Persons and pictures from the histories of France and England from the Norman conquest to the fall of the Stuarts |
Jane Grey and Guilford Dudley.
1554. |
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 | Persons and pictures from the histories of France and England |  |
Jane Grey and Guilford Dudley.
1554.
There was a pleasant summer parlor in an old Elizabethan
mansion, as we are wont nowadays to call the buildings of the
era of the Tudors, although many were built long before the
time of that great princess, and this of which I speak among
the rest—overlooking from its oriel windows a wide stretch of
park and chase, varied by dells and dingly hollows, and interspersed
with clumps and groves of magnificent timber trees, all
falling away in a long, gentle descent to the southwestward, so
that the eye could range for miles over the open country, until
it rested, far on the horizon's verge, on one of the stateliest of
English rivers, and, yet beyond that, on an extensive mass of
forest, empurpled now by the haze of distance and near approaching
sunset.
It was a pleasant parlor, hung with rich tapestries of green,
inwrought with scenes of the chase, deer in full cry, and hounds
in hot pursuit, foresters winding their bugles with puffed cheeks
or spearing mighty boars, nobles with falcons on their fists, and
gentle demoiselles reining their jennets of Castile or Andalusia,
and all the pride and pomp of the mimicry of warfare. The
level sunbeams, streaming in through the latticed casements,
filled the whole apartment with misty golden lustre, played lovingly
on the books and ornaments which crowded the great
of the carved ceiling, the huge sculptured mantel-piece, and
the embossed doorways; but it fell upon nothing—where all
was beautiful and rare—so rare or beauteous as the young girl,
for she was scarcely woman yet, who sat on the cushioned window-seat
of that oriel window, with the sunset rays playing
about her light brown hair, her delicate and pensive features,
and her slender though symmetrical form, like a lambent glory.
She was reading in a huge velvet-covered, brass-clasped folio,
which lay on a desk before her, and that so intently that she
appeared to take no note of the gay sights and exciting sounds
which, all that livelong day, had been sweeping past the windows,
within reach of her abstracted eyes, and ringing in her
ears unheeded. For the chase was sport without, gayer and
more enlivening than it was depicted within; bloodhounds were
baying until the deep woods rebellowed their harmonious discords;
bugles were winded far and near; coursers were prancing
and plumes waving, and ladies cantering across the lily leas,
eager to mark the towering goshawk swoop on the soaring
heron.
Yet from noon till it was now nearly night had that fair girl
sat there engrossed in her studies, though friends and kinsmen
—and one more dear, alas! than friend or kinsman—was chasing
down the sun in the gay sport; and never once had she
upraised those deep blue eyes from those quaintly charactered
vellum pages, although his charger had curveted within sight,
and his view-holloa swelled the breeze within hearing.
Suddenly the door opened, still unheard by the young student,
who read on, unconscious that she had a spectator present
at her studies. It was a tall, spare, dark-featured man, of
sixty years or over, with a thick grizzled beard falling down
square-cut on his breast, and wearing the trencher cap and flowing
universities. His features, naturally grave, not stern, relaxed
into a placid and benevolent smile, and an unbidden tear-drop
sparkled, he knew not why, in his heavy lashes.
“Ha! gentle lady,” he said, advancing slowly towards her,
“indeed you are an earnest and right studious student for one
of such years as most men hold better befitted to gay and
mirthful pastime; what be thy studies, my fair daughter, this
bright evening, when the hunt is up, and all the world, saving
you only, are afield and merry?”
“Oh, Master Roger Ascham,” exclaimed the girl, arising with
a bright smile to greet her friend, the preceptor of the Lady
Elizabeth of England—“Oh, Master Roger Ascham, you have
surprised me. But, indeed, Plato is my most choice favorite,
and his sweet eloquence and all persuading wisdom delight me
far beyond all pleasures they can reap from all their sport and
gaiety.”
“Yet Dudley is among them, daughter,” replied the old man
with a quiet smile.
