Her Highness, the Traitor

48

Frances Grey

January 1555 to April 1555





The Duchess of Northumberland has died,” Adrian informed me one morning in January as we sat breaking our fast in my chamber at Sheen. “A heart malady, it is thought.”

I stared at my lap. We had not liked each other or the other’s children, but for a few short months, we had been bound together by the will of one young king, and now that Jane Dudley was gone, I felt peculiarly bereft.

“She died in comfort. Her children were with her, all of them, and the queen pardoned the sons the day the duchess died. She did so out of compassion for their mother.”

“We should have parted in this life as friends. After all, we each lost a husband and a child to the headsman.”

“Will you go to the funeral?”

“No. It might grieve her children to see me there. I will send someone from our household to pay our respects.” I sighed and pushed my untouched plate away.

“Are you ill? This is the second day in a row that you have not eaten.”

“No. I am not ill.” I touched my belly. “I have suspected for several weeks that I have been blessed far more than I deserve, but now I am quite certain. I am carrying our child.”

Adrian abandoned his own breakfast and wrapped me in his arms. “God be thanked,” he whispered.

***

There was a funeral for the Duchess of Northumberland on the first day of February, with two heralds and many mourners, but it was not what was spoken of that month. Three days after the duchess was laid in her grave at Chelsea’s church, the burnings started.

They began with John Rogers, a canon of St. Paul’s, at Smithfield on February 4. It was a matter no one at court was supposed to speak of, but one everyone was speaking of three days later when the court gathered for a grand wedding: that of my niece Margaret Clifford to Henry Stanley, Lord Strange. People watched the jousts and the Spanish cane-play put on for the occasion, but their minds were plainly not on the grand spectacle before them.

“His wife and eleven children were standing along the route, watching him go to the stake,” I heard Jane Seymour, the Duchess of Somerset’s daughter, whisper to my Kate.

“He bathed his hands in the flames, as if they were cold water,” Lord Paget murmured to his companion.

“People collected his ashes as mementoes. Just as they collected the Duke of Somerset’s blood,” Lord Hastings told one of his sisters.

I went home to Sheen that night fancying the smell of Rogers’s burning flesh lingered in London’s air.

Perhaps, I prayed, his death was an aberration. Instead, on February 8, the day after the wedding, Laurence Saunders, the rector of All Hallows in Coventry, was burned. He was followed the next day by Dr. Rowland Taylor, the rector of Hadleigh in Suffolk, who had supported my daughter’s accession to the throne, and by John Hooper, the Bishop of Gloucester and Worcester, who had given the Duchess of Somerset spiritual comfort while she was in the Tower. It had taken the bishop, crying out for more wood because that which he was provided had failed to ignite properly, forty-five minutes to die.

Yet even as the burnings continued, Mary sat serene and happy, her hands folded over her belly—for the queen was now expecting a child, a state of affairs many regarded as miraculous, as the queen was well in middle age. Each time I came to court before my own condition began to show itself, I saw the Mary I had always liked, the Mary who lost graciously at cards, the Mary whose women were comfortably housed and never overtasked, the Mary who visited the poor in disguise and never failed to make certain something arrived after she had left—a sum of money, a draught of medicine for an ailing child, some warm blankets. My daughter Kate, who like my Jane was strong in her likes and dislikes, never spoke of Queen Mary with anything other than warmth. How to reconcile this Mary with the one who roasted human beings to death?

“It’s not that hard to do,” said Adrian. “The government gives them the chance to recant. I doubt that the queen gets any pleasure from these burnings.” He shook his head. “But the fact remains, she goes on with them.”

And indeed she did. At the end of March, Robert Ferrar, the Bishop of St. David’s, was burned in Wales.

Two bishops in two months, I thought. And God only knew when it would all end.

***

In April, Kate, along with her new friend Jane Seymour, came to visit me at Sheen. “We thought we had better come while we had the chance,” Kate explained. “The queen’s going to go into confinement soon, and then we’ll be boxed up for weeks.”

“She is doing well?”

Kate frowned. “She’s not showing much more than she did a couple of months ago. You’re showing more than she is, in fact. I heard…”

“Well?”

Kate lowered her voice. “I heard one of her ladies, Mistress Strelly, asking her if she might not be with child at all. The queen was furious. She boxed Mistress Strelly’s ears. She hardly ever acts like that. But how could she be mistaken, Mother? She does have a great belly. Have you ever heard of such a thing?”

“Of a woman growing a great belly, yet not bearing a child? Yes, I have. It happened years ago to our kinsman Arthur Plantagenet’s wife.” I was silent, not wanting to think of this possibility as it concerned Queen Mary—or me, for that matter. “But this is different. The queen has had the best physicians in England examine her.”

