[Illustration: _Lady Jane Grey_
_From a photo by Emery Walker after the picture by Lucas de Heere in
the National portrait Gallery_]
LADY JANE GREY
_AND HER TIMES_
By I. A. TAYLOR
_Author of “Queen Hortense and her Friends”
“Queen Henrietta Maria,” etc._
WITH SEVENTEEN ILLUSTRATIONS
[Illustration]
London: HUTCHINSON & CO.
Paternoster Row [Illustration] 1908
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I
PAGE
The condition of Europe and England--Retrospect--Religious
Affairs--A reign of terror--Cranmer in danger--Katherine Howard 1
CHAPTER II
1546
Katherine Parr--Relations with Thomas Seymour--Married to
Henry VIII.--Parties in court and country--Katherine’s
position--Prince Edward 13
CHAPTER III
1546
The Marquis of Dorset and his family--Bradgate Park--Lady Jane
Grey--Her relations with her cousins--Mary Tudor--Protestantism
at Whitehall--Religious persecution 24
CHAPTER IV
1546
Anne Askew--Her trial and execution--Katherine Parr’s
danger--Plot against her--Her escape 36
CHAPTER V
1546
The King dying--The Earl of Surrey--His career and his fate--The
Duke of Norfolk’s escape--Death of the King 48
CHAPTER VI
1547
Triumph of the new men--Somerset made Protector--Coronation of
Edward VI.--Measures of ecclesiastical reform--The Seymour
brothers--Lady Jane Grey entrusted to the Admiral--The Admiral
and Elizabeth--His marriage to Katherine 60
CHAPTER VII
1547-1548
Katherine Parr’s unhappy married life--Dissensions between the
Seymour brothers--The King and his uncles--The Admiral and
Princess Elizabeth--Birth of Katherine’s child, and her death 80
CHAPTER VIII
1548
Lady Jane’s temporary return to her father--He surrenders her
again to the Admiral--The terms of the bargain 100
CHAPTER IX
1548-1549
Seymour and the Princess Elizabeth--His courtship--He is sent
to the Tower--Elizabeth’s examinations and admissions--The
execution of the Lord Admiral 108
CHAPTER X
1549-1550
The Protector’s position--Disaffection in the country--Its
causes--The Duke’s arrogance--Warwick his rival--The success of
his opponents--Placed in the Tower, but released--St. George’s
Day at Court 126
CHAPTER XI
1549-1551
Lady Jane Grey at home--Visit from Roger Ascham--The German
divines--Position of Lady Jane in the theological world 139
CHAPTER XII
1551-1552
An anxious tutor--Somerset’s final fall--The charges against
him--His guilt or innocence--His trial and condemnation--The
King’s indifference--Christmas at Greenwich--The Duke’s
execution 154
CHAPTER XIII
1552
Northumberland and the King--Edward’s illness--Lady Jane and
Mary--Mary refused permission to practise her religion--The
Emperor intervenes 169
CHAPTER XIV
1552
Lady Jane’s correspondence with Bullinger--Illness of the Duchess
of Suffolk--Haddon’s difficulties--Ridley’s visit to Princess
Mary--The English Reformers--Edward fatally ill--Lady Jane’s
character and position 178
CHAPTER XV
1553
The King dying--Noailles in England--Lady Jane married to
Guilford Dudley--Edward’s will--Opposition of the law
officers--They yield--The King’s death 193
CHAPTER XVI
1553
After King Edward’s death--Results to Lady Jane Grey--
Northumberland’s schemes--Mary’s escape--Scene at Sion
House--Lady Jane brought to the Tower--Quarrel with her
husband--Her proclamation as Queen 210
CHAPTER XVII
1553
Lady Jane as Queen--Mary asserts her claims--The English
envoys at Brussels--Mary’s popularity--Northumberland leaves
London--His farewells 225
CHAPTER XVIII
1553
Turn of the tide--Reaction in Mary’s favour in the Council--
Suffolk yields--Mary proclaimed in London--Lady Jane’s
deposition--She returns to Sion House 237
CHAPTER XIX
1553
Northumberland at bay--His capitulation--Meeting with Arundel,
and arrest--Lady Jane a prisoner--Mary and Elizabeth--Mary’s
visit to the Tower--London--Mary’s policy 247
CHAPTER XX
1553
Trial and condemnation of Northumberland--His recantation--Final
scenes--Lady Jane’s fate in the balances--A conversation with
her 259
CHAPTER XXI
1553
Mary’s marriage in question--Pole and Courtenay--Foreign
suitors--The Prince of Spain proposed to her--Elizabeth’s
attitude--Lady Jane’s letter to Hardinge--The coronation--
Cranmer in the Tower--Lady Jane attainted--Letter to her
father--Sentence of death--The Spanish match 275
CHAPTER XXII
1553-1554
Discontent at the Spanish match--Insurrections in the
country--Courtenay and Elizabeth--Suffolk a rebel--General
failure of the insurgents--Wyatt’s success--Marches to
London--Mary’s conduct--Apprehensions in London, and at the
palace--The fight--Wyatt a prisoner--Taken to the Tower 289
CHAPTER XXIII
1554
Lady Jane and her husband doomed--Her dispute with Feckenham--
Gardiner’s sermon--Farewell messages--Last hours--Guilford
Dudley’s execution--Lady Jane’s death 311
INDEX 327
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
LADY JANE GREY (Photogravure)--_Frontispiece_.
