The Sisters Who Would Be Queen: The tragedy of Mary, Katherine and Lady Jane Grey

Jane’s visits to Chelsea, and the return visits to Seymour Place made by the Queen dowager, gave her the opportunity to get to know Elizabeth much better than she had hitherto, although she was acquainted already with some of the princess’s personal staff. Elizabeth’s governess Kate Astley and husband John were old friends of Jane’s family; John Astley would later write a treatise on horsemanship and may have given them both riding lessons.2 But the thirteen-year-old princess, who would one day govern the destinies of Katherine and Mary Grey, did not grow close to Jane. A freshskinned adolescent, with her father’s red gold hair and her mother’s famous black eyes, Elizabeth was too old to wish to play with Jane, and was, in any case, unusually self-contained. This gave her a reputation for arrogance in some quarters, but what it reflected principally was anxiety.3 Elizabeth felt acutely the precariousness of her position.

In the first years of her life Elizabeth had gone from being her father’s heir and the daughter of his most beloved wife, to the bastard child of a traitor-adulteress. This had changed again in 1544, when she was restored in line of succession, but she remained illegitimate in law and was now an orphan, dependent on the goodwill of others. Although she loved Catherine Parr for the kindness she showed, Elizabeth was disgusted at her stepmother’s hasty remarriage and, as she observed to her half-sister, Mary, based in St James’s, she felt there was nothing they could say about it, without putting themselves in danger. Sudeley was the brother of the Protector, whom they had little reason to trust, and who had kept the lands and income Elizabeth’s father had left her, largely in his own control. Elizabeth, utterly powerless, was obliged to make the best of what was to her an uncomfortable situation at Chelsea - and Jane was not a particularly welcome presence in Elizabeth’s bleak and uncertain world. Under the terms of Henry’s will, Jane Grey was Elizabeth’s heir, and Elizabeth had seen already how one heir could leapfrog another, from one parliamentary statute to the next. As Elizabeth was notoriously vain, it also can’t have helped that Jane was proving more adept at her studies than either she or the King, both of whom were considered exceptionally intelligent.*

Jane’s quick mind was absorbing a curriculum of studies that shared similarities with those of Edward, who was now reading Justin the Martyr’s summary of Greek history and copying phrases from Cicero’s Offices and the Tusculan Disputations. This progress in Latin and Greek was matched by her religious education. Evangelicals were enthusiastic for women to be involved in the study of theology and Catherine Parr set Jane an impressive example. For years she had applied her knowledge of Scripture to the promotion of Church reform, and much of the autumn in Catherine’s household was taken up with her religious projects. The translation of Erasmus’s Paraphrases of the New Testament, which she had overseen (and to which the Princess Mary had contributed), was prepared for publication (and would prove a bestseller).4 But she was also completing an original work of her own, written when Henry was alive, and which she had not then dared make public. Entitled The Lamentation of a Sinner, it described her search for salvation. It was distinctly Lutheran in tone, and Henry had considered Luther a heretic, but Jane’s step-grandmother, Katherine Suffolk, helped persuade the Queen dowager the time was ripe for its publication.5

For the first time Jane had a sense of what it was like to be a member of a network of clever women, working together and propagating new and exciting religious ideas.6 The evangelical reformation, meanwhile, was proceeding apace all around her. The ambassador to the Hapsburg Emperor, Charles V, complained that the preachers giving the public sermons at court seemed ‘to vie with each other as to who can abuse most strongly the old religion’.7 By July they had asserted the evangelical belief that salvation was not attainable by man through his own efforts, such as charitable works, but was the gift of God for an elect few. By August the use of the rosary was abolished and the Mass was under attack, with ‘much speaking against the sacrament of the altar, that some called it Jack in the box, with divers other shameful names’.8 Stained-glass windows in churches were smashed and the carved figures of Christ torn down. The iconography of God was now idolatry, but that of the King and the nobility remained everywhere. Indeed the arms of the King were now being painted on church walls. Bishop Gardiner questioned the logic of this to the Privy Council. He also warned it was surely illegal to break Henry VIII’s religious settlement during Edward’s minority, but such pleas and arguments fell on deaf ears.