“True,” said Kate. She giggled. “Anyway, I have another piece of gossip, and it is about you, Mother! They say there are plans afoot to marry you to the Earl of Devon.”

The Earl of Devon was Edward Courtenay, the foolish young man who had been released from the Tower when Mary came to the throne. Although he had revealed to the queen what he knew about the Wyatt rebellion, or at least some of what he knew, he had later been imprisoned. A week or so ago, he had been released in the hope he had learned his lesson.

Kate continued, “Devon said he would rather leave the country than be married to a woman ten years his senior whose husband and eldest daughter had been executed as traitors.”

I snorted. The earl appeared to have forgotten that his own father had been executed as a traitor. “And who proposed this?”

“Some of the queen’s council, but others were against it. They said that if, God forbid, the queen should die in childbirth, along with the child, there would be a contest for the crown between the lady Elizabeth, the Countess of Lennox, the young Queen of Scots, and you. If Devon was married to you, they said, he might try to seize the crown in your name.”

“There will be no contest for the crown on my part,” I said. “It belongs to the lady Elizabeth.”

“It will be quite the joke when everyone finds out that you’re married already,” Kate said. During her last visit, I had told her of my marriage and of my coming child. To my relief, she had reacted with no more than an indulgent smile at the folly of her elders. She glanced at my belly. “Are you going to tell the queen about Master Stokes soon?”

I had been stalling, half hoping that the news of our marriage, known to our small circle of close friends and relations, would reach the queen on its own. It might well have, had not the burnings and the queen’s pregnancy preoccupied the court. But the time for stalling was past. “Tomorrow,” I said. “It is time the queen knew the truth.”

***

The next morning, Adrian and I went to Hampton Court. It was the last time the queen would be seen in public before she withdrew to her private apartments, accompanied only by her female attendants. Her chamber was crowded with courtiers attending to last-minute business. No matter: a large audience suited my purpose.

Mary had a great belly, but not of a size commensurate with the May date that had been predicted for the birth. I had the sickening conviction Mistress Strelly was correct: there was no child on the way. Poor Mary, there would be sorrow ahead for her, I feared.

Unconscious of the burst of pity I felt, Mary smilingly bade us to rise. “I believe we have seen this gentleman before. He accompanied you to Beaulieu?”

“Yes, Your Majesty. He is Adrian Stokes, my former master of horse. He is now my husband.” I pushed back my cloak, revealing the distinct bulge under my gown. “As Your Majesty can see, we have been married some time.”

A silence settled over the court. “You did not ask permission of us for your marriage.”

“No, Your Majesty, I did not, but I believed it would be agreeable to you. I am asking now for your blessing upon it.”

“You must surely know that your marriage is a matter of great concern to us, as you are so close to the throne.”

“It is because I am so close to the throne that I married a good, honest man who will put me far away from it.” I took Adrian’s hand and placed my other hand against the child who grew within me. “I want nothing of crowns, Your Majesty. Not for me, not for those I love. They cost too much.”

Mary placed her hand on her own belly and nodded.

“You and your horse master have our blessing, Cousin Frances,” she said. “Go in peace.”

And so we did.





Author’s Note


Frances gave birth to a daughter, Elizabeth Stokes, on July 16, 1555—the anniversary of Frances’s own birth. Sadly, the child died on February 7, 1556, and Frances and Adrian seem to have lost other children in infancy, as well. Frances herself died in November 1559 and was buried in St. Edmund’s Chapel at Westminster Abbey, where the fine tomb erected by Adrian in her memory can still be seen today. In her will, she made Adrian her sole executor.

In 1572, Adrian Stokes married Anne Carew, the widow of Sir Nicholas Throckmorton. (She makes a very brief appearance in this novel as Jane’s proxy at a christening.) Adrian’s stepdaughter, Elizabeth Throckmorton, married Sir Walter Ralegh (or Raleigh). Adrian served in Parliament and on local commissions before his death in 1585. He was buried at Beaumanor.

Two different death dates are recorded for Jane Dudley: January 15, 1555, in a postmortem inquisition, and January 22, 1555, on her memorial inscription at Chelsea’s Old Church. I chose the latter date, which allowed her to hear the news her sons had been pardoned. The January 22 date also seemed more compatible with the date of her funeral, which took place on February 1. A resilient woman, Jane Dudley would be pleased to know her tomb survived a Nazi bombardment of the church in 1941.

Andrew Dudley died in November 1559, having spent his last years at his house in Tothill Street in Westminster. His disabled brother, Jerome, was still alive in 1556, when Andrew left him a bequest in the will he wrote that year.

