

It is too often assumed that the system of political parties in English Government dates only from the rise of Parliament as the predominant power in the State in the seventeenth century, since, by the open opposition and the public discussion of rival policies in the Legislature, the existence of different groups of statesmen then became evident to the world. But at least it may be asserted that, from the time when the two first Tudor kings sought the aggrandisement of England by placing their power in the balance between the great Continental rivals, two schools of English politicians surrounded their sovereign, each intent upon forwarding the alliance which seemed to them wisest in the interests of the country and their own. When, however, the political rivalry of France and the Emperor was accentuated by the introduction of religious schism in the contest, by the bold defiance of Luther and the spread of the reformed doctrines, the political parties in the English Court were divided more distinctly than ever by the new element introduced; and, despotic as the Tudor sovereigns were, the apparently personal and fickle character of their policy, which proves so puzzling to students, really arose in nearly every case from the temporary predominance in their counsels of one or the other school of thought represented in their Court. It is only by recognising this fact that the strange and sudden changes which took place in the reigns of Henry VIII and Edward VI can be made comprehensible, and by it also the rise and fall of Lady Jane Grey can be seen in its true light.

During the last twenty years of the reign of Henry VIII his bewildering mutations of policy and of wives were the result of efforts on the part of rival sets of politicians to utilise his brutal sensuality and inflated pride to their respective ends. With him, as with the most of them, religion was a mere stalking horse for other interests. The traditional and more Conservative party, which usually leant towards the imperial alliance, naturally took the Catholic side, the established nobility such as the Howards backed by the Catholic bishops being contrasted with the more recently ennobled men, aided by bureaucrats like Cromwell and by the reforming churchmen. Thus it came to be understood before the end of Henry’s reign that the men in the English Court most favourable to emancipation from the Papacy were generally speaking the advocates of a French alliance, whilst those who clung to the orthodox view of religion favoured the traditional adherence to the house of Burgundy. It is true that the men on both sides were equally eager to participate in the plunder of the Church and in filching the commons from the people of England; and that both parties included men who were ready to profess themselves faithful Catholics or ardent reformers as their interests demanded at the time. But the political aims of the respective parties were quite distinctly divided, notwithstanding religious affinities, for the Emperor was just as desirous of having Protestant friends in England as the King of France was willing to accept Catholic support there. The object of the English sovereigns, it must be recollected, was usually somewhat different from that of their bribed councillors who had their own interests to serve. The aim of Henry VII and Henry VIII, and especially of Elizabeth, who alone was successful in attaining it, was so to distribute the weight of England’s influence as to avert any coalition of the two great Continental powers against her, rather than to become the permanent tool of either; the efforts of Charles V, and his French rival being respectively directed towards preventing England from throwing in her lot with their enemies.

Until religious bitterness infinitely complicated the question, and finally led to the long state of war with Spain, the side which commanded most sympathy amongst the English people at large was unquestionably that which favoured a cordial understanding with the sovereign of Flanders and Spain. The country had been in close antagonism with France on and off for centuries, the proximity of the coasts and the aspirations of the French to dominate the Channel represented a constant danger and source of anxiety, and it was instinctively felt in England that the time-honoured policy which bound her to the monarch who was able when he pleased to divert the aggression of the French by threatening any of their land frontiers, was the safest friend of this country. The English merchants who found their richest markets in Flanders and Spain, and who were in chronic irritation at the French piratical attacks upon their commerce, were equally anxious for a friendship which they looked upon as the best assurance against a war which they dreaded; so that the chief English advocates of the French connection were usually those whose adherence to the reformed religious doctrines overbore their political interests, and the newer nobility and politicians who found themselves at enmity on social and other grounds with the traditional conservatives.

It must not be forgotten that both France and the Emperor strove ceaselessly to gain friends amongst the English councillors. Immense bribes found their way into the pockets of ministers and secretaries of State, in many cases regular yearly pensions being settled upon influential political supporters, and by means of flattery, social attentions, and promises, the ambassadors in England of the rival powers became centres of intrigue to influence English policy in favour of one or the other. The goal to which both the rivals directed their eyes was one in which, curiously enough, England had no interest whatever, namely, the hegemony over Italy; but England which by activity on the northern coasts of France or on the Scottish border could weaken the French power for harm in other directions, could enable the Emperor at any time to check his enemy’s Italian ambitions; whilst with England as her friend France could brave the imperialists, certain that she would not be taken in the rear, especially when, as she usually managed to do, she had enlisted on her side the Turks on the Hungarian frontier and the Lutheran princes and towns of Germany.

The marriage of Henry VIII with Jane Seymour was looked upon by the Imperialist Conservative party in England as a victory for their cause. Her brother, Sir Edward Seymour, had been in the Emperor’s service, and Jane had supplanted the hated Anne Boleyn, whose sympathies were, of course, entirely French. It is true that later Seymour, a parvenu noble, be it recollected, was driven into the anti-papal camp mainly by the antagonism of Norfolk and the older nobles who led the Conservative party, but, notwithstanding his Protestantism, he never wavered in his attachment to the imperial alliance and his opposition to French interests.

When the death of Henry VIII made Seymour, as Duke of Somerset and Protector, virtually ruler of England with Paget as his principal minister, both of them were almost servile in their professions of devotion to the cause of the Emperor; and made no secret of their distrust of France with which a hollow and temporary peace had only been recently patched up. Somerset harried the Church and changed religious forms ruthlessly; his greed was insatiable and the devotional endowments were looted without compunction, the Catholic bishops were treated with stern severity, and even the schismatic Catholicism of Henry VIII was cast aside in favour of an entirely new creed and ritual. Norfolk was kept in the Tower, Wriothesley was disgraced and the Catholic Conservative nobles were warned not to stand in the Protector’s way. But through it all Somerset and Paget were politically the sworn servants and friends of the Emperor, pledged to discountenance any attempts of the French to injure him: whilst Charles V on his side, much as he deprecated the religious changes, could no more afford to quarrel with Somerset than he could with Henry VIII, twenty years before when he contumeliously repudiated his blameless Spanish wife and scornfully threw off the papal supremacy which was the keystone of the imperial system.

Submissive as were the words of Somerset and Paget to their imperial master[1] not by words alone but by acts also they sought to serve him as against France. The strong policy adopted by Somerset towards Scotland, and his defiant attitude at Boulogne, then temporarily held by the English against the payment of a great ransom, served the Emperor’s turn excellently at a period when he was at grips with his Lutheran subjects, at issue with the Pope and faced by a series of dangerous French intrigues in Italy. That the French themselves understood this perfectly well is seen by the desperate efforts they made to conciliate Somerset and win him to their side. Early in July 1547, only five months after his accession to power, Somerset told the imperial ambassador in strict confidence, when the latter was complaining of his religious innovations, that the special French envoy, Paulin—“immediately after the death of King Henry had striven to win him, the Protector, to the side of France by means of a large annual pension, which, as was only right, he had always declined. Notwithstanding this, however, Paulin, the last time he came hither, was instructed to offer him the assignment of the pension, which he had brought with him already signed and sealed. But with all these offers and grand promises of the French to divert the English Government from their alliance with your Majesty (the Emperor), he said he would always remain constant and loyal to you, knowing well that the strict preservation of the ancient alliance was so important for both parties.” Even a month previous to this Somerset had informed the ambassador that the French had greatly scandalised him by offering him as an inducement to join France, in an offensive and defensive alliance, the cession of the Emperor’s Flemish province to England when it had been conquered by the allies, Boulogne at the same time to be restored to France.

What wonder that the Emperor’s reply to this was to send flattering autograph letters to Somerset, assuring him of his unalterable regard, but saying not a word about his Protestant proceedings. “Of course,” continues the Emperor, writing to his ambassador, “the Protector would naturally refuse to accept the pension from the French, if only in the interests of duty and decency. The goodwill he displays towards us must be encouraged to the utmost by you on all occasions, and you must lose no opportunity of confirming the Protector in these favourable sentiments.” Somerset and Paget were therefore from first to last “Emperor’s men” and opponents of French interests, that is to say advocates of the same policy as that identified with the older nobles and Catholics, most of whom were now under a cloud in consequence of their religion or in consequence of their personal enmity to Somerset whom they regarded as a greedy, unscrupulous interloper.

From the first days after the death of Henry VIII, it had been seen by close observers that personal and not political rivalry alone was likely in the future to bring about a split in Somerset’s Government. The imperial ambassador, writing less than a fortnight after Henry’s death, says that whilst Hertford (Somerset) and Warwick (Northumberland) would apparently be supreme in authority, “it is likely that some jealousy or rivalry may arise between them because, although they both belong to the same sect, they are nevertheless widely different in character: the Lord-Admiral being of high courage will not willingly submit to his colleague. He is in higher favour with the people and with the nobles than is the Earl of Hertford, owing to his liberality and splendour. The Protector, on the other hand, is not so conspicuous in this respect, and is looked down upon by everybody as a dry, sour, opinionated man”: the sequel to this being that both these nobles with Paget and Wriothesley should, in the opinion of the ambassador, be “entertained” by the Emperor “in the usual way.”

Before many months had passed, as we have seen, it was recognised by the Imperialist party that Somerset and Paget were their fast friends and that the rising personal opposition of Dudley had adopted, not unnaturally, as its policy that of a rapprochement with France. It would, of course, be untrue to say that Dudley’s attack upon Somerset had for its sole object the substitution of one international policy for another. Dudley, like his rival, was in the first place ambitious and self-seeking; but it was necessary for both of them, in order to serve their ends, that they should obtain the cooperation and support of one or other of the two main currents of public opinion, the adhesion of both rivals to the advanced Protestant practices in religion being dictated in the first place by their need for the money and patronage that the religious confiscations provided, and, secondly, by the great predominance of the reformed doctrines in and about London. But Somerset having embraced the Conservative or Imperialistic policy, and infused, under the influence of Catholic Paget, some consideration for the professors of the old faith into his reforming zeal, it was incumbent upon Dudley, who wished to overthrow him, to adopt in both respects an entirely opposite policy.

It is the fate of most Governments to be judged by results, and it was a comparatively easy matter for Dudley to pick holes in Somerset’s management of affairs. The debasement of the coinage and the consequent dislocation of business and the terrible distress it caused, the enclosures of the commons and the process of turning customary copyholds into tenancies at will, had reduced the people of England to a condition of misery such as they had never seen before. The cruel confiscation of the monastic properties had deprived the sick and the poor of their principal source of relief, the drastic changes in religion had produced indignation in the breasts of many citizens, whilst slackening the hold of authority generally and promoting lawlessness. When to all this is added the grasping selfishness of Somerset personally, and above all the success of the French arms before Boulogne, attributed to the parsimony of the Protector, it will be seen that Northumberland had a large area of discontent upon which to work for support against his unpopular rival. But even so, it is improbable that he would have ventured to take so bold an action against the Protector as he did, but for the consciousness that he had behind him the support, moral and financial if not military, of France and the Lutheran enemies of the Emperor.

When the loss of the English forts protecting Boulogne made negotiations for peace necessary, a French Embassy was sent to London, and a keen observer present at the time[2] thus records what was evidently the public impression of events—“It was suspected that the principal object of this embassy was to bribe them (i.e. the English Government) to make war on the Emperor. Whilst these ambassadors were there they were greatly feasted by the Earl of Warwick (Northumberland) and the Grand Master (Paulet, Marquis of Winchester) much more than any other of the lords; for it appears that the French ambassadors could not gain the ear of the others—The King of France found out from his ambassadors which of the English lords showed more leaning towards France and against the Emperor. These were the Earl of Warwick and the Grand Master (of the Household), and it is believed that the King (of France) wrote to them warning them against the Protector and the Earl of Arundel who were plotting their destruction.” If this contemporary belief was well founded, as it probably was, the overthrow of Somerset is proved to a great extent to have been an international intrigue promoted and probably well paid for by France.

As the observer already quoted remarks, the sequel of the Embassy which thus ensured Northumberland’s neutrality in favour of France was the almost immediate declaration of war by the French King against the Emperor, and the wholesale plundering of the imperial subjects at sea. Seen in this light, therefore, Northumberland’s complete change of England’s policy, his truckling to France, his merciless measures against Catholics, although, as events proved he was a Catholic at heart himself, his imprisonment of Paget the Emperor’s humble servant, and his ostentatious disregard for the imperial friendship, his whole attitude indeed, assumes a new aspect. His ambition was boundless for himself and his house; but it must have been evident to him that it could only be successfully carried into effect if he had behind him a strong body of public opinion in England itself, and the countenance of one of the great continental powers. Both these desiderata he had in the earlier months of his domination; and if Edward VI had died or had been despatched late in 1551, or in the earlier weeks of 1552, it is quite possible that Northumberland might have carried through his great conspiracy successfully.

But the eighteen months that elapsed between the execution of Somerset and the death of Edward were fully sufficient to prove to the people of England that they had cast off the yoke of a King Log to assume that of a King Stork—Northumberland’s overbearing arrogance and roughness had offended everyone with whom he came into contact: his colleagues dreaded and hated him, especially after the marriage of his young son Guildford to a lady of the Royal house in the direct line of succession had to some extent opened the eyes of men to the magnitude of his aspirations. The condition of the country, moreover, instead of improving under his rule was considerably worse even than it had been under Somerset. The coinage had now reached its lowest point of debasement, the shilling containing only one quarter of silver to three quarters of copper, and even was ordered by decree to be only valued at half its face value. The gold had all left the country and foreign trade was killed by the lack of a decent currency. Labour, driven from the land by the wholesale conversion of the estates from tillage to pasture, crowded the towns clamouring for food, and the disgraceful treatment of the Princess Mary by the ruling minister had aroused a strong feeling against his injustice and tyranny.

The Emperor was at war with France and the Lutherans, and was obliged to speak softly to Northumberland. Again and again he tried to win him over to his side, and the ruler of England knew full well that, whatever he might do he was safe from any overt interference from the imperial power. But for this fact it is certain that Northumberland would not have attempted the bold stroke of disinheriting Mary and placing Jane Grey and his own son upon the throne of England. When Edward VI was known by him to be sick beyond recovery Northumberland, with an eye to the near future, endeavoured to conciliate the Emperor somewhat and to bring about peace upon the Continent. His object in doing so was twofold—first to persuade Charles that he was still a potential friend; and, secondly, to set his French friends free from their war with the Emperor, and so enable them at the critical moment he foresaw to come to his aid in England if necessary. The English trading classes were by this time in a fever of indignation against the French for their piratical interference with English shipping, and Northumberland must have known that with this and the fear aroused by the French successes in the Emperor’s Flemish dominions—always the key of English policy—even he could not for very long withstand the demand of the English people to help the Emperor against his enemies. It was Northumberland’s misfortune that he was obliged to deliver his blow against the legitimate English succession in this state of public affairs. The Emperor and his ministers were keenly alive to the situation, and although they were of course not yet aware of the details of Northumberland’s intended coup d’état, they feared that the Princess Mary might by his influence be excluded from the throne. This of course would have been a serious blow to the imperial cause; for it would in all probability mean the permanent adhesion of England to the French alliance. But Charles had swallowed so much humiliation to keep England friendly in the past that he was not disposed now to be too squeamish. He did not know how far his enemies the French had gone in their promises of support to Northumberland when Edward should die, but if by blandishments and conciliatory acquiescence he could win the friendship of England he was willing to smile upon any occupant of the throne or any power behind it who would keep to the old alliance and turn a cold shoulder to the French.

As soon as it was known in the imperial court that Edward was approaching his end the Emperor’s ambassadors hurried over to England with instructions to conciliate Northumberland at all costs, and to assure him that the Emperor’s affection for England and its young King was much greater than that of the King of France. “But,” continues the Emperor’s instructions, “if you arrive too late and the King is dead, you must take counsel together and act for the best for the safety of our cousin the Princess Mary, and secure, if possible, her accession to the Crown, whilst doing what you judge necessary to exclude the French and their intrigues. You must endeavour also to maintain the confidence and good neighbourship which it is so important that our States should enjoy with England ... and especially to prevent the French from getting a footing in the country, or of gaining the ear of the men who rule England, the more so if it be for the purpose of embarrassing us.”

News had already reached Flanders of Northumberland’s intention to exclude Mary from the throne on her brother’s death, and although the Emperor saw that in such case the life of his cousin would be in grave peril, especially if French aid, as was feared, were given to Northumberland, the principal efforts of the imperial envoys were to be directed to assuring the English government in any case that the Emperor was their friend and not France; Northumberland was to be persuaded that the Emperor had no thought of proposing a foreign husband for Mary; and that any match chosen for her by the ruling powers in England would be willingly accepted by her imperial kinsman. In short, the envoys were to promise anything and everything to secure the throne for Mary, even to endorsing the religious changes effected under Edward. But failing success in this it is made quite clear that the Emperor was willing to accept Jane Grey or any other sovereign who would consent to regard him as a friend and exclude French influence from the country.

The French were just as much on the alert to serve their own interests, and Northumberland, knowing how unpopular the French were at this juncture, and how much his supposed dependence upon them was resented, was extremely careful not to show ostensibly any leaning towards them. But as soon as he heard, late in June, that the imperial envoys were coming to London he came specially from Greenwich to the French ambassador’s lodging at the Charterhouse to inform him that the Emperor was sending an embassy. “I doubt not,” writes the French agent to his King, “that they will do their best to interrupt the friendship that exists between your Majesty and the King of England. I will keep my eye upon them and will leave no effort untried to subvert them.”

Edward died on the very day that the imperial ambassadors arrived in London, though the death was kept secret for some days afterwards, and it soon became evident, both to the French and the Imperialists, that Northumberland had prepared everything for the elevation of Jane Grey to the throne. At this juncture, which called, if ever one did, for prompt and bold action, only one of the several interests took a strong course, the Princess Mary herself. It is quite evident that everyone else had deceived himself and was paralysed in fear of action by another. Again and again the French ambassador expressed a belief that the coming of the imperial envoys portended an active interference on the part of the Emperor in favour of Princess Mary; and Northumberland and his council, notwithstanding all the protestations of the imperial envoys, were of the same opinion; whereas we now see that the Emperor was quite willing to throw over Mary, and even the Catholics, if only he could persuade Jane Grey and her government to join him against France.

When Mary’s bold defiance of the usurper was announced, the Emperor’s envoys, whom many believed to be forerunners of a strong foreign armed force to aid her, had nothing but shocked condemnation for her action. They considered her attitude “strange, difficult and dangerous”; and predicted her prompt suppression and punishment. In reference to the suggestion of her Catholic friends, that imperial aid should be sent to her, the envoys, who were supposed to be in England for the purpose of forcing her upon the throne, could only say to their master, “Considering your war with the French, it seems unadvisable for your Majesty to arouse English feeling against you, and the idea that the Lady will gain Englishmen on the ground of religion is vain.” Serious remonstrances were sent to Mary herself by the imperial envoys, pointing out the danger and the hopelessness of her position in the face of Northumberland’s supposed strength, and they laboured hard to dissuade the Duke from his idea that they had been sent to England to sustain Mary’s cause.

Nor was the Emperor himself bolder than his envoys. He instructed the latter to recommend Mary, “with all softness and kindness,” to the mercy of Jane’s government, but they were to make it quite clear that he would strike no blow in her favour, and would receive with open arms any sovereign of England who would not serve French interests. Mr. Davey has indicated in the present book the eagerness with which the great imperial minister, Don Diego Hurtado de Mendoza, greeted Guildford Dudley as King of England. That Mendoza, one of the most trusted and ablest of the Emperor’s councillors, could take such a step without knowing that it would not, at least, be against his master’s policy is inconceivable: and all through it is clear that, if Mary had waited for effective help from her imperial cousin, Jane Grey might have reigned for a long lifetime.

Just as the Emperor was paralysed in his action by the fear that he might alienate England from his side, so France allowed discretion to wait upon valour for fear of driving the English government irretrievably into the arms of the Emperor. When the news of Mary’s rising came to London the French ambassador bitterly deplored Northumberland’s want of foresight in not having seized the person of the Princess in time to prevent it. He confessed that Northumberland was excessively unpopular, but believed that his possession of the national forces would enable him to crush Mary and her malcontents. But he took care not to pledge himself too deeply to Jane, and whilst full of sympathy and good wishes for Northumberland’s success always kept in touch with some of Mary’s friends. Neither the French ambassador nor the English council really understood the Emperor’s attitude. When the council communicated to the imperial ambassadors Jane’s succession, they haughtily told them that it was known they were here to force Mary upon the throne, and that a new sovereign now having been successfully proclaimed, the sooner they left England the better. The French ambassador, writing to his king at the same time, remarked that the imperial ambassadors had informed the English council, that rather than submit to Jane’s wearing the crown to Mary’s deprivation his master would make friends with the French on any terms and would deal with Jane in a way which she would not like.

It is almost amusing, now that we have the correspondence of all parties before us, to see how they all deceived themselves. The Emperor, as has been said, would not lift a finger to help Mary, even when she was in the field with a strong armed force, for fear of alienating hopelessly the sovereign of England whoever he might be; the King of France, whilst giving the same sort of hesitating implied support to Northumberland and Jane as Charles held out to the Princess Mary, would give no effective help for the same reason that tied the Emperor’s hands. Both sides, indeed, were waiting to greet success without pledging themselves to a cause which might fail.

But the person who miscalculated most fatally of all was Northumberland himself. He had been during the whole time of his rule the humble servant of France. He had violated the treaty of 1543, by which England was bound to side with the Emperor in case his territory was invaded by France, and he stood between the throne and Princess Mary who it was known would serve the cause of the Emperor and her mother’s country to the utmost. He was obliged, as has been shown, to cast his hazard when the public opinion was strongly against him, the commercial classes of England well nigh ruined, the labourers in a worse condition than had ever been known before, and the nobility jealous and apprehensive. Knowing this, as he did, it is difficult to believe that he would have dared to take up the position he assumed unless he had persuaded himself that, as a last resource, French armed aid would support him. That such a thing was not remotely probable is now evident from the correspondence of the French ambassadors. They were only full of sorrow for “this poor Queen Jane” and feared for the fate of their unfortunate friend the Duke of Northumberland. And yet London itself was in a panic, born of the conviction that 6000 French troops were on their way to keep Jane upon the throne; Northumberland, in fact, presumably believing that his past services to France had deserved such aid, had actually sent and demanded it of the King. If it had been afforded in effective time the whole history of England might have been changed.

We know now, although none knew it then, that the Emperor would have greeted with smooth assurances the victorious Jane and Northumberland, and would have deserted his cousin Mary until a turn of the wheel gave her hopes of success again. There was, indeed, nothing to prevent Henry of France, but groundless fear of his rival, from sending to England the small force necessary to keep Jane upon the throne and defeat Mary. But time-serving cowardice ruled over all. The edifice of Northumberland’s ambition crumbled like a house of cards under the weight of his unpopularity alone, and when Mary the victorious entered into the enjoyment of her birthright, the Frenchman who had plotted and intrigued against her in secret, vied with the imperial ambassadors who had stood by, unsympathetic in the hour of her trial, in their professions of devotion to her and her cause. The people of London, overwhelmingly Protestant as they were, greeted the Queen with effusion and had few words of pity for poor Jane, not because they loved the old observance but because they dreaded the French, and hated Northumberland the tyrannous and unjust servant of France. In the country districts, too, where Catholicism was strong, the enthusiasm for Mary was not so much religious, for all the people wanted was quiet and some measure of prosperity, as expressive of joy at the hope of a return to the national policy of cordial relations with the sovereign of Flanders, which in past times had ensured English commerce from French depredations and the English coast from French menaces, with freedom from the arrogant minister who had harassed every English interest and had reduced to ruin all classes in the country.

The unhappy Jane, a straw upon the rushing torrent, was not raised to her sad eminence that the Protestant faith might prevail, though that might have been one of the results of her rule, nor was she cast down because Catholicism was triumphant, but because the policy which her dictator, Northumberland, represented was unpopular at the time of Edward’s death, and the English sense of justice rebelled at the usurpation and its contriver. Mary, in addition to her inherent right to the succession, which was her strong point, had only her own boldness and tenacity to thank for the success which she achieved. The Emperor, notwithstanding all his sympathy and the enormous importance to him of her success, did nothing for her until she was independent of him, and only promised her armed aid then in case the French should attempt to overthrow her by force.

Northumberland fell, not because the country at large and London above all, was yearning for the re-submission of England to the Pope, but because the eighteen months of his unchecked dictatorship had made him detested, and because he overrated the boldness and magnanimity of the King of France. The English public, by instinct perhaps more than by reason, believed in the ideal policy of Henry VII: that of dexterously balancing English friendship between the rival continental powers, making the best market possible for her moral support, keeping at peace herself and adhering mostly to the more prosperous side without fighting for either. Such a policy required statesmanship of the highest order, and Elizabeth alone was entirely successful in carrying it out. Somerset and Northumberland both failed because they were unequal to it. Each of them took the minister’s view rather than that of a monarch. They were party leaders, both of them, and incapable of adopting the view above party considerations which marks the successful sovereign. They pledged themselves too deeply to the respective foreign alliances traditional with their parties; and in both cases, as a penetrating statesman would have foreseen, their allies failed them at the critical moment.

Mary’s tragical fate was the result of a similar short-sighted policy. When she determined against the wishes of her people and the advice of her wisest councillors, Catholics to a man, to hand herself and her country, body and soul, over to Spanish interests, she ceased to be a true national sovereign; the nice balance upon which England’s prosperity depended was lost, the love and devotion of the people turned to cold distrust, and failure and a broken heart were the result. Not until Elizabeth came with her keen wit and her consummate mastery of the resources of chicanery was England placed and kept firmly again upon the road to greatness which had been traced for her by the first Tudor sovereign.

MARTIN HUME

THE NINE DAYS’ QUEEN

CHAPTER I
BRADGATE HALL AND THE GREYS OF GROBY

There is no more picturesque spot in England than Bradgate Old Manor, the birthplace of Lady Jane Grey. It stands in a sequestered corner, about three miles from the town of Leicester, amid arid slate hillocks, which slope down to the fertile valleys at their feet. In Leland’s Perambulations through England, a survey of the kingdom undertaken by command of Henry VIII, Bradgate is described as possessing “a fair parke and a lodge lately built there by the Lorde Thomas Grey, Marquise of Dorsete, father of Henry, that is now Marquise. There is a faire and plentiful spring of water brought by Master Brok as a man would judge agyne the hills through the lodge and thereby it driveth a mylle.” He also informs us that “there remain few tokens of the old castelle,” which leads us to believe that at the time of Lady Jane Grey’s birth Bradgate was a comparatively new house. The ruins show that the mansion was built of red brick and in that severe but elegant form of architecture known as the “Tudor style.” Worthy old Leland goes on to say that Jane’s paternal grandfather added “two lofty towers at the front of the house, one on either side of the principal doorway.” These are still remaining.

In Tudor times the park was very extensive and “marched with the forest of Chartley, which was full twenty-five miles in circumference, watered by the river Sore and teeming with game.” Another ancient writer tells us, in the quaint language of his day, that “here a wren and squirrel might hop from tree to tree for six miles, and in summer time a traveller could journey from Beaumanoir to Burden, a good twelve miles, without seeing the sun.” The wealth of luxuriant vegetation in the old park, the clear and running brooks, that babble through the sequestered woods, and the beautifully sloping open spaces, dotted with venerable and curiously pollarded oaks, make up a scene of sylvan charm peculiarly English. Here cultivation has not, as so often on the Continent, disfigured Nature, but the park retains the wild beauty of its luxuriant elms and beeches that rise in native grandeur from amidst a wilderness of bracken, fern, and flags, to cast their shadows over heather-grown hillocks. On the summit of one of the loftiest of these still stands the ruined palace that was the birthplace of Lady Jane Grey. The approaches to Bradgate are beautiful indeed, especially the pathway winding round by the old church along the banks of a trout-stream, which rises in the neighbourhood of the Priory of Ulverscroft, famous for the beauty of its lofty tower. When Jane Grey was born, this Priory had been very recently suppressed, and the people were lamenting the departure of the monks, who, during the hard winter of 1528, had fed six hundred starving peasants.

Bradgate Manor House was standing as late as 1608, but after that date it fell into gradual decay. Not much is now left of the original structure, but its outlines can still be traced; and the walls of the great hall and the chapel are nearly intact. A late Lord Stamford and Warrington roofed and restored the old chapel, which contains a fine monument to that Henry Grey whose signature may be seen on the warrant for the execution of Charles I.

A careful observation of the irregularities of the soil reveals traces of a tilt-yard and of garden terraces; but all is now overgrown by Spanish chestnut trees, wild flowers, nettles, and brambles. The gardens were once considered amongst the finest in England, Lord Dorset taking great pride in the cultivation of all the fruits, herbs, and flowers then grown in Northern Europe. The parterres and terraces were formal, and there was a large fish-pond full of golden carp and water lilies. Lady Jane Grey must often have played in these stately avenues, and there is a legend that once, as a little girl, she toppled into the tank and was nearly drowned—a less hideous fate than that which was to befall her in her seventeenth year.

