She-Wolves: The Women Who Ruled England Before Elizabeth (4 page)

By 1553 Henry VIII and his sisters, Margaret and Mary, were dead. As Henry’s son Edward hovered between fervent prayer and feverish delirium, all eyes turned to his siblings and cousins, the possible contenders for his throne. The prospects were not reassuring. There were Edward’s two half-sisters, Mary and Elizabeth, both of whom had been declared illegitimate more than fifteen years earlier. There was Mary Stuart, the ten-year-old queen of
Scots, granddaughter of Margaret Tudor by her first, royal marriage, who was now living in Paris as the intended wife of the heir to the French throne. Margaret’s second marriage – a violently tempestuous relationship that ended in divorce – had left her with a single daughter, Margaret Douglas, whose legitimacy had also been brought into question by her parents’ separation. There was Frances, sole surviving child of the love-match between Mary Tudor and her second husband Charles Brandon; and Frances in her turn was now the mother of three girls, Jane, Katherine and Mary Grey. Frances’s younger sister Eleanor Brandon had died some years earlier, but she too had left a daughter, Margaret Clifford. In these nine women – the oldest nearly forty, the youngest not yet ten – were vested the remaining hopes of the Tudor line.

Extraordinary though it might seem, their sex was the explicit focus of little discussion in the fraught circumstances of May 1553. It was, after all, what they had in common. What mattered now was what separated them: the issues of principle – questions of birth and faith – and the urgent political calculations that would identify the next monarch from among their number. Henry VIII had been in no doubt of the decisive factor in determining the succession, should the worst ever happen to his only son: his own blood, he had declared, should prevail. The rights of his eldest child, Mary, and then his second daughter, Elizabeth, to inherit the crown after their brother were upheld in the Act of Succession of 1544 and confirmed in their father’s last will, despite Henry’s unwavering insistence, in other contexts, on their illegitimacy. It was a tribute to Henry’s overwhelming personal authority that the tacit contradiction between his daughters’ bastardy (which had been enshrined in statute law in the 1530s) and their standing as his heirs was not challenged in his lifetime.

By 1553, however, the old king had been dead for six years, and even his fearsome spirit could not compel obedience from beyond the grave. So much so that the impetus to set aside the claims of his bloodline sprang from the contentious process by which an equally fundamental embodiment of his rule – the Henrician

Church of England – had also been abandoned. Since his death in 1547, the successive regimes led by the dukes of Somerset and Northumberland had dismantled the doctrinal conservatism of Henry’s religious settlement in favour of the evangelical Protestantism in which their young king believed so ardently. For centuries, English church buildings had been infused with the sights, sounds and smells of the Catholic liturgy, the notes of the Latin mass echoing on air made visible by the scented smoke of candles and incense, while the intercessory presence of the saints took tangible form not only in carefully preserved fragments of flesh and bone, but in richly coloured images painted on plaster and worked in glass, stone, wood and alabaster. Now, in only two years, parish churches had been transformed. By 1549, walls had been whitewashed, statues smashed and shrines dismantled. Plain windows let the light shine in on places of worship dedicated to the word – and no longer the image – of God. Processions, pageants and mystery plays were outlawed. Chantry chapels, founded to provide masses and prayers to speed the passage of sinful souls through Catholic purgatory, were dissolved. And worshippers in this new stripped-down Edwardian Church found the Latin mass – the most fundamental expression of the Christian faith for as long as the kingdom of England had existed – replaced by the spoken English liturgy of Archbishop Cranmer’s new Book of Common Prayer.

Resistance to these drastic innovations took the frightening form of armed rebellion in Devon and Cornwall in the summer of 1549, and helped to bring down Protector Somerset’s government that autumn. But the pace of religious change only increased under his successor, the duke of Northumberland. Conservative bishops were deprived of their sees; bonfires of Catholic service-books were lit; precious plate and vestments were summarily confiscated; and in 1552 Cranmer produced a second, radically revised and unequivocally Protestant prayer book. Only months later, however, the young king’s rapidly deteriorating health threatened to undo the ‘godly reformation’ over which he had presided. Should
Edward die – a possibility that had to be faced by the spring of 1553 – the Act of Succession would hand the crown to his elder sister Mary, whose devotion to the old faith had proved as resolutely immovable as Edward’s allegiance to the new. It was a prospect that was wholly unacceptable to both the king and his chief minister: to Edward, because he could not countenance the idea that his own death might precipitate his subjects back into papist darkness; to Northumberland, because his Protestant convictions were underpinned by the political certainty that his own career, and perhaps his life, would not long survive Mary’s accession.