FACING PAGE
HENRY VIII. 6
KATHERINE HOWARD 12
HENRY VIII. AND HIS THREE CHILDREN 20
PRINCE EDWARD, AFTERWARDS EDWARD VI. 32
HENRY HOWARD, EARL OF SURREY 54
KATHERINE PARR 82
WILLIAM, LORD PAGET, K.G. 132
EDWARD VI. 136
LADY JANE GREY 142
ARCHBISHOP CRANMER 152
EDWARD SEYMOUR, DUKE OF SOMERSET, K.G. 168
PRINCESS MARY, AT THE AGE OF TWENTY-EIGHT 184
LADY JANE GREY 200
QUEEN ELIZABETH 254
THE TOWER OF LONDON 284
HENRY GREY, DUKE OF SUFFOLK, K.G. 294
LADY JANE GREY AND HER TIMES
CHAPTER I
The condition of Europe and England--Retrospect--Religious
Affairs--A reign of terror--Cranmer in danger--Katherine Howard.
In 1546 it must have been evident to most observers that the life
of the man who had for thirty-five years been England’s ruler and
tyrant--of whom Raleigh affirmed that if all the patterns of a
merciless Prince had been lost in the world they might have been found
in this one King--was not likely to be prolonged; and though it had
been made penal to foretell the death of the sovereign, men must have
been secretly looking on to the future with anxious eyes.
Of all the descendants of Henry VII. only one was male, the little
Prince Edward, and in case of his death the succession would lie
between his two sisters, Mary and Elizabeth, branded by successive Acts
of Parliament with illegitimacy, the infant Queen of Scotland, whose
claims were consistently ignored, and the daughters and grand-daughters
of Henry VII.’s younger daughter, Mary Tudor.
The royal blood was to prove, to more than one of these, a fatal
heritage. To Mary Stuart it was to bring captivity and death, and
by reason of it Lady Jane Grey was to be forced to play the part of
heroine in one of the most tragic episodes of the sixteenth century.
The latter part of Henry VIII.’s reign had been eventful at home and
abroad. In Europe the three-cornered struggle between the Emperor
Charles V., Francis of France, and Henry had been passing through
various phases and vicissitudes, each of the wrestlers bidding for the
support of a second of the trio, to the detriment of the third. New
combinations were constantly formed as the kaleidoscope was turned;
promises were lavishly made, to be broken without a scruple whensoever
their breach might prove conducive to personal advantage. Religion,
dragged into the political arena, was used as a party war-cry, and
employed as a weapon for the destruction of public and private foes.
At home, England lay at the mercy of a King who was a law to himself
and supreme arbiter of the destinies of his subjects. Only obscurity,
and not always that, could ensure a man’s safety, or prevent him from
falling a prey to the jealousy or hate of those amongst his enemies
who had for the moment the ear of the sovereign. Pre-eminence in
rank, or power, or intellect, was enough to give the possessor of the
distinction an uneasy sense that he was marked out for destruction,
that envy and malice were lying in wait to seize an opportunity to
denounce him to the weak despot upon whose vanity and cowardice the
adroit could play at will. Every year added its tale to the long list
of victims who had met their end upon the scaffold.
For fifteen years, moreover, the country had been delivered over to
the struggle carried on in the name of religion. In 1531 the King had
responded to the refusal of the Pope to sanction his divorce from
Katherine of Aragon by repudiating the authority of the Holy See
and the assertion of his own supremacy in matters spiritual as well
as temporal. Three years later Parliament, servile and subservient
as Parliaments were wont to be under the Tudor Kings, had formally
endorsed and confirmed the revolt.
“The third day of November,” recorded the chronicler, “the King’s
Highness held the high Court of Parliament, in the which was concluded
and made many and sundry good, wholesome, and godly statutes, but
among all one special statute which authorised the King’s Highness to
be supreme head of the Church of England, by which the Pope ... was
utterly abolished out of this realm.”[1]
Since then another punishable crime was added to those, already none
too few, for which a man was liable to lose his head, and the following
year saw the death upon the scaffold of Fisher and of More. The
execution of Anne Boleyn, by whom the match had, in some sort, been
set to the mine, came next, but the step taken by the King was not to
be retraced with the absence of the motive which had prompted it; and
Catholics and Protestants alike had continued to suffer at the hands
of an autocrat who chastised at will those who wandered from the path
he pointed out, and refused to model their creed upon the prescribed
pattern.
