TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:

—Obvious print and punctuation errors were corrected.

—The transcriber of this project created the book cover image using the title page of the original book. The image is placed in the public domain.

THE SISTERS OF LADY JANE GREY

[Frontispiece

LADY KATHERINE GREY

(From the original painting, by an unknown artist, in the possession of Mrs. Wright-Biddulph, bearing the following inscription:)

“Now thus but like to change
And fade as dothe the flowre
Which springe and bloom full gay,
And wythrethe in one hour.”

THE SISTERS OF
LADY JANE GREY

AND THEIR WICKED GRANDFATHER

BEING THE TRUE STORIES
OF THE STRANGE LIVES OF CHARLES BRANDON, DUKE OF
SUFFOLK, AND OF THE LADIES KATHERINE AND
MARY GREY, SISTERS OF LADY JANE GREY,
“THE NINE-DAYS’ QUEEN”

BY

RICHARD DAVEY

AUTHOR OF
“THE SULTAN AND HIS SUBJECTS,” “THE PAGEANT OF LONDON,”
AND “THE NINE-DAYS’ QUEEN”

WITH 14 ILLUSTRATIONS

LONDON

CHAPMAN AND HALL, Ltd.

1911

Richard Clay & Sons, Limited,
BRUNSWICK STREET, STAMFORD STREET, S.E.
AND BUNGAY, SUFFOLK.

TO
THE MEMORY OF THE LATE
MAJOR MARTIN HUME
A GREAT HISTORIAN OF TUDOR TIMES
THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED BY A STUDENT OF
THE SAME PERIOD OF OUR
NATIONAL HISTORY

[PREFACE]

The strange adventures of the Ladies Katherine and Mary Grey, although they excited great interest at the time of their happening, and were of immense contemporary political importance, are now almost unknown, even to professed students of Elizabethan history. The sad fate of these unfortunate princesses has paled before that of their more famous sister, Lady Jane Grey, who, although the heroine of an appalling tragedy, was rather the victim of others than of her own actions. In a sense, she was merely a lay-figure, whereas her sisters, especially Lady Katherine, who played an active part on the stage of history at a later period of life, and possessed an unusually strong personality, were entirely swayed by the most interesting of human passions—love. Lady Katherine was literally “done to death” by her infatuation for the young Earl of Hertford, the eldest son of that Protector Somerset who suffered death under Edward VI. The feline cruelty with which Queen Elizabeth tormented Lady Katherine, after the clandestine marriage with her lover was revealed, called forth the freely expressed condemnation of Chief Secretary Cecil, who denounced his royal mistress’s harshness in no measured terms.

It is said that Lady Willoughby d’Eresby, one of the faithful attendants on Katherine of Aragon, was so infuriated by Henry VIII’s courtship and marriage with Anne Boleyn, that she pronounced a terrible curse upon that wretched queen and the infant Elizabeth. If, through her intercession or incantations, she contrived to induce some evil spirit to inspire Henry VIII to make his famous but ill-considered Will, she certainly succeeded in adding very considerably to the discomfort of his celebrated daughter, who, during all her life, had to experience the consequences of an ill-judged testament, whereby Henry VIII, by passing over the legitimate claim to the succession, of his grandniece, Mary Queen of Scots, the descendant of his eldest sister, Margaret Tudor, widow of James IV of Scotland, in favour of the heirs of his youngest sister, Mary Tudor, Queen of France and Duchess of Suffolk, opened a very Pandora’s box, full of more or less genuine claimants, after Elizabeth’s death, to the English Throne. The Spanish Ambassador enumerates a round dozen of these, all of whom, with the exception of Mary Stuart and Lady Katherine Grey, he describes as more or less incompetent place-seekers, not worth the butter on their bread, but who clamoured to obtain the queen’s recognition of what they believed to be their legal rights, and thereby added greatly to the general confusion. Of these claimants, Lady Katherine Grey was by far the most important, her right to the Crown being not only based on two Royal Wills—those of Henry VIII and Edward VI[1]—but, moreover, ratified by a special Act of Parliament. She therefore played a more conspicuous part in the politics of the early years of Elizabeth’s reign than is generally known, and, as a matter of fact, was rarely out of the queen’s calculations. In the first year of her reign, Elizabeth, wishing to be on the best of terms with her young cousins, not only admitted them to her privy chamber, but went so far as to recognize Lady Katherine as her legitimate successor, and even proposed to adopt her, calling her, in public, her “daughter.” For all this, there was no love lost between the queen and the princess. Lady Katherine, who had been intimate with the Countess of Feria, an Englishwoman by birth, and a close friend of Queen Mary, was strongly prejudiced against the Princess Elizabeth, who, she had been assured, was no daughter of Henry VIII, but a mere result of Anne Boleyn’s intimacy with Smeaton the musician. Notwithstanding, therefore, the queen’s advances, on more than one occasion Lady Katherine Grey, according to Quadra, the Spanish Ambassador, answered Elizabeth disrespectfully. It was not, however, until after the news of the clandestine marriage between Lady Katherine Grey and the Earl of Hertford reached her majesty, that she began to persecute the wretched girl and her husband, by sending them to the Tower—not, indeed, to “dungeons damp and low,” but to fairly comfortable apartments, worthy of their high station, for which the earl, at least, had to pay handsomely. When, thanks to the carelessness or connivance of Sir Edward Warner, the lieutenant, the offending couple were allowed occasionally to meet, and Lady Katherine eventually gave birth to two sons, Elizabeth’s fury knew no bounds, and the young mother had to undergo an awful and lifelong penance as the result of her imprudence. That Elizabeth had good cause to object to the introduction into this world of a male successor, became unpleasantly apparent some ten years later, when the two boys were put forward as claimants to her Throne, and thereby came very near involving England in an ugly civil war.

The misfortunes of her elder sister do not seem to have impressed Lady Mary Grey, on whom the Crown devolved, according to the Wills of Henry VIII and Edward VI, in the event of Lady Katherine dying without issue. She was a dwarf, and married secretly Mr. Thomas Keyes, the “giant” Sergeant-Porter of Whitehall Palace, who “stood seven feet without his shoes.” When Elizabeth received the news of this “outrage” on the part of the youngest of the sisters Grey, her resentment was truly dreadful, though her indignation, in this instance, was almost justifiable, since there is nothing a great sovereign dislikes more than that any members of the royal family should expose themselves to ridicule. Lady Mary, by her unequal marriage, had dragged the great name of Tudor into the mire, and had rendered herself the laughing-stock of Europe! Elizabeth adopted in this case the same unpleasant treatment which she had administered to the recalcitrant Lady Katherine; but, fortunately for the little Lady Mary, Mr. Keyes died “of his torments,” at an early stage of proceedings, and his widow, having promised never to repeat her offence, by re-marrying with an ordinary mortal, let alone with a dwarf or a “giant,” was permitted to spend the rest of her short life in peace and plenty.

The character of Elizabeth does not shine for its wisdom or kindliness in these pages; and some incidental information concerning the mysterious fate of Amy Robsart, Leicester’s first wife, tends to prove that “our Eliza” was perfectly well aware of what was going on at Cumnor Hall, where, it will be remembered, the fair heroine of Scott’s magnificent novel, Kenilworth, died “of a fall downstairs,” which, at the time, was not generally considered accidental. The callous manner in which the queen announced this accident—if accident it was—to the Spanish Ambassador, is full of significance. Meeting him one day in a corridor at Hampton Court, she said to him very lightly, and in Italian: “The Lady Amy, the Lord Robert’s wife, has fallen downstairs and broken her neck.” A few days earlier the queen had asked the ambassador whether he thought there would be any harm in her marrying her servant, meaning Dudley. He ventured to remind her that there was an impediment to this scheme, as the Lord Robert’s wife was then still living. This impediment was soon removed!

Elizabeth’s openly expressed passion for the future Earl of Leicester, who was Lady Katherine Grey’s brother-in-law, damaged her reputation throughout Europe, and even jeopardized her Throne. The French Ambassador informs his sovereign that “the Queen of England is mad on the subject of the Lord Robert,” “she cannot live without him,” “their rooms communicate.” “I could tell your Majesty,” says the Spanish representative at our Court, in a letter to Philip II, “things about the Queen and the Lord Robert which baffle belief, but I dare not do so in a letter.” Strange to relate, however, no sooner was Amy Robsart dead, than Elizabeth’s behaviour to the Lord Robert, as he was generally called, underwent a considerable change. She was willing to retain him as a lover, but, after what had happened, she was too frightened of possible consequences, to accept him as a husband. It was only the beauty of his person that captivated the queen: otherwise, she recognized him to be what he really was—a fool. “You cannot trust the Lord Robert,”[2] she once complained to the French Ambassador, “any further than you see him. Il est si bête.” She was perfectly right, for, although she was perhaps never aware of the fact, the Spanish State Papers reveal that at one time Robert Dudley[3] was actually in correspondence, through the Spanish Ambassador, with Philip II, to obtain his approval of the following astounding scheme, which, in abbreviated form, stands thus: “The Lord Robert is to marry the Queen, and, with Philip’s aid, they are to become Catholics, and work for the reconciliation of England to the Church, and the interests of Spain.” Comment is needless!

The biographies of the two princesses, Katherine and Mary Grey, are preceded by a few chapters dealing with Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, and Mary Tudor, their grandfather and grandmother. I have published these chapters, because they seem to me to complete the history of this strange family, and enable me to place before my readers a subject never before, I believe, treated in detail: that of the remarkable series of marriages of Charles Brandon, who, at the time that he was courting his king’s sister, had two wives living, one of whom, the Lady Mortimer, was destined to give him considerable trouble, and to vex his spirit and that of his consort not a little. I think I may claim to be the first writer on Tudor topics and times who has been able to determine who was this Lady Mortimer, Brandon’s first wife, and to trace her very interesting pedigree to a singular source. The story of Charles Brandon and of his clandestine marriage with Mary Tudor has been frequently related, and, indeed, it forms the subject of one of the last essays ever written by Major Martin Hume. Brandon’s earlier adventures, however, have entirely escaped the attention of historians, and are only alluded to in a casual manner in most volumes on this subject. Brandon had a very interesting and complex personality, and the strange resemblance which existed between him and his master, King Henry VIII, forms not the least singular feature in his romantic career. This resemblance was not only physical, but moral. So great was it, from the physical point of view, that certain of his portraits are often mistaken for those of King Henry, to whom, however, he was not even remotely connected by birth. As to his moral character; his marriages—he had four wives, whilst a fifth lady, Baroness Lisle, was “contracted to him”—tend to prove that either Henry VIII influenced his favourite, or the favourite influenced his master, especially in matters matrimonial.

A brief account of Lady Eleanor Brandon and her heirs closes this volume, which I hope will receive from the public as indulgent and kindly a reception as did the story of Lady Jane Grey (The Nine-days’ Queen), of which the celebrated M. T. de Wyzewa, in a lengthy review in the Revue des Deux Mondes, did me the honour of saying that “Jamais encore, je crois, aucun historien n’a reconstitué avec autant de relief et de couleur pittoresque le tableau des intrigues ourdies autour du trône du vieil Henri VIII et de son pitoyable successeur, Edouard VI.”

It is my duty to state that I submitted the manuscript of this book for the consideration of the late Major Martin Hume, who had already done me the honour of editing my previous work, on Lady Jane Grey, for which he supplied an Introduction on the foreign policy of England during the reign of Edward VI and the “nine-days’ reign,” possibly one of the most brilliant essays on Tudor times he ever wrote. He was so much interested in the present volume, that he promised to write for it a similar introductory chapter; but, unfortunately, a few weeks after this kind offer of assistance was made, I received the sad news of his sudden death. Major Martin Hume, was, therefore, unable to carry his promise into effect; but in a letter which he wrote to me at an earlier period of our agreeable correspondence, he indicated to me several sources of information, of which I have gratefully availed myself.

The loss that historical literature sustained by the death of Major Hume was far greater than the general public, I think, realizes. He was a past-master in Tudor lore and history, and the future will, I trust, accord him that high position amongst our historians to which his work on the Spanish or Simancas State Papers should alone entitle him. In paying this, my poor tribute, to his memory as an historian, I can only add my sincere expression of profound regret at his loss as a personal friend.

In this volume—as well as in the previous one on Lady Jane Grey—I received considerable assistance, in the earlier stages of its compilation, from the celebrated Dr. Gairdner, and from my deeply regretted friend, the late Dr. Garnett. I wish to acknowledge my debt of gratitude to these gentlemen; and to renew my thanks to the authorities of the Record Office, the Bodleian Library, and other libraries, public and private, for their unvarying courtesy.

In conclusion, I desire to express my appreciation of Mrs. Wright-Biddulph’s kindness in allowing me to publish in this work a reproduction of her unique portrait of Lady Katherine Grey. Lord Leconfield, likewise, gave me permission to reproduce several of the portraits in his magnificent collection at Petworth, but, unfortunately, his courteous offer came too late. None the less it merits acknowledgment in these pages.

Richard Davey.

Palazzo Vendramin Calergi, Venice.

August 1911.

Note.—The following brief account of Henry VIII’s Will may aid the reader in understanding the complications to which it gave rise. By this famous testament (dated 26th of December 1546 and revoking all his previous Wills), King Henry VIII provided that, in case he himself had no other children by his “beloved wife Katherine [Parr] or any other wives he might have thereafter,” and in the event of his only son, Edward [afterwards King Edward VI], who was to be his immediate successor, dying childless, that prince was to be succeeded by his eldest sister, Princess Mary; and if she, in turn, proved without offspring, she was to be succeeded by her sister, King Henry’s younger daughter, Elizabeth. Failing heirs to that princess, the Crown was to pass to the Lady Jane Grey and her sisters, Katherine and Mary Grey, successively, these being the daughters of Henry’s eldest niece, the Lady Frances Brandon, Marchioness of Dorset. In the event of the three sisters Grey dying without issue, the Throne was to be occupied successively by the children of the Lady Frances’s sister, the King’s other niece, the Lady Eleanor Brandon, Countess of Cumberland. The Scotch succession, through Henry’s eldest sister, Margaret Tudor, Dowager Queen of Scotland, was set aside, and the name of the young Queen of Scots [Mary Stuart] omitted from the Will, preference being given to the Ladies Grey, the daughters of Henry’s niece, because he hoped that the betrothal of Mary Stuart, then only six years of age, to his son Edward, might be arranged, and the desired union of England and Scotland brought about in a natural manner. It is curious that Henry’s nieces, the Ladies Frances and Eleanor, are not named in the Will as possible successors to the Crown, although their children are. Probably the King thought that, considering the number of claimants in the field, both ladies would be dead, in the course of nature, long before they could be called upon to occupy the Throne.

In 1553 the Duke of Northumberland, then all powerful, induced Edward VI, in the last weeks of his reign, to make a Will, in which he set aside the Princesses Mary and Elizabeth, his sisters, even stigmatizing them as bastards, and thus reversing his father’s testament; and named Lady Jane Grey, his cousin, and in default of her, her sisters Katherine and Mary Grey, as his immediate and legitimate successors. The consequences of this unfortunate “Devise,” as it is called, were, as all the world knows, fatal to the Lady Jane and her family.

As the result of these two Royal Wills, the principal claimants to the Crown on Elizabeth’s death were, therefore, at the beginning of her reign, the following: firstly, Mary Queen of Scots, and her son, afterwards James I, who may be described as the legitimate pretenders; secondly, the Lady Margaret Lennox, step-sister to the Queen of Scots, and her two sons Darnley and Charles Lennox, and, eventually, the latter’s daughter, Arabella Stuart; thirdly, the Lady Katherine Grey and her two sons, and finally, in the event of their deaths, their aunt, the Lady Mary Grey. In case of all these princes and princesses leaving no issue, there remained the children and grandchildren of the Lady Frances’s sister, the Lady Eleanor Brandon, Countess of Cumberland, one of whom, at least, Fernando Strange, rendered himself and his claims distinctly troublesome to Elizabeth.

The queen had, moreover, to contend with the heirs of the Plantagenets, the members of the royal house of Pole, who, in the person of the Earl of Huntingdon, hoped, at one time, to dethrone the queen, and, with the assistance of the ultra-Protestant party, reign in her stead.

Table showing the heirs female, in remainder to the Crown, named in the Will of Henry VIII and the “Devise” of Edward VI:—

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

[THE ORIGIN OF THE HOUSE OF TUDOR]

The amazing marriage of Katherine of Valois, widow of Henry V, with Owen Tudor, possibly accounts for much that was abnormal in the character of their royal descendants of the redoubted House of Tudor. The queen dowager was the daughter of the mad King Charles VI of France and of his licentious consort, Isabeau of Bavaria—bad blood, indeed; and Owen was a mere soldier of fortune. In his grandson Henry VII’s day, a goodly pedigree was discovered for him, which set forth that far from being a “mean born pup,” as was popularly reported, Owen was descended from Kenan, son of Coel, who was king of Britain, and brother of Helen, the mother of Constantine the Great. As to Owen ap Merideth ap Twydder or Tudor, good old Sandford affirms that “the Meanness of his Estate was recompensated by the Delicacy of his Person, so absolute in all the Lineaments of his Body, that the only Contemplation of it might make a Queen forget all other Circumstances”—which it did! Stowe, who lived near enough to those times to receive direct tradition concerning this brave soldier, says, in his Annals,[4] that he was “as ignorant as any savage.” Tall beyond the average, the founder of the House of Tudor carried himself with “a perfect grace.” He was well featured, with hair that was curly and “yellow as gold.” At an entertainment given in 1423, and attended, notwithstanding her recent bereavement, by the widowed queen, this Adonis, while in the act of executing an intricate pirouette, fell at the royal lady’s feet. Whether the passion kindled by this ludicrous accident was reciprocated, we are not told; but so ardent was it, on Katherine’s part, at least, that she soon afterwards clandestinely married the handsome Welshman.[5]

The enemies of the House of Tudor averred that this secret marriage never really took place, and it is a singular fact that no allusion whatever is made to it in the hearse verse originally placed over the tomb of Queen Katherine in Westminster Abbey, and quoted in full in the contemporary Chronicle of William of Worcester. But when Henry VII became king, this inscription was removed and another hearse verse, containing the following significant lines, was substituted and hung over his grandmother’s monument:—

“Of Owen Tudor after this,
The next son Edmund was,

O Katherine, a renowned Prince,
That did in Glory pass.

Henry the Seventh, a Britain Pearl,
A Gem of England’s Joy,

A peerless Prince was Edmund’s Son,
A good and gracious Roy.

Therefore a happy Wife this was,
A happy Mother pure,

Thrice happy Child, but Grandam she,
More than Thrice happy sure.”

For more than seven years, during which time she gave birth to four children, the queen’s household observed profound secrecy with respect to her marriage—a fact which honours the fidelity and discretion of its members.

Notwithstanding all these precautions, Duke Humphrey of Gloucester, who was regent during the minority of Henry VI, suspected the existence of something unusual, and, according to Sir Edward Coke,[6] forthwith framed a statute that “anyone who should dare to marry a queen dowager of these realms without the consent of king and council should be considered an outlaw and a traitor.” Spies were placed about the queen; but they either failed to discover anything unusual, or were bribed to secrecy: for the fact of the clandestine marriage was not really established until shortly before her death. When it became known, there must have been a terrible storm in the royal circle, for Owen was arrested and sent to Newgate, and the queen banished to Bermondsey Abbey,[7] where she died, six months later, on January 1, 1447, of a lingering illness and a broken heart. Katherine de la Pole, Abbess of Barking, took charge of the children, but she did not reveal their existence to Henry VI till some months after the queen’s decease, and then “only because she needed money for their sustenance.”

Meanwhile the London Chronicle, a most valuable contemporary document, thus relates the subsequent misadventures of the unfortunate Owen: “This year [1447] one Owen Twyder, who had followed Henry V to France, broke out of Newgate at searching time, the which Owen had privately married Queen Katherine and had four children by her, unknown to the common people until she was dead and buried.” Owen Tudor was three times imprisoned for marrying the queen, but each time he contrived to baffle the vigilance of his gaolers, only, however, to be promptly recaptured. As years went by, he came to be received into a certain measure of favour by his stepson, the king; and he fought so valiantly for the Lancastrian cause at Northampton, in 1460, that the king made “his well beloved squire Owen Tudyer” [sic] keeper of his parks in Denbigh, Wales.[8]

Later on, at the battle of Mortimer’s Cross, he again unsheathed his Agincourt sword in the Lancastrian cause, but, being taken prisoner by Edward IV, he was beheaded in Hereford market place. Many years later, by a strange and romantic concatenation of events, Edward’s eldest daughter, Elizabeth, married the fallen Owen’s grandson, Henry VII, thereby becoming the first queen of England of the Tudor line, and the great-grandmother of the Ladies Jane, Katherine and Mary Grey.

There was, it seems, a rugged grandeur about Owen Tudor, which stood him in lieu of gentle accomplishments. The physical power, persistent obstinacy and bluff address of his royal descendants may indeed have been derived from this fine old warrior; and from him surely it was that they inherited the magnificent personal appearance, the lofty stature, the fair complexion and leonine locks, that distinguished them from the dark but equally splendid Plantagenets. May we not also justly conclude that their violent passions were an inheritance transmitted to them by the amorous Katherine and her vicious mother?—passions which played so fateful a part in the tragic stories of Lady Katherine and Lady Mary Grey—the two younger sisters of the unfortunate “Nine-days’ Queen,” Lady Jane Grey.

