Chapter 9
In This Chapter
● Charting the rise and fall of John Dudley
● Cosying up to France
● Whizzing through the shortest reign in English history: Jane Grey
● Crowning Mary, and marrying her off
In 1552, with the capable Lord President John Dudley, earl of Warwick, in charge, and the young King Edward growing up to be a Protestant, everything seemed to be on an even keel. But in a whirlwind few months Edward died, Jane Grey became queen in a palace coup and then she lost her head to Mary, who put the religious clock back.
Taking Over: Dudley Rules OK
John Dudley took over as lord president of the Council in February 1550 (see Chapter 7 for details) and on the surface he and his predecessor Somerset got on fine. Somerset’s daughter (Anne Seymour) married John Dudley II (Warwick’s son), Somerset came back onto the Council and it seemed as though the pair had buried the hatchet. But in fact:
● Both Dudley and Somerset were arrogant, impetuous and opinionated and didn’t have much idea of co-operation.
● Somerset didn’t like Dudley’s cosying up to France or the way the religious wind was blowing under relative extremists like Hooper and Knox (see Chapter 8).
● Somerset thought that Dudley had handled the Western Rebellion (see Chapter 8) and other rural discontent badly. Somerset felt Dudley hadn’t tried to sort out genuine grievances but had just backed the landlords.
In the summer of 1550 Council meetings were pretty interesting!
Getting personal
At the end of June 1550 Dudley fired a warning shot. He had a quiet word in the ear of Richard Whalley, one of Somerset’s agents, and said that Somerset must:
● Stop trying to get Bishop Gardiner out of jail (Chapter 8 explains how the bishop ended up incarcerated) because the Council couldn’t stand Gardiner
● Not imagine the king was on his side, because he wasn’t
● In future work with and through the Council and stop going it alone
Dudley’s approach just made things worse.
Plotting against the ex-protector
Somerset was trying to get some of his ideas pushed through Parliament without the Council’s backing. Dudley outmanoeuvred him by not calling Parliament for two years.
Then, in September 1551, the sweating sickness hit the country again, big time (Chapter 1 explains more about this illness), starting in Shrewsbury and spreading. The 16th century being the 16th century, Protestants believed the epidemic was because of delays in religious reforms. Catholics believed the epidemic was because the reforms had gone too far. Either way, God was responsible, visiting his wrath on a misguided people (depending on your religious persuasion). Somerset caught the disease, and while he was out of action Dudley moved against him. He reported a plot to the king.
The Catholic connection
Rumours flew - when didn't they? - that Somerset was a secret Catholic, in cahoots with Princess Mary and Bishop Gardiner who, as we explain in Chapter 8, weren't in favour of the move to Protestantism. Somerset was also supposed to be in touch with semi-Catholic lords like the earl of Derby. In fact, he just suggested tolerance (a 20th-not a 16th-century idea) and didn't like what Cranmer had done to the prayer book (see Chapter 8). But despite his misgivings, Somerset tried to support the archbishop when the Council ganged up on him. It wasn't a good idea to be too fair or too honest in Tudor England (look what happened to Thomas More in Chapter 4).
Sir Thomas Palmer, a crony of Dudley’s and a shady character, swore that Somerset planned to raise a rebellion in the north, murder Dudley and take London. The rather naive Edward swallowed the lie, and on 16 October Somerset and his ‘accomplices’, Ralph Vane, Michael Stanhope and John Thynne, were arrested. The rumour that reached the emperor’s ambassador in Rome was that Somerset and Co. were going to grab the Tower of London and have most of the Council wiped out by hitmen.
Palmer went further, telling all and sundry that Somerset planned to snatch the king himself with 2,000 rebels. People were hauled in to face accusations, both wild and trivial. But all Somerset had actually done was assemble men and not send them away when told to.
From 30 November Somerset stood trial at Westminster. The marquis of Winchester was judge and by Tudor standards the proceedings were pretty fair. The court dropped most of the over-the-top charges and acquitted Somerset on the charge of treason. The London mob went wild with excitement, which annoyed Dudley, who’d had no idea his arch-enemy was so popular.
Punishing the ex-protector
Despite Somerset’s acquittal on the charge of treason, his fans were to be disappointed. Assembling men was a hanging offence (or if you were a nobleman, an axing offence) so Somerset was still in the frame. The mob’s attitude gave Dudley pause for thought, however, and he varied the fate of Somerset’s cronies. Vane and Stanhope were executed but Paget was just fined and Thynne, along with lords Arundel and Strange, was released.