Katherine Brandon, Duchess of Suffolk, returned to England with her husband, Richard Bertie, and their two children, Susan and Peregrine, after Queen Mary’s death. She died in 1580, having remained an outspoken Protestant.

Anne Seymour, Duchess of Somerset, followed the examples of the two Duchesses of Suffolk and married her husband’s steward, Francis Newdigate, late in 1558. Having outlived her second husband, she died in 1587, leaving behind masses of magnificent jewels. Her daughter Anne, Countess of Warwick, widowed when Jack Dudley died at Penshurst, remarried in 1555 and had seven children by her second husband, Sir Edward Unton. The countess suffered from bouts of mental illness in her later years.

In 1557, the surviving Dudley sons, Ambrose, Robert, and Henry, fought for King Philip at St. Quentin, where Henry was killed. Following this, the Crown reversed the attainders of Ambrose, Robert, and their sisters.

The Dudley children and the Grey children fared very differently in Elizabeth’s reign. Robert Dudley became the Earl of Leicester. His volatile but enduring relationship with the queen, which ended only with his death in 1588, has fascinated readers for centuries. Elizabeth marked the final letter he sent to her before his death as “His Last Letter” and kept it for the rest of her life. Ambrose Dudley became the Earl of Warwick. He survived his younger brother Robert, to whom he was devoted, by two years, dying in 1590. Ambrose had no children.

Mary Sidney and her sister Katherine Hastings (which I spelled “Katheryn” in my novel to distinguish her from the many other Katherines of her day) each attended Queen Elizabeth. Mary lived until 1586. Her firstborn son, Philip Sidney, gained fame as a poet and critic and as an embodiment of the chivalric ideal. His literary works are still studied today. Her daughter Mary, who eventually married Henry Herbert, the Earl of Pembroke, was both a poet and a literary patron. Katherine Hastings’s long marriage to Henry Hastings, who inherited his father’s earldom, was happy but childless. As Countess of Huntingdon, Katherine took many well-born young girls into her household and prided herself on her ability to “breed and govern young gentlewomen.” Widowed in 1595, she outlived her husband by a quarter of a century and was buried in 1620 at Chelsea’s Old Church alongside her mother.

For Katherine and Mary Grey, Elizabeth’s reign was disastrous. Katherine Grey fell in love with Somerset’s son, the Earl of Hertford. Frances, approving of the match but recognizing the need to gain royal approval, drafted a letter to Elizabeth seeking permission for the couple to marry. Before she could send the letter, she died. Instead of seeking another means of gaining the queen’s approval, the couple secretly married in 1560 with the assistance of Hertford’s sister Jane. When their marriage came to light, both spouses were imprisoned in the Tower, where the pregnant Katherine gave birth to a son. Katherine spent the rest of her life in custody, first at the Tower and later in various private homes, though a sympathetic Tower guard had allowed the couple to meet, resulting in a second son. Katherine died in 1568, at about age twenty-eight. Hertford eventually was freed and was allowed custody of his two sons by Katherine. Having remarried, he died an octogenarian in 1621. Hertford and Katherine Grey were finally reunited that same year when their grandson, the new earl, moved Katherine’s body to Hertford’s tomb at Salisbury Cathedral.

In 1565, Mary Grey likewise made a secret marriage, hers to Thomas Keyes, a widower who was a sergeant porter at court. The match also resulted in the couple’s imprisonment. Although the spouses were eventually freed, they were never allowed to resume living together as a married couple. Keyes died in 1571. Mary, who had set up her own household at Aldersgate, died in 1578. She was buried at Westminster Abbey in her mother’s tomb.

Except for Mary Sidney’s letter to her mother and the letters mentioned by Katherine Hastings, all of the letters and other writings quoted in this novel are genuine, although I have modernized spelling and punctuation in some cases. Likewise, all of the execution speeches are taken from contemporary accounts, except for Guildford Dudley’s speech, the substance of which was not recorded.

My depiction of the Lord of Misrule’s antics is based upon contemporary accounts of the festivities. The December 1551 celebration featured “an infamous tabernacle, a representation of the holy sacrament in its monstrance, which [was] wetted and perfumed in most strange fashion, with great ridicule of the ecclesiastical estate.” This is as good a place as any to make clear (if anyone is in doubt) that the religious bigotry expressed by various characters echoes their own beliefs, not mine.

There is no evidence that Jane and Frances attended the trials or the executions I have depicted them as attending, but there is nothing putting them elsewhere at the time. Likewise, the execution-eve visits each woman makes to her husband are products of my imagination, but it is possible such visits were allowed. Mary’s refusal to give an audience to Jane Dudley in July 1553, and Frances’s arrival at Beaulieu at two in the morning to see Mary, are both recorded by contemporary sources.

