Lady Jane Grey And Her Times - free ebook by Ida A. (Ida Ashworth) Taylor

LADY JANE GREY AND HER TIMES

By I. A. TAYLOR Author of “Queen Hortense and her Friends” “Queen Henrietta Maria,” etc. WITH SEVENTEEN ILLUSTRATIONS London: HUTCHINSON &amp; CO. Paternoster Row decoration 1908...

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CHAPTER I The condition of Europe and England—Retrospect—Religious Affairs—A reign of terror—Cranmer in danger—Katherine Howard.

In 1546 it must have been evident to most observers that the life of the man who had for thirty-five years been England’s ruler and tyrant—of whom Raleigh affirmed that if all the patterns of a merciless Prince had been lost in the world they might have been found in this one King—was not likely to be prolonged; and though it had been made penal to foretell the death of the sovereign, men must have been secretly looking on to the future with anxious eyes. Of all the descendants of Henry VII. onl

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CHAPTER II 1546 Katherine Parr—Relations with Thomas Seymour—Married to Henry VIII.—Parties in court and country—Katherine’s position—Prince Edward.

It was now three years since Katherine Parr had replaced the unhappy child who had been her immediate predecessor. For three perilous years she had occupied—with how many fears, how many misgivings, who can tell?—the position of the King’s sixth wife. On a July day in 1543 Lady Latimer, already at thirty twice a widow, had been raised to the rank of Queen. If the ceremony was attended with no special pomp, neither had it been celebrated with the careful privacy observed with respect to some of t

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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 mor

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CHAPTER IV 1546 Anne Askew—Her trial and execution—Katherine Parr’s danger—Plot against her—Her escape.

As the months of 1546 went by the measures taken by the King and his advisers to enforce unanimity of practice and opinion in matters of religion did not become less drastic. A great burning of books disapproved by Henry took place during the autumn, preceded in July by the condemnation and execution of a victim whose fate attracted an unusual amount of attention, the effect at Court being enhanced by the fact that the heroine of the story was personally known to the Queen and her ladies. It was

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CHAPTER V 1546 The King dying—The Earl of Surrey—His career and his fate—The Duke of Norfolk’s escape—Death of the King.

The King was dying. So much must have been apparent to all who were in a position to judge. None, however, dared utter their thought, since it had been made an indictable offence—the act being directed against soothsayers and prophets—to foretell his death. Those who wished him well or ill, those who would if they could have cared for his soul and invited him to make his peace with God before taking his way hence, were alike constrained to be mute. Before he went to present himself at a court of

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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 i

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CHAPTER VII 1547-1548 Katherine Parr’s unhappy married life—Dissensions between the Seymour brothers—The King and his uncles—The Admiral and Princess Elizabeth—Birth of Katherine’s child, and her death.

The belated idyll of love and happiness enjoyed by “Kateryn the Quene” was of pitifully short duration. During the first days of September 1548, some fifteen months after the stolen marriage at Chelsea, a funeral procession left Sudeley Castle, and the body of the wife of the Lord Admiral was carried forth to burial, Lady Jane Grey, his ward, then in her twelfth year, acting as chief mourner. 61 Jane had good cause to mourn, in other than an official capacity. It is hard to believe that, had Kat

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CHAPTER VIII 1548 Lady Jane’s temporary return to her father—He surrenders her again to the Admiral—The terms of the bargain.

One of the secondary but immediate effects of the Queen’s death was to send Lady Jane Grey back to her parents. It was indeed to Seymour, and not to his wife, that the care of the child had been entrusted; but in his first confusion of mind after what he termed his great loss, the Admiral appears to have recognised the difficulty of providing a home for a girl in her twelfth year in a house without a mistress, and to have offered to relinquish her to her natural guardians. Having acted in haste,

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CHAPTER IX 1548-1549 Seymour and the Princess Elizabeth—His courtship—He is sent to the Tower—Elizabeth’s examinations and admissions—The execution of the Lord Admiral.

The matter of Jane’s guardianship satisfactorily settled, Seymour turned his attention to one concerning him yet more intimately. He was a free man, and he meant to make use of his freedom. As after the death of Henry, so now when fate rendered the project once more possible, he determined to attempt to obtain the Princess Elizabeth as his wife. The history of the autumn, as regarding him, is of his continued efforts to increase his power and influence in the country and to win the hand of the K

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CHAPTER X 1549-1550 The Protector’s position—Disaffection in the country—Its causes—The Duke’s arrogance—Warwick his rival—The success of his opponents—Placed in the Tower, but released—St. George’s Day at Court.

