Lady Jane Grey and Her Times

by Ida A. Taylor

Lady Tyrwhitt, no more inclined than she to conciliation, retorted that, seeing the Princess had allowed Mrs. Ashley to be her mistress, she need not be ashamed to have any other honest woman in that place, and so the intercourse of governess and pupil was inaugurated.

That Lady Tyrwhitt’s taunt was undeniably justified did not the more soften the Princess towards her, and it was duly reported to the authorities in London that she had taken “the matter so heavily that she wept all that night and lowered all the next day.... The love,” it was added, “she yet beareth [Ashley] is to be wondered at.”

Tact and discretion might in time have availed to reconcile the Princess to the change in her household; but the methods employed by the Tyrwhitts do not appear to have been judicious. Sir Robert, taking up his wife’s quarrel, told her significantly that if she considered her honour she would rather ask to have a mistress than to be left without one; and, complaining to his superiors that she could not digest his advice in any way, added vindictively, “If I should say my phantasy, it were more meet she should have two than one.”[92]

So the days went by, no doubt uncomfortably enough for all concerned. Regarding Tyrwhitt and his wife in the capacity of gaolers, charged with the duty of eliciting her confessions, it was not with them that Elizabeth would take counsel as to the best course open to her. The revelations attained by cross-examination from her imprisoned servants as to the relations upon which she had stood during the Queen’s lifetime with Katherine’s husband, were sufficiently damaging to lend additional colour to the scandalous reports in circulation, and her spirited demand that her fair fame should be vindicated by a proclamation forbidding the propagation of slanders concerning the King’s sister was fully in character with the woman she was to become. Though not without delay, her request was granted, and the circumstantial fable of a child born and destroyed may be supposed to have been effectually suppressed.

Whilst this had been Elizabeth’s condition during the spring, the man to whom her troubles were chiefly due had been undergoing alternations of hope and fear. It may have seemed impossible that his brother should proceed to extremities. But there were times when, in the silence and seclusion of the prison-house, his spirits grew despondent. On February 16, when his confinement had lasted a month, and his fate was still undecided, his keeper, Christopher Eyre, reported that on the previous Friday the Lord Admiral had been very sad.

“I had thought,” he said, upon Eyre remarking on his depression, “before I came to this place that my Lord’s Grace, with all the rest of the Council, had been my friends, and that I had as many friends as any man within this realm. But now I think they have forgotten me,” proceeding to declare that never was poor knave more true to his Prince than he; nor had he meant evil to his brother, though he had thought he might have had the custody of the King.[93]

There is something pathetic in the dejection of the Admiral, arrogant, proud, vain and ambitious, thus deserted by all upon whose friendship he had imagined himself able to count. It is impossible to avoid the conviction that, in spite of a surface boldness, the nobles of his day were apt to turn craven where personal danger was in question. On the battlefield valour was common enough, and when once hope was over men had learnt—a needful lesson—to meet death on the scaffold with dignity and courage. But so long as a chance of life remained, it was their constant habit to abase themselves in order to escape their doom. We do not hear of a single voice raised in Seymour’s defence. The common people, when Somerset in his turn had fallen a victim to jealousy and hate, made no secret of their sorrow and their love; but the nobles who had been his brother’s supporters were silent and cowed, or went to swell the number of his accusers.

By March 20 hope and fear were alike at an end. A Bill of Attainder had been brought into the House of Lords, after an examination of the culprit before the Council, when his demand to be confronted with his accusers had been refused. The evidence against him was reiterated by certain of the peers; the bill was passed without a division; and, in spite of the opposition of the Commons, who supported his claim to be heard in his own defence, the Protector cut the matter short by a message from the King declaring it unnecessary that the demand should be conceded. His doom was sealed.

Was he innocent or guilty? Dr. Lingard, after an examination of the facts, believes that he was unjustly condemned; that, if he had sought a portion of the power vested in the Protector, and might have been dangerous to the authority of his brother, the charge for which he was condemned—a design to carry off the King and excite a civil war—is unproved.

Innocent or guilty, he was to die. In the words of Latimer—who, in sermons preached after the execution, made himself the apologist of the Council by abuse levelled at the dead man—he perished “dangerously, irksomely, horribly.... Whether he be saved or no, I leave it to God. But surely he was a wicked man, and the realm is well rid of him.”[94]