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

From Bradgate on 17th August, Dorset had written to the Privy Council asking that they send his brother, Lord Thomas Grey, to help him keep order in the county. But more bad news had come by return of post. Lord Thomas could not be spared: the King of France, Henri II, had seized the opportunity offered by the crises to declare war. Lord Thomas was in command of 200 men sent to aid Lord John Grey in the defence of Ambleteuse in the Pale of Calais. The enemy was already advancing, Dorset was told. The town would, in fact, be lost before Lord Thomas had even arrived.3 With the seriousness of the situation by then apparent even to Somerset, the policy of pardoning rebels was abandoned. The government used foreign mercenaries to crush the rebel armies, and it had been a bloody business. Dorset’s kinsman, Lord Grey of Wilton, claimed he had never seen men fall so stoutly as the rebels he faced in Devon on 28th July. But fall, they had. Two and a half thousand were killed in the west. Then came the turn of the east.

John Dudley, Earl of Warwick, commanded an army of 12,000 professional soldiers and German mercenaries against Norfolk farm boys with hopes of ‘an equal share of things’. Three thousand men died outside Norwich at Dussindale on 27th August. But there were casualties on both sides.

Fighting under Warwick, Dorset’s brother-in-law, Sir Henry Willoughby, whose wife had died eighteen months earlier, was mortally wounded. His children, playmates of Katherine and Mary Grey, were now orphaned. Of all the deaths it was his that touched the Greys most, and the family took in his children. Thomas, the eldest, who was the same age as Katherine, had come to live at Bradgate as Dorset’s ward. The younger two Willoughby siblings, bossy Margaret, who was Mary Grey’s playmate, and the baby Francis, their mother’s godchild, were placed with Dorset’s half-brother, George Medley (his mother’s son by a first marriage). The dreadful slaughter in Norfolk marked the end of England’s last great popular revolt.4 But it had marked also a loss of faith in Somerset. The duke had ignored, and even insulted, his colleagues as he grew into his role as alter rex. He had involved the country in ruinous wars with Scotland and now France. His decisions had opened the gates to disorder and brought England to the brink of civil war. For that he would not be easily forgiven.

The night after Hertford had left carrying his father’s message to the army in Wiltshire, Somerset took King Edward from Hampton Court to the more secure location of Windsor Castle. It was dark and Edward, who had been told Somerset’s enemies could kill him, carried a little sword to defend himself. It was the night’s chill, however, that presented the most immediate danger, and by the time the eleven-year-old had arrived at Windsor he had caught a cold. As he shivered in the gloom of the castle, with few provisions and no galleries or gardens to walk in, his cousin young Hertford had reached the armies in the west. Sir William Herbert, the third member of Somerset and Warwick’s ‘Tres Viri’, was immediately recognisable by his red hair, and the high style of a great man at court.

Herbert had a reputation for violence. It was said that, in his youth, he had murdered a man in Bristol and that when the peasants had invaded his park at Wilton in the summer he had ‘attacked the rioters in person, and cut some of them in pieces’.5 True or not it says something of the man that such tales were easily believed of him. But Herbert was much more than a mere thug. His first language was Welsh, and ambassadors sneered that he could barely read English, let alone speak any European tongue; but he was clever, and sufficiently sophisticated to have married the elegant Anne Parr, sister of the late Queen dowager.6 It made him a member of the extended royal family. Unfortunately for Hertford this would not, however, help his father. It was Herbert’s brother-in-law, William Parr of Northampton, whom Somerset had kicked off the Privy Council for divorcing his wife.

As young Hertford soon discovered, Sir William Herbert had no intention of bringing the royal army to aid Somerset. The message the boy carried to Windsor on 9th October instead marked the end of the Protectorate. Herbert and his co-commander, Lord Russell, urged Somerset to step aside, ‘rather than any blood be shed’. Somerset had no option but to comply and he threw himself on the mercy of the Council. Soon afterwards Edward was obliged to order his uncle’s arrest. The former Lord Protector was lodged in the Tower on 14th October 1549. It was only two days past Edward’s twelfth birthday and not yet seven months since the execution of his younger uncle, Thomas Sudeley.