Mary did indeed make plans to escape from England in 1550, but her confiding her intentions to Frances is purely my invention.

Jane Grey’s exact birth date is unknown, but Eric Ives convincingly places it in the spring of 1537 rather than the October date of tradition. The birthdates of the children of John and Jane Dudley are also unrecorded. An unnamed Dudley son was christened in March 1537, and Diego Hurtado de Mendoza, who was Guildford’s godfather, was in England from May 1537 to September 1538; I think it possible then that Guildford was the Dudley son born in March 1537 and that Diego served as his godfather, not at his christening, but at his confirmation on a later date. With the other Dudley children, I have followed the estimates of their ages given by Simon Adams, a specialist on Robert Dudley, or, failing that, those given in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

Anne Seymour, born in 1538, was only twelve when she married Jack Dudley. I therefore think it likely her marriage had yet to be consummated when her husband was imprisoned in 1553.

Robert Dudley’s marriage to Amy Robsart was later characterized by William Cecil as a “carnal” marriage, a love match, and that it was not a particularly illustrious match for an earl’s son is further evidence the couple married for love. That Mary Dudley’s marriage to Henry Sidney might have also been a love match is suggested by the fact that she had two wedding ceremonies: one at Esher, the other at Ely Place. It may be that the first was secret, the second public. Her marriage was certainly less distinguished than that of her younger sister, Katherine Dudley, who married the heir to an earldom.

A supposedly contemporary description of Jane Grey’s physical appearance states she was thin and very small, with reddish-brown eyes and nearly red hair. As Leanda de Lisle has observed, however, this description may have been the invention of Richard Davey, a modern biographer of Jane, so I have not relied upon it. No portrait has been definitively identified as being an authentic one of Jane, but John Stephan Edwards makes a good case for a portrait at Syon House as being a true one of Jane. I have therefore followed that portrait, which shows an auburn-haired young woman with brown eyes, in my own novel.

There is no historical evidence that Adrian Stokes suffered the loss of a fiancée. That is my invention.

A “Mistress Ellen,” who is otherwise unidentified, accompanied Jane Grey to the scaffold. As Leanda de Lisle points out, the story about her being Jane’s nurse is a modern invention, possibly inspired by Juliet’s nurse. I supplied her with the first name of “Ursula.”

Recently, several historians, including Eric Ives and Leanda de Lisle, have questioned the story that Frances married Adrian Stokes on March 9, 1554, just weeks after her daughter’s and husband’s deaths. It has been suggested the wedding actually took place in 1555 and there was confusion caused by the official practice of dating the New Year from March 25. In researching this book, however, I found in the United Kingdom’s National Archives a 1560 inquisition post mortem for Frances. To my dismay, it gave the March 9, 1554, wedding date as well as precise birth and death dates of Elizabeth Stokes, her place of birth and death, and the ages of Katherine and Mary Grey—and because it used regnal years, not calendar years, it was unlikely there was confusion over new style/old style dates. While it is possible this information is incorrect, as it sometimes is in inquisitions post mortem, it also seemed likely the dates could have come from Adrian Stokes himself, who would have known this information better than anyone else.

There is, however, evidence that contradicts the March 1554 marriage date. A land grant to Frances dated April 10, 1554, makes no mention of Stokes. As late as April 21, 1555, Frances was still thought to be free to remarry: Simon Renard, the imperial ambassador, passed along the news that the Earl of Devon had been proposed as a husband for her. As Judith Field, a commenter on my blog, pointed out, however, these discrepancies could be readily explained if Frances kept her marriage secret for a time. After wrestling with the matter, I finally chose to use the March 1554 date as the historically more likely one, along with the scenario of a secret marriage.

***

Several of the characters who have appeared in this novel have traditionally been treated harshly in historical fiction, as well as in history. The reader may wonder why I have chosen to treat them differently.

For centuries, John Dudley, Duke of Northumberland, was viewed as one of history’s villains, whose insatiable ambition led him to destroy the innocent Somerset and to manipulate the hapless Edward VI. In the past few decades, however, historians have taken a much more balanced view of this man. As Susan Brigden and other historians have pointed out, there is evidence that Somerset was involved in some sort of plot against Northumberland in 1551, even if its actual details were exaggerated by the government. Far from ruthlessly engineering the downfall of Somerset, Northumberland arranged for the marriage of their children and restored the duke to his position on the council, although his attempt at reconciliation failed.