On 22 January Somerset was beheaded on Tower Hill. Historian John Foxe wrote that he made ‘a Godly end’ and the troops Dudley had got together on St James’s Field meant that the usually rowdy London apprentices (the lowlifes who’d be called Roundheads in 1640) behaved themselves.
Getting promotion: Warwick on the way up
On 20 October 1551 the Council made Dudley general of the marches (the Scottish Borders) and that gave him property and a power base in the North. Dudley had been busy buying and selling land all over the country but his estates, like his men, were scattered. This would now change, and he had himself made Duke of Northumberland (for the sake of clarity, though, we’ll go on calling him Dudley). But despite his titles, Dudley never lived in the North, so he had no real support there when things went against him (see ‘Defending Jane?’, later in this chapter).
By the start of 1552 Dudley was top man but he’d made enemies:
● Lord Paget, who’d been framed on charges of embezzlement, fined and had the rank of knight of the garter taken away (you just don’t do that to people!).
● The earl of Arundel was mightily miffed about his imprisonment over the Somerset affair.
● Richard Rich, the lord chancellor, was forced to resign by Dudley in 1551 (don’t feel too sorry for him though: Rich was the same doubledealer who’d lied on Cromwell’s behalf to topple Thomas More - see Chapter 4).
Dudley was careful not to appear a dictator, always working through the Council. That was no problem for him of course, because he’d appointed the entire Council anyway.
But opposition was growing. The powerful earls of Derby, Shrewsbury, Cumberland and Westmoreland hated Dudley, seeing him as an upstart, and they had lots of cash and large followings. Probably because of this, Dudley decided to speed up Edward VI’s education, guessing that the nobility wouldn’t cross their king.
Financial woes
Financially, England was in a mess. Henry VIII had started debasing the silver currency to pay for his wars against France (see Chapter 3). He'd had tin added to the silver to make the coins go further. Somerset carried on the process. The result was rocketing prices and a credit crisis abroad. By 1550 the value of English currency on the Antwerp stock exchange was half what it had been in 1545 - the only good news was that English cloth cost less so more buyers existed.
In April 1551 the Council announced another 25 per cent devaluation of silver with effect from
August. The result was chaos and the Council had to bring the date forward with the effect that the overseas market froze. Bales of unsold cloth piled up with no buyers and the weavers and spinners were out of work.
Dudley quickly increased the coins' silver content but people just hoarded the good stuff and he couldn't afford to issue more. Luckily, the Government had no expensive wars to fund at the time, and the brilliant financier Thomas Gresham, working in Antwerp on behalf of the Crown, brought the merchants' repayments to the Government under control.
Sitting on the diplomatic fence
Trouble broke out again in September 1551 between those old sparring partners, France (led by King Henri II) and the Roman Empire (headed up by Emperor Charles V. The Roman Empire was made up of many nationalities (see Figure 9-1). This was the age of the nation state - countries like England, France and Scotland were strong because of it. Areas that were part of the Holy Roman Empire, like the Low Countries, would soon demand to be separate nations too. When Maurice, the local ruler of Saxony, signed a secret treaty with the French promising him arms and money, and this got out, the cracks began to appear.
Dudley kept up with the situation through his ambassadors in the Low Countries (Thomas Chamberlain), in France (William Pickering) and in Venice (Peter Vannes), who were well informed by a network of spies. He had nobody in Rome so papal information came through piecemeal via Vannes.
Figure 9-1: Europe in the Tudor period.
The news was that England wasn’t in either the Roman Empire nor France’s good books at the time:
● Charles V didn’t approve of Dudley or his Government because of their high-handed treatment of his cousin Mary (the king’s sister).
● Sir Richard Morison, the English ambassador at Charles’s Court, was deeply unpopular because of his extreme Protestantism (the vast majority of Charles’s subjects were, after all, Catholics).
● Information reached Charles (possibly with the help of the emperor’s agents) about the English Government’s dislike of the Guise party’s involvement in Scotland. Mary of Guise, mother of Mary Queen of Scots, was regent there, and was anxious to cement relations between Scotland and France (see Chapter 7).
● There were rumours of a renewed French move to take back Calais.
In the face of all this, Dudley kept his power dry. Doing nothing wasn’t heroic, but it kept England at peace and saved money.