In 1546 the “Act to abolish Diversity of Opinion”--called more
familiarly the Bloody Statute, and designed to conform the faith of
the nation to that of the King--had been in force for seven years, a
standing menace to those persons, in high or low place, who, encouraged
by the King’s defiance of Rome, had been emboldened to adopt the tenets
of the German Protestants. Henry had opened the floodgates; he desired
to keep out the flood. The Six Articles of the Statute categorically
reaffirmed the principal doctrines of the Catholic Church, and made
their denial a legal offence. On the other hand the refusal to admit
the royal supremacy in matters spiritual was no less penal. A reign of
terror was the result.
“Is thy servant a dog?” The time-honoured question might have risen
to the King’s lips in the days, not devoid of a brighter promise, of
his youth, had the veil covering the future been withdrawn. “We mark
curiously,” says a recent writer, “the regular deterioration of Henry’s
character as the only checks upon his action were removed, and he
progressively defied traditional authority and established standards of
conduct without disaster to himself.” The Church had proved powerless
to punish a defiance dictated by passion and perpetuated by vanity
and cupidity; Parliaments had cringed to him in matters religious or
political, courtiers and sycophants had flattered, until “there was
no power on earth to hold in check the devil in the breast of Henry
Tudor.”[2]
Such was the condition of England. Old barriers had been thrown down;
new had not acquired strength; in the struggle for freedom men had
cast aside moral restraint. Life was so lightly esteemed, and death
invested with so little tragic importance, that a man of the position
and standing of Latimer, Bishop of Worcester, when appointed to preach
on the occasion of the burning of a priest, could treat the matter with
a flippant levity scarcely credible at a later day.
“If it be your pleasure, as it is,” he wrote to Cromwell, “that I shall
play the fool after my customary manner when Forest shall suffer, I
would that my stage stood near unto Forest” (so that the victim might
benefit by his arguments).... “If he would yet with heart return to his
abjuration, I would wish his pardon, such is my foolishness.”[3]
Yet there was another side to the picture; here and there, amidst
the din of battle and the confusion of tongues, the voice of genuine
conviction was heard; and men and women were ready, at the bidding of
conscience, to give up their lives in passionate loyalty to an ancient
faith or to a new ideal. “And the thirtieth day of the same month,”
June 1540, runs an entry in a contemporary chronicle, “was Dr. Barnes,
Jerome, and Garrard, drawn from the Tower to Smithfield, and there
burned for their heresies. And that same day also was drawn from the
Tower with them Doctor Powell, with two other priests, and there was
a gallows set up at St. Bartholomew’s Gate, and there were hanged,
headed, and quartered that same day”--the offence of these last being
the denial of the King’s supremacy, as that of the first had been
adherence to Protestant doctrines.[4]
[Illustration:
From a photo by W. Mansell & Co. after a painting by Holbein.
HENRY VIII.]
No one was safe. The year 1540 had seen the fall of Cromwell, the
Minister of State. “Cranmer and Cromwell,” wrote the French ambassador,
“do not know where they are.”[5] Cromwell at least was not to wait
long for the certainty. For years all-powerful in the Council, he was
now to fall a victim to jealous hate and the credulity of the master
he had served. At his imprisonment “many lamented, but more rejoiced,
... for they banquetted and triumphed together that night, many wishing
that day had been seven years before; and some, fearing that he should
escape although he were imprisoned, could not be merry.”[6] They need
not have feared the King’s clemency. The minister had been arrested on
June 10. On July 28 he was executed on Tower Hill.
If Cromwell, in spite of his services to the Crown, in spite of the
need Henry had of men of his ability, was not secure, who could call
themselves safe? Even Cranmer, the King’s special friend though he
was, must have felt misgivings. A married man, with children, he was
implicitly condemned by one of the Six Articles of the Bloody Statute,
enjoining celibacy on the clergy, and was besides well known to hold
Protestant views. His embittered enemy, Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester,
vehement in his Catholicism though pandering to the King on the subject
of the royal supremacy, was minister; and his fickle master might throw
the Archbishop at any moment to the wolves.
One narrow escape he had already had, when in 1544 a determined attempt
had been hazarded to oust him from his position of trust and to
convict him of his errors, and the party adverse to him in the Council
had accused the Primate “most grievously” to the King of heresy. It was
a bold stroke, for it was known that Henry loved him, and the triumph
of his foes was the greater when they received the royal permission to
commit the Lord Archbishop to the Tower on the following day, and to
cause him to undergo an examination on matters of doctrine and faith.
