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.
Amongst the households where both affairs at Court and the religious
struggle distracting the country were watched with the deepest interest
was that of the Marquis of Dorset, the husband of the King’s niece and
father of Lady Jane Grey.
Married at eighteen to the infirm and aged Louis XII. of France, Mary
Tudor, daughter of Henry VII. and friend of the luckless Katherine of
Aragon, had been released by his death after less than three months
of wedded life, and had lost no time in choosing a more congenial
bridegroom. At Calais, on her way home, she had bestowed her hand upon
“that martial and pompous gentleman,” Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk,
who, sent by her brother to conduct her back to England, thought it
well to secure his bride and to wait until the union was accomplished
before obtaining the King’s consent. Of this hurried marriage the
eldest child was the mother of Jane Grey, who thus derived her
disastrous heritage of royal blood.
It was at the country home of the Dorset family, Bradgate Park, that
Lady Jane had been born, in 1537. Six miles distant from the town of
Leicester, and forming the south-east end of Charnwood Forest, it was
a pleasant and quiet place. Over the wide park itself, seven miles
in circumference, bracken grew freely; here and there bare rocks
rose amidst the masses of green undergrowth, broken now and then
by a solitary oak, and the unwooded expanse was covered with “wild
verdure.”[18]
The house itself had not long been built, nor is there much remaining
at the present day to show what had been its aspect at the time when
Lady Jane was its inmate. Early in the eighteenth century it was
destroyed by fire, tradition ascribing the catastrophe to a Lady
Suffolk who, brought to her husband’s home as a bride, complained that
the country was a forest and the inhabitants were brutes, and, at the
suggestion of her sister, took the most certain means of ensuring a
change of residence.
But if little outward trace is left of the place where the victim of
state-craft and ambition was born and passed her early years, it is not
a difficult matter to hazard a guess at the religious and political
atmosphere of her home. Echoes of the fight carried on, openly or
covertly, between the parties striving for predominance in the realm
must have almost daily reached Bradgate, the accounts of the incidents
marking the combat taking their colour from the sympathies of the
master and mistress of the house, strongly enlisted upon the side of
Protestantism. At Lord Dorset’s house, though with closed doors, the
condition of religious affairs must have supplied constant matter for
discussion; and Jane will have listened to the conversation with the
eager attention of an intelligent child, piecing together the fragments
she gathered up, and gradually realising, with a thrill of excitement,
as she became old enough to grasp the significance of what she heard,
that men and women were suffering and dying in torment for the sake of
doctrines she had herself been taught as a matter of course. Serious
and precocious, and already beginning an education said to have
included in later years Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Chaldaic, Arabic, French,
and Italian, the stories reaching her father’s house of the events
taking place in London and at Court must have imprinted themselves upon
her imagination at an age specially open to such impressions, and it is
not unnatural that she should have grown up nurtured in the principles
of polemics and apt at controversy.
Nor were edifying tales of martyrdom or of suffering for conscience’
sake the only ones to penetrate to the green and quiet precincts of
Bradgate. At his niece’s house the King’s domestic affairs--a scandal
and a by-word in Europe--must have been regarded with the added
interest, perhaps the sharper criticism, due to kinship. Henry was
not only Lady Dorset’s sovereign, but her uncle, and she had a more
personal interest than others in what Messer Barbaro, in his report
to the Venetian senate, described as “this confusion of wives.”[19]
To keep a child ignorant was no part of the training of the day,
and Jane, herself destined for a court life, no doubt had heard, as
she grew older, many of the stories of terror and pity circulating
throughout the country, and investing, in the eyes of those afar off,
the distant city--the stage whereon most of them had been enacted--with
the atmosphere of mystery and fear and excitement belonging to a place
where martyrs were shedding their blood, or heretics atoning for their
guilt, according as the narrators inclined to the ancient or the novel
faith; where tragedies of love and hatred and revenge were being
played, and men went in hourly peril of their lives.