“Ah! Master Ascham!” answered the girl, with a blush arising
for a moment to her fair cheeks and brow, lifting her finger
in half playful reproof; and then she added with a smile, “but
Guilford Dudley is not Plato, father; and though his company
is very pleasant, I doubt if from his converse I should reap so
much good, excellent though it be and gentle, as from this
wondrous Phædon.”
“You are wise, daughter, excellent wise and good, for one
of your years, so gay of wont, and thoughtless,” replied the old
man, with something of a sigh breathed from a smiling lip;
for the aged wise are apt to associate, even the least superstitious
of them, something, I know not what, of premature decay with
no less happy than your youth is promising.”
“Why should it not be happy, father!” she replied. “I
am most happy now. All are so kind and affectionate to me;
and then—”
“And then what, fair daughter?”
Again the faint blush rose to her cheek for an instant; but
she answered in an unfaltering and clear tone of her silver voice
—“I was thinking of him, Master Ascham.” She spoke of
her youthful lord, to whom she had been so lately wedded.
“My life, hitherto, has been but one long, long spring day of
unmixed sweetness, without one cloud to overshadow it, one
shower to drown its rosebuds.”
“God grant, in his goodness,” said the old man solemnly,
“that your life henceforth, my sweet daughter, may advance
into the blush and flower of perfect summer, and decline, peaceful
as an autumn sunset, dying away in a flood of heavenly glory.”
“Amen! good Master Ascham. But you seem sad to-night;
it is not, I trust, that you have any cause for melancholy?”
“It is not melancholy; it is only thought, my daughter; the
old are wont to grow more thoughtful, as they have the less
hold on earth, and the more hope, we will trust, of heaven.
But of a truth—for why should I deceive you?—I have heard
tidings that in some sort disquiet me; that make me thoughtful,
yet glad withal at finding you so studious and so wise; that
make me hope you will know how to hold fast of your philosophy.”
“What are your tidings, father?” she inquired timidly, yet
eagerly withal—for there was something in his manner that
almost alarmed her, while at the same time it excited all her
woman's wonder.
“The King is dead, Jane.”
“Dead! Gentle Edward dead! My excellent good cousin
dead! So virtuous, so wise for his youth; so young for his wisdom!
Oh, father, but this is very, very sad. Oh, father, I
have lost a friend.”
“Pray God, you ne'er may feel the loss of one.”
But she scarce heard his words, for, her short and broken
ejaculations ended, she had bowed her gentle head upon her
knees, and was weeping silently, with the big heavy tears trickling
through the slender fingers in which her face was buried;
and while she wept, the kind grave tutor left the apartment, to
bear the sad news of her half brother's death to his own immediate
charge, the Princess Elizabeth, thereafter the great
woman-king of England; and when she raised her eyes again,
the Lady Jane Grey was alone with her sorrow.
Yes, fair and gentle reader—if any of the fair and gentle deign
to lend an ear to a too sad and too true tale—she, whom you
have seen seeking amusement while her gay comrades were rejoicing
in their festive sports of old, not in the pages of the last
new novel, but in the grand original of the old Greek philosopher,
was not less fair than thou, and not less youthful; of nobler
birth than thine, for hers was royal; like thee, the cynosure
of all eyes, the beloved of all beholders; and yet she read
Plato in the original Greek, rose at six in the morning, and
went to rest not long after the birds flew to their roosts; and
of a certainty would have blushed deeper than she ever did
blush, had she beheld revealed the modern mysteries of the
fashionable waltz, or the more fashionable Redowa polka. She
was Jane Grey, at that instant, by the letters patent of King
Edward, granted on his death-bed, Queen of England. Alas!
for her, the beautiful, the innocent, the young—forced by the
rude ambition of her husband's kinsmen from the sweet privacies,
to her so lovely and delicious, into the thorny seat of England's
wished it, even at that hour, while she was weeping the untimely
death of her young cousin, Jane Grey was England's
queen.