Facing down the French
In August 1549 Henri II proved rumours true by declaring war on England.
In Chapter 7 we explain that Charles V agreed not to get involved as long as the French confined their activities to Boulogne. As it happened, the French weren’t doing very well at Boulogne, hit by plague and desertion.
The French now demanded that Boulogne should be theirs. Henri was happy to do a deal, however, and that was signed on 28 March 1550. Under the terms of the deal, the commander of the English, Lord Clinton, abandoned the Boulogne defences on 25 April and Henri moved in on 18 May. Hostages were politely exchanged, Dudley’s man, Admiral Chataillon, was sumptuously entertained and the first French payment for Boulogne went ahead as planned. But there were niggles:
● Calais remained as an unspoken ghost at the feast.
● A few French commanders fired their guns in the general direction of the English troops and looked threatening at the end of May. No one was hurt.
● The Pale (the English-held area around Calais) was difficult to defend and had no border. Henry and Chataillon sorted this by mutual agreement on 21 July.
● The French army was building up - it’s okay, Henri told the English ambassador; it’s the emperor we’re after, not you.
Parties and honours - for nothing?
Henri II didn't have a very high opinion of England's army (he clearly didn't have much of a grasp of his own country's history either!), but he rated the English navy and realised that in a punch-up with the emperor the English could be a useful ally. So he opened up negotiations with Dudley over a marriage proposal. Edward VI was 13 in 1551; the French princess Elizabeth de Valois was 6 - perfect. Dudley's man, the marquis of Northampton, went over in person to give Henri England's highest order of chivalry, by making him a knight of the Garter.
Edward in turn was given the Order of St Michel, so it was gongs and glad-handings galore. A 400-strong French gravy train stayed in England, with the young king hunting with its leader Jacques d'Albon and enjoying his lute playing.
None of this worked, however, because Dudley stayed neutral in the war ahead. It would take more than a few supper parties to drag Dudley into somebody else's fight.
Priming a Prince
Edward was 12 when Somerset was kicked out as his protector, and by now the image of the young king was changing. To some he was ‘the new Josias’ and the ‘Godly imp’ after the 8-year-old Hebrew king of the Old Testament. Edward listened to sermons, wrote essays and generally seems to have been a bookish goody-two-shoes who was pale, sickly and a bit pathetic. Some of this image, though, is based on hind-sight, because we know he died from tuberculosis. Check out Hans Holbein’s portrait painted at this time. Edward hasn’t got the bulk of his father, but his face is arrogant and scornful. He’s holding his dagger menacingly and even his codpiece is on show!
Edward and his twin?
The Prince and the Pauper is the only film featuring Edward big time. It's based on a novel by American writer Mark Twain and is a classic changing places scenario between the king when he was prince and a beggar. By an extraordinary coincidence (fiction, not fact), the two look alike to the extent that in various films the pair are usually played by actual twins. In the Errol Flynn 1937 version the boys were Billy and Robert Mauch and in the animated version of 1990 the characters were Mickey Mouse and Prince Mickey!
Growing up
Edward’s activities were geared towards him growing into the role of king:
● Edward took part in archery contests and riding at the ring (practice for the tournament). He was excellent at tennis.
● William Thomas, clerk to the Privy Council, wrote papers on the most up-to-date political theory for the king.
● Dudley encouraged the boy to sit in on Council meetings. Dudley realised that to survive politically he also had to coach the boy himself.
● Edward’s devices (essays) increased in number and relevance. He loved making lists and his ‘reasons for establishing a mart [market]’ and ‘memorandum for the Council’, both written in 1552, still survive (his handwriting was excellent - so was his Latin).
● Edward occasionally intervened on minor points in Government - he was impressed by Nicholas Ridley’s sermon on the London poor in the spring of 1552 and worked with the lord mayor of London to turn the royal palace of Bridewell into a poor house.
Anyone wanting to influence Edward long-term would have to take the boy’s ideas seriously. He was 15 in 1552 and, like his father, expected to be obeyed. Dudley did this well; the king trusted and liked him (which couldn’t be said of many other people!).
Going before his time
In April 1552 Edward got measles. Like everything else that happened to him, he wrote about his illness in his diary, but he never really got better. At the end of June a tour of the South and West took it out of him, and by Christmas, at Windsor, he was seriously ill. When Mary came to see him in February it was three days before he felt well enough to talk to her.