Of this place, invested with the attraction and glamour belonging to a
land of glitter and romance, Lady Jane had glimpses on the occasions
when, as a near relation of the King’s, she accompanied her mother to
Court, becoming for a while a sharer in the life of palaces and an
actor, by reason of her strain of royal blood, in the pageant ever
going forward at St. James’s or Whitehall;[20] and though it does not
appear that she was finally transferred from the guardianship of her
parents to that of the Queen until after the death of Henry in the
beginning of the year 1547, it is not unlikely that the book-loving
child of nine may have attracted the attention of the scholarly
Queen during her visits to Court and that Katherine’s belligerent
Protestantism had its share in the development of the convictions which
afterwards proved so strong both in life and in death.
There is at this date little trace of any connection between Jane
and her cousins, the King’s children. A strong affection on the part
of Edward is said to have existed, and to it has been attributed his
consent to set his sisters aside in Lady Jane’s favour. “She charmed
all who knew her,” says Burnet, “in particular the young King, about
whom she was bred, and who had always lived with her in the familiarity
of a brother.” For this statement there is no contemporary authority,
and, so far as can be ascertained, intercourse between the two can
have been but slight. Between Edward and his younger sister, on
the other hand, the bond of affection was strong, their education
being carried on at this time much together at Hatfield; and “a
concurrence and sympathy of their natures and affections, together
with the celestial bond, conformity in religion,”[21] made it the
more remarkable that the Prince should have afterwards agreed to set
aside, in favour of his cousin, Elizabeth’s claim to the succession.
It is true that in their occasional meetings the studious boy and the
serious-minded little girl may have discovered that they had tastes in
common, but such casual acquaintanceship can scarcely have availed to
counterbalance the affection produced by close companionship and the
tie of blood; and grounds for the Prince’s subsequent conduct, other
than the influence and arguments of those about him, can only be matter
of conjecture.
Of the relations existing between Jane and the Prince’s sisters there
is little more mention; but the entry by Mary Tudor in a note-book
of the gift of a gold necklace set with pearls, made “to my cousin,
Jane Gray,” shows that the two had met in the course of this summer,
and would seem to indicate a kindly feeling on the part of the older
woman towards the unfortunate child whom, not eight years later, she
was to send to the scaffold. Could the future have been laid bare it
would perhaps not have been the victim who would have recoiled from the
revelation with the greatest horror.
Although what was to follow lends a tragic significance to the
juxtaposition of the names of the two cousins, there was nothing
sinister about the King’s elder daughter as she filled the place
at Court in which she had been reinstated at the instance of her
step-mother. A gentle, brown-eyed woman, past her first youth, and
bearing on her countenance the traces of sickness and sorrow and
suffering, she enjoyed at this date so great a popularity as almost,
according to a foreign observer, to be an object of adoration to her
father’s subjects, obstinately faithful to her injured and repudiated
mother. But, ameliorated as was the Princess’s condition, she had
been too well acquainted, from childhood upwards, with the reverses
of fortune to count over-securely upon a future depending upon her
father’s caprice.
Her health was always delicate, and during the early part of the
year she had been ill. By the spring, however, she had resumed her
attendance at Court, and--to judge by a letter from her little wise
brother, contemplating from a safe distance the dangerous pastimes
of Whitehall--was taking a conspicuous part in the entertainments in
fashion. Writing in Latin to his step-mother, Prince Edward besought
her “to preserve his dear sister Mary from the enchantments of the
Evil One, by beseeching her no longer to attend to foreign dances and
merriments, unbecoming in a most Christian Princess”--and least of
all in one for whom he expressed the wish, in the course of the same
summer, that the wisdom of Esther might be hers.
It does not appear whether or not Mary took the admonitions of her
nine-year-old Mentor to heart. The pleasures of court life are not
likely to have exercised a perilous fascination over the Princess,
her spirits clouded by the memory of her melancholy past and the
uncertainty of her future, and probably represented to her a more or
less wearisome part of the necessary routine of existence.
Whilst the entertainments the Prince deplored went forward at
Whitehall, they were accompanied by other practices he would have
wholly approved. Not only was his step-mother addicted to personal
study of the Scriptures, but she had secured the services of learned
men to instruct her further in them; holding private conferences with
these teachers; and, especially during Lent, causing a sermon to be
delivered each afternoon for her own benefit and that of any of her
ladies disposed to profit by it, when the discourse frequently turned
or touched upon abuses in the Church.[22]
It was a bold stroke, Henry’s claims to the position of sole arbiter
on questions of doctrine considered. Nevertheless the Queen acted
openly, and so far her husband had testified no dissatisfaction. Yet
the practice must have served to accentuate the dividing line of
theological opinion, already sufficiently marked at Court; some members
of the royal household, like Princess Mary, holding aloof; others
eagerly welcoming the step; the Seymours, Cranmer, and their friends
looking on with approval, whilst the Howard connection, with Gardiner
and Wriothesley, took note of the Queen’s imprudence, and waited and
watched their opportunity to turn it to their advantage and to her
destruction.