[To face p. xxviii

MARGARET BEAUFORT, COUNTESS OF RICHMOND

(From National Portrait Gallery)

Soon after Queen Katherine’s decease, Henry VI brought his Tudor brethren into the royal circle. When the eldest, Edmund of Hadham, grew to manhood, he created him Earl of Richmond (November 23, 1452), with precedence of all other earls. This stalwart nobleman married the dwarfish Princess Margaret Plantagenet, Countess of Beaufort, great-granddaughter of John of Gaunt by his last wife Catherine Swynford, and daughter and heiress of the last Duke of Somerset of the first creation. He was one of the pillars of the Lancastrian party, lending great help at the temporary restoration of Henry VI; afterwards, under Edward IV, he was compelled, with other Lancastrians, to seek safety in Brittany. He died shortly after his return to England, within a year of his marriage, leaving a son, who succeeded to his father’s title of Earl of Richmond, and eventually became King Henry VII. Edmund’s next brother, Jasper of Hatfield, so called from the place of his birth, was raised at the same time to the rank of Earl of Pembroke. He was with his father at the battle of Mortimer’s Cross; but escaped, and later, at the accession of Henry VII, he was created Duke of Bedford in the place of George Nevill, elder brother of the famous “Kingmaker,” whose titles and lands were confirmed in his favour. He died young in 1456 and was buried in St. David’s Cathedral. He never married, but left an illegitimate daughter, who became the wife of William Gardiner, a citizen of London. Stephen Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester, was reputed to be their son. Owen, third son of Katherine of Valois and Owen Tudor, embraced the religious life and lived a monk, at Westminster, into the first half of the sixteenth century. Their only daughter—who was blessed with the curious name of Tacina, and whose existence is ignored by most historians—married Lord Grey de Wilton, an ancestor of the ill-fated subjects of this book.

It is worthy of note that whereas most of the Tudor Princes were very tall, several of them, thanks to a well-known law of atavism, reverted to the tiny type of their ancestress, Margaret Plantagenet. Mary I was a small woman, and the three sisters Grey were not much above the height of average-sized dwarfs.

CHARLES BRANDON, DUKE OF SUFFOLK

[CHAPTER I]

CLOTH OF FRIEZE

It is a remarkable fact that, although Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, was, after Thomas More, Wolsey and the king himself, the most conspicuous personage at the court of Henry VIII, no authoritative biography of him exists, unless indeed it be a short, but very unimportant, monograph (written in Latin, at the end of the sixteenth century) now in the King’s Library at the British Museum. Suffolk outlived nearly all his principal contemporaries, except the king and the Duke of Norfolk, and his career, therefore, runs almost parallel with that of Henry VIII, whom he attended in nearly every event of importance, from boyhood to death. Brandon predeceased the king by only a few months. In person, he bore so striking a resemblance to Henry, that the French, when on bad terms with us, were wont to say that he was his master’s bastard brother. The two men were of the same towering height, but Charles was, perhaps, the more powerful; at any rate, King Henry had good cause, on one occasion, to admit the fact, for Brandon overthrew and slightly injured him in a wrestling match at Hampton Court. Both king and duke were exceedingly fair, and had the same curly, golden hair, the same steel-grey eyes, planted on either side of an aquiline nose, somewhat too small for the breadth of a very large face. In youth and early manhood, owing to the brilliancy of their pink-and-white complexions, they were universally considered extremely handsome, but with the advent of years they became abnormally stout, and vainly tried to conceal their fat, wide cheeks, and double chins, with beards and whiskers. A French chronicler, speaking of Charles Brandon at the time that he was in Paris for the marriage of Mary Tudor to Louis XII, says he had never seen so handsome a man, or one of such manly power who possessed so delicate a complexion—rose et blanc tout comme une fille. And yet he was not the least effeminate, for of all the men of his day, he was the most splendid sportsman, the most skilful in the tilt-yard, and the surest with the arrow. He danced so lightly and so gracefully that to see him was a sight in which even Henry VIII, himself an elegant dancer, delighted.

[To face p. 4

CHARLES BRANDON, DUKE OF SUFFOLK

(From an engraving, after the original in the collection of His Grace the Duke of Bedford)

Unfortunately, so many physical advantages were not allied to an equal number of virtues; and here again, the resemblance between King Henry and his bosom friend is extraordinary. Both were equally cruel, selfish and unscrupulous, and both entertained the same loose ideas as to the sanctity of marriage—with this difference, however, that whereas King Henry usually divorced one wife before he took another, Charles had two wives living at one and the same time, from neither of whom was he properly divorced! What is most singular, too, is that he ventured to marry the king’s sister whilst his first wife was still living, and not as yet legally separated from him, whereby he might easily have been hauled before a justice as a bigamist, and his offspring by a princess of the blood royal of England, and dowager queen of France to boot, been declared illegitimate.

In addition to his great strength and exceptional ability as a commander, both on land and sea, Suffolk possessed a luxuriant imagination, which delighted in magnificent pageantry. In the halcyon days of Henry’s reign, long before the fires of Smithfield had shed their lurid glow over the city, Suffolk and his master devised sports and pastimes, masques and dances, to please the ladies.[9] Once he entered the tilt-yard dressed as a penitent, in a confraternity robe and cowl of crimson velvet, his horse draped in cardinal-coloured satin. Assuming a humble attitude, he approached the pavilion in which sat the king and Queen Katherine, and in a penitential whine, implored her grace’s leave to break a lance in her honour. This favour being granted, he threw back his cloak, and appeared, a blaze of cloth of gold, of glittering damascened armour and sparkling jewels, to break sixteen lances in honour of the queen. Again, when Queen Mary was his bride, and the court went a-maying at Shooters Hill, he devised a sort of pastoral play, and with Jane Grey’s paternal grandfather, Thomas, Marquis of Dorset, disguised himself and his merry men as palmers, in gowns of grey satin with scallop-shells of pure gold and staves of silver. The royal guests having been duly greeted, the palmers doffed their sober raiment and appeared, garbed in green and gold, as so many Robin Hoods. They then conducted their Majesties to a glade where there were “pastimes and daunces,” and, doubtless, abundant wine and cakes. Much later yet, Brandon went, in the guise of a palmer, with Henry VIII, to that memorable ball given by Wolsey at Whitehall, at which Anne Boleyn won the heart of the most fickle of our kings.

The last half of the fourteenth century witnessed the beginning of the decline of feudalism in England. The advance of education, and consequently of civilization, had by this time largely developed the commercial and agricultural resources of the country, and the yeoman class, with that of the country gentry, had gradually come into being. At the Conquest, the majority of the lands owned by the Saxons—rebels to Norman force—were confiscated and handed over to the Conqueror’s greater generals: to such men as William, Earl of Warren, or Quarenne, who seated himself in East Anglia, having, as his principal Norfolk fortress, Castleacre Castle, on the coast, not far from East Dereham. Its picturesque ruins still tower above those of the magnificent priory that the great William de Warren raised, “to the honour of God and Our Lady,” for monks of the Cluniac branch of the Benedictine Order. This Earl of Warren, who was overlord of a prodigious number of manors and fiefs in East Anglia, numbered, among the bonny men who came out of Picardy and Normandy in his train, two stalwart troopers: one haled from Boulogne-on-the-Sea, so tradition says—and is not tradition unwritten history?—and was known as “Thomas of Boulogne”; he settled at Sale, near Aylsham, in Norfolk, and was the progenitor of the Boleyns or Bullens, whose surname is an evident corruption of de Boulogne; the other dropped his French patronym, whatever it was, and assumed the name of Brandon, after a little West Suffolk border town, in the immediate vicinity of the broad and fertile lands he had acquired.

These Brandons, then, had lived on their farm near Brandon for about four centuries, deriving, no doubt, a very considerable income from the produce of their fields and from their cattle. It is certain that they sent several members of their family to the Crusades; that one of them followed the Black Prince to Poitiers, and that yet another, a trooper, it is true, died on the field of Agincourt.[10] Somewhere in the last quarter of the fourteenth century, William, the then head of the family, apprenticed his son Geoffrey to a rich mercer of Norwich, a great commercial centre in those days, next to London and Bristol in importance, and doing what we should now call a “roaring trade” with Flanders, and through Flanders, with Venice and Florence, and even with the East. This Norwich Brandon having made a fortune, was seized with an ambition to attain still greater wealth and station for his son and heir William; and hence it came about, that near the time King Henry VI ascended the throne, young Brandon arrived in London, apprenticed to a firm of mercers established near Great St. Helen’s, Bishopsgate Street. He was a pushing, shrewd, energetic, and very unscrupulous knave, who soon acquired great influence in the city and amassed corresponding wealth. Finally, he became sheriff, and was knighted by Henry VI. He purchased a large property in Southwark, and built himself a mansion, later known as Suffolk Court. During the Wars of the Roses he allied himself at first with the Yorkists, and lent Edward IV considerable sums of money, which, according to Paston, that monarch dishonestly refused to repay. This drove William to cast his fortunes with the Lancastrians and largely assist Henry VII, then simply Earl of Richmond, both with money and men, and so was held in high esteem by that monarch till his death, in the twelfth year of Henry’s reign. William Brandon married Elizabeth, daughter of Sir Robert Wingfield of Letheringham, whose mother was the daughter and co-heir of Sir Robert Goushall, the third husband of the dowager Duchess of Norfolk, widow of the first duke, who, dying in exile in Venice, was buried in the magnificent church of San Giovanni e Paolo. Even thus early, we see a Brandon, the great-grandson of a Suffolk farmer, connecting himself with the noble houses of Wingfield, Fitzalan and Howard.[11]

At one time this gentleman was on very intimate terms with the renowned Sir John Paston, whose Letters throw so much light on the manners and customs of the age in which he lived; but the cronies fell out over some matter of business connected with Paston’s claim to the possession of Caistairs Castle, in which transaction, Paston declares, Brandon behaved like a blackguard—indeed, King Edward, to whom appeal was made, listed him as a “lyre.” During their intimacy, Paston, possibly over a tankard of ale at a merry dinner or supper party, had made some irreverent and coarse remarks about her grace of Norfolk, in the presence of Lady Brandon, who was the duchess’s grand-daughter. He had poked fun at the poor lady’s appearance when on the eve of adding her tribute to the population. Paston has recorded what he said, and it must be confessed, that if Lady Brandon did repeat his vulgar jest to her august relation, that lady had every reason to feel indignant at such familiarity.

Whether it was repeated or not has never transpired, so perhaps we may suppose Lady Brandon was a prudent woman and kept her counsel. But Paston wrote to his brother to ask if he thought she might be trusted, or whether she was likely to have made mischief by repeating his ill-timed remarks to the duchess, her mother, adding a “lye or two of her own to help it out.”

Sir William Brandon, eldest son of the first William, and father of Charles Brandon, was never knighted, although usually styled by courtesy “Sir.” He married, when he was very young, Elizabeth, daughter and co-heir of Sir Henry Bruyn, or Brown,[12] by his wife, Elizabeth Darcy.[13] Sir William Brandon was standard-bearer to Henry VII at Bosworth Field, and there lost his life at the hand of Richard III, whilst gallantly defending his royal patron. Henry proved his gratitude by educating his only son, Charles, who, by his marriage with Mary Tudor, became the grandfather of Lady Jane Grey and her sisters Katherine and Mary. Some historians have confused King Henry’s standard-bearer with a younger brother, Thomas Brandon, who married Anne Fiennes, daughter of Lord Dacre and widow of the Marquis of Berkeley, but had no children. He looms large (in every sense of the word, being of great height and bulk) in all the tournaments and jousts held in honour of the marriage of Katherine of Aragon with Prince Henry. He died, a very wealthy man, at his London house, Southwark Place, in 1502.

At four years of age the child Charles Brandon became playfellow to Arthur, Prince of Wales; but on the birth of the future Henry VIII, he was transferred to the younger prince as his companion. He may even have received his education with Henry, from Bernard André, historian and poet, or perhaps from Skelton, poet-laureate to Henry VII, who, with Dr. Ewes, had a considerable share in the instruction of the young prince. But there is reason to believe that Brandon, as a lad, did not spend so much time at court as has been generally stated, for his letters, phonetically spelt, in accordance with the fashion of his time, prove him to have spoken with a broad Suffolk accent; he must, therefore, have passed a good deal of his youth at Brandon, on the borders of Suffolk and Norfolk, where, according to tradition, he was born. His letters, although the worst written and spelt of his day, are full, too, of East Anglianisms, which could only have been picked up by a man in his position through contact, in boyhood, with yokels and country-folk in general.

Charles, who grew up to be a remarkably fine youth, tall and “wondrous powerful,” began life virtually as an attendant in the royal household, though, as already stated, in due time he became Henry’s principal favourite and confidant. When little over twenty, he distinguished himself in a sea-fight off Brest, and was sent by Wolsey to join Henry VIII in his adventurous campaign to Therouanne. At the famous battle of the Spurs, he proved himself as brave a soldier as he had already shown himself to be a doughty sailor; but for all this merit he can scarcely be described as an honest gentleman, especially where ladies are concerned, and his matrimonial adventures were not only strange and complicated, but also exceedingly characteristic of the times in which he lived. In 1505/6, Charles Brandon became betrothed,[14] per verba de præsenti, to a young lady of good family, Anne Browne, third daughter of Sir Anthony Binyon Browne, K.G., governor of Calais, and of his wife, the Lady Lucy Nevill, daughter and co-heiress of John Nevill, Marquis of Montagu, brother of the “Kingmaker,” Richard, Earl of Warwick. In 1506/7 this contract was set aside and the young gentleman married Margaret, the mature widow of Sir John Mortimer of Essex[15] (will proved, 1505). And now came trouble. The Lady Mortimer, née Nevill (probably rather a tedious companion for so youthful a husband), was none other than the aunt of his first fiancée, Anne Browne, her sister being the Lady Lucy Nevill, who, as stated above, was the wife of Sir Anthony Browne and mother of Anne. Brandon, therefore, probably with the aid of Henry VIII, about 1507, after having squandered a good deal of her fortune, induced the Archdeacon of London (in compliance with a papal bull) to declare his marriage with Lady Mortimer null and void, on the grounds that: Firstly, he and his wife were within the second and third degrees of affinity; secondly, that his wife and the lady to whom he was first betrothed (Anne Browne) were within the prohibited degrees of consanguinity—i.e. aunt and niece; thirdly, that he was cousin once removed to his wife’s former husband. After these proceedings, he married, or rather re-married, in 1508/11, in “full court,” and in the presence of a great gathering of relations and friends—and not secretly, as usually stated—the aforesaid Anne Browne, by whom he had two daughters, the eldest being born so soon after wedlock as to give rise to unpleasant gossip, probably started by Lady Mortimer. Anne, Lady Brandon, did not long survive her marriage, for she died in 1511/12; and in the following year (1513) her widower made a third attempt at matrimony, by a contract with his ward, the Lady Elizabeth Grey, suo jure Baroness Lisle, who, born in 1503/4, was only ten years of age; but the negotiations failed, though Brandon had been granted the viscounty of Lisle, which title he assumed (May 15, 1513). As this lady absolutely refused him, he surrendered the patent of the title of Lisle in favour of Arthur Plantagenet, illegitimate son of Edward IV and husband of Lady Elizabeth Lisle, the aunt and co-heiress of the young lady he had wished to make his bride, and who, being free, gave her hand to Courtenay, Earl of Devon, who presently became Marquis of Exeter. This above-mentioned aunt, the other Lady Elizabeth, had married, in 1495, Edmund Dudley, the notorious minister of Henry VII, and became, about 1502, mother of that John Dudley, Duke of Northumberland, who proved so fatal to Lady Jane Grey and her family.

Whilst he was still plodding through the labyrinth of his matrimonial difficulties, early in 1513, Charles Brandon was entrusted with a diplomatic mission to Flanders, to negotiate a marriage between Mary Tudor, the king’s youngest sister, and the young Archduke Charles of Austria, Infante of Spain, the most powerful and richest prince in Europe. On this occasion he displayed his majestic and graceful figure to such advantage in the tilt-yard, that the demonstrative expressions of admiration which escaped the proposed bridegroom’s aunt, Drayton’s “blooming duchess,” the most high and mighty Princess Margaret, Archduchess of Austria, dowager Duchess of Savoy, and daughter of the Emperor Maximilian, evoked sarcastic comment from the illustrious company.

On Brandon’s return, Henry VIII, probably with a view to facilitating a possible alliance between his favourite and the dowager of Savoy, to universal surprise and some indignation, created his “well-beloved Charles Brandon,” Duke of Suffolk, a title until quite recently held by the semi-regal, but dispossessed house of de la Pole,[16] and further presented him with the vast territorial apanage of that family, which included Westhorpe Hall, near Bury St. Edmunds; Donnington Castle, the inheritance of Chaucer’s granddaughter, the first Duchess of Suffolk; Wingfield Castle, in Suffolk; Rising Castle in Norfolk; and Lethering Butley in Herefordshire.[17]

In the summer of 1513, while the king was sojourning at Tournay, he received a visit from the Archduke Charles of Castile and Austria, and his aunt, the Dowager Duchess of Savoy, Regent of the Netherlands. These august personages came to congratulate the English monarch on the capture of Tournay from their mutual enemy, Louis XI of France. At this time the Austro-Spanish archduke still hoped to secure the hand of the King of England’s handsome sister, Mary Tudor, who had accompanied her brother to France. Henry did his best to ingratiate himself with the regent, a handsome lady with a foolish whimpering expression, who, if we may judge her by her portrait in the Museum at Brussels, was most apt to credit anything and everything that flattered her fancy. The king and his favourites, indeed, to amuse her, behaved less like gentlemen than mountebanks. Henry danced grotesquely before her and played on the giltrone, the lute and the cornet for her diversion, and his boon companions followed their master’s example and exhibited their accomplishments as dancers and musicians. The contemporary Chronicle of Calais contains a most amusing account of the way Henry and Charles made game of the poor dowager, who betrayed her too evident partiality for the latter. Brandon actually went so far on one occasion as to steal a ring from her finger; “and I took him to laugh,” says Margaret of Savoy, describing this incident,[18] “and said to him that he was un larron—a thief—and that I thought the king had with him led thieves out of his country. This word larron he could not understand.” So Henry had to be called in to explain it to him. His Majesty next contrived a sort of love-scene between the pair, in which he made Duchess Margaret a very laughing-stock, by inducing her to repeat after him in her broken English the most appalling improprieties, the princess being utterly ignorant of the meaning of the words she was parroting. To lead her on, Suffolk, who was not a good French scholar, made answer, at the king’s prompting, to the princess’s extraordinary declarations, in fairly respectable French. At last, however, the good lady realized the situation, and, rising in dudgeon, declared Brandon to be “no gentleman and no match for her,”[19] and thus he lost his chance, though he never lost, as we shall presently see, the great lady’s friendship.

[To face p. 20

HENRY VIII AT THE AGE OF 53

(From National Portrait Gallery)

This silly prank on the English king’s part was, no doubt, the final cause of the rupture of the proposed alliance between Mary Tudor and the Archduke Charles of Castile. Be this as it may, it was at Tournay that Mary was reported to have first fallen a victim to the blandishments of Suffolk, who, while fooling the regent, was covertly courting his dread patron’s sister. He flattered himself that the king, loving him so tenderly as a friend, would readily accept him as a brother-in-law. In this he was mistaken. Henry had other views for Princess Mary’s future; and no sooner was the Austro-Spanish match broken off,[20] thanks to certain political intrigues too lengthy and intricate to recapitulate here, than he set to work to arrange a marriage between Mary and King Louis XII,[21] who, although generally described as “old,” was at this time not more than fifty-three years of age. His appearance, however, was most forbidding; he suffered from the deformity of elephantiasis, and was scarred by some scorbutic disease, “as if with small-pox.”[22]

[CHAPTER II]

THE FRENCH MARRIAGE

The negotiations for this incongruous marriage, which united, for the first time since the Norman Conquest, a British princess to a French king, proceeded very slowly, for Henry knew well that his sister would reluctantly sacrifice her youth to so ugly and sickly a bridegroom: thus, according to the late Major Martin Hume, the first intimation of the proposal Mary received was not until after a tournament held at Westminster on May 14, 1514.

This tournament, in the open space between the ancient Palace and the Abbey, was magnificent in the extreme. Never before had there been seen in England so many silken banners, canopies, and tents of cloth of silver and gold. Queen Katherine of Aragon watched the tilting from a pavilion of crimson damask, embroidered with golden pomegranates, the emblems of her native country. Beside her sat Princess Mary, a pink-and-white beauty, with hair of amazing length shimmering down her back, and held in position by a band of jewels that encircled her graceful head. Behind the princess many great ladies occupied the roomy chairs of state—the Countess of Westmorland and her lovely Nevill daughters, the Lady Paulet, the Lady of Exeter, the Lady de Mowbray, the Duchess of Norfolk, the Lady Elizabeth Boleyn, sister of the Duke of Norfolk and mother of the future Queen Anne, the “old Lady” of Oxford, and the Princess Margaret Plantagenet, that fated Countess of Salisbury who in after years was hacked to death by order of her most affectionate nephew, King Henry VIII, now in the full bloom of early manhood. There was a great nodding of glittering hoods and rustling of silken gowns, and whispering and tittering amongst this bevy of high and mighty dames, unto whom many a gallant knight and lordly sire conveyed his homage and the latest gossip of the day. Over the multi-coloured crowd fell the golden haze of a lovely October afternoon. Farther away from the throng of lords and ladies, the hearty citizens of London pressed against the barriers, whilst rich burghers, and British and foreign merchants, with their wives and daughters, filled the special seats allotted to them, that commanded a finer view of the towers of Westminster than did the richer canopies of the court folk. Itinerant vendors of sweetmeats, apples, nuts and cakes, hawked their wares up and down the free spaces, whilst ballad-mongers sang—or rather shouted—their ditties, just as their descendants do, whenever there is a show of sport or pastime in our own day. Men and maidens cheered lustily as knight after knight, armed cap-à-pie, pranced his steed before the delighted spectators, even as we parade our horses before the race at Epsom, Sandown or Ascot.

