BY

RICHARD DAVEY

An excerpt from

THE NINE DAYS’ QUEEN

1909

Introduction

Lady Jane Grey was known for her brief and tragic reign as Queen of England in 1553. She was a Protestant and a scholar who spoke several languages, including Latin and Greek.

In 1553, after the death of King Edward VI, Lady Jane Grey was proclaimed Queen of England by supporters of the Protestant faith, bypassing the rightful heir, Edward's half-sister Mary Tudor. However, her reign was short-lived as Mary Tudor rallied support and overthrew Lady Jane Grey, who was imprisoned in the Tower of London. She was executed for high treason the following year at the age of just 16.

Her story has captured the imagination of people for centuries, and her life has been the subject of numerous books, plays, and films and her tragic fate is often seen as a symbol of the struggle between Protestant and Catholic factions during the Tudor period, as well as the dangers of political intrigue and power struggles in monarchies.

The Lady Jane Grey: Bradgate Hall and the Greys of Groby

There is no more picturesque spot in England than Bradgate Old Manor, the birthplace of Lady Jane Grey. It stands in a sequestered corner, about three miles from the town of Leicester, amid arid slate hillocks, which slope down to the fertile valleys at their feet. In Leland’s Perambulations through England, a survey of the kingdom undertaken by command of Henry VIII, Bradgate is described as possessing “a fair parke and a lodge lately built there by the Lorde Thomas Grey, Marquise of Dorsete, father of Henry, that is now Marquise. There is a faire and plentiful spring of water brought by Master Brok as a man would judge agyne the hills through the lodge and thereby it driveth a mylle.” He also informs us that “there remain few tokens of the old castelle,” which leads us to believe that at the time of Lady Jane Grey’s birth Bradgate was a comparatively new house. The ruins show that the mansion was built of red brick and in that severe but elegant form of architecture known as the “Tudor style.” Worthy old Leland goes on to say that Jane’s paternal grandfather added “two lofty towers at the front of the house, one on either side of the principal doorway.” These are still remaining.

In Tudor times the park was very extensive and “marched with the forest of Chartley, which was full twenty-five miles in circumference, watered by the river Sore and teeming with game.” Another ancient writer tells us, in the quaint language of his day, that “here a wren and squirrel might hop from tree to tree for six miles, and in summer time a traveller could journey from Beaumanoir to Burden, a good twelve miles, without seeing the sun.” The wealth of luxuriant vegetation in the old park, the clear and running brooks, that babble through the sequestered woods, and the beautifully sloping open spaces, dotted with venerable and curiously pollarded oaks, make up a scene of sylvan charm peculiarly English. Here cultivation has not, as so often on the Continent, disfigured Nature, but the park retains the wild beauty of its luxuriant elms and beeches that rise in native grandeur from amidst a wilderness of bracken, fern, and flags, to cast their shadows over heather-grown hillocks. On the summit of one of the loftiest of these still stands the ruined palace that was the birthplace of Lady Jane Grey. The approaches to Bradgate are beautiful indeed, especially the pathway winding round by the old church along the banks of a trout-stream, which rises in the neighbourhood of the Priory of Ulverscroft, famous for the beauty of its lofty tower. When Jane Grey was born, this Priory had been very recently suppressed, and the people were lamenting the departure of the monks, who, during the hard winter of 1528, had fed six hundred starving peasants.

Bradgate Manor House was standing as late as 1608, but after that date it fell into gradual decay. Not much is now left of the original structure, but its outlines can still be traced; and the walls of the great hall and the chapel are nearly intact. A late Lord Stamford and Warrington roofed and restored the old chapel, which contains a fine monument to that Henry Grey whose signature may be seen on the warrant for the execution of Charles I.

A careful observation of the irregularities of the soil reveals traces of a tilt-yard and of garden terraces; but all is now overgrown by Spanish chestnut trees, wild flowers, nettles, and brambles. The gardens were once considered amongst the finest in England, Lord Dorset taking great pride in the cultivation of all the fruits, herbs, and flowers then grown in Northern Europe. The parterres and terraces were formal, and there was a large fish-pond full of golden carp and water lilies. Lady Jane Grey must often have played in these stately avenues, and there is a legend that once, as a little girl, she toppled into the tank and was nearly drowned—a less hideous fate than that which was to befall her in her seventeenth year.