The Bible did not raise any objections to heraldic symbols, but to objects worshipped as God. Praying before a statue or image might not be to worship it, but it could appear close to it. As for the illegality of changing the national religious culture, Somerset and his allies believed that Edward would learn to applaud their actions before he came to his majority. Images of saints, with which Edward had been surrounded, were removed from his rooms, and his mind was being as cleansed of the past as his environment. Edward’s reformist tutor, the gaunt John Cheke, was ‘always at his elbow’ whispering to him in his chapel, ‘and wherever else he went, to inform and teach him’. Edward responded eagerly, but the evangelicals needed to project Edward as the font of reform, not merely as an obedient pupil. It was claimed, therefore, that his ability to absorb what he was taught was such that, ‘it should seem he were already a [spiritual] father’ rather than a boy, ‘not yet ten years old’.9 The radical Dorset would have liked to see still faster progress in religion than was being made, but he also had more earthly matters to consider. In particular he had concerns that Sudeley was proving unable to develop Jane’s friendship with the King.

Somerset had barred Catherine Parr and Sudeley from access to Edward. This was miserable for the boy. Catherine was the only mother Edward had ever known, his Mater Carissima, who, he had once said, held ‘the chiefest place in my heart’. In getting Edward to write a letter giving them permission to marry, however, Sudeley had proven how dangerous their access to the King could be. The ability to shape the King’s mind, to fill it with carefully coloured opinions and edited information that favoured one’s own interests and condemned one’s enemies, was central to the operation of politics in an autocratic monarchy. While the King’s mind was young and impressionable, as Edward’s was, it was all the more important to control access to him. Sudeley was therefore kept well away from him. But he assured Dorset that he nevertheless remained the King’s favourite uncle. Edward had complained, he said, ‘divers times’ that ‘his uncle of Somerset kept him very straight’ and would not let him have money when he asked for it.10 Sudeley explained he was thus able to earn Edward’s gratitude with gifts of £10, £20, even £40, slipped to him through John Fowler, one of the Grooms of the Privy Chamber. While Edward was fond of him, however, Sudeley knew that the truth was he had to place new and higher stakes if he was to achieve the power he wanted.

Katherine and Mary Grey were used to their sister leaving them to spend periods at court. But Jane’s leaving for Seymour Place was of a different order and surely more deeply felt. The ordinary memories of everyday life, such as the dancing horse, taken from Bradgate by one of the servants to entertain the townsfolk of Leicester, were less often shared.11 For Frances also, it must have been hard. Jane was still very young and, no matter how commonplace it was to send a child away, she had to overcome her natural instincts to do what was considered best for her eldest daughter. Even when Frances was away at court, or staying with friends, she knew her children, whether at Bradgate or Dorset House, were being cared for in an environment she had some control over. Giving that up to a known womaniser like Sudeley was a cause for anxiety. But things were far worse at Seymour Place than she ever suspected.

If there was one thing that would have advanced Sudeley’s ambitions more effectively than marrying a King’s widow, it would be to have married a King’s daughter. Jane’s enquiring mind and sharp eyes could not fail to have noticed how especially friendly Sudeley was with the Princess Elizabeth. Whenever the Queen dowager and her stepdaughter visited them at Seymour Place he was always up first and, still in his nightshirt and slippers, he would breeze down the corridors to the door of Elizabeth’s chamber, look round and wish her good morning. Elizabeth’s governess Kate Astley warned Sudeley that it was ‘an unseemly sight to go to a maiden’s bedchamber barelegged’ and was causing gossip amongst the servants. But Sudeley retorted that he was doing nothing wrong. Soon he was going into Elizabeth’s room. Sometimes she was still in bed and he would ‘put open the curtains, and bid her good morrow, and make as though he would come at her’.12 Elizabeth did not dare reprove him. She had not forgotten Sudeley was the brother of the Protector: as he made his advances she simply shrank under her covers.

Increasingly Elizabeth’s feelings towards her stepfather became confused. Having a powerful figure show her so much attention was exciting and, at just fourteen, it was not easy to distinguish predator from protector. There may have been an element too, of wanting to revenge herself on her stepmother for her betrayal of her father in marrying so quickly after his death. There is only one time, however, that Elizabeth’s emotions are recorded as having come to the surface, during this period. This was when, to her great distress, her young tutor, William Grindal, died of plague at the end of January. Sudeley and Catherine were anxious to choose his replacement, but here, outside the complex parameters of the adult, sexual arena, Elizabeth’s natural self-assurance could show through, and she insisted on making her own choice: a man she could trust. She picked the thirty-three-year-old Roger Ascham, who had taught Edward alongside John Cheke and been Grindal’s tutor at Cambridge.