The expressed hope was, of course, that the English knights should vanquish the French noble prisoners who had been set at liberty shortly before the tilt, so that they might join in the sport. The champions among them were the Duc de Longueville and the Sire de Clermont. The trumpets sounded, a hush fell upon the noisy gathering, all eyes were turned in one direction, as two stalwart champions entered the lists. They were garbed as hermits, the one in a black satin cloak with a hood, the other in a white one. With all the punctilious observance demanded by established rule and etiquette, these hermits, who rode mighty chargers caparisoned in silver mail, advanced towards the royal pavilion and made obeisance. On a sudden, off fell their cloaks and hoods, to reveal the two handsomest men in Europe, to boot, Henry, King of England, and Charles, Duke of Suffolk, clad from head to foot in silver armour, damascened in gold by Venetian armourers. Long white plumes flowed from the crests of their gilded helmets. Behind the British champions rode two other fine fellows, bearing standards on which figured in golden letters the motto: “Who can hold that will away?” On reading this motto, the fair bent, the one to the other, to discuss its meaning. Did it refer to the young King of Castile and Flanders; or to the fact that Charles Brandon, as it was whispered about, was venturing to raise his eyes so high as to meet those of the Emperor Maximilian’s daughter, Margaret of Austria? It was said, too, that the Lady Mary, the king’s sister, liked not the motto; for even then she had conceived a wild though secret passion for the splendid son of a Suffolk squire.

The English (God and St. George be praised!) won the day; the Duc de Longueville was defeated “right honourably,” and so, too, was the Sire de Clermont. The silken kerchief, the gilded cup and the wreath of laurel were for Charles Brandon; and the princess, the Beauty Queen of the day, presented them to him as he knelt before her. Katherine of Aragon bestowed the second prize, a cup of gold, on her husband, who had vanquished Clermont.

Immediately after the jousts, Mary Tudor learnt, to her exasperation, that her hand was destined, not for the Spanish prince, the future Emperor Charles V, nor for the Suffolk gentleman, but for the decrepit and doomed King of France. She was too much of a Tudor to accept her fate with meekness, and King Henry soon found he had set himself a difficult task to conciliate his sister, and obtain her consent to what was even then considered a monstrous match. She swore she would not marry his French majesty, unless her brother gave her his solemn promise that she should marry whom she listed when she became a widow. The king answered that, by God! she might do as she listed, if only she pleased him this time. He urged that King Louis was prematurely aged, and not likely, so he had been told, to live many months. Besides, he was passing rich, and the princess would have more diamonds, pearls and rubies than she had hairs on her head. Henry even appealed to her patriotism. England needed peace; the prolonged wars between France and England had exhausted both, and it was deemed advisable that the French should be made to understand, by this happy event, that the enmity which had existed so long had ceased at last. It was to be a thorough entente cordiale on both sides. None the less, when they got to know of it, both the English and the French cracked many an indelicate jest over this unnatural alliance. The bride, it will be remembered, was still in her teens, and beautiful: the bridegroom-elect was fifty-three and looked twenty years older, the most disfiguring of his complication of loathsome diseases being, as we have seen, elephantiasis, which had swollen his face and head so enormously that when, on her arrival in France, Mary first beheld her future consort, she drew back, with an unconcealed cry of horror. For some days Mary seemed obdurate, despite Henry’s promise that, on the death of the French king, she might marry whom she listed. But at last she allowed her brother’s persuasive arguments to prevail, so that, dazzled by the prospect of becoming the richest and grandest princess in Europe, she finally, but reluctantly, consented to marry King Louis.

The “treaty of marriage” between Louis XII and Mary Tudor was signed at London by the representatives of both parties on August 7 (1514); and the marriage by proxy, according to the custom of the time, took place in the Grey Friars’ Church at Greenwich, before Henry VIII, Katherine of Aragon, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk, the Bishops of Winchester and Durham, and others, on August 13. The recently liberated Duc de Longueville represented the French king, whereas the Duke of Orleans gave the bride the ring; afterwards the primate pronounced a brief panegyric of the young queen’s virtues, and those of her august spouse, whom he described as the best and greatest prince in Europe.

The bride left England’s shores on October 2, after a tearful leave-taking of her brother and sister-in-law, King Henry and Queen Katherine. The chronicles of those far-off times, ever delighting in giving the minutest details, inform us that she was “terrible sea-sick” before she arrived at Boulogne, where a pious pageant had been prepared to greet her. Above the drawbridge of the port, suspended in mid-air, was a ship, painted with garlands of the roses of England mingled with the fleur-de-lys of France, and bearing the inscription, Un Dieu, Un Roy, Une Foy, Une Loy: “One God, One King, One Faith, One Law.” In this ship stood a young girl—“dressed like the Virgin Mary,” as the chronicler tells us—together with two winged children, supposed to be angels. The young lady represented Notre Dame de Boulogne, the patroness of the city, and bore the civic gift, destined for the princess, consisting of a silver swan, whose neck opened, to disclose a golden heart weighing sixty écus. So violently raged the storm, that the heavy vessel, instead of riding gracefully into the harbour, stuck on a sandbank, and the future Queen of France, dripping with sea-water, had to be carried ashore by Sir Christopher Gervase. On reaching land, she was met by the Heir Presumptive of her new dominions, François, Duc de Valois, the Dukes of Alençon and Bourbon, and the Counts de Vendôme, de Saint-Pol, and de Guise, supported by the Abbots of Notre Dame and of St. Wulmer, accompanied by their monks wearing copes, and bearing, enclosed in gold and silver shrines, all the relics from their respective churches. In the presence of this goodly company, the ship containing the aforesaid representative of Our Lady of Boulogne was lowered to the ground, and the young lady addressed the princess “en rhétoricque,” otherwise French verse, welcoming her to Boulogne, and presenting her with the city’s gift. Mary then proceeded to the Church of Notre Dame, and after praying there awhile, she was, so says our chronicler, “agreeably occupied in admiring all the rich and royal offerings that formed the principal attraction of the Church.” And gorgeous and wonderful indeed must it have been, before the vandal greed of King Henry’s troops had sacked the shrine. The Treasury contained nearly a hundred gold and silver reliquaries, eighteen great silver images, most of them containing relics, “eleven hearts and a great number of arms and legs, both in gold and silver” (votive offerings), twenty dresses and twelve mantles of very precious stuffs, “for the use of the holy Image.” The altar of the Blessed Virgin was especially magnificent. Seven lamps, four in silver and the rest of gold, burnt incessantly before the Madonna, who held in one hand a golden heart, whilst the other supported a figure of the Infant Jesus, who clasped in His chubby hand a bouquet of “golden flowers,” amongst which was “a carbuncle of a prodigious bigness”; the pillars and columns round this altar were sheathed in “blades of silver”: “in short,” says the chronicler, “everything which was in this chapel could challenge comparison with the richest and most renowned objects that antiquity ever had.” Such was the splendour that enchanted and bewildered our Princess Mary, who after offering to Our Lady of Boulogne a gift consisting of “a great arm of silver, enamelled with the arms of France and England, and weighing eight marcs,” proceeded on her way to Abbeville, near which city she was met, in the forest of Ardres, by King Louis, mounted on a charger and attended by a glittering train of lords and attendants.

To the young and beautiful Mary, who had only just recovered from a violent sea-sickness, this first meeting with her future lord and master must indeed have been painful. As she afterwards admitted, she had never before seen a human being so horribly ugly. It is not therefore to be wondered at that she should have uttered the exclamation of horror above mentioned. King Louis, for his part, was in the best of humours; never merrier. He was very plainly dressed, and was evidently bent on correcting, by his munificence and good temper, whatever unfavourable impression might be created by his unfortunate appearance. Before arriving at the place of meeting, Princess Mary had changed her travelling gown for a weighty robe covered with goldsmith’s work “like unto a suit of armour.” So awkward and stiff was this costume, that when the princess, in accordance with etiquette, attempted to descend from her litter to bend the knee before her royal spouse, she found she was unable to do so, and was in great distress until the deformed king gallantly begged her not to attempt so complicated a manœuvre, and won a grateful smile from his embarrassed bride.

The marriage took place on Monday, October 9 (1514), at Abbeville, in the fine old Church of St. Wolfran, and is one of the most gorgeous functions recorded of those pageant-loving times. Something mysterious must have happened at Abbeville, for, according to the Bishop of Asti, the marriage was consummated by proxy—a weird ceremony in which the Marquis de Rothelin (representing King Louis), fully dressed in a red suit, except for one stocking, hopped into the bride’s bed and touched her with his naked leg; and the “marriage was then declared consummated.” Possibly, considering the rickety state of his health, this was all the married life, in its more intimate form, that, fortunately, Mary Tudor ever knew so long as Louis XII lived. As an earnest of his affection, however, the sickly king presented his spouse with a collection of jewels a few days after the marriage, amongst these being “a ruby almost two inches long and valued at ten thousand marks.”

In the meantime, there had been some unpleasantness between the French monarch and the Earl of Worcester, the English ambassador, about the presence in France of one of the queen’s maids, Mistress Joan Popincourt. The question of her fitness to accompany the princess was first raised before Mary left our shores, to reach its culminating point whilst the new queen was resting at Boulogne, at which time King Louis (then at Abbeville) had an interview with Worcester on the subject. The trouble is said to have originated in the fact that Mistress Popincourt had behaved herself with considerable impropriety,—at least that was the accusation the English envoy laid before his majesty of France; but if we read between the lines of the letters and documents connected with this side-plot, we learn that it was Mistress Popincourt who had first attempted to negotiate the marriage of her mistress with King Louis by means of the Duc de Longueville, whilst that nobleman was still imprisoned in the Tower of London. As the negotiations had succeeded, even through another medium, she considered herself entitled to some recompense for her share in the affair, and probably attempted to blackmail the king; at any rate, for one reason or another, he was so furious with her, that on the occasion in question, he told Worcester never to “name her any more unto me.” “I would she were burnt,” he added; “if King Henry make her to be burnt, he shall do but well and a good deed!” Mary, however, held the recalcitrant Popincourt in the highest esteem. None the less, King Louis decided that she should be there and then sent back to England, but whether with a goodly recompense to soothe her disappointment is not recorded. Maybe she, who had done so much to further the royal match, found herself better off than the other unfortunate attendants on Princess Mary, who, being dismissed after her arrival at Abbeville, were stranded, penniless. Some of these misguided ladies had, says Hall, “been at much expense to wait on her [Princess Mary] to France, and now returned destitute, which many took to heart, insomuch some died by the way returning, and some fell mad.”[23]

Evidently King Louis was determined not to have too many Englishwomen in attendance upon his wife, or, as he put it, “to spy upon his actions,” for fresh difficulties arose, even after the Popincourt incident was closed, and he and the princess had been united in matrimony. According to arrangement, certain of the queen’s ladies were to return to England forthwith, but King Louis and his English monitor, the Duke of Norfolk, settled the matter by ordering that all Mary’s train of young English gentlewomen and maidens, with the exception of the Lady Anne Boleyn[24] and of three others, were to return home. This was bad enough, but Mary was still more distressed to find that her confidential attendant and nurse, Mother Guildford, was very unceremoniously packed off with the rest. “Moder” or “Mowder” Guildford, as the queen was pleased to call her, was the wife of Sir William Guildford, controller of the royal household, who eventually stood godfather to that unfortunate Guildford Dudley who became the husband of Lady Jane Grey. If we may believe King Louis, he had certainly some justification for wishing Lady Guildford out of his sight, since she exasperated him to such an extent that he told Worcester that “rather than have such a woman about my wife, I would liever be without a wife.... Also, “he continued, “I am a sickly body, and not at all times that I would be merry with my wife like I to have any strange woman with her, but one that I am well acquainted with, afore whom I durst be merry.” The king went on to pathetically relate the story of his own and his wife’s sufferings under Lady Guildford’s iron rule. “For as soon as she came on land,” says he, “and also when I was married, Lady Guildford began to take upon her not only to rule the queen, but also that she should not come to me, but she should remain with her, nor that no lady or lord should speak with the queen but she [Lady Guildford] hear it. Withal she began to set a murmur and banding among the ladies of the French court.” The “Moder” Guildford episode induced Mary to write several letters home, one to Henry VIII and another to Wolsey, complaining of the treatment she had received with respect to the dismissal of her attendants. In these she speaks in no measured terms of the Duke of Norfolk, who, as we have seen, had the matter in hand: “I would to God,” she exclaims in the letter to Henry VIII, “that my Lord of York [Wolsey] had come with me instead of Norfolk, for then I am sure I should not have been left as I am now!” In fact, she cast the whole blame of the incident on the shoulders of the Duke of Norfolk, whom she ever afterwards disliked for his share in it. Nevertheless, “Mowder” Guildford was sent back to England, to the great distress and grief of her royal mistress, who was preparing to have a violent scene on the subject with her rickety husband, when the latter came into her chamber, accompanied by two attendants bearing a tray so heaped with rubies, diamonds and pearls, that the cloud of anger instantly passed from the queen’s brow, and her sunny smiles beamed afresh, when she heard the politic and courteous monarch say, “I have deprived you of one treasure, let me now present you with another.” And then he placed a collar of immense pearls round her neck, and taking a heap of jewels in his big hands, dropped them into her lap. “I will have no Guildfords, Popincourts, or other jades to mar my cheer or to stand betwixt me and my wife,” he continued laughingly; “but I intend to be paid for my jewels, and each kiss my wife gives me shall cost me a gem.” On this the covetous Mary kissed him several times, to the number of eight, which he counted, and punctually repaid by giving her eight enamelled buttons surrounded by large pearls. By this amorous playfulness, the astute Louis succeeded in making his queen so contented with her lot, that she presently told Worcester that “finding she was now able to do as she liked in all things,” she thought she was better without Lady Guildford, and would decline to have her back again in France. Mary not only forgave King Louis his share in the business, but personally nursed him through an attack of gout, which beset him at Abbeville, and delayed the royal departure from that town until October 31, when the quaint cavalcade resumed its journey towards St. Denis.

It was one continuous pageant in every village and town through which the royal cortège passed, between Abbeville and St. Denis. Even in villages and hamlets, children dressed as angels, with golden wings, met the fair queen, to present to her pretty gifts of fruit and flowers. It took the king and queen and their escort six days to reach St. Denis, spending the nights either in episcopal palaces or in the splendid abbeys which lined the way. Although the French greeted the queen heartily, it was noticed that they “became overcast and sour” as they looked on the magnificent but defiant figure of the Duke of Suffolk, as he rode, in his silver armour, on the right side of the queen’s litter, whilst on the left cantered that stalwart nobleman, Thomas Grey, first Marquis of Dorset, who was destined by a curious and unexpected event to become the grandfather of Her Majesty’s ill-fated grandchildren, the Ladies Jane, Katherine and Mary Grey. At last, early in the morning of Sunday, November 5, the English princess passed up the splendid nave of St. Denis, escorted by all that was highest and mightiest in French chivalry. The Duc de Longueville, the Duc d’Alençon, the Duke of Albany, Regent of Scotland, the Duke of Bourbon, and the Count de Vendôme, preceded her, bearing between them the regalia. Mary followed, escorted by the Duke of Valois, and clothed in a mantle of cloth of gold. She wore such a prodigious quantity of jewels that a number of them had to be removed in the sacristy before she was able to proceed with the innumerable ceremonies of the day. The new queen was anointed by the Cardinal de Pré, who also presented her with the sceptre and “verge of justice.” When, after more ceremony than prayer, the cardinal had placed the crown of France upon her brow, Prince Francis of Valois led Her Majesty to a throne raised high above the choir, whence in solitary state she glanced down upon the throng of prelates, priests and noblemen and noblewomen who crowded the chancel and the altar-steps, and overflowed into the nave and transepts. There she sat alone, for weak and sickly King Louis could do no more than witness the coronation, contenting himself by obtaining a view of it from a small closet window above the high altar.

The following day, at noon, Queen Mary passed on to Paris, whither King Louis had preceded her earlier in the morning. On this occasion she did not occupy a litter, but rode by herself in a species of carriage designated “a chaise or chair,” embellished with cloth of gold, and drawn by two milk-white horses with silver reins and harness. Her Majesty, all in white and gold, did not wear the crown of France, but merely a diadem of pearls, from beneath which streamed her luxuriant tresses. Pressing round the queen’s chariot, rode the pick of the nobility of France, followed by the Scotch Guard and a detachment of German mercenaries. Pageants and allegories greeted the royal progress at every turn. When close to Paris, the queen’s train was met by three thousand Parisian students, law officers and representatives of the city council, who chanted in chorus a quaint song, still extant, in which Mary is likened to the Queen of Sheba and Louis XII to King Solomon. Over the portcullis of the Porte St. Denis was erected a ship, containing “mountebanks” representing Henry VIII in the character of Honour, and Princess Mary as Ceres, whilst an actor, wearing King Louis’s own gorgeous robes, offered “Ceres” a bunch of grapes, and was popularly held to personate Bacchus!

In the midst of what we should now consider a circus-like cavalcade, the queen, escorted by a thousand horsemen bearing flaring torches, passed round the quays of Paris, brilliantly illuminated for the occasion, to her resting-place at the Conciergerie, where, we are informed, she was so dead tired that, after the official reception by King Louis and subsequent banquet, she fell asleep and had to be carried to her nuptial chamber. Here, so it is stated, King Louis did not receive her, since he was fast asleep already in his own bedchamber at the Louvre, whither he had retired many hours earlier. He was awake pretty early the next day, for at nine o’clock he breakfasted with the queen, having previously presented her with a bouquet of gems, the flowers being made of coloured stones and the leaves of emeralds. The king never left his bride the whole of that day, and it was observed that whenever he gazed upon her, he would put his hand to his heart and heave a deep sigh. Nothing can be imagined more ludicrous, and at the same time more pathetic, than the ardour of this poor, hopelessly love-sick monarch for his beautiful wife, who, thorough Tudor as she was, never missed an opportunity of fleecing him of jewels and trinkets, to such an extent as at last to excite the indignation of the court.

The coronation festivities closed with jousts in which “my lorde à Sofehoke,” as the Marquis of Dorset calls him in a letter,[25] got “a little hurt in the hand.” In this same epistle the marquis adds that King Louis considered that Suffolk and his English company “dyd shame aule (all) Franse.” They did such execution indeed that, as the chroniclers complacently remark, “at every course many dead were carried off without notice taken.” The exasperation of the French against Suffolk grew so great—or was it due, as tradition suggests, to Francis of Valois’s personal jealousy of the British duke?—that they commissioned, contrary to all etiquette of tourney, an abnormally powerful German trooper to kill him by treachery in the lists. Suffolk, however, saw through the mean trick, and refusing to treat such a ruffian according to chivalric rules, gripped him by the scruff of the neck, and punched his head with much heartiness, to the ill-concealed satisfaction of the spectators.

It does not require much imagination to divine what were the thoughts of the lusty young queen, as she watched the prowess of her triumphant lover in the tilt-yard, and mentally contrasted his manly beauty with the wreck that was her husband, who lay on a couch at her side, “grunting and groaning.” He, poor man, was ever graciously courteous, and expressed his delight whenever, in her enthusiasm, the lovely queen, regardless of etiquette, rose to her feet and leant over to applaud the British champions as they rode by her canopy of state. “Ma mie,” cried old Louis, “your eyes brighten like stars when the English succeed. I shall be jealous.” “Fie!” returned the queen with an arch smile, “surely there is no chance for the French today, since, fortunately for my countrymen, your majesty is too unwell to join in the fray?”

When the queen rose to return to the palace, the whole crowd burst into a storm of cheering, crying: “Vive la Reine anglaise!” Mary’s beauty was not the beauty of regularity of feature so often found in France, but of that rarer sort, peculiar to northerly regions, the beauty of the glorious colouring of the blended Tudor and Lancaster roses; so that when the queen pressed forward to the gorgeously decorated balustrade and kissed her hands to the people, the enthusiasm of ses bons Parisiens passed all bounds; and Mary Tudor’s tact and grace won all hearts, when she insisted that the king should lean upon her arm to descend the stairway. Louise of Savoy, jealously noting all these things, said to herself: “Elle ira loin, celle-là”; and forthwith endeavoured to set her son, Francis of Valois, against the young queen, whereby she only fanned his rising passion for her. If Queen Mary Tudor had managed in a few hours to captivate the Parisians, she failed to make a favourable impression upon the court of France. Her free and easy manner, her good nature, her pleasant smiles, and, above all, her astounding love of jewelry, were well calculated to stimulate jealousy and hatred. The game against her now began in earnest. Its object was to abstract the king from her influence. But Mary was a Tudor, and went ahead steadfastly, regardless of intrigues, quips and frowns; and by a sheer display of good nature and the firm obstinacy peculiar to her race, succeeded in defeating her enemies, and having all things her own way. Possibly, in her heart of hearts, she rejoiced to think that she had an opportunity of amassing great wealth by very easy means, and was buoyed up by her secret passion for the Duke of Suffolk, and the knowledge that, with a little patience, she would be able to claim him from her brother as a pledge of her good behaviour whilst occupying the difficult position of Queen of France.

Mary, notwithstanding her overwhelming passion for Suffolk, was by far the most amiable and respectable member of the Tudor family; she behaved with the utmost propriety while Queen of France, and her kindness to her infirm husband filled him with a hopeless but chivalrous passion, of which he gave practical expression by a boundless generosity[26] that excited the jealousy of the rest of the French royal family and imperilled the safety of his greedy queen.

King Louis XII died on New Year’s Day 1515, less than four months after his marriage, and his widow immediately retired to the Hôtel de Cluny[27] to spend the first weeks of her widowhood in the rigorous seclusion imposed by the etiquette of the French court. She was obliged, according to custom, to dress herself entirely in white, and to remain the whole day long in a bed of state, draped with black velvet. The room was darkened, and only lighted with tapers of unbleached wax, whilst all the queen’s meals were served on silver platters covered with black silk cloths and serviettes.

