On Tuesday (the 18th) it was patent that the drama—or rather, tragi-comedy—was drawing to a close. Of all Queen Jane’s Council only two men, Cranmer and her own father, remained true to her; and the former left that afternoon for Lambeth and Croydon. Winchester, Arundel, Pembroke, Paget, and Shrewsbury, to save their necks, had by this time definitely decided to betray the cause of the girl whom they had helped to put on the throne—and of these men, two, Arundel and Pembroke, only nine days before, had knelt before her at Sion House, protesting their loyalty and belief in her right to the crown! This day, however, Jane signed an order to Sir John Brydges and Sir Nicholas Poyntz that those officers should raise forces, “with the same to repaire with all possible spead towardes Buckinghamshire, for the repression and subdewing of certain tumultes and rebellions moved there, against us and our Crowne by certain seditious men.” This order is now to be seen in the British Museum, Harleian MSS, No. 416, f. 30.
On Wednesday, 19th July, the short reign ended—“Jane the Quene” became “Jana non Regina.” Yet still there was a flicker of Queendom, for that morning, information being received from the Lord Lieutenant of Essex, Lord Rich, that the Earl of Oxford, who was then in Essex, had thrown in his forces with Mary, Sir John Cheke, Queen Jane’s Secretary of State, wrote a letter, to which the treacherous Lords of the Council affixed their signatures, requiring Oxford “like a noble man to remain in that promise and stedfastness to our sovereign Lady Queen Jane, as ye shall find us ready and firm with all our force to maintain the same: which neither with honour, nor with safety, nor yet with duty, we may now forsake.” This morning, too, commenced the betrayal, when Winchester, the Lord Treasurer, the Lord Privy Seal, Arundel, Shrewsbury, Pembroke, Sir Thomas Cheney, Sir John Mason, and Sir John Cheke waited on Suffolk, as the principal leader in Northumberland’s absence, and desired leave to depart from the Tower so as to confer with the French Ambassador about the foreign mercenaries[250] who were to come over and aid Northumberland[251]—at that moment awaiting arrest at Cambridge! Their zeal evidently touched Suffolk, who granted them leave to depart. No sooner had they left the grim fortress behind them than they proceeded straight to Baynard’s Castle,[252] where, having sent for the Lord Mayor, they were presently joined by that dignitary, with the Recorder and some of the Aldermen. The proceedings of this improvised Council opened with an attack on Northumberland’s ambition and scheming, delivered by Arundel,[253] and then Pembroke drew his sword, and cried out, “If the arguments of my Lord Arundel do not persuade you, this sword shall make Mary queen, or I will die in her quarrel.” This speech was much applauded, and Mary’s proclamation was signed by all present. The conspirators then had Mary publicly proclaimed Queen at the Cross in Cheapside by four trumpeters and two heralds in their gorgeous coats. This took place about five or six in the evening—the very hour at which Jane’s accession had been published nine days earlier! The proclamation in the Chepe concluded, the Councillors proceeded to St. Paul’s for evensong and the singing of the Te Deum, whilst Cecil,[254] Arundel, and Paget were sent to pay the Council’s homage to Mary. Now that the people had absolutely nothing to fear from the broken power of Jane, they gave wild vent to their feelings. The bells of the city churches, swung with a right good will, sounded a welcome to the coming reign; bonfires blazed in every street. One of those attacks of spontaneous feverish enthusiasm which seize nations from time to time, even in these prosaic days, took hold of London. Tables were dragged into the thoroughfares, that all might sit down and drink to the health of her Catholic Majesty. Money was dispensed freely by the rich; and “the number of cappes that weare throwne up at the proclamacion wear not to be tould.” Most enthusiastic and excited of all was my Lord Pembroke, who filled and refilled his cap with small coin to be scrambled for by the mob. He could afford to be liberal: he knew Mary would reward him well for his share in her proclamation. London was a very pandemonium that night. “For my tyme,” says a contemporary news-letter,[255] “I never saw the lyke and by the reporte of otheres the lyke was never seen.... I saw myself money was thrown out at windows for joy. The bonefires were without number; and what with shouting and crying of the people, and ringing of bells,[256] there could no one man hear what another said; besides banketyng [banqueting] and skipping the street for joy.”[257]
Archbishop Cranmer is said to have been the last of Jane’s Council, then resident in the Tower, to leave it, which he did in the course of 19th July, after a sad leave-taking with Lady Jane. His position in the Janeite conspiracy has been severely criticised by more than one historian, and by none more than by Lord Macaulay. He had been instrumental in aiding Northumberland to overthrow Somerset, probably because he disliked the latter’s Calvinistic tendencies, and regarded him as a stumbling-block in the way of his proceedings for the establishment of a more moderate and orthodox Church of England. After the death of Somerset, the Archbishop became one of Northumberland’s chief supporters, and, as Macaulay points out, covered himself with lasting obloquy by his attempt to seduce an innocent girl into a treasonable career which was to lead to her ruin. In her eyes he was something more than a political Councillor—an Apostle of the Lord—and his advice no doubt told with her above that of any one else. The next time they met, Cranmer was a prisoner on his way to Guildhall,[258] whither she too was tramping on foot to hear her doom, approved of by most of the men who had been her chief Councillors, read out before the multitude of Queen Mary’s friends and supporters.
