CHAPTER VI 1547 Triumph of the new men--Somerset made Protector--Coronation of Edward VI.--Measures of ecclesiastical reform--The Seymour brothers--Lady Jane Grey entrusted to the Admiral--The Admiral and Elizabeth--His marriage to Katherine.

With the death of the King a change, complete and sudden, passed over the face of affairs. So long as Henry drew breath all was uncertain; security there was none. The men who were in favour to-day might be disgraced to-morrow, and with regard to the government of the country and the guardianship of the new sovereign all depended upon the state of mind in which death might find him. Happening when it actually did, it left the “new men,” the objects of Surrey’s contempt, triumphant. Norfolk was in prison on a capital charge; his son was dead. Gardiner had fallen into disgrace at the same time as the Howards, and, though averting a worse fate by a timely show of submission, had never regained his power, his name being omitted by Henry from the list of his executors, all, with the exception of Wriothesley the Chancellor, adherents of the Seymours and for the most part pledged to the support of the Protestant interest. Henry had acted deliberately.

“My Lord of Winchester—I think by negligence—is left out of Your Majesty’s will,” said Sir Anthony Browne, kneeling by the King’s side, and recalling to the dying man the Bishop’s long service and great abilities. But Henry refused to reconsider the question.

“Hold your peace,” he returned. “I remembered him well enough, and of good purpose have left him out; for surely, if he were in my testament, and one of you, he would cumber you all, and you should never rule him, he is of so troublesome a nature.”50

Gardiner removed, there was no one left of sufficient influence to combat the Seymours. Their day was come.

The King’s death had taken place on Friday, January 28. The Council, for reasons of their own, kept the news secret until the following Monday, when, amidst a scene of strong emotion, real or simulated, the fact was made known to Lords and Commons, Parliament was dissolved, and the Commons dismissed, the peers staying in London to welcome their new sovereign. On February 1 a fresh and crowning success was scored by the dominant party, and Hertford—Wriothesley’s being the sole dissentient voice in the governing body—was made Protector and guardian of the King. That afternoon Edward received the homage of the Lords spiritual and temporal, and the new reign was inaugurated.

On the 20th of the same month the coronation took place with all magnificence. On the previous day the nine-year-old King had been brought “through his city of London in most royal and goodly wise” to Westminster, the crafts standing on one side of the streets to see him pass, priests and clerks on the other, with crosses and censers, waiting to cense the new sovereign as he went by. The sword of state was borne by Dorset, as Constable of England, and his daughter, the same age as the King, was probably a witness of the splendid pageant and watched her cousin as, in his gown of cloth of silver embroidered in gold and with his white velvet jerkin and cape, he rode through the city.51

At the coronation on the following day Dorset again occupied a prominent place, standing by the King and carrying the sceptre, Somerset bearing the crown. Cranmer, with no longer anything to fear from his enemies, performed the ceremony and delivered an address that can have left no doubt in the minds of any of his hearers, if such there were, who had clung to the hope that a moderate policy would be pursued in ecclesiastical matters, of what was to be expected from the men who had in their hands the little head of Church and State. As God’s Vice-regent and Christ’s Vicar, Edward Tudor was exhorted to see that God was worshipped, idolatry destroyed, the tyranny of the Bishop of Rome banished, and images removed, the hybrid ceremony being concluded by a solemn high mass, Cranmer acting as celebrant.

Signal success had attended the inauguration of the new rÉgime. Dissentients were almost nonexistent. Wriothesley, now Earl of Southampton, remained the solitary genuine adherent of the old faith belonging to the Council. His lack of caution in putting the great seal into commission without the authority of his colleagues afforded them an excuse for ousting him from his post of Chancellor; he was compelled to resign his office, and received orders to confine himself to his house, whilst Hertford, become Duke of Somerset, took advantage of his absence to obtain letters patent by which he became virtually omnipotent in the State.

The earlier months of his government were chiefly devoted to carrying through drastic measures of ecclesiastical reform, in which he was aided by conviction in some, and cupidity in others, of his colleagues, eager to benefit by the spoliation of the Church. With the education of the King in the hands of the Protector, they could count upon immunity when he should come to an age to execute justice on his own account, and the work went swiftly forward. Gardiner, it was true, offered a determined opposition. If he had pandered to his old master, he vindicated his character for courage by braving the resentment of the men now in power, and paid for his boldness by imprisonment.