It continues to be debated whether the plan to alter the succession originated with Edward VI himself or with Northumberland, but it is beyond question the young king held rigidly Protestant views and made it clear to Mary he disapproved of her Catholic practices, berating her in person on occasion. Certainly once his “devise” was revealed, Edward VI himself demanded his councilors put it into effect. Thomas Cranmer would later tell Mary it was not Northumberland, but other members of the council and Edward, who pressured him into supporting Jane as queen. He wrote that the king himself required him to sign the document supporting the king’s will. Furthermore, while the devise certainly benefited the Dudley family, it should be noted that Northumberland’s first choice of a bride for Guildford Dudley had not been Jane Grey, but Margaret Clifford, who was much further from the throne than her cousin Jane. William Cecil indicated that the idea of a match between Guildford and Jane originated with the Marchioness of Northampton.

As Edward VI sickened, rumors swirled that Northumberland, hated by many because of his role in executing the popular Somerset and because of his suppression of Kett’s rebellion, was poisoning him. (Even Frances alleged that Northumberland had poisoned her husband, and Jane claimed to have been “envenomed” in the Duchess of Northumberland’s house.) The charges against Northumberland at his trial did not include regicide, and modern historians give the rumors of poison little credence, although it may be that a wise woman was called upon when conventional physicians failed to cure the king. An associated story, which still is repeated today, even had it that the duke switched Edward VI’s body with that of a youth murdered for that purpose. This story is most improbable. The merchant John Burcher, the only contemporary source to record this particular rumor, was residing in Strasburgh at the time and did not name his informant. Edward VI was buried on August 8, long after Northumberland had been imprisoned in the Tower. Had there been doubts the body was the king’s, it would have been simple for Mary’s government to ascertain the truth.

Northumberland’s private life does not support the notion of him as a scheming, coldhearted man. Jane, his wife, loved him deeply, as her letter to Lady Paget pleading for his life, and her will, make heartbreakingly apparent. In a revealing letter, the duke, ailing and depressed, wrote, “Surely, but for a few children, which God has sent me, which also helps to pluck me on my knees, I have no great cause to desire to tarry much longer here.” He was indulgent to his son John when he ran into debt, telling him to inform him of his bills so they could be paid. Facing execution, he begged for the lives of his children, and though his motives for his last-minute conversion to Catholicism will likely never be known, it has been speculated that he did so in hopes of saving his sons from his fate.

As for the Dudley son most affected by the king’s devise, little is known about Guildford Dudley’s personality. Jane Grey’s letter to Mary suggests he might have been a bit of a mother’s boy, but her account is hardly impartial and was written at a time when Jane had no reason to think kindly of her husband or his family. There is certainly no historical basis for depicting Guildford as dissolute, cruel, or cowardly, as he is characterized by many novelists. The gracious note he wrote to Jane’s father after Henry Grey’s ill-judged participation in Wyatt’s rebellion surely says something about Guildford’s character, as does the quiet dignity with which he went to the scaffold, according to an anonymous chronicler who was probably employed at the Tower. The chronicler Grafton, who may have known Guildford, wrote, “that comely, vertuous, and goodly gentleman the lorde Gylford Duddeley most innocently was executed, whom God had endowed with suche vertues, that even those that never before the tyme of his execution saw hym, dyd with lamentable teares bewayle his death.”

Finally, we come to Jane Grey and her family, a subject about which fiction has come to overlay fact so heavily that distinguishing between the two has become difficult if not impossible. In my own attempt to do so, I have been heavily influenced by the research of Leanda de Lisle and Eric Ives, who have done much to clear away the myths that permeate most modern works about Jane and those who brought her to the throne. I am indebted to their research for much of what I say below, though any errors I may have fallen into are of course my own.

There is a widespread notion, stated as a matter of fact in most modern accounts of Lady Jane, that Adrian Stokes was a pretty boy half Frances’s age. A friend of Adrian’s recorded his birth to the hour in a horoscope: Adrian was born on March 4, 1519, making him less than two years younger than Frances, born on July 16, 1517. A portrait of a stout, middle-aged lady and a much younger man, for centuries described as one of Frances and Adrian Stokes, was identified recently as a portrait of Mary, Lady Dacre, and her son, Gregory Fiennes.

Adrian Stokes is named variously as Frances’s steward and as her master of horse, but in either case, such a position in a noble household was a responsible one requiring a man of ability, not a sinecure for the decorative and vacuous. Indeed, privy council records show that in the 1540s, Adrian Stokes served in France as marshal of the garrison of Newhaven (now Ambleteuse), where he had command of ten men.

There is no evidence Frances’s match with Adrian offended Queen Mary or caused Frances’s daughters to be taken from her care, as is claimed by some authors. It seems to have been understood as a means for Frances to distance herself from the royal succession. Queen Elizabeth’s early biographer, William Camden, wrote that Frances’s marriage was “to her dishonor, but yet for her security.”

