Read Ebook: Lady Jane Grey and Her Times by Taylor Ida A Ida Ashworth

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Ebook has 921 lines and 82430 words, and 19 pages

The Marquis of Dorset and his family--Bradgate Park--Lady Jane Grey--Her relations with her cousins--Mary Tudor--Protestantism at Whitehall--Religious persecution 24

Anne Askew--Her trial and execution--Katherine Parr's danger--Plot against her--Her escape 36

The King dying--The Earl of Surrey--His career and his fate--The Duke of Norfolk's escape--Death of the King 48

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 80

Lady Jane's temporary return to her father--He surrenders her again to the Admiral--The terms of the bargain 100

Seymour and the Princess Elizabeth--His courtship--He is sent to the Tower--Elizabeth's examinations and admissions--The execution of the Lord Admiral 108

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 126

Lady Jane Grey at home--Visit from Roger Ascham--The German divines--Position of Lady Jane in the theological world 139

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 154

Northumberland and the King--Edward's illness--Lady Jane and Mary--Mary refused permission to practise her religion--The Emperor intervenes 169

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 178

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 193

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 210

Lady Jane as Queen--Mary asserts her claims--The English envoys at Brussels--Mary's popularity--Northumberland leaves London--His farewells 225

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 237

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 247

Trial and condemnation of Northumberland--His recantation--Final scenes--Lady Jane's fate in the balances--A conversation with her 259

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 275

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 289

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 311

INDEX 327

KATHERINE HOWARD 12

HENRY HOWARD, EARL OF SURREY 54

KATHERINE PARR 82

WILLIAM, LORD PAGET, K.G. 132

LADY JANE GREY 142

ARCHBISHOP CRANMER 152

EDWARD SEYMOUR, DUKE OF SOMERSET, K.G. 168

PRINCESS MARY, AT THE AGE OF TWENTY-EIGHT 184

LADY JANE GREY 200

QUEEN ELIZABETH 254

THE TOWER OF LONDON 284

HENRY GREY, DUKE OF SUFFOLK, K.G. 294

LADY JANE GREY AND HER TIMES

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.

The royal blood was to prove, to more than one of these, a fatal heritage. To Mary Stuart it was to bring captivity and death, and by reason of it Lady Jane Grey was to be forced to play the part of heroine in one of the most tragic episodes of the sixteenth century.

At home, England lay at the mercy of a King who was a law to himself and supreme arbiter of the destinies of his subjects. Only obscurity, and not always that, could ensure a man's safety, or prevent him from falling a prey to the jealousy or hate of those amongst his enemies who had for the moment the ear of the sovereign. Pre-eminence in rank, or power, or intellect, was enough to give the possessor of the distinction an uneasy sense that he was marked out for destruction, that envy and malice were lying in wait to seize an opportunity to denounce him to the weak despot upon whose vanity and cowardice the adroit could play at will. Every year added its tale to the long list of victims who had met their end upon the scaffold.

For fifteen years, moreover, the country had been delivered over to the struggle carried on in the name of religion. In 1531 the King had responded to the refusal of the Pope to sanction his divorce from Katherine of Aragon by repudiating the authority of the Holy See and the assertion of his own supremacy in matters spiritual as well as temporal. Three years later Parliament, servile and subservient as Parliaments were wont to be under the Tudor Kings, had formally endorsed and confirmed the revolt.

"The third day of November," recorded the chronicler, "the King's Highness held the high Court of Parliament, in the which was concluded and made many and sundry good, wholesome, and godly statutes, but among all one special statute which authorised the King's Highness to be supreme head of the Church of England, by which the Pope ... was utterly abolished out of this realm."

Since then another punishable crime was added to those, already none too few, for which a man was liable to lose his head, and the following year saw the death upon the scaffold of Fisher and of More. The execution of Anne Boleyn, by whom the match had, in some sort, been set to the mine, came next, but the step taken by the King was not to be retraced with the absence of the motive which had prompted it; and Catholics and Protestants alike had continued to suffer at the hands of an autocrat who chastised at will those who wandered from the path he pointed out, and refused to model their creed upon the prescribed pattern.

In 1546 the "Act to abolish Diversity of Opinion"--called more familiarly the Bloody Statute, and designed to conform the faith of the nation to that of the King--had been in force for seven years, a standing menace to those persons, in high or low place, who, encouraged by the King's defiance of Rome, had been emboldened to adopt the tenets of the German Protestants. Henry had opened the floodgates; he desired to keep out the flood. The Six Articles of the Statute categorically reaffirmed the principal doctrines of the Catholic Church, and made their denial a legal offence. On the other hand the refusal to admit the royal supremacy in matters spiritual was no less penal. A reign of terror was the result.

