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

Chapter I Beginning

Frances, Marchioness of Dorset, prepared carefully for the birth of her child. It was an anxious time, but following the traditions of the lying-in helped allay fears of the perils of labour. The room in which she was to have her baby had windows covered and keyholes blocked. Ordinances for a royal birth decreed only one window should be left undraped and Frances would depend almost entirely on candles for light. The room was to be as warm, soft and dark as possible. She bought or borrowed expensive carpets and hangings, a bed of estate, fine sheets and a rich counterpane. Her friend, the late Lady Sussex, had one of ermine bordered with cloth of gold for her lyingin, and, as the King’s niece, Frances would have wanted nothing less.

The nineteen-year-old mother-to-be was the daughter of Henry’s younger sister, Mary, Duchess of Suffolk, the widow of Louis XII and known commonly as the French Queen. She was, therefore, a granddaughter of Henry VII and referred to as ‘the Lady Frances’ to indicate her status as such. The child of famously handsome parents, she was, unsurprisingly, attractive. The effigy that lies on her tomb at Westminster Abbey has a slender, elegant figure and under the gilded crown she wears, her features are regular and strong.¹ Frances, however, was a conventional Tudor woman, as submissive to her father’s choice of husband for her as she would later be to her husband’s decisions.

Henry - or ‘Harry’ - Grey,² Marquess of Dorset, described as ‘young’, ‘lusty’, ‘well learned and a great wit’, was only six months older than his wife.³ But the couple had been married for almost four years already. The contractual arrangements had been made on 24th March 1533, when Frances was fifteen and Dorset sixteen.⁴ Amongst commoners a woman was expected to be at least twenty before she married, and a man older, but of course these were no commoners. They came from a hereditary elite and were part of a ruthless political culture. The children of the nobility were political and financial assets to their families, and Frances’s marriage to Dorset reflected this. Dorset came from an ancient line with titles including the baronies of Ferrers, Grey of Groby, Astley, Boneville and Harrington. He also had royal connections. His grandfather, the 1st Marquess, was the son of Elizabeth Woodville, and therefore the half-brother of Henry VIII’s royal grandmother, Elizabeth of York. This marked Dorset as a suitable match for Frances in terms of rank and wealth, but there were also good political reasons for Suffolk to want him as a son-in-law.

The period immediately before the arrangement of Frances’s marriage had been a difficult one for her parents. The dislike with which Mary, Duchess of Suffolk, viewed her brother’s then ‘beloved’, Anne Boleyn, was well known. It was said that women argued more bitterly about matters of rank than anything else, and certainly Frances’s royal mother had deeply resented being required to give precedence to a commoner like Anne. For years the duke and duchess had done their best to destroy the King’s affection for his mistress, but, in the end, without success. The King, convinced that Anne would give him the son that Catherine of Aragon had failed to produce, had married her that January and she was due to be crowned in May. It seemed that the days when the Suffolks had basked in the King’s favour could be over; but a marriage of Frances to ‘Harry’ Dorset offered a possible lifeline, a way into the Boleyn camp. Harry Dorset’s father, Thomas Grey of Dorset, had been a witness for the King in his efforts to achieve an annulment of his marriage to Catherine of Aragon. He had won his famous diamond and ruby badge of the Tudor rose at the jousting tournaments that had celebrated Catherine’s betrothal to the King’s late brother, Arthur, in 1501. In 1529, the year before Thomas Grey of Dorset died, he had offered evidence that this betrothal was consummated. It had helped support Henry’s arguments that Catherine had been legally married to his brother and his own marriage to her was therefore incestuous.⁵ Anne Boleyn remained grateful to the family, and Harry Dorset was made a Knight of the Bath at her coronation.

From Harry’s perspective, however, the marriage to Frances - concluded sometime between 28th July 1533 and 4th February 1534 - also carried political and material advantages to his family.⁶ His grandfather, the 1st Marquess, may have been Henry VII’s brother-in-law, but by marrying a princess of the blood he would be doing even better; and the fact he had only the previous year refused the daughter of the Earl of Arundel may be an early mark of his ambition. Through Frances, any children they had would be linked by blood to all the power and spiritual mystery of the crown. It was an asset of incalculable worth - though it would carry a terrible price.