By September the internal affairs of the kingdom were on a sufficiently settled footing to allow the Protector to turn his attention to Scotland. Crossing the border with an army of twenty thousand men, he conducted in person a short campaign ending with the victory of Pinkie, after which, to the surprise of those who expected to see him follow up his success, he hurried home.

His hasty retreat was ascribed to different causes. Some supposed him eager to be again at his post, with the prestige of his victory still fresh. By others it was imagined that he feared the intrigues of his enemies, and in especial of his brother the Admiral. Nor would such uneasiness have been without justification. So long as their combined strength was necessary to enable them to stand against their enemies, the two had made common cause. Somerset was popular in the country; the nobles preferred the Admiral. For both a certain distrust was entertained by those who felt that “their new lustre did dim the light of men honoured with ancient nobility.52” The consciousness of insecurity kept them at one with each other. Become all-powerful in the State, jealousy and passion sundered them. Ambitious, proud, and resentful of the Duke’s assumption of undivided authority, Seymour had quickly shown an intention of undermining his brother’s position in the country, with his hold upon the King, and the Protector may reasonably have felt that it was neither safe nor politic, so far as his personal interest was concerned, to remain too long at a distance from the centre of government.

To the jealousies natural to ambitious men other causes of dissension had been added. These were due to the position achieved by Seymour some months previous to the Scotch campaign by his marriage with the King’s widow.

The conduct of Katherine at this juncture is allowed by her warmest partisans to furnish matter for regret. Little information is forthcoming concerning her movements at the time of the King’s death; nor does any blame attach to her if she regarded that event in the light of a timely release, an emancipation from a condition of perpetual unrest and anxiety. In any case the age was not one when overmuch time was squandered in mourning, real or conventional, for the dead; and, judging by the sequel, it is possible that, even before the final close was put to her married life, she may have been contemplating the recovery of her lost lover. It is said that when the Lord Admiral paid her his formal visit of condolence she not only received him in private, but candidly confessed how slight was her reason to regret a man who had done her the wrong of appropriating her youth.53

If the conversation is correctly reported, Seymour would augur well of the Queen’s willingness, so far as was possible, to make up for lost time. But he was not himself inclined to be hurried. Intent upon securing every means within his power to assist him in the coming struggle for pre-eminence, he did not at once convince himself that it was his best policy to become the husband of the King’s step-mother, and that a more advantageous alliance was not within his grasp.

Other matters were also occupying his attention; and it was now that Lady Jane Grey, unfortunately a factor of importance in the political world, was brought prominently forward and that her small figure comes first into view in connection with the competition for power and influence.

Although allied with the royal house, and in a position to share in some sort Surrey’s contempt for the parvenu nobility of whom the Seymours were representative, Dorset and the King’s uncles, agreed upon the crucial matter of religion, were on good terms; and Henry was no sooner dead than it occurred to the Admiral that he might steal a march upon his brother and secure to himself a point of vantage in the contest between them, by obtaining the custody for the present, and the disposal in the future, of the marquis’s eldest daughter. He lost no time in attempting to compass his purpose. Immediately after the late King’s death—according to statements made when, at a later date, Seymour had fallen upon evil times—Lord Dorset received a visit from a dependant of the Admiral’s, named Harrington, and the negotiations ending in the transference of the practical guardianship of the child to Seymour were set on foot.

Harrington was, it would seem, the bearer of a letter from his master, containing the proposal that Lady Jane should be committed to his care; and found the Marquis, on this first occasion, “somewhat cold” in the matter. The messenger, however, proceeded to urge the wishes of his principal, supporting them by arguments well calculated to appeal to an ambitious man. He reported that he had heard Seymour say “that Lady Jane was as handsome as any lady in England, and that, if the King’s Majesty, when he came of age, would marry within the realm, it was as likely he would be there as in any other place, and that he [the Admiral] would wish it.”54

Such was Harrington’s deposition. Dorset’s account of the interview is to much the same effect. Visiting him at his house at Westminster “immediately after the King’s death,” he stated that Seymour’s envoy had advised him to be content that his daughter should be with the Admiral, assuring him that he would find means to place her in marriage much to his comfort.