The Protector’s conduct with regard to his brother does much to alienate sympathy from him in his approaching fall, in a sense the consequence and outcome of the fratricide. He “had sealed his doom the day on which he signed the warrant for the execution of his brother.” 96 If the Admiral, having crossed his will, was not safe, who could believe himself to be so? Yet the fashion of the accomplishing of his downfall, the treachery and deception practised towards him by men upon whom he might fair

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CHAPTER XI 1549-1551 Lady Jane Grey at home—Visit from Roger Ascham—The German divines—Position of Lady Jane in the theological world.

Whilst these events had been taking place Jane Grey had been once more relegated to the care of her parents, to whose house she had been removed upon the imprisonment of her guardian, the Admiral, in January, 1549. To the helpless and passive plaything of worldly and political exigencies, the change from Seymour Place and Hanworth, where she had lived under Seymour’s roof, to the quiet of her father’s Leicestershire home, must have been great. Nor was the difference in the moral atmosphere less

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CHAPTER XII 1551-1552 An anxious tutor—Somerset’s final fall—The charges against him—His guilt or innocence—His trial and condemnation—The King’s indifference—Christmas at Greenwich—The Duke’s execution.

Aylmer had been so far encouraged by the success of his appeal to Henry Bullinger on behalf of his pupil that he is found, some seven months later, calling the Swiss churchman again into council. He was possibly over-anxious, but the tone of his communication makes it clear that Lady Jane Grey had been once more causing her tutor disquiet. Responding, in the first place, to Bullinger’s congratulations upon his privilege in acting as teacher to so excellent a scholar, and in a family so well disp

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CHAPTER XIII 1552 Northumberland and the King—Edward’s illness—Lady Jane and Mary—Mary refused permission to practise her religion—The Emperor intervenes.

For the moment master of the field, Northumberland addressed himself sedulously to the task of strengthening and consolidating the position he had won. In the Council he had achieved predominance, but the King’s minority would not last for ever, and the necessity of laying the foundation of a power that should continue when Edward’s nominal sovereignty should have become a real one was urgent. The lad was growing up; nor were there wanting moments causing those around him to look on with disquie

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CHAPTER XIV 1552 Lady Jane’s correspondence with Bullinger—Illness of the Duchess of Suffolk—Haddon’s difficulties—Ridley’s visit to Princess Mary—the English Reformers—Edward fatally ill—Lady Jane’s character and position.

The removal of the two Seymour brothers, whilst it had left Northumberland predominant, had also increased the importance of the Duke of Suffolk. Both by reason of the position he personally filled, and owing to his connection, through his wife, with the King, he was second to none in the State save the man to whom Somerset’s fall was due and who had succeeded to his power. He shared Northumberland’s prominence, as he was afterwards to share his ruin; and, as one of the chief props of Protestant

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CHAPTER XV 1553 The King dying—Noailles in England—Lady Jane married to Guilford Dudley—Edward’s will—Opposition of the law officers—They yield—The King’s death.

The King was becoming rapidly worse, and as his malady increased upon him, strange suspicions were afloat amongst the people, their hatred to Northumberland giving its colour to their explanation of the situation. He himself, or those upon whom he could count, were ever with the sick boy, and hints were uttered—as was sure to be the case—of poison. For this, murmured the populace, had the King’s uncles been removed, his faithful nobles disgraced; and the condition of public opinion caused the Du

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CHAPTER XVI 1553 After King Edward’s death—Results to Lady Jane Grey—Northumberland’s schemes—Mary’s escape—Scene at Sion House—Lady Jane brought to the Tower—Quarrel with her husband—Her proclamation as Queen.

A boy was dead. A frail little life, long failing, had gone out. That was all. Nevertheless upon it had hung the destinies of England. Speculations and forecasts as to the consequences had Edward lived are unprofitable. Yet one wonders what, grown to manhood, he would have become—whether the gentle lad, pious, studious, religious, the modern Josiah, as he was often called, would have developed, as he grew to maturity, the dangerous characteristics of his Tudor race, the fierceness and violence o

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CHAPTER XVII 1553 Lady Jane as Queen—Mary asserts her claims—The English envoys at Brussels—Mary’s popularity—Northumberland leaves London—His farewells.