“This was thy home, then, gentle Jane!
This thy green solitude; and here
At evening, from thy gleaming pane,
Thine eyes oft watched the dappled deer
(Whilst the soft sun was in its wane)
Browsing beside the brooklet clear.
The brook yet runs, the sun sets now,
The deer still browseth—where art thou?”

These sentimental lines were written in the eighteenth century, when deer still browsed in Bradgate Park, whence they have long since departed. Many curious traditions concerning Lady Jane are even now current among the local peasantry. Some believe that on St. Sylvester’s night (31st December) a coach drawn by four black horses halts at the door of the old mansion. It contains the headless form of the murdered Lady Jane. After a brief halt it drives away again into the mist. Then again, certain strange[3] stunted oaks are shown, trees which the woodmen pollarded when they heard that the fair girl had been beheaded. The pathetic memories of the great tragedy, reaching down four slow centuries, prove how keenly its awful reality was felt by the poorer folk at Bradgate, who, no doubt, had good cause to love the “gentle Jane.”

The Manor of Bradgate was settled upon the Lady Frances Brandon, Henry VIII’s niece, when she espoused Henry Grey. It had been inherited by the Greys of Groby, Lady Jane’s paternal ancestors, from Rollo, or Fulbert, said to have been chamberlain to Robert, Duke of Normandy, who gave him the Castle of Croy in Picardy, the ruins of which are still to be seen not far from Montreuil-sur-Mer. It was hence he derived the surname of de Croy, afterwards anglicised to de Grey. This Rollo accompanied William the Conqueror into England, and was settled, soon after the Conquest, at Rotherfield, in Oxfordshire. The first of the family to be noticed by Dugdale is Henry de Grey, to whom Richard I granted the Manor of Grey’s Thurrock, in Essex, which grant was confirmed by King John in the first year of his reign. The descendant of this nobleman, Edward de Grey, was summoned to Parliament in 1488 in right of his wife’s barony of Ferrers of Groby, and his son John, afterwards Earl Rivers, who was slain in the battle of St. Albans, married the beautiful daughter of Sir John Woodville, subsequently the Queen of Edward IV. Bradgate is thus associated with two of the most unfortunate of England’s Queens: Elizabeth Woodville, who passed much of her life in its leafy glades; and Lady Jane Grey, who first saw the light in the stately red brick Manor House of which the crumbling ruins are now so beautiful in their decay.

Jane Grey’s grandfather, Thomas, the eldest son of Elizabeth Woodville, was summoned to Parliament on the 17th October 1509 as Lord Ferrers of Groby, his mother’s barony, and to the second Parliament in 1511 as Marquess of Dorset. He was a man of great note. In the third year of Henry VIII’s reign he had charge of the army of 10,000 men sent into Spain to assist the forces invading Guyenne under the Emperor Ferdinand. This force returned to England without doing service. We next hear of the Marquess figuring at the jousts with Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, Lady Jane’s maternal grandfather, on the occasion of the latter’s adventurous journey to France to bring back Mary Tudor, widow of Louis XII of France, whom he subsequently married. The Marquess was also sent to Calais to attend Charles V to England; indeed, he was very conspicuous throughout the early years of Henry’s reign. King Hal paid him the compliment of calling him “that honest and good man”—a title which he thought he richly deserved, since he signed the celebrated letter to Pope Clement VII touching the King’s divorce. He died in 1530, and was succeeded by his eldest son, Henry, Lady Jane’s father. The inheritance of this nobleman included the Marquisate of Dorset and the baronies of Ferrers,[4] Grey, Astley, Boneville, and Harrington, besides vast estates in Leicestershire and other parts of England. Henry Grey, though his portraits show him to have been a very good-looking man, did not enjoy a good contemporary reputation for ability or strength of character. During the brief reign of Edward VI he became the patron of the Swiss Reformers and was adulated by Bullinger and Hill. His name will be found attached to many of Henry VIII’s anti-papal decrees, and so long as that monarch lived, he was a staunch “Henryite” or schismatic, professing belief in all the doctrines of Rome save and except papal supremacy. In 1531, when the clergy were threatened with præmunire and mulcted in a fine, as a punishment for their too close attention to pontifical interests, young Henry of Dorset, who had just come to his own, displayed great energy in carrying out the King’s wishes and supporting his attempt to get himself acknowledged supreme head of the English Church. He also evinced considerable courage in connection with Henry VIII’s resistance to the excommunication of the Pope, launched against him after his marriage with Anne Boleyn. Such zeal in his sovereign’s service undoubtedly led to his advancement and paved the way to his marriage with the King’s niece, the Lady Frances Brandon. He may have owed much to the counsels and influence of Cromwell, to whom he carried a letter of introduction from his mother,[5] when he first went to London as a lad of seventeen, immediately after his father’s decease. The Dowager recommended her son very earnestly to “Master Cromwell,” pleaded his youth, and besought that worthy, then all-powerful, not to take heed of certain ill-natured reports concerning alleged wilful damage to the priory buildings of Tylsey, where she was then residing.[5]

The good lady couches her letter in very humble terms, but does not enlighten us fully about the nature of the “damage” to which she refers, or by whom it was done. She seems, at any rate, to be in a terrible fright lest the tale should injure her son’s prospects with the all-powerful Chancellor. Some little time afterwards the Marchioness wrote another letter to Cromwell complaining of her son’s undutiful behaviour to her. It is dated from the “House of Our Lady’s Passyon”[6] (the Priory of Tylsey), and begins:—

“My Lorde,—I beseeche you to be my good lorde, consyderyng me a poor wydo, so unkyndly and extreymly escheated by my son.”

This curious epistle, now in the British Museum, is much defaced and in parts illegible. The name of the person to whom it is addressed is undecipherable, but, taken in conjunction with two other letters previously addressed to Cromwell by the same correspondent, there can be little doubt as to its destination. Her son had evidently withheld some property intended for her under her husband’s will. Whether he mended his manners and paid her the money, we know not; but as the Dowager is occasionally mentioned as attending Court functions in company with her daughter-in-law, it seems probable that the ultimate issue of the difficulty, whatever it was, was satisfactory to her.

Margaret, Dowager Lady Dorset, became one of the greatest ladies of the Court in the latter years of the reign of Henry VII and during a part of that of Henry VIII. She was in much request, it seems, at royal christenings, for not only was she specially invited to that of Mary Tudor, afterwards Queen Mary I, but she enjoyed the signal honour of carrying the infant Elizabeth to the font. She was invited to perform a like office at the baptism of Edward VI, but this time she was unable to be present, and wrote to make her loyal excuses, pleading that some of her household at Croydon had been attacked by the “sweating sickness.” It is probable that she had no desire to attend, for she had been the intimate friend of Anne Boleyn, and could hardly have felt kindly towards Jane Seymour.[7] Her place was filled by the Marchioness of Exeter, who eventually, after the execution of her luckless husband, was sent to the Tower on a flimsy charge of treason, and kept there until Mary I’s time.[8]

A singular point in the history of Jane Grey’s forbears is that her father, in his hot haste to marry into the royal family, set aside, without the slightest scruple, his legitimate wife, Lady Katherine Fitzalan, daughter of the Earl of Arundel. Some writers say he was simply “contracted,” not married, to this lady, who never demanded her marriage rights, but retired into a dignified obscurity. None the less her family resented the affront offered their kinswoman, and it was Thomas, Earl of Arundel, this discarded lady’s brother, who acted as Dorset’s Nemesis, and at last betrayed him into the hands of his enemies.

Lady Jane Grey’s maternal grandfather was, as he wrote himself in the famous quatrain referring to his marriage with the King’s sister, descended from “cloth of frieze.” He was the grandson of a London mercer who had married a lady allied to the great houses of Nevill, Fitzalan and Howard, and his father had fought and fallen at Bosworth Field in the cause of Henry VII. In recognition of his services, Henry attached young Charles Brandon to the person of his younger son, Prince Henry, who was of similar age to himself. Thus began a friendship which was only severed by death. In appearance the Prince and his comrade were singularly alike: both were tall and stalwart, both with red hair and fair complexions, and they were equally skilful and agile in sport and manly pastimes. Charles was more intellectually gifted than Henry, but there was little to choose between them as regards their execrable views of moral responsibilities and their laxity in respect of their marriage vows.

As this last characteristic of Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, touches somewhat upon the legitimacy of Lady Jane Grey’s descent, a short summary of his matrimonial vagaries may be pardoned here. He was contracted in marriage early in life to Anne Browne, a daughter of Sir Anthony Browne, Governor of Calais, by his wife Lady Lucy Nevill, daughter of George Nevill, Duke of Bedford, brother of Richard, Earl of Warwick, “the King maker.” In 1513 he was bold enough to flirt most outrageously with, and seek in marriage, one of the greatest ladies in Europe, Margaret of Austria, the widowed Duchess of Savoy, aunt of the Emperor Charles V. But though Margaret fell in love with him, such a match was soon seen to be impossible, even by the lady herself, and Brandon came out of the affair most ungallantly. For this or some other reason never clearly explained, Brandon set aside his contract with Anne Browne, notwithstanding that by the laws of the period it was considered as binding as the completed marriage ceremony. We next learn that a probable reason for his unchivalrous conduct was a chance that suddenly offered itself to him of marrying the Lady Margaret, the rich widow of Sir John Mortimer of Essex. Charles and his mature consort—there was a difference of nearly thirty years between them—did not abide long together, for he presently endeavoured to annul this marriage on a plea of consanguinity, the Lady Margaret being sister to the mother of his neglected bride, Anne Browne, and consequently her aunt, a complication which surely ought to have been discovered at an earlier stage of the proceedings. Having settled this matter for the time being to his own, but certainly not to the lady’s, satisfaction, he remarried his discarded wife, Anne Browne, in the presence of a great concourse of relations and friends. By this lady he had two daughters: Mary, who became the wife of Lord Mounteagle; and Anne, who married a connection of the Greys, Viscount Powis. Their mother died in 1515, and Brandon soon afterwards contracted himself in matrimony with the Lady Elizabeth Grey, daughter and heiress of Viscount de Lisle. Whether through the interference of Lady Mortimer or not it is impossible to say, but it is certain that Lady de Lisle refused to carry out her side of the contract, and the match was broken off. Brandon, with the consent of Henry VIII, filched from the poor lady her title of Lisle, which he forthwith assumed. In due time the lady gave her hand to Edmund Dudley, father of the fateful Duke of Northumberland. It was probably when in France, and in attendance upon King Henry, at the time of the negotiations for the marriage of the King’s youngest and most beautiful sister, Mary, to the prematurely aged Louis XII, King of France, a hideous victim to elephantiasis, that Charles made so strong an impression upon that ardent Tudor princess that she swore by all the saints that she would not wed the French King unless it was thoroughly understood she was to marry whom she chose after his death, which took place within eighteen months of the marriage. The romantic story of how Brandon, now created Duke of Suffolk, wooed and married the royal widow within a fortnight of the King’s death, and whilst she still wore the white widow’s weeds of a French King’s Consort, is too well known to need recapitulation here, nor need we enter into the details of the gorgeous ceremonies of remarriage that took place at Greenwich, in the presence of King Henry, Queen Katherine of Aragon, and their Court, soon after Mary and Suffolk had landed in England. The Duke of Suffolk took his bride to spend their honeymoon in his magnificent mansion in Southwark, known as Suffolk Place, which he had recently inherited by the death of his uncle, Sir Thomas Brandon. It must have been about this time that the friends of the Lady Mortimer, and probably that lady herself, began to spread rumours abroad that made both Charles and his consort anxious as to the validity of their marriage and the legitimacy of their offspring. Indeed, even at the time of his clandestine wedding in the Chapel of the Hôtel de Cluny (now incorporated in the Museum of that name), he had felt very uneasy about the matter, and, foreseeing his peril, wrote to Wolsey, beseeching his assistance and advice on a matter of such vital importance, which, however, was not decided so easily as Charles expected. It was not until 1528 that Wolsey dispatched a somewhat garbled account of the matter to Pope Clement VII, then in exile at Orvieto, where he received Cardinal Campeggio and the English envoys who came to him with the first negotiations for the divorce of Henry VIII from Katherine of Aragon. Trusting in the evidence which Wolsey sent him, the Pope, by a special Bull (dated 12th May 1528), annulled the marriage of Brandon with the Lady Mortimer, on the plea of consanguinity, and at the same time declared valid that of her niece, Anne Browne, and legitimized her two children. The Bull further stated that Lady Mortimer and her friends were “liable to ecclesiastical censure if they made any attempt to invalidate the decree” making valid Brandon’s marriage to Anne Browne and Mary Tudor. The importance of this decree, which was first read out to the people in Norwich Cathedral in 1529 by Bishop Nyx, can readily be imagined when we remember that it was not delivered until after the Queen-Duchess had given birth to two children. Her only son, the Earl of Lincoln, died in infancy, and the Lady Frances became in due time the Marchioness of Dorset and mother of Lady Jane Grey. On the other hand, the legitimacy of the Lady Eleanor Brandon, the younger daughter, who was born after the publication of the papal decree, was never disputed, and moreover, before she entered upon her sorrowful career, the Lady Mortimer was dead. That considerable doubt was entertained as to the validity of Brandon’s marriage with the Queen-Dowager is proved by a variety of facts too numerous to be detailed, but one of which is very significant. Late in the first half of Queen Elizabeth’s reign, the validity of the claims of the Lady Mounteagle and her sister, the children of Brandon and Anne Browne, to be considered legitimate, was ventilated in the Court of Arches, and after much deliberation confirmed. Although the legitimacy of these ladies, both of whom were long since deceased at the time of this trial, had nothing to do with the legal position of Mary Tudor as the wife of the Duke of Suffolk, it was none the less an indirect test of the right to the throne of her granddaughters, the Ladies Katherine and Mary Grey.

From these briefly resumed facts it is not difficult to understand that although King Henry VIII highly approved of his bosom friend’s conduct, his subjects held Charles to be an arrant rascal. His treatment of his beautiful royal wife was on a par with his low conception of his moral obligations. He neglected her, spent her money, and lived openly with a notorious woman known as Mrs. Eleanor Brandon, by whom he had an illegitimate son, Charles, who is said to have been the well-known jeweller to Queen Elizabeth, and whose son, or grandson, Gregory Brandon, was, according to tradition, the headsman who executed Charles I.

Lady Jane’s grandmother, Mary Tudor, was a most amiable and long-suffering princess, who after a somewhat secluded life in Southwark withdrew to Westhorpe Hall. Here she died on 24th June 1533. Her two daughters—the Lady Frances, who had recently married the Marquess of Dorset; and the Lady Eleanor, soon to be the bride of Henry, Lord Clifford, eldest son of the Earl of Cumberland—were with her at the time of her death, but the Duke was absent in London, and so too was the Marquess of Dorset, her son-in-law, attending at the coronation of Anne Boleyn. The Queen-Duchess was interred in Bury St. Edmunds, Henry VIII and Suffolk paying the expenses of a gorgeous alabaster monument to her memory, “full of little saints and angels,” which was destroyed soon after, during the wreck of the glorious Abbey Church at the time of the suppression of the monasteries. The remains of the Queen were then removed to the parish church, where they still rest, a marble tablet put up in the early nineteenth century being the only memorial of Mary Tudor, Dowager Queen of France and Duchess of Suffolk.

Within three months of the Queen’s death (September 1533) Suffolk married a fifth wife, the Lady Katherine Willoughby d’Eresby, who, it seems, was his ward and only fifteen years old. She was a great heiress, and what made her marriage all the more singular was the fact that she was a daughter of that Doña Maria de Sarmiento who, as Lady Willoughby, was the friend and attendant of Queen Katherine of Aragon. It must also be remembered that Queen Katherine had no more bitter enemy than Suffolk. This Duchess developed into a very pretty woman, of great wit and character, and a staunch supporter of the doctrines of the Reformation.

The Lady Frances Brandon was born at Hatfield, then a palace of the Bishop of Salisbury, who had afforded her mother hospitality; for it seems that the Queen-Duchess was obliged to halt here, for reasons easily understood, on her way to Walsingham Priory, whither she was bound on a pilgrimage. There is still extant a very curious account of the baptism of the Lady Frances in the parish church of Hatfield, which was hung with garlands for the occasion. The Lady Anne[9] Boleyn, aunt of the ill-fated Queen Anne of that ilk, stood proxy for Queen Katherine of Aragon as sponsor.

In 1533–4 the Lady Frances was married, notwithstanding his afore-mentioned “contract” to the Lady Fitzalan, to Henry Grey, Marquess of Dorset. The wedding took place at Suffolk Place, Southwark, and the religious ceremony in the Church of St. Saviour, now the cathedral of the new diocese. No very great pains seem to have been taken with the lady’s education, except in the matter of what we should call “sports,” in which, it seems, she was very proficient.

The Lady Frances was a handsome woman, however, but somewhat spiteful and wholly unscrupulous. In a well-known portrait, dated after her second marriage, she is represented as a buxom, fair-haired, well-featured matron, with a very sinister expression in her light grey eyes. Her eldest child was a son who died of the plague when a baby, and the three children who survived were all girls—the Ladies Jane, Katherine, and Mary Grey. Lady Jane Grey, as we shall see, had little cause to feel deep affection for either of her parents, but least of all for her mother. The Lady Frances seems to have been cast, so far as her heart went, in a mould of iron. Even the bloody deaths of her husband and her eldest daughter, and the wretchedly precarious existence of her two remaining children, did not affect her buoyant spirits, since she enjoyed her life to the end. It would be difficult to define her religious opinions. She was a schismatic under Henry VIII, and under Edward VI she appeared a zealous Protestant and so intimate with the famous Reformer Bucer that when he died she petitioned Cranmer to obtain a pension for his widow. She became a pious Papist in Queen Mary’s time, and died a prominent member of the Church of England as by law established, under Elizabeth.

The Lady Eleanor Brandon, Henry VIII’s niece and Lady Jane Grey’s only maternal aunt, married, as we have said, Henry, Lord Clifford, to whom she was united in 1537 at the Duke of Suffolk’s palace in Southwark. The Lady Eleanor gave birth to two sons and a daughter. At the time of the Pilgrimage of Grace (in 1536) she was staying at Bolton Abbey, which Henry VIII, after confiscating it from the Church, had presented to Lord Clifford; and had it not been for the chivalry and bravery of Christopher Aske, the rebel leader’s brother, she would have suffered at the hands of the infuriated “pilgrims.” By dint of a bold night ride, Aske aided Lady Eleanor to fly from Bolton Abbey and reach a place of safety. In 1542 her husband succeeded to the Earldom of Cumberland on the death of his father, and five years later (November 1547) Lady Eleanor passed away at Brougham Castle and was laid to rest in Skipton Church.

HENRY GREY, DUKE OF SUFFOLK

FROM THE PAINTING BY JOANNES CORVUS IN THE NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY

It will be seen by this rapid sketch of her forbears on both sides that Lady Jane Grey might, without exciting surprise, have developed a character strongly sensual and unscrupulous. That she did not do so, apart from the fact that her early death perhaps prevented the full development of her character at all, was probably owing to the rigid and severe nature of the education to which she was subjected. The influence of Erasmus and the fashion of the newly revived classical learning had in the childhood of Jane Grey firmly seized upon the higher classes of England; and the ladies of royal and noble birth, schooled in the stern pietism of The Instruction of a Christian Woman of Luis Vives, which they all studied in Latin or in English, and, steeped in the classic moralities, they became prim and self-suppressed in expression and behaviour. It is likely enough, indeed, that in most cases this prudishness of attitude was but skin deep; but in the case of the hapless Jane, who was little more than a child when she was sacrificed, no other impression of her personality than this was left upon the world. We may picture the tiny demure maiden pacing the green alleys and smooth sward of Bradgate, with her Latin books and her exalted religious meditations, a fervent mystic, with no knowledge of the great world of greed, ambition, and lust, of which she, poor child, was doomed to be the innocent victim.

CHAPTER II
BIRTH AND EDUCATION

Lady Jane Grey was born at Bradgate Old Manor[10] in October 1537, most probably in the first days of the month, for Prince Edward, her cousin, came into the world on the 12th,[11] St. Edward’s Eve, and three days later Henry, Marquess of Dorset, attended the royal christening, which he would scarcely have done if his own wife, a member of the royal family, had not been safely delivered. His presence in London can be traced in the State Papers from the date of Prince Edward’s birth until the first week in November. Lady Jane’s christening took place, as was then the custom, within forty-eight hours of her birth, in the parish church, with all the ancient rites. Some writers state that the babe was carried to the font by her grandmother, the Dowager Marchioness; but this good lady, as we have already seen, was unable at the time to leave her sick household at Croydon. She sent her new granddaughter a rich bowl with a chiselled cover. It was the custom at that time, when a baptism took place, for the whole family, godfathers and godmothers and guests, to walk in procession from the mansion to the church. As is still the case in Catholic countries, the number of sponsors in pre-Reformation times was unlimited. All these worthy people brought gifts of more or less value, according to the nearness of their kinship and the length of their purses. The Marquess, if he was present, would certainly have worn his robes of state and “carried the salt.” At the church door the christening company was met by the clergy, and after a short prayer the child was named.[12] The officiating priest on this occasion was either Mr. Harding, then chaplain at Bradgate, or else Mr. Cook, Rector of the parish. After being named, the child was carried to the font, which stood in the middle of the church under an extinguisher-like canopy, richly carved and painted, which pulled up and down, so as to keep the holy water clean. In those days the back of the head and the heels of the infant were immersed in the water,[13] the present ceremony of sprinkling having only been introduced into this country from Geneva by the Reformers during Elizabeth’s reign. The infant was also anointed with chrism on the back and breast, a very ancient ceremony, the abolition of which caused considerable controversy and some persecution in the reign of Henry VIII. This anointing, or unction, which was performed within the sacred edifice, was followed by the presentation of the gifts of the various sponsors.[14] Abundant hospitality in the shape of sweet wafers, comfits, spiced wine, or hippocras was dispensed in the porch, not only to the invited company, but to the promiscuous village crowd that elected to attend the function; and at last the procession, with the infant wrapped in a sort of shawl of rich brocade, returned to the mansion, where a dinner was served to the guests and to the members of the household.

The life of an English child in olden times, especially in the upper classes, was by no means the ideal existence it has now become. A careful study of contemporary records proves that the barbarous and filthy system of swathing or “swaddling” an infant was almost universally practised. We may take it for granted that the baby Jane Grey was swathed or “swaddled” according to the prevailing English fashion, from her armpits to her knees, and was thus able at all events to move her tiny hands and feet, a privilege denied her infant contemporaries on the Continent. So late as 1684, Madame de Maintenon, writing to Madame de Présné, who had just been delivered of a son, beseeches her to “adopt the English method of allowing her infant’s limbs free play,” and stigmatises the French custom of “tight swaddling” as “abominably dirty and unhealthy.”

The Lady Frances certainly did not nurse her own baby; it would have been considered most indecent for a woman of her rank to suckle her offspring. A foster-mother was engaged, and it is likely enough that the good woman who supplied little Jane Grey with the sustenance nature had intended her to derive from her parent, was that Mrs. Ellen who, seventeen years later, attended her beloved foster-child on the scaffold.

In her eighteenth month the child was weaned, and this was attended by some considerable ceremony. In the morning Mass was said in the presence of the whole family, including the foster-mother and the child, who was blessed with holy water. This finished, the company returned in procession to the hall and forthwith sat down to a copious banquet.

The archives of Sudeley Castle contain an interesting description of an aristocratic nursery in the first half of the sixteenth century. Queen Katherine Parr, having married Admiral Lord Thomas Seymour, lived at Sudeley, where she died in September 1548, after giving birth to a child, for whom was provided an apartment very elaborately furnished with tapestry, and containing everything a modern infant of the highest rank could possibly want, all in silver or pewter, and, moreover, a “chair of state” hung with cloth of gold.

The Lady Frances’s nursery was, no doubt, fitted up quite as luxuriously as that prepared for the infant of Queen Katherine Parr; but no inventory of its contents has been handed down to us. Nearly all the toys commonly used in England at this period were made either in France or Holland, and closely resembled those grotesque playthings which were our grandparents’ delight: wooden dolls with roughly painted heads and jointed limbs, hobby horses, hoops, and even toy soldiers mounted on movable slides. Jane must have had an abundance of these nursery treasures, besides an oaken cradle with rockers and also a sort of little perambulator, wherein she might be carried to take the air in the park and gardens. She had a complete household, consisting of Mrs. Ellen, two under-nurses, a governess, two waiting women, and two footmen. Sometimes, but very rarely, the voice of nature may have prompted her mother and father to play with her and enjoy those exquisite moments of purest love common alike to prince and peasant. Her babyhood may have been fairly happy, but when that ended, the stern training which prevailed in every aristocratic family of the period began in all its severity: long prayers, tedious lessons, and that terrible “cramming” system which as often as not engendered premature physical decline and even imbecility. The tiny princess, from her third year upwards, was dressed like a little old lady, in miniature reproduction of her mother, coif and all complete, an exceedingly irksome garb for so very small a child. Even when full-grown, Jane, like her sister Katherine, was of very diminutive stature; and their youngest sister, Mary, was an actual dwarf, “not bigger, when over thirty, than a child of ten.”

The greater part of the Lady Jane’s[15] infancy was spent at Bradgate with her little sisters—Katherine, two years her junior; and Mary, six years younger than herself. A Mrs. Ashly, sister or sister-in-law to the Mrs. Ashly, or Astley, who acted in the same capacity to Princess Elizabeth, was appointed to attend as governess upon Jane and her sisters; but of this lady little is known, whereas Elizabeth’s governess is, of course, frequently mentioned as a woman of great importance. It was evidently not until the Lady Jane had been named in Henry VIII’s will as a possible successor to his throne that any particular attention was paid to her instruction, and then only for purely political purposes. Her two sisters received but an ordinary education, and Jane herself must have been between nine and ten years of age when she was handed over to Queen Katherine Parr to begin her more important studies. No doubt the Dorsets secretly intended their eldest daughter to become Edward VI’s consort and to rule the kingdom through her, and her education therefore became a matter of great importance to them, as they wished her to be thoroughly equipped to hold the high station they desired her to occupy. In religion she was to be exceedingly Protestant, but in social matters her training was most varied, including music and classical and modern languages, even Hebrew and, if we may credit some of her enthusiastic eulogists, Chaldee!!

The royal birth of the Marchioness of Dorset and the great wealth of her lord placed their family in a very exceptional position in the county. Here, as also in London, they maintained semi-regal state. No one could compete with them, and although they received much company, especially at Christmas time, they rarely mixed with their neighbours, and when they did so condescend, they were invariably received with all the ceremony due to royalty. When, for instance, the Marquess of Dorset and his lady visited Leicester, they were entertained with great ceremony. In the archives of that city for 1540 there is a charge of “two shillings and sixpence for strawberries and wine for my Lady Marchioness’s Grace, for Mistress Mayoress and her sisters.” Also, on the occasion of another visit, “Four shillings” were paid “to the pothicary for making a gallon of Ippocras,[16] that was given to my Lady’s Grace, Mistress Mayoress and her sisters, and to the wives of the Aldermen of Leicester, who gave the said ladies, moreover, wafers, apples, pears, and walnuts at the same time.” From another record, of the city of Lincoln, we learn that the Dorset family when on its way to London frequently put up at the White Hall Inn for the night, their expenses being paid by the town. There is also an entry specifying the expenses for entertaining the Lady Jane Grey when on her way to London and on her return journeys through Leicester to Bradgate in 1548 and 1551.

There was much in the stately mode of life led by our great aristocracy in the sixteenth century which has not even now passed altogether out of fashion. At certain seasons of the year, it appears, the family resided in the main building of the mansion and kept up a state almost equal in magnificence to that of a royal Court. A great number of servants—as many as eighty or a hundred—were maintained, and these, being very ignorant, often formed a rather disorderly crew. They received very small wages; but as they wore brilliant liveries, and served as an escort to their masters when they went abroad, they made a highly picturesque appearance. Few people, even in the upper circles of society, could read or write with ease; and as there were no newspapers and scarcely any books, no correspondence, and but few visits to fill up leisure time, the men’s sports were mainly those of the field, so that large hunting and hawking parties were the general order of the day. The ladies were frequently invited to share these pursuits; and the Lady Frances was well known in Leicestershire in her day as a great huntress and a skilful archeress.