“This was thy home, then, gentle Jane!
This thy green solitude; and here
At evening, from thy gleaming pane,
Thine eyes oft watched the dappled deer
(Whilst the soft sun was in its wane)
Browsing beside the brooklet clear.
The brook yet runs, the sun sets now,
The deer still browseth—where art thou?”

These sentimental lines were written in the eighteenth century, when deer still browsed in Bradgate Park, whence they have long since departed. Many curious traditions concerning Lady Jane are even now current among the local peasantry. Some believe that on St. Sylvester’s night (31st December) a coach drawn by four black horses halts at the door of the old mansion. It contains the headless form of the murdered Lady Jane. After a brief halt it drives away again into the mist. Then again, certain strange stunted oaks are shown, trees which the woodmen pollarded when they heard that the fair girl had been beheaded. The pathetic memories of the great tragedy, reaching down four slow centuries, prove how keenly its awful reality was felt by the poorer folk at Bradgate, who, no doubt, had good cause to love the “gentle Jane.”

The Manor of Bradgate was settled upon the Lady Frances Brandon, Henry VIII’s niece, when she espoused Henry Grey. It had been inherited by the Greys of Groby, Lady Jane’s paternal ancestors, from Rollo, or Fulbert, said to have been chamberlain to Robert, Duke of Normandy, who gave him the Castle of Croy in Picardy, the ruins of which are still to be seen not far from Montreuil-sur-Mer. It was hence he derived the surname of de Croy, afterwards anglicised to de Grey. This Rollo accompanied William the Conqueror into England, and was settled, soon after the Conquest, at Rotherfield, in Oxfordshire. The first of the family to be noticed by Dugdale is Henry de Grey, to whom Richard I granted the Manor of Grey’s Thurrock, in Essex, which grant was confirmed by King John in the first year of his reign. The descendant of this nobleman, Edward de Grey, was summoned to Parliament in 1488 in right of his wife’s barony of Ferrers of Groby, and his son John, afterwards Earl Rivers, who was slain in the battle of St. Albans, married the beautiful daughter of Sir John Woodville, subsequently the Queen of Edward IV. Bradgate is thus associated with two of the most unfortunate of England’s Queens: Elizabeth Woodville, who passed much of her life in its leafy glades; and Lady Jane Grey, who first saw the light in the stately red brick Manor House of which the crumbling ruins are now so beautiful in their decay.

Jane Grey’s grandfather, Thomas, the eldest son of Elizabeth Woodville, was summoned to Parliament on the 17th October 1509 as Lord Ferrers of Groby, his mother’s barony, and to the second Parliament in 1511 as Marquess of Dorset. He was a man of great note. In the third year of Henry VIII’s reign he had charge of the army of 10,000 men sent into Spain to assist the forces invading Guyenne under the Emperor Ferdinand. This force returned to England without doing service. We next hear of the Marquess figuring at the jousts with Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, Lady Jane’s maternal grandfather, on the occasion of the latter’s adventurous journey to France to bring back Mary Tudor, widow of Louis XII of France, whom he subsequently married. The Marquess was also sent to Calais to attend Charles V to England; indeed, he was very conspicuous throughout the early years of Henry’s reign. King Hal paid him the compliment of calling him “that honest and good man”—a title which he thought he richly deserved, since he signed the celebrated letter to Pope Clement VII touching the King’s divorce. He died in 1530, and was succeeded by his eldest son, Henry, Lady Jane’s father. The inheritance of this nobleman included the Marquisate of Dorset and the baronies of Ferrers, 1 Grey, Astley, Boneville, and Harrington, besides vast estates in Leicestershire and other parts of England. Henry Grey, though his portraits show him to have been a very good-looking man, did not enjoy a good contemporary reputation for ability or strength of character. During the brief reign of Edward VI he became the patron of the Swiss Reformers and was adulated by Bullinger and Hill. His name will be found attached to many of Henry VIII’s anti-papal decrees, and so long as that monarch lived, he was a staunch “Henryite” or schismatic, professing belief in all the doctrines of Rome save and except papal supremacy. In 1531, when the clergy were threatened with præmunire and mulcted in a fine, as a punishment for their too close attention to pontifical interests, young Henry of Dorset, who had just come to his own, displayed great energy in carrying out the King’s wishes and supporting his attempt to get himself acknowledged supreme head of the English Church. He also evinced considerable courage in connection with Henry VIII’s resistance to the excommunication of the Pope, launched against him after his marriage with Anne Boleyn. Such zeal in his sovereign’s service undoubtedly led to his advancement and paved the way to his marriage with the King’s niece, the Lady Frances Brandon. He may have owed much to the counsels and influence of Cromwell, to whom he carried a letter of introduction from his mother, 2 when he first went to London as a lad of seventeen, immediately after his father’s decease. The Dowager recommended her son very earnestly to “Master Cromwell,” pleaded his youth, and besought that worthy, then all-powerful, not to take heed of certain ill-natured reports concerning alleged wilful damage to the priory buildings of Tylsey, where she was then residing. 2