“With whom?” demanded Dorset, plainly anxious to obtain an explicit pledge.

“Marry,” answered Harrington, “I doubt not you shall see him marry her to the King.”

As a consequence of this conversation Dorset called upon the Admiral at Seymour House a week later, and as the two walked in the garden an agreement was arrived at, and her father was won over to send for the child, who thereafter remained in the Admiral’s house “continually” until the death of the Queen.55

It was a strange arrangement; the more so that it was evidently concluded before the marriage of the late King’s widow to Seymour, a man one would imagine to have been in no wise fit to be entrusted with the sole guardianship of the little girl. But Dorset was ambitious; the favour of the King’s uncle, with the possibility of securing the King himself as a son-in-law, was not lightly to be forgone; and the sacrifice of Jane was made, not for the last time, to her father’s interest.

To the child herself the change from the Bradgate fields and parks to the London home of her new guardian must have been abrupt. Yet, though she may have felt bewildered and desolate in her new surroundings and separated from her two little sisters, her training at home had not been of a description to cause her overmuch regret at a parting from those responsible for it. It has been said that every child should dwell for a time within an Eden of its own, and with many men and women the recollection of the unclouded irrational joy belonging to a childhood surrounded by love and tenderness may have constituted in after years a pledge and a guarantee that happiness is possible, and that, in spite of sin and sorrow and suffering, the world is still, as God saw it at creation, very good. The garden in which little Jane’s childhood was passed was one of a different nature. “No lady,” says Fuller pitifully, “which led so many pious, lived so few pleasant days, whose soul was never out of the nonage of affliction till Death made her of full years to inherit happiness, so severe her education.” Her father’s house was to her a house of correction.56

Such being the case, the less regret can have mingled with the natural excitement of a child brought into wholly new conditions of life, and treated perhaps for the first time as a person of importance. Nor was it long before circumstances provided her with a home to which no exception could be taken. By June Seymour’s marriage with the Queen-Dowager had been made public.

In the interval, short though it was, that elapsed between the King’s death and the union of his widow and the Admiral, Seymour had had time, before committing himself to a renewal of his suit to Katherine, to attempt a more brilliant match. Henry had been scarcely a month dead before he addressed a letter, couched in the correct terms of conventional love-making, to the Princess Elizabeth, now fourteen. He wished, he wrote, that it were possible to communicate to the missive the virtue of rousing in her heart as much favour towards him as his was full of love for her, proceeding to pay the customary tribute to the beauty and charm, together with “a certain fascination I cannot resist,” by which he had been subjugated.

Elizabeth, at fourteen, was keen-witted enough to estimate aright the advantages offered by a marriage with the uncle of the reigning sovereign. Nor was she, perhaps, judging by what followed, indifferent to the personal attractions of this, her first suitor. Though a certain impression of vulgarity is conveyed, in spite of his magnificent voice and splendid appearance, by the Lord Admiral, a child twenty years younger than himself was not likely to detect, in the recognised Adonis of the Court, the presence of this somewhat indefinable attribute. In her eyes he was doubtless a dazzling figure; and though she replied by a polite refusal to entertain his addresses, it is said that she afterwards owed her step-mother a grudge for having discouraged her from accepting them. Her answer was, however, a model of maidenly modesty. She had, she stated, neither age nor inclination to think of marriage, and would never have believed that the subject would have been broached so soon after her father’s death. Two years at least must be passed in mourning, nor could she decide to become a wife before she had reached years of discretion.57

That problematical date would not be patiently awaited by a man intent upon building up without delay the fabric of his fortunes; and, denied the late King’s daughter, Seymour promptly fell back upon his wife. A graphic account of the beginning of his courtship is supplied by the Spanish chronicle, and, if not reliable for accuracy, the narrative no doubt represents what was believed in London, where the writer was resident. The question of the marriage had been, according to him, first mooted to the Council by the Protector, and though other authorities assert that the Duke was opposed to the match, both facts may be true. It is not inconceivable that, whilst he would have preferred that his brother should have looked less high for a wife, the possibility that Seymour might have obtained the hand of the King’s sister may have caused the Protector to regard with favour an arrangement putting a marriage with the Princess out of the question. At the Council Board it is said that the proposal received the approbation of the Chancellor. Cranmer, though characterising it as an act of disrespect to the memory of the late King, promised to interpose no obstacle. Paget, the Secretary, went further, engaging that his wife, in attendance on the Queen, should push the matter to the best of her ability.

