Plowden Lady Jane Grey: Classic Histories Series

Nine Days Queen
1. Auflage 2011
ISBN: 978-0-7524-6712-2
Verlag: The History Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 208 Seiten

Reihe: Classic Histories Series

Jane Grey's tragedy was her royal blood. As Henry VIII's great-niece she stood perilously close to the throne and from early childhood was used as a pawn in the deadly power game of Tudor politics. Jane was not happy at home - she once famously remarked that she thought herself in hell in her parents' company - and sought consolation in her studies and the uncompromising Protestantism fashionable in the l550s. When it became clear that her cousin Edward VI was dying she was forced into marriage with a son of the powerful John Dudley Duke of Northumberland and confronted with the news that the king had made her his heir. So began her reign as the Nine Days Queen, leading to her imprisonment in the Tower and execution at the age of sixteen. Alison Plowden reveals with insight and skill the complex intensity of the woman behind the myth, the brilliantly gifted child who was developing into a passionate, forceful young woman.

The late ALISON PLOWDEN worked at the BBC as a script editor in Features and Drama, before leaving to work as a full-time writer. She specialised in the Tudor and Stuart periods and had numerous books published including Henrietta Maria, The House of Tudor, Two Queens in One Isle and Elizabeth I.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Plowden, Alison

Leseproben

TWO

AS HANDSOME A LADY
AS ANY IN ENGLAND

If I may once get the king at liberty, I dare warrant that his majesty shall marry no other than Jane.

Thomas Seymour to Lord Dorset

Henry VIII died at Whitehall at about two o’clock in the morning of Friday 28 January 1547 and at once a curtain of secrecy descended over the palace as a plan of action, privately agreed between Edward Seymour, earl of Hertford, and Secretary of State William Paget, was put into operation. In his will, a controversial and much-discussed document, the old king had provided for a council of sixteen executors, each ‘with like and equal charge’ to rule the country during his son’s minority – an arrangement so patently impractical that it had been set aside within a week of his death and at a meeting of the executors held on 31 January it was agreed that ‘some special man’ of their number would have to be preferred above the rest. The choice was an obvious one and the council proceeded to confer on Edward Seymour, earl of Hertford, ‘the name and title of Protector of all the realms and dominions of the King’s majesty that now is, and of Governor of his most royal person’.1

There were, of course, plenty of precedents, albeit not all of them happy ones, for appointing the uncle of a child king as regent and guardian, and Edward Seymour had other qualifications. He was a man of proven ability, an experienced and successful soldier and diplomat, generally respected by his peers and trusted by the late king. But he was not of the blood royal, nor even of noble blood. The son of a Wiltshire landowning family, he owed his earldom in part to his own ability but rather more to the fact that his sister had had the good fortune to become queen and give birth to the longed-for male heir. His elevation now to vice-regal status would inevitably give rise to jealousy and faction, and it remained to be seen whether he possessed the qualities necessary to fight off competition and stay at the top of the heap.

He had begun well. Guided by his friend and ally, that shrewd political operator William Paget, Seymour had left the palace before the old king’s body was cold. His destination was Hertford Castle, the current residence of the new king; his purpose to get possession of his nephew while Paget handled his interests in London. Largely thanks to Paget, the coup was so skilfully managed that by the time the executors met on the 31st they were simply rubber-stamping an already accomplished transference of power. That same day Seymour brought young Edward to the capital, and saw him safely installed in the fortress palace of the Tower, where his apartments had been ‘richly hung and garnished with rich cloth of arras and cloths of estate as appertaineth unto such a royal King’. On the following day came his formal introduction to ‘the most part of his nobility, as well spiritual as temporal’, who had gathered in the presence chamber to kiss his hand and hear the official promulgation of Seymour’s appointment.

The assembled lords then declared they would be ready at all times ‘with their might and power’ to defend the realm and the king and finally ‘cried all together with a loud voice, “God save the noble King Edward!”’ After which, the noble King Edward took off his cap and recited his piece: ‘We heartily thank you, my lords all; and hereafter in all that you shall have to do with us for any suits or causes, you shall be heartily welcome to us.’2