The good lady couches her letter in very humble terms, but does not enlighten us fully about the nature of the “damage” to which she refers, or by whom it was done. She seems, at any rate, to be in a terrible fright lest the tale should injure her son’s prospects with the all-powerful Chancellor. Some little time afterwards the Marchioness wrote another letter to Cromwell complaining of her son’s undutiful behaviour to her. It is dated from the “House of Our Lady’s Passyon” 3 (the Priory of Tylsey), and begins:—

“My Lorde,—I beseeche you to be my good lorde, consyderyng me a poor wydo, so unkyndly and extreymly escheated by my son.”

This curious epistle, now in the British Museum, is much defaced and in parts illegible. The name of the person to whom it is addressed is undecipherable, but, taken in conjunction with two other letters previously addressed to Cromwell by the same correspondent, there can be little doubt as to its destination. Her son had evidently withheld some property intended for her under her husband’s will. Whether he mended his manners and paid her the money, we know not; but as the Dowager is occasionally mentioned as attending Court functions in company with her daughter-in-law, it seems probable that the ultimate issue of the difficulty, whatever it was, was satisfactory to her.

Margaret, Dowager Lady Dorset, became one of the greatest ladies of the Court in the latter years of the reign of Henry VII and during a part of that of Henry VIII. She was in much request, it seems, at royal christenings, for not only was she specially invited to that of Mary Tudor, afterwards Queen Mary I, but she enjoyed the signal honour of carrying the infant Elizabeth to the font. She was invited to perform a like office at the baptism of Edward VI, but this time she was unable to be present, and wrote to make her loyal excuses, pleading that some of her household at Croydon had been attacked by the “sweating sickness.” It is probable that she had no desire to attend, for she had been the intimate friend of Anne Boleyn, and could hardly have felt kindly towards Jane Seymour. 4 Her place was filled by the Marchioness of Exeter, who eventually, after the execution of her luckless husband, was sent to the Tower on a flimsy charge of treason, and kept there until Mary I’s time. 5

A singular point in the history of Jane Grey’s forbears is that her father, in his hot haste to marry into the royal family, set aside, without the slightest scruple, his legitimate wife, Lady Katherine Fitzalan, daughter of the Earl of Arundel. Some writers say he was simply “contracted,” not married, to this lady, who never demanded her marriage rights, but retired into a dignified obscurity. None the less her family resented the affront offered their kinswoman, and it was Thomas, Earl of Arundel, this discarded lady’s brother, who acted as Dorset’s Nemesis, and at last betrayed him into the hands of his enemies.

Lady Jane Grey’s maternal grandfather was, as he wrote himself in the famous quatrain referring to his marriage with the King’s sister, descended from “cloth of frieze.” He was the grandson of a London mercer who had married a lady allied to the great houses of Nevill, Fitzalan and Howard, and his father had fought and fallen at Bosworth Field in the cause of Henry VII. In recognition of his services, Henry attached young Charles Brandon to the person of his younger son, Prince Henry, who was of similar age to himself. Thus began a friendship which was only severed by death. In appearance the Prince and his comrade were singularly alike: both were tall and stalwart, both with red hair and fair complexions, and they were equally skilful and agile in sport and manly pastimes. Charles was more intellectually gifted than Henry, but there was little to choose between them as regards their execrable views of moral responsibilities and their laxity in respect of their marriage vows.