It must be remembered in this place that Henry VIII., shortly
before his death, declared his only son his successor, under
the title of Edward VI., under the government of a council, one
of whom was Dudley, Viscount Lisle, the Admiral of England,
agreeably to the destination of Parliament. After Edward and
his heirs, the Lady Mary was named first, and the Lady Elizabeth
second, in order of succession, with this proviso, that if
either should marry without the consent of the council, she
should forfeit the crown for herself and her posterity. Failing
the heirs of his own body, he passed over the heirs of his eldest
sister, the Queen of Scots, in accordance with an act of parliament,
and settled the succession on Frances Brandon, Marchioness
of Dorset, eldest daughter of his second sister the
French queen, and, after her, on Eleanor, Countess of Cumberland,
her second danghter. But he subjoined that, after these,
the crown should descend to the lawful heirs, thus leaving it
open to a question, and thence to a contest, whether he meant
thereby entirely to exclude the Scottish line, who were actually
the next heirs before, not after, the house of Suffolk.
By a succession of events, intrigues, and acts of violence and
iniquity, which do not of right belong to this sketch, Dudley,
Viscount Lisle, the son of that Dudley who, with Sir Richard
Empson, was executed in the first year of Henry VIII. for extortion
during the reign of his father, afterwards created Earl
of Warwick, gradually undermined and finally overthrew the
protector, Somerset, who ultimately perished on the scaffold,
himself succeeding to his dignity and office under the title of
Duke of Northumberland. That title he obtained, together
which was still the most warlike part of England, by grant
from the young king; as the late Earl of Northumberland having
died without issue, and his brother, Sir Thomas Percy, having
been attainted for his share in the Yorkshire insurrection
during the reign of Henry, the title was now extinct, and the
lands were vested in the crown. This done he proceeded, being
a man of extraordinary capacity and ability, both for peace
and war, and of ambition not inferior to his parts, on his course
of aggrandizement, by persuading the new Duke and Duchess
of Suffolk to give their daughter, the Lady Jane Grey, who
was the next of kin, and heiress to the Marchioness of Dorset,
in marriage to his fourth son, the Lord Dudley Guilford.
Thereafter he negotiated a marriage, whereby to strengthen himself
by further great alliance, between Catharine Grey, Jane's
younger sister, and Lord Herbert, eldest son of the Earl of Pembroke,
giving at the same time his own daughter in marriage
to Lord Hastings, eldest son of the Earl of Huntingdon. These
marriages being celebrated with extraordinary pomp and splendor,
while the young king was languishing and like to die,
moved extreme indignation among the people at large, who
hated Northumberland in proportion as they had loved the regent,
Somerset, whom he had caused to be put to death, as well
as for his intolerable haughtiness and overbearing pride.
About this time Edward VI., a prince of the most amiable
disposition, and by no means without parts, whose only fault
was something of intolerance towards the Catholics, and an
overleaning to ultra Protestants or puritanic doctrines, fell ill,
being seized with a cough which, yielding to neither regimen
nor medicines, speedily degenerated into consumption.
So soon as this fact came to the knowledge of Northumberland,
he applied himself forthwith to the execution of his plans
creatures should be about the person of the king, and, paying
him constant visits, under pretence of great solicitude for his
health, he found it easy to work upon his religious feelings, and
to create much alarm in his mind concerning the safety of the
Protestant Church, should so bigoted a Catholic as the Lady
Mary was known to be succeed to the throne of England.
Mary, he represented, was, moreover, illegitimate, her mother's
marriage having been pronounced incestuous and null. This
he was easily induced to believe in, and he readily acquiesced in
depriving her of her rights in succession: but it was far more
difficult to bring him to pass over the Lady Elizabeth, to whom
he was tenderly and sincerely attached, and against whom no
such cause of exclusion existed, she being, no less than himself,
a sincere, though scarcely zealous, Protestant.
Means were at length found, however, by which to convince
him that both sisters having been alike pronounced by act of
Parliament illegitimate, it was not possible to exclude the one
to the preference of the other on that plea, since the act of illegitimacy
was a bar against both in the same degree, nor could
be valid in the one case and void in the other. On these
grounds letters patent were granted by the king, setting aside
both his sisters of the half blood as illegitimate, and settling
the succession on the Lady Jane and the heirs of her body after
his demise.
