Tudor Women: Queens and Commoners (18 page)

But although the Princess usually had the last word in such encounters, the Council had won the battle. Her household had been manoeuvred into submission, and for the next two years, if their mistress heard Mass, it was in fear and secrecy behind locked doors. This was the second time in her life that Mary had been defeated on a matter of principle, but at least she had gone down fighting, making it abundantly clear that she had only surrendered to superior force. No one could be in any doubt about the strength of her convictions, nor of what her attitude would be were she ever to succeed to the throne.

By the early spring of 1553 this had become a matter of acute concern, for those in power could no longer conceal from themselves that Edward was mortally ill. The previous summer the young King had unfortunately succumbed to a sharp attack of measles, and now tuberculosis, which had already carried off three promising teenage Tudor boys, was taking its inevitable course. To John Dudley, Duke of Northumberland, that brilliant, unscrupulous soldier of fortune who had risen to power by ruthlessly exploiting the weaknesses of the late Lord Protector and who dominated the other members of the Council of Regency by the most hypnotic force of his personality, Edward's death threatened personal disaster. But the Duke did not intend to relinquish pride of place if he could help it, and he spent the spring and summer of 1553 working desperately to secure the future. His plan was a simple one. The King, like his father, would dispose of the Crown by Will, disinheriting both his half-sisters in favour of his cousin Jane Grey and, to ensure continued Dudley ascendancy, Jane would be married forthwith to Guildford, the youngest of Northumberland's brood of sons, who was fortunately still a bachelor.

Despite the barefaced illegality of the scheme, Edward needed little persuading to fall in with it. Wholly committed to the new religion, he was as anxious as Duke Dudley to exclude Mary, knowing that she would strive to bring back the idolatry of the Mass and undo all the godly work of the past five years. The same objection could not be urged against Elizabeth but, as Northumberland pointed out, it would be difficult to pass over one princess and not the other. In any case, both had been declared bastards by Act of Parliament and both might marry foreign princes, who would take control of the government 'to the utter subversion of the commonwealth'. Equally important, Elizabeth would be no more amenable than Mary to Dudley control. Jane Grey, on the other hand, was still only fifteen; she had been strictly brought up and would do as she was told. Her parents, too, could be relied on to play their part. The Dorsets - or the Suffolks as they now were, since her late father's dukedom had devolved upon Frances Brandon - had been disappointed of seeing their daughter married to the King; the prospect of seeing her become a Queen in her own right was guaranteed to entrance them.

After the arrest of Thomas Seymour, Jane had gone back to live at home, but her relations with her mother and father had not improved. She told Roger Ascham -

When I am in presence of either father or mother, whether I speak, keep silence, sit, stand or go, eat, drink, be merry or sad, be sewing, playing, dancing or doing anything else, I must do it .. . even as perfectly as God made the world - or else I am so sharply taunted, so cruelly threatened, yea, presented sometimes with pinches, nips and bobs [blows] and other ways - which I will not name for the honour I bear them - so without measure misordered, that I think myself in hell.

Not surprisingly, Jane sought solace in her studies under the sympathetic guidance of her tutor, John Aylmer. When Ascham visited the family at Bradgate, their Leicestershire estate, in the winter, of 1550, he found her deep in Plato's Phaedo, reading it 'with as much delight as if it had been a merry tale of Boccaccio'. At fourteen she was conducting a learned correspondence (in Latin, naturally) with a group of Calvinist divines in Switzerland and seeking their advice on the pursuance of her Hebrew studies, so that she could read the Old Testament in the original.

Jane's only escape from the tyranny of her parents would, of course, be through marriage, but when Guildford Dudley was presented to her as her future husband, she refused him - or tried to do so. She seems to have disliked and feared all the Dudleys - feelings which many people shared - and besides, she considered herself to be already contracted to the Earl of Hertford, son of the former Protector. Her resistance, though, was useless. According to a contemporary Italian account, her parents fell on her with blows and curses, and the wedding duly took place amid much pomp and ceremony on 25 May 1553.

