Lady Jane Grey and Her Times

by Ida A. Taylor

The place chosen for the celebration of the weddings might have served—perhaps it did—to host and guests as a reminder of the perils of those who climbed too high. Durham House, appropriated in his days of prosperity by Somerset—to the indignation of Elizabeth, who laid claim to the property—had been forfeited to the Crown upon his attainder, and was the dwelling of his more fortunate rival; and, as if to drive the lesson further home, the very cloth of gold and silver lent from the royal coffers to deck the bridal party had been likewise drawn from the possessions of the ill-starred Duke. The dead furnished forth the festal array of the living.

That day, with its splendid ceremonial—the marriages took place with much magnificence in the presence of a great assembly, including the principal personages of the realm—presents a grim and striking contrast to what was to follow. None were present, so far as we know, with the eyes of a seer, to discern the thin red ring foretelling the proximate fate of the girl who played the most prominent part in it, or to recognise in death the presiding genius of the pageant. Yet the destiny said in old days to dog the steps of those doomed to a violent death and to be present at their side from the cradle to the grave must have stood by many, besides the bride, who joined in the proceedings on that Whitsunday. Where would Northumberland be that day year? or Suffolk? or young Guilford Dudley? or, a little later, the Bishop who tied the knots?

How Jane played her part we can only guess, or what she had thought of the arrangement, hurriedly concluded, by which her future was handed over to the keeping of her boy husband. Whether willing or unwilling, she had no choice but to obey, to accept the bridegroom chosen for her—a tall, handsome lad of seventeen or nineteen, it is not clear which—and to make the best of it. Rosso indeed, deriving his information from Michele, Venetian ambassador in London, and Bodoaro, Venetian ambassador to Charles V., states that after much resistance, urged by her mother and beaten by her father, she had consented to their wishes. It may have been true; and, standing at the altar, her thoughts may have wandered from the brilliant scene around her to the room at Greenwich, where the husband proposed for her in earlier days was dying. She might have been Edward’s wife, had he lived. She can scarcely have failed to have been aware of the hopes and designs of her father, of those of the dead Admiral, and of others; she had, in a measure, been brought up in the expectation of filling a throne. But the plan was forgotten now. Edward was to be the husband neither of Jane nor of that other cousin, not of royal blood, the daughter of his sometime Protector, whose father was dead and mother in the Tower; nor yet of the foreign bride, well stuffed and jewelled, of whom he had himself bragged. He was dying, like any other boy of no royal race, upon whose life no momentous issues hung. From his sick-bed he had taken a keen interest in what was going forward, appearing, says Heylyn, as forward in the marriages as if he had been one of the principals in the plot against him.[145] He might be fond of Jane, but even had he loved her—which there is nothing to show—he was too far within the shadow of the grave to feel any jealousy in seeing her handed over to another bridegroom.

At the demeanour of the little victim of the Whitsun sacrifice we can but guess. Grave and serious we picture her, as it was her wont to be, with the steadfast face depicted by the painters of the day—far, in spite of Seymour’s boast, from being “as handsome as any lady in England,” but with a purity and simplicity, a stillness and repose, restful to those who looked into the quiet eyes and marked the tranquillity of the countenance. Did she, in her inward cogitations, divine that there was danger ahead? If so we can fancy she was ready to face it. Were it God’s will, then let it come. Peril was the anteroom, death the portal, of the eternal city—the heavenly Jerusalem in which she believed.

Such was the image printed upon the time by the woman-child who was never to know maturity, as it lived in the tender and loving remembrance of her contemporaries, the delicately sculptured figure of a saint in the temples of the iconoclasts.

From an engraving by George Noble after a painting by Holbein.

LADY JANE GREY.

By the country at large the sudden marriages were regarded with suspicion. “The noise of these marriages bred such amazement in the hearts of the common people, apt enough in themselves to speak the worst of Northumberland, that there was nothing left unsaid which might serve to show their hatred against him, or express their pity for the King.”[146] Overbearing and despotic, the merciless “bear of Warwick,” as he was nicknamed, was so detested that by some the failure of his scheme was afterwards ascribed rather to his unpopularity than to love for Mary. Yet it was Northumberland who, with the blindness born of a sanguine ambition, was to trust, six weeks later, to the populace to join with him in dispossessing the King’s sister, for whom they had always shown affection, and in placing his daughter-in-law and her boy-husband upon the throne. So glaring a misapprehension of the situation demands explanation, and it is partly supplied by a French appreciation of the Duke’s character. According to M. Griffet, he was more heedful to conceal his own sentiments than capable of discerning those of others; a man of ambition who neither knew whom to trust nor whom to suspect; who, blinded by presumption, was therefore easily deceived, and who nevertheless believed himself to possess to the highest degree the gift of deceiving all the world.[147] Such as he was, he had deceived himself to his undoing.

Meantime Lady Jane’s marriage had made for the moment little change in her manner of life. She had answered the purpose for which she was required, and was permitted temporarily to retire behind the scenes. It is said—and there is nothing unlikely in the assertion—that, the ceremony over and obedience having been rendered to her parents’ behest, she entreated that she might continue with her mother for the present. She and her new husband were so young, she pleaded. Her request was granted. She was Guilford Dudley’s wife, could be the wife of no other man, and that was, for the moment, sufficient.