Lady Katherine’s remains were evidently embalmed, for among the items in the list of expenses incurred by Sir Owen Hopton we find the following: “Itm’; for one Mr. Hannse S’geon, for the cering of the corpse of the Lady Katherine, 3 li. Itm’; for spice, flax, rosin, wax, and the coffin-making and for the serge clothes, 3 li.” The funeral took place on February 21, 1568, in Yoxford Church. There were seventy-seven mourners, but nobody of great note was present; and, needless to say, Hertford was not allowed to attend, even by proxy. According to Hopton’s account, there was but a meagre display of the banners, etc.,[106] usual at state and semi-state funerals; and it also indicates that the service was choral.[107] A sum of £4 17s. 8d. was dispensed to the poor after the funeral. There is no monument to Lady Katherine Grey in Yoxford Church; but a small black stone in the chancel was, according to local tradition, said to mark her resting-place. As the words Hic tandem qua vixere concordia requiescant simul (“At length they rest together here, in the concord in which they lived”) are inscribed on Hertford’s tomb in Salisbury Cathedral, it is believed that Lady Katherine’s remains were translated thither. There is no clear documentary evidence that this was the case, but the theory seems supported by a statement in an MS. in the College of Arms (Reyce’s MSS. relating to Suffolk), to the effect that, “There lie buried in the church and chancel of Yoxford, the bowels of Lady Katherine, wife of Edward Seymour, Earl of Hertford,” implying that her body was interred elsewhere. Another MS. relating to Yoxford states that the banners and pennons, mentioned in Hopton’s accounts, continued to hang in the chancel of the parish church as late as 1594, and included, “for the Lady Katherine, a target [i.e. coat of arms] of England, and four standards of arms, two France and England quarterly, a bordure, goboné argent and azure.”
According to a pretty tradition still lingering through the ages at Yoxford, a little pet spaniel that had belonged to Lady Katherine, was, for weeks, seen to come daily to her grave, upon which it was one morning found dead. Much the same story is related of a spaniel belonging to Mary Queen of Scots, which followed her to the scaffold and died of grief a few days after her execution.
No trace is to be found in the State Papers of any letters addressed by Katherine, either to her sister Mary or to others, save Cecil, Leicester or the queen, during all the time of her imprisonment. Probably she was strictly prohibited from writing to any one except these last three, and to them only. Considering how actively Cecil supported her cause, it seems a little unwise to have allowed him to hold intercourse with her; but, no doubt, Elizabeth kept watch also over him, and therefore had nothing to fear from that quarter.
From 1568 onwards we hear nothing of Hertford until, in June 1571, he addresses a letter to Burleigh, “from my park of Tottenham,” in which he speaks of “the endeavour to bring in question great part of the title of my lands.” The details of this dispute are lost, nor is any mention of this Tottenham property to be found in the records of that place. A letter from Queen Elizabeth, the date and destination of which are uncertain, but which was probably written in 1570, alluding to “a suit long dependent between the Earl of Hertford and the Lord Wentworth for certain concealed lands,” doubtless refers to this matter. At that time, Hertford seems to have been still in disfavour with the queen; but soon after, matters mended, for, according to Doyle’s Official Baronage, on August 30, 1571, he was permitted to proceed to Cambridge to take his degree as Master of Arts.
The earl remarried some years after Lady Katherine’s death. His second wife was a sister of that Lady Sheffield who was at this time secretly married to Leicester, and was a daughter of Lord Howard of Effingham, and maid of honour to Queen Elizabeth. This marriage brought back to Hertford Elizabeth’s favour, to such an extent that he entertained her with great pomp at his estate of Elvetham in Hampshire, in September 1591.[108] He had no children by his second wife, who died some years after her marriage. Hertford had a fine monument erected over her remains; according to Dean Stanley, he was also instrumental in erecting his mother’s (the Duchess of Somerset) handsome tomb in St. Edmund’s Chapel, Westminster. The Earl of Hertford’s third wife was Lady Frances Howard, another cousin of the queen, and widow of a certain Mr. Prannel, a London wine merchant, who had left her an enormous fortune. She seems to have been a very haughty woman, who gave herself such prodigious airs, that her husband was fain to remind her, from time to time, of the fact that before he married her she had been a mere city dame: “Frank! Frank!” he would call out—the lady’s name was Frances—“how long is it since thou wert wedded to Prannel?”
Shortly after this marriage, Hertford once more incurred the queen’s displeasure by attempting to prove, before the Court of Arches, the legitimacy of his eldest son by Lady Katherine Grey. Elizabeth promptly lodged him in the Tower again (in 1596), and his wife came up to London to petition Her Majesty for his release. For nearly six months she came daily to the palace, without being received by Elizabeth, who seems, however, to have treated her not unkindly, sending her broths, meats, sweets and wine from the royal table. After a good deal of trouble, Hertford was released, and probably from sheer fear of angering Her Majesty anew, kept out of London till after her death. Under James I he returned to court, and in 1605 he was appointed ambassador to the archduke regent at Brussels. He died in 1621 in his eighty-third year, having survived his first wife fifty-three years: the third Countess of Hertford outlived him, and two months after his death, married Ludovic, Duke of Richmond and Lennox, being buried with him, in a fine tomb in Henry VII’s Chapel in Westminster Abbey. Hertford lived long enough to see the validity of his marriage to Katherine Grey proved by the reappearance (in 1608) of the priest who had performed the ceremony. He left no issue by his second and third marriages.