As this last characteristic of Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, touches somewhat upon the legitimacy of Lady Jane Grey’s descent, a short summary of his matrimonial vagaries may be pardoned here. He was contracted in marriage early in life to Anne Browne, a daughter of Sir Anthony Browne, Governor of Calais, by his wife Lady Lucy Nevill, daughter of George Nevill, Duke of Bedford, brother of Richard, Earl of Warwick, “the King maker.” In 1513 he was bold enough to flirt most outrageously with, and seek in marriage, one of the greatest ladies in Europe, Margaret of Austria, the widowed Duchess of Savoy, aunt of the Emperor Charles V. But though Margaret fell in love with him, such a match was soon seen to be impossible, even by the lady herself, and Brandon came out of the affair most ungallantly. For this or some other reason never clearly explained, Brandon set aside his contract with Anne Browne, notwithstanding that by the laws of the period it was considered as binding as the completed marriage ceremony. We next learn that a probable reason for his unchivalrous conduct was a chance that suddenly offered itself to him of marrying the Lady Margaret, the rich widow of Sir John Mortimer of Essex. Charles and his mature consort—there was a difference of nearly thirty years between them—did not abide long together, for he presently endeavoured to annul this marriage on a plea of consanguinity, the Lady Margaret being sister to the mother of his neglected bride, Anne Browne, and consequently her aunt, a complication which surely ought to have been discovered at an earlier stage of the proceedings. Having settled this matter for the time being to his own, but certainly not to the lady’s, satisfaction, he remarried his discarded wife, Anne Browne, in the presence of a great concourse of relations and friends. By this lady he had two daughters: Mary, who became the wife of Lord Mounteagle; and Anne, who married a connection of the Greys, Viscount Powis. Their mother died in 1515, and Brandon soon afterwards contracted himself in matrimony with the Lady Elizabeth Grey, daughter and heiress of Viscount de Lisle. Whether through the interference of Lady Mortimer or not it is impossible to say, but it is certain that Lady de Lisle refused to carry out her side of the contract, and the match was broken off. Brandon, with the consent of Henry VIII, filched from the poor lady her title of Lisle, which he forthwith assumed. In due time the lady gave her hand to Edmund Dudley, father of the fateful Duke of Northumberland. It was probably when in France, and in attendance upon King Henry, at the time of the negotiations for the marriage of the King’s youngest and most beautiful sister, Mary, to the prematurely aged Louis XII, King of France, a hideous victim to elephantiasis, that Charles made so strong an impression upon that ardent Tudor princess that she swore by all the saints that she would not wed the French King unless it was thoroughly understood she was to marry whom she chose after his death, which took place within eighteen months of the marriage. The romantic story of how Brandon, now created Duke of Suffolk, wooed and married the royal widow within a fortnight of the King’s death, and whilst she still wore the white widow’s weeds of a French King’s Consort, is too well known to need recapitulation here, nor need we enter into the details of the gorgeous ceremonies of remarriage that took place at Greenwich, in the presence of King Henry, Queen Katherine of Aragon, and their Court, soon after Mary and Suffolk had landed in England. The Duke of Suffolk took his bride to spend their honeymoon in his magnificent mansion in Southwark, known as Suffolk Place, which he had recently inherited by the death of his uncle, Sir Thomas Brandon. It must have been about this time that the friends of the Lady Mortimer, and probably that lady herself, began to spread rumours abroad that made both Charles and his consort anxious as to the validity of their marriage and the legitimacy of their offspring. Indeed, even at the time of his clandestine wedding in the Chapel of the Hôtel de Cluny (now incorporated in the Museum of that name), he had felt very uneasy about the matter, and, foreseeing his peril, wrote to Wolsey, beseeching his assistance and advice on a matter of such vital importance, which, however, was not decided so easily as Charles expected. It was not until 1528 that Wolsey dispatched a somewhat garbled account of the matter to Pope Clement VII, then in exile at Orvieto, where he received Cardinal Campeggio and the English envoys who came to him with the first negotiations for the divorce of Henry VIII from Katherine of Aragon. Trusting in the evidence which Wolsey sent him, the Pope, by a special Bull (dated 12th May 1528), annulled the marriage of Brandon with the Lady Mortimer, on the plea of consanguinity, and at the same time declared valid that of her niece, Anne Browne, and legitimized her two children. The Bull further stated that Lady Mortimer and her friends were “liable to ecclesiastical censure if they made any attempt to invalidate the decree” making valid Brandon’s marriage to Anne Browne and Mary Tudor. The importance of this decree, which was first read out to the people in Norwich Cathedral in 1529 by Bishop Nyx, can readily be imagined when we remember that it was not delivered until after the Queen-Duchess had given birth to two children. Her only son, the Earl of Lincoln, died in infancy, and the Lady Frances became in due time the Marchioness of Dorset and mother of Lady Jane Grey. On the other hand, the legitimacy of the Lady Eleanor Brandon, the younger daughter, who was born after the publication of the papal decree, was never disputed, and moreover, before she entered upon her sorrowful career, the Lady Mortimer was dead. That considerable doubt was entertained as to the validity of Brandon’s marriage with the Queen-Dowager is proved by a variety of facts too numerous to be detailed, but one of which is very significant. Late in the first half of Queen Elizabeth’s reign, the validity of the claims of the Lady Mounteagle and her sister, the children of Brandon and Anne Browne, to be considered legitimate, was ventilated in the Court of Arches, and after much deliberation confirmed. Although the legitimacy of these ladies, both of whom were long since deceased at the time of this trial, had nothing to do with the legal position of Mary Tudor as the wife of the Duke of Suffolk, it was none the less an indirect test of the right to the throne of her granddaughters, the Ladies Katherine and Mary Grey.