So far all had gone according to their hopes, and his enemies augured
well of the result. But that night, at eleven o’clock, when Cranmer, in
ignorance of the plot against him, was in bed, he received a summons
to attend the King, whom he found in the gallery at Whitehall, and who
made him acquainted with the action of the Council, together with his
own consent that an examination should take place.
“Whether I have done well or no, what say you, my lord?” asked Henry in
conclusion.
Cranmer answered warily. Knowing his master, and his jealousy of being
supposed to connive at heresy, save on the one question of the Pope’s
authority, he cannot have failed to recognise the gravity of the
situation. He put, however, a good face upon it. The King, he said,
would see that he had a fair trial--“was indifferently heard.” His
bearing was that of a man secure that justice would be done him. Both
he, in his heart, and the King, knew better.
“Oh, Lord God,” sighed Henry, “what fond simplicity have you, so to
permit yourself to be imprisoned!” False witnesses would be produced,
and he would be condemned.
Taking his precautions, therefore, Henry gave the Archbishop his
ring--the recognised sign that the matter at issue was taken out of the
hands of the Council and reserved for his personal investigation. After
which sovereign and prelate parted.
When, at eight o’clock the next morning, Cranmer, in obedience to the
summons he had received, arrived at the Council Chamber, his foes,
insolent in their premature triumph, kept him at the door, awaiting
their convenience, close upon an hour. My lord of Canterbury was become
a lacquey, some one reported to the King, since he was standing among
the footmen and servants. The King, comprehending what was implied, was
wroth.
“Have they served my lord so?” he asked. “It is well enough; I shall
talk with them by and by.”
Accordingly when Cranmer, called at length and arraigned before
the Council, produced the ring--the symbol of his enemies’
discomfiture--and was brought to the royal presence that his cause
might be tried by the King in person, the positions of accused and
accusers were reversed. Acting, not without passion, rather as the
advocate of the menaced man than as his judge, Henry received the
Council with taunts, and in reply to their asseverations that the
trial had been merely intended to conduce to the Archbishop’s greater
glory, warned them against treating his friends in that fashion for the
future. Cranmer, for the present, was safe.[7]
Protestant England rejoiced with the Protestant Archbishop. But it
rejoiced in trembling. The Archbishop’s escape did not imply immunity
to lesser offenders, and the severity used in administering the law
is shown by the fact that a boy of fifteen was burnt for heresy--no
willing martyr, but ignorant, and eager to catch at any chances of
life, by casting the blame of his heresy on others. “The poor boy,”
says Hall, “would have gladly said that the twelve Apostles taught it
him ... such was his childish innocency and fear.”[8] And England, with
the strange patience of the age, looked on.
Side by side with religious persecution ran the story of the King’s
domestic crimes. To go back no further, in the year 1542 Katherine
Howard, Henry’s fifth wife, had met her fate, and the country had
silently witnessed the pitiful and shameful spectacle. As fact after
fact came to light, the tale will have been told of the beautiful,
neglected child, left to her own devices and to the companionship of
maid-servants in the disorderly household of her grandmother, the
Duchess of Norfolk, with the results that might have been anticipated;
of how she had suddenly become of importance when it had been perceived
that the King had singled her out for favour; and of how, still “a
very little girl,” as some one described her, she had been used as a
pawn in the political game played by the Howard clan, and married to
Henry. Only a few months after she had been promoted to her perilous
dignity her doom had overtaken her; the enemies of the party to which
by birth she belonged had not only made known to her husband misdeeds
committed before her marriage and almost ranking as the delinquencies
of a misguided child, but had hinted at more unpardonable misdemeanours
of which the King’s wife had been guilty. The story of Katherine’s
arraignment and condemnation will have spread through the land, with
her protestations that, though not excusing the sins and follies of her
youth--she was seventeen when she was done to death--she was guiltless
of the action she was specially to expiate at the block; whilst men may
have whispered the tale of her love for Thomas Culpeper, her cousin
and playmate, whom she would have wedded had not the King stepped in
between, and who had paid for her affection with his blood. “I die a
Queen,” she is reported to have exclaimed upon the scaffold, “but I
would rather have died the wife of Culpeper.”[9] And it may have been
rumoured that her head had fallen, not so much to vindicate the honour
of the King as to set him free to form fresh ties.
However that might be, Katherine Howard had been sent to answer for her
offences, or prove her innocence, at another bar, and her namesake,
Katherine Parr, reigned in her stead.
[Illustration:
From a photo by W. Mansell & Co. after a painting of the School of
Holbein.
KATHERINE HOWARD.]