Lady Katherine’s husband was buried under a handsome but over-elaborate Jacobean monument of various marbles, which stands at the east end of the south aisle of Salisbury Cathedral.[109] The recumbent effigies of the earl and Lady Katherine praying, the former clothed in armour, are remarkably fine; so, too, are the figures of the two sons, also in armour, kneeling on either side. This monument is said to be the work of an Italian sculptor, and bears a strong resemblance to some of the tombs of the decadent period in Venice.
The question of the succession, in relation to the Grey family, did not close with the death of Lady Katherine. Henry VIII’s will, the cause of all the trouble, and Edward VI’s “Devise for the Succession,” its confirmation, both placed the children of the two Ladies Grey in the direct line of the succession, a fact not forgotten by Lady Katherine’s partisans, even in her lifetime. Death having removed that lady, a movement was started in favour of the claims of her sons, then aged six and four years respectively. Eight days after Lady Katherine’s funeral, Guzman de Silva informed the King of Spain, his master, that Leicester had obtained the queen’s leave to go and visit his estates and meet the Duke of Norfolk on the road, “and it is now said that he will leave here in five days, and that in Northampton the duke and earl will meet together with the earls of Warwick and Huntingdon and other nobles, in order to arrange a new friendship. Cecil and Leicester will also be reconciled, and they will discuss the succession in consequence of Katherine’s death.”[110] The result of this meeting, if it ever took place, is not on record; but it was rumoured in political circles at this time, that one of the sons of Lady Katherine might be eventually placed on the Scottish Throne, and thus the conversion of that country to Protestantism be absolutely assured, and probably its annexation to England effected at the same time. The greatest supporters of this scheme were Cecil and the chancellor (Sir Nicholas Bacon), who, as we have already seen, had all along consistently favoured Lady Katherine’s claim. More remarkable still, Elizabeth, although she abhorred the idea that these boys, “brats” as she called them, might one day occupy her Throne, endorsed the scheme for placing one of them on that of Scotland. Very likely she saw in this a chance of getting at least the eldest out of the way of the English succession. A letter written in June 1570 by one Antonio de Guaras, a Spanish merchant or banker who acted as a sort of spy in England, during a period when there was no regular ambassador, contains the following curious statement, which had no doubt considerable foundation in fact. The northern rebellion had only recently been crushed, and Elizabeth demanded of the Scotch, certain hostages, including Prince James of Scotland, afterwards James I of England, to be held as pledges of the future good behaviour of our northern neighbours. The Scotch, says De Guaras, would not accede to these demands, “which would be their ruin, as the object of the Queen of England, it is suspected, is to at once kill the prince [James], and place on the [Scotch] Throne the eldest son of Katherine, sister of Jane who was beheaded, he being a heretic.”[111] It was doubtless with some such object in view that Elizabeth, as another Spanish envoy informs us, was “bringing up with much more state than formerly the two children of Hertford and Katherine,”[112] from which we may suppose that poor Katherine’s dying request had been conveyed to the queen by Sir Owen Hopton, and that Elizabeth acceded to it, if only from interested motives.[113]
Meanwhile, the vexed question of the English succession was not left in abeyance. In 1572, Parliament met to discuss who should take Her Majesty’s place in the event of her death, and the claim of the young son of Katherine and Hertford was supported by many of the members, although others contested his legitimacy, and it was even thought that the second son had a better chance, because, according to the Spanish State Papers, “his parents were married, before he was born, with the consent of the queen and council.” It is puzzling to make out what is meant by this statement; either it is an error, or else indeed the ecclesiastical courts had, on some date now unknown to historians, reversed their previous decision, annulling the marriage. Certainly the legitimacy of the children of this marriage was still doubted as late as 1574, since a document in the British Museum,[114] states that in October of that year “the privy council were disputing warmly as to the legitimacy of the sons of the Earl of Hertford, and it was understood that they unanimously agreed that they were not legitimate; and that the legitimate heir (to the English Throne) was the Prince of Scotland (afterwards James I).”
In October 1572 Elizabeth had a recurrence of exactly the same sickness which had so alarmed her subjects ten years before—the physicians called it small-pox.[115] She was soon once more so near death that her life was despaired of: Sir Thomas Smith, in a letter to Cecil, tells us “My Lord Leicester sat up by her bed all night.” Again the question of the succession was actively discussed, and an unsigned letter addressed from London to the Duke of Alva,[116] dated the 26th of October 1572, informs us that before the precise nature of the queen’s complaint was known at court, “the Earl of Leicester, the Treasurer (the Marquis of Winchester), and the Earl of Bedford were closeted together several times to arrange, in case the queen died, to proclaim king one of the two sons of the Earl of Hertford by Lady Katherine; this being the intention of the three lords in question and all their party. The two boys,” the letter continues, “are being brought up by their paternal grandmother, the Duchess of Somerset.” Once more the vigorous queen rallied, but falling ill again in December of the same year, “the secret murmurs in court, and amongst people all over the country, as to what will become of the country in case of the queen’s death, were very remarkable.... The Catholics wish in such case to proclaim the Queen of Scots, and the heretics to take up arms against her and proclaim the son of the Earl of Hertford.... They have passed a law, making it treason to discuss the matter during the queen’s life.”[117] Her Majesty had at this time once more refused to allow a successor to be nominated.