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.

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.

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.

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