[Illustration: Edward Prince
From an engraving by R. Dalton after a drawing by Holbein.
PRINCE EDWARD, AFTERWARDS EDWARD VI.]
Such was the internal condition of the Court. The spring had meanwhile
been marked by rejoicings for the peace with foreign powers, at last
concluded. On Whit-Sunday a great procession proceeded from St. Paul’s
to St. Peter’s, Cornhill, accompanied by a banner, and by crosses from
every parish church, the children of St. Paul’s School joining in the
show. It was composed of a motley company. Bishop Bonner--as vehement
in his Catholicism as Gardiner, and so much less wary in the display
of his opinions that his brother of Winchester was wont at times to
term him “asse”--carried the Blessed Sacrament under a canopy, with
“clerks and priests and vicars and parsons”; the Lord Mayor was there
in crimson velvet, the aldermen were in scarlet, and all the crafts
in their best apparel. The occasion was worthy of the pomp displayed in
honour of it, for it was--the words sound like a jest--the festival of
a “Universal Peace for ever,” announced by the Mayor, standing between
standard and cross, and including in the proclamation of general amity
the names of the Emperor, the King of England, the French King, and all
Christian Kings.[23]
If soldiers had for the moment consented to proclaim a truce and to
name it, merrily, eternal, theologians had agreed to no like suspension
of hostilities, and the perennial religious strife showed no signs of
intermission.
“Sire,” wrote Admiral d’Annebaut, sent by Francis to London to ratify
the peace, “I know not what to tell your Majesty as to the order given
me to inform myself of the condition of religious affairs in England;
except that Henry has declared himself head of the Anglican Church,
and woe to whomsoever refuses to recognise him in that capacity. He
has also usurped all ecclesiastical property, and destroyed all the
convents. He attends Mass nevertheless daily, and permits the papal
nuncio to live in London. What is strangest of all is that Catholics
are there burnt as well as Lutherans and other heretics. Was anything
like it ever seen?”[24]
Punishment was indeed dealt out with singular impartiality. During the
spring Dr. Crome had been examined touching a sermon he had delivered
against Catholic doctrine. Two or three weeks later, preaching once
more at Paul’s Cross, he had boldly declared he was not there for the
purpose of denying his former assertions; but a second “examination”
had proved more effective, and on the Sunday following the feast of
Corpus Christi he eschewed his heresies.[25] “Our news here,” wrote a
merchant of London to his brother on July 2, “of Dr. Crome’s canting,
recanting, decanting, or rather double-canting, be this.”[26] The
transaction was representative of many others, which, with their
undercurrent of terror, struggle, intimidation, menace, and remorse,
formed a melancholy and recurrent feature of the day, the victory
remaining sometimes with a man’s conscience--whatever it dictates might
be--sometimes with his fears.
The King was, in fact, still endeavouring to stem the torrent he
had set loose. In his speech to Parliament on Christmas Eve, 1545,
after commending and thanking Lords and Commons for their loyalty and
affection towards himself, he had spoken with severity of the discord
and dissension prevalent in the realm; the clergy, by their sermons
against each other, sowing debate and discord amongst the people....
“I am very sorry to know and hear how unreverently that most precious
jewel, the Word of God, is disputed, rimed, sung and jangled in every
ale-house and tavern ... and yet I am even as much sorry that the
readers of the same follow it in doing so faintly and so coldly. For
of this I am sure, that charity was never so faint amongst you, and
virtuous and godly living was never less used, nor God Himself amongst
Christians was never less reverenced, honoured, and served.”[27]
Delivered scarcely more than a year before his death, Henry’s speech
was a singular commentary upon the condition of the realm, consequent
upon his own policy, during the concluding years of his reign.