The marriage of Jane Grey to Guildford Dudley remains the most famous example in Tudor times of a reluctant bride forced to the altar by an ambitious or mercenary family; but how often a similar fate overtook other, less important, less well-documented young ladies, is difficult to say. Certainly forced marriages were frowned upon by society at large. The Church insisted on the 'full and free consent' of both parties as an essential pre-condition for entering into the holy estate, and all writers on the subject were of the same opinion. Parents and guardians grievously offended by compelling their sons and daughters to be married to such as they hated, without any consideration of age, love, condition and manners, declared Henry Cornelius Agrippa in his Commendation of Matrimony. Another authority described forced marriage as 'the extremest bondage there is'. While yet another, Thomas Heywood, made the point that such marriages were bound to be self-defeating. 'How often', he enquired, 'have forced contracts been made to add land to land, not love to love? And to unite houses to houses, not hearts to hearts? which hath been the occasion that men have turned monsters, and women devils.'

Fulminations of this kind show that forced contracts were by no means unknown but, at the same time, it's probably fair to assume that they were uncommon. Not many parents were heartless enough to drive unwilling daughters into the arms of men they really detested or found physically repugnant and, although the concept of romantic love found little place in the normal run of sixteenth-century marriage negotiations, it was generally accepted that there should be 'liking' and a reasonable amount of compatibility between an engaged couple. In any case, sensible parents - and the majority of parents were sensible people - could see the force of Thomas Heywood's warning. An unhappy, discontented wife could quickly poison not only her husband's life but her in-laws' as well. The quarrels of an unhappy, ill-matched couple would inevitably spill over on to their respective families, sides would be taken and bad feeling spread through the small, tightly-knit community of town or village.

Some parents were more enlightened than others in this respect. The Dowager Duchess of Suffolk, when discussing the possibility of a marriage between one of her sons and the Duke of Somerset's daughter, had been very reluctant to bind the children to an engagement before they were old enough to judge the matter for themselves. She personally was all in favour of the alliance but, she wrote, 'no unadvised bonds between a boy and girl can give such assurance of good will, as hath been tried already'. T cannot tell', she went on, 'what more unkindness one of us might show the other, or wherein we might work more wickedly, than to bring our children into so miserable a state, as not to choose by their own liking such as they must profess so strait a bond, and so great a love to, forever.' As the Duchess pointed out, once they realized they had married only to please their parents, or out of obedience, and had lost their 'free choice', neither of them would 'think themselves so much bounden to the other, a fault sufficient to break the greatest love'. If, later on, the young people were to 'make up the matter themselves', well and good. If not, then 'neither they nor one of us shall blame another'. As it happened, the matter never was made up, for the bridegroom elect died of the sweating sickness while still in his teens.

In practice, sons could expect to exercise fuller and freer consent than daughters. Trained from earliest childhood to obedience and passivity, to believing that her parents knew best, it took considerable courage and strength of will on the part of any well-brought-up girl to withstand family pressure in the matter of her marriage - and family pressure did not have to include physical violence to be compelling. Even the best-brought-up girl had a right to object if her father was proposing a dishonourable or unequal marriage - if, for example, the bridegroom were noticeably beneath her in social status or so much older that he would be unlikely to be able to give her children; but to reject an otherwise eligible suitor on the grounds that he was a bore, picked his nose or laughed at his own jokes, would be considered perverse and ungrateful by even the most indulgent father. So very many young women - especially those without a great deal to offer in the way of beauty or dowry - resigned themselves to accepting their parents' choice and prepared to make the best of it, hoping their mothers were right in their earnest assurances that love would follow marriage.

There were love matches too, of course. No one had anything against love, providing the price was right, and plenty of youthful romances flourished with parental approval. The great Duke of Northumberland himself had allowed his son Robert to marry for love, although the fate of that particular marriage rather justified those spoil-sports who maintained that a union founded on carnal love alone all too often ended in sorrow.

King Edward had been a guest at the wedding of Robert Dudley and Amye Robsart in June 1550, but he did not grace the marriage of Lady Jane Grey and Guildford Dudley. In May 1553 Edward was nearing the end of his sufferings, while alone in the country Mary waited in 'sore perplexity' and increasing fear of the future. Northumberland had become more conciliatory towards her in recent months, sending her bulletins on the King's condition, and when she last visited London in February had received her with greater courtesy than on previous occasions. But Mary was not deceived. She knew the Duke to be her enemy who would destroy her if he could, but as long as Edward lived, there was nothing to be done but wait.