Over three years later, it was sometime before the end of May, 1537, that Frances’s child was to be born.⁷ Harry Grey of Dorset was in London and Frances would surely have been with him at Dorset House, on the Strand.⁸ It was one of a number of large properties built by the nobility close to the new royal palace of Whitehall. There was a paved street behind and, in front - where the house had its grandest aspect - there was a garden down to the river with a watergate on to the Thames. Travelling by boat in London was easier than navigating the narrow streets and foreigners often commented on the beauty of the river. Swans swam amongst the great barges while pennants flew from the pretty gilded cupolas of the Tower. But there were also many grim sights on the river that spring. London Bridge was festooned with the decapitated heads of the leaders of the recent rebellion in the north, the Pilgrimage of Grace: men who had fought for the faith of their ancestors and the right of the Princess Mary to inherit her father’s crown. For all Henry’s concerns about the decorum of female rule, the majority of his ordinary subjects had little objection to the concept. That women were inferior as a sex was regarded as indisputable, but there was room for exceptions. The English were famous in Europe for their devotion to the Virgin Mary, the second Eve, born without the taint of the first sin, and who reigned as Queen of Heaven. It did not seem, to them, a huge leap to accept a Queen on Earth. Just as the Princess Mary’s rights were under attack, however, so were their religious beliefs and traditions.

When the Pope had refused to annul Henry’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon, he had broken with Rome and the Pope’s right of intervention on spiritual affairs in England had been abolished by an act of Parliament on 7th April 1533. With the benefit of hindsight this was a definitive moment in the history of the English-speaking world, but at the time most people had seen these events as no more than moves in a political game. Matters of jurisdiction between King and Pope were not things with which ordinary people concerned themselves, and the aspects of traditional belief that first came under attack were often controversial ones. Long before Henry’s reformation in religion there had been debate for reform within the Catholic Church, inspired in particular by the so-called Humanists. They were fascinated by the rediscovered ancient texts of Greece and Rome, and in recent decades Western academics had, for the first time, learnt Greek as well as Latin. This allowed them to read earlier versions of the Bible than the medieval Latin translations, and to make new translations. As a change in meaning to a few words could question centuries of religious teaching so a new importance came to be placed on historical accuracy and authenticity. Questions were raised about such traditions as the cult of relics, and the shrines to local saints whose origins may have lain with the pagan Gods. It was only in 1535 when two leading Humanists, Henry’s former Lord Chancellor, Thomas More, and the Bishop of Rochester, John Fisher, went to the block rather than accept the King’s claimed ‘royal supremacy’ over religious affairs, that people began to realise there was more to Henry’s reformation than political argument and an attempt to reform religious abuses. And even then many did not waver in their Catholic faith. These ‘Henrician’ Catholics included among their number the chief ideologue of the ‘royal supremacy’, the Bishop of Winchester, Stephen Gardiner. For the bishop, as for the King, papal jurisdiction, the abolished shrines, pilgrimages, and monasteries, were not intrinsic to Catholic beliefs.⁹ The Holy Sacraments, such as the Mass, remained inviolate and they argued that although the English Church was in schism in the sense that it had separated from Rome, it was not heretical and in opposition to it.¹⁰

Those who disagreed, and opposed Henry’s reformation, felt his tyranny to full effect, as the heads displayed at London Bridge and other public sites bore silent witness. One hundred and forty-four rebels from the Pilgrimage of Grace were dismembered and their body parts put on show in the north and around the capital. Even if Londoners avoided the terrible spectacle of these remains, they would not miss the other physical evidence of the King’s reformation. Everywhere the great religious buildings, that had played a central role in London life, were being destroyed or adapted to secular use. Only that month, the monks from the London Charterhouse who had refused to sign an oath to the royal supremacy, were taken to Newgate prison, where they would starve to death in chains.

