After dinner came an interview with Jane, who bade farewell to the Duke and to the lords who were to accompany him on his mission. Everywhere we are confronted by the same heavy atmosphere of impending treachery. As the chief conspirator passed through the Council-chamber Arundel met him—Arundel, who was to be one of the first to leave the sinking ship, and who may already have been looking for a loophole of escape from a perilous situation. Yet he now prayed God be with his Grace, saying he was very sorry it was not his chance to go with him and bear him company, in whose presence he could find it in his heart to shed his blood, even at his foot.
The words, with their gratuitous and unsolicited asseveration of loyal friendship, must have been remembered by both when the two met again. It is nevertheless possible that, moved and affected, the Earl was sincere at the moment in his protestations.
“Farewell, gentle Thomas,” he added to the Duke’s “boy,” Thomas Lovell, taking him by the hand, “Farewell, gentle Thomas, with all my heart.”
The next day Northumberland took his departure from the capital. As he rode through the city, with some six hundred followers, the same ominous silence that had greeted the proclamation of Lady Jane was preserved by the throng gathered together to see her father-in-law pass. The Duke noticed it.
“The people press to see us,” he observed gloomily, “but not one sayeth God speed us.”
When next Northumberland and the London crowd were face to face it was under changed circumstances.
CHAPTER XVIII
1553 Turn of the tide—Reaction in Mary’s favour in the Council—Suffolk yields—Mary proclaimed in London—Lady Jane’s deposition—She returns to Sion House.
Northumberland was gone. The weight of his dominant influence was removed, and many of his colleagues must have breathed more freely. In the Tower Lady Jane, with those of the Council left in London, continued to watch and wait the course of events. It must have been recognised that the future was dark and uncertain; and whilst the lords and nobles looked about for a way of escape should affairs go ill with the new government, the boy and girl arbitrarily linked together may have been drawn closer by the growing sense of a common danger. Guilford Dudley did not share his father’s unpopularity. Young and handsome, he is said to have been endowed with virtues calling forth an unusual amount of pity for his premature end,[169] and Heylyn declared that of all Dudley’s brood he had nothing of his father in him.[170] “He was,” says Fuller, adding his testimony, “a goodly and (for aught I find to the contrary) a godly gentleman, whose worst fault was that he was son to an ambitious father.”[171] The flash of boyish ambition he had evinced in his determination to be content with nothing less than kingship must have been soon extinguished by the consciousness that life itself was at stake.