It was a novelty for the three sisters to have a nine-year-old boy living amongst them at Bradgate. Katherine, in particular, must have enjoyed having a playmate her own age; one who shared the pleasures of the park, as well as the books that Jane always had her nose in. But Thomas Willoughby wasn’t with them for long. He left the family to join Katherine Suffolk’s two sons at Cambridge on 16th November. The sisters ended up seeing more of the younger siblings, Margaret and Francis. The Grey and Willoughby cousins were regularly in and out of each other’s houses that winter, sometimes at Bradgate, sometimes at the Willoughby seat, Wotton, in Nottinghamshire, and often they were all at George Medley’s house, Tilty in Essex. It was there the sisters headed, as they set off from Bradgate towards the end of November 1549 - Mary and Katherine Grey still riding their horses with a servant sitting behind them, holding them tight so they didn’t fall when they tired; Jane treated as an adult, sitting side-saddle with a foot rest to keep her secure. Nurses, grooms and gentlemen servants also rode in the train, while other servants were carried in carts along with the baggage and mail. It was a spectacular sight on the quiet roads and bells rang in the villages and towns ahead to warn people of their arrival. Crowds came out to stare at the passing celebrities, or to offer fresh horses, food and places to rest.

The sisters enjoyed several days playing with their cousins at Tilty. Little Mary Grey, although much smaller than her friend Margaret, was equally strong-willed, and there must have been some impressive battling for dominance in their games. Then, after breakfast on 26th November, the sisters were mounted again on their horses, and travelled with their mother to the Princess Mary’s house Beaulieu, also in Essex.7 They recognised the turreted palace as it came in view, with its great gateway carved with King Henry’s arms in stone. The sisters had visited the princess many times before. Their grandmother, the French Queen, and Catherine of Aragon had been friends as well as sisters-in-law, while their mother had served in Mary’s household when Jane was a baby.

The princess - small and of ‘spare and delicate frame’ - was now thirty-three. She had suffered with menstrual problems and depression for years, and was regularly bled for them. But her fragile appearance belied a strong voice, ‘almost like a man’s’, and ‘piercing eyes’. She struck a formidable figure, and an unusually independent one. It was very unusual for a woman of her age and wealth to remain unmarried. But she was simply too good a catch to be free to take a husband. Her father had executed men he feared were plotting to marry their sons to his daughter. He didn’t want Edward to have any dangerous rivals. Now, Edward’s Privy Council would have regarded anyone seeking her hand with similar suspicion, and they had the legal veto on any choice she might have made. So she had to remain alone, watching her youth pass, resting her love only in God.

Mary Tudor must have seemed like a spinster aunt to the Grey sisters: intimidating, but also kindly. She enjoyed giving them presents of necklaces, beads and dresses. She gambled at cards with their mother, and played her lute for them all. It was said that Mary ‘surprised even the best performers, both by the rapidity of her hand and by the style of her playing’.8 Jane, who had learned so much about music from Catherine Parr, would have been impressed. But the Mass that the sisters had been taught to despise remained at the heart of Mary’s daily routine: she maintained no fewer than six Catholic chaplains in her household, in the face of government objections. Life had not been easy for Mary since Whit Sunday 1549, when the new Prayer Book came into force. But she had not expected it to be so. She had demonstrated her contempt for the government’s decree by having a high Catholic Mass said that day at her chapel at Kenninghall in Norfolk. The Council had tried subsequently to link her to the Devonshire rebels. When that had failed they demanded she cease having Mass said publicly in her chapels. She refused, arguing she had broken no laws, unless they were new laws of their own making: and she did not recognise these since the King, her brother, was not yet of an age to make them. For the time being her Hapsburg cousin, the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V (the nephew of Catherine of Aragon), protected her from retribution. But Mary was pessimistic about the future. Warwick had used conservative support to overthrow Somerset, and had looked to Mary for backing for his coup; but she had not, and did not, trust him. ‘The conspiracy against the Protector has envy and ambition as its only motives,’ she warned the imperial ambassador, François Van der Delft; ‘You will see that no good will come of this move.’9 Indeed, Dorset was at court, hoping that Northumberland would, in the end, prefer to side with evangelicals such as himself, who shared the developing religious beliefs of the King.