Jane also liked Ascham. He was easy-going with a taste for good wine and gambling at cards. He got on particularly well with the Astleys, with whom he recalled enjoying ‘free talk, always mingled with honest mirth’, and Jane would later write a letter commending him to a future employer.* Outside the schoolroom, however, Sudeley’s reckless familiarity with Elizabeth was beginning to cause tensions in his marriage. Sudeley and Catherine enjoyed a passionate, but volatile relationship. He was a jealous lover and Catherine was sometimes frightened of his rages. But she was now pregnant and had her own anxieties. At thirty-six she was old for a first-time mother and feared Sudeley saw Elizabeth as a potential replacement, were she to die in childbirth. There were even rumours, which she may have heard, that Sudeley had expressed an interest in marrying the princess before he had begun to woo her.13

Kate Astley’s complaints about Sudeley’s behaviour with Elizabeth had resulted in the Queen dowager deciding to accompany Sudeley on his early morning perambulations. But she couldn’t be with him all the time. The final straw for Catherine came in May when she was six months pregnant. Elizabeth and Sudeley had disappeared and Catherine went looking for them. When she found them Elizabeth was in her husband’s arms.14 Catherine and Sudeley had a furious row. The embrace does not seem to have been overtly sexual, but Catherine later explained to a shocked Elizabeth the grave risk she had taken with her reputation. As the daughter of an infamous adulteress, Elizabeth had more reason than most to be careful with her good name. To prevent any further opportunity for scandal or for some misdeed on Sudeley’s part, Catherine suggested Elizabeth stay for a while with Astley’s sister, Joan Denny. The chastened Elizabeth left a week after Pentecost, ashamed and shaken by what had occurred.

It was Jane alone who accompanied Catherine Parr to her guardian’s Gloucestershire estate at Sudeley for the summer. The orphaned Elizabeth must have reflected bitterly that Jane would now replace her in Catherine’s attentions. If she had felt any malice towards Catherine, it had vanished and she felt remorseful that she had allowed herself to hurt a woman who had shown her nothing but warmth and generosity. For Jane, on the other hand, there was a danger Elizabeth’s leaving would encourage a sense of entitlement. While the illegitimate Elizabeth was banished, she, who was the apple of her father’s eye, took her place as the princess of the households. Sudeley, meanwhile, still didn’t acknowledge that he had behaved irresponsibly with Elizabeth. ‘Suspicion,’ as he wrote in one of his poems, ‘I do banish thee.’ He was a ‘master of noble blood…of manner good, And spotless in life.’ His behaviour was simply, ‘sporting’.15 He was now only looking forward to fatherhood. He liked to hear Catherine describe how his child was stirring in her womb and shared with her his hopes of a son who would grow up to avenge all the humiliations they endured at his brother’s hands. He had prepared a nursery at his house furnished for a prince. There were scarlet curtains of silk taffeta, a chair upholstered in cloth of gold, carved stools, rich hangings, carpets and a gilded salt. All the signs of the baby’s expected arrival were there, from the cradle where he would sleep, to the three feather beds and goblets for his nurse and servants.16

Jane had to get used to the noise of further extensive building works while she was at Sudeley House. Her guardian was spending a fortune on his Gloucestershire seat (although nothing like the £10,000 his brother spent that year alone on Somerset House). But it was a happy time for Jane, studying under the Queen dowager’s guidance and with a fine library of books to read. There were upwards of twenty-two volumes in Catherine’s personal collection, some in English, others in French or Italian. Only seven, however, were religious works: Catherine was losing her passion for theology. Sudeley even seemed bored by the twice-daily prayers given by the chaplains. Hugh Latimer, who was the spiritual adviser of Jane’s stepgrandmother, complained later he avoided them ‘like a mole digging in the dirt’.17 If Jane reflected on this she would have worried that he was tempting fate: God punished such behaviour, she was taught.