In the meantime, Louise of Savoy, mother of the new king, Francis I, a most intriguing princess, began to agitate for the return of the youthful dowager to England. She had made up her mind that Mary should not wed the Archduke Charles of Austria-Spain, who again came forward as a suitor, nor yet encourage the attentions of her own son, who had practically deserted his consort, Claude, daughter of the late king by his second wife, Anne of Brittany. The court astrologers had persuaded Francis that before many weeks were over, good Queen Claude, of greengage fame,[28] stout, short, and very plain, would die, and that, as he was soon to become a widower, he might just as well begin his courtship at once. The duchess-mother, well versed in the laxity of the age in which she lived, was terribly afraid Francis might attempt to set aside his wife, in order to marry the English widow, in which event Claude’s rich heritage, the duchy of Brittany, would pass from the French Crown. She therefore resolved to get rid of Mary Tudor, a resolution strengthened by her well-founded conviction that even in the early days of her mourning, Francis I had intruded into the widow’s presence. At her first secret interview with the new king, Mary told him plainly that her heart already belonged to Suffolk, and that she “was resolved to marry none other.” She even reminded Francis of his own neglected consort, and he, instead of resenting this rebuff, promised to exert his influence to obtain Henry VIII’s consent to Mary’s union with her lover.

[CHAPTER III]

CLOTH OF FRIEZE WEDS CLOTH OF GOLD

Henry VIII was accused, at the time, of having sent Suffolk as special ambassador, on the death of King Louis, in order to lure his sister back to England, with the object, as soon as he had her in his power, of re-opening negotiations for her marriage with the Archduke Charles of Castile.[29] If this was the case, he little understood his sister’s character, for in her first interview with Suffolk she gave him to understand that she “would not land in her brother’s dominions except as his [Suffolk’s] bride.” According to the French contemporary historian Daniel,[30] she even declared: “If you do not court and wed me within four days I will not hold you for much of a man, and will stay abroad.” The duke, much alarmed, remonstrated with her, objecting that so exalted an alliance might lead to his ruin both in France and England, seeing he was but “base born”; and, he might have added, already married to no less than two wives, both still living. The young dowager of France, however, reminded him that “when she married King Louis she had made it a condition that on becoming a widow she was to have full liberty to marry whom she chose, and she chose to marry none other than himself.” Whereupon Suffolk, as he subsequently informed his master, “could but obey”; and, to use his homely expression, “she and I were married.”[31]

[To face p. 50

CHARLES BRANDON, DUKE OF SUFFOLK, AND MARY TUDOR, TAKEN TOGETHER

(From an engraving, by Vertue, of the original portrait by Mabuse)

Louise of Savoy’s spies soon informed her that Mary and Suffolk were in constant communication with each other, and she was even informed that the duke had been seen leaving her apartment at questionable hours. Seizing a favourable opportunity when she knew the lovers to be together, the duchess threw open the door of the queen’s closet and, it seems, discovered Her Majesty and her lover in so compromising a situation, that “she ordered the startled couple into the chapel and then and there had them married by a priest who chanced to be saying Mass.” When Francis heard the wedding was well over, he did all in his power to propitiate his “dearly beloved brother Henry VIII.” He was not very successful, however, and Mary and her husband had to spend some weeks of terrible suspense, during which an astounding correspondence was kept up between them, Henry VIII, and Wolsey,[32] one of Mary’s staunchest friends, who consistently took her part. Most of Suffolk’s letters are undated, and written in an almost illegible hand. Their tone is honest enough, but he takes good care not to allude to the fact that he had two wives living. In one missive, of a particularly confidential sort, he expresses fear that this royal marriage may ruin him; and adds: “My Lord, as the reverence of God, help that I may be married as I go out of France openly for many things of which I will advertise you.” The queen’s handwriting in her numerous letters to her brother and to the cardinal varies much, apparently according to the state of her nerves. In some of them her hand has evidently trembled, so as to render her calligraphy almost illegible, and this is notably the case in a document which settled her business to her own satisfaction and most certainly to that of her greedy brother. As we have seen, King Louis had been very lavish with gifts of gold and silver plate, and above all jewelry, including even the celebrated “Star of Naples” (Stella di Napoli),[33] a diamond of abnormal size and brilliance, which Charles VIII had filched from Ferrante of Naples, when he paid his unwelcome visit to Italy in 1498. These glittering baubles, valued in those days at the enormous sum of £200,000, equal to over £1,000,000 of present currency, together with her rich dower, Mary freely handed over to Henry VIII, on condition that he recognized her marriage with her worthless, though handsome, husband and forgave them both. The deed of gift[34] whereby the queen yields up all her treasures to Henry VIII, is preserved in the Cottonían Collection in the King’s Library of the British Museum. When Francis I learnt that she had parted with the “Star of Naples” he waxed exceeding wroth and attempted to repossess himself of it. If Duchess Louise, who at this time ruled her son, had not been in such a hurry to get rid of the queen dowager, this affair of the Neapolitan diamond might have cost Mary dear. Out of France, however, it was necessary that she should go, and the sooner the better; so she was allowed to depart in peace, with all her valuables, which, shortly after her arrival in England, were duly handed over to the king, her brother.[35]

Henry was so well pleased with the treasure she brought him that he received his sister at Greenwich Palace with effusion, and was ostentatiously civil to Suffolk. On May 13, 1515, the Queen Dowager of France and Charles Brandon were re-married publicly in Grey Friars’ Church, Greenwich, the ceremony being performed by the Archbishop of Canterbury and graced by the presence of King Henry and Katherine of Aragon. The wedding was followed by a magnificent banquet, the plan for the arrangement of the table for which still exists. This plan proves that in those days ladies and gentlemen were seated alternately, according to their precedence, precisely as at a modern dinner-party. In honour of these unequal nuptials, elaborate jousts and tournaments were held, in which the bridegroom, and Thomas, Marquis of Dorset, Lady Jane’s other grandfather, won great applause and many prizes. A number of bridal portraits, intended as gifts to friends, were painted on this occasion. These depict Mary Tudor as a broad-faced woman, with an evidently dazzling complexion, small eyes, golden hair, and a firm but rather sensual mouth. At the Historical Exhibition held in the New Gallery in 1902, the writer was particularly struck by the remarkable resemblance between the disputed likeness of Jane Grey, preserved at Althorp, and the small portrait of her grandmother, Mary Tudor, attributed to Holbein, now in His Majesty’s collection at Windsor Castle. Mary has the same broad face with small features as Jane Grey. Her expression is pleasing[36] and bears a strong resemblance to the earlier likenesses of Henry VIII. In the Windsor picture the queen-duchess holds a globe in the shape of an artichoke, above which, in the left corner of the portrait, appear some lines, said to have been composed by the Duke of Suffolk for the occasion:—

“Cloth of gold, do not despise,
Though thou hast wedded cloth of frieze.
Cloth of frieze, be not too bold,
Though thou hast wedded cloth of gold.”

The attitude assumed by Cardinal Wolsey in the affair of Charles Brandon’s royal marriage was friendly enough both to bride and bridegroom, although in the course of the correspondence which preceded the wedding, he reminded Suffolk, in very straightforward fashion, of his “cloth-of-frieze” origin. There was some mysterious connection between the cardinal and Charles Brandon: it seems, indeed, that Henry VIII had conceived the sinister project of ridding himself of his brother-in-law on some trumped-up charge of treason, once he had possessed himself of her treasure. Apparently Wolsey saved Brandon’s life at that time, of which fact he reminded him some years later. Suffolk was one of the judges at Queen Katherine’s trial (1529), and, being exasperated one day by the way in which Wolsey constantly impeded the king’s desire to close the matter at once without appealing to Rome, he struck the table, exclaiming loudly that “they had never been merry in England since a cardinal came amongst them.” Rising to his feet, Wolsey replied with the utmost dignity: “Sir, of all men within this realm, ye have the least cause to dispraise or be offended with cardinals, for, but for me, simple cardinal as I am, you at this moment would have had no head upon your shoulders, and therefore no tongue to make so rude a report against me. You know what friendship ye have received at my hand, and which never before this time have I revealed to any one alive, either to my own glory or to your dishonour.” Suffolk, who well knew the circumstance to which the cardinal alluded, rose abruptly,[37] and, abashed, left the council chamber.

Wolsey evidently hinted at some matter connected with Brandon’s weird matrimonial adventures already related; or else to the fact that he had saved him from the clutches of his brother-in-law for some imprudence history has not revealed.

After her return to England, Mary Tudor regained her royal position, and for a brief time she lived in considerable state at Suffolk’s house on his Southwark estate. A year or two ago, a fair Tudor archway and a few other remains of this fine mansion were discovered during the erection of some model school-houses. Suffolk Court, as it was called, had two parks, one of which stretched down to the bank of the Thames; and in the extensive gardens there was a maze, or labyrinth, similar to the one at Hampton Court. A street in the neighbourhood is still known as Suffolk Street, though probably not one of its inhabitants is aware that it marks the site of a princely residence. The Duke of Suffolk had yet another dwelling in London, situated at the top of the Strand: it was built in 1539 on a site occupied in our day by Northumberland Avenue. He and his royal consort frequently lived here, and probably used it as their winter residence. They occasionally rented Stepney Palace from the bishops of London, and some of Mary’s letters are dated thence.

At Suffolk Court, about eighteen months after her marriage, Mary gave birth to a son, to whom Henry VIII stood godfather, the christening being attended by the king and queen. Some time after his birth, the infant was taken to Bridewell Palace, where Henry raised him to the rank of Earl of Lincoln. At Suffolk Court the queen-duchess received and entertained the Emperor Charles V, when he visited England to be betrothed to the young Princess Mary. Notwithstanding her mésalliance, the Duchess of Suffolk was treated as the second lady in the realm, precedence immediately after the queen being accorded to her at all State functions, notably during the great reception given to Charles V at Canterbury (1518), and, later, at that unparalleled pageant, the Field of the Cloth of Gold, at which she figured both as dowager Queen of France and as a princess of the blood royal and a duchess.

In March 1517 Mary and her husband accompanied Katherine of Aragon on a pilgrimage to Walsingham Priory. Three months later, the duchess returned to London to entertain her sister, Margaret of Scotland, whom she had not seen since childhood; on this occasion Suffolk won splendid success in a tournament before the king and the then queen. Later in the same month, Brandon and his wife were at Bishops Hatfield, where, on July 16, was born the Lady Frances, “who was mother to the Lady Jane Grey.”[38] The queen-duchess, it appears, was suddenly taken ill on her way from London to Suffolk, and had perforce to ask the hospitality of the Bishop of Ely, to whom Hatfield Palace in those days belonged. Some years later it was confiscated by Henry VIII and converted into a royal residence.

A very elaborate account of the manner in which the parish church at Hatfield was decorated “with cloth of gold and garlands of evergreen,” on the occasion of the baptism of the said Lady Frances, is still extant. The sponsors were Queen Katherine and the young Princess Mary, who were represented by proxy, the queen by the Lady Anne Boleyn[39] and the princess by the Lady Elizabeth Grey. The Abbot of St. Albans was godfather, and there was an abundant distribution of viands, cakes, and wine, to the parishioners, rich and poor alike.

In 1524 the queen-duchess gave birth to her second daughter, the Lady Eleanor, who in due time became Countess of Cumberland.

All this long while, Brandon’s discarded wife, the Lady Mortimer, nursed her grievance (which she held to be supported by an ecclesiastical dispensation in her possession) against the Duke of Suffolk, so that, justly incensed as she was at his marriage with the ex-queen of France, she endeavoured to force him to recognize her as his legitimate wife; which he steadfastly refused to do. Possibly, in a sense, she blackmailed him, knowing full well the parlous position in which he had placed himself. Some time in 1524, therefore, just before the birth of the Lady Eleanor, Lady Mortimer must have clamoured so loudly for the return of her recalcitrant husband to his conjugal duties, as to make herself very unpleasant, for Brandon was once more fain to have recourse to the law to obtain an official absolute dissolution of his connection with her. He appealed to the ecclesiastical and to the civil courts, and received a favourable verdict from both, the marriage between himself and the Lady Mortimer being declared null and void. This decision, however, did not satisfy Wolsey as a sufficient protection for the queen and her children against the humiliating aspersions persistently cast on them by Lady Mortimer and her friends. In 1528 a mission, headed by Stephen Gardiner and Edward Fox, was sent to Orvieto, where Clement VII was then residing,[40] with the object of inducing His Holiness to despatch Cardinal Campeggio to England to represent the pope on the Commission for the matter of the divorce of Queen Katherine of Aragon. Wolsey availed himself of this mission to forward an account, written by Suffolk and endorsed by himself, of the reasons why the duke petitioned the Pontiff for the dissolution of his marriage with the Lady Mortimer. In this document Suffolk declared that, “although a lapse of time had passed, instead of diminishing, it only increased his crime, and hence his seeking this divorce from a woman with whom he was too closely allied.” Clement, after due investigation, and on the strength of Wolsey’s assurance, issued a bull dissolving the marriage with Lady Mortimer, and declaring the children of Anne Browne, alias Brandon, the second wife, legitimate. This bull, dated Orvieto, May 12, 1528, was not, however, published in England until August of the following year, when Bishop Nix of Norwich read it from the pulpit of his cathedral, to a no doubt highly interested and gossiping congregation. This successful appeal to Rome apparently settled the matter, even in the eyes of Lady Mortimer herself, for she presently took a third husband,[41] Robert Horn, Esq., with whom she lived in peace for the rest of her life, which, however, was not long, for the invaluable Baronagium informs us that she died before the marriage of Suffolk’s second daughter, the Lady Eleanor Brandon, which took place in 1537.

[To face p. 62

LADY MONTEAGLE
(Younger daughter of Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk)

(From an engraving after Holbein)

Anne and Mary, the two daughters of Brandon by his second wife, Anne Browne, became respectively Baroness Powis and Viscountess Monteagle. After her mother’s death, the first-named lady, in accordance with the custom of those days, was sent abroad for her education and placed in the household of Suffolk’s faithful friend, Margaret of Savoy, Governess of the Netherlands. Among the State Papers is a letter written by Suffolk, and dated May 13, 1515, in which he thanks the duchess for her kindness to his daughter Anne, and begs she will allow her to return to England “at the request of the queen dowager, my wife.” He sent Sir E. Guildford and Mr. William Woodale to escort the young lady home. Both Miss Strickland and Miss Green, in their respective lives of Mary Tudor, and Mr. Howard, in his Life of Jane Grey, state that Lady Powis, in the thirteenth year of Elizabeth, charged Frances, Duchess of Suffolk, and her sister Eleanor, Countess of Cumberland, with bastardy. This is an error, since an entry in Machyn’s Diary proves that Lady Powis died in 1557,[42] during the reign of Mary. That the affaire Mortimer was revived in the thirteenth year of Elizabeth is true, for among the State Papers we find documents relative to the matter; but it was probably put forward at the instigation of Elizabeth herself, merely as a test case, to settle, once and for all, the validity of the claims of the Ladies Katherine and Mary Grey and their heirs to the succession. The verdict then given confirmed the decision arrived at, forty-two years previously, and the document containing it is endorsed in Burleigh’s own hand.

Lady Monteagle,[43] Brandon’s second daughter, enjoyed the rare distinction of being limned by Holbein, and her portrait is one of the most magnificent in all the collection of drawings of the nobility of the court of Henry VIII, now in the possession of His Majesty the King. She is represented as an exceedingly handsome woman, and wears some fine pearl ornaments, one of them being a medallion in the shape of the letter “M,” composed of very large gems. There was some doubt, at one time, as to whether this particular portrait represented the first or second Lady Monteagle, but the fashion of the gown and the coif, in conjunction with the discovery of the exact date of Holbein’s death, settles the question beyond dispute, and in this drawing we have an undoubted presentment of Brandon’s younger daughter by his second wife.

In addition to his wives, Brandon had a notorious mistress, who bore him several children, one of whom, Sir Charles Brandon, had a son who was a celebrated jeweller in the reign of Elizabeth,[44] and who, some say, was the father of that Richard Brandon who is alleged to have beheaded Charles I.[45] These scandals and many others, of which we know little or nothing, though some are hinted at in the correspondence of the various ambassadors, no doubt affected the happiness of the queen-duchess, and account for the infrequency of her visits to London and her rare appearances at court functions.

[CHAPTER IV]

THE LAST DAYS OF SUFFOLK AND OF THE QUEEN-DUCHESS

Notwithstanding Mary Tudor’s exalted rank, her husband neglected her. The Chronicles and State Papers of the period frequently allude to this sad fact. The death of her only son, the young Earl of Lincoln, of the “sweating sickness,” which occurred in 1527, when he was only twelve years old, affected her health, so that she retired from London, and spent nearly all her time at Westhorpe Hall, a grand Tudor mansion near Bury St. Edmunds, which remained intact until the beginning of the last century, when it was pulled down to make room for the present ugly and uninteresting structure. The ancient furniture, some of which had evidently belonged to the queen-duchess, was sold in 1805, and amongst the other miscellaneous lots put up to auction was a lock of Mary Tudor’s fair hair, which was purchased by a Suffolk antiquary for seven shillings.

Mary espoused, as far as she dared, the cause of her unhappy sister-in-law, Katherine of Aragon, and it is not surprising, therefore, that though in London at the time, she did not attend the coronation of Anne Boleyn, where her husband figured so conspicuously as Lord High Constable of England. He behaved abominably to Queen Katherine, and even insulted her grossly when he was sent by Henry to Bugden to visit her, just before her removal to Kimbolton; so coarsely, indeed, that the queen ordered him out of her presence, reminding him, at the same time, of the many favours she had heaped upon him when she was in power.

The royal grandmother of the unfortunate sisters of the House of Grey seems never to have enjoyed good health. As far back as 1518, Suffolk wrote to Wolsey to inform him that the queen-duchess, his wife, was ill of a “anagu” [an ague], the cure of which gave the king’s “fuesesune” plenty of good occupation. The word “physician” was apparently an orthographic stumbling-block to both the duke and his consort. Early in February 1533, Mary Tudor wrote from Westhorpe Hall to the king, informing him that she intended coming to London to consult “Master Peter, her fesysyon”; as her health was failing, she felt it wise to seek other advice. Accordingly, towards the middle of April, she arrived, with her two daughters, at Suffolk Court; here preparations were at once made for the marriage of the elder of these young ladies with the youthful Marquis of Dorset, and for the betrothal of the younger, the Lady Eleanor, to Lord Henry Clifford, eldest son of the Earl of Cumberland. These combined ceremonies were solemnized in the first week of May, most likely in that stately parish church which is now Southwark Cathedral. Henry VIII attended the function, but whether he was accompanied by Anne Boleyn, who was already queen, though not as yet crowned, we know not.[46]

A few days later, on May 19, Queen Anne Boleyn passed in triumph through the streets of London from the Tower to Westminster Abbey, to be crowned. On either side of her open litter, sumptuously hung with silver tissue, and borne by two milk-white palfreys draped in white brocade, rode the Duke of Suffolk and Henry, Marquis of Dorset, who bore the sceptre. Cecily, dowager Marchioness of Dorset, was with the old Duchess of Norfolk in a chariot that followed the litter conveying the queen, who in glittering robes of cloth of gold and with a circlet of magnificent rubies crowning her raven tresses, “freely exposed the beauty of her person to the gaze of the people.” But the populace, even as it gazed upon her loveliness, did not forget the good “old queen” it had worshipped, who was even then lying sick unto death at Bugden Hall in Huntingdonshire. Anne was received in dead silence, throughout the whole line of the procession: not a cap was raised in her honour.

On June 26, of this same year (1533), the queen-duchess—who had returned with Lady Dorset, the bride, and her younger daughter, the Lady Eleanor, to Westhorpe, none the better for consulting the Court “fesysyon”—died somewhat suddenly, in the presence of her two children; her husband and son-in-law being still in London. Her body was embalmed and carried to Bury Abbey on July 20, nearly a month after her decease. Garter King at Arms and other heralds preceded the hearse, which was followed by a procession of lords and ladies on horseback, among whom, as chief mourners, the Ladies Frances and Eleanor rode pillion on the same black steed, caparisoned with violet cloth. They were supported on either side by the Marquis of Dorset and the young Lord Clifford, who had been summoned from London to attend the funeral. A strange incident occurred during the ceremony, at which the Duke of Suffolk was not present. The Ladies Powis and Monteagle, the duke’s daughters by his second wife, appeared uninvited, and assisted at the Mass, on perceiving which intrusion, the Lady Frances and the Lady Eleanor rose, and left the church, without waiting for the conclusion of the office. The unbidden guests had evidently determined to assert their position in the family by appearing at their step-mother’s obsequies, an act which was openly resented by the rest of the family,[47] since it was intended to prove the Ladies Powis and Monteagle’s legitimacy, and, moreover, insinuate that the queen-duchess’s daughters were bastards.

Mary Tudor’s death[48] may well have been hastened by anxiety about the calamities that had overwhelmed her sister-in-law, Queen Katherine, and by the certainty that her own husband had been Henry’s most active confederate in maligning the luckless queen. Suffolk’s behaviour to Katherine of Aragon was, in fact, infamous and ungrateful in the extreme. In the early stages of his career she had given him a helping hand, she had accepted entertainment at his house, and had stood godmother to his elder daughter; yet, in the hour of misfortune, he turned against her, and became her “unjust judge” and bitterest foe. He treated Anne Boleyn in the same fashion. When that ill-fated woman’s star reached its zenith, the craven duke was one of her most obsequious courtiers, but no sooner did the shadow of her impending doom darken the horizon, than Suffolk deserted her, went over to her enemies, urged his master to hasten her destruction, and outraged decency—even the decency of those callous times—by appearing at her execution. He was also present as one of the Privy Council when, some hours before her death, she was compelled to hear the sentence: That her marriage with the king was “invalid, frustrate, and of none effect.” So, too, when poor Anne of Cleves displeased the king by her Dutch homeliness, Suffolk was overheard offering his advice as to the best means of getting rid of her. Katherine Howard fared no better at his hands. He was her flatterer in her brief hour of success, but it was he who escorted her as a prisoner from Sion House to the Tower, who judged her, and who, but for sudden indisposition, would have feasted his eyes on her mangled form when her head was struck off at one blow by the skilful Calais headsman who had already proved his dexterity at the execution of Anne Boleyn.