Hospitality, if barbaric, was none the less sumptuous. Tablecloths and napkins were already in use, and “damask” was pretty generally to be seen in the houses of the wealthy; while the plate belonging to the great nobility was not only very costly, but exceedingly artistic in design. Then as now, it was the custom to pass the winter months in the country and the summer in London. During the hunting season Bradgate was thrown open to a throng of guests, and since the mistress of the house was niece to the reigning sovereign, many of these were of princely rank, including Princess Mary, who was on very friendly terms with her cousin Frances and her children. It is not at all unlikely that when the family gathered in the great hall of an evening, dances, masques, and other pastimes of a more boisterous kind, described as “romps and jigs,” were indulged in. On occasion, players were summoned from London, and displayed their skill in representing those rough and unformed plays which delighted our ancestors until the more shapely Elizabethan drama came into being.[17]

People rose and retired to rest earlier in Tudor days than we do now, especially in summer, when breakfast was served as early as six o’clock, dinner at ten, and supper at five. Tea and coffee were as yet undiscovered, and light home-brewed ale was the usual breakfast beverage. Such very young ladies as Lady Jane Grey would be served at this meal with a cup of hot milk and sometimes with a sort of mead, or barley water, heated and spiced. During Lent breakfast consisted of bread, with salt fish, ling, turbot and eels, fresh whitings, sprats, beer and wine. At other seasons there were chines of beef, roast breast of mutton or boiled mutton, butter, cooked eggs, custard, pies, jellies, etc., as well as chickens, ducks, swan, geese, and game.[18] Dinner came at noon, and it was customary in large country houses to close the gates while the whole establishment sat down, according to rank, in the great hall. Sometimes a slight alteration was made, two tables being set in the dining-room, at the first of which sat the lord and his family, with such titled guests as they might be entertaining, while the second was occupied by “knights and honourable gentlemen.” In such a case the tables in the great hall were generally three, the first for the steward, comptroller, secretary, master of the house, master of the fish-ponds, the tutor—if one was attached to the family—and such gentlemen as happened to be under the degree of a knight. In a very large household it frequently happened that as many as a hundred and fifty or two hundred people would sit down to eat at one and the same time, but in most castles, halls, and manors the ladies of the family, excepting on state occasions, ate apart from the men, a separate table being laid for them, and for the chaplain, in the ladies’ chamber, while two others were laid in the housekeeper’s room for the ladies’ women. The Lady Frances usually partook of her dinner in solitary state, waited upon by young gentlewomen and, when they were old enough to do so, by her two elder daughters, who stood on either side of her until she had finished, when they in their turn sat down and were served by gentlewomen. In their infancy, the children, attended by their nurses and gentlemen and women, dined with the housekeeper in her chamber.

All meals were somewhat disorderly, for, forks not being in general use, it was the custom for the gentlemen to pick the daintiest scraps out of the common dish with the tips of their fingers, and place them gallantly upon the platters of the ladies seated nearest them. It was considered ill-bred to lick one’s fingers after this act of courtesy. Proper behaviour was to wipe them daintily upon a sort of napkin or serviette, sometimes, as in Japan, made of tissue paper.

Grace was said both before and after meals, and as most large houses had several chaplains and a choir for the service of the chapel, it was usual for one of the priests, accompanied by three or four of the choristers wearing their surplices, to enter the hall and solemnly chant the Benedicite or Grace, which until Edward VI’s time invariably concluded with a petition for the release of the souls in Purgatory. It was considered impolite to talk during a repast unless addressed by the master or mistress of the feast. The chaplain was employed to read aloud either the Gospel of the day or a chapter from that enlivening work The Martyrology. Occasionally a minstrel was invited to sing an interesting ballad or tell a story; otherwise the clinking of the knives was the only sound heard during meals, which, however copious, were invariably dispatched with the utmost speed. In proportion to the amount of meat very little bread was consumed. “The English bolt their food in dead silence,” remarked the Venetian Ambassador Giustiniani, “and, bread being dear, eat very sparingly of it. They throw their chicken bones under the table when they have sucked them clean.”

When supper, a meal which corresponds with our late dinner, was over, evening prayers were said, and soon afterwards, on ordinary occasions, everybody retired to rest. It should be remembered that artificial light was exceedingly costly and inadequate, as indeed it remained until the beginning of the later half of the nineteenth century. Many who are still in the prime of life can remember the rush tallow dips made and used in old-fashioned country houses and farms in their childhood. In the sixteenth century these were the only lights to be had, except oil lamps and wax candles imported at immense expense from France and Italy, and only kindled on high days and holidays.[19] Resin torches were burnt in the great hall; but many complained of the stench and smoke, so that an early departure to bed was not only wise but necessary.

It may perhaps be concluded that we who live at the beginning of the twentieth century would have found life in an English manor in Tudor days insufferably dull and monotonous. Yet there were compensations. Outdoor exercises were many and various. There was the tennis-court, bowls and quoits were much in vogue, and our forefathers practised many other excellent sports, some of which we might well revive. There was hawking, then in the zenith of its popularity; hunting, archery, slinging, mase or “prisoner’s bars,” wrestling, tennis, of which game Henry VIII was exceedingly fond; fivestool ball, football, and golf. Cricket does not seem to have been known, at all events under its present name; but there were a score or so of other popular games and sports, some of which, such as duck-hunting, dog-fighting, and cock-fighting, were exceedingly barbarous. The cruel sport of trying on horseback to pull off the greased head of a living duck or goose suspended by the legs from a cross beam was exceedingly popular at this time.[20] Edward VI, in his Journal, mentions it in an entry dated 4th June 1550: “Sir Robert Dudley, third surviving son of the Earl of Warwick, was married this day to Sir John Robsart’s daughter, after which marriage there were certain gentlemen on horseback that did strive who should first carry away a goose’s head that was hanged alive on two cross-posts.” Can we imagine the whole Court of England, King included, assisting at this childish and cruel spectacle?

The Marquess of Dorset and his family did not spend the whole year at Bradgate; political and social duties brought them a great deal to London, especially in the early spring and summer months. In London they inhabited a mansion at Westminster, not far from Whitehall Palace. The town residence of the Marquess of Dorset was not, as usually stated, situated in Grey’s Inn. At no time did his branch of the family of Grey possess property in or near the Inn which bears their name; it belonged from a remote period to the house of Grey de Wilton, who sold it, in Edward IV’s time, to the Carthusians of Sheen, from whom it was confiscated at the Dissolution and subsequently granted by the Crown for the purpose which it still serves. Thus Grey’s Inn did not fall to Lady Frances, although she was presented by her uncle the King with nearly all the other property owned by the Carthusians in and around London. It has also been said that the Marquess of Dorset had a house in Salisbury Place, Fleet Street, but this is another popular error. This property passed to the Earls of Dorset in 1611 and is connected, not with Lady Jane and her family, but with many worthies of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Henry, Marquess of Dorset, had his town residence on the Thames above Whitehall,[21] precisely where stood, until quite recently, Dorset Place—the name by which the house was known in Lady Jane’s time. After the execution of Suffolk it was seized by the Crown and eventually, in the last days of the sixteenth century, cut up into three separate houses, one of which was inhabited by John Locke the philosopher, who died in it. By a curious coincidence, Locke had previously lived at Salisbury Square. Dorset Place must have been a very large house; we know from contemporary evidence that it had a fine garden and a broad terrace overlooking the Thames. Here Lady Jane Grey certainly lived for a good many months of her life, and here she formed the acquaintance of the Reformers Bullinger and Ulmer, or ab Ulmis. She may also have lived for a time in yet another house owned by the Marquess, near the Temple, of which no trace now exists.

The Dorsets were in the habit, especially in the winter season, of paying country visits to their numerous relatives—to Princess Mary at Newhall; to the Lady Frances’ stepmother, Katherine, Duchess of Suffolk, at Wollaton; to Dorset’s sister, the Lady Audley, at Walden; to his orphan wards and cousins the Willoughbys, at Tylsey; and to Lady Jane’s paternal grandmother, the Dowager Marchioness of Dorset, either at her house at Croydon or at Tylsey, where at one time she presided over the household of the young Willoughbys.

The entertainment of such important personages must often have been a doubtful pleasure to hosts of limited means, for they never stirred abroad without a numerous escort of male and female servants and a guard of thirty or forty retainers mounted on horseback and armed to the teeth. Carriages were but little used as yet, and people of quality had to journey from place to place on horseback, the elderly ladies being provided with the quaintest but most inconvenient and perilous of side saddles, while the young girls and children rode pillion either in front of or behind their nearest male relatives or some trusty yeoman. In cold or damp weather the ladies and children and their female attendants travelled in a huge and very heavy covered vehicle[22] not unlike a Turkish araba or a modern omnibus in shape. This was furnished with leathern curtains and lined with mattresses and cushions, and could often contain as many as twelve persons, six on either seat facing each other. To protect themselves from the cold the ladies wore cloaks and vizors, or “safeguards.”[23] The first genuine statute for repairing roads dates only from 1668. Before that the roads were, like those of modern Turkey, universally execrable, and over them this ponderous vehicle, with its enormous wheels, moved at a snail’s pace: it is not surprising that most people preferred the hackney, even in winter time. Yet in spite of all its inconveniences, this old-world fashion of travel was not without charm, especially in genial weather, when the passage of a lordly cavalcade added much to the life of our highways and verdant lanes and lent to the ever lovely English landscape a picturesqueness and a gaiety which modern civilisation can never hope to restore. On the other hand, delicate folk must have dreaded these excursions, and it is not surprising to learn that on one occasion, in 1550, after a ten hours’ ride in very bad weather to Newhall, on a visit to Princess Mary, the Lady Jane was taken very ill, and kept her room for many days.

The Dissolution of the monasteries and the general troubles of the Church had no doubt greatly attenuated the quaintness of English life on the high roads by the time Jane had attained girlhood. No longer did the Lord Abbot or Prior, with his princely train of ecclesiastics on their gaily caparisoned horses and mules, pass through the leafy lanes on their way to pay visits of duty or ceremony. Lady Jane can never have seen the Abbot of Leicester, for instance, he who attended the death-bed of Wolsey, go forth with all his monks to pay his respects to the Prior of the rich house of Ulverston, for both abbeys were suppressed before she was a year old. She was not familiar with the begging friars, with their sacks and their jokes; and the pardoner, the palmer, and the pilgrim had also faded into the near past long before she began to toddle on the green slopes of Bradgate. Still she must have often witnessed the procession on Corpus Christi, when her own native village was enlivened by garlands of flowers and on every house front hung a linen sheet decked with bunches of bright flowers. She may even have walked with the rest of the children of high and low degree in the annual procession of Our Lady on Assumption Day, for throughout the reign of Henry VIII this festival was observed.

The roads were still full of colour in the summer months, with packmen and peddlers, troops of armed men—not unfrequently dragging along between them some poor wretch, tied by the wrists, to his fiery doom at Leicester or London—with travelling caravans, with itinerant mountebanks and jugglers, and occasionally with a troop of showmen hastening to exhibit dancing bears or learned dogs and pigs at some neighbouring village fair.

The suppression of the monasteries had a disastrous effect on travelling in Henry VIII’s time, comparable only to what would happen nowadays if all the first-class hotels in the country were suddenly closed. The Marquess and Marchioness of Dorset, as they journeyed with their children from Bradgate to London, must have heartily regretted the hospitality they had enjoyed in their own young days at many a lordly abbey and wealthy priory now laid in ruins. The inns were picturesque enough, but none too luxurious; still the beds were generally comfortable, and the cooking, according to the taste of the day, was excellent. Conti, an Italian traveller who visited England some few years after Henry VIII’s death, was much struck by the cleanliness of the parlours and the softness of the feather beds he met with in our country hostelries. The fare, too, he found abundant, and the wines, “sack,” and beers often of superlative quality—facts to which Shakespeare has not failed to allude. The innkeepers were great gainers by the Dissolution, for such rich travellers as did not care to trouble their peers looked to them for board and lodging now that they were no longer able to put up at a religious house. We may be sure that the Dorsets and their people were familiar and welcome guests at all the chief inns along the roads they travelled.

Aylmer, who became Bishop of London in Elizabeth’s time, is usually described as Lady Jane’s earliest tutor. This is a patent error, for Aylmer, who was born in 1521, would have been far too young, in Jane’s infancy, to be appointed tutor to the children of the Marquess of Dorset. It is more likely that Dr. Harding, who was chaplain at Bradgate when Jane was born, had the honour of teaching his patron’s daughters their alphabet. He was reputed a learned man, and posed at one time as a staunch Protestant; but he resembled his employers in having a chameleon-like facility for changing the colour of his opinions according to the state of the religious barometer in regal quarters. Under Henry VIII he was a schismatic and a firm believer in transubstantiation and in the wisdom of invoking saints; when Edward came to the throne he turned quasi-Calvinist. Very early in Mary’s reign he became, much to the unspeakable horror of Lady Jane, a penitent Papist. Aylmer, a far more estimable man and a greater scholar, appeared on the scene at Bradgate as tutor after the accession of King Edward, when Jane was in her twelfth year and ripe to receive his learned instruction in theology and classic lore.

CHAPTER III
THE LADY LATIMER

No task is more congenial to the earnest student of history than that of tracing the origin of some important event, and following its gradual development from a trivial incident to its culmination in a great matter destined to alter the fortunes, and even change the faith, of an entire nation. If we would reach a thorough comprehension of the chain of events which led up to the proclamation of Jane Grey as Queen of England, we must now leave her to pursue her Greek and Latin studies and broider her samplers at Bradgate, while we trace the earlier fortunes of those who so ruled her destiny as to compel a simple-hearted and naturally retiring girl to accept a station which, by the time she was constrained to relinquish it, brought her to the lowest depths of misfortune and transformed the regal diadem which she herself had never coveted into a crown of martyrdom.

The Lady Latimer, better known in history as Queen Katherine Parr, influenced the fortunes of Lady Jane Grey more than is usually imagined, for it was to her care that the ten-year-old child was committed (after it had been proposed by the Seymour faction that she should become Queen-Consort of Edward VI and head of the Protestant party in England), in order that her education might be directed and her mind bent towards “the new learning” of which Katherine was secretly a supporter.

Born in 1513 at that lordly Kendal Castle whose ruins still command one of the loveliest prospects in Westmoreland, Katherine Parr, though a simple gentlewoman, could boast royal blood—that of our Anglo-Saxon kings, inherited from her paternal ancestor Ivo de Talbois, who married Lucy, the sister of the renowned Earls Morcar and Edwin. She was also of Plantagenet descent through her great-great-grandmother Alice Nevill, sister to Cicely Nevill, Duchess of York, a lineage that made her cousin four times removed to King Henry VIII himself. We will not enter in detail into the many alliances of the Parr family with the Nevills, Stricklands, Throckmortons, and Boroughs, but we are safe in describing it as a wealthy and honourable county stock, much looked up to in those days.

Katherine’s father, Sir Thomas Parr, married, when his bride was but little over thirteen, Maud Green, daughter of the rich Sir Thomas Green of Boughton and Greens-Norton in Northamptonshire. Lady Parr had a sister, Mary, who, when a mere child, married Lord Vaux of Harrowden, and, dying without issue, left her splendid fortune to her sister Maud. Lady Parr’s eldest son, born before his mother was fifteen, was the celebrated Sir William Parr, ultimately Earl of Essex and Marquess of Northampton. Her next child mated with Mr. William Herbert, who was raised to the peerage in 1551 by Edward VI as Earl of Pembroke six weeks before the death of his wife. Katherine, the third and youngest child of Sir Thomas and Lady Parr, was destined to occupy the perilous position of sixth Queen-Consort to King Henry VIII. When she was a mere child, the proverbial gipsy-woman predicted that “she should one day wear a crown, and not a cap; and wield a sceptre, not a distaff.”[24] Sir Thomas Parr died in London in 1517, leaving very scant provision for his two daughters, the bulk of his fortune having been settled upon his wife and son; but both young ladies married wealthy men, and thus were not seriously affected by their lack of means. Anne married at fifteen; and Katherine, long before she was fourteen, was led to the hymeneal altar by Lord Borough of Cantley Hall, Gainsborough, Yorkshire. The bridegroom had already been twice married, and so great was the disparity of age between the couple that Lady Borough was wont to call her eldest stepdaughter “little mother.” Two years after her marriage Katherine became a widow with a very handsome dower. Much of her time of mourning was spent at Sizergh Castle in Westmoreland, the seat of her kinsfolk the Stricklands, where she left several fine specimens of her skill as a needlewoman—notably a gorgeous white satin quilt embroidered with gold—which are still preserved in an apartment known as Queen Katherine’s Room.

We are fortunate in possessing a good many portraits of this lady, and at least one wonderful miniature, formerly in the Strawberry Hill Collection, and which now belongs to Mr. Brocklehurst-Dent of Sudeley Castle. This contains a likeness of Henry VIII painted in a space not bigger than a pin’s head, on a tiny medallion suspended round the Queen’s neck. A strong magnifying glass is required to do justice to the beauty of this microscopic miniature within a miniature, probably the smallest ever executed. Judged by all these portraits and by contemporary descriptions, Katherine Parr must have been a pretty little woman with delicate features, an intellectual brow—too amply developed for beauty—fox-coloured eyes, and a rather cunning expression about the thin yet flexible mouth. When her body was disinterred in 1786[25] it was found not to be decomposed, and measured exactly five feet and three inches. The hair, very long and curling naturally, was of a fine golden auburn.

QUEEN KATHERINE PARR

AFTER THE PAINTING FORMERLY IN THE POSSESSION OF HORACE WALPOLE

History does not record the names of the tutors who assisted Katherine Parr to acquire her remarkable education and numerous accomplishments. We may suppose that some priest or monk chaplain at Kendal or Sizergh instructed her in Latin and Greek, in both of which languages she was proficient. She may have learnt French from Mr. Bellemain, French tutor to Prince Edward, a pronounced Huguenot, who, notwithstanding his unorthodoxy, was in high favour at Henry’s Court, received a pension from Edward after he ascended the throne, and walked in the young King’s funeral procession. She mastered the language sufficiently to be able to write it and speak it correctly, and even to record her sentimental impressions in tolerable verse. Amongst the MSS at Hatfield there is a curious French poem, partly written by Katherine and partly by another, probably her teacher. It opens with the following verse in the Queen’s handwriting:—

“Considerant ma vie miserable
Mon cœur marboin, obstine, intraitable,
Outrecuide tant, que non seullement,
Dieu n’estimoit ny son commandement.”

The concluding verse runs:—

“Qui prepare vous est devinement
Ainsi que le monde eust son commencement
Au Pere au Filz au Saint Esprit soit gloire
Loz et honneur d’eternelle memoire. Finis.”[26]

Katherine’s handwriting, though clear and legible, is not to be compared with that of Elizabeth, King Edward, and Jane Grey, who very probably took lessons in the then much esteemed art of caligraphy from Dr. Cheke, chief tutor to the Prince, or from Ascham, both famous for the beauty of their penmanship.

Although very worldly, Katherine Parr was much preoccupied with theological disputations, and a distinctly evangelical tone pervades her literary remains; it is nevertheless certain that during the lifetime of her second husband, Lord Latimer, she was, or pretended to be, a Catholic, and that during the few years of her married life with Henry VIII she was a schismatic or “Henryite.” Tact and prudence were her leading characteristics, and she was both amiable and conciliatory, though she could, when angered, be extremely vindictive. Thomas Cromwell’s downfall, usually attributed to the machinations of Katherine Howard, was in reality mainly due to those of Katherine Parr, for she it was, as we shall presently see, who opened Henry VIII’s eyes to the prodigious rapacity and unpopularity of his favourite chancellor.

Lord Latimer, the lady’s second spouse, like Lord Borough, had been twice married, and when he took her to wife was already the father of several children. The date of this marriage has not been handed down to us, but as Latimer lost his second wife in 1526, it could not have taken place earlier than 1527. He was a staunch Catholic of the belligerent sort, and a prominent leader of the Pilgrimage of Grace, an insurrection that broke out in the North of England in 1536 in consequence of the popular displeasure at the suppression of the monasteries and sequestration of church property. The peasants, suddenly deprived of the monks’ accustomed charity and driven to desperation, began a local crusade, which soon assumed large proportions, their ranks being joined by a great number of noblemen and gentlemen belonging to the old faith, amongst them the Archbishop of York, Lord Nevill, Lord Darcy, Lord Latimer, Sir Stephen Hamerton, Sir Robert Constable, a certain mysterious individual who called himself the “Earl of Poverty,” and Robert Aske, who though of mean extraction was nevertheless considered by the rest of his party as their nominal general. These motley pilgrims increased in numbers as they swept southwards in picturesque confusion; but despite the enthusiasm of their members, they seem to have been ill-disciplined and badly organised, and were presently dispersed at Dunstable, thanks to the conciliatory attitude of the Duke of Norfolk, whom the King had empowered to treat with these rebels and disband them. Latimer, who had been elected their spokesman, withdrew almost immediately and returned to London, where he soon afterwards resumed his post as Comptroller of the King’s Household. After this excursion into open revolt against his sovereign, Lord Latimer evidently deemed it prudent to keep himself very much in the background: he did not join the second Pilgrimage of Grace, which broke out in the following February (1537) and terminated in the execution by sword and fire of some seventy of its more prominent members, among them old Lord Derby, who was over eighty-three years of age.

When in London, Lord Latimer inhabited a house situated in the churchyard of the Charterhouse. The Chartreuse, as it was then called, was rather a fashionable place of residence, being not far distant from Clerkenwell, which in King Henry’s time was a sort of Court suburb, such as Kensington became in the eighteenth century. From a letter still extant, it would appear that Lord Latimer, like many a modern nobleman and gentleman, was in the habit of letting his mansion furnished when he himself was absent at Snape Hall, his country seat in Yorkshire. Sir John Russell, Lord Privy Seal, who looked meek enough[27] but was popularly known as “Swearing Russell” on account of his profane language, wrote in January 1537 requesting Latimer to allow a friend of his to have the loan of his house in the “Chartreuse” during his absence. Latimer dared not refuse, but his answer betrays his reluctant compliance with the request and some temper at the favour having been asked:—

“Right Honourable and my especial good Lord,—After my most hearty recommendations had to your good Lordship. Whereas your Lordship doth desire ... [effaced] of your friends my house within Chartreuse churchyard, beside so ... [effaced] I assure your Lordship the getting of a lease of it costs me 100 marcs, besides other pleasures [i.e. “improvements”] that I did to the house; for it was much my desire to have it, because it stands in good air, out of press of the city. And I do alway lie there when I come to London, and I have no other house to lie at. And, also, I have granted it to farm [i.e. “have let it”] to Mr. Nudygate,[28] son and heir to serjeant Nudygate, to lie in the said house in my absence; and he to void whensoever I come up to London. Nevertheless I am contented if it can do your Lordship any pleasure for your friend, that he lie there forthwith. I seek my lodgings at this Michaelmas term myself. And as touching my lease, I assure your Lordship it is not here; but I shall bring it right to your Lordship at my coming up at this said term, and then and alway I shall be at your Lordship’s commandment, as knows our Lord, Who preserve your Lordship in much honour to His pleasure. From Wyke, in Worcestershire, the last day of September.—Your Lordship’s assuredly to command,

“John Latimer”

“To the right honourable and very especial good lord, my Lord Privy Seal.”[29]

Lord Latimer died in February 1543, a twelvemonth after the execution of Queen Katherine Howard, leaving his widow the manors of Nunmonkton and Hamerton for life, and his mansion in the Charterhouse for as long as she should remain a widow. As soon as her husband was safely buried in St. Paul’s Churchyard, Katherine began to indulge her leaning towards what was then known as the “new learning”; and her house became the resort of the leaders of a movement which was eventually to complete the Reformation in England. These gentlemen were wont, it is said, to assemble at regular intervals and hold conferences on religious subjects in the presence, not only of Katherine and her household, but of a select circle of great ladies, among them Katherine’s sister, Anne Herbert, and the charming Katherine, Duchess of Suffolk, the fourth wife of Lady Jane’s singular grandfather, who were only too willing, notwithstanding the risk they ran, to sit at the feet of a Coverdale, a Latimer, or a Parkhurst. Religion, however, sat lightly on this clever Duchess, who—so brilliant, witty, and amusing are her letters—might well claim to be the precursor in the epistolary art of Madame de Sévigné. To these pious gatherings of the widow Latimer came likewise the haughty and turbulent Anne Stanhope, Countess of Hertford, who in due time, as wife of the Protector, was to be Duchess of Somerset and Katherine Parr’s arch-enemy; Lady Denny,[30] wife of Sir Andrew Denny, Privy Councillor to Henry VIII; the Lady Fitzwilliam,[31] wife of Sir William Fitzwilliam, and acknowledged to be one of the ablest women of her time; and the Lady Tyrwhitt,[32] who came very near martyrdom for her heretical opinions, in the last year of Henry’s life. The Countess of Sussex,[33] second wife of Henry Ratcliffe, Earl of Sussex, was likewise one of Lady Latimer’s intimes. This lady’s alleged familiarity with the black art eventually led to her being charged with witchcraft, in 1552, and imprisoned in the Tower, from which durance she was delivered six months later by order of the Duke of Northumberland. The Marchioness of Dorset may also have assisted at Lady Latimer’s religious exercises, which, although noticed by her contemporaries as matters of general knowledge, seem to have temporarily escaped the unpleasant attention of King Henry’s chief heretic-hunters. The Lady Frances was certainly on the most friendly terms with Lady Latimer, and so too was Princess Mary.

Another guest there was at the Charterhouse who probably came when the house was quiet, the voices of the preachers hushed, and the great ladies returned to their respective domiciles. This was Sir Thomas Seymour, the late Queen Jane’s second brother, who was considered the Adonis of the Court. Lady Latimer seems to have been deeply enamoured of his good looks and stalwart figure; but it is not unlikely that it was her rich dower, rather than herself, that tempted Sir Thomas. Be this as it may, the intimacy which began about this period, paved the way to the tragic close of the handsome courtier’s chequered career. Seymour appears to have proposed to the widow three months after Lord Latimer’s death, and she seems to have rejected him “pleasantly,” saying “some one higher than he had asked her to be his wife.” For all that, Sir Thomas had certainly made a deep impression on her heart, a fact all the more remarkable since he was in every way the opposite to herself: she was learned and sedate—he was gay and profligate; the lady loved rich but sober attire—the gentleman blazed with brilliant satins and silks and cloth of gold and silver, setting his brother courtiers the fashion as to the wearing of their jewels and the number of feathers they should sport in their caps. Still, the advantage of the alliance was obvious, for though not a rich man, he was a great favourite with the King, his potent brother-in-law, and further, he was the second member of the rising house of Seymour, which many predicted—in the event of any accident happening to His Majesty, whose health was fast declining—would at once assume a preponderating position at his successor’s Court.

But although Lady Latimer must have been acquainted with every detail of the conspiracy organised by the Seymours against the house of Howard, of which the first fruit was the revelation of the unfortunate Queen Katherine Howard’s misconduct, she does not seem to have hesitated for a moment in her determination to become Queen of England, even at the sacrifice of her passion for Thomas Seymour, which, all-absorbing as it was, never diverted her from the two great objects of her ambition: her own political influence, and the ultimate advancement of the Reformation. She cannot be described as a Protestant, for in her time that word was not yet coined. During her second husband’s lifetime she must have concealed her “advanced views,” and when she became Queen she was—outwardly at least—a schismatic, who attended as many as three and four Masses daily. Henry VIII rarely heard less than three, and sometimes as many as five Masses every day, and what is more, obliged every official of his Court and household, high and low, to do the same. How she first attracted his attention has never transpired; but as a great Court lady she must have been in frequent and immediate relations with the sovereign. The first mention of her personal dealings with King Henry is connected with trouble in the Throckmorton family. Owing to some dispute over their respective country seats, Coughton Court and Oursley, which were contiguous to one another, her maternal aunt’s husband, Sir George Throckmorton, had incurred Cromwell’s ill-will. Cromwell, with a view to ruining his opponent, went so far as to accuse him of conspiring against the King’s supremacy in ecclesiastical matters. According to an MS. ballad still preserved in the Throckmorton archives, Lady Latimer interceded with His Majesty for her uncle, and obtained full justice for him. At the same time she contrived the overthrow of Cromwell, whose title of Essex was eventually conferred upon her brother, Sir William Parr, who married Anne Bourchier, only daughter of the last Earl of Essex of the original branch.

The divorce—based on the futile plea that the King did not find Anne of Cleves physically attractive[34]—which followed six months after Henry VIII’s pompous marriage with that lady was accepted by the philosophical Dutchwoman in a spirit that proved her practical sense to be stronger than her sentiment. A noble mansion in the country, a dower of £4000 a year, and precedence over all the great ladies of the Court, the Princesses Mary and Elizabeth excepted, struck her as more desirable than an anxious and uncertain struggle to retain the crown matrimonial which, under somewhat similar circumstances, had proved so sorry a possession to Queen Katherine of Aragon. None the less, the Reformers took Anne’s humiliation—she was a Lutheran princess—in much the same spirit as that which possessed the Catholics at the time of the momentous divorce of Queen Katherine. The accommodating “daughter of Cleves,” as she now styled herself, continued to receive friendly visits from the King even in the halcyon days of his brief matrimonial alliance with Katherine Howard, and shortly after that wretched woman’s execution an influential party appears to have been bent, in Reformation interests, on reconciling King Henry with his repudiated spouse. Anne herself seems to have been not at all averse to the scheme; and Marillac, the French Ambassador, who favoured it, found her on one occasion quite hopeful—“in the best of spirits,” and “thinking only of amusing herself and of her fine clothes.” But when the matter of a reunion between the King and his discarded wife was formally proposed to Cranmer by the Duke of Cleves’ Ambassador, it met with a flat refusal. The Archbishop knew the good-natured lady’s character too well to doubt that she was never likely to influence the King or be of the least use in furthering the Reformers’ interests. In the meantime, Parliament had urged Henry, for his “comfort’s sake,” to take unto himself another wife; and at the same time, as if to keep him out of the way, Sir Thomas Seymour was sent on an embassy to the Queen of Hungary, and did not return to London until some days after Katherine Parr’s wedding.