In August, when the baby was almost due, Jane’s father came to visit and she was able to catch up with family news. Her sister, Katherine, who had just turned eight, was now studying Greek with the new chaplain, Thomas Harding, a former Regius Professor of Hebrew at Oxford. She did not show the same aptitude for her studies as Jane, but she made up in charm what she lacked in intellectual drive. Everyone liked Katherine. Little Mary Grey was also doing well. Jane could imagine her dashing about, the long tippets sewn at her shoulders known as the ‘ribbons of childhood’ streaming behind her as she ran and played: a small, determined figure, as yet ignorant that she was not the beauty her sisters were said to be. There was news too, for Jane, of the extended family, and especially the sisters’ uncle, Lord John Grey, who was commanding cavalry in the war with Scotland. Somerset hoped to achieve what King Henry had failed to do and unite the two kingdoms, by marriage or force. The family was fearful for Lord John after the almost fatal injuries he had received at the battle of Pinkie in September 1547, but they thought his troops had cut a fine spectacle when they had left London in July, dressed in blue coats guarded in yellow, and he had, thus far, survived this campaign unhurt.18

Sudeley was anxious, however, to discuss other matters with Jane’s father and, when the adults were alone, Dorset found him full of plans. To Sudeley’s delight, his brother, the Protector, had begun to make enemies. There were those who felt the evangelical reformation was losing impetus. The radical preacher, John Knox, later complained that Somerset spent more time with his masons than he did with his chaplains. And the regal style of his Italianate palace irritated on a further account: it reflected the lofty attitude he held towards his colleagues. There were profound concerns about the expense of the war with Scotland and the high inflation the country was suffering, but Somerset was dismissive of the anxieties of his fellow Councillors and sometimes even appeared contemptuous of them. He had brutally expelled Sudeley’s brother-in-law, William Parr of Northampton, from the Privy Council for taking the novel step of divorcing his wife and marrying his mistress, the court beauty Elizabeth Brooke - an action that reflected, in turn, Somerset’s fears that parts of the country were restive over the religious changes already introduced.19

Sudeley outlined to Dorset, as he had already to Northampton, a future in which Edward had come of age and rejected the unpopular Protector in favour of his younger uncle. There was a danger, Sudeley explained, that his brother would not give up power without a fight. It was necessary, therefore, to prepare for the struggle ahead. Northampton had been advised to ‘set up house in the North Country’ where, on his core estates, surrounded by tenants and friends, he would be a powerful figure.20 Dorset was also now given detailed instructions on how to build up an effective military following. Gentlemen had too much to lose to be trustworthy, Sudeley told him. It was better to gain the loyalty of yeomen for they were ‘best able to persuade the multitude’. Dorset was advised to ‘go to their houses, now to one, now to another, carrying with you a flagon or two of wine and a pasty of venison and to use a familiarity with them, for so shall you cause them to love you’.21 The talk of war seemed unreal to Dorset, but it was also fascinating. The aims were presented as altruistic: to protect the King from the overweening Somerset. But they coincided also with his personal interests. Dorset’s honour had been slighted by the Protector’s failure to recognise better his place within the royal family. As he returned to Bradgate he had to consider whether he should fight to protect it and whether the horrors of battle were justified by his duties to the King.

The Queen dowager’s confinement, meanwhile, was coming to an end and on 30th August 1548 she went into labour. Catherine had suffered a difficult and uncomfortable pregnancy, but she eventually delivered a healthy baby girl. Sudeley, despite his hopes for a son, was overwhelmed by the thrill of first-time fatherhood. His daughter was to be called Mary, after Edward’s elder half-sister, and he wrote to his brother, the father of many daughters, declaring his a most spectacular beauty. For a few days all seemed well and Jane Grey rejoiced with her surrogate family. Gradually, however, Catherine grew delirious: the fatal sign of puerperal fever. In her delirium she was tormented by her old fears about her husband’s desire to marry Elizabeth. ‘Those that be about me careth not for me,’ she confided to her servant Lady Elizabeth Tyrwhitt as Sudeley stood over her. ‘Why sweet heart, I would you no hurt,’ he reassured her. ‘No, my Lord, I think so,’ she replied, and whispered, ‘but my Lord you have given me many shrewd taunts.’ Sudeley lay down beside her on the bed and tried to comfort her. But she soon burst out with another accusation: she had not dared spend as much time with her doctor as she would like for fear of making him jealous.