It may seem surprising that Frances maintained her closeness to Mary despite their religious differences. It was usual, however, for court women to keep open channels of communication between warring parties and sustain friendships across political and religious divisions. William Cecil’s fiercely evangelical sister-in-law, Anne Cooke, would serve in Mary’s household a few years later. Frances was simply performing a family duty in maintaining a good relationship with the heir to the throne. The cordial visits Frances and her daughters made to Beaulieu were, however, about to become more difficult. Three days after the Greys’ arrival at Beaulieu, the question of whether Warwick was going to base his regime with the religious conservatives was answered resolutely in the negative with Dorset’s appointment to the Privy Council. As the imperial ambassador observed, Dorset was ‘entirely won over to the new sect’. The most ‘forward’ of the evangelicals rejoiced at his success.10 But for Mary his appointment spelled real danger. Dorset’s ambitions for his daughter, Jane, were matched, or even exceeded, by his enthusiasm for religious reform. The rediscovery of the New Testament through Greek seemed to the evangelicals to mark the beginning of the breaking of a code through which Satan’s puppets in the Vatican had kept religious Truth hidden. Nothing could be more important to Dorset than overthrowing ‘the vain traditions of men’ expressed through the Church’s teaching, in favour of what God willed, as revealed through his Word - and Mary presented an obstacle.

Within weeks of Dorset’s promotion, remaining conservatives on the Council were expelled and the imperial ambassador was expressing fears for Mary. Dorset, Northampton and Herbert were the dominant figures in Warwick’s ‘crew’, he said, and all were men who would ‘never permit the Lady Mary to live in peace…in order to exterminate [the Catholic] religion’.11 Mary would eventually be driven out of England, he believed, forced to change her faith, or even killed. While the political situation remained unsettled the Grey sisters continued to come and go from their father’s houses in London and Leicestershire to his half-brother’s house in Essex. On 2nd December, Katherine and Mary returned to Tilty, arriving with their attendants and ‘a great many gentlemen’. Katherine, in particular, was a light-hearted girl who enjoyed such parties, and little Mary Grey took her cue from her older sister in this regard. But the more serious Jane also joined them at Tilty, on 16th December, with her parents and uncle, Lord John Grey.

The family enjoyed a huge party at Tilty on Christmas Day and further celebrations on the 26th and 27th. The plays and festivities continued until almost the end of January 1550, broken only by a visit Katherine made to the sisters’ sole surviving aunt, Elizabeth, the widow of Lord Audley, at nearby Walden Abbey. Lady Audley’s only child, Margaret Audley, was a playmate, and also being raised as an evangelical.12 There were no further journeys recorded to see the Princess Mary at Beaulieu that month. But it is probable the princess continued occasionally to welcome Frances and her daughters in the troubled years ahead. The cousins knew how quickly things could change in politics, and that the time could come when they might need the help of the other.

By February 1550, as the immediate political situation stabilised, the Grey sisters were settled at Dorset House on the Strand with their Willoughby cousins. For their father the rewards of office were already proving plentiful. Over the previous month he had been made Steward of the King’s Honours and Constable of Leicester Castle, as well as being granted lands, lordships and manors in Leicestershire, Rutland, Warwickshire, Nottinghamshire, and the Duchy of Lancaster.13 This vast increase in wealth ensured his wife and children could afford the finest new gowns for court functions where he was in daily attendance on the King.

Edward’s day was a busy one. He rose early and was dressed by his four Gentlemen of the Privy Chamber, who remained on their knees throughout. He then enjoyed some exercise: ball games, dancing, riding, shooting the bow or other sports. Breakfast was followed by a morning prayer, and then two hours’ tuition in Greek or Latin. Before and after lunch there could be meetings with Councillors. He would then have a lute lesson, an hour of French and then further Latin or Greek, before taking some more physical exercise and entertainments, dinner and bed, with all its attendant rituals. But around the routines of this isolated royal schoolboy, the court had the feeling of an armed camp.