The earliest intimation in the State Papers of the King’s connection with Katherine is in a letter from Lord Lisle, afterwards Duke of Northumberland, to Sir William Parr, dated Greenwich, 20th June 1543:—

“My lady Latymer, your sister, and Mrs. Herbert be both here in the Court with my Lady Mary’s grace and my Lady Elizabeth.” Quite a friendly party!

On 22nd June 1543 the gorgeous State barges streamed up the Thames from Greenwich to Hampton Court. On 10th July Cranmer issued a licence for the King to marry Katherine, Lady Latimer, “in any church or chapel without issue of banns,” and two days later Henry VIII led Lord Latimer’s widow to the altar of an upper oratory called “the Quynes Prevey closet” at Hampton Court Palace. After Low Mass, said by Bishop Gardiner, the consent of both parties was pronounced in English. The King, taking the fair bride’s right hand, repeated after the Bishop the words: “I, Henry, take thee, Katherine, to my wedded wife, to have and to hold from this day forward, for better for worse (sic), for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, till death us do part, and thereto I plight thee my troth.” Then, unclasping and once more clasping hands, Katherine likewise said, “I, Katherine, take thee, Henry, to my wedded husband, to have and to hold from this day forward, for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health to be bonayr and buxome in bed and at board, till death us do part, and thereto I plight unto thee my troth.” The putting on of the wedding ring and offering of gold and silver followed, and after a prayer the Bishop pronounced the nuptial benediction.

At the wedding were present, amongst others, Lord Hertford and his Countess; Sir Anthony Browne; Joan, Lady Dudley; Katherine, Duchess of Suffolk; Lord John Russell; the King’s niece, the Lady Margaret Douglas; Mrs. Herbert, the Queen’s sister; and last but not least, the Princesses Mary and Elizabeth, to whom their stepmother made handsome presents of money. There is no mention of the Dorsets attending the wedding, though both were in London at the time. Everybody seemed delighted, even Wriothesley, who went so far as to write to Suffolk, then with the army in the north, that “on Thursday last the King had married the Lady Latimer, a lady in his judgment for virtue and winsomeness and gentleness most mete for His Highness, who never had such a wife more agreeable to his harte than she is.” Katherine herself informed her brother, Sir William Parr, that “it had pleased God to incline the King’s heart to take her as his wife, which was to her the greatest joy and comfort that could happen.” Wriothesley enclosed this letter in one of his own in which he entreated Parr to make himself worthy of such a sister as the new Queen. Chapuys wrote to the Emperor on 27th July: “My lady of Cleves has taken great grief and despair at the King’s espousal of this last wife, who is not, she says, nearly so beautiful as she, and besides that there is no hope of issue, seeing that she has been twice married before and no children born to her.” Richard Hills, “Heretic Hills,” as they called him, in a letter to Bullinger, the Swiss Reformer, who subsequently became the friend of Lady Jane Grey, and dated from Strasburg on 26th September, makes the following very characteristic comments on the King’s sixth marriage:—

“No news but that our King has, within these two months as I have already written to John Bucer, burnt three godly men in one day. In July he married the widow of a nobleman named Latimer, and, as you know, he is always wont to celebrate his nuptials by some wickedness of this kind.”

The victims alluded to are known as the “Windsor martyrs.” They were men in humble circumstances named Parsons, Testwood, and Filmer.[35] A fourth, John Marbeck, who was organist at St. George’s Chapel Royal, was, it is said, reprieved at the instance of Dr. Casson, Bishop of Salisbury, and of the Queen, who is also credited with having saved the life of Dr. Haines, Dean of Exeter, of Sir Philip Hoby and his wife, and of Sir Thomas Carden, who had been denounced by Dr. London as spreading heresy even within the precincts of the palace. The result of the Queen’s action was that London and Simmonds, his coadjutor, were condemned for perjury, and sentenced to ride round Windsor with their faces to the horses’ tails—a humiliating punishment which is said to have caused Dr. London’s death—no great loss to humanity.

To save human life and to alleviate suffering is a meritorious act that brings its own reward; but in spite of this, and although the newly made Queen was thus enabled to realise her own influence, she must have found her honeymoon a season full of dread, revealing as it did the terrible insecurity of lives dependent on the fiat of so capricious a tyrant as her royal mate.

CHAPTER IV
THE KING’S HOUSEHOLD

Not Solomon in all his glory—nor Sultan Suleyman the Magnificent of Istambul—was lodged more sumptuously than Tudor King Henry VIII of England. When Katherine Parr espoused the much-married monarch, she found herself mistress of a score of royal palaces, each furnished in a manner not unworthy of the splendour of Aladdin after that fortunate youth had gained possession of his magic Lamp, and served by the most numerous retinue ever brought together in this ancient kingdom of ours. The Venetian envoys, accustomed to the luxury and artistic elegance of the Queen of the Adriatic, were fairly dazzled by the sight of the treasures Henry gathered about him. Although within the space of a few brief years he suffered vandal hands to rob his country of more noble abbeys, churches, libraries, and works of art than had been destroyed by time and foreign and civil war combined since William’s Conquest, the King’s own artistic sense was highly developed, and he revelled, with a glee that sometimes verged upon the childish, in pomp and luxury and all things rare and beautiful.[36] To the confiscated collections of Wolsey he added the spoils of a hundred monasteries, and the Inventory of his effects, taken a few days after his death,[37] fills two enormous folio volumes preserved among the Harleian Papers in the British Museum. It is written in a round, legible hand, on the finest paper of the period, and a glimpse of its contents cannot fail to excite the longing of the virtuoso and to stir the imagination as effectually as any brilliant page of description in the Arabian Nights. A perusal of these bulky tomes facilitates some partial conception of the extraordinary magnificence of the Court at which Lady Jane Grey figured as a child, and whence, no doubt, she derived that taste for “costlie attire, music and other vanities,” which was to evoke the unfavourable criticism of her Puritan friends at Zurich and Strasburg, who exhorted her, if she really desired to save her soul, to forswear all such trash, and imitate “the simplicity in dress and modesty in demeanour” practised by her cousin the Princess Elizabeth. We find hundreds of entries touching bedsteads, tables, card or playing tables, chairs, couches and footstools of carved ebony, cedar-wood, walnut, or oak, inlaid with mother-of-pearl, ivory, or rich metal wirework, and upholstered in silk, satin, velvet, or Florence brocade, fringed with gold, and even with strings of seed-pearls. Persian and Turkish carpets, silks and woollen, covered every available space in corridor, gallery, hall, and bedchamber, and there is mention of one especially wonderful carpet “of silk,” probably Persian, “nine yards long by two and a half wide.” One chamber was decorated with “101 yards of white satin embroidered and fringed with gold,” while the walls of another were panelled with purple cloth of gold, i.e. purple silk shot with gold.

There must have been some hundreds of complete sets of the costliest tapestries and arras in the various royal palaces. Wolsey, whose passion for tapestry as a mural decoration became quite unreasonable, collected scores of the finest specimens the looms of Italy and Flanders could produce and lavish outlay secure. After his fall these remained as he had left them at Hampton Court, where we still admire the splendid series representing the “Story of Abraham,” designed by Raphael’s pupil, Bernard van Orly, and another of yet earlier date illustrating the “Triumphs,” of which three, those of “Death,” “Renown,” and “Time,” occupy their original positions in Henry VIII’s Great Watching or Guard Chamber. As we gaze on their faded beauty, we should remind ourselves that the immense quantity of gold thread wrought with infinite care and taste into their composition, and now tarnished, glistened in King Henry’s time in all the glory of its freshness. In the Audience Chamber at Whitehall many a great Ambassador may have envied the arras hangings, representing the “Acts of the Apostles,”[38] from designs by Raphael presented to the King by Pope Leo X when he gave him the proud title of “Defender of the Faith.”

The walls of three State rooms at Hampton Court were hung “with cloth of gold, blue cloth of gold, crimson velvet upon velvet, tawny velvet upon velvet, green velvet figury, and cloth of bawdekin,” a regal material woven partly of silk and partly of gold. Some of the chief tapestries at Whitehall represented the “History of Our Lady,” the “Story of Ahasuerus and Esther,” the “Crucifixion,” the “Story of Apollo and Daphne,” “St. George and the Dragon,” “Hawking and Hunting Scenes,” the “Siege of Jerusalem,” and many other like episodes in sacred and profane history and in mythology. The King would order a score of sets of tapestry at once, and would spend a sum equal to £10,000 or £15,000 of our money upon them. The overflow of tapestries, “picture-hangings,” Oriental silks, Genoa velvets, Florence and Venice brocades, curtains of French lace, Chinese silks, and costly furniture, went to the State rooms of the stern old Tower; to Windsor—where a few remnants of Henry VIII’s belongings still remain; to Woodstock, to Richmond, to Greenwich, to Oatlands in Surrey—where Prince Edward often lived; to Newhall to Havering atte Bower—the chief country seat of Princess Mary; to Hatfield and Enfield Chase—where Princess Elizabeth spent her girlhood; to the Queen’s dower-houses at Hanworth and Chelsea; and above all, to that marvel of the age, the new Palace of Nonesuch, which Henry had built him at Cheam, Surrey.[39] At Whitehall there were scores of cupboards crammed with gold and silver plate, and there were ivory and ebony cabinets with crystal doors, in which glittered strange Italian jewels, and curiosities from all parts of the then known world. In none of Henry’s palaces does there seem to have been a gallery exclusively devoted to pictures, such as would be found in most contemporary Italian and French royal and princely residences; but there were plenty of pictures or “painted tables,” as the Inventory quaintly calls them, in nearly every chamber. In 1540 Holbein’s great fresco in the King’s Privy Council Room at Whitehall, representing King Henry VII and Queen Elizabeth of York in the background, with Henry VIII and Jane Seymour standing in front, was a comparatively recent work. The illustrious artist, who died in London of the plague in 1543, had also designed the ceiling of the “Matted Gallery,” and covered the walls of the Chapel Royal with frescoes and arabesques.

The King’s appearance, as he developed from boyhood to manhood and middle age, might have been studied in scores of presentments of him, to be met with at every turn: here, a plump little boy, by Mabuse; there, a singularly handsome fair-haired young man by Paris Bordone; and yonder, a full-length portrait by Hans Holbein, in which it was evident that His Majesty was beginning to “put on flesh.” In the Audience Chamber was a “table” of the monarch painted by Bartolomeo Penni, wherein the “peepy eyes” and the bloated cheeks of his latter years were only too faithfully portrayed. Though there were portraits of nearly all the King’s contemporaries, including one of Charles VIII of France and another of Charles V, besides a round dozen of Francis I, the likenesses of the five queens who preceded Katherine Parr had all been carefully removed, or, as in the case, of Anne Boleyn and Katherine Howard, destroyed. A cabinet full of relics of Queen Jane stood, however, in the anteroom of the King’s bedchamber at the Tower; and at Westminster, in a picture-book, there was a portrait of this Queen with another of the King facing it on the opposite page. Among the great “tables” at Whitehall were the “Virgin and Child,” by Leonardo da Vinci,[40] given to the King by Francis I in exchange for a picture by Holbein; “St. George and the Dragon,”[41] by Raphael; “Christina of Denmark,”[42] by Holbein, full length; a portrait, “Like unto Life,” of “Thomas, Duke of Norfolk,”[43] and “one table of the King’s Highness trampling upon the papal tiara, whence issues a serpent with seven heads snorting fire. In the King’s hand is the Bible, and a sword whereon is written Verbum Dei.”[44]

If the art of painting was well represented in the King’s many palaces, that of music was even more cherished. Page after page in the Royal Inventory is devoted to “double” and “single” virginals, with cases inlaid and encrusted with ivory and mother-of-pearl or adorned with arabesques of gold, studded with gems; while of lutes and flutes, rebecks and viols, there seems to have been a perfect arsenal. Then there was a library of over a thousand precious volumes, a sort of perambulating feast of reason, for in the Household Expenses we find various sums of money disbursed from time to time for the removal of boat-loads of books from one palace to another. The number of gold, silver, bronze, crystal, and glass chandeliers, sconces, and candlesticks distributed among the royal residences baffles belief. Each of the two hundred and eighty-four guest-chambers at Hampton Court boasted a bedstead hung with the richest silk and satin, with a gorgeously embroidered and wadded counterpane to match, an Oriental carpet, and a toilet set, ewer, basin, and candlesticks complete, of massive silver; while one closet at Whitehall was stored with an immense collection of the choicest German and Venetian glass. Such, in fact, was the King’s mania for collecting things rich and rare that, in spite of the hopeless and suffering condition of his health, he was still “buying,” down to the ultimate week of his life, and some of his last purchases seem never to have been paid for by his successors.

These contemporary accounts of the Household of Henry VIII strike the student by their marked resemblance to similar descriptions, by such writers as Sagrado and Knowles, of the quaint and numerous population of the Seraglio in the palmy days of the Ottoman Khaliphats. The Tudor King, like the Grand Turk, had four battalions of pages—pages of the Outer and of the Inner Court, of the King’s Antechamber, and of the King’s Presence Chamber; and yet a fifth contingent was attached to the service of the Queen. These lads, some hundreds in number, had their captains and even their school-masters; they were mostly of good family, and were apparelled, according to their rank, in wondrous State garments either of satin, green and white, the colours of the house of Tudor, or else of royal scarlet and gold. There was a legion of Grooms of the Wardrobe, Keepers of the King’s Horse, Sports and Pastimes, of his Harriers and Beagles, Sergeants-at-Arms, Sergeants of the Woodyard, Sergeants of the Bakehouse, Sergeants of the Pantry, Sergeants of the Pastry, Sergeants of the Trumpeters, Yeomen of the Wardrobe, Yeomen of the Armoury, Yeomen of the Buttery, Yeomen of the Chamber, Yeomen of the Chariots, of the Cooks, of the Henchmen, Stables, and Tents. The Royal Chapel was served by a full complement of chaplains, sub-chaplains, organists, and choir-boys. There were apothecaries, physicians, astronomers,[45] astrologers, secretaries, ushers, cup-bearers, carvers, servers, singing-boys, virginal players, Italian singers and English madrigalists, and a perfect orchestra of players on the lute, the flute, the rebeck, the sackbut, the harp, the psalter, and all manner of instruments.

Full fifty cooks and twice as many scullions worked in the spacious kitchens, and in 1544 we hear of a French pastry-cook of good repute who rejoiced in the very pleasing and appropriate name of M. Doux. A regiment of gardeners and under-gardeners trimmed the pleasaunces and kept the King’s orchards in order.

The dresses and costumes of this army of picturesque, though often quite useless, folk, numbering some thousands or so, were sufficiently costly to account in part for the straits of the Royal Exchequer. Their wages and silks and satins cost the nation, in the last year of Henry VIII’s reign, £56,700—against £17,280 in the last year of that of his father; a prodigious increase—when we take into consideration the relative value of money—and sufficient to explain the depletion of the coin.

HENRY VIII IN 1548

FROM AN OLD ENGRAVING

Scarlet, or rather deep red, was the predominant colour of the garments of King Henry’s retainers, but dark blue and orange, with the white and light apple green of the house of Tudor, were not lacking, and added to the kaleidoscopic aspect of the courtyards and staircases, galleries and audience chamber, in the stately residences of “bluff King Hal.” One Venetian Ambassador, commenting on the order kept at the English Court, declared that “everything is regulated as by clock-work, and no one ever seems to be out of his place.” When the King condescended to walk abroad, he was attended by a host of superbly attired courtiers, by his grand equerries and chamberlains, the Grand Master of his Horse, his almoners, ushers, and physicians; his fool—Will Somers[46]; his pages, and even by a favourite musician or so. In the last years of his life, owing to his increasing infirmity, Henry was sometimes carried upon the shoulders of six sturdy noblemen, in a kind of sedia gestatoria like the Pope’s. At His Majesty’s approach every knee was bent, and many who particularly desired to conciliate his favour “grovelled” face downward as Orientals before some Eastern despot. The officials and serving-men who prepared the table for His Majesty’s meals made an obeisance each time they passed the vacant chair wherein the monarch was presently to seat himself. The Queen-Consort, and the Princesses, his daughters, knelt whenever they addressed him. In brief, King Henry, having filched from Peter some of Peter’s pontifical prerogatives, exacted the same sort of homage as that paid to the Roman Pontiff, and turned himself from mortal into a sort of demigod or idol. But foreigners and Catholics noted that though people knelt as he rode past, His Majesty bestowed no blessing upon them. This slavish etiquette continued throughout the reign of Edward VI,[47] but was modified when Mary renounced the titular position of Head of the Church. Elizabeth, however, demanded, and, what is more, received, quasi-divine honours from her subjects.

Yet another point of resemblance between the Courts of England and the Ottoman at this period: Whitehall, like the Seraglio, was gay and brilliant on the surface, but in each case there was an undercurrent of terror and suspicion. The Tudor Court swarmed with spies and informers, and often a thoughtless jest, a careless remark, spitefully retailed at headquarters, would send men or women to the Tower, or even to the stake. Folks went in fear and trembling lest what they had said overnight in their cups might be brought home to them with appalling consequences in the morning. This state of abject and habitual fear engendered habits of whispering and talking apart and an atmosphere of mystery, in spite of which the gossip and rumours of the King’s own chamber passed to the pages, grooms, and serving-men in the courtyards below, and thence to the general public, as rapidly as news flies nowadays by telephone and telegraph.

There can be no doubt that Jane Grey, the daughter of one so closely connected with the throne as was the Marchioness of Dorset, must often have mingled in the gaudy crowd that thronged her grand-uncle’s palace. Henry was as “fond of children as he was of pastry,” although, for obvious reasons, he did not display any overweening affection for his own offspring. This engaging little niece, now about six years of age, is likely to have found favour in the monarch’s sight, and Jane Grey, for all we know, may even have throned it on her dread relative’s august knee. Cranmer’s hand, too, must have rested in benediction upon her head, and she may, perchance, have won the smile of Gardiner and of Bonner. She must often have heard the sick King, who had lost his own fine voice, accompany his favourite fool, Will Somers, on the lute, in some song or hymn of his own composition. She must have been familiar with the two Seymour brothers; with the dreamy face and austere manner of the Earl of Hertford, and the bluff good-nature of Sir Thomas. She may even have been tossed in the strong arms of John Dudley, at this time Lord High-Admiral of England and Viscount de Lisle, reputed a “magnificent gentleman,” but otherwise of secondary importance. Wriothesley, Rich, and foredoomed Surrey and his father, old Norfolk, must often have watched her run along, clinging to her portly mother’s trailing brocades as she passed on her way to and from the King’s cabinet, and may even have whispered one to the other that the little damsel would surely be as good a match for young Prince Edward as the Scottish Queen’s daughter, Mary Stuart. In the apartment of her grand-aunt the Queen, where that busy little lady nestled like a sultana among her innumerable soft pillows and cushions,[48] encased in cloth of gold and silver, the child Jane must have heard much evangelical counsel from the erstwhile widow Latimer, who found some consolation in the gorgeousness of her thraldom for the loss of her handsome lover, Sir Thomas Seymour.

The Queen’s lodgings were parted from the King’s by a short corridor, and nearly all her windows overlooked the Thames. Here Katherine Parr played the housewife, and in the midst of her tapestries and brocades and her “stretches” of silver and gold cloth, made poultices for Henry’s ulcered legs, wrote her pious treaties on probity and prayers, and probably counted the hours till the Lord in His mercy should deliver her royal spouse from his sore sufferings. In these rooms, perhaps, Jane Grey sat for her miniature to Lavinia Tyrling; Bartolomeo Penni may here have limned her diminutive but very pretty features; and we fancy we can see Mr. Crane or Mr. John Heywood, His Majesty’s chief virginal players, teaching her the notes upon the King’s “favourite virginal,” the one “enlaid with gold and mother-of-pearl.” In the last months of Henry’s life, when Lady Jane is known to have been much with Katherine Parr, the little girl may have listened with delight to the wonderful warbling of the King’s Italian singers, Alberto of Venice, Marc Antonio Galiadello of Brescia, or Giorgio da Cremona, as they vainly endeavoured to soothe the sufferings of the dying monarch by their elaborate cadenze.

Queen Katherine soon made her influence felt at Court. She could not control the violent passions of her wayward lord, but she did in a measure modify them, and steered her own course amid the shoals of regal existence with consummate skill. No breath of scandal ever sullied her fair name, though Thomas Seymour, back from his convenient mission to Hungary, was appointed her Chamberlain, and must have been a good deal in her company. Even her worst enemies never ventured on that track. When at a later date they planned a blow, which they hoped would prove fatal to the Queen, they selected her religious leanings, not her love affairs, as their fell weapon. Katherine Parr, to her credit, lost no time in reconciling the King with his hitherto neglected daughters. Princess Mary was near her own age, and had been intimate with her when she was Lady Latimer. The Emperor’s Ambassadors praise “the new Queen for her kindness to the daughter of Katherine of Aragon,[49] who now takes her proper place at Court.” Elizabeth, too, was summoned from her suburban retreat, but had not been many weeks under her father’s roof ere he became so exasperated by her pert obstinacy that he summarily ordered her back to Enfield. In a few weeks, however, Katherine patched up the quarrel, and on 24th July 1544 Elizabeth wrote Her Majesty, in Italian, a most graceful letter of thanks for her good offices.[50] Edward was too delicate to be much in London, but none the less his stepmother looked after his health with so much “gentleness” that she soon won his sincere affection and lasting goodwill. He wrote her letters in Latin, French, and Italian, addressed to his charisima Mater, and full of praise for her beautiful penmanship, which, on comparison, proves greatly inferior both to his own and to that of either Elizabeth or Jane Grey. Katherine induced her stepdaughter Mary to assist in the translation of Erasmus’s Paraphrase of the Four Gospels. The Princess selected that of St. John, and when the work was finished, an amusing correspondence ensued as to the propriety of the future Queen of England placing her name, as translator, on the frontispiece. “I see not why you should reject the praise deservedly yours,” argued the Queen; and the Princess at last allowed the editor of the work, the learned Dr. Udall, to allude to the fact that “the most noble, the most virtuous and the most studious Lady Mary” had a hand in its success.[51]

To occupy her own leisure, Queen Katherine devoted herself to the composition of a quaint book entitled The Lamentations of a Penitent Sinner, a pious work which gives us, at least in one passage, a lucid idea of the methods employed by Her Majesty to keep her hold over her extraordinary husband, among which gross flattery was by no means the least. A copy of this work was once in the possession of John Thelwall, and was sold at the death of his second wife. It contained a curious autograph, indicating that it had been given by the Queen to her “dear cosyn, Jane Grey,” who no doubt read it with veneration and delight. In this tiny volume Henry had the satisfaction of being likened unto Moses leading the Children of Israel out of bondage. “I mean by Moses, King Henry VIII, my most sovereign favourable lord and husband, one (if Moses had figured any more than Christ) through the excellent grace of God, meet to be another expressed verity of Moses’ conquest over Pharaoh (and I mean by this Pharaoh the Bishop of Rome), the greatest persecutor of all true Christians than ever was Pharaoh of the Children of Israel.”

As may well be imagined, Queen Katherine Parr did not fail to use her influence to obtain prominent positions about the Court for her own kith and kin. Her uncle and Chamberlain, Sir Thomas Parr, was created Lord Parr of Horton; her brother was raised from the rank of Baron Parr of Kendal to be Earl of Essex, in lieu of the lately decapitated Thomas Cromwell; and her brother-in-law, William Herbert, was knighted. These gentlemen received their new dignities in the Chapel Royal, but were not entertained in one of the apartments spread with Persian carpets. Their dinner was served in the choir-boys’ mess-room, in which a fresh litter of rushes was strewn for the occasion—a curious fact, which leads one to conclude that the acting master of ceremonies expected the party to indulge in libations which might result in some injury to Oriental rugs but were not likely to do much damage to fresh rushes costing 3s. 6d. the litter. Parr had to pay 40s. for his new paraphernalia, and the choir-boys got 10s. for singing after the dinner.[52]

On 14th July 1544 King Henry sailed from Dover for France to superintend in person the approaching siege of Boulogne. He left our shores in a vessel with sails made of cloth of gold, the glitter of which does not appear to have added to the ship’s speed, for the King did not get to Calais for nearly twenty-four hours, although the weather was fine, and the sea calm—probably too calm. The last time he had crossed the Channel, on his way to the Field of the Cloth of Gold, Henry had acted the part of pilot, garbed in nether garments of cloth of gold, and had blown the pilot’s whistle as loud as any trumpeter. This time he was too anxious and enfeebled to play at all. His Majesty was attended by his brother-in-law, the Duke of Suffolk, also a very sick man; by Sir William Herbert, who acted as his spear-bearer, by the Duke of Norfolk, the Earl of Surrey, the Spanish Duke of Alberqurque, John Dudley, the Lord High-Admiral, afterwards Duke of Northumberland, and half the English nobility. Before his departure he appointed the Queen Regent of England and Ireland, with power to sign all official and State documents, this being almost the first occasion on which a Queen-Consort of England held so responsible a position. The Earl of Hertford was to be Her Majesty’s constant attendant, but should he chance to be temporarily absent, Cranmer was to remain with her, and with these two, Sir William Petre and Lord Parr of Horton, her Grace’s uncle, Wriothesley, and Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester, were to sit in council.

During this regency Katherine kept aloof from politics and occupied herself principally with assisting the University of Cambridge and with the royal children, who were left in her charge. Princess Mary, who was an almost constant guest during the King’s absence, and Princess Elizabeth, were both invited to join the circle at Oatlands, where Prince Edward was residing, and whither, owing to an outbreak of the plague, the Queen herself soon retired. From the various suburban palaces in which she was residing, Katherine addressed letters almost daily to the King, giving him accounts of the health and the doings of his children; and the monarch vouchsafed in return to write most approvingly of all she did. Towards the middle of August the Lady Dorset and her daughter, the Lady Jane Grey, came to Oatlands for a few days’ visit. This was perhaps the first and probably the only time spent by Lady Jane and Prince Edward under the same roof. The royal kinsfolk may have lived a very quiet life, spending their days in the gardens and park, and their evenings either listening to the singing of Princess Mary, who is reputed to have had a magnificent contralto voice, or to Princess Elizabeth’s playing upon the virginals, an art in which she already excelled. The Queen may perchance have favoured the company with a chapter or so from some one or other of her remarkably dull theological compositions. There is no evidence that she was a musician, and she does not seem to have been infected with the prevailing Court vice—gambling—in which even the pious Princess Mary indulged, frequently losing much more than she could pay—as demonstrated by the Household Books of Henry VIII.

Boulogne capitulated to Suffolk on 16th September, after a lengthy siege, and on the 18th, the King, accompanied by the Duke of Alberqurque, representing his ally the Emperor, received the keys of the city from his brother-in-law’s hands, and made what he was pleased to consider his triumphal entry into the town. But he rode through a city untenanted and in ruins; even the magnificent Cathedral had not been spared, and the townsfolk, who had fled for security, as they hoped, to Hardelot and Etaples, were massacred, man, woman, and child, by the allied Spanish, German, and English troops. English historians have been reticent in dealing with the siege of Boulogne,[53] and the majority have passed very lightly over the disagreement which soon broke out between our King and his ally the Emperor.[54] Charles now urged Henry to join him and march on Paris. Henry, who knew his troops to be enfeebled by hardship and suffering, and moreover felt himself far too ill to supervise fresh military operations, would go no farther, more especially because he feared to infuriate the French King, who might at any moment ally himself with his former enemy the Emperor Charles, and thus form a Catholic coalition absolutely inimical to the policy of the English King. Henry’s hesitation undoubtedly saved the city of Paris. Seeing the Emperor’s troops approach the capital, Francis roused himself for a moment from the lethargy in which he had been plunged, and once more became the hero of Marignano. The King’s attitude and the bravery of the Dauphin, who was covering the capital with 8000 men, stimulated the drooping spirits of the Parisians, and, with their usual heroism, they prepared to offer a stout resistance to their foes. They even made merry at the expense of their two arch-enemies, ridiculing the gouty Emperor and caricaturing the corpulent English King—a proof, if one were lacking, that the fatal diseases destined eventually to carry Henry off had already made sufficient progress to excite general attention. Queen Eleanor, the neglected wife of Francis I, foreseeing the horrors to which the capital and its inhabitants were exposed, determined, without consulting her husband, to plead personally with the Emperor. Accompanied by a Spanish monk named Guzman, she proceeded to the Imperial tent, and casting herself upon her knees before Charles, then writhing in agonies of gout, obtained terms from him, thus averting a siege which must have cost rivers of blood. The peace then concluded was none too satisfactory, so far as England was concerned, since it stipulated that Boulogne was to be restored in the space of six years, during which time the place lost us in money and men far more than it was worth. Never, indeed, was there a more futile expedition than this, nor a greater waste of money. The much-talked-of sails of cloth of gold wafted the King home on 1st October 1544. In London he was received with little enthusiasm, or none at all. The nation was disappointed by the terms of the peace, the army was disorganised, Norfolk already out of favour, and Surrey, accused of insubordination, was openly disgraced. Boulogne was left in the hands of Jane Grey’s future father-in-law, Lord High-Admiral John Dudley.

