Lady Jane Grey and Her Times

by Ida A. Taylor

Gardiner, now not only Bishop of Winchester but Lord Chancellor, had performed the rites of the coronation, in the absence of the Archbishops, both in confinement. The Tower had been once more opening its hospitable doors, and a fortnight earlier its resident diarist had noted Cranmer’s arrival. “Item, the Bishop of Canterbury was brought into the Tower as prisoner, and lodged in the Tower over the gate anenst the water-gate, where the Duke of Northumberland lay before his death.”

Nor was Cranmer the only churchman to find a lodging there. Doctor Ridley had preceded him to the universal prison-house, and on the same day that the Archbishop took up his residence in it “Master Latimer was brought to the Tower prisoner; who at his coming said to one Rutter, a warder there, ‘What, my old friend, how do you? I am now come to be your neighbour again,’ and was lodged in the garden in Sir Thomas Palmer’s lodging.”

Ominous quarters both! It was a day when the great fortress received, and discharged, many guests.

If Cranmer had drawn his imprisonment upon himself, the imprudence to which it was due did him honour. He had at first been treated by Mary with an indulgence the more singular when it is remembered that he had been the instrument of her mother’s divorce, and a strenuous supporter of Lady Jane. Prudence would have dictated the adoption on his part of a policy of silence; but, confined to his house at Lambeth, and regarding with the bitterness inevitable in a man of his convictions the steps in course of being taken for the restoration of the ancient worship, the news that Mass had been once again celebrated in Canterbury Cathedral, and that it was commonly reported that it had been done with his consent and connivance, was too much for him. Feeling the need of clearing himself from what he regarded as a damaging imputation, he wrote and spread abroad a declaration of his faith and opinions, adding to it a violent attack upon the rites of the Catholic Church. By Mary and her advisers the challenge could scarcely have been ignored; and it was this document, read to the people in the streets, which was the cause of the Archbishop being called before the Council and committed to the Tower on a charge of treason accompanied by the spreading abroad of seditious libels.[204]

The Tower continued to be, in some sort, the centre of all that was going forward. On September 27, two days before the coronation, Mary had again visited the fortress whither she had so nearly escaped being brought in quite another character and guise. Elizabeth came with her, and she was attended by the whole Council—just as they had, not three months before, attended upon Jane, the innocent usurper. And somewhere in the great dark building the little Twelfth-night Queen must have listened to the pealing of the joy-bells and to the acclamations of the people who had kept so ominous a silence when she herself had made her entry. Perhaps young Guilford Dudley too, who a week or two before had been accorded “the liberty of the leads on Beacham’s Tower,” may have stood above, catching a glimpse of the show, and remembering the day when he and his wife had their boy-and-girl quarrel, because she would not make him a King.

The two questions of the hour were those relating to the Queen’s marriage and to matters of religion. When Parliament met on October 5, the news of the Spanish match had not been announced, and the bills of chief interest passed were one dealing with the important point of the validity of Katherine of Aragon’s marriage, and a second, which, avoiding any discussion of the Papal supremacy, the only thoroughly unpopular article of the Catholic creed, cancelled recent legislation on ecclesiastical matters, and restored the ritual in use during the last year of Henry’s reign. The other important measure carried in this session was the attainder of Cranmer, Lady Jane and her husband, and Sir Ambrose Dudley.

So far as Lady Jane was concerned the step was purely formal, intended to serve as a warning to her friends, and it was understood on all hands that a pardon would be granted to the guiltless figure-head of the conspiracy. Yet to a nervous child, not yet seventeen, there may well have been something terrifying in the sentence hanging over her, and it seems to have been about this time that she addressed a letter to her father which could scarcely have been otherwise conceived had she expected in truth to suffer the penalty due to treason.

From an etching by W. Hollar.

Photo by W. A. Mansell & Co.