There was little joy and much grief within the Tower. Presently a messenger to Suffolk from Baynard’s Castle came to tell him that the nobles there assembled required him to deliver up the Tower, and proceed to the Castle to sign Mary’s proclamation. They also ordered Lady Jane to resign the title of Queen. Instantly Suffolk abandoned the unequal struggle; leaving the Lieutenant in charge of the Tower, he went out, telling his men to leave their weapons behind them. He himself announced Mary’s accession on Tower Hill, and then, going to Baynard’s Castle, he signed her proclamation. This done, the wretched man returned to the Tower to tell his daughter that her Queenship was a thing of the past. Jane, meanwhile, having promised Edward Underhill, the famous “Hot Gospeller,” then on duty in the Tower, that she would act as godmother that day to his infant son, who was to be christened Guildford, and being herself too ill to attend the baptism, commissioned Lady Throckmorton to go in her stead. Lady Throckmorton left the royal apartments and proceeded to St. John’s Chapel (some say All Hallows’, Barking), leaving Jane surrounded by the insignia of royalty—the cloth of estate, the throne, and all that marked her position as Queen. When her ladyship returned, these had all been removed; for the Queen of England had not yet arrived in London, and her subject, “Jane, the usurper,” no longer sat on the throne. During the absence of Lady Throckmorton Suffolk had rushed back to his daughter. He found her alone in the Council Chamber, seated, forlorn, under her canopy of State. “Come down from that, my child,” said he; “that is no place for you.” Then he gently told her all; and gladly did poor Jane rise and quit her hateful office. For a moment father and daughter stood weeping, locked in each other’s arms, in the centre of the deserted hall, through the open windows of which, borne on the summer air, came the exulting shouts of “Long live Queen Mary!”
Then, after a pause, Jane Grey spoke four simple words, sublime in their pathos. “Can I go home?” she asked ingenuously. God help her! what a world of innocence was in that little sentence, “Can I go home?” Alack! alas! poor little victim of so much ambition and such damnable intrigue, there is no more earthly home for thee!
CHAPTER XVIII
THE LAST DAYS OF NORTHUMBERLAND
All through the night of Queen Mary’s proclamation, Jane Grey was abandoned in the great fortress to the care of her personal attendants; and bitter must have been her distress, as she realised the cruel plight to which the mad ambitions of others had brought her. Everything helped to heighten her terror—the changed attitude of the guards, and other Tower officials, who a few brief hours before had treated her with obsequious deference, and who now marked their loyalty to Mary by an ostentatious display of scorn for the fallen majesty of the “Nine Days’ Queen”; the tears of her women, their whispered talk, the brooding and ominous silence of the palace, broken only by the distant shouts of revellers, who acclaimed the triumph of her successful rival, all combined to increase the nervous and hysterical agitation into which the poor girl’s recent illness had already thrown her. Her mother, the Duchess, compelled by circumstances beyond her control, most probably, had left the Tower, and hurried back to Sheen, after having obtained Queen Mary’s pardon for her husband. The Duchess of Northumberland, white with horror, and trembling with anxiety for her wretched husband and children, had likewise departed with her attendants up the river to Sion: so that of all Jane’s Court none remained to help and comfort, except her faithful women and servants. Suffolk’s movements at this time are not quite clearly recorded. That he retired to Sheen immediately after Mary’s proclamation, appears certain; and also that, on the 27th July, he was arrested and committed to the Tower, to be released at the intercession of the Duchess his wife, on his own bail, on the 31st of the same month.[259] Yet a contemporary letter, dated August 11th, says: “The Duke of Suffolk is (as his owne men report) in prison, and at this present in suche case as no man judgeth he can live.” An explanation of these conflicting statements may be, that the Duke, when officially released, was for some days too ill to leave the Tower.
There is reason to believe that Lady Jane remained in the State apartments till late in the evening of the 19th July, when she was transferred to the rooms above the Deputy-Lieutenant’s, recently vacated by the Duchess of Somerset. The Deputy-Lieutenant of this period was Thomas Brydges or Bridges, brother of Sir John Brydges, Lieutenant of the Tower. This last gentleman attended Jane on the scaffold, in discharge of his duty; but Thomas Brydges figures a good deal in the narrative of the last months of Jane’s life. There has been much dispute as to the exact situation of the rooms in the Tower in which the innocent prisoner was confined, and the absolute identity of her keeper. But it is now pretty clearly established that the first period of her detention was not spent, as so often stated, in the Brick Tower, but in the modernised house of the Deputy-Lieutenant, which stands next door to the Lieutenant’s or the King’s House. Later—we do not know the precise date of her removal—she was lodged in a house, also on the Green, adjacent to the Lieutenant’s dwelling, and which then belonged to the Gentleman Gaoler, Mr. Nathaniel Partridge.[260] Earlier historians have denied the existence of Partridge, and even Harris Nicholas thought he was Queen Mary’s goldsmith; but his identity is now conclusively proved, and he is admitted to have been a well-known figure in and about the Tower at this period. He died in February 1587, and is buried in St. Peter-ad-Vincula in the same vault as his illustrious guest. During her incarceration, Jane was allowed to walk in the Queen’s Garden, and “on the hill within the Tower precincts.”[261]