In March Edward opened Parliament but had to cut the ceremony short. One of his shoulders was now higher than the other and he was coughing blood. His ulcers were probably bed sores and his swollen stomach the result of tuberculous peritonitis. The young king was wracked with fever.
Dudley now had to think fast. In one of his devices, Edward had already considered the succession if he died without an heir. His father, Henry VIII’s will (almost certainly prompted by his last wife, Catherine Parr) had included both Mary and Elizabeth if Edward should die before them without producing children, but times and opinions had moved on since then. Edward’s own childlike ideas were limited to members of the Brandon family, who were closely connected to the Tudors (see the nearby sidebar ‘What was so special about the Brandons?’), because he believed both Mary and Elizabeth were illegitimate (Henry VIII had decided his marriage to their mother, Catherine of Aragon, was illegal; see Chapter 5). At the time the Brandon option didn’t make much sense - Frances, the duchess of Suffolk, was menopausal and the three nieces still unmarried teenagers.
The fact that Edward was ignoring his sisters didn’t matter while he was just writing essays. As long as he was well his ideas were just cloud-cuckoo land theorising. But suddenly, by the summer of 1553, the situation of the death of an heir-less king was horribly real.
Making last-minute changes
In the first week of June 1553 Jane Grey, the duke of Suffolk’s daughter, married Guildford Dudley (John Dudley’s son) and the king gave the marriage his blessing. Edward was too ill to go to the ceremony.
There was no time for Jane to produce a son, nor for Parliament to repeal Henry VIII’s Succession Act which decreed who should follow him and in what order. The one thing that Edward himself was sure of was that Mary mustn’t succeed - she was not only illegitimate, she was Catholic.
For Edward, the only rational choice successor was Jane Grey (now Dudley), and he issued a decree to that effect. When he died without direct heirs, the crown would pass to ‘Lady Jane and her heirs male’. The Council were horrified but they couldn’t shake Edward. No one was sure whether Edward (still a minor) could make a will that would stand up - and Parliament certainly didn’t have the right to choose a new monarch.
In fact, technically, Edward’s documents weren’t legal because the seals were never actually attached to the letters patent (a document granting someone a right or privilege) that he’d drawn up.
What was so special about the Brandons?
In Chapter 2 we tell you the tale of the battle of Bosworth Field. Go back to 22 August 1485 for a minute. King Richard III is thundering towards Henry Tudor, earl of Richmond, at the head of his bodyguard, the Fellowship of the White Boar. One man is standing between Richard and Henry - William Brandon, Henry's standard bearer. Richard hacks at William, and down goes Brandon, down goes the standard.
Luckily, Lord Stanley's men stop Richard before he can reach Henry.
If it weren't for William Brandon, the Tudors would never have ruled England and you wouldn't be reading this book. The Brandon family were made dukes of Suffolk by the Tudors and Henry VIII's sister Mary married one of them. It was from this family that Jane Grey came.
Both Mary and Elizabeth had tried to see Edward in the weeks before this decree, but a paranoid Dudley had kept them away. Charles V’s ambassador got wind of it all and told the emperor that cousin Mary was being sidelined. Charles sent a special mission, ostensibly to show concern for the king’s health but actually to watch out for Mary’s interests. Charles’s men were told, politely, to butt out.
Passing on in a terrible storm
On 5 July a summer storm flooded whole areas and brought down trees. The lightning was frightening and the wind terrifying. In the midst of all this, his hair almost all gone, his toes and fingers gangrenous, Edward VI died. He hadn’t eaten properly for three weeks.
Dudley had dismissed his doctors, insisting that the king be treated (with unknown medicine) by a ‘wise gentlewoman’ of his choosing. Are you thinking what we are? Although the cause of Edward’s death was almost certainly pulmonary tuberculosis there were those then (as there are now) who wondered whether Dudley hadn’t poisoned the boy. After all, Dudley’s daughter-in-law was now queen of England.
Reigning for Nine Days: Jane Grey
You might think that London, at the cutting edge of Protestantism, would have been delighted to have a Protestant queen as opposed to the rabid Mary. But in fact, the proclamation that Jane was queen was greeted with stony silence.
Bishop Ridley backed Jane, believing Edward’s will to be valid. Bishop Hooper, however, disagreed and saw Mary as some sort of divine retribution on England for its sins: God was getting his own back.