After dinner one day, accordingly—to continue the narrative of the Spaniard—when the Queen, with all her ladies, was in the great hall of the palace, and the Lord Admiral entered, “looking so handsome that every one had something to say about him,” Lady Paget, taking her opportunity, made a whispered inquiry to the Queen as to her opinion of Seymour’s appearance. To which the Queen answered that she liked it very much—“oh, how changeable,” sighs the chronicler, “are women in that country!” Encouraged by Katherine’s reply, Lady Paget ventured to go further, and to hint at a marriage; answering, when the Queen replied by demurring on the score of her superior rank as Queen-Dowager, that to win so pretty a man you might well stoop. Katherine would, she added, continue to retain her royal title.58

The Queen did not prove difficult to persuade. If it is true that she had been cognisant of Seymour’s attempt to obtain the hand of her step-daughter, the fact might have warned her of the nature of the love he was offering to herself. But a woman in her state of mind is not accessible to reason. A little more than a month after Henry’s death the betrothal took place, the marriage following upon it in May, and the haste displayed giving singular proof of how far the Queen’s old passion had mastered prudence and discretion. The world was scandalised, and the King’s daughters in particular were strong in their disapproval; Mary, the more energetic of the two on this occasion, summoning her sister to visit her, that together they might devise means of preventing the impending insult to their father’s memory, or concert a method of making their attitude clear.

Elizabeth, though her objections to the match were probably, on personal grounds, stronger than those of her sister, was more cautious than Mary. The girl, or her advisers, may have been aware of the fact that opposition to the King’s uncle would be a dangerous course to be pursued by any one whose future was as ill assured as her own; and, in answer to her sister, she pointed out, though expressing her grief at the affair, that their sole consolation would lie in submission to the will of Providence, since neither was able to offer practical resistance to the project. Dissimulation, under these circumstances, would be their best policy. Mary might decline to visit the Queen, but in Elizabeth’s subordinate position she would herself be compelled to do so, her step-mother having shown her so much kindness.59

Despite public censure, despite the blame and disapproval of critics whose disapproval would carry more weight, Katherine may not at this time have regretted her defiance of conventional propriety; and those spring weeks, passed at her jointure palace in Chelsea, were probably the happiest of her life. The nightmare sense of insecurity, which can never have been wholly laid to rest so long as Henry lived, was removed; the price exacted for her royal dignity had been paid, to the uttermost farthing; and she was a free woman. Her old love for Seymour had re-awakened in full force, and she believed it was returned. Pious and prudent, Katherine had forgotten to be wise. Disillusionment might come later, but at present the future smiled upon her; and she may fairly have counted upon it to pay, at long last, the debts of the past.

Her letters, light and tender, grave and gay, indicate her mood as she awaited the day when she would take her place before the world as Seymour’s wife. Whether a marriage had already taken place, though kept private as a concession to public opinion, or whether it was still to come, there were secret meetings in the early spring mornings by the river, when the town was scarcely awake, the more welcome, it may be, because of the sense that they were stolen. “When it shall be your pleasure to repair hither,” wrote Kateryn the Quene—her invariable signature—to her lover, “ye must take some pains to come early in the morning, that ye may be gone again by seven o’clock; and so I suppose ye may come hither without suspect. I pray you let me have knowledge over-night at what hour ye will come, that your portress [herself] may wait at the gate of the fields for you.... By her that is, and shall be, your humble, true, and loving wife during her life.”

Poor, learned Katherine had fallen an unresisting victim, like any other common woman, to the gifts and attractions of the man who was to prove so unsatisfactory a husband!