Warwick was extremely security-conscious. A new contingent of guardsmen and armed yeomen had been attached to the King’s Privy Chamber, as well as twelve bands of cavalry, of which Dorset commanded a hundred horse.* Access to Edward was also severely restricted. Nothing could be presented to him that had not been approved by the Council and his tutors first. For the Grey sisters, however, conversation with Edward was easier to achieve than for most. Not only was their father constantly at Edward’s side, nearly all the King’s personal servants were either family friends or relations, or the clients of those who were. Catherine Parr’s brother, the Marquess of Northampton, was close at hand as Lord Chamberlain, and his brother-in-law, Sir William Herbert, as Edward’s Master of the Horse. Northampton’s cousin, Nicholas Throckmorton (who had shouted in support of Anne Askew as she was burned), was Edward’s favourite Gentleman of the Privy Chamber, one of the four men who dressed Edward each morning, and played games and sports with him. But the figure who dominated the court was the new Lord President, John Dudley, the Earl of Warwick.

The Lord President, who would play a key role in Lady Jane Grey’s future, was a towering figure, albeit one who had emerged from the shadow of the scaffold. His father, Edmund Dudley, had been a faithful servant to Henry VII and a brilliant lawyer. On his master’s behalf he had squeezed the rich of their wealth until the pips squeaked. But when the first Tudor king died, the new monarch, the eighteen-year-old Henry VIII, had disassociated himself from his father’s unpopular policies. The young John Dudley saw his father set up on charges of treason and executed as a royal public relations exercise. It had made him a cautious man, as well as a ruthless one. People found Warwick physically intimidating, the sense of the soldier’s brute power all the more terrifying because he was so unusually controlled. He watched and waited before he made his moves and it was said that he ‘had such a head that he seldom went about anything, but he conceived first three or four purposes beforehand’.14

It wasn’t long before Jane discovered that Warwick had plans for her. He was keen to avoid the mistakes of the Protectorship. That meant treating Edward as a maturing monarch, training him for a gradual introduction into matters of state, while also involving fellow Privy Councillors in important decision-making. Warwick even hoped to work again with Somerset, who was released from the Tower that month, in February, and invited to rejoin the Privy Council in May. It seemed to Warwick, however, that the best way to bind the new allies was the traditional means of inter-family marriages. Somerset agreed, and the marriages he most wanted for his children were with members of the Grey family. Just as Thomas Sudeley had suspected, Somerset wanted Jane for his son, the young Earl of Hertford. Through his mother Hertford was descended from Edward III. This did not give him any noteworthy claim to the throne, but his smidgen of royal blood raised his rank and made him a suitable match for Jane. Somerset asked also that his elder daughter Anne be married to Jane’s fourteen-year-old uncle, Henry Brandon, the Duke of Suffolk, who was being educated alongside the King.

Jane’s step-grandmother, Katherine Suffolk, turned Somerset down flat. As she explained to Somerset’s secretary - her friend William Cecil, a kinsman of the Greys - she disapproved of child marriages. ‘I cannot tell what unkindness one of us might show the other than to bring our children into so miserable a state as not to chose by their own liking,’ she told him.15 Warwick was obliged to step into the breach and marry Anne Seymour to his eldest son, Lord Lisle. But if Somerset was still hoping to capture Lady Jane Grey he hoped in vain. Dorset was prepared to make vague promises about Jane’s future, but he declined to write anything down. If there had been any betrothal it would have emerged during government investigations into Hertford’s actual marriage in 1560. Dorset believed that he was in a stronger position than he had ever been to achieve the ultimate prize for his favourite daughter. A German client of Dorset called John of Ulm, who was writing to the chief pastor of the Zurich Church, Heinrich Bullinger, and outlining Dorset’s role in driving forward religious change, noted how carefully educated Jane was. Dorset was the ‘thunderbolt and terror of the papists’, he observed, while Jane was ‘pious and accomplished beyond what can be expressed’. She was to be the pious Queen of a Godly King, the rulers of a new Jerusalem that Dorset intended to help build.16

* For this he received £2,000 a year: as much as he had agreed for Jane’s wardship.

Chapter VII Bridling Jane

It was late in the summer of 1550 when the Princess Elizabeth’s former tutor, Roger Ascham, arrived at Bradgate. He was en route to take up a post to the English ambassador at the court of Charles V. Ascham had come principally to say goodbye to his wife Alice, and the Astleys, Elizabeth’s former governess and her husband: all based at Bradgate since the break-up of Elizabeth’s household following Sudeley’s arrest. But Ascham also hoped to see Jane, to thank her for a letter of reference she had sent to his new employer. A prime purpose of Jane’s education was to coach her to perform on the public stage and the letter demonstrates she was already playing the role of a great patron. As Ascham would discover, however, the thirteen-year-old was finding the pressure intense.