Manoeuvring with Mary
Always suspicious of Dudley, Mary got out of Hunsdon and fled to her Kenninghall estates in Norfolk. She proclaimed herself queen and wrote to the Council, demanding their support.
Dudley was gobsmacked. The dithery woman who hadn’t fled to cousin Charles earlier now showed no intention of leaving the country, and the ships he’d sent to stop Mary going to France went over to her side; she now had cannon as well as moral support.
The Council turned Mary down and asked her politely to be a loyal subject to Jane. But in reality Mary began to gather ever more support in East Anglia, and not many people knew who Jane Grey was.
Defending Jane?
The Council were actually divided over the rival queens and it didn’t help that Simon Renard, Charles V’s ambassador, stirred them up with gossip that Jane Grey was just a stalking horse and that the French were behind the whole thing to get Mary Queen of Scots (now 11) on the English throne. This was nonsense, but who could be sure what sort of double game Dudley was playing?
Jane Grey had married Guildford Dudley under protest. She was 15 and headstrong and fancied the earl of Hertford, but as was common for the times, politics were more important. On her wedding day Jane went home to her family rather than sleep with Guildford, and when he finally did get her into bed she went to Chelsea to get over the experience!
On 10 July she and Guildford, all dressed in white, went by river to the Tower where Jane was shown the Crown Jewels. This spooked her because reality dawned, and she absolutely refused to give Guildford the title of crown matrimonial. Duke, maybe; king, never.
Four days later Dudley realised he had to sort Mary out himself. His younger son Robert (whom appears again in Chapter 12, under Elizabeth [literally!]) hadn’t managed to capture Mary and her forces were growing. But Dudley’s absence left a divided Council. At Baynard’s Castle in London (more or less where the Savoy Hotel now stands along the Strand) the earls of Arundel and Pembroke led most of the Council to proclaim Mary as queen. It was now 19 July, the last day of Queen Jane’s nine-day reign.
Dudley’s army stopped at Cambridge. Here he heard that the earl of Oxford had gone over to Mary and he waited to see what would happen. In London the duke of Suffolk told his daughter that she was no longer queen. They’d been abandoned by almost everybody.
Making Up With Mary
History is all about blowing with the wind. Men who were staunchly antiCatholic and anti-Mary now said how delighted they were that Mary was queen.
Charles V’s ambassador, Simon Renard, thought that civil war would break out, but that didn’t happen. He reported to Charles that a miracle had taken place in England. It must have seemed that way to Mary too, but she couldn’t show her surprise. Arundel, Paget and other members of the Council went to Framlingham in Norfolk to kneel and kiss her hand.
Checking out her team
What did the new queen - the second in ten days - do with her Government, which was full of Dudley’s men?
● She put her closest supporters, Catholics Robert Rochester and Francis Englefield, into the Council, but they had no political experience. She appointed the earl of Bath, but he too was a political lightweight.
● She brought in men who’d crossed Dudley - Arundel, Paget, Rich and Thomas Wharton. She made others wait, but eventually recruited the marquis of Winchester (as lord treasurer) and the earls of Bedford, Pembroke and Shrewsbury.
Mary stayed at Framlingham until 23 July and then came south, reaching Essex by the 31st.
We’re not talking huge distances here (today you can drive from Framlingham to Essex in an hour and a half), but queens travelled with everything and the kitchen sink, and expected gentlemen to put them up in their country houses on the way. Forced entertainment on this scale could bankrupt people.
Stepping into power
Mary reached London on 5 August, by which time her supporters had grown to 10,000. Dudley was awaiting execution in the Tower (see the nearby sidebar ‘Off with his head!’) and it was there that Mary went that day. She didn’t visit the ex-protector, nor Jane Grey, held across the Green from Dudley. Events now moved fast.
Off with his head!
Mary's first hit was Dudley. On Tower Green on 22 August 1553 Dudley climbed the wooden scaffold and made a bold speech - 'I have done wickedly all the days of my life and most of all against the queen's highness, of whom I here ask forgiveness.' But Mary didn't buy this last minute contrition and she let him die. The imprisoned Jane Grey watched as Dudley's head rolled.
What about Mary's sister?
We haven't mentioned Edward's other sister, Elizabeth, yet, have we? We put all that right in Chapters 12-18 of this book. Elizabeth was 19 when Mary became queen and she'd sensibly kept her head down during the crisis that had just passed. She entered London with Mary, and as long as her sister had no children, Elizabeth was the heir to the throne.
