Born in 1545, the Lady Mary was contracted to her kinsman, Arthur, Lord Grey de Wilton, on the day her sister Jane was married to Lord Guildford Dudley, and Katherine betrothed to Lord Pembroke’s son. Froude is not correct in stating that Lady Mary was married on that day “to Martin Keys, a Groom of the Chambers,” a statement which proves that he knew nothing whatever of Lady Mary’s history. She was then (1553) in her eighth year, and England was on the eve of the tragedy of which her eldest sister, Jane, was to be at once the heroine and the victim, a tragedy speedily followed by her mother, the Lady Frances, the widowed Duchess of Suffolk’s indecorous marriage with her groom of the chambers, Adrian Stokes.[120] Lady Mary’s early betrothal was, however, annulled, mainly on account of the terrible troubles that overwhelmed the Dudley family.
All we know of Lady Mary’s childhood and youth is an occasional mention of her name in the State Papers, in connection with those of her sisters, or in the correspondence, wills and bequests of her family, and in accounts of visits to royal and other illustrious persons, in which she accompanied her parents. She is also mentioned in a legal document, recently discovered in the Record Office, as co-heiress with her sisters, of certain landed estates in Warwickshire belonging to their mother, the Lady Frances. Long after that lady’s death, this document was submitted to Queen Elizabeth, who apparently desired to know the exact amount of her cousin’s fortune. It was not large, but the queen none the less confiscated the greater part. We know nothing of what became of Lady Mary during the catastrophe which overwhelmed her sister Jane.[121] We can only conclude she was either abandoned to her nurses at Sheen, or sheltered by some relative or friend of her parents. In the first months of Mary’s reign, and after some measure of order had been restored, that queen, as we have seen, took compassion on the two sisters, Katherine and Mary Grey, received them at court and admitted them to her privy chamber. Elizabeth also befriended the two sisters, but far less generously. Lady Mary received a pension of £80 a year from the queen, paid through the Lady Clinton, mistress of the royal household.
In 1559, Frances, Duchess of Suffolk, died, and the Ladies Katherine and Mary Grey, who nursed her during her last sickness, attended her funeral in Westminster Abbey, their flowing trains “being upheld,” as was then the etiquette for ladies of the highest rank.
Lady Mary was in her sixteenth year, when, two years later (1561), Lady Katherine Grey was arrested for the unpardonable offence of choosing her husband without reference to Queen Elizabeth’s desires. Though dwarfish in stature (she was only four feet in height, and the Spanish ambassador describes her as being “little, crookbacked,—deformed—and very ugly,”) freckled and red-haired, like her sisters, Mary was a thorough Tudor; for she, too, not only fell in love, but resolved to marry the object of her passion on the earliest possible opportunity, and this in spite of the dreadful punishment that befell her sister for a similar misdemeanour.
There was, in those days, an official at court—the post did not fall into abeyance, indeed, until the middle of the seventeenth century—who bore the title of the “Porter of the Royal Water-gates.” Each of the palaces on the Thames possessed a river-gate and stairway, and as Westminster was in times gone by the most frequented of all the royal residences—the Tower being only used on occasions of extreme state, and very rarely at all by Queen Elizabeth—Master Thomas Keyes, the Sergeant-Porter at this particular gate,[122] was a personage of considerable importance; and even a remote connection of the queen’s, for he was descended from the Knollys family, into which Katherine Carey, daughter of Mary Boleyn, Queen Anne’s sister, had married. Master Thomas Keyes, therefore, was a notability of a kind, with his right to boast kinship with the great queen’s nearest and dearest relatives; and Elizabeth, whatever may have been her faults, never ceased to favour her mother’s tribe of connections, not a few of whom were in very humble positions indeed. When he first met Lady Mary Grey, Thomas was in his prime, a widower of some years’ standing, a good deal over forty, and moreover the father of six or seven children. He was the tallest and biggest man[123] about the court, being six feet eight inches without his shoes, but so stout, we are assured, that he “did not look near so tall as he really was.” How and when the Lady Mary formed this giant’s acquaintance is never likely to be known, but she must have seen him almost daily when her royal mistress was in residence at Westminster, for she had to attend upon the queen on her various water excursions up and down the Thames, in those times the chief thoroughfare of the city, teeming with boats and barges of all kinds, just as the Strand and Piccadilly now teem with motor-omnibuses and motor-cars. Almost every one of note, and many, indeed, who were of no note at all, kept a boat of some sort, and found it as useful as we find a wheeled conveyance. So numerous and gorgeous were the craft floating upon the Thames, especially of a summer afternoon, that foreigners averred there was nothing in the whole world to compare with it, except on the Grand Canal at Venice. Whenever that “imperial Votress, Gloriana,” and her attendants moved to and fro between Westminster and Greenwich, or Richmond, or Hampton Court, the royal train passed down the stairs of the Water-gate to the queen’s barge, into which sumptuous, if somewhat cumbrous, vessel Master Keyes, as in duty bound, handed Her Majesty and her ladies.[124]
Above this particular Water-gate there was a fair and comfortable apartment, consisting of several large rooms, overlooking the enchanting panorama of the Thames, a thousand times more picturesque at this epoch than at the present. Here Mr. Sergeant-Porter dwelt in solitary state, waited on by his cook and valet—for although, when on his trial, he himself mentioned the existence of his numerous progeny, no member of it was living with him at the period in question. Keyes, who seems to have been convivially disposed, was in the habit of giving what we should now call afternoon parties, to which he invited some of the young people about the court, and these gatherings, his own cousin, Lettice Knollys, one of the most beautiful young women of the day, and at this time greatly favoured by Queen Elizabeth, was wont to attend. With Lettice, we may rest assured, came the little Lady Mary, to enjoy the cool breezes that were wafted through the Gothic windows of Keyes’s water-mansion, whilst she munched his marchpanes and sipped his dainty coloured canary. Somewhere in the apartment, probably, there was a virginal, lute, or mandoline, out of which one of the fair girls would contrive to extract melody, either to accompany a ballad, or set nimble feet a-moving in some lively jig or stately pavan. Be this as it may, certain it is, that during the summer of the year 1565, the Lady Mary was in Keyes’s apartment more often than was either seemly for so young a maiden, or prudent for one so closely connected with the queen.
[CHAPTER II]
A STRANGE WEDDING