The health of Lady Jane’s maternal grandfather, Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, failed him completely soon after his return to England. He seems to have suffered from a complication of disorders not unlike those which were afflicting his brother-in-law, the King. After the siege of Boulogne, he appears to have been of very little use, and eighteen months later he retired with his Duchess to Guildford Castle “in much suffering and pain.” There is a portrait extant of Charles Brandon, taken at this time, which represents him seated in a large armchair, his head bound up in a sort of nightcap, and his swollen and gouty feet, one of which rests on a stool, enveloped in bandages. The bloated face bears a weird resemblance to Henry VIII. Brandon died at Guildford in 1546 after a long illness, during which he was nursed by his Duchess and his two daughters, the Ladies Frances and Eleanor, the former of whom brought her eldest daughters, Jane and Katherine, with her. By his will Charles Brandon left, after deducting a rather meagre dower for his wife, the bulk of his vast fortune to his two sons, with remainder to his daughters in unequal shares, the Lady Frances, in the case of the death of her two brothers, inheriting considerably more than two-thirds of her father’s lands and money. He desired to be buried in Lincolnshire, but Henry, overlooking this request, caused his body to be conveyed to Windsor, where it was interred with great pomp in St. George’s Chapel, in the presence of his family and of a multitude of courtiers.

CHAPTER V
MRS. ANNE ASKEW

It was in the latter years of Henry VIII’s reign that Stephen Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester, conceived his scheme for the reconciliation of England and England’s monarch with the Roman Pontiff. Although a less astute intriguer than his powerful opponent Cranmer, Gardiner, who was apt to lose his temper and blurt out things best kept to himself, was a man of marked ability, one of whom his crafty master made frequent use, playing him off against the Archbishop, and so retaining the balance of power in his own jealous hands. Cranmer was at this period using his influence with Henry to abolish the use of Latin in the Mass, preparatory to the eventual introduction of the Book of Common Prayer and the early and total abrogation of the Eucharistic Service in the Roman sense. Yet the wily Churchman knew right well that so long as the King lived there was but faint hope of this change. For His Majesty clung to the doctrine of Transubstantiation closer than to any other tenet; not so much on account of his faith—did he believe anything?—as because, in the days of his youth, he had indited a work in defence of the Catholic doctrine of the Sacraments, which, so his clergy had averred, proved him wiser than Solomon himself, and which Pope Leo X had favourably compared with the writings of St. Augustine and Gregory the Great, rewarding the royal author with that title of “Defender of the Faith” which is still a cherished appanage of British royalty. Henry had even made belief in the Sacrament of the Altar a principal Article amongst the famous Six, any denial of which was punishable with death. Yet, if the King had searched Cranmer’s study at Lambeth at the very moment when that wily prelate was professing to accept his beliefs from his King, as submissively as though the monarch had possessed the infallible powers of his own Maker, he might have laid his hand on a bulky correspondence between the Primate and every Lutheran and Calvinistic leader in Germany and Switzerland—with Calvin, Bullinger, Œcolampadius, Osiander, Dryander, Bucer, and the rest. Gardiner, on his side, was in communication with Cardinal Pole, Charles V, the Pope, and the entire papal party at home and abroad. This duel between the papal leader and the Reformers, then, was the true basis of all political undertakings at this momentous crisis. The rival parties were really preparing themselves for the departure of the dying King, and aimed at controlling the inevitable Protectorate, necessitated by the minority of his successor, a lad of nine summers. Had Gardiner, the Howards, and the Catholic party won the day, history would have had little, perhaps nothing, to record concerning Lady Jane Grey. Her name, like that of her accomplished friend Lady Jane Seymour, daughter of Lord Hertford, would have been lost, buried in the spent sands of the past.

The decline of the King’s health began in the summer of 1541–2, when he was attacked by a dangerous tertian fever, from which, thanks to his powerful constitution, he partially recovered.

At the time of his marriage with Anne of Cleves he was again in poor health, and during the proceedings for the King’s divorce from his Dutch consort, Cranmer laid great stress on the fact that although she had shared his chamber for six months, the bride was still to all intents and purposes unwed. At the siege of Boulogne, as we have seen, Henry was terribly altered, and the French ballad-writers jested about le cercle de fer, which, they averred, kept his ungainly carcass together. Queen Katherine was probably espoused rather as a skilful nurse than as a wife, in the ordinary acceptance of the term, and a most assiduous attendant she proved, kneeling for hours at a time rubbing his swelled legs and dressing his many ulcers. It would be unjust to the Queen’s memory to attribute this wifely devotion to none but selfish motives. But her contemporaries shrewdly guessed that, while fulfilling her wifely duty, she did not fail to work in her own interest, and that of her friends, with her own peculiar skill and tact. She certainly wished to be appointed Regent during Edward’s minority, and would gladly have excluded the Howards, Wriothesley, Gardiner, Rich, and the whole Catholic element from the King’s sick-room, while doing all she could to strengthen the hand of the Seymours, maternal uncles of the future King, who were intent on ruling his kingdom for him on strictly anti-papal lines. In the spring of the year 1546 the King had a bad relapse, and day by day the grey shadows of approaching death deepened on that broad and bloated countenance. He would not have the grim word mentioned in his presence, and any courtier who appeared before him dressed in mourning[55]—even for the nearest kin—was driven in fury from his sight. None the less, he realised that he had not many months to live. It was imperative, therefore, if any reconciliation with Rome was to be effected before the new reign began, that no time should be lost, and that some sharp and decisive blow should overthrow the influence of the Queen, now the chief intermediary between her sick spouse, Cranmer, and the Seymours. But Katherine, in spite of the notoriety of her intimate friendship with Sir Thomas Seymour, was far too clever to give her enemies any chance of blasting, or even smirching, her reputation. With respect to her religious opinions, which were distinctly heterodox, she was less guarded, however, and her enemies had good reason to believe that if they could convince the King, beyond any doubt, that she was in correspondence with those whom he was pleased to term “heretics,” she would never be able to weather the storm her treachery must inevitably raise in the King’s resentful breast.

Henry, whose brain remained astonishingly active, notwithstanding his infirmities, had never been so irritable and ferocious as during the last few months of his life. He was like a half-dead rattlesnake, which may recover life and spring afresh upon its prey at any moment. Never were the fires at Smithfield so active as in 1546. Early in this year six poor wretches were sent to the stake—three Catholics; the other three, Reformers. To demonstrate the impartiality of their merciless judge they were all chained together. People scarcely knew what they must believe or what disbelieve, to escape execution. The King’s informers were always at work, spying upon the sayings and doings of people in every rank of life; and the wonder is that the Queen and her ladies were not caught in some imprudent admission or other, and convicted. At last, however, in the early spring of 1546, an incident occurred which brought Katherine’s foes their longed-for chance of effecting her downfall.

Anne Askew, second daughter of Sir William Askew, or Ayscough, of South Kelsy, Lincolnshire, was born at Stallingbrough, near Grimsby, in 1521. When about fifteen years of age, she was married, without her consent, to Mr. Thomas Kyme, a Lincolnshire squire and neighbour, who had been previously “contracted” to her elder sister. During her early wedded life Mrs. Kyme appears to have been happy enough, and became the mother of two children. She presently occupied herself in studying the newly translated Scriptures, and shortly after imagined she had a divine mission to preach the gospel and correct what she deemed the theological errors of her neighbours, especially on the subject of the Lord’s Supper, concerning which she held Genevan views.

After a few years of discomfort, Mr. Kyme, who, according to the latest researches, entertained contrary religious opinions to those of his wife, began to complain of the scanty enjoyment he derived from her society. She was perpetually “gadding up and down the country, a-gospelling and a-gossiping, instead of looking after her children.” Anne is described as a handsome and daring young woman with a good deal of native wit and ability, and was evidently the prototype of not a few ladies of our own time, who prefer public life and controversy to domestic duty and retirement. She even took upon herself to read and comment on the New Testament in the nave of Lincoln Cathedral, where she was often to be found surrounded by an interested or amused group of priests and people. This state of things no Dean or Chapter could be expected to endure, and one fine day Mrs. Kyme found herself forcibly ejected from the sacred edifice. After this incident, she must have had some unusual disagreement with her husband, for her relations persuaded her to leave the town, and she travelled to London, where she soon made herself conspicuous as a preacher of the new learning, and secured several distinguished converts. She lodged in a house near the Temple, and one of her neighbours, Mr. Wadloe, a hot Catholic, who began by deriding her behaviour, ended by admiring her “godliness”; to use his own expression—“At mydnyght when I and others applye ourselves to sleape, or do worse, Mrs. Askew” (she had resumed her maiden name), “begins to pray, and ceaseth not in many howers after,” doubtless to the edification of such of her neighbours as suffered from insomnia.

By dint of perseverance, and also, it may be, through her connections, Anne Askew formed the acquaintance of several great ladies of the Court, and is said to have obtained, through the offices of the Duchess of Suffolk, an interview with the Queen, to whom, in the presence of her ladies, notably Lady Tyrwhitt, Lady Lane, Lady Denny, and the little Lady Jane Grey,[56] she offered some copies of Tyndale’s version of the New Testament, and certain tracts arguing against Transubstantiation, which were subsequently found in the Queen’s own closet and in the possession of the King’s “Suffolk nieces.”

It was in March 1545 that Mrs. Askew was first arrested on a charge of heresy and taken to Sadler’s Hall, where she was denounced to the civil authorities and taken before the Lord Mayor, who in the course of his examination questioned her as to the probable changes in a consecrated wafer after a “mowse” had swallowed it, whereupon she “made no answer but smiled,” and was committed to the Counter. That much-abused man, Bishop Bonner, appears to have taken an interest in her case, and endeavoured to save her from an awful fate. He granted her a private interview and drew up a form of recantation which she signed in the following ambiguous terms: “I, Anne Askew, do believe all manner of things contained in the Catholic Church and not otherwise.” On this, Bonner, whose patience had been severely tried,—for Anne was very sharp-tongued and uncompromising,—waxed wroth, and taking her by the shoulders, pushed her out of the chamber. Her next friend was Dr. Weston, afterwards Bishop of Westminster, who got her liberated on her own security; and for some months we hear no more about her, except that she was busy preaching and distributing her tracts secretly. On 10th May 1546 both Mr. and Mrs. Kyme received a summons to present themselves within a specified time before the Privy Council, then sitting at Greenwich, and they accordingly appeared on the 19th of the following June before the Chancellor of the Augmentations, Sir Richard Rich, the Bishops of Durham and Winchester and a number of other noblemen and gentlemen, and were put through a severe cross-examination.[57] Anne, we learn, received this summons in London, but her husband came to town on purpose to attend. Kyme got off with a caution, on his promise to return forthwith to Lincoln, and remain there. His wife, in open court, declared she would never again recognise him as her husband. He went back to Lincoln, and we lose sight of him. All we know is that he died, where he is buried, at Friskne in 1591.

Anne Askew was eventually arraigned before the King’s Justices at Guildhall for speaking against the Sacrament of the Altar, contrary to the Statute of the Six Articles. This time she appeared with two other “heretics,” one of them that singular personage Dr. Nicholas Shaxton, ex-Bishop of Salisbury, whose pupil she is said to have been. Shaxton, a Norfolk man by birth, was one of the Commission appointed by Gardiner in connection with the divorce of Katherine of Aragon, and during the proceedings he so favoured the King’s view that he eventually became almoner to Anne Boleyn and Bishop of Salisbury. At a later date he preached Zwinglian doctrines concerning the Eucharist, got himself into serious difficulties with Archbishop Cranmer, and was forced to relinquish his see. After a time he became a notorious “gospeller,” and was finally arrested with Anne Askew and a man named Christopher White. The lady and White were both sent to Newgate; but the former recanted, and so escaped a fiery ordeal. Shaxton did the same, obtained his pardon, and was actually ordered to visit Anne in prison, and persuade her to follow his example. But, weak woman though she was, Anne was made of sterner stuff than the ex-prelate. “It were better for you you had not been born than do that which you have done,” cried she; and, crestfallen, her former friend and tutor left her presence. Her condemnation followed immediately afterwards. It was presently noticed that Anne enjoyed more creature comforts in prison than the customs of Newgate allowed. She explained the matter by saying that “her maid went abroad into the streets and made moan to the prentices and they did send her money!” But her persecutors refused to believe this story, and so one afternoon, not long before her martyrdom, she was conveyed to the Tower, taken to the torture chamber, and there racked in the presence of Lord Chancellor Wriothesley, Sir Richard Rich, Sir John Barker, and Sir Anthony Knyvett, Constable of the Tower. Hitherto no one had been tortured in England for conscience’ sake, this terrible resource being solely employed to extract information from persons suspected of treasonable practices. Wriothesley, exasperated at his failure to elicit direct information or satisfactory answers from his victim, turned the screws himself, after Knyvett had refused to order her to be further tormented by the official executioner. Sir Richard Rich lent his hand to the Chancellor in this merciless task, and so, to use poor Anne’s own words, she “was nigh dead.”[58]

Dr. Lingard and other historians have cast doubt upon the veracity of this horrible story, but the scene is described by Anne herself in her “Narrative,” dictated a few days before her death, and published at Marburg, in the Duchy of Hesse, in 1547, with a long running commentary by John Bale, afterwards Bishop of Ossory. In his Three Conversions of England, the Jesuit, Father Parsons, who had access to much information and evidence long since destroyed or lost, not only confirms the truth of the torture episode, but adds that it was ordered by the King himself, who, hearing of the intercourse between his Queen and Anne, “caused her to be apprehended and put to the rack, to know the truth thereof. And by her confession he learned so much of Queen Katherine, as he had purposed to burn her also, if he had lived.” Parsons goes on to say that “the King’s sickness and death, shortly ensuing, was the chief cause of her escape.” Mrs. Askew bravely endured the most horrible torments rather than betray her friends’ trust, and only yielded so far as to admit that whilst in prison she had received ten shillings, delivered by a man in a blue livery. She thought the money had been sent her by the Countess of Hertford, but was not sure. She had a further sum of eight shillings at the hand of a footman in a purple livery, and believed it was a gift from Lady Denny. Questioned if she knew Lady Fitzwilliam, the Duchess of Suffolk, Lady Sussex, or any other great ladies of the Court, she evasively answered that she “knew nothing about them that could be proved.” She does not seem to have been questioned point-blank as to whether she had ever had any direct dealings with the Queen. Wriothesley may have thought he had already obtained sufficient information for his purpose. However that may have been, the stout-hearted lady was sent back to Newgate, there to spend her last three days of life, which she occupied in writing and dictating the “Narrative” to be found among Dr. Bale’s writings.[59]

On the eve of her execution Anne Askew and three men who had been condemned for heresy at the same time as herself were visited in the little parlour at Newgate by George Throckmorton and his brother, who were kinsmen of the Queen—a rather suspicious circumstance. They were cautioned in time, and thus escaped being arrested on a charge of heresy, which might have proved fatal to themselves and their royal cousin. John Louthe, the Reformer, who has left us an account of the meeting, also came, at great risk to himself, to encourage the unfortunate Anne. Mrs. Askew, with an “Angel’s countenance and a smiling face,” talked “merrily” with her unhappy companions, John Laselles, who had been a gentleman in attendance upon the King, and is supposed to have been the individual who betrayed the secrets of Katherine Howard; Nicholas Bolenian, a priest from Shropshire; and John Adams, a tailor. They talked on religious subjects until it was time to separate. The next day, 16th July, Mrs. Askew and her three fellow-prisoners were taken from Newgate to Smithfield. So dislocated were the poor lady’s limbs that she had to be carried to her doom in a chair. Cranmer, seeking to throw the full odium of the horrible business on Gardiner, kept much in the background in the whole matter of Anne Askew. He did not attend the ecclesiastical commission which condemned her to the stake; but for all that his signature is affixed to her death-warrant. Six years later, another martyr, Joan Bocher, one of the last of his many victims, reminded the Archbishop that he had martyred her friend Anne Askew for teaching more or less the same doctrines he now preached himself.

In the 1563 edition of Foxe’s Martyrs there is a most curious engraving, probably after an original drawing, representing the burning of Anne Askew and her companions. The spectators are kept back by a ring fence within which we see the stake, and a quaint pulpit, from which Dr. Nicholas Shaxton, duly restored to grace, preached a sermon, supporting the very dogma for denying which he had been prosecuted but a few days previously. Anne is shown dressed in white; one side of the pyre is entirely devoted to her, while the three men, apparently naked to the waist, are bound together, on the side opposite the pulpit. The concourse of people appears enormous; the mob seems to seethe round the scaffold, loll out of the surrounding windows, and even swarm on the opposite roofs. On a raised bench, under a canopy, sit Wriothesley, Rich, the Dukes of Norfolk, Surrey, “Swearing Russell,” and the Lord Mayor. These worthies, it appears, were sorely perturbed by a rumour that there was an unusual amount of gunpowder on the spot, and were very much afraid of a dangerous explosion. Their terrors were swiftly allayed when Bedford informed the company that the explosive in question was merely a number of small bags of gunpowder concealed about the persons of the victims with the object of shortening their sufferings.

At the very last moment Mrs. Askew was offered a pardon on condition that she recanted and gave up the names of her high-born friends. She refused: the Lord Mayor shouted Fiat justitia, and the faggots were lighted. Presently the fire crackled. A quick succession of explosions followed, the smoke concealing the wretched victims from sight. When the flames and smoke died down only the charred and blackened remains of four human beings could be descried. Clouds had been gathering; a peal of thunder rolled, and heavy drops of rain soon dispersed the throng. The show was over, and the home-returning spectators chatted as they went, blaming or praising the deed, according to their individual view. The horror of it does not seem to have affected them much, although among the Reformers and the better classes of all creeds expressions of hearty indignation were not lacking. But the masses were accustomed to such sights of horror, and so, indeed, were our own immediate forbears, until public executions ceased and the death sentence was carried out in the courtyards of the prisons. We have indeed progressed in these matters since 1546 and even since 1868.

A few days after the burning of the unfortunate Lincolnshire lady, Foxe tells us, Wriothesley, Gardiner, and Rich waited on the King, and so persuaded him that Anne had made damaging revelations concerning the Queen’s intercourse with heretics that Henry “proposed to burn her also.” His Majesty, in his rage, actually signed a warrant for the arrest of his offending Consort and handed it to Wriothesley. That worthy let the paper drop in a corridor or gallery close to the Queen’s apartment. One of her servants picked it up and carried it to Her Majesty, who was so terrified by its contents that she fell into violent hysterics. Her apartments were close to the King’s, and Henry, overhearing the outcry, and probably disturbed by the noise, sent to inquire what was amiss. The Queen’s physician, Wendy, informed the messenger that Her Majesty was dangerously ill, and her sickness, to his reckoning, caused by sudden and extreme distress of mind. Whereupon the King sent word that she was not to trouble herself further, as no ill was intended to her. Greatly comforted by this reassuring message, Katherine presently felt herself sufficiently recovered to receive a visit from her husband, who, at great personal inconvenience, caused himself to be conveyed into her apartment in his chair. Nothing could have been better calculated to revive the drooping spirits of the scared Consort than the sight of her august spouse in a good humour. The following evening she was well enough to return the King’s visit. She was accompanied by the Lady Tyrwhitt, her sister the Lady Herbert, by the King’s niece the Lady Jane Grey, and by the Lady Lane, who bore the candles before Her Majesty. The King welcomed the Queen and her company very courteously, and, bidding her be seated, in a cheerful tone entered into a controversial conversation with her. He possibly wished to “draw” his Consort upon certain theological questions; but she shrewdly observed that “since God had appointed him Supreme Head of the Church it was not for her to teach him theology, but to learn it from him.” “Not so, by St. Mary,” said the King, “you are become a doctor, Kate, to instruct us, and not to be instructed of us, as oftentimes we have seen.” “Indeed, indeed, Sire,” quoth the Queen, “if your Majesty so conceive, my meaning has been mistaken, for I have always held it preposterous for a woman to instruct her lord.” “If,” she continued, “I have occasionally ventured to differ with your Highness on religious matters, it was partly to obtain information, and also to pass away the pain and weariness of your present infirmity with arguments that interested you.” “And is it so, sweetheart?” replied His Majesty, “then we are perfect friends,” and thereupon he kissed her and gave her leave to depart.

The day appointed by her foes for the Queen’s arrest chanced to be fine and the sun shone brightly. The King sent for her to take the early air with him on the garden terrace overlooking the Thames. Katherine came, attended as before by her sister, the Lady Herbert, the Lady Lane, the Lady Tyrwhitt, and the little Lady Jane Grey. They had not been long walking up and down in the sunshine before the Lord Chancellor, with forty of the guard, entered the garden, expecting to carry off the Queen to the Tower—for no intimation of the change in the King’s intentions had reached him. Henry received his minister with a burst of furious invective. Bidding the Queen and her ladies stand apart, he called up Wriothesley and cast every evil name he could think of at him, commanding him, finally, to “avaunt from his presence and never show his face again till he was summoned.” Wriothesley, crestfallen and humbled, was about to withdraw, when the Queen advanced and interceded for him: “Poor soul, poor soul!” quoth the King; “thou little knowest, Kate, how ill he deserveth this grace at thy hands. On my hand, sweetheart, he hath been to thee a very knave!” So the disappointed minister departed, and Henry walked up and down the terrace again, leaning on his Queen and followed by her escort of ladies. Although Wriothesley’s part in this tragi-comedy seems to have been overlooked, the King is said never to have forgiven Gardiner his share in the matter. A little later, notwithstanding the royal prohibition, both conspirators presented themselves with their colleagues. The King forthwith reminded Wriothesley in his most forcible manner that he had ordered him never to show his face again, and above all never, on any pretext whatever, to bring “that beast Gardiner” along with him. “My Lord of Winchester,” replied the cunning Wriothesley, “has come to wait upon your Highness with an offer of benevolence from his clergy.” The King being as usual in great need of money, began to listen more benignly, allowed Gardiner to present the address, and finally accepted the bribe.[60] But he took no further notice of the Bishop, and is said to have struck his name off the list of his executors within the next few days. He also cancelled that of Thirlby, Bishop of Westminster, because, said he, “he is too much under the influence of Gardiner.”[61] Queen Katherine may have had a hand in this affair, and after the revelation of the treachery which would fain have destroyed her she very likely took the opportunity of letting the King know more concerning the machinations of Gardiner and Wriothesley than was good for their credit or likely to serve their influence.

The details of this formidable but abortive plot against Katherine Parr rest mainly on the authority of Foxe. But it must be remembered, by those inclined to doubt the “Martyrologist,” that at this time he had attained his thirtieth year, he was in touch with most of the personages named, and was consequently in a position to obtain the information which he wove into his famous narrative—not, we admit, without considerable embellishment and exaggeration, introduced to suit the taste of his readers—from living witnesses. Foxe also made liberal use of Paget’s statement during the proceedings for Gardiner’s deprivation, which took place early in Edward’s reign. All the Elizabethan and Jacobean historians of Henry VIII—Herbert, Parsons, Holinshed, Strype, Speed, Oldmixon, and others—reproduce the story with slight emendations and additions from Foxe. No direct confirmation of it is to be found indeed in the State Papers, but this is not surprising, for such matters were not usually set down in writing. Nevertheless, it is hinted at.[62] Nor do the Ambassadors seem to have known anything about it. Father Parsons, who, like Foxe, obtained much of his information at first hand, introduces the incident in his Three Conversions of England, a book written to refute some of Foxe’s errors, and adds that although Foxe lays “all the cause of the Queen’s trouble upon Bishop Gardiner and others, and though the King did kindly and lovingly pardon her, the truth is that the King’s sickness and death were the chief causes of her escape, for had the King found her guilty he would have commanded her also to be burned.”

Speed, possibly mistaking Lady Lane for Lady Jane, introduces the King’s little niece on this occasion, not only as a witness of the reconciliation of the royal couple, but in the character of a candle-bearer before the Queen. Jane Grey, being a Princess of the Blood, could never have been in attendance upon the Queen, and she was too small a child to be laden with a pair of heavy branch candlesticks. Lady Lane, on the other hand, was certainly in the Queen’s Household at this particular juncture. She was Her Majesty’s cousin-german, being the daughter of her uncle, Lord Parr of Horton, and wife of Sir Ralph Lane of Orlingby, Nottinghamshire. Still, since the fact of her being present is mentioned by so many almost contemporary writers, we may conclude that Lady Jane was a witness of the dramatic scenes that took place between King Henry and his terrified Consort, and may herself, in after life, have narrated the incident to some friend of Foxe or immediate forbear of Parson’s informant. Gardiner’s disgrace does not seem to have been quite as complete as Foxe has been pleased to represent it, and he was in close enough contact with those in power to be selected as chief celebrant at the King’s Requiem.

That the King was completely reconciled to his wife is proved by the conspicuous part he assigned her in the splendid series of festivities in honour of the French Envoy, who arrived in August, when the Court had removed to Hampton Court. Not only was her apartment refurnished with sumptuous tapestries, but her wardrobe was renewed, and the King presented her with a quantity of magnificent jewellery, which, after his death, gave rise to considerable misunderstanding and trouble.

These festivities in honour of Monsieur d’Annebault, Francis I’s special Envoy, were the last flicker of the pageantry of Henry VIII’s reign, and revived for a week something of the brilliance of the Court of England in the great days of Wolsey. For the first and only time, Prince Edward, as heir-apparent, played a conspicuous part. On Monday, 23rd August, the boy-prince rode out towards London to meet the Ambassador, attended by the Archbishop of York and the Earls of Hertford and Huntingdon, and by a retinue of “five hundred and forty persons in velvet coats, and the Prince’s liveries wore sleeves of cloth of gold, and half the coats embroidered also with gold, and there were the number of eight hundred, royally apparelled.” D’Annebault, who came to ratify the peace recently concluded between the sovereigns of France and England, was accompanied by a suite of two hundred gentlemen, who were all lodged at the King’s expense and entertained in the most hospitable manner. His Majesty was not well enough to receive the Ambassador on his arrival, but he received him in audience on the following day, after which monarch and Ambassador proceeded to the Chapel Royal, where, during Mass, they solemnly received the Host together.[63] Then followed six days of banqueting, hunting, and merry-making, masques, and mummeries, “with divers and sundry changes, inasmuch that the torch-bearers were clothed with gold cloth, and such like honourable entertainments, it were much to utter and hard to believe.” On these occasions the Marchioness of Dorset and her daughter, the Lady Jane Grey, were present, and Prince Edward danced with his little cousin, who also tripped it with young Lord Edward Seymour, the Lord Hertford’s eldest boy. When the Ambassador took his leave, Henry made him a present of silver plate to the value of £1200. After his departure the dying King seems to have led a very quiet life at Hampton Court and Whitehall. The end was visibly approaching. His feet and hands were abnormally swollen; dropsy had set in, and he was probably also suffering from an internal tumour. Even his most fervent admirers were obliged to confess that in appearance, at least, he had assumed somewhat of the aspect of a monster; but music still charmed the suffering monarch, and the last Household Books of his reign contain various items of payments to musicians and madrigal singers.

Note.—Dr. Gairdner makes the following comments on this subject in his Preface to vol. 21, part i. of the Calendar of State Papers for 1546 (published in 1908): “But one word may be permitted here about that dreadful incident, the racking in the Tower. It took place after her (Anne’s) condemnation, the object being to elicit from her information about persons at the Court who it was suspected had been her allies in promoting heresy. Besides others whose names are given, against whom she positively refused to utter a word, she was probably expected to accuse Queen Katherine Parr herself; for Parsons (Three Conversions of England, ii. 493) is no doubt perfectly correct in saying that the well-known incident related by Foxe, about this Queen, when she stood in real danger from a charge of heresy, was connected with the affair of Anne Askew. But Parsons is certainly wrong in saying that the King would have burned Katherine Parr also if he had lived. For though her heretical propensities were no secret, she survived the King, and he himself for fully six months survived Anne Askew. More probably the Queen was saved by Anne’s refusal to commit anyone except herself.”

