The Queen and the King dined alone together; but the Duchess of Suffolk, the Duchess of Northumberland, and the Lady Margaret Lennox, together with the Ladies Jane and Katherine Grey, dined, we are told, in the Queen’s hall, and were sumptuously entertained. Neither the Princess Elizabeth nor the Princess Mary attended these festivities. They were not in favour at this time and had not been invited.
The banquet must have taken place at the hour we usually devote to luncheon, for at four the Queen, having visited the galleries and state apartments of the Palace, then considered “show places,” left Westminster, and, accompanied by her escort of nobles and ladies, rode once more through the City to her lodgings in the Episcopal Palace.
On the following day (5th November), she made a solemn progress through the City, riding from St. Paul’s, through Cheapside and Bishopsgate, to Shoreditch, whence she took the high road for her own dominions. She was accompanied by a great train of nobility, among them the Duchess of Suffolk and her daughter, the Lady Jane Grey, and that fateful Duke of Northumberland who was destined to bring ruin on the unfortunate Jane and her father. Northumberland had in his train one hundred horsemen, of whom thirty were gentlemen clad in black velvet, guarded with white, and wearing white hats with black feathers.
As soon as this state visit, mentioned with considerable delight by King Edward in his Journal, was over, the Lady Frances and her daughters returned to Bradgate.
In the middle of November the Ducal party set out again for Tylsey, the seat of Suffolk’s young cousin and ward, the heir of Willoughby of Woollaton. From here they went on a visit to Princess Mary. A very curious MS. account book, still in the possession of the Willoughby d’Eresby family, shows that, on 20th November 1551, “ten gentlemen came from London to escort my Lady Frances’s grace to my Lady Mary’s grace, and they all left Tylsey after breakfast, the Lady Frances, accompanied by her daughters, the Lady Jane, the Lady Katherine and the Lady Mary, and repaired to my Lady Mary’s grace.” Whilst on this visit to Princess Mary, who was then at her town house, the former Priory of St. John of Jerusalem, in Clerkenwell, the Dorset family received handsome gifts, as appears from the Princess’s expense book: “Given to my cousin Frances beads (i.e. ‘rosary’) of black and white, mounted in gold”; “To my cousin, Jane Grey, a necklace of gold, set with pearls and small rubies.” In return, the Lady Jane presented Mary with a pair of gloves.
In the first days of December, the two younger daughters returned to Tylsey, but the Duchess and Lady Jane stayed on in London, for the Lady Jane, we are told, remained with the Princess at her house in Clerkenwell.
On 16th December, the Duke came to Clerkenwell to escort Jane and her mother back to Tylsey. There they seem to have spent a merry Christmas in the company of the Lords Thomas and John Grey. The Duke of Suffolk, in honour of his young wards the Willoughbys, and in their name, threw open the gates of Tylsey to all such of the county gentry as chose to seek hospitality within them. A company of players was ordered from London, together with a wonderful boy, who “sang like a nightingale,” besides a tumbler and a juggler. These were presently supplemented by another band of players, belonging to the Earl of Oxford, who acted several pieces. Open house was kept until 20th January 1552, when the whole family proceeded to Walden, to spend some days with the Duke’s sister, Lady Audley,[154] whose husband, Lord Audley, or Audrey, was created Lord Chancellor by Henry VIII and presented with the house and property of the London Charterhouse, as an acknowledgment of his infamous treatment of Anne Boleyn. The record of the doings at Tylsey is in an account book kept by “old Mr. Medeley,” husband of the heiress of Willoughby’s grandmother and a trustee. This book was lent to Miss Agnes Strickland, who says—in her Tudor and Stuart Princesses—Lady Jane Grey—that Medeley “kept a very thrifty notation of all that was spent in ‘man’s meat’ and ‘horse’s meat’ on these journeys; likewise the payments of the players who were to assist in spending the Christmas with the ‘godliness and innocence’ dwelt upon with such unction” by Suffolk and by the Reformers.[155] After the visit to Walden, the Lady Frances and her brood went back to Tylsey for about a week, at the end of January 1552.
These cross-country journeys, even if sometimes broken by two or three days’ stay in one place, must have been extremely fatiguing to so young and delicate a girl as Lady Jane. The Duke of Suffolk and the Lady Frances being of the blood royal, travelled with a great escort, as many as a hundred to a hundred and fifty horsemen, scouts, etc., preceding and following their horses and waggons, otherwise called “chariots.” If the weather was fine, equestrian travel was exceedingly pleasant: the canter through the leafy lanes, the midday picnic under the greenwood tree, and the evening meal in some picturesque inn, full of Shakespearean character, the bustling, bowing and curtseying host and hostess, the rustic waiters and grooms, the flicker of lamp and candle light, the glowing wood fire, the sanded floor, the shining pewter, and the savoury baked and roasted meats, all combined to make up a scene of primitive comfort, entirely absent from the great and sumptuous hostelries of our own time, in which luxury often predominates over more solid qualities of entertainment. But when pouring rain turned the ill-kept roads into quagmires, when the nipping airs of autumn and winter whistled through the skeleton branches of the trees, or the snow lay feet thick on the ground, and the keen wintry winds whistled over the frozen rivers and streams, then must the welcome glow cast by the crackling fires within the inn parlours have made them, however humble, appear so many havens of celestial refuge to the Lady Frances, her husband, her daughters, and her merry men and women. Since there were no other means of locomotion in those days, a specially swift and steady steed, or a particularly well-cushioned waggon, must have been considered with much the same sense of satisfaction as we bestow now on a new type of motor-car or a specially well-appointed railway train. Our immediate forbears were by no means dissatisfied with the old stagecoaches that transported them from one end of the kingdom to another in a week or ten days; sailing in luxurious airships which will have so reduced the bulk of the globe that from being “a vastie sphere” it will have become a mere overgrown orange—“from London to Rome in less than an hour; London to New York in three!”—our descendants will try to imagine how it was ever possible for us to travel by train and motor—so slow and uncomfortable! And thus we and our civilisation may presently come to be looked upon with the same sort of good-natured disdain we now bestow upon the social conditions and travelling arrangements of the days of “My Lord à Suffhoke.”
It may well be that all this hard riding in bad weather and the unwonted dissipations of Christmas at Tylsey proved too much for Lady Jane, for in February 1552, Ab Ulmis writes to his friend Bullinger: “The Duke’s daughter has recovered from a severe and dangerous illness. She is now engaged in some extraordinary production, which will very soon be brought to light, accompanied with the commendation of yourself. There has lately been discovered a great treasure of valuable books: Basil on Isaiah and the Psalms in Greek, ... Chrysostom on the Gospels, in Greek; the whole of Proclus; the Platonists, etc.... I have myself seen all these books this very day. The Duke of Suffolk, his daughter, (the Lady Jane), Haddon, Aylmer, and Skinner, have all written to you.”[156]
These literary treasures were probably found in several parcels of old books purchased about this time by the Marquis from an Italian merchant.