Edward was only fifteen, but he was a Tudor king who believed in his authority to command the future just as much as his father had done. Despite the troublesome technicality that, as a minor, he could not make a legally binding will – and that, even if he could have done so, a private document would have no power to overturn an act of parliament – Edward carefully composed what he called ‘my device for the succession’. Drafting and redrafting in his own hand, he methodically set about excluding his Catholic sister’s right to his throne. Religion was the essence of the issue, but – disquieteningly for Edward – Mary’s faith offered no formal justification for prohibiting her inheritance. The question of her legitimacy, however, proved to be more fertile ground. Their father’s insistence that Mary was a bastard, even as he nominated her as her brother’s heir, gave Edward ample scope to argue (as letters patent drafted by his legal advisers later put it) that she was ‘clearly disabled to ask, claim, or challenge the said imperial crown’. It was a tactic which would also strike a collateral target. If Mary was illegitimate, then so, too, was his younger sister Elizabeth, a committed believer in the reformed religion. But that, clearly, was an outcome Edward was prepared to accept, whether because he was convinced of his sisters’ bastardy, or because he knew that Elizabeth’s Protestantism was more politic and less full-hearted than his own.

The decision to set aside Mary and Elizabeth solved one problem – the intolerable possibility that Catholicism might be restored
– but raised another: to whom, then, could Edward entrust his crown and his legacy? The Act of Succession had already discounted the descendants of Henry VIII’s elder sister Margaret, and Edward had no more reason than his father to restore them. Margaret’s granddaughter and heir, Mary Stuart, was a staunch Catholic who, as queen of Scotland and dauphine of France, personified the traditional alliance between England’s two most enduring enemies. Her proximity to the English throne had been a powerful element of her appeal as a prospective daughter-in-law to the French king, Henri II; but the threat of England being subsumed into a new Franco-British empire ruled from Paris was sufficiently alarming to undermine any chance that she might be seen as a viable claimant in London.

The lone remaining contenders, therefore, were the heirs of King Henry’s younger sister, Mary, and her second husband, Charles Brandon, duke of Suffolk. Edward, of course, knew the Brandon family well. His childhood friends Henry and Charles Brandon, whose loss he had felt so deeply in 1552, were not his blood relatives, but sons of the duke’s remarriage to a fourteen-year-old heiress just three months after Mary Tudor’s death. However, Tudor blood flowed in the veins of Mary’s daughter Frances Brandon, whose husband, Henry Grey, the new duke of Suffolk after the deaths of his wife’s young half-brothers, was a member of Edward’s Privy Council. In the early spring of 1553, the ailing king – ‘not doubting in the grace and goodness of God but to be shortly by his mighty power restored to our former health and strength’ – still saw the claims to the throne of Frances Brandon and her three daughters as a safety net rather than an imminent political reality. The first draft of his ‘device’ accordingly nominated as his successors any future sons to whom Frances might yet give birth, to be followed by the male heirs of her (as yet unmarried) daughters, Jane, Katherine and Mary Grey.

By May, however, there could no longer be any question but that Edward was dying. If the king still laboured under any delusions about his prospects of recovery, Northumberland could not
afford to indulge them, since the twin imperatives of safeguarding the fledgling Edwardian Church and securing the duke’s political career were now matters of critical urgency. At the beginning of June, with Northumberland at his bedside, Edward once more took up his pen to amend his ‘device’ for the succession. Where the original draft spoke of the crown descending to the unborn sons of Frances Brandon’s eldest daughter – ‘the Lady Jane’s heirs male’ – the king now altered the text to read ‘the Lady Jane
and
her
heirs male’. With the addition of two small words, Jane Grey became the chosen heir to Edward’s crown.