From these briefly resumed facts it is not difficult to understand that although King Henry VIII highly approved of his bosom friend’s conduct, his subjects held Charles to be an arrant rascal. His treatment of his beautiful royal wife was on a par with his low conception of his moral obligations. He neglected her, spent her money, and lived openly with a notorious woman known as Mrs. Eleanor Brandon, by whom he had an illegitimate son, Charles, who is said to have been the well-known jeweller to Queen Elizabeth, and whose son, or grandson, Gregory Brandon, was, according to tradition, the headsman who executed Charles I.

Lady Jane’s grandmother, Mary Tudor, was a most amiable and long-suffering princess, who after a somewhat secluded life in Southwark withdrew to Westhorpe Hall. Here she died on 24th June 1533. Her two daughters—the Lady Frances, who had recently married the Marquess of Dorset; and the Lady Eleanor, soon to be the bride of Henry, Lord Clifford, eldest son of the Earl of Cumberland—were with her at the time of her death, but the Duke was absent in London, and so too was the Marquess of Dorset, her son-in-law, attending at the coronation of Anne Boleyn. The Queen-Duchess was interred in Bury St. Edmunds, Henry VIII and Suffolk paying the expenses of a gorgeous alabaster monument to her memory, “full of little saints and angels,” which was destroyed soon after, during the wreck of the glorious Abbey Church at the time of the suppression of the monasteries. The remains of the Queen were then removed to the parish church, where they still rest, a marble tablet put up in the early nineteenth century being the only memorial of Mary Tudor, Dowager Queen of France and Duchess of Suffolk.

Within three months of the Queen’s death (September 1533) Suffolk married a fifth wife, the Lady Katherine Willoughby d’Eresby, who, it seems, was his ward and only fifteen years old. She was a great heiress, and what made her marriage all the more singular was the fact that she was a daughter of that Doña Maria de Sarmiento who, as Lady Willoughby, was the friend and attendant of Queen Katherine of Aragon. It must also be remembered that Queen Katherine had no more bitter enemy than Suffolk. This Duchess developed into a very pretty woman, of great wit and character, and a staunch supporter of the doctrines of the Reformation.