"Is thy servant a dog?" The time-honoured question might have risen to the King's lips in the days, not devoid of a brighter promise, of his youth, had the veil covering the future been withdrawn. "We mark curiously," says a recent writer, "the regular deterioration of Henry's character as the only checks upon his action were removed, and he progressively defied traditional authority and established standards of conduct without disaster to himself." The Church had proved powerless to punish a defiance dictated by passion and perpetuated by vanity and cupidity; Parliaments had cringed to him in matters religious or political, courtiers and sycophants had flattered, until "there was no power on earth to hold in check the devil in the breast of Henry Tudor."

Such was the condition of England. Old barriers had been thrown down; new had not acquired strength; in the struggle for freedom men had cast aside moral restraint. Life was so lightly esteemed, and death invested with so little tragic importance, that a man of the position and standing of Latimer, Bishop of Worcester, when appointed to preach on the occasion of the burning of a priest, could treat the matter with a flippant levity scarcely credible at a later day.

"If it be your pleasure, as it is," he wrote to Cromwell, "that I shall play the fool after my customary manner when Forest shall suffer, I would that my stage stood near unto Forest" .... "If he would yet with heart return to his abjuration, I would wish his pardon, such is my foolishness."

Yet there was another side to the picture; here and there, amidst the din of battle and the confusion of tongues, the voice of genuine conviction was heard; and men and women were ready, at the bidding of conscience, to give up their lives in passionate loyalty to an ancient faith or to a new ideal. "And the thirtieth day of the same month," June 1540, runs an entry in a contemporary chronicle, "was Dr. Barnes, Jerome, and Garrard, drawn from the Tower to Smithfield, and there burned for their heresies. And that same day also was drawn from the Tower with them Doctor Powell, with two other priests, and there was a gallows set up at St. Bartholomew's Gate, and there were hanged, headed, and quartered that same day"--the offence of these last being the denial of the King's supremacy, as that of the first had been adherence to Protestant doctrines.

No one was safe. The year 1540 had seen the fall of Cromwell, the Minister of State. "Cranmer and Cromwell," wrote the French ambassador, "do not know where they are." Cromwell at least was not to wait long for the certainty. For years all-powerful in the Council, he was now to fall a victim to jealous hate and the credulity of the master he had served. At his imprisonment "many lamented, but more rejoiced, ... for they banquetted and triumphed together that night, many wishing that day had been seven years before; and some, fearing that he should escape although he were imprisoned, could not be merry." They need not have feared the King's clemency. The minister had been arrested on June 10. On July 28 he was executed on Tower Hill.

If Cromwell, in spite of his services to the Crown, in spite of the need Henry had of men of his ability, was not secure, who could call themselves safe? Even Cranmer, the King's special friend though he was, must have felt misgivings. A married man, with children, he was implicitly condemned by one of the Six Articles of the Bloody Statute, enjoining celibacy on the clergy, and was besides well known to hold Protestant views. His embittered enemy, Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester, vehement in his Catholicism though pandering to the King on the subject of the royal supremacy, was minister; and his fickle master might throw the Archbishop at any moment to the wolves.

One narrow escape he had already had, when in 1544 a determined attempt had been hazarded to oust him from his position of trust and to convict him of his errors, and the party adverse to him in the Council had accused the Primate "most grievously" to the King of heresy. It was a bold stroke, for it was known that Henry loved him, and the triumph of his foes was the greater when they received the royal permission to commit the Lord Archbishop to the Tower on the following day, and to cause him to undergo an examination on matters of doctrine and faith. So far all had gone according to their hopes, and his enemies augured well of the result. But that night, at eleven o'clock, when Cranmer, in ignorance of the plot against him, was in bed, he received a summons to attend the King, whom he found in the gallery at Whitehall, and who made him acquainted with the action of the Council, together with his own consent that an examination should take place.

"Whether I have done well or no, what say you, my lord?" asked Henry in conclusion.

Cranmer answered warily. Knowing his master, and his jealousy of being supposed to connive at heresy, save on the one question of the Pope's authority, he cannot have failed to recognise the gravity of the situation. He put, however, a good face upon it. The King, he said, would see that he had a fair trial--"was indifferently heard." His bearing was that of a man secure that justice would be done him. Both he, in his heart, and the King, knew better.

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