Inside Frances’s specially prepared chamber at Dorset House, however, the sights, sounds and horrors of the outside world were all shut out. She was surrounded only with the women who would help deliver her baby. When the first intense ache of labour came it was a familiar one. Frances had already lost at least one child, a son who died in infancy, as so many Tudor children did. Nothing is recorded of his short life save his name: Henry, Lord Harington.¹¹ Contemporary sources focus instead on the children born to Anne Boleyn: her daughter, Elizabeth, born on 7th September 1533, at whose christening Dorset had borne the gilded salt;^* and the miscarriages that had followed - the little deaths that had marked the way to Boleyn’s own, executed on trumped-up charges of adultery on 19th May 1536. The King’s second marriage was annulled and an act of Parliament had since declared both the King’s daughters, Elizabeth and Mary, illegitimate and incapable of succession.¹² This raised in importance the heirs of the King’s sisters in the line of succession, and both King and kingdom had already shown sensitivity to the implications. The rebels of the Pilgrimage of Grace had expressed their fear that England would pass on Henry’s death to the foreigner, James V of Scots, the son of his elder sister, Margaret. Meanwhile her daughter by a second marriage to the Earl of Angus, Lady Margaret Douglas, a favourite of the English court, was currently in prison for having become betrothed without the King’s permission. Her lover, Anne Boleyn’s uncle, Thomas Howard, would die in the Tower that October. But while Frances’s child would, inevitably, hold an important place within the royal family, the King remained determined his own line would succeed him. The pressure on her to produce a male heir was therefore of a different order to Henry’s wives. Dorset wanted a son, as all noblemen did, but he and Frances were still young and, when a girl was born, their relief that she was strong and healthy would have outweighed any disappointment in her sex.

A servant carried the newborn child immediately to a nearby room and handed her to a nurse. It was usual for fathers to be at hand when their children were born and Dorset would have been one of the first to visit the dimly lit nursery where his daughter was being fed and bound in swaddling, to keep her limbs straight and prevent her from scratching her face. Her spiritual welfare was of still greater concern to her parents and her christening was arranged as soon as possible, though this meant Frances could not attend. New mothers were expected to remain in bed for up to a month, and some did not even sit up for a fortnight. Frances played a role, however, in helping choose as her daughter’s godmother, the King’s new wife, Jane Seymour, after whom the little girl was named.¹³

With her pursed lips and sandy eyelashes, Jane Seymour seems a poor replacement for Anne Boleyn, whose black eyes, it was said, ‘could read the secrets of a man’s heart’, but like her predecessor, Jane Seymour was a ruthless seductress.¹⁴ Her betrothal to Henry was announced only the day after Anne was executed. Having got her king it was her performance as a brood mare that was now important. In this too, however, she was showing marked success. A pregnancy had been evident for weeks and on 27th May the rumours were confirmed with a Te Deum sung at St Paul’s Cathedral ‘for joy of the Queen’s quickening with child’.¹⁵ It remained to be seen whether Jane Seymour would give the King the son he wanted, but in choosing her as godmother to their new daughter, Frances and Harry Dorset had offered a vote of confidence, and although they could not know it, the Seymour family would remain closely linked to their own, one way or another, thereafter.

About a fortnight after the christening, Frances had her first day out of bed and dressed in one of her finest nightgowns for a celebratory party. The royal tailor advised damask or satin, worn with an ermine-trimmed bonnet and waistcoat, allowing the wearer to keep warm as well as look good, for visiting female friends and relations. Frances had a younger sister, Eleanor, married to Lord Clifford, and an equally young stepmother. Frances’s mother had died on Midsummer’s Day in June 1533, and her father had wasted little time before remarrying. The bride he had chosen was his fourteen-year-old ward, the heiress, Katherine Willoughby. He was then forty-nine, and the muscles of the champion jouster, like those of his friend the King, had begun to turn to fat. Frances would doubtless have wished her father had waited longer and made a different choice: the new Duchess of Suffolk had been raised alongside her like a sister since the age of seven. But Frances had accepted what she could not change and remained close to her childhood friend, who was now pregnant with the second of Frances’s half-brothers, Charles Brandon. After the party was over, Frances could venture beyond her chambers to the nursery and other rooms in the house, until the lying-in concluded at last when Jane was about a month old with the ‘churching’ - a religious service of thanksgiving and purification that ended with Frances being sprinkled with holy water. ‘Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean,’ she prayed; ‘wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow.’ Frances then was ready to return to Henry’s court.¹⁶ Here, the care and blessings, showered on most new mothers, were in stark contrast to the treatment Henry had meted out to the Queens who had borne his children. If his third wife, Jane Seymour, had any fears about the future, however, there was little sign of them before her own lying-in began. She made her last public appearance on 16th September at Hampton Court. There was a grand procession into Mass at the royal chapel (which still survives, the ceiling a brilliant blue, studded with golden stars), and afterwards the court gathered in the vast space of the Watching Chamber (which also remains) to enjoy cold, spiced wine. There had been months of building work carried out in anticipation of the royal birth, and the heady scents of clove and cinnamon mixed with those of burnt brick and newly hewn wood. Once Jane Seymour disappeared to her chamber, however, so most of the court left the palace. There had been an outbreak of plague that summer and they were encouraged to go home.