In November 1534 the duke took a fourth wife, his deceased consort’s ward, the Lady Katherine Willoughby d’Eresby, a child of fifteen, whose rich dower had evidently excited his rapacity; for, notwithstanding his vast landed possessions, he was in constant want of ready money, Mary Tudor’s income having been very scanty, and most irregularly paid. Katherine was the only child of the lately deceased William, Lord Willoughby d’Eresby by his second wife, Doña Maria de Sarmiento y Salinas, a Spanish noblewoman and a faithful and tried attendant upon Queen Katherine. It seems incredible that such a pious woman should have approved of so unnatural an alliance, but in Tudor times the voice of Nature herself was often hushed, and that of personal and political interest alone heard. Katherine, Duchess of Suffolk, of whom we shall see more anon, developed into a very handsome and cultured woman, and was the authoress of quite the most brilliant and witty letters in the English epistolary literature of the period. She had the distinction of being sketched by Holbein, and her portrait is one of the most beautiful in the king’s collection. By this lady, Suffolk had two sons, who survived him and became successively Dukes of Suffolk. They were reputed to be exceedingly clever lads, and were educated with Prince Edward. Both died at an early age, on July 6th, 1551, of the “sweating sickness,” at Bugden, in Huntingdonshire, within a few hours of each other and in the same bed.[49]

Shortly after his fourth marriage, Suffolk wrote to his mother-in-law, the dowager Lady Willoughby, that he had been ordered to proceed to Bugden Hall to reduce the household of the “Princess Dowager,” as the divorced queen was now called, and to induce her to remove to Fotheringhay Castle. He adds that he wishes “an accident might befall him” to prevent his undertaking so unpleasant an expedition. Notwithstanding this heroic desire, Suffolk arrived at Bugden Hall late in December[50] 1534/5, and behaved so abominably that the poor queen, stung to the quick by the repeated humiliations and insults heaped upon her and her handful of faithful retainers, rose and swept haughtily from his presence. She resolutely refused to go to Fotheringhay, which, she had heard, was “damp,” but after much more trouble she submitted to being sent to Kimbolton, where she arrived early in the following January.

[To face p. 74

KATHERINE WILLOUGHBY, DUCHESS OF SUFFOLK

(From an engraving, by Bartolozzi, after Holbein)

On January 7, 1535/6, the sorely tried and persecuted queen passed quietly away at Kimbolton Castle, in the arms of Lady Willoughby, and in the presence of Eustache Chapuys, the imperial ambassador; being “done to death by cruelty,” as her Spanish chronicler quaintly and faithfully puts it.[51]

The public career of Jane Grey’s maternal grandfather was far more creditable than his private life. In early manhood, as we have seen, he distinguished himself as a naval commander, and he later became a skilful general, affording his master most efficient help against the popular rising known as the “Pilgrimage of Grace.” During that otherwise futile expedition into Picardy which resulted in King Henry’s only substantial French victory, the capture of Boulogne, Suffolk proved himself both bold and sagacious, and was able to present the keys of that city to the king. He was also of great service all through the intricate operations against the Scots, which occupied English diplomacy and arms from 1543 to 1544, and formed the first link in the chain of misfortunes marking the untoward career of Mary Stuart—since these certainly arose out of the attempt made by Henry VIII to affiance his son Edward to the infant Queen of Scots, and so secure the custody of her person. This effort, had it been crowned with success, would have united the Crowns of England and Scotland some fifty years before the union of the two kingdoms was finally accomplished, under James I.

In 1532-33, when Henry VIII and Francis I held a conference in the Church of Our Lady at Boulogne, such was the piety of bluff King Hal that he was well pleased to attend as many as three and four Masses every day before St. Mary’s shrine, whilst round him knelt the Dukes of Suffolk and Norfolk; the Marquises of Dorset and Exeter; the Lords of Surrey, Essex, Derby, Rutland, Huntingdon and Sussex; and a legion of other noblemen and knights. Boulogne was greatly edified at beholding the French and English Kings, the King of Navarre, the Dauphin, and the Princes of Orleans, Angoulême, Vendôme, and Guise, together with a glittering train of French and English peers, devoutly telling their rosaries, and following the cherished image in solemn procession through the streets. But in July 1544 all this was changed. Suffolk ordered the Church of Notre Dame to be desecrated and occupied by the English artillery. The sacred image, however, was carefully packed and sent over to England, where Henry, who had burnt the Lady of Walsingham and “her old syster of Ipswich,” preserved it in high veneration in his own bedroom. Edward VI, at the time of the restitution of Boulogne, consented to restore the treasure, and Louis de la Tremeuil, Prince of Talmont, was deputed to fetch it back to its time-honoured shrine.[52]

In August 1545 Suffolk died, after a long illness, at Guildford Castle, which had evidently been lent to him by Sir William Parr, who had it from the king. The duke’s illness seems to have been, in every phase, identical with that of the king, who died of a similar complication of diseases not two years later: Charles suffered from gout, heart failure, rheumatism, and dropsy. Henry VIII expressed great interest and anxiety concerning him, and sent constantly to Guildford to obtain news of his old friend and life-long companion. One of Suffolk’s portraits, painted in the last year of his life, represents him looking much older than he really was, and extremely like Henry VIII. He wears a dressing-gown and a silk skull cap, and his feet, much swollen with gout, are resting on a stool. During his last illness, the duke was attended by his wife and his two daughters, the Ladies Frances and Eleanor. He expired in their presence and in that of his grand-children, including Katherine Grey. Suffolk left instructions in his will that he was to be buried in an obscure Lincolnshire parish, without pomp, but Henry VIII ordered otherwise, and gave his accommodating brother-in-law and friend splendid obsequies at Windsor, where his tomb may still be seen, on the right-hand entrance to St. George’s Chapel. Requiem Masses for the repose of the soul of “the most High and Puissant Prince,” Charles, Duke of Suffolk, were said at St. Paul’s and at Westminster Abbey.

Suffolk left all his property to his widow and her children, with reversion to his daughters Frances and Eleanor Brandon, respectively Marchioness of Dorset and Countess of Cumberland, and to their heirs and successors, who are named. His widow retired to her lodging at the Barbican, where she was several times visited by the Lady Frances and her daughters, and by the Princesses Mary and Elizabeth, the latter being her sincere friend, whereas the former disliked her exceedingly, on account of her change of religion. When the duchess, some short time after the death of her first husband, took unto herself a second, in the person of her young secretary, Mr. Bertie, an aggressive Protestant, Queen Mary was exceedingly wroth at what she considered to be a mésalliance. Mr. Bertie and the Duchess fled from England, and after staying awhile in Germany and visiting Venice, succeeded, despite many romantic adventures, in reaching Poland. The duchess and her “unequal match” did not return to England until after Mary’s death.

LADY KATHERINE GREY

[CHAPTER I]

BIRTH AND CHILDHOOD

The Lady Katherine Grey, two years younger than her unfortunate sister, the Lady Jane, was born in August 1540, and, according to tradition, not at Bradgate Hall in Leicestershire, but in London, at Dorset Place, Westminster, a mansion which the Duke of Suffolk, her father, then Marquis of Dorset, had purchased and rebuilt in the finest Tudor architecture of the period, having a very long gallery and terrace, overlooking the Thames. It was considerably altered towards the close of the sixteenth century, when it was divided into three separate houses, and in one of these Locke the philosopher lived and died. A relic of the existence of this palace was extant only a few years ago, in the name of a little street called Dorset Place, which was pulled down for modern improvements when the new War Office and its adjacent edifices were built.

There is, needless to say, no registered record of Lady Katherine’s birth, and we know very little of how her childhood was spent. The hygienic and more humane methods of rearing children, which are now in vogue, were then unknown. Lady Katherine’s little limbs must have been swathed in swaddling clothes, precisely as were those of all her infant contemporaries. She was certainly not nursed by her mother—which would have been against all precedent in royal circles of society—but by some country foster-mother, possibly the Mrs. Helen who performed the same office for Lady Jane, and who attended that unfortunate princess on the scaffold. A foster-mother in the family of the great position of the Dorsets was in many ways a personage. Her costume was rich; her board and lodging expensive, even luxurious; and the children she nursed were taught to consider her almost in the light of a mother, and this, many years after the very necessary functions which she had performed for their benefit had ceased.

The child’s costume as she grew up was cut on absolutely the same pattern as that of her mother, of which it was a miniature reproduction, without, however, the train or manteau de cour, which the Lady Frances only wore on state occasions. At five years of age, Lady Katherine wore long petticoats and a dress of brocade reaching to the feet, a ruff, and a little white cap, tied in a bow under the chin. There is still in existence a list or inventory of the toys which were in the possession of Princess Elizabeth when she was an infant at Hunsdon. They included a number of dolls of all sizes, one or two mechanical, “that could speke” and even walk (evidently imported from Italy), a wooden horse on rockers, a set of marionettes, some little cooking utensils, and no doubt most popular of all, a kind of Noah’s Ark, containing “beesties and Noah with hys familie.” With similar toys, doubtless, the little Lady Katherine and her sister Jane frequently did play.

As she grew older she was placed, to learn her letters, under the care of a certain Mrs. Ashley or Astley (sister or sister-in-law of the lady who figures so largely in history as the governess of Queen Elizabeth), who remained in the quality of governess-companion to the children of the Marquis of Dorset until the death of Lady Jane, when we lose sight of her, unless indeed the little Lady Mary was placed in her charge and remained at Bradgate during the tragic events that decimated her family.

Lady Katherine’s entry into what we should now call society, took place on the 20th August, 1547, when that renowned, not to say redoubted, lady, Bess of Hardwick, married her second husband, Sir William Cavendish. For some reason or other which has escaped record, this wedding took place at Bradgate Hall, in Leicestershire, evidently placed at the disposal of the bride and bridegroom by the Dorsets. The nuptial knot was tied at two o’clock in the morning, according to a curious custom of nocturnal marriages which holds good to this day in certain parts of America, Italy, and Spain. There was a house-party assembled for this festive occasion, and among the guests were the Earl of Shrewsbury, who in due time became the fourth husband of the bride of that day—or better, night—and the Marchioness of Northampton, the discarded wife of Katherine Parr’s brother, a lady who had had a very curious and adventurous history, which excluded her from court, although, at the time of her death, she was staying at Sudeley Castle, as the guest of Henry VIII’s sixth wife, Katherine Parr. The Marchioness was evidently a very great friend of the Dorset family, with whom, for all her rather scandalous reputation, she was a frequent visitor. The wedding must have taken place in the private chapel (which is still standing) of the now ruined hall, and amongst those present were the Marquis and Marchioness of Dorset, with their three daughters, the Ladies Jane, Katherine and Mary, who acted as bridesmaids. Immediately after the wedding ceremony, a sort of breakfast was served, after which, with much music and noise, the bride and bridegroom were led in procession to the bridal chamber. This marriage taking place at Bradgate, shows how early was the connection that existed between Bess of Hardwick and the Greys—a connection which, some twenty years later, proved a very uncomfortable one for the said Bess, since it sent her to the Tower.

As Bess of Hardwick will be mentioned again in these pages, it may be well to remind the reader here, that she was the daughter of a certain Mr. John Hardwick, a small Derbyshire yeoman farmer or squire, and one of seven or eight brothers and sisters. She had acquired, under her paternal roof, an excellent knowledge of brewing, baking, starching, making of elder and cowslip wine, preserves and cordials; but she grew tired of the country, early in life, and on one occasion, without warning any of her relatives, put herself in communication with Lady Zouch,[53] a distant cousin, who was then residing in London, in a prominent position at the court of Henry VIII. To Lady Zouch, therefore, Bess addressed herself, begging of her not to think it impertinent that she should write to her, but to remember her forlorn condition and take compassion on it. It would seem that Derbyshire, and especially that part of it in which she lived, was not conducive to matrimony, and the enterprising Bess thought that if she could come to London as companion to Lady Zouch, she might succeed in extricating herself from the narrow circumstances in which she had hitherto lived. Lady Zouch replied favourably, and invited Mistress Elizabeth Hardwick to come and stay with her. She had not been very long under her noble cousin’s roof, ere she formed the acquaintance of old Mr. John Barlow. He was seventy, and Bess was considerably under twenty. The gentleman, who was a great invalid, was very rich; the young lady was active and healthy, but poor. She became his nurse, and rubbed his legs and applied his leeches and poultices with such admirable skill, avoiding giving him unnecessary pain, that he proposed to her and was accepted. Mr. Barlow did not long survive his wedding, and when he died, Bess inherited every penny of his fortune. Having now secured wealth, she was determined to acquire rank. Her next choice fell upon Sir William Cavendish, a son of that Thomas Cavendish who assisted Henry VIII in suppressing the monasteries, and who wrote an excellent life of Cardinal Wolsey. Sir William was not a very young man when he first made the acquaintance of Mistress Barlow, and he was already the father of six sons and daughters. Bess, who wished to be a “lady,” forgave him this numerous progeny, even going so far as to declare she would be a mother unto them all. It is at this period of her existence that she begins to loom largely in the social history of her time. During the ten years that she was Cavendish’s wife, she filled his quiver with not less than eight children, four sons and four daughters, one of whom, Elizabeth, had by way of godmother Queen Elizabeth, the Lady Katherine Grey representing “Our Eliza” by proxy. This Elizabeth Cavendish in due time married Darnley’s youngest brother (there were seventeen years between them), and became, eventually, the mother of the unfortunate Arabella Stuart, whose life-story runs on almost parallel lines with that of Lady Katherine Grey, her godmother by proxy. Both were the victims of their unfortunate love affairs and of the vindictiveness of Elizabeth, who was determined to have as few heirs to her Throne as possible. Bess, after the death of Sir William, married again, for the third time, Mr. William Saintlow or St. Lo, a rich gentleman, captain in Queen Elizabeth’s bodyguard, and considered to be the handsomest man in Europe.

In the case of the Cavendish children, Bess behaved admirably, but she evidently took a fierce dislike to the Saintlow progeny, whom she treated so abominably that they never set foot inside their father’s house until his death, when they attended his funeral, to learn that he had left them all his available property. The ambitious Mrs. Saintlow, wishing to still further increase her rank, next married George Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury. This marriage was not a very happy one, mainly through the strange circumstances in which the earl and countess were placed. They were obliged by Queen Elizabeth to take into their charge the unfortunate Mary Queen of Scots; and Bess, by marrying her daughter, Elizabeth, to young Charles Lennox, Darnley’s brother, became the grandmother of Arabella Stuart, which, to use her own words, was “the greatest trouble that ever God inflicted upon her.” Bess of Hardwick built Hardwick Hall, near Chatsworth, one of the most beautiful Elizabethan mansions in England, and possibly the only one which still contains intact the furniture, tapestries and works of art which its builder installed there.

After the wedding of Mrs. Barlow with Sir William Cavendish, the name of Lady Katherine Grey becomes more conspicuous in the memorials of her family. We know, for instance, that, together with her parents and her sisters, Jane and Mary, she spent the Christmas of 1551 with her cousin, Princess Mary, afterwards queen, at Hunsdon. The princess had provided a good deal of amusement for the children, in the shape of singers and conjurers obtained from London. In the following year (1552/3), the Marquis of Dorset—now become Duke of Suffolk, thanks to the Lord Protector Somerset, and consequently to Edward VI—helped Katherine, Duchess of Suffolk,[54] to entertain a large party at Tilsey, the seat of the young Willoughbys, who were her grace’s wards. There still exists, in the archives of the Willoughby family, a note-book of household expenses drawn up by “old Mr. Medley,” a connection of the family who acted as a sort of majordomo. Mr. Medley informs us that for the forty guests and servants who were being entertained, as much as £200 a week was spent for meat, fowls, fish, fruit, sweetmeats, etc. He likewise says that a sum of six pounds, equivalent to about sixty of our money, was given to the manager of Lord Oxford’s players, who brought his troupe to Tilsey, with the permission of the earl, to perform before the company on three separate days, when they gave, no doubt to the huge delight of the children, some of those horse-play comedies and farces which amused our Tudor ancestors, and which included amongst their attractions such items as “four hobby-horses, two dragons, four men as monkeys, a giraffe, and a man that swallowed fire.” Such wonders as these, probably, greatly pleased Lady Katherine and her little sisters, for children are the same in all ages. Then there were “romps, games and dances” in the great hall; and altogether, to use our familiar expression, the young people had “a real good time” at Tilsey—which doubtless contrasted rather unpleasantly with the formal hospitality offered them a fortnight later by the duke’s sister, the Lady Audley, at Saffron Walden, where there was a preacher engaged to improve their manners and their morals. Bullinger, who got wind of the very secular form of entertainment ordered by the Duke of Suffolk for the amusement of his young guests at Tilsey, took umbrage, and wrote one or two bitter letters about it, which, let us hope, never fell into the hands of his grace, else the cause of the Reformation might have suffered considerably thereby. Probably the duke was not at this time as completely converted to Puritanism as he was a couple of years later. After their visit to Walden, the whole family rode up to London, the little Ladies Katherine and Jane perched on pillions in front of their father and their uncle John. Here they were again entertained by Princess Mary, at the Priory, Clerkenwell. When the Suffolks returned to Bradgate, they stayed in Leicester, and were entertained with wine and hippocras and more solid refreshments by the mayoress and her sister. After partaking of these, they proceeded to Bradgate, three miles farther on.

So many cross-country journeys on horseback, to and fro, from Bradgate to Hunsdon, Hunsdon to Tilsey, Tilsey to Saffron Walden, from Saffron Walden to London, and then a three-days’ journey back to Leicestershire, either in a litter or on horseback, told unfortunately on the health of the little Ladies Jane and Katherine, and both of them—and no wonder!—were laid up for a week or so with serious illnesses. Indeed, Lady Katherine’s health, like that of her sister Jane, seems, throughout her life, to have been very fragile, for later we shall hear of her being frequently ill with fever, headaches, and rheumatic pains.

The Lady Frances and her husband, the Duke of Suffolk,[55] never seem to have destined Lady Katherine, as they did her sister Jane, to play any very conspicuous part in history. Jane they set aside and educated, coached—or better, “crammed”—to be the head of the Protestant party in England, and, as such, either to share the Throne with her cousin, Edward VI, or else to occupy it alone, instead of the Catholic Princess Mary, or of Elizabeth, whose religious opinions were not at this time clearly defined. Lady Jane, very skilfully surrounded by the most able and learned Reformers of her time, was veritably moulded for the dizzy but unfortunate station for which she was destined, and her parents, in their eagerness to fit her to occupy the Throne on the death of the sickly Edward VI, did not even allow her the time to take necessary recreation. The memorable interview between Lady Jane and Roger Ascham proves that the poor child was tortured into learning. If by chance, worn out by study, she turned to lighter things than Greek or Latin grammar, she got so many “bobs and pinches” from her charming mother, “that for pain she was fain to weep”; or find relief from so much cruelty and trouble in the unusual recreation, for a young girl, of reading Plato’s Dialogues or the Orations of Demosthenes. Ascham found Lady Katherine otherwise engaged, enjoying herself with the rest of the company at hunting and archery and those sports in which her mother, the Lady Frances, excelled. It is not surprising, then, to find that Bullinger, Œcolampadius, Conrad Pellican, Ulmer and the many other Reformers who flocked to England during the reign of Edward VI, and who were specially welcome at Bradgate, had very little or nothing to do with Lady Katherine. Under the shade of the beautiful trees of Bradgate, therefore, and in the sunlight of its broad and flower-covered meadows; in the stately avenues of its gardens and by the running brooks and broad pools of its park, the girlhood of Lady Katherine Grey was passed, we may presume, far more pleasantly and naturally than that of her sister Jane. She was at least allowed to indulge in sports and pastimes suitable to her age, to try her skill at archery and possibly to leap a fence on a favourite pony, to dance in the hall, and may be to sing a ballad to the accompaniment of a lute, aye, even to practise on the virginals, without incurring, as her elder sister had done, the displeasure of good Master Bullinger, who in one of his most remarkable letters, written at the request of Aylmer, cautioned the Lady Jane against the vanities of this world and urged her to dress soberly, as becomes a Christian maiden, by taking as her model the Princess Elizabeth!—above all, not to lose time in practising music and in other like frivolities.[56]

In his history of Lady Jane Grey (The Nine-days’ Queen), the author pointed out that the legends as to any intimacy or love-making having ever existed between Lady Jane and her cousin King Edward VI, are absolutely apocryphal. Although at one time the Lord Admiral Thomas Seymour actually suggested that, in the event of the engagement between Edward and the Queen of Scots failing, the Lady Jane Grey should be proposed as queen consort, the young people do not seem to have come much in contact; and despite that the Duke and Duchess of Suffolk and the Lady Katherine were in London very frequently during the reign of Edward VI, there is no record of the Lady Katherine having been to her cousin’s court, not even on the occasion when her sister Jane figured rather prominently at the revels given in honour of the queen dowager of Scotland, when she passed through London on her way northwards. Katherine was probably too young; but there is a touching record extant, proving that, notwithstanding a slight disparity in age (only two years, however), a great affection existed between Lady Jane Grey and her sister.

On Whit-Sunday (probably May 21) 1553, the day on which Lady Jane became the bride of Lord Guildford Dudley, Katherine was married, or rather, contracted—she was only thirteen years old at the time—to Henry, Lord Herbert, eldest son of the Earl of Pembroke, who was just a little over nineteen. After the ceremony (it was no more than a ceremony), the very youthful “bride” lived, according to custom, under her father-in-law’s roof at Baynard’s Castle, the ancient palace on the Thames, within the walls of which Pembroke proclaimed his allegiance to Mary on the last day of Queen Jane’s reign. Lady Katherine, unlike her sister Jane, was not blessed (or cursed) with a mother-in-law, for Anne Parr, only sister of Queen Katherine Parr and mother of Lord Herbert, had died some months before her son’s marriage and her husband’s accession to the rank of earl. The young “bride’s” father-in-law, however, must have been the reverse of a pleasant companion—his selfishness, craft, and brutality, like his enormous wealth, were common talk. When he expelled the abbess and nuns from the royal abbey of Wilton, which had been bestowed upon him by Henry VIII, he is said to have struck some of them with his whip, exclaiming, “Go spin, ye jades, go spin!” Like the majority of his peers, indeed, he was a staunch Protestant under Edward VI, a “Janeite” for something near nine days, and, when Mary came to the Throne, so fervent a Catholic that he actually invited the nuns of Wilton to return to their old home, and stood bareheaded as they filed into it in his presence.