Thomas Howard, the aged duke of Norfolk who’d remained Catholic throughout, was released from prison; so was Edward Courtenay, son of the marquis of Exeter, and he was made earl of Devon. Stephen Gardiner was also released, given his old see of Winchester back and made lord chancellor. Cuthbert Tunstall, the ex-bishop of Durham, rejoined the Council having been released.
The Privy Council now had over 40 members and they were a pretty mixed bunch in terms of politics and religion.
What the crisis proved was that Parliament’s power would go on. If Jane Grey had been accepted, the will of the monarch would have won the day and everything that Parliament had built up over 20 years would have counted for nothing.
Mary now faced urgent problems:
● Her claim to the throne: Mary was still technically illegitimate, but she could put this right via Parliament. Her coronation was more important, and the Act of Succession would cover her in the meantime. The coronation was fixed for 1 October; Parliament would be called four days later.
● Religion: What was going to happen? Because Mary was a devout Catholic, of course the ‘old faith’ would come back, but how? Would the Church of England be returned to its status under Henry VIII because all decisions made since then had been made by a child?
Parliament restored Henry VIII’s marriage to Mary’s mother, Catherine of Aragon (see Chapter 6), which of course made Elizabeth illegitimate, and took away all reforms in religion carried out under Edward.
Priests all over the country didn’t wait for Mary to direct religious changes. They began to use the old Latin mass immediately and when Sir James Hales protested to the lord chancellor about this, Gardiner told him to shut up and obey his queen.
From 20 December 1553 Protestant services were illegal. What a miserable Christmas many of Mary’s subjects must have had that year! You can read more on Mary’s religious changes Chapter 10.
Marrying Mary
Just like Henry VII when he became king (see Chapter 2), Mary needed a strong (preferably male) heir who’d live long enough to run the country. So marriage and child production were top of Mary’s agenda.
Mary had a religious horror of sex (unlike Elizabeth we have no gossipy stories about girlhood flings), but she had to lie back and think of England as a matter of duty: she was 37 and her biological clock was winding down.
But who would hubby be? As an honest person who took her promises seriously, Mary remembered she’d once vowed that her cousin Charles, more of a father figure to her than bullying Henry had ever been, would make that decision for her. Charles had in fact been betrothed to Mary once himself, but he was a 53-year-old widower now and wasn’t likely to jump at the idea of having Mary as his wife (have you seen the portraits of Mary?). But he had a cunning plan . . .
Mary’s marital options were:
● Charles V’s son, Philip: He was 26, a widower, a good Catholic, sexually and politically experienced and he’d one day inherit most of Europe from his father (just think - the old Anglo-Spanish alliance dreamed of by Henry VII - see Chapter 2).
● Dom Luis: The younger brother of the king of Portugal. But Charles didn’t like him, so no go.
● Edward Courtenay: The earl of Devon, he had a dash of Yorkist blood and was a good Catholic. But he’d been brought up mostly in prison and couldn’t really cope with the decision-making of the outside world.
No contest really - it had to be Philip.
The Mary-Philip courtship was a long distance affair, with Simon Renard as the go-between. Philip wasn’t keen - in fact, in the Cate Blanchett film Elizabeth he’s always lurking in the shadows and he doesn’t have any lines to say!
When the engagement was announced on 28 October 1553 the Council and Parliament did their best not to scream in horror; a Spanish Catholic on the throne of England!
Brokering the deal
The Council did their best but they were dealing with Charles, not Philip, and he had his own agenda. Charles wanted his successor, his younger brother Ferdinand, to become holy Roman emperor (it was an elected position) and Philip would have the Spanish Netherlands. Philip, of course, knew nothing about this. Charles needed Philip as king of England because although the English would never give him real power, having his son as king would at least mean that the English wouldn’t interfere in the emperor’s ongoing war with France.
The arrangement sounded great to the English commissioners, who wrote up a treaty that was signed in January 1554. By the time Philip knew what was going on, it was too late to pull out.
Rebelling with Wyatt
Sir Thomas Wyatt, poet, courtier and lover of Anne Boleyn (Chapter 5 gives the lowdown on Anne’s flirtiness), had got off lightly under Henry VIII by being allowed to keep his head. His son wasn’t so lucky.