Jane was expected to excel in all fields, including dance and Greek, manners and philosophy, but the duty of obedience was the lesson she was finding hardest to absorb. ‘Unless you frame yourself to obey, yea and feel in yourself what obedience is, you shall never be able to teach others how to obey you,’ her future nephew, Philip Sidney, would explain to his son.1 The harder this lesson was taught, however, the more Jane struggled against it, and she had begun to avoid her parents’ company. When Ascham reached the house he was told that the entire household was hunting in the park, save for Jane who had chosen to stay behind. He found her alone in her chamber looking ‘young and lovely’. She had just broken off from reading Plato’s Phaedo, which describes the courage Socrates displayed in the face of death. ‘When I come to the end of my journey,’ Socrates says as he prepares to take hemlock from the executioner, ‘I shall obtain that which has been the pursuit of my life.’2 Many lesser students struggled with the Greek and, perhaps, with its arguments for the immortality of the soul. But to Ascham’s amazement it was apparent that Jane read it ‘with as much delight as gentlemen read a merry tale in Boccacio’.*

Ascham chatted with Jane for a while, before summoning up the courage to ask why she was reading Plato instead of being in the park with everyone else? Jane smiled and replied that ‘all their sport in the park is but a shadow to that pleasure that I find in Plato! Alas! Good folk, they never felt what true pleasure meant.’ Ascham, oblivious to the authentic voice of the teenage know-it-all, was delighted to find a young woman with such a love of philosophy, and he wondered what might have drawn her to it ‘seeing not many women [and] very few men, have attained thereunto’. At that, however, Jane seized the opportunity to launch an attack on the wrongs she believed she was being dealt at the hands of her parents.

I will tell you, and tell you a truth which perchance ye will marvel at. One of the greatest benefits that ever God gave me is that he sent me so sharp and severe parents and so gentle a schoolmaster. For when I am in presence of either father or mother, whether I speak, keep silence, sit, stand or go, eat, drink, be merry or sad, be sewing, playing, dancing or doing anything else, I must do it, as it were, in such weight, measure and number, even so perfectly as God made the world, or else I am so sharply taunted, so cruelly threatened, yea, presently sometimes with pinches, nips and bobs, and other ways, (which I shall not name, for the honour I bear them), so without measure misordered, that I think myself in hell, till time come that I must go to Mr Aylmer, who teaches me so gently, so pleasantly, with such fair allurements to learning, that I think all the time nothing whilst I am with him. And when I am called from him, I fall on weeping, because whatever I do else but learning is full of grief, trouble, fear and wholly misliking unto me. And thus my book hath been so much my pleasure, and brings daily to me more pleasure and more that in respect of it, all other pleasures, in very deed, be but trifles and troubles unto me.3

Years later, Ascham recorded this conversation in his memoir The Schoolmaster, and used it to support his thesis that pupils did better if their tutors treated them kindly. The passage has been misused since, however, as ‘proof’ of the cruelty of Jane’s parents - and especially of Frances - in contrast to the kindliness of Aylmer. Jane, like many girls her age, may well have preferred the world of books to that in which she was forced to engage with demanding adults, but Ascham’s image of a kindly Aylmer and bullying parents was never an accurate one, and has been used in a way that would surely have appalled him. The reason for the later slandering of Frances’s reputation, in particular, is shameful. Since the eighteenth century she has been used as the shadow that casts into brilliant light the eroticised figure of female helplessness that Jane came to represent. While Jane is the abused child-woman of these myths, Frances has been turned into an archetype of female wickedness: powerful, domineering and cruel. The mere fact that Frances was with the rest of the household in the park, while Jane read her book, became the basis for a legend that she was a bloodthirsty huntress. The scene in Trevor Nunn’s 1985 film, Lady Jane, in which Frances slaughters a deer on white snow, is inspired by it and establishes her early on in the film as a ruthless destroyer of innocents: a wicked Queen to Jane’s Snow White.