His companion and playfellow was one Barnaby Fitzpatrick, to whom he clung throughout his short life with constant affection. It was Barnaby’s office to bear whatever punishment the Prince had merited—a method more successful in the case of the Prince than it might have proved with a less soft-hearted offender, since it is said that “it was not easy to affirm whether Fitzpatrick smarted more for the default of the Prince, or the Prince conceived more grief for the smart of Fitzpatrick.”[17]
Katherine Parr is not likely to have regretted the pressure put upon her stepson; and the boy, apologising for his simple and rude letters, adds his acknowledgments for those addressed to him by the Queen, “which do give me much comfort and encouragement to go forward in such things wherein your Grace beareth me on hand.”
The King’s latest wife was, in fact, a teacher by nature and choice, and admirably fitted to direct the studies of his son and daughters, as well as of any other children who might be brought within the sphere of her influence. That influence, it may be, had something to do with moulding the character and the destiny of a child fated to be unhappily prominent in the near future. This was Lady Jane Grey.
CHAPTER III
1546 The Marquis of Dorset and his family—Bradgate Park—Lady Jane Grey—Her relations with her cousins—Mary Tudor—Protestantism at Whitehall—Religious persecution.
Amongst the households where both affairs at Court and the religious struggle distracting the country were watched with the deepest interest was that of the Marquis of Dorset, the husband of the King’s niece and father of Lady Jane Grey.
Married at eighteen to the infirm and aged Louis XII. of France, Mary Tudor, daughter of Henry VII. and friend of the luckless Katherine of Aragon, had been released by his death after less than three months of wedded life, and had lost no time in choosing a more congenial bridegroom. At Calais, on her way home, she had bestowed her hand upon “that martial and pompous gentleman,” Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, who, sent by her brother to conduct her back to England, thought it well to secure his bride and to wait until the union was accomplished before obtaining the King’s consent. Of this hurried marriage the eldest child was the mother of Jane Grey, who thus derived her disastrous heritage of royal blood.
It was at the country home of the Dorset family, Bradgate Park, that Lady Jane had been born, in 1537. Six miles distant from the town of Leicester, and forming the south-east end of Charnwood Forest, it was a pleasant and quiet place. Over the wide park itself, seven miles in circumference, bracken grew freely; here and there bare rocks rose amidst the masses of green undergrowth, broken now and then by a solitary oak, and the unwooded expanse was covered with “wild verdure.”[18]
The house itself had not long been built, nor is there much remaining at the present day to show what had been its aspect at the time when Lady Jane was its inmate. Early in the eighteenth century it was destroyed by fire, tradition ascribing the catastrophe to a Lady Suffolk who, brought to her husband’s home as a bride, complained that the country was a forest and the inhabitants were brutes, and, at the suggestion of her sister, took the most certain means of ensuring a change of residence.