Lady Katherine Grey was still at Baynard’s Castle during the whole of the last days of the tragic existence of her unfortunate sister, and was not, as usually stated, at Sheen. The more minute details of what had befallen Lady Jane may have been spared her; but surely she must have been acquainted with the general outline of what was happening to her father and mother and to the victim of their ambition, the “Nine-days’ Queen.” There is no evidence, however, that during the time Lady Jane was on the Throne, Lady Katherine Grey ever entered the Tower, and she certainly never saw her sister again; but she was remembered by her in one of the most exquisite letters of the period.[57] The letter runs as follows:—

“I have sent you, good sister Katherine, a book [i.e. the Testament], which, though it be not outwardly trimmed with gold, yet inwardly it is of more worth than precious stones. It is the book, dear sister, of the laws of the Lord; it is His Testament and last Will, which He bequeathed to us poor wretches, which shall lead us to the path of eternal joy; and if you, with good mind and an earnest desire, follow it, it will bring you to immortal and everlasting life. It will teach you to live—it will teach you to die—it will win you more than you would have gained by the possession of your woeful father’s lands, for if God had prospered him ye would have inherited his lands.

“If ye apply diligently to this book, trying to direct your life by it, you shall be inheritor of those riches as neither the covetous shall withdraw from you, neither the thief shall steal, nor the moth corrupt. Desire, dear sister, to understand the law of the Lord your God. Live still to die, that you by death may purchase eternal life, or, after your death, enjoy the life purchased for you by Christ’s death. Trust not that the tenderness of your age shall lengthen your life, for as soon as God will, goeth the young as the old. Labour alway and learn to die. Deny the world, defy the devil, and despise the flesh. Delight only in the Lord. Be penitent for your sins, but despair not. Be steady in your faith, yet presume not, and desire, with St. Paul, to be dissolved, to be with Christ, with Whom, even in death, there is life. Be like the good servant, and even in midnight be waking, lest when death cometh, he steal upon you like a thief in the night, and you be, with the evil servant, found sleeping, and lest for lack of oil ye be found like the first foolish wench,[58] and like him that had not the wedding garment, ye be cast out from the marriage. Persist ye (as I trust ye do, seeing ye have the name of a Christian), as near as ye can, to follow the steps of your Master, Christ, and take up your cross, lay your sins on His back, and always embrace Him!

“As touching my death, rejoice as I do, and adsist [i.e. consider] that I shall be delivered from corruption and put on incorruption, for I am assured that I shall, for losing a mortal life, find an immortal felicity. Pray God grant that ye live in His fear and die in His love....[59] neither for love of life nor fear of death. For if ye deny His truth to lengthen your life, God will deny you and shorten your days, and if ye will cleave to Him, He will prolong your days, to your comfort, and for His glory, to the which glory God bring mine and you hereafter, when it shall please Him to call you.

“Farewell, dear sister; put your only trust in God, Who only must uphold you.

“Your loving sister,

“Jane Duddely.”

Shortly after the “Nine-days’ Queen’s” execution, the Earl of Pembroke, true to his callous nature, and so as to avoid any suspicion of having supported the fallen cause, forced his son to annul his engagement with Lady Katherine, on the plea that it had been a mere formality, and that the bride had been at the time betrothed to the young Earl of Hertford—a curious statement, certainly, when considered in the light of subsequent events. Camden says that she was officially “divorced,” but this is not probable, there having been no marriage beyond a mere ceremony of contract. It was therefore simply annulled, and the bride, who, according to the custom of the period, had gone to live with her husband’s parents, in order the better to form her future husband’s acquaintance, was sent back to her mother. Strange to say, five years later (March 24, 1559), the Count de Feria wrote to King Philip of Spain stating that “Lady Katherine has been hitherto very willing to marry the Earl of Pembroke’s son, but she has ceased to talk about it as she used to. The Bishop will have told Your Majesty what passed between the Earl of Pembroke and me on this matter.” It is easy to understand that Pembroke, recognizing Katherine’s position in respect to the succession, may have eventually regretted the over-hasty dissolution of his son’s betrothal, and desired that so advantageous a marriage should take place; but why Katherine, at that time engaged to the Earl of Hertford, should have favoured Pembroke’s son, is hard to say, unless she was suddenly temporarily jealous or annoyed with her fiancé, or was simply pretending to approve of Pembroke’s plan, in order to distract attention from her real engagement to the earl, which it was advisable to keep secret.

Scarcely had Lady Katherine returned to the maternal roof from Baynard’s Castle than she had to undergo the trying ordeal of hearing of the executions of her father and uncle, and of witnessing the callous manner in which these tragedies were treated by her mother. The Lady Frances’s mourning for her husband or her daughter could not have been of long duration, for well within the first three weeks of her widowhood, regardless of the tragic fate of her daughter, her husband, and her brother-in-law, this heartless woman put aside her mourning robes, and, gaily attired, allowed herself to be led to the hymeneal altar by a ginger-headed lad of twenty-one, young enough to be her son and of such inferior rank that the Princess Elizabeth, in her indignation at so unequal a match, cried out: “What? Has the woman so far forgotten herself as to mate with a common groom!” “A common groom,” however, Mr. Stokes was not. He was a member of a fairly good yeoman family and had been appointed secretary and groom of the chambers to the princess some two years earlier, during which time he must not only have won her confidence, but been on terms of so unusually intimate a kind, that had his first child been born alive, which fortunately it was not, it might have claimed the paternity of the Duke of Suffolk, and have added another complication to the many as to the succession, the result of the irregular wills[60] made by Henry VIII and Edward VI, who both appointed the Lady Frances and her daughters the immediate heiresses to the Throne, in the event of the deaths without issue of the former king’s daughters, Elizabeth and Mary. Perhaps the real reason why Lady Jane Grey never wrote to her mother in the last months of her life and never mentioned her in the letters to her sister Katherine and to her father, nor even on the margin of the Prayer Book (still in the possession of the nation) in which she has recorded her last thoughts, was that she was well aware of some scandal attaching to the Lady Frances in connection with the “base-born” Mr. Adrian Stokes. There are portraits, both in one canvas, facing each other, of Mr. Adrian Stokes and the Lady Frances, at Chatsworth. The gentleman is distinctly plain and common looking—he might indeed be a groom, with his ginger hair, his colourless eyes and rather silly expression. He wears a very rich doublet of black velvet, furred with ermine; whereas the Lady Frances, a buxom, but sour and ill-tempered looking lady, bearing a strange resemblance to her uncle, Henry VIII, is attired in a dress of black satin, with a jewelled pattern. She wears the well-known Mary Stuart coif and some fine jewels. In the corner of the picture figures the date “1555” and the words, “Adrian Stokes, aged twenty-one, and Lady Frances Duchess of Suffolk, aged thirty-six”—she looks fully ten years older.

[To face p. 104

FRANCES BRANDON, DUCHESS OF SUFFOLK, AND HER SECOND HUSBAND, ADRIAN STOKES

(From an engraving, by Vertue, after the original portrait by Lucas de Heere)

The question arises, Why did Lady Frances marry Mr. Stokes? The match appeared, even at that time, an incredible breach of common decency. Was it a love-passion; or was it not rather the result of well pondered policy? The Lady Frances might easily have been selected as the head of one or other of the numerous parties then existing in England, in order that she should become a possible successor or even rival to Queen Mary. The fact that she was the wife of a “base-born knave” made it almost an impossibility that she could be used as a tool against the queen. The people would never have accepted her as a ruler, nor would they have allowed her offspring, notwithstanding the example of Katherine of Valois and Owen Tudor, to have succeeded to the Throne. This was the view of the case taken, even at the time, at court; for the French ambassador speaks of it as simply a move on the part of the Lady Frances to get herself tacitly excluded from the succession, and thereby enable her to lead a peaceful existence. It may be remarked here that nearly all the greatest court ladies of the late King Edward’s reign, including the Duchess of Somerset and Katherine, Duchess of Suffolk, married men who were their inferiors by birth and station. Katherine, Duchess of Suffolk, married her youthful secretary, Mr. Bertie; and Mr. Newdigate, Anne Stanhope, Duchess of Somerset’s secretary, became, in due course, that haughty lady’s husband.

[CHAPTER II]

LADY KATHERINE GREY AT THE COURT OF QUEEN MARY

Miss Agnes Strickland and other historians have fallen into the error of stating that Mary Tudor appointed the Lady Frances, Duchess of Suffolk, to be one of her women of the bedchamber, and her two daughters, the Ladies Katherine and Mary Grey, maids of honour. A little reflection will show that such appointments were as impossible in Mary’s time, as it would be, in our day, for Her present Majesty, to name the Duchess of Fife and her children, or the Princess Louise, Duchess of Argyll, to similar positions in her household. The Ladies Grey were royal princesses and possible successors to the reigning sovereign. Mary, therefore, simply restored to the royal Duchess of Suffolk her rights of precedence and entrée at court, which had been withdrawn on account of her share in the conspiracy to place her daughter, the Lady Jane Grey, upon the Throne. A note among the Willoughby Papers (1556) probably gave rise to the error in question, by stating that “Mrs. Margaret Willoughby has been to Court with the Lady Frances’ Grace, who has her place in the Privy-chamber. Young Mistress Willoughby was much commended, and the Lady Frances’ Grace did not doubt but, in a short time, to place her about the Queen’s highness, so as to content all her friends.” This, however, merely confirms what we have said above. Throughout her reign, owing to ill-health, Queen Mary received not only her intimate friends, but even ambassadors and other official persons, in her bed-chamber, whilst she lay, propped up with cushions, in the bed.

The Lady Frances, after her ill-assorted marriage, lived with her young husband at Sheen, but came up to London to her house in the Strand (which she had not as yet sold, and on the site of which Northumberland House was subsequently built) whenever it suited her purpose to visit the queen or her other royal relatives. Though the Ladies Katherine and Mary Grey were not exactly “received” into the queen’s household—their rank forbade it—they accompanied the queen wherever she went, and lodged in the royal palaces. Mary did not wish the sisters of Lady Jane Grey to be far out of her sight and reach, lest they might be involved in some attempt to place either of them, and especially the Lady Katherine, at the head of the Protestant party, in the position left vacant in so tragic a manner by their sister Jane. Mary, and after Mary’s death, Elizabeth in her turn, paid each sister a pension of eighty pounds a year; but this was a bounty, not a salary. After the deaths of their father, uncle, and sister, the estates of the Greys, at Bradgate and elsewhere, were confiscated, and eventually passed by entail to the next male heir, Lord Grey of Pirgo; and therefore the inheritance of the two sisters from their father was lost to them and never restored. It was otherwise with the Lady Frances, whose property, although considerably diminished by mortgages and loans, was never confiscated; but the rents only sufficed for her own maintenance and that of her young husband. As to her daughters, this sinister lady does not seem to have troubled much about them. She apparently left their interests to Providence—and the queen. Lady Katherine Grey and her little sister were treated with consideration at the court of Queen Mary, and granted the state and precedence due to princesses of the blood, as is clearly indicated in the records of the time, by an apparently trivial mention, that “their trains were upheld by a gentlewoman” on all great occasions, a privilege only accorded to members of the royal family.

The contrast between the secluded life which she had led at Baynard’s Castle, and the court of Queen Mary, must have been great, and afforded, to a very young girl of Katherine’s age, sufficient amusement to make her forget the sorrows through which she had recently passed. The Duke of Somerset, when protector, had reduced the household expenses of Edward VI to about half what they had been in the reign of his father, Henry VIII. Queen Mary, being economically inclined, although aware that she must make a great figure if she wished to captivate Philip of Spain, did not restore things to the splendid state in which they had been in her father’s time. She reduced the number of her servants and attendants, but in a measure increased the splendour of their costumes. Like her sister Elizabeth, she was inordinately fond of dress, with this difference, however, that she had perfect taste; and fortunately for her, fashion was not then as grotesque as it became later on, when good Queen Elizabeth wore farthingales four yards in circumference, and a ruff that gave her head the appearance of being in the centre of her body. Mary’s household was ordered almost on monastic lines. Mass every morning, saying the rosary, evening and night prayers, and pious readings took up much of the ladies’ time. They were, moreover, expected to accompany the queen to hear innumerable sermons, and to follow her in the countless religious processions which were now revived with exaggerated zeal. The queen, it is true, occasionally indulged in a stately measure, was fond of music and not a little, also, of cards; but until the advent of Philip, her court was as decorous as it was dull.

[To face p.110

MARY TUDOR, QUEEN OF ENGLAND

(From a little known portrait by Antonio Moro, in the Escurial)

Lady Katherine Grey’s first appearance at the court of the queen, her cousin, was on the occasion of Mary’s marriage to Philip of Spain in July 1554, when she is mentioned as being among the ladies who rode in that startling red-lacquered chariot, lined with crimson velvet and specially constructed for the purpose, that so delighted contemporaries, and conveyed Her Majesty and her ladies over the very rough roads between London and Winchester, rendered still more dreadful by an almost incessant downpour of rain which had lasted for some weeks. The queen and her suite reached Winchester on Monday, July 23, on the same day that Prince Philip left Southampton, where he had landed, after seven days’ rough voyage from Corunna, on Thursday, July 19. At Southampton he had been lodged in the palace, specially adorned with tapestries sent down from London. The decorations of his bedroom puzzled and displeased him not a little, for it was hung with crimson velvet embroidered “in many places” with the arms of England, bordered with scrolls on which figured the words, “Defender of the Faith and Head of the Church,” in raised letters of gold and silver, interlaced with the roses of York and Lancaster. Philip, a belligerent Catholic, did not like himself in the character of “Defender of the [Protestant] Faith” or as “Head” of the Protestant or any other church. The people of Southampton seem to have been delighted with the personal appearance of the Spanish prince; contemporary documents describe him as possessing a “bright complexion,” which he certainly had not in ordinary life, and we may therefore conclude that he rouged for the occasion—a by no means unusual practice, even with men, in those days. Titian and Coelho have depicted Philip, and it would be hard to find a more unpleasing countenance than that of this Prince of Naples, soon (1556) to be King Philip II of Spain and emperor of half the known world; a strangely shaped conical head, a prematurely wrinkled forehead, a chubby nose with large nostrils, and a protruding underlip, made up a most unprepossessing face, not even relieved by fine eyes, but merely by a pair of grey ones that rather emphasized than otherwise the sodden complexion of a gentleman who was, however, nothing like so unpleasant in his manners as we have been led to fancy him. He was, at least at this period of his life, neither mean nor morose, but exceedingly alert, liberal, and courteous, even to menials. He arrived in England in the best of tempers, which was, however, sorely tried during his short journey from Southampton to Winchester, performed, with a very numerous escort, on horseback. The roads were wretched, the rain and wind incessant, and at a given point, some three miles before reaching Winchester, the prince’s horse shied, and Philip, Infante of Spain, Viceroy of Naples, Sicily, Austria, Flanders and the Indies, East and West, was sent sprawling, like an ordinary mortal, into a mud-heap, whence he emerged in such a filthy condition, that he had to be conveyed into a hut, washed, cleaned and furbished up generally for the rest of his ride. He reached Winchester towards evening, where he dined alone. He was then dressed afresh, the better to make a favourable impression upon the royal bride, who awaited him with the utmost impatience at the Bishop’s palace. When he entered the great hall, the queen, gorgeously robed in white satin embroidered in silver, with a train of blue velvet, greeted him with every demonstration of affection. Philip himself was in white velvet, slashed with cloth of silver. He moreover wore a short cloak of black velvet, embroidered in gold with a design of pomegranates. A little before reaching Winchester, His Highness had been met at the wayside by a gentleman on horseback, bearing a ring from the queen, as a token of her regard, which ring Philip took great care to wear, and even to point to, when he first beheld Her Majesty. There had, however, been some trouble over the matter of the ring, for Lord Pembroke, who had been selected to convey it to the prince, spoke neither French, Italian, nor Spanish. Pembroke’s speech on delivering the said ring was either misunderstood or wrongly translated, and Philip came to the conclusion that it was intended to warn him of some plot or other against him, for he was well aware of the intense dislike to the marriage entertained by the majority of the English; and he even prepared to turn back. He, however, called the Duke of Alva and Count Egmont to him, and passing for shelter under the dripping boughs of a tree, consulted with them. Pembroke was now called also, and after a good deal of pantomiming, it was made clear that the ring was simply a matter of compliment, and not a warning; and thus, greatly relieved, the brilliant company galloped on, through the blinding wind and rain, as fast as their horses could speed. As the queen spoke Spanish fluently, no doubt Philip described this incident to her, and maybe it explains why, shortly after the prince had entered her presence, Mary was observed to be laughing heartily as she conversed with him.

The marriage of the Queen of England to the Prince of Naples and Spain took place in Winchester Cathedral on July 25, being the Feast of St. James. Mary walked from the episcopal palace to the church, her cousin, the Lady Margaret Douglas (Lennox), carrying her train, assisted by Sir John Gage, the chamberlain. Behind her walked Lady Katherine Grey, “her train upheld by a gentlewoman.” Then came the queen’s favourite women: the Lady Browne, Mrs. Jane Dormer, Mrs. Clarencieux, the Lady Bacon, Mrs. Sands, the beautiful Lady Magdalen Dacre, Mrs. Mary Finch, Jane Russell, Mrs. Shirley, and many others. In the chancel were assembled the distinguished Spanish noblemen and women who had accompanied the prince from Spain. The tall, majestic, but sinister-looking Duke of Alva, with his fine features, steely grey eyes, and long forked grey beard, must have been the observed of all observers, for he was already renowned and dreaded as a formidable opponent of the Reform. The handsome Count Egmont was also a conspicuous personage in the prince’s foreign escort. Within a few short years, together with his friend, Count Horne, he was to be amongst Alva’s most famous victims, and eventually to be immortalized in a tragedy by Schiller and an overture by Beethoven. After the wedding ceremony, performed by Dr. Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester, the illustrious company walked processionally to the episcopal palace, where a copious banquet was served, the royal table being furnished with plate of solid gold. A cupboard of nine stages, full of gold vases and silver dishes, was placed well in sight, for ornament rather than for use. In a gallery opposite was stationed a band of musicians, who played a selection of English and Spanish tunes; after which, four heralds, attired in their official tabards, entered, and between the first and the second courses, one of them, after much trumpeting, pronounced a congratulatory Latin panegyric in the queen’s honour and in that of the Prince of Naples, which was received with tumultuous applause, though we may take it for granted that nine-tenths of the audience did not understand a word of what had been said! At what we should call the dessert, a group of Winchester boys pressed forward and grouped themselves round their head-boy, who read a Latin epithalium[61] of his own composition. The queen then most graciously introduced the lads to the prince, and they were all of them rewarded by Her Majesty and His Highness with gold and silver coins, tied up in little red bags. At the close of the banquet, Prince Philip rose and returned thanks to the Lords of the Privy Council and to the other English nobility present. At six o’clock the tables were cleared and taken up, and a little later the queen, who had retired for about an hour, returned to the hall, accompanied by her women, and spoke very graciously to the Spanish ladies. Among these were the Duchess of Alva, the Countess Egmont, the Countess Horne, the Countess of Villhermosa, the Duquesa de las Neves, and many others, whose costumes were deemed so extraordinary and ludicrous by the English ladies that they had the greatest difficulty to conceal their merriment. We can imagine how the little Lady Katherine Grey must have been diverted by the comical spectacle presented by the towering form of the Duchess of Alva, a very large and tall woman, attired in one of those gigantic farthingales with which Velazquez has made us familiar. It seems that the Duchess of Alva’s huge petticoat was embroidered in a design of parrots and squirrels pecking at cherries and oranges and other fruits, and even nuts: the whole on a ground of gold thread. No doubt it was a marvellous specimen of needlework, but when taken in conjunction with a formidable ruff of gold lace and a headdress so peculiar as to baffle description, the presence of the august lady was well calculated to astonish and divert her English hosts, who were attired in the tasteful costume of the period. The Spanish ladies, who did not dance the English dances, after much ado consented to execute a Spanish fandango, to the amused delight of the queen and the court of England.