CHAPTER VI
THE HOWARDS AND THE SEYMOURS

The collapse of the conspiracy against Katherine Parr led to an immediate counter-plot on the part of the Seymours and their allies to compromise the Duke of Norfolk and his son, Surrey, and thereby frustrate the aspirations of the Catholics, of whose party Norfolk was the acknowledged chief. A previous attempt to inflict irretrievable damage on the credit of the Howards had partially failed, though the unsavoury revelations connected with the arrest and execution of Queen Katherine Howard had covered the illustrious name with obloquy, and almost every conspicuous Howard in England had been sent to the Tower,[64] on the charge of having concealed the Queen’s previous immorality from the King’s knowledge when he proposed to marry her. At that moment Norfolk and his son only escaped by taking Henry’s side against their miserable kinswoman. But the Duke never regained his full influence over his master, and, despite his great services, both as statesman and warrior, lived on, to use the expression of one of his contemporaries, “like the bird that is wounded i’ the wing.” Yet he was a great power in the politics of those days, for though the Catholic party was of but small account at Court, a good two-thirds of the people remained firmly attached to the ancestral faith; this was the case more especially in the rural districts, where the vast majority clung to the dogmas and ceremonies of the ancient Church, and only awaited an opportunity to assert their preference. For the matter of that, it was shown very early in Queen Mary’s reign that the Protestant fervour of the official world, being a matter of policy rather than of conviction, was not to be relied on. The majority of that aristocracy which had so eagerly accepted the extreme reforms assented to by Edward VI was to be seen, a few weeks after his death, parading the streets of London, taper in hand, in the wake of the revived processions of Corpus Christi and Our Lady.[65]

Thomas Howard, third Duke of Norfolk, was one of the most conspicuous figures in Henry’s reign. He may not, perhaps, have been as astute a statesman as has been asserted, but he showed remarkable qualities as a capable peacemaker on the occasion of the Pilgrimage of Grace; while as a warrior he had no rival, and proved himself a hero on Flodden Field. If anything, he was excessive in his loyalty to the King, and he would even seem to have sunk all sense of his own dignity and importance, humbling himself utterly before the monarch whose assumption of quasi-divine attributes he had aided and abetted. Thus, when his niece Anne Boleyn was tried and executed for misdemeanours she was certainly not proved to have committed,[66] he, at her royal assassin’s command, pronounced the death sentence, and with his son, the young Earl of Surrey, who sat at his feet, holding the Earl Marshal’s baton in his hand, was actually present at her execution. When, some few years later, Norfolk’s other niece, Katherine Howard, was proved guilty of many serious offences, both before and after marriage, Norfolk sat in judgment upon her and would have witnessed her death too but for an attack of gout which kept him a prisoner. Two days after the execution he penned an abject letter to the King apologising for “the naughtiness of his said niece, the late Queen.”[67] In person, Norfolk was a dark, handsome man, of moderate stature, with piercing eyes and an exceedingly intelligent countenance. Holbein has left us several magnificent oil portraits of him, and at least one noble drawing, now in the Windsor Collection. He was fairly educated, a good Latin scholar, and a patron of art. His first wife, Princess Anne Plantagenet, the King’s aunt, died young in 1512. The day on which he espoused his second,[68] the handsome Lady Elizabeth Stafford, was an evil one for him. The alliance was one of convenience on his side and of compulsion on hers. His duchy had been greatly impoverished by the attainder of his father, the second Duke, after Bosworth, and the luckless Buckingham’s daughter was possessed of a handsome fortune in money and wide lands. She had been previously contracted to Ralph Nevill, afterwards Earl of Westmoreland, to whom she was greatly attached and with whom she kept up a correspondence till the end of her life. Although she bore her husband five children, the Duchess of Norfolk suffered some neglect at his hands, her rival being a certain Bess Holland,[69] a gentlewoman in her service. The mortification caused by this outrage drove the poor Duchess to the verge of distraction. She seems to have been a naturally conscientious, if narrow-minded, woman, of an exceedingly high-strung and excitable temperament. We should describe her nowadays as an “impossible” person, whose lack of tact and outbursts of uncontrollable rage not only alienated her husband’s affections, but deprived her of her children’s love as well as of her servants’ respect.

Of all the men of his time, Surrey, this ill-used lady’s son, was the most accomplished. He was an excellent Latin, French, and Italian scholar, and well versed in ancient and modern literature. No one could excel him in tourney or joust—not even John Dudley, afterwards Duke of Northumberland, who had exceeding skill with the sword and spear, and than whom scarce one could pull a bow with surer aim. Surrey danced more lightly than Thomas Seymour, who prided himself on the “altitude of his pirouettes,” and the King himself in his singing youth did not warble a sweeter note. No Englishman since Chaucer had so enriched our literature with verse all redolent of those sweet-scented fields and lanes, meadows and gardens amid which the poet’s muse loved best to linger. An Elizabethan critic well described him as “a poet new crept out of the school of Dante, Petrarch, and Ariosto,” and “coming nearer to Ariosto” than to either the prophet of Florence or the inspired singer of Vaucluse. Though of but medium height, Surrey was so graceful and well-proportioned as to seem taller than he really was. There is a portrait of him at Hampton Court, most probably by Guilliam Streete, which gives us a fair idea of this prince for a fairy-tale. The face is full of youthful charm: the eyes hazel, frank, and winning; the cheeks rounded and flushed with rosy health; the hair a darkish chestnut; the slight moustache of the colour of ripe corn. His costume is superb. The young Earl stands before us garbed from head to foot in red velvet, softened by bands of brocade and sarsenet, the only white spot visible being the silk shirt open at the neck, and even that enriched with a dainty arabesque wrought in gold stitchery. On his well-shaped head rests a jaunty cap of crimson velvet with a feathered plume of the same tint.

There was much that was purely personal in the violent animosity displayed by the Seymours against the Howards in general and against Surrey in particular. The Seymours, although of far more ancient and well-ascertained lineage than either the Brandons or the Boleyns, were not of the great aristocracy, but, in a sense, what the modern French would call arrivistes. Had it not been for the accident which raised their sister Jane to the towering position of Queen-Consort, the Seymours would probably have remained what they originally were, mere country squires of excellent lineage, reputed to be remotely connected with royalty. Their father,[70] Sir William St. Maur, or Seymour, of Wolf’s Hall, Wiltshire, had on one occasion entertained King Henry VIII; and their mother, Lady Seymour, by birth a Wentworth, and a lineal descendant of Edward III, was highly connected; but otherwise there was nothing in their antecedents to distinguish them from scores of other equally respectable and wealthy country gentlemen. The sudden[71] elevation of their sister Jane brought them a rapid promotion, which first dazzled them and then turned their heads. Honours and positions were heaped upon them. Edward, the eldest son, was first created Viscount Beauchamp, and, after the birth of Prince Edward, Earl of Hertford; the second, Thomas, was knighted. The youngest, Henry, seems to have preferred obscurity and security to rank and risk, and lived the life of a country gentleman, married young, and merely accepted knighthood on Edward VI’s accession.

The ranks of the old aristocracy had been thinned by the prolonged civil wars and the plague, and towards the middle of the century the Court was so full of new men that at the time of Henry’s last illness there were only two dukes in the peerage—Norfolk, then seventy-two; and Suffolk, a lad of seventeen. The new peers, whose fortunes were mainly derived from confiscated church property, were eager to obtain recognition from the few of the old aristocracy who yet remained, and more especially from the Howards, a sturdy race, full of sap and vigour, and conspicuous in Court and State. The Duke of Norfolk was too experienced a man, both socially and politically, to permit his inborn pride of birth to display itself out of season. With Surrey it was otherwise. In his case, pride of ancestry was something more than a mere matter of vulgar boast. He regarded it with a poet’s eye and imagination, and took delight in remembering that through his veins flowed the blood of emperors and kings who had founded realms and dynasties, and built up the glory of a great nation. In the beginning of the fifteenth century a marriage between Robert Howard and the Lady Margaret Mowbray had brought the illustrious house into alliance with royalty. His father’s first wife had been the reigning King’s aunt, and his mother, Elizabeth Stafford, had a right to quarter Royal Arms on her escutcheon. With such a pedigree, and in an age when rank was paramount, Surrey conceived himself sufficiently powerful to hold his own against the encroachments of a new peerage only too eager to claim a fellowship which offended his sense of propriety.

When the Seymours first came to Court, in the heyday of their youth and good looks, they sought young Surrey’s society, just as in our day new people seek that of a leader of the “smartest set.” So long as they kept their place, Surrey consorted with them willingly enough; but their rapacity and arrogance jarred on him at last, and he resented their many attempts at over-familiarity. He himself, on occasion, was apt to transgress the bounds of good behaviour, and once upon a time, being in lodgings in St. Lawrence Lane, Old Jewry, and leading what he himself is pleased to call a “racketty life,” went brawling about the streets at midnight with young William Pickering[72] and young Wyatt, the poet’s son, casting stones into peaceful citizens’ windows, and frightening them out of their wits. One night the party rowed over in a boat to Southwark, where dwelt in those days that gay and facile sisterhood whose representatives, in this year of Grace, 1909, patrol more central parts of our great city. In this fast company, our young gentlemen, evidently in their cups, behaved disgracefully. On Surrey’s part such conduct was all the more unseemly since he was already married to the plain-faced, but wealthy, Lady Frances Vere,[73] Lord Oxford’s daughter, to whom he declared himself devotedly attached. These escapades ended by attracting public attention, and their heroes were arrested for disorderly conduct. Thanks to their rank, they were brought before the Privy Council,[74] instead of being haled before an ordinary justice, though, as ill-luck would have it, Edward, Lord Hertford, was presiding at the Council board. The opportunity of paying off a few old scores was too much for him, and he swiftly resolved to give Surrey good cause to remember him in future. A very comical and characteristic scene ensued.[75] Surrey, mimicking Hertford, who was nothing if not puritanical in his mode of expressing himself, “having ever God on his lips,” assured the Council that if he had done what he had, it had been for the good of the souls of the wicked citizens of London, who were behaving more abominably than the men of papal Rome. Had he not seen them sitting round tables and playing at cards in the late hours of the night?—and was it not a godly thing to whizz a stone or so at their windows, which stone, passing silently through the air, fell with all the greater suddenness among them, thereby recalling them to a proper sense of their duties to their God, their King, and their country?[76] Mrs. Arundel, a woman of good family but greatly impoverished, who kept a sort of boarding-house for bachelors of rank in St. Lawrence Lane, Old Jewry, was the Earl’s landlady, and imparted a very different colour to the episode. “Her young gentleman,” she said, had frankly admitted to her that he considered these pranks good jokes: but she herself disapproved of them, especially the shooting at the windows of women of light character, or “bawds,” in Southwark, which the Earl, it seems, was addicted to, going by boat close to their quarters and firing off petards at the “trolls”! There was nothing for it, therefore, but to pronounce sentence. Surrey was committed to the Fleet, the most abominable of all the many vile prisons of those days, while Wyatt and Pickering, though of much inferior rank, were sent to the stately Tower, whence they were delivered in a day or two on payment of a heavy fine and promising good behaviour. How long Surrey remained in durance it is difficult to say—long enough certainly for him to compose his “Satire on the Citizens of London” and several other poems. He never forgave Seymour his share in the business, and never failed to annoy his enemy openly or covertly whenever opportunity occurred. It was quite in keeping with his character to address amatory verses with this intent to Hertford’s handsome and very proud wife, who took his lines in very bad part, as so many insults to her honour. The Countess once made a scandal by deliberately turning her back upon the poet-Earl when, in August 1542, at a ball in his own father’s house,[77] he ventured to ask her permission to lead her out to dance.

Late in the summer of 1542 a very serious quarrel broke out between Seymour and Surrey, over an incident which took place in Hampton Court Park. Seymour, it was alleged, had reported against Surrey that he had openly approved of the Pilgrimage of Grace. Surrey, coming face to face with his antagonist in a glen in the park, instantly challenged him. Coats were off in a moment, and the two were in the midst of a hearty boxing-match when the guard arrived and took both into custody for violating the royal privilege and fighting within the precincts of the King’s palace. The punishment for this offence, as readers of The Fortunes of Nigel will recollect, was loss of the right hand. All the diplomacy and influence of the Duke of Norfolk had to be exerted to avert the infliction of this terrible penalty; but, thanks to his efforts, both the hot-headed young gentlemen escaped with a sharp reprimand. Scores of similar curious instances might be quoted from the chronicles and letters of the time, to prove the depth and bitterness of the social animosity between the Howards and the Seymours. The Duke himself resented the cruel manner in which Hertford had behaved in the matter of His Grace’s niece, the unhappy Katherine Howard. There can be no doubt that at one time both Cranmer and the King wished to spare her life, and would have spared it had not Hertford, in his hot haste to ruin the Howards’ credit, prematurely dispatched letters to the King’s Ambassadors abroad containing full details of the Queen’s disgrace, with orders to hand them to the sovereigns to whose Courts they were accredited. This publicity rendered the royal clemency impossible.[78]

Early in the summer of 1546 the Duke of Norfolk made up his mind, in what he held to be the interests of himself and his family, to bring about a reconciliation, if that were possible, between his house and Seymour’s. He fully realised that, ageing as he was, he could no longer be a match for two unscrupulous and very able men, then reaching the prime of life, and already holding the King’s complete confidence. Further, he felt Surrey to be hopeless in all business calling for tact and diplomacy, and was convinced the persistent animosity between his son and Hertford would lead before long to some awful catastrophe. Surrey’s bravery as a fighting soldier was undisputed, but as a commander his lack of reticence and his rashness had led the King’s troops in France into more than one disaster; he himself had paid the penalty of his rashness before the walls of Montreuil, where he was seriously wounded and only saved from certain death by the gallantry of Sir Thomas Clere. He had then been recalled, and Hertford had been sent to take his place, a bitter humiliation to the proud Howards and one which more than anything else rankled in Surrey’s soul. Yet the old Duke recognised that Hertford’s bravery and tact as warrior and diplomatist had soon ended the war and obtained peace with honour for the English forces, thus raising his popularity to the highest pitch; for there was nothing the nation then desired so much as peace, at home and abroad. Hertford’s brother, Sir Thomas, was, if anything, still more popular, for he had so successfully scoured the seas in quest of French galleons laden with provisions that suppressed monasteries had been converted into storehouses. The magnificent ex-church of the Grey Friars had become a wine-vault, crammed to the roof with barrels of Burgundy and other wines of the best French vintages. In Austin Friars such a stock of cheeses was stored that there was no moving in that erstwhile beautiful priory church, and the huge and splendid church of the Black Friars was literally packed with salt herring and dried cod. Wherefore the people had good reason to be well pleased with brother Thomas.

The Duke, then, without consulting his son,—and here his disastrous mistake,—obtained an interview with Hertford, and, skilfully playing on his well-known vanity and social ambition, suggested at length that a betrothal should be forthwith arranged between Hertford’s eldest daughter and Surrey’s eldest son, and a similar contract entered into between Lord Thomas Howard[79] and Seymour’s youngest daughter, the Lady Jane Seymour. His Grace, apparently in a match-making mood, gave his paternal sanction to the wooing and wedding of his beautiful daughter, the widowed Duchess of Richmond, by Sir Thomas Seymour. With all these suggestions the Seymours gladly closed, making but one condition, that Surrey should accept a slightly subordinate position under Hertford’s command, virtually tantamount to a tacit apology for his repeated slights, covert and open, in the past. On Tuesday in Whitsun week 1546, then, the Duke, well pleased with his own diplomacy, presented himself at Whitehall and laid his rather complicated scheme of alliances before His Majesty. Henry was graciously pleased to approve it, and willingly agreed that his daughter-in-law of Richmond should become the bride of the handsome Thomas Seymour, with whom, according to Court gossip, she was already much in love. But in all these schemes the Duke had reckoned without his host, for when he put the matter before Surrey, that impetuous poet flew into a towering rage. He would “sooner see his children dead in their coffins than married to Seymour’s brats,” he said. Then, turning furiously on his sister, the Duchess of Richmond, who had accompanied her father, he cried,—at least, according to that dangerous Court gossip, Sir Gawen Carew,—“Go, carry out your farce of a marriage. My Lord of Hertford is in full favour, I grant; but why not do yet better for yourself and follow Madame d’Estampes’ example with King Francis. Get you into the same sort of favour with King Henry, and rule through him.” This sinister advice was evidently dictated by that vein of bitter sarcasm usual with Surrey when the uncontrollable temper which he inherited from his mother mastered his common sense. It could not have been seriously meant, for nobody knew better than Surrey that the King was already more than half dead, utterly unable to trouble himself about new mistresses, and in any case not likely to select his own daughter-in-law to replace his excellent Queen-Consort and nurse, Katherine Parr. The Duchess of Richmond, however, took the jibe seriously, replied that she “would sooner cut her throat” than do “any such vile thing,” and left her irate brother to his own reflections, which, when he cooled down, cannot have been particularly agreeable. He knew his sister well; she was an exceedingly beautiful woman, to whom Holbein, in his exquisite drawing, has given the expression of one of Ghirlandajo’s sweetest Madonnas. But at heart she was a little fiend, capable, when her passions were roused, of working dire mischief. She said little at the time, but she nursed her grievance and exaggerated its importance. She may also have felt not a little embittered against Sir Thomas Seymour, who had ungallantly refused her hand because it was not accompanied by her brother’s submission. Be this as it may, “the Duchess of Richmond from that day forth hated her brother as much as she had previously loved him,”[80] and when the hour for revenge came at last, forgetful of her obligations as sister and woman, she scandalised even that unsentimental age by appearing at her brother’s trial as one of the principal witnesses for the prosecution.

Meanwhile the Duke of Norfolk was at his wits’ end to know how to make Hertford aware of the unfortunate results of his negotiations with his son. He was possessed of a perfect mania for putting pen to paper on any and every pretext, although, as every one who has waded through his correspondence knows, there has never been a statesman, before or since, who could indite more indiscreet and exasperating epistles. If then, as is likely, he conveyed the unpleasant news by letter, he was not the man to improve matters by a tactful manner. The breach between the Howards and the Seymours was now complete. Hertford, hurt in pride and vanity, would accept no apologies from the Duke, and the feud between himself and Surrey soon grew more bitter than ever. To make matters worse, the Duchess of Richmond made a confidant of her friend, Sir Gawen Carew, who detested her brother, and was the most inveterate gossip of the Court, as is well known to those who have read the State Papers connected with the tragedy of Katherine Howard; it was, indeed, the gossip of Sir Gawen that did most to ruin that Queen. Presently young scions of the nobility, courtiers who hated the Howards for their airs and graces and forgot the old Duke’s well-known kindness to the youthful, buzzed about the King, and did their best to set him against the luckless Earl. Hertford and his brother afforded them ample assistance, supplying all necessary instructions and information; and, for all we know to the contrary, the Queen may have lent a helping hand. In fact, the whole Protestant party was now roused against the Howards, the representatives of the Catholics, and determined to bring about their ruin or perish in the attempt. It had hoped the folly of Katherine Howard would have sufficed for this purpose, but the great house of Norfolk was firm enough to resist even that storm. Another pretext had to be found, and the impolitic behaviour of the poet-Earl supplied it.

Poor Surrey was no match for the low and cunning intrigues amongst which “Fate and metaphysical aid” had thrown him. Somewhere in June 1546 he was summoned before the Privy Council, severely reprimanded for what he could not possibly help, and imprisoned in Windsor Castle, where he consoled himself by writing one of his most exquisite poems. This was his “Swan Song”! By August, however, he was certainly out of durance, and apparently once more in favour with the King, for he figured as Earl Marshal at the entertainments given in honour of the French Envoy, Claude d’Annebault, taking precedence of everyone excepting members of the royal family.

Early in September he left London, and returned to his wife and children at Kenninghall, accompanied by Churchyard the poet, who was his secretary, and an extremely numerous and miscellaneous retinue, which included several Italian painters, musicians, and jesters. One of the artists, Toto, was soon engaged upon a portrait of him, which was later used to his great disadvantage; in the left-hand corner of it appeared his escutcheon, bearing among its numerous quarterings the arms of England, but so arranged that a slide could be drawn, when necessary, over the coat-of-arms. The Duke of Norfolk and my Lady of Richmond came to Kenninghall Palace about this time; but the mansion, of which not a vestige now remains, was so enormous that every member of the ducal family had a separate dwelling. The Duchess of Richmond had a whole wing to herself, which she shared with her friend Mrs. Holland. The society of those days was not so dead to all sense of propriety as not to be scandalised by this singular intimacy between the Duke’s daughter and his mistress. Most people agreed with the Duchess of Norfolk “that her dater’s abiding ever with that drab Holland” was a “scandayul and most unnatterall.” Owing to the huge size of the mansion, not much inferior to that of Hampton Court, the Duchess and Mrs. Holland may never once have come into contact with Surrey and his family; otherwise, it is difficult to account for the fact that we have no record of any fiery scene between brother and sister. The Duke seems to have spent his time very quietly, reading the books he most affected, such as Plutarch’s Lives of Illustrious Men, Josephus’s History, and The Confessions of St. Augustin.[81]

Whilst the Howard family was thus peacefully rusticating in Norfolk, gossip and slander were making headway in the metropolis and preparing poor Surrey’s ruin. Sir George Blagg, the “my Blagg” of one of his finest poems, had picked a quarrel with him in the summer, and was busy as a bee spreading evil reports against him. Sir Gawen Carew had confided to every one what the Duchess of Richmond had related to him anent her brother’s advice to hasten and become the King’s mistress. His enemies had even pressed the Court astrologer into their service, and this functionary had actually warned the King that unless he was careful, his successor’s monogram would, like his own, be “H.R.” The Duke himself was not spared: he had been seen to enter the French Ambassador’s house late at night and to leave it again in the small hours of the morning. A letter of his to Gardiner, then on a mission to Brussels, was intercepted—and vague though its terms were, it was held to be proof positive of Norfolk’s adherence to Gardiner’s scheme, as planned with Cardinal Granville, to restore the papal supremacy in England. At last, truth and lies together rolled themselves up into an ominous storm-cloud, which burst when Surrey was called to appear before the Council in London on a charge of high treason.

Some writers have attempted to extenuate Henry VIII’s share in the dénouement of this tragedy. They plead that he was too ill at this time to know exactly what he was doing, and that, in consequence of the swollen state of his hands, he was compelled to use a stamp to sign his letters. With regard to this, we know that as far back as 1st August 1546 he had commissioned Sir Anthony Denny, Sir John Gates, and William Clere to sign documents for him with a dry stamp, the signature thus made being filled in with ink. And even this is not the first time Henry had recourse to a mechanical contrivance for signing letters and State Papers. Lord Hardwick has a letter of the King’s signed with a stamp and dated as early as the seventh year of his reign. Moreover, the official documents, which were drawn up by Wriothesley, are carefully annotated and corrected in pencil by Henry himself, with very full marginal notes and numerous interlineations. The handwriting is very shaky, but it is the King’s none the less, and proves that if the monarch’s body was infirm, his brain was as clear and his feelings as vindictive as ever. The death-warrant of the Earl of Surrey is also scribbled over on the margin with certain pencil notes in the King’s own writing, proving that Henry must have retained the use of his hands to the end.

Sufficient evidence having been gathered, and Surrey being summoned to London, he left Kenninghall[82] in the last days of September, and appeared before the Privy Council in Wriothesley’s house in Holborn, not far from Chancery Lane, on 2nd October. His first accuser was Sir Richard Southwell, at one time in his mother’s household at Kenninghall, who hated him heartily. He averred that Surrey had placed the Royal Arms of England in the first quartering of his escutcheon, thereby claiming the crown. When confronted with Southwell, Surrey, with his foolish impetuosity, and to the consternation of the Council, proposed a sort of trial by battle after the mediæval fashion. Southwell and he were there and then to divest themselves of their upper garments, descend on to the floor of the court, and indulge the Lord Chancellor and the Council with the spectacle of a boxing-match, the winner of which was to be declared innocent. The Council, needless to say, did not see fit to accept the fiery Earl’s suggestion, and both Surrey and Southwell were temporarily detained—the Earl being not yet formally charged.

The examination of the other witnesses took place privately a few days later, before the Council but not in the presence of the prisoner. Sir Edmund Knyvyt, a son of the Lady Muriel Howard, the sister of the Duke of Norfolk, and therefore a cousin of Surrey, out of sheer spite, and also perhaps to give himself importance, accused the Earl of harbouring Italian spies in his house at Kenninghall, of affecting foreign airs, of wearing foreign costumes, and, gravest of all, of entertaining persons suspected of correspondence with Cardinal Pole and other “traitors” abroad. Then came Sir Gawen Carew with an exaggerated version of the Duchess of Richmond’s story that her brother advised her to become the King’s mistress, and had spoken lightly of the King’s illness, and speculated as to what might occur in the event of his death; and before the week was out a score or so of other venal witnesses had concocted sufficient evidence to send fifty men to the block.

The Duke, meanwhile, tarried at Kenninghall, wondering what had happened to his son, and never imagining how bitter and relentless was the suddenly, and indeed inexplicably, developed hatred of the King, which we, however, know was stimulated by the Seymours and Cranmer for their own ends. Instead of coming up to London to help the Earl out of his difficulties, he set himself, as usual, to write confidential letters to those members of the Council upon whom he thought he could rely. These effusions were promptly shown to Hertford, with the result that His Grace himself was ordered to London with the utmost dispatch. On 12th December the Duke of Norfolk appeared before Lord Chancellor Wriothesley at his house in Holborn, near the present Southampton Buildings, and, to his unutterable amazement, found himself formally charged with high treason. He was immediately committed to the Tower, but on account of his rank and age, and to spare him the humiliation of being paraded as a prisoner through the city streets, he was conveyed down the hill, put on board a barge in the Fleet, and so to the Thames, through the arches of London Bridge, and onward to his ominous destination in the ancient fortress. Later in the same day Surrey too was conducted to the Tower, but he had to go on foot and through a dense multitude. To the consternation of his enemies, he was cheered all along the road, and grave fears were entertained of a rescue.[83] Three commissioners were now dispatched to Kenninghall to bring the Duchess of Richmond and her friend Mrs. Holland up to town. Another embassy rode to Redbourne, to fetch the Duchess of Norfolk, who was only too delighted to come to London and blurt out all she could to the detriment of her hated spouse. By this time London could talk of nothing but the Surrey trial. In the palaces of the rich, in the hovels of the poor, in all the little taverns and drinking-houses down by the Thames, in the parlours of the great inns in Southwark and the Cheape, the conversation turned upon no other subject, and even the all-absorbing topic of the King’s illness was forgotten for the time being. A touch of horror was added to the general excitement when it became known that Norfolk’s wife and his daughter and mistress were to be the chief witnesses against him and his son. The Duchess did not spare her husband. Snatching at the welcome chance of avenging her wrongs, the half-witted lady grew garrulous, and confirmed everything suggested by those who desired to damn her lord’s cause. She had but little to say, however, concerning her son, for the simple reason that she had not seen him for many months and knew nothing about his affairs. He was very “unnatturell” towards her, she declared, and so was her daughter, but nevertheless she “loved her children dearly.” Her husband, she said, had leanings towards Popery, and caused his children to be brought up to deny the King’s supremacy.

Mrs. Holland behaved with great discretion, considering her position and antecedents. It was true, she said, that the Duke of Norfolk had on one occasion told her that “if he had been young enough he would like to go to Rome to venerate the Veronica, an image of our Lord miraculously impressed upon a handkerchief which He had given to certain women on His way to Calvary.” The Duke had bidden her lay aside some needlework upon which she was engaged, to oblige the Earl of Surrey, and in a corner of which were his arms, one quartering of which was to be left blank, “probably for the introduction of the Royal Arms and monogram.” She had obeyed the Duke’s behest and never set needle into the work again. Before concluding her evidence, she, perhaps not unnaturally, seized the opportunity to try and clear her own reputation, and informed the Court that “the Earl detested her because she was so friendly with his sister.”

The appearance of Mary, Duchess of Richmond, must have created a sensation. Her angelic beauty contrasted strangely with her spiteful and bitter nature. Like her mother, when she was once started there was no stopping her, and in her excitement she materially damaged her brother’s cause, exaggerating every point against him suggested by the prosecution. With telling and dramatic effect she related the scene when he advised her to become the King’s mistress. Her brother, she said, had been reading the book about Lancelot of the Lake, and had introduced that hero’s arms, together with those of Anjou, into his own. He had recently had his portrait taken by an Italian artist, as already related, and had caused the arms of England to be painted into the left corner, with the monogram “H.R.” surmounted by a crown, which she thought was a closed crown, like the King’s. He had also appropriated the Confessor’s arms, which belonged by right to the King, and the King only; he had spoken irreverently of His Majesty, and had speculated upon what might happen after his death; and, she added, “my lord of Hertford is particularly hateful to him because he superseded him at Boulogne, and indeed he detested the new nobility in general.” The Council, to its credit, discarded the Duchess’s evidence concerning Surrey’s alleged infamous advice to her. They held it too abominable to be even probable, and it was not included in the indictment; but the rest of her evidence was considered very compromising.

On 13th January 1548 Surrey was brought on foot from the Tower to the Guildhall, which was packed to suffocation, and the charges of treacherously conspiring, together with his father, either to usurp the throne or seize the protectorate, were read over to him. He made an eloquent defence, and, while denying every other item of the charge, said he had a right, in accordance with a grant made by Richard III to his grandfather, the first Duke of Norfolk, to use the arms of the Confessor; which was perfectly true—“Herald-at-Arms knew this, and was content he used them.” As to his ever “having dreamed of usurping the throne,” that was “mere chatter.” He owned he bore Hertford no goodwill, but the fault rested with that gentleman, and was “not of my making.” He was innocent on all points, he said, and called God to witness his loyalty to his King and country. In spite of all, sentence was passed upon him, and he was condemned to die on the following morning. The breathless silence with which the verdict had been awaited gave way to tumultuous protests from all sides of the Court, and it was only with great difficulty, even danger, that the hall was cleared. As the condemned Earl passed from the Guildhall to the Tower every cap was lifted, and the utmost sorrow and sympathy were displayed when the result of the trial was revealed by the sight of the executioner walking in the procession, the sharp edge of his axe turned towards the prisoner’s person.