The Lady Frances Brandon was born at Hatfield, then a palace of the Bishop of Salisbury, who had afforded her mother hospitality; for it seems that the Queen-Duchess was obliged to halt here, for reasons easily understood, on her way to Walsingham Priory, whither she was bound on a pilgrimage. There is still extant a very curious account of the baptism of the Lady Frances in the parish church of Hatfield, which was hung with garlands for the occasion. The Lady Anne 6 Boleyn, aunt of the ill-fated Queen Anne of that ilk, stood proxy for Queen Katherine of Aragon as sponsor.

In 1533–4 the Lady Frances was married, notwithstanding his afore-mentioned “contract” to the Lady Fitzalan, to Henry Grey, Marquess of Dorset. The wedding took place at Suffolk Place, Southwark, and the religious ceremony in the Church of St. Saviour, now the cathedral of the new diocese. No very great pains seem to have been taken with the lady’s education, except in the matter of what we should call “sports,” in which, it seems, she was very proficient.

The Lady Frances was a handsome woman, however, but somewhat spiteful and wholly unscrupulous. In a well-known portrait, dated after her second marriage, she is represented as a buxom, fair-haired, well-featured matron, with a very sinister expression in her light grey eyes. Her eldest child was a son who died of the plague when a baby, and the three children who survived were all girls—the Ladies Jane, Katherine, and Mary Grey. Lady Jane Grey, as we shall see, had little cause to feel deep affection for either of her parents, but least of all for her mother. The Lady Frances seems to have been cast, so far as her heart went, in a mould of iron. Even the bloody deaths of her husband and her eldest daughter, and the wretchedly precarious existence of her two remaining children, did not affect her buoyant spirits, since she enjoyed her life to the end. It would be difficult to define her religious opinions. She was a schismatic under Henry VIII, and under Edward VI she appeared a zealous Protestant and so intimate with the famous Reformer Bucer that when he died she petitioned Cranmer to obtain a pension for his widow. She became a pious Papist in Queen Mary’s time, and died a prominent member of the Church of England as by law established, under Elizabeth.

The Lady Eleanor Brandon, Henry VIII’s niece and Lady Jane Grey’s only maternal aunt, married, as we have said, Henry, Lord Clifford, to whom she was united in 1537 at the Duke of Suffolk’s palace in Southwark. The Lady Eleanor gave birth to two sons and a daughter. At the time of the Pilgrimage of Grace (in 1536) she was staying at Bolton Abbey, which Henry VIII, after confiscating it from the Church, had presented to Lord Clifford; and had it not been for the chivalry and bravery of Christopher Aske, the rebel leader’s brother, she would have suffered at the hands of the infuriated “pilgrims.” By dint of a bold night ride, Aske aided Lady Eleanor to fly from Bolton Abbey and reach a place of safety. In 1542 her husband succeeded to the Earldom of Cumberland on the death of his father, and five years later (November 1547) Lady Eleanor passed away at Brougham Castle and was laid to rest in Skipton Church.

It will be seen by this rapid sketch of her forbears on both sides that Lady Jane Grey might, without exciting surprise, have developed a character strongly sensual and unscrupulous. That she did not do so, apart from the fact that her early death perhaps prevented the full development of her character at all, was probably owing to the rigid and severe nature of the education to which she was subjected. The influence of Erasmus and the fashion of the newly revived classical learning had in the childhood of Jane Grey firmly seized upon the higher classes of England; and the ladies of royal and noble birth, schooled in the stern pietism of The Instruction of a Christian Woman of Luis Vives, which they all studied in Latin or in English, and, steeped in the classic moralities, they became prim and self-suppressed in expression and behaviour. It is likely enough, indeed, that in most cases this prudishness of attitude was but skin deep; but in the case of the hapless Jane, who was little more than a child when she was sacrificed, no other impression of her personality than this was left upon the world. We may picture the tiny demure maiden pacing the green alleys and smooth sward of Bradgate, with her Latin books and her exalted religious meditations, a fervent mystic, with no knowledge of the great world of greed, ambition, and lust, of which she, poor child, was doomed to be the innocent victim.

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