Although the council, who were all creatures of Northumberland,
easily assented to this iniquitous proceeding, it was
not without great difficulty, nor until a special commission was
passed by the king and council commanding them to do so,
and a free pardon granted them in case they should incur offence
by their compliance, that the judges would draw a new
patent of settlement of the crown. When the patent was
to affix the great seal thereunto, unless it should be
previously signed by all the judges; and though the others finally
assented, after much violence and menace from Northumberland,
Sir James Hales, though a zealous protestant, could not be
brought to do so. In like manner, when the privy councillors
were called upon to sign, Cranmer resisted long, and at last
yielded only to the earnest and pathetic entreaties of the youthful
king.
Thus, in spite of the late king's will; in spite of act of parliament;
in spite of the laws fundamental of the land; against
the acknowledged order of hereditary succession; against all
rule and precedent, the two daughters of the late king, Mary
and Elizabeth, were arbitrarily and illegally set aside, and the
crown settled on the heirs of the Duchess of Suffolk; for she
herself, though living, waived the perilous dignity in favor of
her daughters, the ladies Jane and Catharine Grey, and their
posterity.
And thus, although neither of them knew it then, when
Roger Ascham left her presence, the Lady Jane was de facto
queen of England.
What follows is sad history. On the following morning, after
a fruitless effort to entrap the princesses Mary and Elizabeth, in
which, had he succeeded, to judge of the unscrupulous nature
and proceedings of this bold bad man, their tenure even of the
barren right of succession would have been but of short duration,
Northumberland waited on the Lady Jane, accompanied
by the Duke of Suffolk, the Earl of Pembroke, and others of
their partisans, and tendered to her their allegiance with all the
respect and honor due to a sovereign prince.
It was with equal grief and astonishment that the amiable
been entered into, and that too successfully, in her behalf.
Of the same age with Edward, she had been his friend, his
companion, and his fellow student; had acquired with him, and
even more than he, a perfect and familiar acquaintance with the
Greek and Roman classics, reading them fluently in the original,
and also with the modern languages, in several of which
she conversed as easily as in the vernacular. Her favorite
amusement was the pursuit of elegant and graceful letters; her
preferred mode of life was retirement—with her lord, to whom
she had given not her hand only, but her whole heart, with all
its rich store of delicate and feminine attachments—in some sequestered
rural residence, where they might live alone with nature
and their books,
“The world forgetting, of the world forgot.”
and possessed wholly by such sentiments and tastes, it needs
not to say that the splendid glare of courts, the perilous ways
of ambition, and the thorns which to a proverb lurk within the
circle of the diadem, offered no pleasure, no allurement.
Her affection, moreover, to the late king, and her regard for
the Princess Elizabeth, led her to consider even a lawful occupation
of the throne as an act of ingratitude, if not treason.
She wept, when the crown was offered to her, even more bitterly
than she had wept on hearing of the death of Edward;
for those were tears of sorrow and sisterly affection—these were
in some sort tears of remorse, in some sort of sad and dark foreboding.
She argued earnestly, though gently—for all her character
was of gentleness—against her own elevation to the perilous
height of royalty. She pleaded the superior right of the
two princesses to the crown; expressed her conviction of the
and at length, when urged to the point, decidedly refused
to accept the proffered honor. In vain Northumberland argued
and insisted; nay, he almost threatened, yet could he not prevail;
nor was it until the entreaties and caresses of her young
husband, whose ambition, it would seem, was dazzled by the
prospect of the crown matrimonial, that she, at length, reluctantly
and tearfully, and with many hesitations and forebodings,
consented to ascend that fatal eminence.
“It was then usual,” says Hume, “for the kings of England,
after their accession, to pass the first days in the Tower; and
Northumberland immediately conducted thither the new sovereign.