The next morning, 14th January, rose bright and frosty. A huge multitude had assembled on Tower Hill to witness the closing scene. Surrey, dressed in black velvet, looked very handsome, as with brave and elastic step he mounted the scaffold. He delivered the usual speech—a part of the grim pageant which no prisoner, male or female, ever missed—in a clear voice. He eloquently declared his innocence, forgave his enemies, and avowed his loyalty to his sovereign. He begged the prayers of all the company, and himself prayed aloud while the final preparations were being made. These done, in the midst of an awed silence, Surrey knelt to receive the fatal stroke, and with the sacred name of “Jesus” on his lips, his brave soul passed into eternity. Thus was the Court of England robbed of a gallant and magnificent gentleman, and the country of a man of genius, who, had he lived into the calmer and fostering atmosphere of Elizabeth’s reign, might have left a name in literature equal, if not superior, to that of Spenser.

The Duke of Norfolk escaped trial, but not attainder. His dignities and estates were confiscated and distributed among his enemies. On the 27th of January his death-warrant was brought to the King; but Henry was too far gone, by this time, to be able to affix his autograph, and Sir Richard Gates stamped the document with the Royal Seal only. The deed, however, never reached its destination. Possibly it was detained by the Seymours, who may have thought that age and infirmity would soon spare them the blood-shedding of an old man. If so, they were mistaken, for Norfolk survived them both. A few hours later the King’s death saved the aged Duke’s. He remained, however, a close prisoner throughout the reign of Edward VI, but at the accession of Queen Mary he was liberated and all his dignities restored.

The most pitiable part of this strange episode in the history of an epoch which was one long series of domestic and political tragedies is that the Duke, in the hope of saving his life, was induced to address a shameful confession to the King. This confession His Majesty never read. It is still in existence, and must be described, even by the most merciful critics, as a very foolish and impolitic effusion. Yet that the Duke of Norfolk and his son were both conspiring—not, indeed, to usurp the throne, but to obtain the protectorate—is beyond dispute. The Seymours, on their side, though with much greater skill and diplomacy, were doing precisely the same thing.

Among our national archives and those of Norfolk House are full inventories of the estates, goods, and chattels of the Duke of Norfolk and his son, and also of the Duchesses of Norfolk and Richmond and of Mrs. Holland. Norfolk’s list is valuable as affording a fair idea of the contents of a great English nobleman’s house and wardrobe in the first half of the sixteenth century. In his desire to save them, the Duke had presented his vast landed estates to the Prince of Wales, who, needless to say, never got an acre of them; they were made over to the Duke of Somerset, a title assumed by Hertford on becoming Lord Protector, to Paget, and to other members of the new Government. His wearing apparel, which consisted of many garments, mostly of black or russet velvet or satin richly furred, and “much worn,” or even “very much worn,” was also seized. The Countess of Surrey was allowed one of her father-in-law’s “coats” of black satin much worn, and furred with coney and lamb, which was delivered to her “to put about her in her chariot.” This is probably the first mention of a carriage rug in the domestic history of this realm. All the rest of the Duke’s effects, including “three broad yards of marble cloth and two pairs of old black slippers,” were given to the Duke of Somerset for his use. The Protector also obtained possession of the magnificent jewelled collars belonging to the various Orders of which the Duke was a member. Paget had a “George, set with diamonds and one ruby,” and Lord St. John had poor Surrey’s “Order of St. Michael with its chain, studded with pearls and diamonds.” The Duke left many pictures, all of a sacred character, and an enormous quantity of gold and silver plate, which was divided into equal parcels, and delivered to Somerset, Princess Mary, the Duchess of Norfolk, the Duchess of Richmond, and Surrey’s widow. Somerset seized a collection of thirty-two splendid rings, but Mrs. Holland claimed the finest table diamond as her private property. His Grace had also some fifty sets of rosary beads, some of coral with paternosters in gold, others of pearl, agate, gold studded with little jewels, black enamel, and even of glass. A great quantity of these were presented to Princess Mary, to whom also went much of the altar furniture of the Duke’s private chapel.

Surrey’s wardrobe was as magnificent as that of any prince. There was “a Parliament robe, of rich purple velvet lined with ermine, and with a garter set with jewels upon the shoulder,” and a gown “of black velvet curiously figured in gold pasmentary”; “a coat and cassock of crimson velvet, wrought with satin in the same colour, with a cloak, hat and hose to match,” was most probably the identical costume in which he was represented by Streete in the picture still at Hampton Court. We read of dozens of gorgeous suits, one more splendid than the other. Somerset chose the finest for himself, and handed over the rest to his brother Henry, who had come up to town to be knighted, and who doubtless ultimately paraded his Wiltshire market town, decked in poor Surrey’s finery, looking very much like the fabled jay in peacock’s feathers. The furniture of Surrey’s country house, St. Leonard’s, near Norwich, which he had built after designs of John of Padua, was given to his widow, but some of the altar furniture went to Princess Mary at Newhall.

Seals had been placed on the goods and chattels of the Duchesses of Norfolk and Richmond and of Mrs. Holland, but they were lifted immediately, and the ladies received all their several properties intact.

The name of Sir Thomas Seymour does not figure in any connection, even remote, with this tragedy, and he did not receive a single coat or “night-gown,”[84] whether of velvet, satin, or common cloth, belonging to either the Duke or to his son. It may be that by the time the distribution of the confiscated property took place the feud between the ambitious brothers had already begun. It was destined amply to avenge Surrey’s untimely fate.

Readers may fairly ask what the story of the poet-Earl’s end has to do with Lady Jane Grey? It may be replied that his death and his father’s imprisonment affected her very nearly. They cleared the way for the temporary triumph of the Protestant party, and enabled Seymour to proclaim himself Protector unopposed. The close intimacy between the families of Howard and Dorset is easily traced through at least three generations in the household books of Thomas, Earl of Surrey, afterwards Duke of Norfolk.

When the Earl entertained company, the ladies and gentlemen, it seems, all dined together in the “great chamber,” and there were often as many as twenty to fifty guests staying in the house. Their names include nearly all the leading aristocracy of the time, among them being Lady Jane Grey’s father and mother, the Lord Marquis of Dorset and the Lady Frances; Brandon, Duke of Suffolk; the Lady Wyndham, the Lady Parker, the Lady Essex; Mrs. Brian, afterwards governess to the Princesses Mary and Elizabeth; the Lady Vere, the “old” Lady of Oxford,[85] etc. The ladies attending on the visitors[86] dined at my Lady’s mess, the gentlemen in the hall. When Mr. Thomas Reddynge, a gentleman of the Duke’s household, brought his bride to Tenderinge Hall for her honeymoon, “all the company dined and supped in the bride’s bedroom.” The little Lord Thomas Howard, afterwards Earl of Surrey, dined in the nursery.

Hospitality was exchanged between the Howards and the Dorsets almost to the end of the Duke’s life. The Marquis and Marchioness of Dorset (the Lady Frances Brandon), Lady Jane Grey and her sisters, were certainly at Hunsdon[87] on more than one occasion, and when the two families were in town there was, doubtless, constant visiting between them. It must be remembered that the Duke of Norfolk, being uncle-by-marriage to the King, was also uncle to the Lady Frances’s mother, Mary Tudor, the royal Queen-Duchess of Suffolk. Little Lady Jane must often have sat perched on Surrey’s knee and listened with delight as he whispered in her ear those tales of fairy enchantment he himself loved so well. Owing to her tender age, Jane may never have been told the details of the closing scenes of her gallant kinsman’s life, but she must surely have noticed that on a certain day in January 1547–8 the curtains of her father’s house were drawn, as for a family in mourning; that her parents moved about with pale and saddened faces; and that the servants stirred noiselessly and spoke under their breath. The shadow lay everywhere, and the various chronicles of the period afford abundant proof that there was a genuine sorrow felt in the city on the day of Surrey’s death.

And there is yet another link between Lady Jane Grey and the unhappy Surrey. The name of her kinswoman, Elizabeth Fitzgerald, the “fair Geraldine,” must ever be associated with that of the poet-Earl, for she is as indissolubly connected with him as is Laura with Petrarch, or Leonora with Tasso. A daughter of Oge, Earl of Kildare,[88] by his wife, the Lady Elizabeth Grey, daughter of the first Marquis of Dorset, the fair Fitzgerald was a not distant cousin to Lady Jane Grey, and there were but a few years between them. She was born in Ireland, probably at Maynooth Castle, somewhere in 1528, and was brought to England whilst yet an infant. In 1533 her father died in the Tower, broken-hearted at the news that his son, whom the Irish cherished as a patriot and the English hated as a rebel, had been captured and brought to London. A few days after his father’s decease, the young man was hanged at Tyburn with some seventeen other Irishmen. Henry VIII appears to have pitied the widowed Lady Kildare, who was reduced to the verge of starvation after her husband’s death. A small pension was granted her, and her children were dispersed among the leading families of the aristocracy, to receive an education worthy of their rank. Elizabeth, “the fair Geraldine,” an extremely beautiful child, was placed under the guidance of the Princess Mary.[89] It was probably in the year 1542, whilst attending Her Highness on a visit at Hunsdon, that she first fell under the notice of Surrey, who, though already married, became desperately enamoured of her. The young lady cannot have been more than fourteen or fifteen at this time, but in those days this was quite a marriageable age. We have Surrey’s own word for it that it was at Hunsdon he first beheld the “fair Geraldine”—

“Hunsdon did first present her to mine eyen:
Bright is her hue, and Geraldine she hight.
Hampton me taught to wish her first for mine;
And Windsor, alas! doth chase her from my sight.
Her beauty of kind; her virtues from above.
Happy is he that can obtain her love!”

They appear to have met again at Hampton Court, and we seem to have evidence that the “fair Geraldine” yielded to some extent to her suitor’s prayers. They danced together, no doubt, in the Great Hall, which still delights us with its lofty beauty and rich arras. They sat side by side in the oriel windows, or romped among the flower-beds of the palace garden. But the lovely Irish girl, true to her race, was chaste as snow, and when Surrey’s ardour grew too hot for modest endurance, he was firmly repulsed. One thing is quite certain, that “Geraldine” was very beautiful, with Irish sea-green eyes[90] and glorious fair hair. She seems otherwise to have been a very matter-of-fact young lady, who presently bestowed her hand on the rich old Sir Anthony Browne.[91] After his death, in 1548, she re-entered the household of her royal mistress, and as the Lady Frances and her daughter paid several visits to their cousin, Princess Mary, in 1551, Jane Grey must often have seen the bella ma fredda innammorata of poet Surrey. After Queen Mary’s death the “fair Geraldine” consoled herself with a second husband, in the person of Clinton, Earl of Lincoln. An account of her funeral still exists, according to which sixty-one old women walked in the procession, each wearing a new suit of clothes and carrying a loaf of bread, their number recording the fact that the lady they mourned had reached sixty-one years at the time of her decease.

The Duchess of Richmond seems ultimately to have repented to some extent of her wickedness. At any rate, her father left her £500 in his will—a considerable sum of money in those days—in acknowledgment of the expense and trouble she had borne to obtain his liberation, and of her care of her brother’s children. She died of the plague in 1556.

It is curious that Surrey’s children should have been placed under his sister’s charge, since their mother, an eminently respectable woman, was living, and they were with her at the time of their father’s death. She was, however, a Catholic, whereas the Duchess had for some years past rather ostentatiously proclaimed herself a Protestant. Somerset’s religious opinions may have had something to do with this transaction, concerning which there is a strange legend. Three days after the Earl of Surrey’s execution, Foxe, the martyrologist, was sitting in St. Paul’s Cathedral, pale, haggard, and almost dying of misery and starvation. Presently a gentleman approached him and placed a considerable sum of money in his hand, bidding him be of good cheer, for that “luck was coming to him at last.” A few days later Somerset appointed him tutor to the children of the late Earl of Surrey, then under the charge of their aunt, the Lady of Richmond. Notwithstanding his ardent Protestantism, Foxe was never able to completely detach the future Duke of Norfolk from the older faith; but he gave his pupil a sound and virtuous education, and won his enduring affection. This Duke shared his father’s fate; he was beheaded, in the reign of Elizabeth, for espousing the cause of Mary Stuart. From him the present Duke of Norfolk is descended in a direct line.

The Countess of Surrey resided for many years at Kenninghall, but, as usual in those days, she presently took a second husband, in the person of Mr. Thomas Steyning, of Woodford, Suffolk, most likely her steward or secretary. She lived to an advanced age, and is buried in Framlingham Parish Church, under the elaborate monument she erected to the memory of her husband, whose remains, however, are by some believed to be still lying in the interesting church of All Hallows’, Barking, near the Tower, where they were certainly interred immediately after his decapitation.

CHAPTER VII
HENRY VIII

On the night of Wednesday, 27th January 1547, Henry Tudor lay dying on that huge fourpost bedstead which Andrea Conti, an Italian traveller who visited Whitehall a few years after the King’s death, described as “looking like a High Altar,” so costly were its hangings of crimson velvet and cloth of gold, so dazzling its rich embroideries.[92] The vast apartment was hung with rare Flemish tapestry glistening with gold thread; the furniture, of carved oak and inlaid ebony, was upholstered in glorious Florentine brocade. Curtains of “red velvet on velvet” draped the numerous windows overlooking the Thames, and the Eastern carpets that covered the floor muffled the sound of footsteps cautiously moving about the mighty couch.

The once puissant and magnificent Henry VIII, King of England, France, and Ireland, and Defender of the Faith, was now a mass of deformed flesh, eaten up and disfigured by a complication of awful disorders—gout, cancer of the stomach, rheumatism, ulcers, and dropsy. So swollen were the miserable man’s hands, arms, and legs that he could only move with great pain, and then only with the aid of a mechanical contrivance. But his immense head tossed restlessly from side to side and he groaned piteously, often praying those about him to cool his parched lips with a drop of water. Though little over fifty-six years of age, the dying monarch’s hair had turned quite white, and his beard, formerly so well trimmed, had grown scant and straggling. His steel-grey eyes looked as small in proportion to the broad, bloated face as those set in the elephant’s enormous mask, but they still retained their ophidian glitter.[93]

The dying King had been unusually irritable throughout the weary day. At times indeed he was delirious, but on the whole his mind remained fairly clear. At about six o’clock in the afternoon he awakened out of a deep sleep or lethargy and asked for a cup of white wine, which was given him. Presently he wandered again,—the result, perhaps, of the draught of wine,—and shouted, “Monks, monks!” imagining, so it would seem, that he saw cowled forms hovering about his bed. Three times, too, and very distinctly, he cried out the name “Nan Boleyn.” After that he kept his eyes fixed on a certain spot near his bedside, where, it may be, his fancy showed him the menacing wraith of his murdered wife. This outburst of feverish excitement was followed by a lull, and presently the King grew calmer and fell into a profound slumber.

The principal persons about the death-bed were the Earl of Hertford and his brother, Sir Thomas Seymour; Henry’s Chief Secretary, Sir William Paget; and his Master of the Horse, Sir Anthony Browne, the only non-schismatic present. The physicians in attendance upon the King were Dr. Wendy and Dr. Owen, who had brought the Prince of Wales[94] into the world, and who subsequently assisted at the death-beds of Edward VI[95] and Mary. With them was Dr. John Gale,[96] the King’s surgeon-in-ordinary, who had waited upon Henry and his army when in France. Notwithstanding the number of priests attached to the Chapel Royal, there were no clergymen in the room. The Catholic party afterwards declared they had been purposely kept out of the way lest the King, whose hatred of the Papacy was purely political, might recant and make a death-bed submission to Rome. The elimination of the clerical element from the death-chamber is significant, and we have no certainty as to whether the King, who clung so tenaciously to the theory of the Church as to her Last Sacraments, ever personally received them.

Another very remarkable fact is that neither in the State Papers nor in any other contemporary accounts of the death of Henry VIII is there any mention of the Queen’s presence at this time. Her Majesty had certainly been her husband’s assiduous nurse until early in January, but after that we hear no more of her, and except for one or two hints to the contrary in documents connected with the household effects of the King, we might almost conjecture she had left the palace before the King passed away. The Spanish Chronicle, introduced to English readers by Martin Hume, which contains a great deal of what would now be called back-stair gossip, informs us, however, that Katherine Parr was summoned to the King’s bedside the day before he died, and that “he thanked her for her great kindness to him,” adding that he had “well provided for her.” The good Queen, falling on her knees, burst into such loud sobbing that she had to be removed and conveyed back to her apartments. From the same source we learn that Princess Mary saw her father three or four days before the end, and received his blessing. Of these statements there is no confirmation in the English State Papers; they are confirmed, however, by documents in the Simancas archives and in a pamphlet published at Valladolid some three years after Queen Mary’s death entitled La Muerte de la Serenissima Reyna Maria d’Inglaterra (Valladolid, 1562).[97]

The last we hear of Katherine Parr as Queen-Consort is in a letter addressed to her from Hertford on 10th January by her stepson, Prince Edward, in which he thanks her for a New Year’s gift.[98]

If we trust the Acts and Monuments, there is direct evidence that Henry VIII deliberately omitted Gardiner’s name from his testament. In the afternoon of the day before his death, Sir Anthony Browne asked him directly if “My Lord of Winchester was left out of His Majesty’s will by negligence or otherwise?” He was kneeling at the moment by the King’s bed and endeavouring to recall to him the Bishop’s long services. The broad face of the dying King turned towards him, and he said angrily, “Hold your peace. I remember him well enough, and of good purpose have I left him out; for surely if he were in my testament and one of you, he would cumber you all and you should never rule him, he is of so troublesome a nature.” If this be a truthful account of the scene, there can be no doubt that Henry realised the omission of Winchester’s name from the will, which would imply a truckling to the Seymour faction; for there was now no one left to oppose their influence or expose their intrigues.

Between seven and eight in the evening of 27th January, Sir Anthony Denny, who had been watching his master very closely, thought he perceived signs that the end was approaching. Stooping over him, he whispered into the dying ear a message especially dreadful to one who, like Henry, held the mere mention of death in horror, warning him that his hour was very near, and that “it was meet for him to review his past life and seek God’s mercy through Jesus Christ.” The King, although in great agony, evidently understood what Denny had said, and is reported to have answered that he would suffer no ecclesiastic near him but Cranmer, who was immediately sent for. The Archbishop was at Croydon, but, being an excellent horseman, he galloped up to London, and reached Whitehall about one o’clock in the morning of Thursday, 28th January.[99] He found the King almost speechless but in full possession of his faculties, and exhorted him, in a few words, to repent him of his sins and “to place his trust in Christ only.” Henry pressed the Churchman’s hand, and muttering the significant words, “All is lost!” immediately expired.

So passed into eternity Lady Jane Grey’s great-uncle and the most extraordinary of all our kings. Even at this date it is impossible to define his true character, for whereas, on the one hand, his cousin Pole, who knew him well, likened him unto Nero and Tiberius, that painstaking historian Froude has endeavoured to prove him a well-intentioned man, whose political and whose domestic troubles especially were not of his own making, but the result of circumstance and of Court intrigues beyond his control. Between these two appreciations the truth doubtless lies. Henry VIII was beyond question a wonderful being—in whom were reflected, nay, absorbed, all the good and evil qualities of the subjects whose very Church he contrived to dominate. With all his treachery, his lust, and his cruelty, he may well have been a necessary evil, a tool in the guiding Hand that has shaped the destinies of the British Empire. He tore down the last vestiges of the Middle Ages; and if the light so suddenly admitted was too dazzling for the eyes that first beheld it, in due time it mellowed into the slowly developed liberty and progress that have placed our country at the forefront of civilisation. Our eighth Henry was the tyrant who inadvertently forced open the gate whereby Freedom was to enter.

Much as we loathe his sensuality and his cruelty, his personal extravagance that emptied the overflowing treasury left by his father and led him to debase the coin of the realm in order to replenish it, much as we may deplore his iconoclasm that destroyed a thousand abbeys, priories, and noble churches and dispersed the art treasures of ages, as Englishmen we still entertain a surreptitious liking for Bluff King Hal. His magnificent appearance and the Oriental side of his nature, his six wives, his fantastic and gorgeous pageants, his outbursts of bad language, his masterfulness, his love of art and music, all appeal to the imagination and help us to convert a monarch, a very weak and poor specimen of humanity, who really had much of the vile criminal about him, into a hero of romance, and cast over his strange career something of the legendary glamour that so fascinates all students of the reign of the illustrious daughter who inherited so many of his good and evil qualities and carried on much of his chosen policy. To King Henry we owe the formation of our Army and the creation of our Navy. He abused his Parliament, but he was its first and greatest organiser. He shaped it to his own will; and it eventually shaped itself to the will of the nation.

Earlier in the evening of that momentous 27th of January Hertford and Paget had spent slow hours pacing up and down the long corridor outside the King’s chamber, and consulting as to what it would be best to do as soon as the monarch was dead. Parliament, then in session, had been busy with the alleged treasonable transactions of the Duke of Norfolk, now lying in the Tower under sentence of death. His Grace, therefore, was one of the only three members of the Privy Council absent from the death-chamber: the other two were Dr. Thirlby, Bishop of Westminster, then resident Ambassador at the Court of Charles V; and Dr. Nicholas Wotton, Dean of Canterbury, recently dispatched on a diplomatic mission to France. Gardiner, whose name had been erased from the Council list, had lately returned from Brussels, and must have been communicated with at once, for to him were eventually entrusted all the arrangements for the late King’s obsequies. An improvised Council was held immediately after Henry’s death, and decided that the event should be kept a profound secret until the Prince of Wales was brought to London. This was cleverly managed by putting all the immediate attendants in the King’s private apartments under oath; and the multitudinous household in the outer rooms performed its usual vocations as though Henry, who had long been absent from his general courtiers’ sight, were still alive. The sentinels were changed, and everything at Whitehall went on with clockwork regularity, as if nothing unusual had happened. At about four o’clock in the morning of 28th January Hertford and his brother, Thomas Seymour, stole out of the palace, took horse, and galloped towards Hertford, where the young heir was then residing. By an oversight—or was it done purposely?—Hertford put in his pocket the key of the coffer in which the King’s will was kept, and Paget had to ride out into the dark after him to obtain possession of it. At about dawn the Seymours were joined by Sir Anthony Browne, an accession which greatly elated them, for he was one of the most important leaders of the Catholic party. They reached Hertford[100] a little after daybreak, and the boy Edward was instantly roused from his slumbers. They did not at once inform him of his father’s decease, but rode with him to Enfield Chase, where his sister, the Princess Elizabeth, was residing with her governess, Mrs. Ashley. Here they broke the news to both of the dead King’s children, who burst into tears, the Princess Elizabeth holding her young brother’s hand the while. The company stayed all Sunday at Enfield, their suite being in the meantime reinforced by a numerous bodyguard, attended by which they started on the following morning for London, the boy-King riding on a milk-white palfrey between Lord Hertford and Sir Anthony Browne. As the procession passed through the villages on its way to London, the inhabitants were informed of King Henry’s death. We have proof, however, that it was not known in the metropolis on the Sunday. On that day the Grey Friar’s Church, which had been closed for some years and converted into a wine-vault, was restored to public worship by order of the late King, and his “munificence and generosity” were fulsomely eulogised by the preacher, who, however, never alluded to the sovereign’s demise. Towards evening, the fact that the King was dead began to circulate among the upper classes, and next morning it was pretty generally known all over London.

At three o’clock on the Monday afternoon King Edward VI entered the capital through Aldgate, where he was met by the Lord Mayor and a great assembly of the nobility and gentry. Cranmer greeted him at the Bridge and read him an address, after which he was conducted in state to the Tower, being only fairly well received by the populace. Meanwhile, his father’s body, still at Whitehall, after being “spunged,” cleaned, disembowelled, and embalmed with spices, was exhibited, covered with a silken garment, to the great nobility. This done, it was sealed up in a leaden coffin and brought down into the Privy Chamber, where it lay, “with all manner of lights thereto requisite, having divine service about him with Masses, obsequies, and prayers,” until 3rd February, when it was conveyed into the Chapel Royal, where Mass was said between nine and ten in the morning.

The Chapelle Ardente was hung with black cloth and with banners of St. George and England. Eighty huge silver candlesticks with tall wax tapers in them were ranged on either side of the catafalque. On the Tuesday, and for five following mornings, Norreys stationed himself at the entrance to the chancel and cried out at intervals to the congregation, “Of your charity pray for the soul of the most high and mighty Prince Henry VIII, our late Sovereign Lord and King.” Watch was kept day and night by the chaplains and gentlemen of the Privy Chamber. Then began the saying of Masses for the benefit of the King’s soul, and these were “as numerous as they were on the occasion of the funeral of his father, Henry VII.” They were continued until the 13th February. Tens of thousands of Masses were said throughout the country, both in the capital and the provinces, in the cathedrals as well as in the parish churches.[101] The ritual was everywhere absolutely Latin. In London Gardiner was the celebrant at High Mass each day, assisted by the Bishops of Durham, London, Ely, St. David’s, Gloucester, Bangor, and Bath. Archbishop Cranmer was present but did not officiate. Low Masses were said in the chapel at Whitehall, at an altar erected at the foot of the catafalque, from four o’clock in the morning until ten, when High Mass was chanted, the Marquis of Dorset acting as chief mourner. In the evening there were Vespers for the Dead and Dirge and “a great attendance of noblemen and gentlemen mourners.” The Queen and the King’s nieces, the Marchioness of Dorset and her daughters, the Ladies Jane and Katherine Grey, the Lady Eleanor Brandon, Countess of Cumberland, the Lady Margaret Lennox, the Duchess of Richmond, the Duchess of Suffolk, and all the great ladies[102] of the Court, were present, not only at High Mass, but at countless other Masses in the Chapel Royal. They were, however, not in the body of the Chapel, but in an upper gallery overlooking it—mourning cloaks being provided for them out of the Wardrobe.

Queen Katherine may have left the palace somewhat hurriedly,[103] for in the inventory taken immediately after the King’s death there is an account of the seals being on one chamber described as full of female attire of the most sumptuous description, presumably belonging to the Queen, who certainly left behind her the jewels given her by the King to wear at the reception of M. d’Annebault, the French Envoy—an oversight that gave rise to terrible subsequent dissensions between Sir Thomas Seymour and his eldest brother.

Lord Chancellor Wriothesley dissolved Parliament early on Monday, 1st February, in a neatly turned speech declaring that “their most puissant master was dead.” The eventful news was received with every demonstration of sorrow, some members even bursting into tears, or pretending to do so. Then followed the reading of that portion of the King’s will which concerned the Royal Succession.

By this famous testament[104] Henry provided that in case Edward died childless, and Henry himself had no other children by his “beloved wife Katherine or any other wives[105] he might have hereafter,” King Edward was to be succeeded by his eldest sister Mary; and if she in her turn proved without offspring, she was to be succeeded by her sister Elizabeth. Failing heirs to that princess, the crown was to pass on the same conditions to the Lady Jane Grey and her sisters Katherine and Mary Grey, daughters of the King’s eldest niece, the Lady Frances Brandon, Marchioness of Dorset. In the eventuality of the three sisters Grey dying without issue, the throne was to be occupied successively by the children of the Lady Frances’ younger sister, the Lady Eleanor, Countess of Cumberland. The Scotch succession was set aside, from no personal ill-will, however, to Henry’s eldest sister, the Dowager Queen of Scotland, Margaret Tudor, for he left her daughter a handsome legacy. Henry most probably omitted the name of the young Queen of Scots as heiress to the throne, and gave his preference to the daughters of his two nieces, because, although at war with the Regent of Scotland, he still hoped that the betrothal of his grand-niece, Mary Stuart, then only six years of age, to his son Edward might be arranged, and thus eventually bring about the desired union of the two crowns in a natural manner. Moreover, there was the religious question to be considered. The Regent, Mary of Guise, was an ardent Papist, using all her influence, both in England and in Scotland, to thwart the English King’s anti-papal policy.

Henry VIII mentioned Queen Katherine in the following eulogistic manner: “And for the great love, obedience, chastity of life, and wisdom being in our forenamed wife and Queen, we bequeath unto her for her proper life, and as it shall please her to order it, three thousand pounds in plate, jewels, and stuff of household goods, and such apparel as it shall please her to take of such as we have already. And further, we give unto her one thousand pounds in money, and the amount of her dower and jointure according to our grant in Parliament.” Henry appointed the Earl of Hertford Protector of the Realm during the minority of his son, and mentioned as his colleagues all those persons who were interested in keeping him in power in order to share it with him. Gardiner’s name was omitted, as already stated. The provisions of the will opposed a serious obstacle to the Earl of Hertford’s ambition, for they made him fifth in order of precedence, thus placing him on a footing of equality with other executors; recognising no claim arising out of his kinship to the young Prince. Sir Thomas Clere declared that the original will was stamped, a fact which inclined so careful a writer as Mr. Pollard to conclude that the idea that a stamped will was illegal must have flashed across somebody’s mind, and suggested the hasty drawing up of another, for the King to sign in autograph. The form now in the Record Office is doubtless this second one. It displays no trace of a stamp, and the two signatures at the beginning and end are not sufficiently uniform to have been impressed mechanically. In the last the up-strokes are very unsteady, and on comparing them with other signatures of Henry VIII one is justified in thinking that both were forged. It must not be forgotten, however, that the King was very ill, and failing; his hand may well have trembled.[106]

In those days the funeral of a sovereign and the coronation of his successor took place almost simultaneously, occasionally with strange results, considerable confusion arising as to the arrangements for the two ceremonies: the sombre preparations for the obsequies of King Henry, for instance, clashed weirdly with the festivities organised for the accession of his son. Matters became so confused at last that Bishop Gardiner found himself obliged to appeal to “My Lord of Oxford’s Players,” who were already at Southwark preparing to act a pageant and a comedy. It would be more decent, His Lordship pointed out, to sing a solemn Dirge for their master than to perform a merry play, and he besought them to desist until after the King’s funeral.