By May 17, if not before, it is clear that the marriage had taken place, though the secret had been so closely kept that it was a surprise to the bridegroom to discover that it was known to the Queen’s own sister, Lady Herbert. On visiting the latter, he told Katherine in a letter of this date, she had charged him “touching my lodging with your Highness at Chelsea,” the Admiral stoutly maintaining that he had done no more than pass by the garden on his way to the house of the Bishop of London; “till at last she told me further tokens, which made me change colour,” and he had arrived at the conclusion that Lady Herbert had been taken into her sister’s confidence. Meantime the inconvenience of the present condition of things was evident; and to Mary—curiously enough, since her disapproval of the projected marriage had been so pronounced—Seymour applied for help which should enable him to put an end to it. Although he preserved the attitude of a mere suitor for the Queen’s hand, it may be that the Princess suspected that she was being consulted after the event. Her answer was not encouraging. Had the matter concerned her nearest kinsman and dearest friend it would, she told the Admiral, stand least with her poor honour than with any other creature to meddle in the affair, considering whose wife the Queen had lately been.

“If the remembrance of the King’s Majesty my father ... will not suffer her to grant your suit, I am nothing able to persuade her to forget the loss of him who is, as yet, very rife in mine own remembrance.” If, however, the Princess refused the assistance he begged, she assured him that, “wooing matters apart, wherein, being a maid, I am nothing cunning,” she would be ready in other things to serve him.

The young King, to whom recourse was next had, was found more accommodating; and indeed appears to have been skilfully convinced that it was by his persuasions that his step-mother had been induced to bestow her hand upon his uncle, writing to thank the Queen for her gentle acceptation of his suit. The boy, after Katherine’s death and her husband’s disgrace, gave an account of the methods used to obtain his intervention:

“The Lord Admiral came to me ... and desired me to write a thing for him. I asked him what. He said it was none ill thing; it is for the Queen’s Majesty. I said if it were good the Lords would allow it; if it were ill I would not write on it. Then he said they would take it in better part if I would write. I desired him to let me alone in that matter. Cheke said afterwards to me, ‘Ye were best not to write.’”60

The boy’s letter to the Queen proves that he had subsequently yielded to his uncle’s request; and in June the fact of the marriage became public property.

The progress of the love-affair will have been watched with interest by the curious and jealous eyes of Elizabeth, the half-grown girl, who, placed by the Council under her step-mother’s care at Chelsea, had ample opportunities of forming her conclusions. Lady Jane Grey may, not improbably, have been likewise a spectator of what was going forward. There is no evidence to show whether it was before or after the public avowal of the marriage that she took up her residence under the Queen’s roof. But, having obtained his point and gained her custody, it is not unreasonable to imagine that the Admiral may have found a child of ten an encumbrance in his household, and have taken the earliest opportunity of consigning her to Katherine’s care.

A passive asset as she was in the political reckoning, the debates concerning her guardianship must have done something to bring home to her mind the consciousness of her importance; and she had doubtless been made well aware of her title to consideration by the time that she became an honoured inmate of the Lord Admiral’s house. But concerning the details of her existence at this date history is dumb, and we can but guess at her attitude as, fresh from her country home, she watched, under the roof of her new guardian in Seymour Place, the life of the great city around; or within the more tranquil precincts of Chelsea Palace, with the broad river flowing past, shared in the studies and pursuits of her cousin Elizabeth, ready-witted, full of vitality, and already displaying some of the traits marking the Queen of future years.

Did the shadow of predestined and early death single little Jane out from her companions? Like the comrades of whom Maeterlinck tells, “children of precocious death,” possessing no friends amongst the playmates who were not about to die, did she stand in some sort apart and separate, regarding those around her with a grave smile? We build up the unrecorded days of childhood from the few short years that followed; and reading backwards, and fitting the fragments of a life into its place, we find it difficult to believe that Jane Grey’s laughter rang like that of other undoomed children through the pleasant Chelsea gardens, that she shared with a whole heart in the games of her playfellows, or that the strange seriousness of her youth did not envelope the small, sedate figure of the child.

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