Mary was already (with that nasty word hindsight) a tragic, self-deluded figure. Having seen portraits of Philip (like all Hapsburgs he had a huge chin and tiny mouth) she said she was ‘half in love with him’. Oh dear!
Courtiers feared that Spaniards would take their places. Landlords were sure they’d lose their property to foreigners. All over London, anti-Spanish broadsheets and ballads appeared and it was only a matter of time before a rebellion happened.
The end of Jane
There are few more tragic victims of the Tudors than Jane Grey. Rumours flew that Wyatt's Rebellion had been carried out in her name (untrue) and that as long as she lived she'd be a threat to Mary (probably untrue). Jane's husband, Guildford Dudley, was executed on Tower Hill on 12 February, and Jane saw his headless corpse in the chapel of St Peter ad Vincula before she was taken to the block on Tower Green. The lieutenant of the Tower, John Brydges, steadied her and she was accompanied by her ladies, Nurse Ellen and Mrs Tilney. Dr Feckenham, the abbot of Westminster, had been sent to convert Jane to Catholicism but that failed and the best he could do was to recite the Lord's Prayer in Latin while she said it in English. Jane made a short speech to the crowd and only panicked a little when the blindfold was put on - because she was unable to find the block - 'What shall I do? Where is it?'
The axe came down and Jane was dead. The 16-year-old was just five feet tall, so small that her body could be placed under two stones in St Peter's chapel. Alongside her lay two more Tudor victims - Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard.
The men of Kent, the Midlands and Devon (what, again?) planned a threepronged protest march on London to force Mary to change her mind. As it turned out, only the Kent contingent actually got there: 3,000 men under Thomas Wyatt. The only troops Mary had were the London trained militia and they didn’t seem too keen to kill fellow Englishmen for the sake of a Spaniard who’d never set foot in the country. Even so, they refused to open the gates to Wyatt and after a few skirmishes the rebels were broken up and about 100 ringleaders executed, including Wyatt himself, who went to the bynow-much-used block on Tower Green.
Mary was taking no chances. She had Jane Grey put to death (see the nearby sidebar ‘The end of Jane’, and later that month Jane’s father was also executed. Mary had heard the scuttlebutt that Edward Courtenay, the earl of Devon, was out to marry Elizabeth, and because the girl was 17 years Mary’s junior, she had a lot more potential child-bearing years ahead of her. So the same day as Jane’s execution, Elizabeth was arrested and held in the Tower until the Wyatt disturbances died down.
Sorting out the pre-nup
The marriage arrangements between Mary and Philip were complicated.
Philip didn’t really want to know. He daren’t openly oppose his father, Charles V, but he had no intention of being bound by the restrictions to power that Mary and the Council were trying to impose on him. Mary, on the other hand, was very interested in the terms of the union, for they affected not just her but the entire future of the kingdom.
The legal position of women was peculiar:
● A woman could sue in a court of law and was answerable to the courts.
● A woman could have titles and her own land, but she couldn’t carry out the military bits that went with all that, so she had to find a man to take charge of the military side for her.
● When a woman married, all her property became her husband’s and she couldn’t testify against him in court.
● When a woman died, her husband kept all her property and only when he died would it go to her heirs. (Are you with us so far?)
So technically, if Mary died before Philip (she did, by 40 years!) he’d be king of England in his own right and the title wouldn’t pass to any child they may have until Philip died. But if Mary died before Philip, English law said he wouldn’t be allowed to keep England! Nobody had ever had to face this technical problem at this high level before, and in the event of Mary’s death, Philip would be bound to insist on his legal rights.
The only solution to all this was an act of Parliament. In April 1554 the law was changed, making Mary an honorary man so that Philip couldn’t inherit England. So far, so peculiar, but it didn’t help Mary cope with what was bound to be a difficult relationship.
Philip crossed the Channel in an appalling storm and reached Southampton on 20 July 1554. Five days later, with bells ringing and bonfires burning into the night, the couple were married in a full Catholic ceremony in the cathedral in Winchester (it must have made Bishop Stephen Gardiner’s day). The slight snag was one of communication (see Chapter 10) - Mary understood but spoke no Spanish and Philip didn’t speak or understand English. On the wedding night he must have rehearsed the line ‘Good night, my lords all’ to clear everybody but Mary out of the bedroom.
The new bride now faced the greatest test of her life; restoring the Catholic faith.