In the end the Bishop had his way, and the grandeur of Henry’s obsequies suffered nothing from the counter-attractions of the “green men,” “morris dancers,” and “mountain for the gods,” which were among the items promised by the players, who produced their performance in the hall of the ex-monastery of Blackfriars immediately after Edward’s coronation—doubtless to their own satisfaction and that of the public, albeit they seem to have had hard work to get the necessary cash for their “properties” out of Sir William Carwarden or Carden, the official in charge of such matters, to whom they had to frequently apply for payment.[107]

On Monday, 31st January, the young King entered London, and passed direct to the Tower, where, in accordance with traditional etiquette, he was to remain in semi-seclusion until after his coronation. The next day, Tuesday, 1st February, the late King’s executors assembled in the great hall of the Tower, and having heard the will read from beginning to end, took the oath for the King, and Hertford[108] was proclaimed Protector during the coming minority. On 4th February the Protector proceeded in state to Westminster Hall, where he assumed the offices of Lord Treasurer and Earl Marshal, rendered vacant by the attainder of the Duke of Norfolk. He subsequently relinquished his post as Lord Great Chamberlain to John Dudley, Viscount de Lisle, who in his turn surrendered his place as Lord High-Admiral to Sir Thomas Seymour.

On Sunday, 13th February, High Mass was again sung in the Chapel Royal by Gardiner, assisted by the Bishops of London and Bristol, and the royal coffin was removed “from the Chapell to the Chariot; over the coffin was cast a pall of rich cloath of gold, and upon it a goodly ymage like to the Kyng’s person in all poynts, wonderfully richly aparrelled with velvet gold and precious stones of all sorts, holding in ye right hand a Sceptre of gold, in the left hand the ball of the world with a crosse; upon the head a crown imperial of inestimable value, a collar of the Garter about the neck and a garter of gold about the leg, with this being honourably conducted as aforesaid, was tied upon the said coffin by the Gentlemen of his Privy Chamber upon rich cushions of cloath of gold and fast bound with silk ribands to the pillars of the said Chariot for removing.” It seems, however, that this image was not quite complete, for it had presently to be removed and “touched up.”

The gorgeous funeral procession, which is said to have been four miles long, left the Chapel Royal, Whitehall, at about eleven o’clock on 14th February for Sion en route for Windsor. The weather was very fine, and immense crowds lining the streets, people of every class, holding lighted candles. Over a thousand “lights,” or torches, were held by the mourners who preceded or followed the hearse containing the King’s body and upon which was placed the waxen image already described. This hearse was drawn by eight black horses emblazoned with the Arms of England and of the house of Tudor, and surrounded by noblemen and knights in mourning robes, some on horseback and others on foot, holding lights and banners, images of saints, and other glistening devices and symbols. The procession passed through the streets of London by Charing Cross, Knightsbridge, Hammersmith, Chiswick, and Brentford, and, owing to its enormous length, did not reach Sion until twilight. It is gratifying to note that the vast assemblage of nobles and gentry was plentifully supplied with refreshments, wine, and beer throughout the whole of these very elaborate and costly obsequies, to the tune of about £10,000 of our money.

At Sion the coffin stood all night within the ruined walls of that erstwhile monastic house which had been the prison of Katherine Howard, the second of Henry’s murdered consorts. The ravages of ruin to be seen there were now hidden by hangings of fine black cloth and by two great altars blazing with lights and jewels. By a curious coincidence, the body arrived at Sion on the day after the fifth anniversary of the Queen’s execution, a fact which lends additional horror to the following story, related in a contemporary document now in the Soane Collection: “The King’s body rested in the ruined Chapel of Sion, and there, the leaden coffin[109] being cleft by the shaking of the carriage, the pavement of the church was wetted with Henry’s blood. In the morning came plumbers to solder the coffin, under whose feet, I tremble while I write it,” says the author, “was suddenly seen a dog creeping and licking up the King’s blood. If you ask me how I know this, I answer, William Greville, who could scarce drive away the dog, told me so, and so did the plumber also.”

The coffin had most likely been abandoned by the mourners, who had retired to rest for the night, and probably some gaseous explosion led to this uncanny incident, the report of which greatly increased the superstitious terror in which the late King’s name was held. Thus was fulfilled, so the people said, Friar Peyto’s denunciation from the pulpit of Greenwich Church in 1553, when that daring friar compared Henry to Ahab, and told him to his face “that the dogs would in like manner lick his blood.”

This horrible occurrence, if it really took place, does not seem to have made any very deep impression on Bishop Gardiner, for no more fulsome sermon was ever preached than that delivered by him at Windsor on 16th February. He took for his text, “Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord,” and, enlarging on the virtues of the late monarch, lamented the “loss both to high and low by the death of this most good and gracious King”; for whom, Sir Anthony Browne declared, “there was no need to pray, for he was surely in Heaven.” Queen Katherine Parr, the King’s nieces, the Lady Frances, Marchioness of Dorset, and the Lady Eleanor of Cumberland and their daughters and other noblewomen attended the obsequies at Windsor from a closet or chamber looking into the chapel, much such a one as Queen Victoria used in the Chapel Royal, Windsor, on similar occasions.

Some weird stories of supernatural apparitions were circulated all over London, especially among the Catholics. The “old King” had appeared, wreathed in flames, to an ex-Carthusian friar. Folks at Windsor had beheld him fleeing along the battlements and corridors of the castle, blazing like a meteoric ball; and he had even, so it was rumoured, paid a warning visit to his widow in the still hours of darkness.

CHAPTER VIII
CONCERNING THE LADY JANE AND THE QUEEN-DOWAGER

The will of Henry VIII conferred upon the houses of Seymour and Grey a towering position in the State which naturally brought forward into extraordinary relief the hitherto ignored name of Lady Jane. A few weeks earlier she was but the eldest daughter of the rather weak-minded Marquis of Dorset, a man whom no one seems to have held in any great consideration, notwithstanding his royal alliance and rather showy past career as a soldier under Henry VIII; to-day she was almost as prominent in the matter of the succession as the King’s two daughters, Mary and Elizabeth, both of whom could easily be set aside by an ambitious faction: the elder on account of her religion, the younger on that of her somewhat doubtful legitimacy. It is not surprising, therefore, that the intrigues which were to culminate in the ruin of the unfortunate Lady Jane began almost immediately after the accession of her cousin, Edward VI; for it was at this time that the newly made Lord Sudeley, desiring to possess “two strings to his bow,” embarked in a most imprudent intrigue to obtain possession of the person of the Marquis of Dorset’s daughter, who, as the reversionary heiress of England, was justly regarded by both parties as a most valuable asset. The intermediary employed in this transaction was one William Sharington, a gentleman in Seymour’s confidence, who was his equal in the conducting of tricksome intrigues: it will become apparent as we proceed that whenever Sudeley had any particularly difficult and dangerous matter to deal with, he invariably got some subordinate to share the danger with him. One morning, very soon after King Henry’s death, Sharington appeared at Dorset Place, Westminster, to open negotiations with the Marquis about the transfer of his eldest daughter into Sudeley’s charge. He began by informing Dorset, apparently one of the most credulous of mortals, that the Admiral, as uncle to the King, “was like to come to great authority, and was most desirous of forming a bond of friendship with him.” On the following day Sharington returned, and after assuring the Marquis that “the Lord High-Admiral was very much his friend,” insinuated that “it were a goodly thing to happen if my Lady Jane his daughter were in the keeping of the said Lord Admiral.” He said he had often heard his master say “that the Lady Jane was the handsomest lady in England and that the Admiral would see her placed in marriage much to his (the Marquis’s) comfort.”

“And with whom will he match her?” inquired Dorset.

“Marry,” replied Sharington, “I doubt not but you shall see he will marry her to the King, and fear you not, he will bring it to pass, and then you shall be able to help all the friends you have.”

After this visit the Marquis held a consultation with the Lady Frances, which resulted in his accepting a personal interview with Lord Sudeley.

Thomas Seymour does not appear to have had any fixed London abode in his bachelor days, but probably lived, on occasion, as Surrey did, in what we should now call chambers, somewhere in the Strand. But when he became Baron Sudeley and Lord High-Admiral, he conceived it incumbent upon him to live in a style commensurate with his increased rank, and solicited a suitable mansion from his brother, the Protector. Somerset forthwith filched Bath House, Strand, from Bishop Barlow, and presented it to his brother. This house, which must not be mistaken for Bath House, Holborn, was built in the fourteenth century and considerably enlarged and embellished in the beginning of the sixteenth; it was one of the finest mansions in London, and, with its gardens, occupied the whole space now covered by Arundel, Norfolk, and Suffolk Streets, Strand. The mansion stood on the approximate site of the present Howard Hotel. It commanded an extensive view of the Thames, and there was an orchard extending to the Strand.[110]

To Seymour Place, Strand, therefore, rode my lord of Dorset, to find Sudeley walking in his garden. The two gentlemen held a most confidential conversation, in the course of which Sudeley persuaded Dorset not only to hand the wardship of the Lady Jane over to him, but to send for her then and there, and allow the young girl to take up her abode under the roof of one of the most notorious profligates of an exceedingly degenerate Court.

The Lady Jane did not arrive at Seymour Place in formâ pauperis. She was attended by her governess, Mrs. Ashley, by four waiting women and a number of male servants of various degrees. Sudeley’s household was at this time ruled over by his mother, the Dowager Lady Seymour. Since the death of her husband, Sir John Seymour, in December 1536, this lady had kept house for her younger son, who brought her for that purpose either from Hertford or from a suburban house on a site now crossed by Upper and Lower Seymour Street, Portman Square.

There is some unexplained mystery connected with Lady Seymour which the present writer does not pretend to have fathomed. No explanation is discoverable of the strange fact that the mother of a Queen and the grandmother of a King of England seems to have been almost ignored by her son-in-law Henry VIII, by her young grandson Edward VI, by her own son the Protector, and indeed by all the great people with whom her high position must have brought her into contact. Her name is not once mentioned in connection with that of her daughter, Jane Seymour, after she became Queen. She did not figure at the christening of the baby Edward, and did not present the customary gifts offered by near relations on such occasions. She has left no correspondence, and there is only one allusion to her in the Household Books of Henry VIII, and none at all in those of Edward VI, which contain some reference to almost every lady of importance of the period, as receiving or presenting gifts from or to the sovereign, either personally or through attendants. We only know that her banner of arms figured, close to that of her daughter, Queen Jane, at the obsequies of Henry VIII and Edward VI; and that Henry, in 1537, during the year of his marriage with Jane Seymour, when he raised his brother-in-law Edward Seymour to the rank of Baron Beauchamp, granted him a pension of £1100 per annum, out of which he was to pay his mother an annuity of £60[111]—but beyond the papers connected with this pension there is only one other existing document in which her name figures, and this deals with an incident that arose after her death, in 1551, when her grandson the King was induced by the Privy Council, and by her own son, the Duke of Somerset, to countermand the wearing of official mourning for her. Beyond the fact that Lady Seymour was by birth a Wentworth, and therefore highly connected, and that in one of his letters to Lady Jane’s mother Seymour represents his own as a fitting person to take the young girl under her maternal care, Lady Seymour may be said to have lived and died as much ignored as though she had been a woman of no birth and no importance.[112]

Of the sort of life lived by the Lady Jane during the weeks she spent at Seymour Place we know nothing, but from the alacrity with which she consented to return there at a later period we may feel justified in believing she was very happy under the charge of the mysterious Lady Seymour and her erratic and wilful son. Miss Strickland says, but without naming her authority, that Lady Seymour was one of the earliest Englishwomen of rank to adopt the tenets of the Reformation. If this was the case, Lady Jane Grey probably met at her house some one or other of the numerous foreign Reformers who began to invade England shortly after the death of Henry VIII. It is, however, likely that Sudeley undertook the charge of this young lady at the instigation of Katherine Parr, and that whilst at Seymour Place her education was continued under the direction of the scholarly Miles Coverdale, afterwards Bishop of Exeter, who had been appointed chaplain to the Queen-Dowager. There is some little resemblance between the handwriting of this divine and that of Lady Jane, which leads one to think he had a considerable share in directing her studies at this period.

If the Dorsets imagined they were doing themselves and their daughter a service by placing her under the guardianship of Thomas Seymour, they made a terrible mistake, for this incident was certainly at the root of that fatal animosity between the two brothers which led up to one of the most appalling tragedies in our history. In the first place, it revealed to Somerset that Sudeley was fighting for his own hand, and further, entirely upset the Lord Protector’s domestic schemes and arrangements. Both Somerset and his wife had been very intimate with the Marquis and the Marchioness, his royal consort, and the young Earl of Hertford,[113] their eldest son, was a constant visitor at Westminster and at Bradgate. He was an exceedingly handsome youth, described by Norton, his tutor, as “singularly like his father,” who, judged by his portraits, was one of the finest-looking men of his day. So fond was the Lady Frances of the young Earl that she would call him “her son,” and undoubtedly looked on him as a welcome suitor for her eldest daughter; and if there was any love romance in Lady Jane’s brief life, it was certainly in connection with this youth, and not with Guildford, whom she eventually married, but whom she slighted rather than loved. The Somersets, moreover, had made up their minds that if the proposed marriage between Mary Stuart and Edward VI came to nothing, Edward should be contracted as soon as possible to their youngest daughter, the very pretty and highly accomplished Lady Jane Seymour.[114] Under these circumstances it may well be imagined that the Duke and Duchess were not only furious when they learned that Lady Jane Grey was already comfortably installed under their brother’s roof, without their knowledge and consent, but firmly resolved that the young lady should see as little of her cousin the King as possible.

Brother Thomas had yet a greater surprise and vexation in store for Somerset and his Duchess, and even for King Edward VI himself, than the matter of the wardship of Lady Jane Grey. He was, if the truth is to be honestly told, about the most extraordinary scamp of his time. Physically he eclipsed his elder brother, the Protector, himself considered a very handsome man. In addition to a fine figure, Thomas possessed beautiful features, just escaping the long thin nose which characterised his brother’s face and ruined Queen Jane’s pretensions to beauty. He was dark, with a full beard, a ruddy complexion, and full brown eyes. In a word, a very fine fellow indeed, and exceedingly attractive to the fair sex, who found it hard to resist his blandishments, a cruel fact of which he was apt to boast. He danced to perfection, was first in all sports, could turn pretty verses when it suited him—and even godly ones, on occasion. His love of dress was proverbial, and in that brilliant Court of Henry VIII Sir Thomas Seymour never failed to hold his own for extravagance and magnificence. Like his brother Somerset, he could be kindly when it suited his purpose, and liberal enough to his inferiors when he desired to create a good impression. He seems to have even been a dutiful son, for, as we have said, his mother lived with him to the end of his life, and he spoke well of her.

These comparative virtues were outweighted by his evil qualities, for not even in that age of rascality and of wickedness in high places did there exist a greater ruffian than this seemingly polished gentleman. Thomas was one of those men who are born without a conscience.[115] Henry VIII had not long been dead and the elder Seymour scarcely proclaimed Protector of the Realm when Sudeley began to realise that his own part at the Court of his nephew, Edward VI, must be quite secondary unless he could forthwith contract some royal alliance and thereby make his position equal to his brother’s. So it fell out that, before the late King’s body was cold, Thomas Seymour had made up his mind to marry one of the royal princesses; and ere it was buried he had offered his hand to the elder of the King’s widows, Anne of Cleves. That cautious Princess promptly refused the dubious proposal, preferring her independence and present comfort to the probable sacrifice of a handsome income paid by the State for the poor pleasure of espousing a cadet of the house of Seymour. Nothing daunted by this refusal, the undismayed suitor aimed higher yet, and offered his hand and heart to Princess Mary, who thanked him, in a courteous letter, for the honour he paid her, and assured him that she had not the slightest intention of changing her state, especially so soon after her father’s death. Baffled again, my Lord of Sudeley now addressed himself to the youthful Princess Elizabeth, who, according to Leti, answered him in a most becoming manner, reminding him that her father was just dead, and that it would ill become her to think of marriage at such a moment or for at least two years after so sad an event. She had not, she said, had time to enjoy her maidenhood, and wished to do so for that period at least, before embarking on the stormy seas of matrimony. Elizabeth’s letter, if she really wrote it,—one can never quite trust Leti, though he lived near enough to the time to have access to papers and documents long since destroyed,—was a model of finesse and good taste.

The rejected, but undejected, Seymour now turned his attention to his old love, Katherine Parr, whom, as we know, he first courted when she became the widow of Lord Latimer. He must have been a good deal in her company in the last months of King Henry’s life, and on her own admission she had not lost any of her old love for him; for in a letter, written presumably within a fortnight of the late King’s death, she says, “I would not have you think that this, mine honest good will towards you to proceed from any sudden motion of passion; for, as truly as God is God, my mind was fully bent the other time I was at liberty [that is, after the death of Lord Latimer], to marry you before any man I know. Howbeit God withstood my will therein most vehemently for a time, and through His grace and goodness made that possible which seemed to me most impossible; that was, made me renounce utterly mine own will and follow His most willingly. It were long to write all the processes of this matter. If I live, I shall declare it to you myself. I can say nothing, but as my Lady of Suffolk[116] saith, ‘God is a wonderful man.’” In March, after Henry’s death, the Queen removed to Chelsea Manor, a mansion which Henry had built as a nursery for his children and settled on her as a dower-house. Princess Elizabeth had joined her within a few days for the purpose of finishing her education under the auspices of the learned Queen. At the very time, therefore, that Seymour was intriguing to secure possession of Lady Jane Grey, he was clandestinely spending his evenings with Katherine Parr either at Whitehall or, later, when she finally removed with her household to Chelsea, at the Manor House, coming there by a lane that led from the Bishop of London’s house up a path which, until a few years ago, was still in existence and associated by tradition with the names of Katherine Parr and Thomas Seymour. Some authorities assert that the two were secretly married about three weeks after the King’s death, and that the Lord Admiral prolonged his visits, not leaving his wife till dawn, when she would let him out by the garden wicket, and then steal back to her room unobserved (at least, so she hoped).[117] According to Edward VI’s Journal, however, the marriage was not officially celebrated until May, and it was certainly not made public before the end of June 1547. The intrigues of Lord Thomas to induce the young King, his nephew, to sanction his marriage with his stepmother began by his poisoning the King’s mind against his brother Somerset, and, taking advantage of the Protector’s absence in Scotland, he did all in his power to make himself agreeable to Edward VI by lending him considerable sums of money. Somerset kept the royal lad very short of petty cash, so that at times he had none to distribute to such folk as strolling musicians, servants who brought him presents from his relatives, and other persons who had obliged him. Seymour, who had isolated the King, employed a man named Fowler as intermediary between himself and Edward.[118] Flattered and cajoled by his uncle Thomas and well disposed by his natural affection to his stepmother, the poor little King was at length induced to write a letter advising the Lord Admiral to marry the Queen-Dowager. This extraordinary missive, which is still extant, was penned a few days after Edward had received a very curious epistle from his stepmother, then on a visit to him at St. James’s Palace, in which she had dilated upon her extraordinary affection for the memory of his late father. The letter was written in Latin, and the young King’s answer was in the same dead language. The King’s letter is full of advice, which comes oddly from a lad not yet ten to a woman verging upon forty. He hopes to do what is acceptable in her sight because of, firstly, “the great love you bear my father the King, of most noble memory; then your good-will towards me; and lastly, your godliness, and knowledge and learning in the Scriptures. Proceed, therefore, in your good course; continue to love my father, and to show the same great kindness to me which I have ever perceived in you. Cease not to love and read the Scriptures, but persevere in always reading them; for in the first you show the duty of a good wife and a good subject, and in the second, the warmth of your friendship, and in the third, your piety to God.”[119] Very soon after writing this letter he wrote another to Her Majesty, this time in English, in which he assured her that, far from being vexed with her for marrying his uncle, he promised to aid her in the hour of need, should the alliance prove offensive to those who were in power.

In June the marriage was made public. The indignation of the Duke and Duchess of Somerset knew no bounds. They had been greatly angered over the matter of Lady Jane Grey, but no words could express their exasperation at what they were pleased to consider their brother’s fresh exhibition of “indecency and wickedness.” The first practical expression of their wrath was the sequestration of the jewels the Queen had left behind at Whitehall after King Henry’s death. She had applied for them several times, and now wrote in a more determined strain; only, however, to receive a haughty refusal and the startling information that the jewels belonged to the Crown, whereas they really were a personal gift to her from the King at the time of the visit of the French Envoy M. d’Annebault. These jewels were never returned to Katherine Parr—a matter which roused the Lord Admiral’s wrath to a culminating pitch. “My brother,” he said, “is wondrous hot in helping every man to his right save me. He maketh a great matter to let me have the Queen’s jewels, which you see by the whole opinion of the lawyers ought to belong to me, and all under pretence that he would not the King should lose so much, as if it were a loss to the King to let me have mine own!”[120]

Then came another unpleasant incident, in the course of which the Queen-Dowager was subjected to unfair treatment on account of her marriage. Somerset determined to force her to lease her favourite manor of Fausterne to a friend of his named Long. Katherine refused point-blank to receive this gentleman as a tenant, especially at a ridiculously low rent, and in a letter to her husband expressed her scornful indignation at the “large” offer for Fausterne which his brother had made her. Yet in the end she was obliged to accept Somerset’s terms. Fausterne passed from her hands into those of Long, and was never restored to her.

It is not surprising that she felt a little “warm,” as she expresses it, at the manner in which the Somersets handled her. Her position had been recognised by the King and Parliament, and yet her brother-in-law and his wife refused to acknowledge her right to precedence: the Duchess of Somerset declared that she was herself as good as Queen, since she was the consort of the King’s Protector, “who was virtually the head of the Realm.” Whenever Katherine went to Court, if the Duchess of Somerset chanced to be present, there was sure to be trouble. According to Lloyd, the Duchess not only refused to bear up the Queen’s train, but actually jostled her so as to pass first. “So that what between the train of the Queen, and the long gown of the Duchess, they raised so much dust at Court, as at last put out the eyes of both their husbands, and caused their executions.” Heylin says the Duchess was accustomed to inveigh against her royal sister-in-law in her coarsest manner. “Did not King Henry VIII marry Katherine Parr in his doting days, when he had brought himself so low by his lust and cruelty that no lady that stood on her honour would venture on him? And shall I now give place to her who in her former estate was but Latimer’s widow, and is now fain to cast herself for support on a younger brother? If master admiral teach his wife no better manners, I am she that will.”

Historians who, for political and religious purposes, have exaggerated the virtue and accomplishments of Edward VI, and endowed Lady Jane Grey with charms and gifts which that modest young lady never possessed, have woven a legend around her and Edward VI which would lead the uninitiated to believe that she was the constant sharer of his juvenile tasks and pastimes, whereas in reality it was only in the last few months of his life that she became in the least prominent at his Court. Immediately after his birth and the death of his mother Prince Edward was handed over to the care of Lady Brian,[121] formerly governess to his two sisters, by whom she was greatly beloved and respected, and also to that of his dry nurse, Mrs. Sybilla Penn.[122] His infancy was spent at Chelsea Manor House and at the country seats of Ampthill and Oatlands. In these places he was frequently visited by his sisters Mary and Elizabeth, and presumably also by his little cousins of the house of Grey; but when he attained his sixth year, in accordance with the peculiar views of his father on the subject of education, all female influence was withdrawn from him, although Lady Brian continued to preside over his household. A number of very young noblemen were selected to be his constant companions and playfellows. Among them were his cousins, the two sons of Brandon, Duke of Suffolk; the Lord Edward Seymour, afterwards Earl of Hertford; and his great friend, the one being he seems to have really loved, young Barnaby Fitzpatrick, sometimes mentioned by the Swiss Reformers as Earl of Ireland.[123] His principal tutors were the extremely Protestant Dr. Richard Cox, who became Dean of Westminster in 1549 and subsequently, in Elizabeth’s reign, Bishop of Ely; the learned Sir John Cheke,[124] Provost of King’s College, Cambridge, and his first schoolmaster; Sir Anthony Cooke; M. Jean Bellemain, his French master; and Roger Ascham, who taught him caligraphy. He also received lessons in the art of writing in the Italian or Roman type, which most nearly resembles the modern, from Dr. Croke, who had taught this art at an earlier period to the young Duke of Richmond and Queen Katherine Parr. Dr. Christopher Tye was his music master; and Philip Van Wylder taught him to play upon his father’s favourite instrument, the lute. Lady Jane was certainly not among his circle of intimate associates, which did not even include his two sisters, although the Lady Mary was at one time officially appointed his guardian, and Elizabeth passed the greater part of the year 1546 with him at Hatfield. So little intercourse had he with his sisters after his accession to the throne that he actually only met Princess Mary three times, and Elizabeth five. As to Lady Jane, he scarcely ever saw her, unless indeed she spent a few days with him at Whitehall some weeks before his death. As soon as the Somersets were thoroughly acquainted with the true motive that had induced the Dorsets to part with their daughter, they took every precaution to prevent its accomplishment; and so little was the Lady Jane seen at the Court of King Edward that she is only once casually mentioned by that monarch in his Journal as being present at the great functions arranged in 1550 in honour of the Dowager of Scotland when she passed through London on her way to her northern dominions; and this was at the time that Northumberland was in favour and Somerset in disgrace.

On Thursday, 18th February 1547, the temporal Lords assembled at the Tower in their robes of estate to witness a solemn and significant ceremony. The young King having ascended his throne, and the officials of his Court taken their allotted positions about him, the doors were thrown open, and Edward Seymour, Lord Protector and Earl of Hertford, was led from the Council Chamber and conducted before His Majesty. Garter bore his letters-patent, the Earl of Derby his mantle, the Earl of Shrewsbury his rod of gold; my Lord Oxford carried his cap of estate and coronet. The Lord of Arundel bore the sword, and walked immediately before the Protector, who was supported by the young Duke of Suffolk and the Marquis of Dorset. After the usual ceremonies, Hertford knelt and was invested by his royal nephew, who put on the mantle, girded on the sword, placed the coronet upon his uncle’s head, and delivered him his rod of gold. Then the trumpets sounded, and the Herald proclaimed Edward Seymour to be no longer Earl of Hertford, but now and hereafter Duke of Somerset.

After the Protector came the Lord William Parr, Earl of Essex, brother to the Queen-Dowager, who was created Marquis of Northampton and of Essex. Then appeared John Dudley, Lord de Lisle, who had not assumed full importance at that time, but who was presently to become the protagonist of the ominous tragedy already in preparation. The future father-in-law of Lady Jane Grey, and the Nemesis of Somerset, was a man of splendid presence, exceedingly tall, with regular and majestic features, rendered even more striking by his long beard and sweeping moustache. He entered led by the Earls of Derby and Oxford, and was presently created Earl of Warwick. Dudley was followed by Wriothesley, who was raised to the peerage as Earl of Southampton.[125] Immediately after him came the majestic Sir Thomas Seymour, whom the King created Baron Seymour of Sudeley, at the same time delivering to him his patent as Lord High-Admiral of England. Sir Richard Rich, Sir John Sheffield, and Sir William Willoughby followed in succession and were created barons by the same names they had borne as knights. When the elaborate ceremony was over, a grand banquet, at which the King was not present, was offered to the new peers in the Tower. His Majesty, who was far from strong, had fainted from fatigue, and no wonder!—the function had lasted from seven in the morning till nearly midday!

In the evening of the same day (18th February) three of the handsomest men of the English Court—Somerset, Sudeley, and Warwick—rode with a small escort from Whitehall through the Strand to Baynard’s Castle, the residence of Sir William Herbert, Queen Katherine’s brother-in-law, one of the wealthiest men in England, served by not less than a thousand men, who wore his liveries. Here these three gentlemen were hospitably entertained at supper. There was much to talk over, and the party, elated by the honours so recently showered upon its members and heated by Herbert’s good wine, became “right merry”—little dreaming that within two years’ time Somerset would condemn his own brother Thomas to death, and that a few months later Warwick, as Duke of Northumberland, would sign the death-warrant of Somerset, only to be beheaded in his turn for high treason a year or so later by Queen Mary’s command. The Marquis of Dorset may have been of the company, and his presence would add an additional note of tragic significance—for Warwick was to become the direct cause of the deaths both of Lady Jane and of her father!