The most enshrined legend about Frances and, to a much lesser extent, her husband Henry Grey is that they were brutal parents who made young Jane Grey’s life a miserable one. This belief is based chiefly on Roger Ascham’s book The Schoolmaster, written long after the deaths of Jane and her parents, in which Ascham recalled Jane complaining about the “pinches, nips, and bobs” she received from her parents, in contrast to the lessons she received from her kindly tutor, John Aylmer. Yet in a letter to John Sturm written a few months after the visit, Ascham commented only on his admiration for Jane’s command of Greek: “I was immediately admitted into her chamber, and found the noble damsel—Oh, ye gods!—reading Plato’s Phaedro in Greek, and so thoroughly understanding it that she caused me the greatest astonishment.” If anything disturbed Ascham about his recent encounter with Jane, he did not see fit to mention it to Sturm at the time.

Contemporary correspondence by those who knew Jane shows a father who took pride in his daughter’s intellectual accomplishments and who shared her religious views. In July 1551, Jane wrote to thank the reformer Heinrich Bullinger in Zurich for “that little volume of pure and unsophisticated religion” which he had sent to her and her father; both were reading it, she added. Earlier, in May 1551, while Jane’s father was in Scotland, John ab Ulmis wrote to Bullinger that he had been visiting Jane and her mother at Bradgate, where he had been “passing these two days very agreeably with Jane, my lord’s daughter, and those excellent and holy persons Aylmer and Haddon [Jane’s tutor and the family chaplain].” Ulmis went on to gush, “For my own part, I do not think there ever lived any one more deserving of respect than this young lady, if you regard her family; more learned, if you consider her age; or more happy, if you consider both.” The previous year, in December 1550, Ulmis noted Jane was translating a treatise “On marriage” from the Latin to the Greek as a New Year’s gift for her father, whom Holinshed described as “somewhat learned himself, and a great favorer of those that were learned.” Henry Grey himself wrote of Jane in December 1551 to Bullinger, “I acknowledge yourself also to be much indebted to you on my daughter’s account, for having always exhorted her in your godly letters to a true faith in Christ, the study of the scriptures, purity of manners, and innocence of life.” Robert Wingfield, in a contemporary account of Mary’s victory that is hostile to Henry Grey, described Jane as the duke’s “favourite daughter.”

It needs to be remembered that Tudor standards of child-rearing were very different from our own: the smart-mouthed children lording it over their hapless parents who are staples of modern television and film would have been regarded with horror by Jane’s contemporaries. The humanist Juan Luis Vives, who had been asked by no less a personage than Catherine of Aragon to advise her on her daughter Mary’s education, wrote, “Never have the rod off a boy’s back; specially the daughter should be handled without any cherishing. For cherishing marreth sons, but it utterly destroyeth daughters.” Even John Aylmer, the tutor whom Ascham recalled Jane speaking of so fondly, wrote letters indicating his belief that the adolescent Jane needed a firm hand.

Frances Grey is a much more shadowy figure than her husband and Jane, but contemporary sources do not support her portrayal as a vicious and rabidly ambitious woman who terrorized her hapless daughter. Though she is often depicted as a dominant figure in making her daughter queen, at least one source, the Marian sympathizer Robert Wingfield, wrote that she was “vigorously opposed” to the match of Jane and Guildford Dudley. Significantly, she never spent any time in prison for her role in the succession crisis of 1553, an indication, perhaps, that she was believed by Mary’s government to have been a reluctant participant. There is no evidence she shared her daughter’s or her husband’s intellectual interests, but there is equally no evidence she discouraged her daughter’s intellectual development or that she resented her because she was not a boy, although she certainly must have grieved for the loss of her infant son. (For that matter, despite the prevailing notion that Frances spent most of her time slaying sad-eyed does when not beating her daughter, there’s no evidence she particularly enjoyed hunting, other than her one recorded absence on a hunting excursion on the day Ascham showed up at Bradgate.) Unlike Anne Seymour, Duchess of Somerset, whose difficult personality elicited negative comments from everyone from Catherine Parr on down, none of Frances’s contemporaries are on record as disliking her. When Sir Richard Morison groused about “Lady Suffolk’s heats” in May 1551, he was referring to the sharp-tongued and quick-tempered Katherine Brandon, not to Frances, who did not bear the Suffolk title at that time.

It is often stated that Frances’s callousness toward her daughter is shown by her failure to plead with Mary for her release and by her remarriage just weeks after the death of Jane and Henry Grey. As we have seen, however, a near-contemporary believed Frances married for her own security. As for the former charge, it is recorded that Frances successfully pleaded with Mary to free her husband in 1553, but it does not necessarily follow that Frances did not plead for her daughter on that occasion or she did not plead for Jane’s life in 1554. There is no evidence Frances visited her daughter in the Tower, but there is likewise no evidence the Duchess of Northumberland, whose desperate attempts to save her husband and her sons are well documented, visited her imprisoned children, either. It may simply be that permission for such visits was denied.