All the councillors were obliged to attend her to that
fortress; and by this means became, in reality, prisoners in the
hands of Northumberland, whose will they were necessitated to
obey. Orders were given by the council to proclaim Jane
throughout the kingdom; but these orders were executed only
in London, and the neighborhood. No applause followed; the
people heard the proclamation with silence and concern; some
even expressed their scorn and contempt.”
Of such a commencement it required no prophet's eye to
discern the disastrous conclusion. The fact appears to have
been, that as yet the mass of the people comparatively cared
but little about religious matters; that the respect and singular
affection for Henry VIII., which had always dwelt in the popular
breast, was by no means extinguished; and that the hatred
against the Dudleys, on account of the execution of the Seymours,
was still paramount. Moreover, although the masses
were certainly disposed to regard the marriage between Henry
VIII. and Catharine of Aragon as unlawful, they were by no
means prepared to consider the issue of that marriage illegitimate,
seeing that it had been entered into under the authority
On all sides, therefore, the gentry and nobility of Suffolk,
with their servants and retainers, flocked to the standard of
Mary in Suffolk, whither she had fled for refuge on the first intelligence
of the conspiracy. Ere long, the Earl of Huntingdon,
who had been sent by the council to make levies for the Lady
Jane in Buckinghamshire, carried his forces over to Mary;
while the very fleet which Northumberland dispatched to cruise
on the coast of Suffolk, deserting him, sailed into Yarmouth,
and declared for the queen de jure.
Northumberland himself, when, after in the first instance
sending out Suffolk to command the forces, doubting his capacity
to lead them, he marched forth in person, observed the supineness,
if not the disaffection of the people, and commented
on it to the Lord Grey: “Many,” he said, “come out to look
upon us; but I find not one who cries `God speed you!' ”
His forebodings were right speedily proved true; for, finding
himself unequal to cope with Mary in the field, and sending in
to the councillors for reinforcements, those gentlemen, with Pembroke
at their head, obtaining egress from the Tower, as if to
obey their orders, at once shook off and denounced his usurped
power, unsheathed their swords for Mary Tudor, and proclaimed
her in the midst of great applause from the people.
Suffolk, who commanded in the Tower for the Lady Jane, at
once laid down his arms, and gave up the keys; while the messengers
who were sent off with orders to command Northumberland
to forbear further resistance, which must perforce be fruitless,
found that he had already disbanded his followers, and proclaimed
Queen Mary, although too late to save his head.
Throughout the country, as Mary approached the metropolis,
she was greeted with general, almost unanimous loyalty; and
before entering the gates was joined by her sister Elizabeth, at
against the usurper; thus giving evidence in her girlhood of
what she would do in after years for the protection of her throne,
and her own country's freedom, in a more desperate struggle
and against a far mightier foe.
All the conspirators and abettors in this desperate act of treason
were of course arrested, brought to trial, and sentenced;
and among them, innocent and unhappy children—mere tools
and victims of ambitious traitors, Jane Grey and Guilford Dudley.
In the commencement of her reign, however, Mary affected,
if she were not really inclined to, a clemency, which, it is
very certain, nothing in her latter career showed to be natural
or congenial to her hard, cold, cruel nature.
None suffered, at that time, save those whom no modern
casuistry or apologetic clemency could deny to be justly slain—
Northumberland, the arch mover and executor of the plot, and
his subordinates, Sir Thomas Palmer and Sir John Gates. No
more of slaughter, at this time, was the consequence of this ill-timed
and absurd, yet at the same time most iniquitous and
desperate, conspiracy.
Dudley and the Lady Jane, being neither of them as yet
seventeen, and being evidently and before all eyes guiltless, so
far as intent of all complicity in the treason, it would not have
been politic in any case to have them brought to the scaffold.
Their youth, their innocence, their beauty, alike conciliated the
people in their favor, and to have brought them to judgment
them would probably have been to jeopard all the vantage-ground
won, and perhaps to risk a second outbreak in the name of
Jane Grey.