To enter in any degree into the position of “Jane the Queen” during the brief period when she was the nominal head of the State, the time in which she lived, as well as the prevalent conception of royalty in England, must be taken into the reckoning. In our own days she would not only have been a mere cipher—as indeed she was—but would have been content to remain such, so far as actual power was concerned. Royalty, stripped of its reality, is largely become a mere matter of show, a part of the p

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CHAPTER XVIII 1553 Turn of the tide—Reaction in Mary’s favour in the Council—Suffolk yields—Mary proclaimed in London—Lady Jane’s deposition—She returns to Sion House.

Northumberland was gone. The weight of his dominant influence was removed, and many of his colleagues must have breathed more freely. In the Tower Lady Jane, with those of the Council left in London, continued to watch and wait the course of events. It must have been recognised that the future was dark and uncertain; and whilst the lords and nobles looked about for a way of escape should affairs go ill with the new government, the boy and girl arbitrarily linked together may have been drawn clos

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CHAPTER XIX 1553 Northumberland at bay—His capitulation—Meeting with Arundel, and arrest—Lady Jane a prisoner—Mary and Elizabeth—Mary’s visit to the Tower—London—Mary’s policy.

The unanimous capitulation of the Council, in which he was by absence precluded from joining, sealed Northumberland’s fate. The centre of interest shifts from London to the country, whither he had gone to meet the forces gathering round Mary. The ragged bear was at bay. Arundel and Paget had posted northwards on the night following the revolution in London to inform the Queen of the proceedings of the Council and to make their peace with the new sovereign; Paget’s success in particular being so

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CHAPTER XX 1553 Trial and condemnation of Northumberland—His recantation—Final scenes—Lady Jane’s fate in the balances—A conversation with her.

The great subject of interest agitating the capital, when the excitement attending the Queen’s triumphal entry had had time to subside, was the approaching trial of the Duke of Northumberland and his principal accomplices. On August 18 the great conspirator, with his son, the Earl of Warwick, and the Marquis of Northampton, were arraigned at Westminster Hall, the Duke of Norfolk, lately himself a prisoner, presiding, as High Steward of England, at the trial. Its issue was a foregone conclusion.

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CHAPTER XXI 1553 Mary’s marriage in question—Pole and Courtenay—Foreign suitors—The Prince of Spain proposed to her—Elizabeth’s attitude—Lady Jane’s letter to Hardinge—The coronation—Cranmer in the Tower—Lady Jane attainted—Letter to her father—Sentence of death—The Spanish match.

To Mary there were at present matters of more personal and pressing moment than the fate of her ill-starred cousin. It was essential that the kingdom should be provided as quickly as possible with an heir whose title to the throne should admit of no question. Mary was no longer young and there was no time to lose. The question in all men’s minds was who was to be the Queen’s husband. Amongst Englishmen, Pole, who, though a Cardinal, was not in priest’s orders, and Courtenay, the prisoner of the

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CHAPTER XXII 1553-1554 Discontent at the Spanish match—Insurrections in the country—Courtenay and Elizabeth—Suffolk a rebel—General failure of the insurgents—Wyatt’s success—Marches to London—Mary’s conduct—Apprehensions in London, and at the palace—The fight—Wyatt a prisoner—Taken to the Tower.

When the year 1553 drew towards its close there was nothing to indicate that any catastrophe was at hand. The crisis appeared to be past and no further danger to be apprehended. Northumberland and his principal accomplices had paid the penalty of their treason. Suffolk, with lesser criminals, had been allowed to escape it; the rest of the confederates had been practically pardoned. If some were still in confinement it was understood to be without danger to life or limb. In the Tower Lady Jane an

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CHAPTER XXIII 1554 Lady Jane and her husband doomed—Her dispute with Feckenham—Gardiner’s sermon—Farewell messages—Last hours—Guilford Dudley’s execution—Lady Jane’s death.

Those anxious days when the fortunes of England and its Queen appeared once more to hang in the balance had sealed the fate of the prisoners in the Tower. They must die. Mary had been warned that the clemency shown to her little cousin was unwise; she had struggled against the counsellors who had striven to convince her that the usurper, so long as she lived, was a menace to the peace of the realm, and the stability of her government. Their warnings had been justified, and Jane must pay the pena

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