It seemed the perfect solution. Jane was fifteen years old, an exceptional scholar and a fiercely devout adherent of the same evangelical faith as Edward himself. She had also, on 21 May, become Northumberland’s daughter-in-law, when she married his teenage son, Guildford Dudley, in a magnificent ceremony at the duke’s London home. But Jane was an unwilling bride, forced into unhappy compliance out of duty to her ambitious parents, and it was far from clear whether her regal responsibilities would be any more welcome than her marital ones, either to Jane herself, or to the realm she now stood to inherit. Certainly, Edward’s sister Mary, who had been dispossessed of so much in her thirty-seven years, would not stand quietly by while her rights as ‘princess of England’ were passed over in favour of a slip of a girl representing a Church Mary hated. As so often before, she and her brother were evenly matched in the intensity of their convictions, Mary’s determination to lead her people back to the true faith of Rome every inch the equal of Edward’s resolve to save them from it. And in that campaign she would hope for the support of her cousin, the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V – whose ambassador Jehan Scheyfve continued to despatch ominous reports of Edward’s physical decline – as well as the backing of an as yet unknown number of her prospective subjects.

As a result, June 1553 was a month of mounting tension and barely suppressed fear. The princesses Mary and Elizabeth, who had been prevented from seeing their brother since the early
stages of his illness, were now kept in ignorance of the progress of the disease, beyond what they could glean of the speculation spreading from the capital to their homes twenty miles north, at Hunsdon and Hatfield. The duke of Northumberland reinforced the garrison at the Tower of London and ordered royal warships into the Thames; and the king’s lawyers and councillors were called in secret to his bedchamber to put their seals to Edward’s ‘device’ for Lady Jane’s succession. The Chief Justice of the Court of Common Pleas, Sir Edward Montagu, apprehensively demurred on the grounds that the scheme was not only legally unenforceable but criminal, even treasonable, by the terms of the Act of Succession of 1544. But a combination of the fury of a dying boy and a promise that the plan would imminently be ratified by parliament brought the judges to heel. Their imprimatur persuaded those councillors who still hesitated, Archbishop Cranmer foremost among them, to append their signatures to the document. At the beginning of July, Princess Mary was at last summoned to the king’s bedside. Northumberland planned to accommodate her in some suitably secure royal lodging – the Tower, say – on her arrival in the capital. It was hardly surprising that Mary fled in the opposite direction, taking refuge instead at her estates in Norfolk, which were reassuringly close to the coast should escape prove necessary, and surrounded by her loyal retainers.

Now, on the afternoon of 6 July, the king lay in the great gilded bed, transformed by the extremity of his suffering into a figure of grotesque pathos. He was not alone: his personal physician, George Owen, who had been present at his birth fifteen years earlier, was in constant attendance, quietly assisted by Christopher Salmon, a favourite among Edward’s valets. His devoted friend Barnaby Fitzpatrick had been unable to return as Edward had wanted, detained by family responsibilities in Ireland. Instead, two gentlemen of the king’s chamber – Sir Thomas Wroth and Sir Henry Sidney, Edward’s companion since childhood – kept vigil at his bedside. But he was beyond help. The imminent inevitability of his death had been reported to the royal courts of Europe
for weeks, and time and again Edward had defied the rumours; but the stimulating effects of the powerful drugs his doctors had administered were fading as their toxins poisoned an already failing body. Now he lay still and silent, eyes closed in the swollen, darkened face, the disfigured hands motionless. For a moment it seemed as though the shallow breathing had stopped; but then Edward began to murmur to himself, the prayer inaudible but its purpose clear. Sidney took him in his arms, and held him until he died.

Outside, a summer storm raged. Later, it was said that the howling darkness that engulfed London was the wrath of Henry VIII, thundering from the grave at the thwarting of his will. His son was dead, and with him died Henry’s vision of a glorious line of Tudor kings. Amid the chaos and confusion, one thing alone was certain: for the first time, a woman would sit upon the throne of England.