Lady Jane Grey and Her Times

by Ida A. Taylor

“Marry,” answered Harrington, “I doubt not you shall see him marry her to the King.”

As a consequence of this conversation Dorset called upon the Admiral at Seymour House a week later, and as the two walked in the garden an agreement was arrived at, and her father was won over to send for the child, who thereafter remained in the Admiral’s house “continually” until the death of the Queen.[55]

It was a strange arrangement; the more so that it was evidently concluded before the marriage of the late King’s widow to Seymour, a man one would imagine to have been in no wise fit to be entrusted with the sole guardianship of the little girl. But Dorset was ambitious; the favour of the King’s uncle, with the possibility of securing the King himself as a son-in-law, was not lightly to be forgone; and the sacrifice of Jane was made, not for the last time, to her father’s interest.

To the child herself the change from the Bradgate fields and parks to the London home of her new guardian must have been abrupt. Yet, though she may have felt bewildered and desolate in her new surroundings and separated from her two little sisters, her training at home had not been of a description to cause her overmuch regret at a parting from those responsible for it. It has been said that every child should dwell for a time within an Eden of its own, and with many men and women the recollection of the unclouded irrational joy belonging to a childhood surrounded by love and tenderness may have constituted in after years a pledge and a guarantee that happiness is possible, and that, in spite of sin and sorrow and suffering, the world is still, as God saw it at creation, very good. The garden in which little Jane’s childhood was passed was one of a different nature. “No lady,” says Fuller pitifully, “which led so many pious, lived so few pleasant days, whose soul was never out of the nonage of affliction till Death made her of full years to inherit happiness, so severe her education.” Her father’s house was to her a house of correction.[56]

Such being the case, the less regret can have mingled with the natural excitement of a child brought into wholly new conditions of life, and treated perhaps for the first time as a person of importance. Nor was it long before circumstances provided her with a home to which no exception could be taken. By June Seymour’s marriage with the Queen-Dowager had been made public.

In the interval, short though it was, that elapsed between the King’s death and the union of his widow and the Admiral, Seymour had had time, before committing himself to a renewal of his suit to Katherine, to attempt a more brilliant match. Henry had been scarcely a month dead before he addressed a letter, couched in the correct terms of conventional love-making, to the Princess Elizabeth, now fourteen. He wished, he wrote, that it were possible to communicate to the missive the virtue of rousing in her heart as much favour towards him as his was full of love for her, proceeding to pay the customary tribute to the beauty and charm, together with “a certain fascination I cannot resist,” by which he had been subjugated.

Elizabeth, at fourteen, was keen-witted enough to estimate aright the advantages offered by a marriage with the uncle of the reigning sovereign. Nor was she, perhaps, judging by what followed, indifferent to the personal attractions of this, her first suitor. Though a certain impression of vulgarity is conveyed, in spite of his magnificent voice and splendid appearance, by the Lord Admiral, a child twenty years younger than himself was not likely to detect, in the recognised Adonis of the Court, the presence of this somewhat indefinable attribute. In her eyes he was doubtless a dazzling figure; and though she replied by a polite refusal to entertain his addresses, it is said that she afterwards owed her step-mother a grudge for having discouraged her from accepting them. Her answer was, however, a model of maidenly modesty. She had, she stated, neither age nor inclination to think of marriage, and would never have believed that the subject would have been broached so soon after her father’s death. Two years at least must be passed in mourning, nor could she decide to become a wife before she had reached years of discretion.[57]

That problematical date would not be patiently awaited by a man intent upon building up without delay the fabric of his fortunes; and, denied the late King’s daughter, Seymour promptly fell back upon his wife. A graphic account of the beginning of his courtship is supplied by the Spanish chronicle, and, if not reliable for accuracy, the narrative no doubt represents what was believed in London, where the writer was resident. The question of the marriage had been, according to him, first mooted to the Council by the Protector, and though other authorities assert that the Duke was opposed to the match, both facts may be true. It is not inconceivable that, whilst he would have preferred that his brother should have looked less high for a wife, the possibility that Seymour might have obtained the hand of the King’s sister may have caused the Protector to regard with favour an arrangement putting a marriage with the Princess out of the question.

At the Council Board it is said that the proposal received the approbation of the Chancellor. Cranmer, though characterising it as an act of disrespect to the memory of the late King, promised to interpose no obstacle. Paget, the Secretary, went further, engaging that his wife, in attendance on the Queen, should push the matter to the best of her ability.

After dinner one day, accordingly—to continue the narrative of the Spaniard—when the Queen, with all her ladies, was in the great hall of the palace, and the Lord Admiral entered, “looking so handsome that every one had something to say about him,” Lady Paget, taking her opportunity, made a whispered inquiry to the Queen as to her opinion of Seymour’s appearance. To which the Queen answered that she liked it very much—“oh, how changeable,” sighs the chronicler, “are women in that country!” Encouraged by Katherine’s reply, Lady Paget ventured to go further, and to hint at a marriage; answering, when the Queen replied by demurring on the score of her superior rank as Queen-Dowager, that to win so pretty a man you might well stoop. Katherine would, she added, continue to retain her royal title.[58]