Before her death, Jane wrote a message to her father in her prayer book (Eric Ives has suggested that a purported second letter to Henry Grey, stylistically different from the one in the prayer book, may not be genuine) and another one to her sister Katherine. No letter to Frances survives, but Michelangelo Florio, Jane’s erstwhile tutor in Italian, stated that Jane wrote to her mother. It is quite possible the letter has been lost or Frances destroyed it, perhaps because it was purely of personal, not of religious, value. The absence of a surviving letter, then, does not indicate that Jane and her mother were estranged at the time of Jane’s death.

What of the story that Jane refused to marry Guildford until being beaten into submission by her parents? As Dr. John Stephan Edwards has written in his dissertation, no contemporary English source records Jane’s reaction to her marriage. Giovanni Commendone, a papal nuncio from Italy who arrived in England in August 1553, wrote that Jane was “compelled to submit [to the Dudley marriage] by the insistence of her Mother and the threats of her Father.” As Ives notes, the story of an actual beating appears only five years later, in a pirated account by Raviglio Rosso, another Italian, and the official 1560 text by the same writer mentions no beating. Notably, Jane, in her letter to Mary, made no claim that she was compelled to marry Guildford Dudley by physical force, although it would have been to her advantage to emphasize that she was a reluctant bride. While Jane may not have been happy about her marriage, there is little reason to suppose she was treated differently from other noble girls, who were expected to marry in accordance with their parents’ wishes. Frances herself made her arranged marriage before she was sixteen.

It may well be, of course, that Jane’s parents were strict disciplinarians—as indeed, Tudor parents were expected to be. It may be that they were perfectionists. It may also be that Jane, as an unusually intelligent girl, resented being treated as an ordinary daughter from whom misbehavior or slacking off would not be tolerated. But to damn Jane’s parents as cruel and unloving based on a single outburst by a teenage girl, recalled by a listener years after the fact and after an aura of martyrdom had already settled around Jane, is hardly fair to them—or, for that matter, to Jane, who in later life might have regretted her youthful comments had she been spared her tragic death on the scaffold.

For more about the historical figures in this novel, please see my website, www.susanhigginbotham.com, and my blog, History Refreshed, at www.susanhigginbotham.com/blog.





Further Reading




Adams, Simon. Leicester and the Court: Essays on Elizabethan Politics. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2002.

Beer, Barrett. Northumberland: The Political Career of John Dudley, Earl of Warwick and Duke of Northumberland. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1973.

Berkhout, Carl T. “Adrian Stokes.” Notes and Queries, March 2000.

Bridgen, Susan. London and the Reformation. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989.

Edwards, John. Mary I: England’s Catholic Queen. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2011.

Gunn, S. J. “A Letter of Jane, Duchess of Northumberland, in 1553.” English Historical Review, November 1999.

Ives, Eric. Lady Jane Grey: A Tudor Mystery. West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009.

James, Susan E. Kateryn Parr: The Making of a Queen. Aldershot and Brookfield: Ashgate, 1999.

de Lisle, Leanda. The Sisters Who Would Be Queen: Mary, Katherine, and Lady Jane Grey. New York: Ballantine Books, 2008.

Loach, Jennifer. Edward VI. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1999.

Loades, D. M. Two Tudor Conspiracies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965.

Loades, David. John Dudley, Duke of Northumberland, 1504–1553. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996.

———. Mary Tudor: A Life. Cambridge, Mass., and Oxford: Blackwell, 1989.

Porter, Linda. The First Queen of England: The Myth of “Bloody Mary.” New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2007.

Skidmore, Chris. Edward VI: The Lost King of England. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2007.

Whitelock, Anna. Mary Tudor: Princes, Bastard, Queen. New York: Random House, 2009.



Websites of Interest

The Lady Jane Grey Internet Museum

www.bitterwisdom.com/ladyjanegrey/

This site, by Sonja Marie, has an extensive gallery showing how Jane has been depicted by artists throughout the centuries. It is also an invaluable resource for finding books about Jane and the rest of the Tudors.

Some Grey Matter by John Stephan Edwards

www.somegreymatter.com/

Maintained by a historian who did his doctoral dissertation on Lady Jane, this site offers a rich array of materials about Jane, including a listing of primary and secondary sources, a transcription of Jane’s prayer book, and a discussion of the various contemporary portraits alleged to be of Jane.