Preparations now began for the coronation, which was to take place on 20 February, and on the 18th there was a grand investiture as the new rulers of England made their first experiments in sharing out the sweets of power. The earl of Hertford was created duke of Somerset to emphasise the grandeur of his position; the queen’s brother, William Parr, became marquess of Northampton; John Dudley, Viscount Lisle, became earl of Warwick; and the younger Seymour brother, Thomas, became Baron Seymour of Sudeley. On the 19th Edward made the recognition procession from the Tower to Westminster. Dressed in white and silver, with the tall imposing figure of the new duke of Somerset at his side, the third Tudor king rode through gaily decorated, freshly gravelled streets lined with cheering crowds and surrounded by all the pomp and panoply amassed by his ancestors. The city had, as usual, put on a splendid show, with allegorical tableaux, singing boys and Latin orations at every corner; but as far as Edward was concerned, the high spot of the occasion was undoubtedly the Spanish acrobat who performed ‘masteries’ on a rope stretched above St Paul’s churchyard, and who delayed the king’s majesty with all his train ‘a good space of time’.3

The coronation ceremony itself, performed by Edward’s godfather, Archbishop Cranmer, went without a hitch, though it was perhaps ironical that the first king of England to be crowned as Supreme Head of the Church, God’s vice-regent and Christ’s vicar within his own dominions should have been a child of nine. But if anyone in the congregation found anything even faintly ludicrous in the spectacle they were careful not to say so, and in sermon after sermon preached in the weeks following the coronation Edward was compared to such Old Testament heroes as David, Josiah and the young Solomon. The physical age of the spiritual father of the people was immaterial, his extreme youth a mere temporary inconvenience. What mattered was the fact that he was God’s anointed, divinely ordained to guide the people into the paths of righteousness. Edward certainly believed this. Whatever inner misgivings he may have felt were connected not with God’s purposes but with man’s.

The king’s stepmother had been left with no say in the government or in Edward’s further upbringing, but the queen dowager was generously provided for in her husband’s will. Katherine Parr was now an extremely wealthy lady, and until the king married she would remain the first lady in the land, taking precedence even over the two princesses. Once the coronation was over she moved out to the royal manor at Chelsea, one of her dower houses, a comfortable, up-to-date, red-brick building, convenient for London and pleasantly situated overlooking the Thames on the site of the present Cheyne Walk. She was accompanied by the thirteen-year-old Princess Elizabeth, and on an unrecorded date during that spring or early summer the establishment was also joined by young Jane Grey.

The custom of ‘placing out’ – that is, of sending one’s children away to learn virtue and good manners in a family better circumstanced than one’s own – was an old one and much deprecated by foreigners who considered it to be yet another instance of English coldness and selfishness. It seems to have had its origins in the feudal practice of sending a boy to serve as a page in his lord’s household as the first step in his progression towards knighthood, while for girls, even if in some cases they paid for their keep by performing domestic duties or acting as ‘waiting gentlewomen’ to their hostesses, it offered a useful opportunity for acquiring extra accomplishments and social polish, as well of course as enhancing their chances of making a good marriage.

For a girl of Jane Grey’s social status the only possible ‘place’ was the royal household and in normal times she would no doubt have joined the ranks of the queen’s maids of honour. As things were, the queen dowager’s household would have offered the next best thing. Edward was known to be very fond of his stepmother and although she had no share in the regency Katherine continued to command a great deal of influence and respect. For Jane herself the change in her circumstances brought nothing but good. She had not been happy at home and her parents, her mother in particular, never appear to have shown her any affection. Not that this was necessarily unusual, though the Dorsets do seem to have been rather more unfeeling than most – unless it is simply that their harshness has been better publicised. But the sixteenth century practised no sentimental cult of childhood. Even that enlightened scholar Luis Vives disapproved of ‘cockering’, or indeed of any outward display of maternal love, ‘lest the children become emboldened to do whatever they like’. He was of the opinion that daughters especially should be handled without cherishing, for while indulgence was bad for sons ‘it utterly destroyeth daughters’.4 It is unlikely that Frances Dorset, a buxom, hard-riding woman who, as she grew older, began to bear an unnerving resemblance to her late uncle Henry, had ever read Vives’s somewhat turgid manual on The Education of a Christian Woman, but she would certainly have agreed with this precept, and her daughters, at least, were never in danger of being destroyed by indulgence.

The queen was a very different proposition. Katherine Parr, like Jane Seymour, came from a well-to-do landed gentry family but possessed neither royal nor noble blood. The Parrs were originally from Kendal in the remote and rugged northern border country of Westmorland, but by the time of Katherine’s birth in 1512 they had transferred themselves to the more congenial climate of the English midlands. Katherine’s parents were both closely connected with the court, her mother having been a lady-in-waiting and close friend of the unfortunate Catherine of Aragon, and it is possible, though by no means certain, that Katherine spent some part of her childhood at court and may even have been one of the...