Although the horrors of Smithfield and other auto-da-fés had ceased with Mary’s reign, religious persecution on the part of the Reformers was all too rampant under Elizabeth. The new Queen inherited far too much of her father’s nature to brook any kind of opposition to her wishes. She was a strange compound of the greatest qualities and the meanest failings. Endowed with prodigious statecraft, her vanity was no less immense, and her jealousy of all who came between herself and those whom she liked and admired, caused her not only to commit acts of injustice, but actual crimes. Her mind, which had a grasp of affairs of state and policy that would have done credit to a great statesman, had also many of the weaknesses and pettinesses of a vain, frivolous, and foolish woman. Elizabeth’s conduct towards the unfortunate Catherine Grey, her cousin, and the younger sister of Lady Jane, shows the jealousy of her character in its worst light.
It was to Catherine Grey that Lady Jane, on the eve of her execution, had sent the book in which she had written the “exhortation.” Lady Catherine had married Lord Herbert of Cardiff, but had been separated from him, being known by her maiden name. In 1560 she had met at Hanworth, the house of her friend the Duchess of Somerset, the latter’s eldest son, Lord Hertford, the result of this meeting being that an affection had sprung up between them which was followed by a secret marriage, as it was known that Elizabeth would not approve of the match. The only confidante was Hertford’s sister, Lady Jane Seymour, and the young couple—he was only twenty-two and she twenty—were married as secretly as possible.
Catherine, accompanied by Lady Jane Seymour, walked from the Palace at Whitehall—they were both ladies-in-waiting on the Queen—along the river side at low tide, to Lord Hertford’s house near Fleet Street. Here the marriage took place, but, by a strange want of foresight or by some strange oversight, neither of the contracting parties were afterwards able to remember the name of the clergyman who married them, “with such words and ceremonies, and in that order, as it is there” (the Prayer Book) “set forth, he placing a ring containing five links of gold on her finger, as directed by the minister.” The Hertfords afterwards described the minister as being of the middle height, wearing an auburn beard and dressed in a long gown of black cloth.
The newly-wed Lady Hertford was too nearly related to the Queen to be allowed to please herself with regard to whom she married, and when the time drew near when further concealment was impossible, the poor lady was in a terrible dilemma. Lord Hertford appears to have been the more timid of the two, for when he found that his wife was about to become a mother, he, dreading the Queen’s anger, fled to France, leaving poor Lady Hertford to bear the brunt of Elizabeth’s imperious temper alone. To complicate matters, Lady Jane Seymour, who throughout this adventure had been the young couple’s only friend, died early in the year 1561. When concealment was no longer possible, Lady Hertford threw herself upon the mercy and generosity of her terrible mistress. But on being informed of what had happened, Elizabeth’s anger knew no bounds, and poor Lady Hertford was at once sent to the Tower, where shortly after her arrival her child was born. Hertford now returned to England, and was promptly arrested, being also imprisoned in the Tower, where he remained for many a long year.
In the meantime the Queen declared that the marriage was illegal, and a Commission sitting upon the matter, consisting of the Primate, Parker, and Grindal, Bishop of London, declared it null and void. Matters might perhaps have been arranged had not another child been born to the Hertfords. When Elizabeth heard that Lady Hertford had been again confined, her rage was ten times greater than before. She summarily dismissed the Lieutenant of the Tower, Sir Edward Warner, for having allowed the unfortunate couple to meet again, and ordered Hertford to be brought before the Star Chamber, when he was heavily fined and sent back to his prison, where he remained for the next nine years.
In the Wardrobe accounts of the Tower in the Landsdowne MSS. at the British Museum, there is a list of the furniture supplied to Lady Hertford in her prison. Tapestry and curtains are mentioned, also a bed with a “boulster of downe,” as well as Turkey carpets and a chair of cloth of gold with crimson velvet, with panels of copper gilt and the Queen’s arms at the back. All this furniture, which sounds very magnificent, is noted by the Lieutenant of the Tower as being, “old, worn, broken, and decayed,” but in a letter he addressed to Cecil he wrote that Lady Catherine’s monkeys and dogs had helped to damage it. One is glad to know that the poor lady was allowed her pets, however harmful to the furniture, to amuse her in her lonely prison, where she lingered for six years, dying there in 1567.
Considering Elizabeth’s own experience of the amenities of imprisonment in the Tower one would have thought that she might have shown more mercy to her unfortunate kinswoman. In later years Hertford consoled himself by marrying twice again, both his second and third wives being of the house of Howard. His marriage with Catherine Grey was only made valid in 1606, when the “minister” who had performed the ceremony was discovered, a jury at Common Law proving it a bonâ fide transaction, and making it legal.
Another unfortunate lady who was a victim of Elizabeth’s implacable jealousy was Lady Margaret Douglas, who married the Earl of Lennox. The Countess, like Lady Catherine Grey, was one of Elizabeth’s kinswomen, and owing to her near relationship her actions were a source of continual suspicion to the Queen. Lady Lennox suffered three imprisonments in the Tower; as Camden has it, she was “thrice cast into the Tower, not for any crime of treason, but for love matters; first, when Thomas Howard, son of the first Duke of Norfolk of that name, falling in love with her was imprisoned and died in the Tower of London; then for the love of Henry, Lord Darnley, her son, to Mary, Queen of Scots; and lastly for the love of Charles, her younger son, to Elizabeth Cavendish, mother to the Lady Arabella, with whom the Queen of Scots was accused to have made up the match.” In the description of the King’s House, reference has been made to the inscription in one of its rooms recording the imprisonment of the Countess of Lennox there; that inscription refers to her second incarceration in the Tower in 1565. Few women can have suffered so severely for the love affairs of their relatives as this unfortunate noblewoman.
The long struggle between Elizabeth and Mary Stuart, which only closed on the scaffold at Fotheringay in 1587, brought many prisoners of State to the Tower. Some of the earliest of these belonged to the de la Pole family, two brothers, Arthur and Edmund de la Pole, great-grandchildren of the murdered Duke of Clarence, being imprisoned in the Beauchamp Tower in 1562, on a charge of conspiring to set Mary Stuart on the English throne. There are, as we have seen, several inscriptions in the prison chamber of the Beauchamp Tower bearing the names of the two brothers. These two de la Pole brothers ended their lives within their Tower prison, whether guilty or not who can tell?
Few can realise the terrible and constant danger in which Elizabeth lived from the claim of Mary Stuart to the throne of England. Compared with France, England at the close of Mary Tudor’s reign was only a third-rate power, and never had the country sunk so low as a martial power as in the last years of her disastrous rule. We had no army, no fleet, only a huge debt, whilst the united population of England and Wales was less than that of London at the present time.