QUEEN MARY AT THE PERIOD OF HER MARRIAGE
FROM THE PAINTING BY ANTONIO MOR IN THE PRADO MUSEUM
Some mystery surrounds the motives of Suffolk’s misguided action. He does not seem to have intended, as has been frequently but wrongly represented, to reconstruct a party in favour of his daughter, Lady Jane.[290] Perhaps, after all, he was sincerely incensed at the Spanish match, fearing it would undo all the work of the Reformation, to which he was honestly attached. It is presumable, too, that a conspiracy existed to place Princess Elizabeth on the throne,[291] which, Suffolk may have hoped, would lead to the release of his daughter and son-in-law. The result, however, was entirely opposite. The knowledge of this movement, combined with Wyatt’s rebellion, enabled the Spanish party to force Mary’s hand and oblige her to put Lady Jane and her young husband to death.[292] Mary affixed her signature to the “Nine Days’ Queen’s” death-warrant on the very day which saw Suffolk led a prisoner into the Tower.
The terror and anxiety with which Jane received the news of her father’s arrest and imprisonment may be better imagined than described. Did she ever see him again? There is no trace of such an interview, but we possess the MS. of a letter she wrote him on the fly-leaf of a prayer book. She was certainly very much attached to her father, but it is significant that she never attempted to see her mother, nor wrote, nor even alluded to her. And whereas the petitions of the wives of the Dudleys—including, by the way, that of Amy Robsart, wife of Lord Robert Dudley—to see their husbands in the Tower, are still extant, and were readily granted—no document exists to prove that the Duchess of Suffolk ever made any attempt to visit either her daughter or her son-in-law in their prison. Perhaps she was otherwise and more agreeably engaged!
There was a great commotion and consternation in the Tower during the Wyatt rebellion, when London presented a spectacle not unlike that of Paris during certain of the greatest outbursts of the Reign of Terror. Lady Jane and the other State prisoners, most of whom had attendants, who, after due ransacking of their persons, were allowed to pass in and out of the Tower and its wards, were well acquainted with the details of that extraordinary attempt on the part of a youth of only twenty-three summers, not to overthrow the legitimate sovereign indeed, but to prevent her marriage with Philip of Spain, soon to be called King of Naples. The Queen’s courage in risking her person in defence of her rights had won the hearts of the people, opposed though they were to the Spanish alliance, and the Wyatt crusade was, in every sense, a useless and a foolish one. Never, however, since the tumultuous days of Jack Cade had London been so disturbed as during the early months of the year 1554. On 7th February Wyatt and his men were as near the Tower as Southwark, where they sacked the shops and destroyed Bishop Gardiner’s library, so that they stood “knee deep among the tattered leaves of his precious volumes.” Later in the day, when the rioting had got as far as Charing Cross, so great and shrill was the noise of the shouts of men and of the cries of frightened women and children, “that it was heard to the top of the White Tower; and also the great shot was well discerned there out of St. James’s field.”[293] “There stood upon the leads there [i.e. of the White Tower],” continues the same Chronicler, “the Lord Marquess [of Northampton], Sir Nicholas Poyns, Sir Thomas Pope, Master John Seamer and others. From the battle, when one came and brought word that the Queen was like to have the victory, and that the horseman had discomfited the tale of his enemies, the Lord Marquess for joy gave the messenger ten shillings in gold, and fell in great rejoicing.”
We may imagine the anxiety of the condemned prisoners in the Tower. If Wyatt were victorious, they might yet be saved by a change of administration, that would send Mary flying abroad for her life, and bring Princess Elizabeth to the throne. Wyatt’s object was to seize the Tower, but alas! poor man, when he had approached it as near as the Belle Sauvage Yard, on Ludgate Hill, he collapsed on the bench of a fishmonger’s shop, was swiftly seized and cast into durance, in that very fortress whence he hoped to proclaim his victory over “Spanish tyranny.” The prisoners in the Tower must have heard a hundred tales of the appalling retaliation practised on the promoters of the rebellion; of the scores of men hanged in bunches at the street corners[294]; of the bloody heads stuck on London Bridge, and even in front of the Queen’s palace at St. James’s. They may even have seen Wyatt and his fellows enter the Tower. Guildford, too, since he had the same privileges as Northampton, may have heard the cries of the frightened populace in those days of hot rebellion, from the leads of the White Tower, where he was allowed to take the air, and whence he could see beyond the precincts over on to Tower Hill without.
Jane may likewise have learnt with considerable distress that the Earl of Huntingdon and many other Catholic courtiers—all the Spaniards, for instance—were permitted to attend Mass in the Tower chapel; and that this, to her, idolatrous ceremony had replaced the plain Communion service of Edward VI in most of the churches of London, and indeed, throughout the length and breadth of the kingdom. She must also have heard with disgust that half London was going in procession nearly every day, with banners, copes, “imauges,” and lights, praying for fine weather.
Unfortunately little is known about the death-warrant of Lady Jane Grey and her husband. The date of its signature would seem to have been 6th February—the very day, as we have said, that Suffolk was brought back a prisoner into the Tower—a confirmation of the statement that it was his indiscreet action which eventually decided Queen Mary to put Lady Jane to death. The warrant itself and the text have disappeared. All we know is that the document unceremoniously described the unfortunate young couple as “Guildford Dudley and his wife”; and named Friday, 9th February 1554, as the day of execution. The Queen signed the document at Temple Bar, whither it was brought by the Lord Mayor and Sheriffs. How Mary came to be at Temple Bar on this occasion is not clear, but as Her Majesty is not likely to have performed her dread duty in the middle of the street, it is probable that the warrant received her signature in the office of the Duchy of Lancaster, just beyond Temple Bar. If this is the case, the actual chamber in which the dramatic event occurred still exists, in the upper storey of the quaint old house now used as a barber’s shop and recently restored (externally) to its original condition by the removal of a lath and plaster façade, dating from the early eighteenth century, which masked the fine Tudor front that now lends so picturesque a note of mediævalism to modern Fleet Street. For a long time this chamber was believed to have been of the reign of James I, but a close examination of the scheme of decoration revealed the monogram of Prince Arthur, younger brother of Henry VIII, and from this we may conclude the building to have been the office of the Duchy of Lancaster, of which this young Prince was treasurer, and which is known to have stood hereabouts. This is the origin of the tradition so popular in London a generation ago, that the house in question was “the palace of Henry VIII and Cardinal Wolsey”; who may indeed have forgathered there for business purposes, but who certainly never inhabited the building.