Sudeley persisted in his efforts to reassure and soothe Catherine and, as it became clear she was dying, Jane and the other women read the Scriptures with her. They would have prayed also, as the chaplain arrived to perform the service for the Visitation of the Sick. The priest was expected to exhort Catherine to ask forgiveness for her sins and to forgive all those who had offended her, and before she died on 5th September, Catherine and Sudeley were reconciled. Her will left her husband everything she had, ‘wishing them to be a thousand times more in value than they were’.22 For his part, Sudeley was left stunned by his wife’s death. The happiness at the birth of his daughter had tapped into a deep well of feeling and now he was plunged into desperate grief. ‘I was so amazed I had small regard either to myself or to my doings,’ he later recalled. Politics were forgotten. He went with his baby daughter to his brother the Protector’s house, to recuperate, and ordered that his own household be broken up. Jane Grey was to be sent back to Bradgate. But he asked first that she fulfil the role of chief mourner at Catherine’s funeral.

The eleven-year-old Jane performed her first public role with great dignity. She walked behind the Queen’s coffin in the procession from the house to the chapel at Sudeley, her small figure erect in a black gown, the long train ‘borne up by a young Lady’. She was, perhaps, the fifteen-year-old Elizabeth Tilney, the younger sister of the favourite lady-in-waiting of Henry’s fifth wife Katherine Howard, and a friend who would accompany Jane on the last procession of her life.23 The funeral ceremony in the chapel was modest and took only a morning, but it was of disproportionate historical significance. This was the first Protestant royal funeral in English history. The biblical translator Miles Coverdale conducted the service in English and gave the sermon. In it he stressed that the alms given for the poor at the funeral and the candles burned were not to profit Catherine’s soul but to honour her memory. In reformed teaching there was no purgatory, where in Catholic belief sinners may, after death, do penance for their sins while the living pray for their release: the elect went straight to heaven, while the rest went to hell. Jane did not pray for Catherine, therefore, although she surely remembered her distraught guardian and his motherless baby.

When the service was over, and Catherine buried, Jane returned home. The records of the towns she travelled through on the road to Bradgate record the expenses laid out to entertain their royal visitor. When she was a little girl, Jane often saw her parents going off to Leicester and other local towns before returning with gifts from the mayor and the aldermen’s wives. There would be strawberries, walnuts, pears and home-made treats such as the spiced wine, ippocras.24 Now she was treated with similar deference. Jane’s mother was not getting back the child she had said goodbye to a year before, but a questioning, maturing girl with a strong sense of her own dignity.

* John Foxe, who knew Aylmer, claimed that Jane was a better student than Edward, and Elizabeth’s later tutor, Roger Ascham, recorded her superiority to Elizabeth. Neither had reason to exaggerate.

* The Dorsets also later employed his wife, Alice, and a cousin at Bradgate.

Chapter V The Execution of Sudeley

Jane’s younger sisters had endured their share of mourning at Bradgate. Their mother Frances, who had been fond of Catherine Parr and kept her portrait all her life, had lost her younger sister, Eleanor, Countess of Cumberland, the previous November. Eleanor was still only in her twenties and left a husband stricken with shock, as well as an only daughter.1 Then, on 3rd January 1548, when the family were celebrating the Christmas season at Bradgate, Dorset had received news that his younger sister, Anne Willoughby, was also dying. This branch of the Willoughbys, kin of Katherine Suffolk, were based in Nottinghamshire, not far from Bradgate, and the two families were very close.

Katherine and Mary understood something of Jane’s grief, then, as they prepared to welcome her home after the Queen dowager’s funeral. The excitement of having their sister with them again and the hopes of exchanging confidences, soon gave way, however, to the awkwardness of readjustment. The three-year gap between Jane and Katherine seemed suddenly very wide. While Katherine and Mary Grey were both still of an age when they wanted to please their parents, Jane was more questioning. At eleven she was showing the same rebellious streak her father had had at her age. Dorset used to infuriate his Latin teacher, Richard Croke, by laughing at rude jokes about the clergy, and then, when Croke complained, by stirring up the other pupils against him.2 Jane felt equally irritated by the restrictions and demands imposed on her at Bradgate. She had got used to a long rein at Seymour Place and resented her mother’s efforts to reassert her authority. Frances, in turn, was angered and worried by Jane’s defiance.