EDWARD VI
FROM AN ENGRAVING BY G. VERTUE
King Edward VI lived exactly fifteen years, eight months, and six days. We can easily believe Strype’s assurance that his wonderful and almost preternatural sagacity was merely the result of skilful prompting. He informs us that whenever the young King was about to attend the Council, Northumberland carefully rehearsed with him both how he should behave and what he was to say. Yet the boy does not appear to have been devoid of exceptional intelligence. It may be doubted whether his affections were very deep; he certainly did not hesitate to bastardise his two sisters at the bidding of their common enemy. It has been stated that Lady Jane Grey was devotedly attached to her young cousin; that there had even been love passages between them. The King’s youth should mark this report as the veriest gossip. Not a tinge of affection or regret for her cousin is expressed in any of Lady Jane’s letters, and we have no proof whatever that she was specially affected by his early death. There is but little evidence, indeed, of her having been much in his company, nor any proof that he, on his side, held her in exceptional esteem.
Nature added a warning note to the horror of the approaching tragedy. “Several women were delivered of monsters on the day of the King’s death, one of an infant with two heads and four feet, and another of a child whose head was planted in the centre of his body.” The ghost of Henry VIII was reported to have been seen stalking along the battlements of Windsor and at Hampton Court and Whitehall—so that even the supernatural stimulated popular imagination. The hour of the young King’s death, too, was ushered in by a tempest of such appalling violence, that heaven and earth seemed to menace the city. A terrible hailstorm swept over London and its outskirts, and the ruined gardens and devastated orchards for miles round were heaped with hailstones “as red as blood.” Cataracts of water deluged the lower parts of the city: trees were torn up, and the steeple of the church in which the first Protestant service was held was shattered by forked lightning. The people, terrified at the universal havoc, believed, when they learnt of the King’s death, that this storm was the forerunner of fresh disasters and terrible crimes, and so indeed it proved to be—for the death of Edward VI was the signal for the outbreak of the long contemplated revolution so skilfully prepared by Northumberland.
CHAPTER XVI
THE LADY JANE IS PROCLAIMED QUEEN
No sooner had King Edward VI given up the ghost, than Northumberland devised a cunning attempt to obtain possession of the person of Princess Mary, then at Hunsdon. The Duke persuaded the Council to address a treacherous letter to her, after Edward was actually dead, but before his decease was divulged to the public, in which they gave no hint that her brother was dead, and informed her he was only very ill, and “prayed her to come to him, as he earnestly desired the comfort of her presence.” Touched by this exhibition of brotherly affection, Mary fell into the trap, and, returning a loving answer, started immediately for London; but a timely warning prevented the whole course of our history being changed. The plot was to seize her on the high road near the metropolis, and convey her a prisoner to the Tower.
A young brother of Sir Nicholas Throckmorton, however, who was in Northumberland’s service, and in attendance upon him at Greenwich Palace, was surprised to see Sir John Gates come, on the morning after the King’s death, to the Duke’s chamber before he was dressed. They discussed the movements of the Princess, and young Throckmorton overheard Gates exclaim angrily, “What sir! will you let the Lady Mary escape, and not secure her person?” Acting upon this hint, he forthwith galloped to Throckmorton House, where he found his father and his brothers, together with Sir Nicholas, who had just come to inform them of the King’s death, of which he had been a witness, and also of Northumberland’s schemes concerning the proclamation of Lady Jane. On this the youth related what he had overheard that morning in Northumberland’s bedroom; and Sir Nicholas, who, although a Reformer, was none the less loyal to Mary, instantly dispatched her goldsmith, a trusty servant, who met her at Hoddesden, and informed her both of her brother’s death and of the danger in which she stood. Even yet she doubted the genuineness of the warning, and remarked to the goldsmith that “If Robert[217] had been at Greenwich, she would have hazarded all things, and gaged her life on the leap.” Sir Robert Throckmorton,[218] however, arriving on 7th July, confirmed the goldsmith’s message, and Mary and her retinue, in consequence, left the London road and struck off into Suffolk, reaching her manor of Kenninghall after a two days’ hard gallop. Almost as soon as she arrived there, she addressed the Council a comparatively mild remonstrance, and at the same time confirmed her claim to the throne. Mary prized the fidelity of the Throckmortons so highly as to bestow upon the chief of that ancient house the position of chief-justice of Chester, which act of kindness he repaid in after times, when Mary was long dead, by praying for her soul whenever he said his mealtime grace.
Lady Jane Grey meanwhile remained at Chelsea until she was sent for: “There came unto me,” she continues in her letter to Queen Mary, “the Lady Sidney, the daughter of the Duke of Northumberland, who told me she was sent by the Council to call me before them, and she informed me that I must be that night at Sion House, where they were assembled, to receive that which was ordained for me by the King.”