Reading Group Guide




1. Frances overhears Jane’s famous “nips and bobs” speech to Roger Ascham but decides not to confront her daughter. Would you have done so?

2. In begging Lady Paget to intercede for her in saving her husband’s life, Jane Dudley frankly admits that her husband is more dear to her than are her sons. Did her admission make you think less of her?

3. Frances tries to reconcile the kind and charitable Mary she knows with the queen’s burning of heretics. Nearly three hundred people would be burned to death on Mary’s orders before her reign ended. Do you believe Mary was psychologically damaged, or was she merely acting in accordance with the values of her time, which did not look favorably on religious tolerance?

4. Desperate to save her family, Frances tells Mary what she knows are dubious stories about Edward VI being poisoned and encourages Jane Grey to do the same. Did this make her a less sympathetic character to you?

5. Prisoners facing execution in Tudor England were expected to express their penitence on the scaffold and to profess their loyalty to the monarch, even if the prisoner believed his sentence was unjust. Most of the people executed in this novel dutifully follow this convention. Could you have done this?

6. Despite his misgivings, John Dudley carries out the dying Edward VI’s wishes and puts Jane Grey on the throne. Setting aside for the moment the hindsight that informs us of the disastrous consequences of his decision, do you believe he was right to do so? Or should he have honored the provisions of the dead Henry VIII’s will?

7. Though Henry VIII is dead when Her Highness, the Traitor opens, he casts a shadow over the novel. In what ways does the king continue to influence events?

8. Frances tells her stepmother that her relationship with the Lord is no different no matter whether she goes to mass, and Jane Dudley readily changes her religion in hopes of seeing her sons freed. Others choose to die for their religious beliefs. Are there principles, religious or otherwise, that you would never compromise?

9. Certain characters in this novel, especially Frances Grey and John Dudley, have traditionally been depicted hostilely by novelists and by popular historians. Were you surprised to see them treated differently here? What about the depiction of Jane Grey, who has often been depicted as meek and helpless?

10. What sort of ruler do you think Jane Grey would have been if Mary had not claimed the throne?

11. Mary promises to spare Jane’s life but executes her after Henry Grey participates in Wyatt’s rebellion. Was her action necessary to prevent future rebellions, as she tells Frances? As a ruler, would you have spared Jane’s and Guildford’s lives?

12. At the end of her life, Jane Dudley writes, “For whoever trusts to this transitory world as I did, may happen to have an overthrow as I did.” How, if at all, does Jane’s reversal of fortune change her? What about Frances’s reversal of fortune?

13. Which heroine did you prefer, Frances Grey or Jane Dudley? Did your feelings about them change as the novel progressed?

14. Most of the writings in this novel, such as Jane Grey’s letters, Northumberland’s last letter, Somerset’s prayer composed on the eve of his execution, and Jane Dudley’s letter to Lady Paget and her will reflect the actual words of the historical figures involved. Likewise, Somerset’s, Northumberland’s, and Jane Grey’s execution speeches are drawn from contemporary reports. Did you find that this brought you closer to the characters?

15. Henry Grey loves his daughter Jane dearly but puts her life—and his own—at risk by joining Wyatt’s rebellion. Do you believe that he willfully blinded himself to the consequences of his actions, that he underestimated Mary’s strength of will, or that he was simply naïve?

16. Frances Grey has often been criticized for her hasty marriage to Adrian Stokes. Did you find the motives given here to be convincing? Do you think she found happiness in her second marriage?



Acknowledgments


When I left behind medieval England (for the time being) to write about the Tudors, I worried that those I had enjoyed discussing history with online might fall silent. Happily, I found that I was wrong: the conversations only grew livelier. I would like to thank those with whom I have discussed the Greys and the Dudleys in the course of writing this novel. A special thanks must go to Judith Field, a commenter on my blog who pointed out that the discrepancies involving the date of Frances’s marriage to Adrian Stokes could be accounted for if the marriage were a secret one.

I would also like to thank Simon Neal, who has done a number of transcriptions of contemporary documents for me, thereby saving both my eyesight and my sanity, and Dr. John Stephan Edwards, who kindly answered some questions I had about Jane Grey. Several of my Facebook friends in a long-buried thread provided translations of a short Italian passage; I am grateful for their assistance.

As ever, my deepest thanks go to my family, particularly to my mother, Barbara Higginbotham, who did not live to see this novel in print. Although my mother would have much preferred me to write about Regency England and to leave all my characters with their heads intact, she gamely read each of my novels upon publication. I inherited my love of books from her and would probably not be writing this today had it not been for her influence. If I ever write that novel set in Regency England, it’ll be for you, Mother—but I can’t make any promises about the heads.