But Mary knew not how to pardon; and, though they were
not put to death, they were committed to the Tower, that “den
of drunkards with the blood of princes”—that dungeon-keep,
many great of the sons of men, had been immured for years,
to glut the scaffold with their gore.
How they passed the weary months which ensued is covered
with a gloom impalpable, inscrutable, though there is too much
reason to believe that they were not allowed even the poor consolation
of sharing the sorrows which would have been alleviated
by participation.
But, like all other human things, those months came to an
end, and brought to an end likewise the sorrows of that bright
and fair young couple.
On the publication of the articles of marriage between Mary
of England and Philip of Spain, a violent insurrection broke
out in several parts of England, and had any foreign prince
supported the insurgents with his countenance, it is probable
that she would have lost her kingdom. As it was, although
for a short time Mary was all but overtaken and surprised by
her rebels, it was in the end suppressed with great ease, and
avenged by merciless and bloody executions. For Mary, now for
the first time giving free scope to her natural disposition, revelled
in blood and cruelty. Could she by any means have
effected it, she would have sent her sister Elizabeth to the scaffold;
but, as she was expressly acquitted by the dying declaration
of Wyatt, the chief of the insurgents, she concentrated
her bloody rage on the heads of Jane and Dudley. No further
trial was needed, the old sentence being still on record and in
force. Warning was sent to the Lady Jane that she must now
prepare for death, a fate which she had long expected tacitly,
and which—in the consciousness of innocence and the weariness
of life—she perhaps desired as a boon, rather than dreaded
as a penalty. To the arguments of the Catholic divines with
which Mary's zeal assailed her last moments—and I believe this
firmly and consistently in defence of her own religion; and
after this she wrote a letter to her sister in the Greek tongue,
encouraging her to hold fast to her faith in every trial, and to
maintain, in every fortune, a like steady perseverance.
When the day of her execution arrived, her husband sent to
request a parting interview, which she declined, informing him
that the tenderness of their parting would overcome the fortitnde
of both; while their separation would be but for a moment.
She even stood at her window and watched to see him led
forth to execution, when she waved to him a parting token, and
then awaited calmly the return of the cart with Guilford's
headless body; for, though it had been at first intended that
both should suffer together on one scaffold on Tower Hill, it
was deemed prudent to avoid the risk of stimulating the compassion
of the people for their innocence, and youth, and beauty,
into fury for their unmerited judicial murder, and it was resolved
that they should suffer singly within the precinets of that
bloody building.
When his body was brought back, and her turn had come,
she expressed herself but the more strengthened by the reports
of the constancy with which he had met his doom, and descended
the dark stairway which led, not metaphorically, to the
grave, not bravely but cheerfully, as though she longed to join
him who had gone before on the dark path which leads to life
immortal, whether for weal or woe eternal.
To the constable of the Tower, who asked her for “some
small present which he might preserve as an everlasting remembrance,”
she gave her table-book, containing the last words she
should ever write—three sentences in Greek, Latin, and English,
which she had just inscribed therein on seeing the headless
corpse of her loved lord.
When she reached the scaffold, she delivered a short speech,
taking the whole blame on herself, without one word of reproach
or complaint against the needless cruelty of her doom;
admitting that she had erred against the laws of her land, and
declaring that she was willing to make satisfaction to them,
but averring that she had sinned not in grasping too greedily
the crown, but in not refusing it more steadfastly. Filial obedience
and reverence to her parents, she said, acting on youth
and ignorance, and by no means ambition, had brought her to
this pass. And she concluded by stating that she hoped the
story of her fate might prove useful to the world, by proving
that innocence itself is no excuse for misdeeds, if they be injurious
to the commonwealth. Then, causing herself to be disrobed
by her women, she submitted herself with a serene countenance
to the blow of the executioner.
She died, yet lives for ever—lives in the memories and affections
of her countrymen—lives, doubtless, among the saints of
heaven in everlasting glory: for, if there was ever yet a woman
who was almost a saint, while on this earth, that woman was
Jane Grey.
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