What became of Lady Katherine Grey immediately after the marriage of the queen is not recorded. From Winchester the royal couple went to Basing Hall for their honeymoon, where they were splendidly entertained by the Marquis of Winchester; but as the suites of the queen and her consort were, to use Dominie Sampson’s expression, “prodeegious,” both in quality and quantity, a large contingent of them rode on to London to await their majesties’ arrival. After a week at Basing Hall, the royal couple, with their courts, proceeded, in mended weather, to Windsor. The cavalcade consisted of fifty-two of the lumbering but vividly painted coaches then in vogue, containing about a dozen persons each: that occupied by the prince and the queen, who sat opposite each other precisely as they would have done in an omnibus, was the only one painted scarlet. The passage of the royal party and their suite through the hamlets, villages, and small towns on the way, created, we may be sure, a delightful impression upon the country-folks, unaccustomed to seeing so many gay coaches, litters, cavaliers, and horsemen. Long before the interminable cortège reached Windsor, the sun shone out gloriously, as the noble silhouette of the incomparable castle, with its round and square towers rising majestically from the midst of its delicious surroundings of every tint of verdure, burst upon the delighted English and the surprised Spaniards, who had no conception that England—which, according to their letters home, they considered a land of barbarians—contained any palace so superb: one that coul until August 27, in that fair riverside palace, of which, unfortunately, so little has survived. On the morning of that day, Philip and Mary, in their state barges, escorted by nearly a hundred other craft, some of them manned by as many as forty oarsmen, rowed down the river to Suffolk Place, Southwark, where they spent the night before making their state entry into London. In those days, Suffolk Place, of which only a memory remains in the name of a mean court, was one of the most magnificent Tudor residences in England. It had been inherited by the queen’s uncle, Charles Brandon, from his uncle Thomas, and sumptuously furnished for the reception of the queen-dowager, Mary Tudor. In the reign of Edward VI it was converted into a mint, but was now refurnished for the reception of Prince Philip. It is not likely that either the Lady Frances, or her daughters Katherine and Mary, were included in the state procession that started for Westminster from Suffolk Place early in the morning of the 28th of August. The tragedy of Lady Jane was too fresh in the minds of the people for it to be prudent to recall it too forcibly by the presence in a public function of the mother and sisters of the numerous victims. The state entry of Philip and Mary into the metropolis must have been very curious, if only on account of the number of giants which, for some unexplained reason, formed part of the usual pageants along the road: their towering height contrasted sharply with the very diminutive stature of the queen. Of greater interest probably to the people of London than this state entry was another procession which passed through the streets some months later, bearing to the Tower no less than ninety-seven iron chests, each a yard and a quarter in length, and reported to contain a quantity of Spanish silver, which, says Machyn, “will mak by estymacyon 1 thousand pounds.” These chests were carried in carts specially constructed for the purpose, and guarded by Spaniards in rich liveries, and were greeted, so it was noted, with greater enthusiasm than was shown for either the prince or the queen. Naturally the people were well pleased to see so tangible a proof that the national exchequer, which had been emptied by Henry VIII and by the protector, under Edward VI, was being thus replenished by the otherwise intolerable Spaniards.

Unhappily, in the midst of the coronation festivities, the old Duke of Norfolk died; and in deference to his memory, the queen, who was probably very tired herself of these rejoicings, ordered that they should be suspended for some time. The court therefore proceeded to Hampton Court, where it arrived on August 23 (1554), and was met, we know, by Lady Katherine Grey, because a few days after their highnesses’ arrival, an important incident in the life of this young lady occurred—i.e. her meeting, after some years’ separation, with young Edward Seymour, Earl of Hertford, the late Duke of Somerset’s eldest son, who at one time had been much attached to Lady Jane Grey. He was not a very desirable suitor, it may be, for so great a lady as Katherine, since, besides being not very well off—having been deprived of his father’s lands and titles—he was so undersized that he was generally called “little Hertford”; whilst, as we shall see later on, he seems to have possessed a timorous and vacillating character.

[To face p. 122

PHILIP II, KING OF SPAIN

(From a contemporary Spanish print)

Meanwhile, the king and queen retired to a suite of beautiful Gothic chambers, known as “Paradise,” which were destroyed in the seventeenth century, when this part of the palace was rebuilt by William and Mary. Philip and Mary shut themselves up for nearly a week, much to the annoyance of the public, no one being admitted, except such ladies-in-waiting and gentlemen as were absolutely necessary for the service of the royal table and bedchamber. These days of peaceful seclusion were possibly the happiest of Mary’s life: for she firmly believed Philip to be in love with her, and he played up to her fancy as deceitfully and skilfully as only he knew how. The royal pair would sit for hours together hand in hand, and even disappear down a private staircase, to meander, with their arms round each other’s waists, like the commonest of lovers, across the lawns and the flower-bordered avenues of that charming and still delightful garden. The queen was infatuated, and firmly believed that in due course she would give birth to a son and heir—had not the fact been lately prophesied to her by a famous soothsayer? Unfortunately, even thus early in his married life, Philip exhibited his fickle nature, in an amusing incident that moved the court to merriment. Among the ladies in attendance on Mary at this time was the beautiful Lady Magdalen Dacre, a friend of Lady Katherine Grey and of about her age. Her beaming face and her bright eyes soon attracted the attention of Philip, who watched an opportunity to pounce upon his fair prey and kiss her, whereupon the fiery young Englishwoman, breaking away from him, gave him a resounding box on the ears. Philip took his punishment prettily enough and made no complaint; but the story of his defeat, spreading like wildfire through the court, created much amusement, and no doubt eventually reached Her Majesty’s ears.

Mr. Martin Hume published, some years ago, a very curious letter he found among the Spanish archives, giving a description of the few happy days Mary enjoyed with Philip, from which we learn that the over numerous Spaniards who accompanied the prince were as much disgusted with the English as the English were with them. Left somewhat to themselves, thanks to the love-making of their sovereign, they made themselves masters of Hampton Court. They could not endure the cooking; it was, they said, coarse, raw, and horrible. The famous “roast-beef of old England” was unsuited to their palates, and their stomachs revolted at the quantity of strong beer which the attendants upon Mary imbibed so copiously that, according to the correspondent in question, by the time evening drew on, the majority of them were drunk. Further, this correspondent says: “There is not a single Spanish gentleman here who would give a farthing for any of their women; and, to speak plainly, they care equally little for us Spaniards. The English, in fact, hate us as they do the devil, and in that spirit they treat us. If we go up to town to make purchases, we are sure to be cheated, and it is quite dangerous for us to venture into the country. As to their women, with few exceptions, they are most plain, very fat, and red in the face. They dress extremely badly, and shuffle rather than walk. There are eighteen kitchens in this royal palace, and every day there are consumed not less than one hundred sheep, twelve oxen, eighteen calves, and beer in such abundance, that the winter flow of the river at Valladolid is not greater in quantity.” The amusing writer then proceeds to describe the queen. “Bless you,” says he, “she is a very plain little lady, small, lean, with a pink-and-white complexion and no eyebrows; very pious and very badly dressed.” In this matter of the queen’s dress our Spanish critic probably preferred the Spanish fashion for ladies, with its “vastie” farthingales and impossible head-dress, to the rich but sober costume which Queen Mary affected.

Whilst Philip and Mary were spending an idyllic existence in the pleasant seclusion and surroundings of their sequestered apartments, the ladies of the court no doubt availed themselves of the opportunity to enjoy a greater amount of freedom than court etiquette usually allows; and thus it came to pass than young Hertford and Lady Katherine met almost daily, either in the garden or in the palace itself, thereby adding fuel to the fire of that attachment between them which was eventually to prove so disastrous to both. That the Duchess of Somerset, the lad’s mother, was aware of their love-making appears pretty certain, and probably Mary herself was cognizant of it, and by no means disapproved. She felt sure she would become the mother of an heir to the Throne, and it mattered very little to her whom the Lady Katherine married, provided he was of sufficient rank. Notwithstanding that his mother, the duchess, was a very outspoken Protestant, Queen Mary always entertained a great affection for her, addressing her, in her numerous letters, as her “Dearest Nan.” Indeed the early courting of Lady Katherine and Hertford was spent under the most auspicious circumstances, smiled upon by the queen and amidst the most charming and romantic surroundings.

On the 28th of September the court removed from Hampton Court and went to Westminster Palace, and with it went Lady Katherine and all the ladies, young and old; and there is a record that, on the 30th of the month, the Lady Frances came up to town and paid her respects to the queen and her consort. She probably attended their highnesses to St. Paul’s, where the whole court listened to a sermon preached by Gardiner.

Meanwhile the Spaniards, who had flocked to London in great numbers, were the cause of perpetual trouble to the citizens and to themselves. Street fights between them and the English were of constant occurrence, and all sorts of brawls, as picturesque, no doubt, as they were unpleasant, between the English gentlemen and the Spanish cavaliers, and Spanish valets and London apprentices, occurred almost daily—and especially nightly. Probably London felt itself well quit of this foreign invasion when the greater part of it followed Philip, on his return to Spain in August 1555, leaving the queen at Greenwich in the deepest despondency. Before this, the Lady Katherine Grey had formed an intimacy with the two daughters of the late Duke of Somerset, the Ladies Margaret and Jane Seymour, who had been appointed maids of honour to the queen. They are described as very good-looking young women, and Jane was even considered to be one of the most learned of her time. Shortly after the departure of Prince Philip, Lady Jane Seymour, who was very delicate, fell ill, and the queen allowed Lady Katherine to go with her to her mother, the Duchess of Somerset’s house at Hanworth, which Mary had recently restored to her, and where the young Earl of Hertford was staying. As may be imagined, the courting which had begun at Hampton Court was continued, with renewed vigour, at Hanworth, Lady Jane Seymour being Lady Katherine’s confidante.

[CHAPTER III]

THE PROGRESS OF LADY KATHERINE’S LOVE AFFAIRS

The happiest years of Lady Katherine’s life were, according to her own account, those spent at the court of Queen Mary. She was too well versed in the politics of the time not to recognize that the queen’s action with respect to her sister Jane was not a matter of private revenge but of public policy, approved and indeed endorsed by her Parliament. She bore witness, in after years, to the kindness and consideration she had received from Queen Mary, and the precedence accorded to her on all state occasions as a princess of the blood, allowing her to walk before any of the other great ladies of the court, excepting the Princess Elizabeth, the Lady Frances, and Henry VIII’s fourth wife and only surviving widow, Anne of Cleves. Queen Mary, unlike her successor Elizabeth, insisted upon her ladies and maids of honour paying the utmost attention to their religious duties, and was, moreover, very vigilant as to their manners and their morals. So long as her health permitted, together with all her court, she heard Mass every morning in the palace chapel, or in her bedroom, when she was ill. Very frequently she attended Vespers, together with all her court, besides taking her part in those numerous religious processions—which had been suppressed since her father’s reign—round the cloisters of Westminster Abbey and the courtyards of her palaces, on saints’ days and holy days. Of an evening, when at needlework with her ladies, hymns and litanies were sung; so that King Philip, notwithstanding his zeal for the Church, was somewhat depressed by so much piety, when he returned to England in 1556, and observed that “his wife’s court was now become like that of some abbess, there was so much praying and psalm-singing.” No doubt, Lady Katherine Grey joined in all these pious exercises, and it was even reported that, at this period, she followed her mother’s example, and reverted to the Church of Rome. She was certainly not a very staunch Protestant, since she told Feria that she was “as good a Catholic as any.”

At the court of Queen Mary, Lady Katherine Grey formed one or two interesting friendships. She kept up her connection with Mrs. Saintlow, who, however, does not seem to have troubled Queen Mary overmuch with her presence; and she became intimate with Jane Dormer, Countess de Feria, an extremely beautiful young woman, belonging to a very ancient Catholic family, for whom the queen entertained a great affection. This lady has left a book of memoirs, printed some fifty years ago, which contains many interesting details of life at the court of England under the rule of Mary Tudor. This friendship between Katherine Grey and the Countess of Feria proved dangerous, since it placed the former in immediate communication with the Spanish ambassador, and led to her being compromised in one of the most remarkable plots of the many connected with the succession that rendered Elizabeth’s life a misery to her. So great was the influence of the Ferias over Lady Katherine that, in March 1559, the count could write to King Philip triumphantly stating that she had actually given him her solemn promise that she would not marry without his consent, nor change her religion, which points to the fact that, as we have said above, she had become a Catholic. Another of Lady Katherine’s intimates at this time was Surrey’s “Fair Geraldine,” the beautiful Lady Clinton, who, although a professed Protestant, was beloved by Queen Mary, who retained her in her privy-chamber, together with Lady Bacon and one or two other ladies who approved of the Reformation. She had married, when very young, the elderly Sir Anthony Browne, who was master of the horse to Henry VIII, and had been left by him a rich widow. Her second husband was Lord Clinton, who in due time became Earl of Lincoln. Lady Katherine held her in such high esteem that she bequeathed her a legacy in her will.

Of Katherine’s mode of life at Mary’s court in the last years of that unhappy queen’s reign, we know very little, beyond the fact that she is occasionally mentioned as attending Her Majesty on various state occasions; but we may rest assured that she knew the cause of all the many sorrows and troubles—the unrequited love, the failing health of mind and body—that rendered those last years of Mary’s life so gloomy and yet so pathetic, during that fearful time when London was lighted by the lurid flames of Smithfield. Lady Katherine saw Queen Mary neglected by her husband; she knew of the tragic story of the dropsy mistaken for pregnancy, and as she was with Mary during the last weeks of her life, she must often have seen her sitting on the floor, her hands clasping her knees and her forehead resting upon them, her long grey hair streaming round her. She would sit for hours thus, silently nursing her knees; or lifting up her face, would stare vacantly, her mind far away in dreams, her eyes not recognizing even those who stood nearest to her. When at last death released this queen of woes from her suffering, and her sister, who had been hastily summoned from Hatfield, rode triumphantly to London to succeed her and attend her obsequies, Lady Katherine Grey and her sister Lady Mary walked from St. James’s Palace to Westminster Abbey in the solemn funeral procession of a queen who ought to have been beloved, but who, owing to circumstances beyond her control, died hated and defamed as “Bloody Mary.”

During the last two years of Mary’s life, young Hertford’s courtship of Lady Katherine Grey progressed smoothly enough, approved by the queen, by the Lady Frances and her husband, and also, in a certain degree, by that shrewd virago, his mother the Duchess of Somerset, who, however, expressed some anxiety lest such an alliance might eventually lead to “the undoing of her son.” Had Mary lived, there is no doubt but that the marriage would have taken place with state in the presence of the queen and the whole court, without the least let or hindrance.

After the funeral of Queen Mary, Lady Katherine went to the Charterhouse, Sheen, to stay for a few weeks with her mother, who was very ill at this time—like unto death. Here the matter of her betrothal to young Hertford was resumed with renewed energy. The young gentleman was invited to Sheen, where every opportunity was afforded him, under the auspices of the Lady Frances and her husband, Mr. Adrian Stokes, to meet his fiancée and her little sister Lady Mary; but nothing was concluded, the marriage being left an open question, as the Lady Frances recovered soon afterwards. Both the sisters were then summoned back to the palace at Whitehall, where Elizabeth gave them apartments, which they were “to retain as their own, even when absent.” Her Majesty received her young cousins with some display of an affection which she certainly never really felt for either of them. Katherine, on the other hand, took the queen’s advances coldly; she was annoyed, so she told Feria, that Elizabeth refused to accept her as her successor, and her dignity was hurt at the fact that the queen had only made her one of her ladies of the presence, “whereas she was in the privy-chamber of the late queen, who showed her much favour. The present queen,” he adds, “probably bears her no goodwill.” Elizabeth thought it good policy, however, to keep Lady Katherine, of whom she was seriously afraid, near her, because, so far as England was concerned, she was an even greater danger to the safety of the Throne than was Mary Stuart, since Lady Katherine’s position, in the matter of the succession, was defined by two royal wills, and by a special Act of Parliament; whereas the Scotch queen’s was never confirmed, either in the wills of Henry VIII or Edward VI, nor by any Act of Parliament.

Queen Elizabeth’s court formed a striking contrast to that of her sister Mary. “Gloriana” had restored all the extravagant magnificence of Henry VIII’s time: all, save the supreme artistic taste that distinguished the best period of the Renaissance, but which had almost entirely died away by the time of the accession of Elizabeth, whose egregious farthingales, ridiculous ruffs and towering head-dresses, disfigured herself and her courtiers, and rendered them a laughing-stock to foreigners. “This queen,” says the Venetian envoy, “exaggerates everything in a manner so preposterous that instead of inspiring awe, she excites laughter. Her ruff is sometimes so high, that her face appears to be in the middle of her body. She wears more jewels than any other princess, but as she has no discernment, they look tawdry and valueless. She is a handsome woman, of dignified carriage and fairly tall. Her face is oval, her features aquiline; her eyes very black and piercing; and her hair changes its colour, but is generally red—to match her clothes.” Surrounded by courtiers and ladies attired after a similar grotesque fashion, “Gloriana” must indeed have presented a marvellous spectacle, especially when she was carried in a sort of palanquin borne by six noblemen, that made her look for all the world like a Hindu idol.

[To face p. 134

QUEEN ELIZABETH

(From the original portrait by F. Zucchero, at Hatfield)

Absorbed, therefore, in her political intrigues and her private amusements, Elizabeth, who was the strangest mixture of wisdom and folly that ever occupied a throne, cared very little about her ladies’ morals. Provided they were punctually on hand whenever she wanted them, she was content to allow them to go their own ways, always, however, on the condition they created no public scandal. Under these circumstances, Lady Katherine Grey may have even preferred the greater freedom allowed under the Elizabethan régime, to the rigorous round of pious exercises that made up the routine of court life under Queen Mary.

Meanwhile, in March 1559, the Lady Frances being still very sick, her daughters were once more sent for, and, with the queen’s permission, arrived at the Charterhouse at Sheen one windy day towards evening. The scheme for the marriage of Lady Katherine with young Hertford was now revived with greater vigour than ever.

The Lady Frances was in such very bad health that she evidently wished, before leaving this world, to provide her eldest surviving daughter with a husband. The Lady Frances had recently given birth to a child, which, notwithstanding the attention and skill of Dr. Wendy, had died almost as soon as it was born; but although its mother failed to gain strength, her mind continued very clear. Calling one day the Lady Katherine and young Hertford to her, she declared it was her opinion that he (Hertford) “would make a very suitable husband for her daughter Katherine, if the queen would only see it in the same light; but she (the Lady Frances) would have nothing to do with the matter unless with the queen’s knowledge and consent, and that of her honourable council.” Mr. Stokes then drew Hertford aside, and taking him into an inner room, held a consultation with him. He thought, as the Lady Frances was so near a kinswoman of the queen, it would be well if she wrote Her Majesty a letter on the subject. This advice pleased Hertford, and the two gentlemen set to work to frame what they deemed a suitable letter. They, however, considered it wise, before obtaining the Lady Frances’s signature, to consult Mr. Bertie, the husband of the other dowager Duchess of Suffolk, Katherine Willoughby, who had returned from his exile in Poland, and who apparently expressed considerable sympathy with the lovers. They therefore rode to London, to the Barbican, where Duchess Katherine had her house, and not only saw Mr. Bertie, but a Mr. Gilgate and a Mr. Strikely, who were apparently in the employ of the duchess and Mr. Bertie. Whatever may have been their exact social position, they were taken into the secret, as they were probably necessary as witnesses to documents that might have to be signed. The duchess and her husband and all concerned considered it imperative that, before any further steps were taken, Elizabeth should be made aware of all that was going on, and, if possible, conciliated and induced to countenance the match. If these worthy people thought that Elizabeth was likely to be “conciliated,” they knew evidently very little about her, for of all the happenings of this world, the one she dreaded most was precisely the marriage of Lady Katherine and her having children, for, as she observed later on, “it was bad enough to have Lady Katherine to deal with, let alone to endure her brats.” She was determined, she added, “to keep the sisters Grey, spinsters.” She bore no personal dislike to either of them, if they would only do as she wished, but if they were rebellious, she would be obliged to act, in her own defence and in that of the realm.

On their return to Sheen, Hertford and Mr. Stokes found the Lady Frances much worse. Greatly alarmed, they conceived it to be their duty to act as promptly as possible. They were terribly afraid of Elizabeth, and did not hesitate to say so, even in the presence of the dying woman. They advised the duchess to send at once for her daughters, who had returned to court a few days earlier. On informing Elizabeth that their mother was not expected to live, the queen gave them permission to go back immediately, sending them in one of her own palanquins or litters. They arrived to find the duchess propped up with cushions, and looking very ill indeed. The Lady Frances, taking Katherine’s hand in hers, and stretching out her other hand to Hertford, said: “Daughter Kate, I have found a husband for you, if you like well to frame your fancy and good-will in his direction.” On this the Lady Katherine replied that she was very willing so to do, as she loved Hertford very dearly. The Lady Frances, thinking that a message from one who was so near her end might influence the queen, called her husband, Mr. Adrian Stokes, to her, and asked him to frame a letter for her which should be delivered to the queen, and he, bending over her, declared that “he would be right glad to do so.” He then, with the assistance of Hertford, wrote a draft of the letter which was to be addressed to Elizabeth, and which ran much as follows: “That such a nobleman did bear good-will to her daughter the Lady Katherine, and that she did humbly require the Queen’s Highness to be good and gracious lady unto her, and that it would please Her Majesty to assent to the marriage of her to the said Earl, which was the only thing she desired before her death, and should be the occasion for her to die the more quietly.” This draft of the letter, which was never sent, was read out at the subsequent trial which took place after the clandestine marriage of the Lady Katherine with the Earl of Hertford. Mr. Stokes on that occasion said: “My Lord of Hertford would not let me send the letter, for he took fright at the boldness of it and said he would not care to meddle any more in the matter.” Mr. Stokes did not seem to think this was a very manly thing on Hertford’s part; but Hertford was not manly, only a very small, delicate, frail-looking young gentleman, who, however, like so many other frail and sickly looking youths, contrived to live to a very advanced age. These occurrences took place somewhere in March: throughout the spring and summer the Lady Frances lingered on, a very sick woman, rarely if ever rising from her bed or her couch, but frequently visited by her daughters, who brought her kind messages and gifts from Elizabeth, still in complete ignorance of the matrimonial project. Hertford seems to have been a good deal at Sheen, though nothing was determined as to the marriage. It was apparently, under advice, deemed safest to leave the whole concern in abeyance until after the Lady Frances’s death; which took place, in the fifty-fifth year of her age, in the presence of her husband and children, on the 20th November 1559. Elizabeth gave her “beloved” cousin a right royal burial, worthy of a princess of the blood. She was represented by her chamberlain, and the court put on the mourning usual for a member of the royal family. The Ladies Katherine and Mary Grey attended their mother’s funeral, “having their trains upheld by gentlewomen.” Clarencieux stood at the head of the coffin, and cried out, at a given moment, in a loud voice: “Laud and praise be to Almighty God, that it hath pleased Him to call out of this transitory life into His eternal glory, the most noble and excellent Princess, the Lady Frances, late Duchess of Suffolk, daughter to the right high and mighty Prince, Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, and of the most noble and excellent Princess, Mary the French Queen, daughter to the most illustrious King Henry VII.” The Communion Service was then read in English, and a carpet laid before the high altar for the chief mourners to kneel upon. At the Communion, the Ladies Katherine and Mary, kneeling upon this carpet, received the Holy Communion, Dr. Jewel having previously preached the usual panegyric. When the service was over, Mr. Adrian Stokes, who had been chief mourner, went back to the Charterhouse, with his step-daughters, in the very chariot that had borne the Lady Frances’s coffin to the abbey: they literally returned on the hearse! The Lady Frances is buried in St. Edmund’s Chapel, on the south side of the abbey. Her tomb is a handsome specimen of the art of the period, and although considerably damaged, the likeness between the face of the effigy and that in the famous portrait is remarkable. Quite close to the Lady Frances’s tomb is an upright figure of a small girl, kneeling. Is this the tomb of her child by Adrian Stokes, which died in infancy; or is it, as Stow seems to imply, that of her daughter, the dwarfish Lady Mary Grey? By her will, the Lady Frances left all her possessions to her husband for life, with reversion to her two daughters. As Mr. Stokes outlived them both, they never inherited much of their mother’s property, except the proceeds of the sale of some land near Oxford and of several other manors which were in her possession at the time of her last illness, and concerning the disposal of which she wrote to Cecil some eight or ten days before her death.