Towards the end of the first week in July, both Mary and Elizabeth received urgent summonses to their brother's bedside. Elizabeth promptly took to her bed - too ill to travel, she declared, and ready with a doctor's certificate to prove it. Mary, then at Hunsdon, set out hesitantly on the journey but got no further than Hoddesdon on the London road before she was met by an anonymous messenger, a goldsmith of the City says one account, who told her that Edward was already dead and Northumberland's summons a trap. Pausing only to send a hasty word to the Imperial embassy, Mary turned aside and, accompanied only by two ladies and six loyal gentlemen of the household, made for her manor of Kenninghall in Norfolk. She had friends in the eastern counties, and there, if the worst happened, she would be well placed for flight to the Low Countries and sanctuary.

As Mary and her little party pushed on down the road which ran straight for mile after mile through the flat fertile farmlands of East Anglia, she probably had no very clear plans in mind. She was too much of a Tudor, and too much her mother's daughter, to be ready to give in without a fight, but she can have had few illusions about the desperate nature of her predicament. Certainly few outsiders believed she had a chance. She might be King Harry's daughter and the rightful heir, but Northumberland was the man in power. With the Council in his pocket, he controlled the capital, the treasury, the navy, the fortress of the Tower and its armoury, and had the reputation of being 'the best man of war' in the realm. Opposing him was a frail, sickly woman in her late thirties, without money, soldiers, advice or any organized support. The result of such a contest looked to be a foregone conclusion. But the Duke knew how narrow his power base really was and how quickly most of his supporters would desert him the moment the going got rough. His survival depended on a swift, bloodless success, and every day that Mary remained at large shortened the odds in her favour.

By Sunday, 9 July, she had reached the comparative safety of Kenninghall, and Northumberland had been forced to show his hand. The Bishop of London, preaching at St. Paul's Cross, attacked both the Princesses as bastards but especially Mary, a papist who would bring foreigners into the country. On the following day Jane Grey was proclaimed Queen and brought in stately procession to the Tower, her Dudley husband, resplendent in white and gold, preening himself at her side and her mother acting as her train-bearer. But that evening, just as the new Court was sitting down to dinner, a letter arrived from the rival Queen defiantly ordering the Lords of the Council to proclaim her right and title in her city of London. Still no one really believed she stood a chance, but clearly she'd evaded the party of three hundred horse sent out with orders to catch and take her prisoner, and hopes of a swift, bloodless success were receding.

In fact, for Mary, the miracle was already happening. She hadn't stayed long at Kenninghall and by 11 July was established at Framlingham Castle, a fortified place closer to the sea. She may still have been considering the possibility of flight, but now every day that passed was making the necessity for that last, humiliating admission of defeat seem less urgent. Even before she left Kenninghall, substantial local gentlemen like Sir Henry Bedingfield and Harry Jerningham had rallied to her with their tenantry, and at Framlingham, where she raised her standard for the first time, more and more volunteers were coming to offer their allegiance. Important men like Sir Thomas Wharton, Sir John Mordaunt, Sir Edward Hastings, the Earl of Sussex and his son, and the Earl of Bath were on their way to join her, while 'innumerable small companies of the common people' carrying their makeshift weapons, trudged through the lanes towards the castle in a spontaneous, heartwarming show of support for the true Tudor line. On 12 July the town of Norwich had her publicly proclaimed and sent her men and supplies, and on the fourteenth the crews of the royal ships lying off Yarmouth came over to her in a body, bringing their captains and their heavy guns with them. This was such an encouraging development that Mary decided the time had come to review her forces; but as she rode along the ranks the enthusiasm was so great, the cries of ‘Long live our good Queen Mary!' and the firing-off of harquebuses so deafening that her palfrey, who was used to a quiet life, would do nothing but rear. So the Queen had to dismount and go about the camp on foot, her eyes filling with ready tears at the sight of so much loyalty and true devotion.