There persists a myth that Lady Jane Grey was born during the subsequent three weeks of the Queen’s confinement, at the Grey family’s principal seat of Bradgate Manor in Leicestershire. Dorset’s mother, the dowager marchioness, was, however, installed at Bradgate until January 1538 and Frances was busy enjoying herself, not lying in bed. On 11th October 1537, when news reached her that Jane Seymour was in labour, she was being entertained at the house of a friend and her husband was on their estate at Stebbing in Essex.¹⁷ Dorset left immediately for London, where a procession was already being organised for priests and clerks, the mayor and aldermen, to pray for the Queen. It seemed their prayers were soon answered. At two o’clock the following morning, on the eve of the feast of St Edward, Henry VIII’s longed-for son, soon also to be christened Edward, was born. By 9 a.m. on that pivotal morning, Dorset was with the large crowd at the door of the medieval church of St Paul’s, singing the Te Deum. When the great hymn of thanks was finished volleys of gunfire were shot from the Tower and hogsheads of wine were set out for the poor to drink. The long-term security and peace of the nation hinged on having an undisputed succession and people of all religious persuasions now rejoiced at the birth of their prince.¹⁸

As the nation celebrated in the days ahead, Frances joined Dorset and together they made frantic efforts to arrange for permission to be at court for Edward’s christening. It was an event the entire nobility and royal family wished to attend, and Frances’s father had been invited to be godfather at the confirmation that followed immediately after the baptism. But, to their frustration, they found that they were not to be allowed back to Hampton Court. There had been several plague deaths in Croydon, where Dorset’s mother had a property. They hadn’t visited her recently, but no chances were being taken with the possible spread of disease to the palace.¹⁹

Such precautions would not save the Queen. Days later Jane Seymour suffered a massive haemorrhage, probably caused by the retention of part of the placenta in her womb. She was given the last rites two days after her son’s christening and died on 24th October. Frances was bequeathed several pieces of the Queen’s jewellery, pomanders and other trinkets,²⁰ and while she and Dorset had missed the royal baptism, they took leading parts in the state funeral in November. Dorset, his father-in-law the Duke of Suffolk, and four other courtiers, rode alongside the horse-drawn chariot that bore Jane Seymour’s coffin in procession to Windsor. It was surmounted by her effigy, painted to look lifelike and dressed in robes of state, with her hair loose, and rings on her fingers set with precious stones: the wooden dummy of a woman who had served her purpose. Riding immediately behind it, on a horse trapped in black, was the King’s elder daughter, the Princess Mary, who acted as chief mourner. The child who, thirteen years earlier, when her father was almost killed at the joust, had been his undisputed heir, was now a grown woman, twenty-one and pretty, with his pink and white complexion, and a painfully thin frame. She had seen her late mother humiliated in her father’s quest for a son, and Parliament brought into the divine process of the succession to deny her her birthright. But the vagaries of fate are uncertain. Under the Act of Succession of the previous year, Henry had been granted the right to nominate his heirs, and Mary knew she could yet be restored in line to the throne, despite having been declared illegitimate.

Behind Mary, sitting in the first of the chariots bearing the great ladies of the court, sat Frances, dressed in black and attended by footmen in demi-gowns.²¹ The procession then continued with the mourners in descending order of precedence so that at its very end even the servants walked according to the rank of their masters. ‘The heavens themselves, the planets and this centre, Observe degree, priority and place,’ Shakespeare wrote later in Troilus and Cressida;

Take but degree away, untune that string, And hark, what discord follows…Strength should be lord to imbecility, And the rude son should strike his father dead. This chaos, when degree is suffocate, Follows the choking. ²²

^* Salt was used in Catholic baptism until the 1960s: a small amount was placed on a baby’s lips as a symbol of purity and to ward off evil.