The Ladies Katherine and Mary Grey, on their return to Westminster, found themselves in pecuniary straits, although their embarrassment was, it seems, relieved by Mr. Stokes, out of the money he had received from his late wife’s executors. Elizabeth welcomed her bereaved cousins with much apparent sympathy. She was, or pretended to be, most affectionate to them, and even called Lady Katherine “her daughter,” although, as Quadra, the Spanish ambassador, says, “the feeling between them could hardly have been that of mother and child.” “But,” he goes on to say, “the Queen has thought best to put her [Lady Katherine] in her chamber and makes much of her in order to keep her quiet. She even talks about formally adopting her.”

Whilst still in the early weeks of her mourning for her mother, the Lady Katherine received information that greatly distressed her. Young Hertford, so she was told, had been paying his addresses to the daughter of Sir Peter Mewtas,[62] a piece of news that made her very jealous and unhappy. Seeing the state of nervous prostration into which Lady Katherine was thrown by Hertford’s alleged infidelity, Lady Jane Seymour insisted upon knowing what was the matter, whereupon Katherine confessed to her tearfully that she had heard there was love-making between Mistress Mewtas and Lord Hertford. On the following day, the Lady Jane obtained leave to go to Hanworth, where Hertford was staying with his mother, the Duchess of Somerset. She taxed her brother, in no measured terms, with his lack of fidelity to the Lady Katherine, to which he replied that he knew nothing of the matter of the daughter of Sir Peter Mewtas, that the whole story was a falsehood, and that he was willing to live or die for the sake of Lady Katherine. He added that if she would but consent to marry him, he was willing to defy Elizabeth, and he thought that the sooner the marriage took place the better; and so saying, he drew from his finger a ring with a pointed diamond in it, and gave it to his sister to carry to the Lady Katherine. Armed with this bond of peace, Lady Jane Seymour returned to London and found Lady Katherine, to whom she gave the ring and her brother’s message. “My little love, my little love,” said Katherine, “well pleased am I that he should thus treat me,” and drying her eyes, she became once more her cheerful self.

Amongst Lady Katherine Grey’s friends at the court of Elizabeth was a certain Mrs. Blanche Parry,[63] widow of Sir Thomas Parry, and a pupil, in the occult arts, of the famous Dr. Dee.[64] Elizabeth entertained for Blanche not only a great affection, but also held her in a sort of awe. She believed implicitly in her favourite’s powers, and never a week passed that Blanche Parry was not admitted to confidential interviews with her august mistress, whose innermost secrets she possessed, and, through her knowledge of palmistry, not only shared, but even guided.

Blanche was a handsome and amiable woman, who used her influence over her mistress to the advantage of others as well as of herself. One day, Lady Katherine asked her to “do” her hand for her, and Blanche, who was probably well aware of all that was going on between young Hertford and her royal client, told her: “The lines say, madam, that if you ever marry without the queen’s consent in writing, you and your husband will be undone, and your fate worse than that of my Lady Jane.” Katherine paid very little attention to the admonition, but went her way to perdition blindly. In after years she probably remembered Blanche Parry’s sagacious advice, for she left her a legacy in her will, as also did her sister, Lady Mary Grey, another of Blanche’s clients and friends.

[CHAPTER IV]

QUEEN ELIZABETH AND HER SUCCESSION

In the year 1560, Elizabeth’s position became very precarious; her popularity was rapidly diminishing, owing to the evil reports spread abroad by her enemies, with respect to the nature of her intimacy with the Lord Robert Dudley. The Spanish ambassador wrote to King Philip, early in the year, that he was amazed by “the new queen’s flightiness,” and remarks that “there is no understanding this woman. She will surely come to trouble of her own making.” Elizabeth was at her wits’ end to know exactly what to do.

Her equanimity was greatly disturbed by the question of the succession, and she was advised on all hands to marry, and by having an heir of her own, so to speak, succeed herself. It was freely bruited about—and the foreign envoys frequently allude to the slander—that she was already a mother, and many strange stories were current concerning a daughter she had had by Dudley, which was being brought up secretly.

Others said that the queen could never know maternity, although she herself, like her sister Mary, seems to have believed that sooner or later she would have offspring to succeed her, and it was stated that this was the reason she steadfastly refused, to the end, to nominate an heir. When, in 1563, a deputation from the lords waited upon her, to urge her to come to some definite decision in the matter, Elizabeth rounded on them fiercely, crying out that the marks on her face were not wrinkles, but the pits of small-pox, and that “although she might be old, God could send her children as He did to Saint Elizabeth.” She warned them to consider well what they did in this affair of the succession, “as if she declared a successor, it would cost much blood to England.”

Yet for all her desire to have an heir of her own body, Elizabeth was at heart loath to marry; Philip of Spain had courted her, through his ambassadors (she was already personally well acquainted with him), but, remembering how miserable her sister had been as his wife, she consistently rejected his suit, saying that she “did not think it was right before God for a woman to marry her brother-in-law.” The rejected Philip was none the less determined to secure paramount Spanish influence in England, and wrote to Feria proposing that the queen should be brought to favour the Archduke Ferdinand of Austria, his very Catholic brother. Elizabeth had lately thrown over the Earl of Arundel, with whom she had been flirting, and had repulsed the Italian, Guido Cavalcanti, Catherine of Medici’s secret agent, in his vicarious wooing on behalf of a French prince, the Duc d’Alençon. Therefore there was a fair chance that Elizabeth might at last have yielded to persuasion and favoured the archduke’s suit. Had Philip played his game firmly at this juncture, most probably she would have fallen an easy victim to his intrigues and have married Ferdinand, whereby England would have lost, for some time at least, her independence. At the bottom of all the queen’s hesitation and perplexity about her marriage was less the interests of country than the violence of her headstrong passion for Robert Dudley, still the husband of that Amy Robsart who has been immortalized by Sir Walter Scott in Kenilworth. On April 18, 1559, Feria wrote to Philip that he had heard dreadful news concerning the queen’s conduct with Dudley; it was all over the court, that they slept in contiguous rooms—that she never let him out of her sight. “Indeed,” the ambassador continues, “I have heard such things of the queen’s conduct with respect to the Lord Robert that I dare not repeat them. Meanwhile, a rumour is circulating to the effect that Robert Dudley’s wife, who is in the country, is sick of a malady of the breasts and like to die.” On a close examination of the documents connected with the singular death of Amy Robsart,[65] who by the way was never Countess of Leicester, her husband not being elevated to that rank for some considerable time after her demise, we find no mention whatever of this malady. The rumour was, therefore, merely a feeler put forward to prepare public opinion for coming events. Elizabeth had made up her mind that, should the Lady Robert Dudley conveniently depart this life at an early date, she would marry the widower. All these and many other open and covert attacks on the queen’s character were damaging her good name with the people, to such an extent, indeed, that it was actually proposed to dethrone her and to replace her by some more suitable successor. The English Catholics naturally favoured the Queen of Scots, but Katherine Grey was preferred by Spain. King Philip, as we have said, all his life certainly regretted the loss of Spanish influence in English politics which came to an end on the death of Queen Mary, and he determined to regain it at any cost. That Lady Katherine Grey, on account of her supposed leaning towards Catholicism and her friendship for the Ferias, was regarded by the Spanish King as the most likely medium for realizing his hopes, was well known.

As will be seen in the course of this biography, many and curious were the intrigues, of which Lady Katherine was the centre, for retrieving Spanish ascendancy in the British Isles; but by far the most astonishing and fantastic (and the earliest) was a plot—evolved in 1558 or early in 1559—for secretly abducting Katherine to Spain.[66] There she was to be married to Don Carlos, the king’s son, or to the Archduke Ferdinand, or some other Spanish prince, and put forward by Philip as Elizabeth’s immediate successor or even rival, her claims to the Throne being supported by all the might of Spain, in opposition to those of Mary Queen of Scots, the candidate favoured by France. Apparently Philip, misled by his ambassadors, who miscalculated the extent of Elizabeth’s unpopularity, failed to realize how strong was the anti-Spanish feeling which existed in England, and did not perceive the enormous difficulties which would have to be surmounted before Katherine could be placed on the Throne. Nor does he appear to have known that she had also, strange to say, been selected by the Evangelical, or Swiss, faction of the Protestants, as their special champion. The Spaniards thought Lady Katherine would not be unwilling to accept the proposal to leave England, since she was said to be very unhappy at home; Elizabeth, whatever may have been her outward demonstrations of affection, at heart disliked her, and Katherine reciprocated this dislike, whilst it was thought that “neither her mother[67] nor her step-father loved her, and her uncle (Lord John Grey) could not abide her.” There was probably less grounds for this latter statement; Katherine was not on bad terms with her mother, who, as we have seen, had done her best to further the marriage with Hertford; there is no evidence that she ever quarrelled with Mr. Stokes; and her uncle, Lord John Grey, is known to have treated her kindly when, some years later, she became a prisoner in his house, although there had indeed been coldness between them.

The Countess of Feria was considered the most suitable person to approach Katherine with reference to her leaving England; but meanwhile, whether, as subsequent events indicate, Queen Elizabeth knew of the plot and was determined secretly to frustrate it, or whatever else the cause, the bellicose Feria’s existence at the English court was presently rendered so untenable, by reason of the queen’s open hostility to him and above all, to the countess, that by May 1559 he could stand it no longer, and, inventing an excuse for relinquishing his mission, forthwith returned to Flanders; departing from London in such haste that he left Durham House, Strand, then the Spanish Embassy, in the hands of his wife, who seems to have had some sort of charge upon it.[68] Thus, the plot for Katherine’s abduction, of which, it may be, that princess was entirely ignorant, came to an abrupt conclusion, and was never, so far as we know, revived during the embassy of Feria’s successor, although Philip continued, by less complicated means, to try to get Katherine into his power. Elizabeth, however, could not be brought to believe, as late as 1566, that the original scheme had been abandoned. As there is no mention of the matter in the Simancas Papers, and we only hear of it through the English ambassador at Madrid, it is probable that the plot fell through immediately upon the departure of Feria.

Notwithstanding the open enmity of Queen Elizabeth towards her, the Countess de Feria remained at Durham House some months later than her husband, packing up her own effects and preparing the house for the new ambassador, who was a Roman Catholic Bishop—to wit, the Neapolitan, Don Alvaro de la Quadra, created Bishop of Venosa in 1542, and two years later translated to the bishopric of Aquila in the Kingdom of Naples, which see he resigned on his appointment to the court of England. He was a shrewd, clever man, and so broad-minded that he actually wrote, during the debate upon the Act for Conformity in Faith and Doctrine, the following remarks—which might be endorsed by a Liberal in our time: “It was,” he thought, “natural that the Queen should wish to see uniformity of belief throughout her Kingdom; but,” he adds, “I see that she no longer wishes to style herself Head of the Church, but simply Governor. It is, however, unjust, but still possible, to force a man to act as you will, but that he should be obliged to see things in the same light as his King is simply absurd. Yet they are so ignorant here they pass such a thing as this, for religion in this country is simply, believe me, a matter of policy.” Indeed, religion in the sixteenth century was not only in England, but elsewhere, “merely a matter of policy,” a fact which may explain why Lady Katherine Grey, who was a good Catholic under Mary, had become an equally good Protestant under Elizabeth. After the arrival of Quadra and the departure of the count, and finally, of the Countess of Feria, it is not probable that Katherine ever came again into immediate contact with the Spanish Embassy, although Quadra kept a close watch upon her movements and was well informed as to what was happening with respect to her connection with the succession. Quadra evidently thought that the people might yet favour Lady Katherine over Elizabeth, who in the first year of his embassy he believed to be more unpopular than she really was. He seemed disgusted at the queen’s levity and indecision: “It is ruining her popularity,” he says; “she is in danger of losing her Crown.” One day she tells him she will never marry any one, and the next she asks him if he thinks there would be much opposition if she married one of her servants [meaning Dudley], as the duchesses of Somerset and Suffolk had done. Knowing well what she meant by this, and remembering that Dudley’s wife was living, he made no direct answer—he could not give her any advice; but it was evident that the only man she would ever marry was Robert Dudley. Until he was free, she would remain free. Presently a fresh rumour was started concerning Dudley’s neglected wife, Amy Robsart, now residing, separated from her husband, at Cumnor Hall, near Oxford, a fair old mansion, still in existence, which in those days was rented from the heirs of George Owen, physician to Henry VIII, by a certain Mr. Anthony Forster. In November 1559, Quadra wrote to the king that there is “a rumour in London to the effect that Robert Dudley thinks of poisoning his wife.” So at least he has been told by “a person who is in the habit of giving him veracious news.” “Certainly,” he adds, “all the queen has done with us, and will do with the rest in the matter of her marriage, is only keeping the Lord Robert’s enemies and the country engaged with words, until this wicked deed of killing his wife is consummated.” The matter had become so serious that Lady Sidney, Dudley’s sister Mary, who had been in the habit of visiting Quadra, “thought it best to abstain from doing so.” Sinister rumours were, therefore, circulating as early as November 1559, concerning the relations between the queen and Robert Dudley, and his intention of getting rid of his wife, by foul means, if necessary.

[To face p. 156

ROBERT DUDLEY, EARL OF LEICESTER

(From National Portrait Gallery)

On Sunday, the 8th September of the following year (1560), Lady Dudley (Amy Robsart) fell down a back staircase at Cumnor Hall, and was found dead at the bottom. The following day, a messenger was sent to Dudley, who was in attendance on the queen at Windsor, informing him that his wife had been killed by falling downstairs, whilst all the servants were absent from the house at Abingdon Fair. Dudley, who manifested neither surprise nor much concern, stated that he did not believe his wife’s death had been the result of accident, but was an act of premeditated violence, and added that he feared he would be implicated in the matter. He immediately sent the news of the Lady Dudley’s death to her relations, and invited them to be present at the coroner’s inquest, which was held at Cumnor a few days later. Early in September, Quadra, in a letter to the Duchess of Parma, informed her that it was rumoured in London that the Lord Robert was “thinking of killing his wife, although she was quite well (and would take good care they did not poison her).” “The next day,” which would be about the 9th of September, the queen returning from hunting, meeting him, said that my Lord Robert’s wife was dead, or nearly so, and asked him not to say anything about it. “Certainly,” he continues, “this business is most shameful and scandalous.” Cecil also, earlier in the year, had told him that he thought and believed that Robert Dudley was planning the murder of his wife. Elizabeth must have been informed of the unfortunate Amy’s death almost as soon as Dudley himself, for in the same letter, dated September 11, Quadra adds a postscript: “Since writing the above the queen has published the news of the death of Robert’s wife, and has said to me, in Italian, ‘She broke her neck. She must have fallen downstairs.’”

It is difficult, after reading the above extracts from the Spanish Papers, not to feel fairly certain that, notwithstanding Robert Dudley’s persistent declarations of innocence, he was guilty; and that Amy Robsart was foully murdered by his orders, and with Elizabeth’s knowledge and consent. If this be the case, the “Wizard of the North,” Sir Walter Scott, was, in the main, right, and his explanation of the mystery of Cumnor Hall fairly correct. It was generally believed in London that Dudley had pre-arranged the murder of his wife, with the intention of marrying the queen as soon as possible.[69] Cecil evidently believed this version of the story, and, greatly disgusted thereat, turned his attention in the direction of Lady Katherine. The supporters of the Earl of Huntingdon, the representative of the house of Pole, availing themselves of the queen’s unpopularity, now began agitating in his favour, and Quadra informed the King of Spain that he had just heard that “they are forming an important plan for the maintenance of their heresies, namely, to make the Earl of Huntingdon king, in case the queen should die without issue.” He added that Cecil had told him that the succession belonged of right to the earl, because he was descended from the House of York. Huntingdon, however, was not really a very formidable claimant, for although married, he had no children. Quadra’s letter is dated the 15th of October, and contains, moreover, the following curious reference to Lady Katherine: “They fear here that if the Queen were to die, Your Majesty [the King of Spain] would get the Kingdom into your family by means of the Lady Katherine. Cecil has sounded me on the subject, saying it would be well if a marriage should take place between her and one of Your Majesty’s relations ... [Here there is a piece torn out of the letter].... She [Lady Katherine] should succeed by virtue of the will of King Henry. He [Quadra] asked Cecil if he thought the Queen would declare her [Lady Katherine] heiress to the Crown; whereupon Cecil answered, ‘Certainly not, because as the saying is, the English run after the heir to the Crown more than after the present wearer of it.’” In all probability, the relative alluded to was the Archduke Ferdinand; or may be, the Infante Don Carlos, whose health, however, was very precarious, so that he, on the other hand, may have been at this time already out of the running. Certainly the Archduke was considered by Quadra as a suitable candidate for Lady Katherine’s hand, and it was hoped that if such a marriage could be arranged, Lady Katherine might eventually ascend the Throne, with Ferdinand as her consort, and England would thus be brought again under Spanish influence, if not actually annexed to that country. With such high interests at stake, therefore, Quadra had already been for some time extremely anxious to marry the Archduke either to Elizabeth or, failing her, to Lady Katherine; and hence he wrote to the Spanish king, in November 1559, in the following terms: “This hatred of the Lord Robert will continue, as the Duke [of Norfolk] and the rest of them cannot put up with his being King. I am of opinion that if the Archduke [Ferdinand] comes and makes the acquaintance and obtains the goodwill of these people, even if this marriage—of which I have now no hope except by force—should fall through, and any disaster were to befall the Queen, such as may be feared from her bad government, the Archduke might be summoned to marry Lady Katherine, to whom the Kingdom falls if this woman dies. If the Archduke sees her [Katherine] he should so bear himself that she should understand this design, which in my opinion may be beneficial and even necessary.”

Unfortunately for this scheme, the Archduke never saw Lady Katherine, and the proposed match fell through. Elizabeth found out this intrigue, and resented it, and it was one of the many reasons for her hatred of Katherine, who, however, was probably totally unaware of the numerous plots which were rife concerning her position as Elizabeth’s heiress; but Hertford, never very courageous, was growing alarmed. He knew that the queen, who at one time had called Lady Katherine her “daughter,” now expressed her contempt for her, and also kept her as far removed from her person as possible, “frowning upon her whenever they passed each other.” He therefore despaired of ever obtaining Elizabeth’s consent to their marriage; and was, moreover, reminded by Cecil (who one day questioned him very sharply about the matter of his courtship) of the existence of a law passed by Henry VIII’s Privy Council and ratified by Parliament, at the time the Lady Margaret Douglas, the king’s niece, married her first husband, Lord Thomas Howard, without the royal consent, to wit, inflicting the severest punishment—imprisonment for life and a fine so enormous as to absorb an earl’s income—upon any man who should marry a kinswoman of the crown without the king’s leave. The details of this interview, between the earl and “Mr. Sekrettory,” came out during the subsequent examination of Hertford touching the marriage. Cecil, who was probably actuated much more by political motives than by any personal desire to save Hertford from the fate which awaited him if he married Lady Katherine, came upon the young man one day, and asked him point-blank, whether there was not “good-will” between him and the lady in question. “There is no such thing,” was Hertford’s prompt but untruthful reply. When on his trial, the earl, tormented by scruples, stated publicly that “he desired it to be noted that there was no truth in his reply to Mr. Secretary Cecil.” A little later on—but, it seems, after the marriage had actually taken place—Cecil tried to find out from Katherine herself how matters stood. Always haunted by the idea that one day she might succeed Elizabeth as queen, he was anxious to try to prevent a marriage which, he wisely foresaw, would but injure her cause yet further in the queen’s eyes. Cecil, a cunning diplomat, commenced by questioning Katherine over some extraneous matter concerning her property, but eventually insinuated a few words, warning her “of her too great familiarity with the Earl of Hertford”; and considerately added, that he “would not make the Queen’s Majesty privy thereto.” Katherine, later on, said that the warning, if it had been given before the marriage, might have been heeded. What reply she made at the time is not on record. Prompted by Cecil, the Marquis of Northampton and the “Fair Geraldine” also approached the princess on the subject, advising her “to beware of the company and familiarity of the said earl,” of whom, one fancies, none of these worthy interferes had a very high opinion. Their advice, however, if indeed it did not really come too late, was disregarded.

Love, like Justice, is reputed blind; and between All Hallows and Christmas, 1560, a year after the death of the Lady Frances, Hertford solemnly pledged his troth to Katherine and presented her with a plain gold ring, which opened with a secret spring in several linked compartments, on each of which he had engraved different Latin distichs of his own composition. They ran as follows:—

As circles five, by art compressed, show but one ring to sight,

So trust uniteth faithful minds, with knot of secret might,