CHAPTER XI
1549-1551 Lady Jane Grey at home—Visit from Roger Ascham—The German divines—Position of Lady Jane in the theological world.
Whilst these events had been taking place Jane Grey had been once more relegated to the care of her parents, to whose house she had been removed upon the imprisonment of her guardian, the Admiral, in January, 1549. To the helpless and passive plaything of worldly and political exigencies, the change from Seymour Place and Hanworth, where she had lived under Seymour’s roof, to the quiet of her father’s Leicestershire home, must have been great.
Nor was the difference in the moral atmosphere less marked. Handsome, unprincipled, gay, magnificent, one imagines that the Admiral, in spite of the faults to which she was probably not blind, must have been an imposing personage in the eyes of his little charge; and self-interest—the interest of a man who did not guess that the future held nothing for him but a grave—as well as natural kindliness towards a child dependent upon him, will have led him to play the part of her “half-father” in a manner to win her affection. Was she not destined, should his schemes prosper, to fill the place of Queen Consort? or, failing that, might it not be well to turn into earnest the “merry” possibility he had mentioned to Parry, and, if Elizabeth was denied him, to make her cousin his wife? In any case, so long as she lived in his house, Jane was a guest of importance, of royal blood, to be treated with consideration, cared for, and flattered.
But now the ill-assorted house-mates had parted. Seymour had taken his way to the Tower, as a stage towards the scaffold; and Jane had returned—gladly or sorrowfully, who can tell?—to the shelter of the parental roof, and to the care of a father and mother determined upon neutralising by their conduct any ill-effects produced by her two years of emancipation from their control. Once more she was an insignificant member of her father’s family, the eldest of his three children, subjected to the strictest discipline and, whatever the future might bring forth, of little consequence in the present.
It is possible that Lord Dorset’s fears, expressed at the time when he was attempting to regain possession of his daughter, had been in part realised; and that Jane, “for lack of a bridle,” had “taken too much the head,” and conceived an unduly high opinion of herself—it would indeed have been a natural outcome of the position she held both in her guardian’s house and, as will be seen, in the estimation of divines. If this was the case, her mother and he were to do their best to “address her mind to humility, soberness, and obedience.” The means taken to carry out their intentions were harsh.
Of the year following upon Jane’s return to Bradgate little is known; but in the summer of 1550, a picturesque and vivid sketch is afforded by Roger Ascham of the child of thirteen[105] upon whom so many hopes centred and so many expectations were built. In the description given in his Schoolmaster[106] of the visit paid by the great scholar to Bradgate, light is thrown alike upon the system of training pursued by Lord Dorset, upon the character of his daughter, and upon the spirit she displayed in conforming to the manner of life enforced upon her.
Ascham, in his capacity of tutor to her cousin Elizabeth, had known Jane intimately at Court—so he states in a letter to Sturm, another of the academic brotherhood—and had already received learned letters from her. Before starting on a diplomatic mission to Germany in the summer of 1550, he had visited some friends in Yorkshire, and on his way south turned aside to renew his acquaintance with Lady Jane, and to pay his respects to her father, who stood high in the estimation of the religious party to which Ascham belonged. To this visit we owe one of the most distinct glimpses of the girl that we possess.
By a fortunate chance he found “that most noble Lady Jane Grey, to whom I was exceeding much beholden,” alone. Lord and Lady Dorset, with all their household, were hunting in the park, and Jane, in the seclusion of her chamber, was engaged in studying the Phaedo of Plato, “with as much delight as some gentlemen would read a merry tale in Boccaccio,” when Ascham presented himself to her.
The conversation between the scholar and the student places Lady Jane’s small staid figure in clear relief. Notwithstanding Plato’s Phaedo, notwithstanding, too, the sun outside, the sounds of horns, the baying of hounds, and all the other allurements she had proved able to resist, there is something very human and unsaintly in her fashion of unburthening herself to a congenial spirit concerning the wrongs sustained at the parental hands. To Ascham, with whom she had been so well acquainted under different circumstances, she opened her mind freely when, “after salutation and duty done,” he inquired how it befell that she had left the pastimes going forward in the Park.
