3

Rebel

IN THE SUMMER OF 1553 Mary’s brother, the boy-King Edward VI, lay dying. He was showing symptoms of advanced tuberculosis: lethargy, racking cough, spitting of blood and the ejection of foul greenish-yellow and black phlegm. Once more the question of the succession loomed. A fervent Protestant far to the left of his father, Edward was tormented by the prospect of his Catholic sister Mary succeeding him and overturning all the godly work of recent years. Indeed, there were far too many prominent courtiers who had done well out of the Reformation and had too big a stake in the regime to contemplate a return to the old religion, of which Mary was the undoubted representative. It was an easy matter for the ruthless and ambitious regent, John Dudley, Duke of Northumberland, to play on those fears and persuade Edward to set aside his late father’s will and devise his own plan for the succession.

Through most of Edward’s six-year reign, Mary had fought a war of attrition. A great landed magnate in East Anglia, she avoided the court, playing no part in politics, which were driven by the ambition and greed of the key protagonists: first, Edward’s maternal uncle, Edward Seymour, Duke of Somerset, then, after his overthrow, by John Dudley, Earl of Warwick, who seized power late in 1549, sending his erstwhile rival to the scaffold two years later. A magnetic personality with several sons of his own, Warwick – soon created Duke of Northumberland – quickly gained ascendancy over Edward, who looked up to him with genuine admiration. Unlike Somerset, who kept the boy short of pocket money, Northumberland knew how to win Edward’s gratitude and loyalty, flattering him by listening to his opinions and giving him an illusion of a greater say in affairs, pandering to his rigid Protestant beliefs.

Somerset had been determined to carry the Reformation in England to its logical conclusion. In a few months he had virtually eradicated the seasonal rituals of the Church, abolishing the feast days and ceremonies and expunging prayers to individual saints. The existence of purgatory was denied, prayers for the dead were forbidden. The chantries and guilds, where Masses had been offered up for the dead, were destroyed, their wealth forfeit to the crown.

Over the next few years, the parish churches were systematically stripped of their Catholic furnishings: their high altars and side altars, their statues, rood screens and holy water stoups. The perpetrators embarked on an orgy of destruction. Exquisite gold and silver objects were smashed for easier transport; lovely carvings were hacked to pieces; richly coloured medieval wall paintings and the ‘Doom’ – the Last Judgement – above the altar whitewashed. Even as Edward lay dying, processions of carts were trundling towards London, replete with the last treasures of the old religion, lovingly lavished on the Church for centuries by a devout people and the pride of every parish.

There would be no need for such excess and distraction in the new, simplified Church of England. Now the pulpit took prominent place and the parishioners were expected to concentrate on the word; the emphasis was on the ear, on hearing the word of God, not on the vision or the senses. In March 1549 it was announced that the Latin Mass was to be replaced by a new communion service in English contained in Archbishop Cranmer’s first Book of Common Prayer, to come into effect at Whitsun; in 1552 a second, more radical, Prayer Book would replace it. The Mass was outlawed.

Mary refused to have anything to do with the new-fangled Prayer Book, continuing to have the old Latin Mass – her chief consolation in life – said in her household at least twice a day and welcoming any who wished to attend. Only the protection of her cousin, Emperor Charles, enabled her to flout the law so blatantly. Realizing, however, that Northumberland would be a much more ruthless opponent than Somerset, Mary raised the question of her escape with the Imperial ambassador, Van der Delft. Would the Emperor help her and give her refuge? Mary had always laboured under the illusion that Charles cared about her happiness and security, when in fact his support for her cause was only ever self-interested. She could be a useful tool in England to serve Habsburg interests; if she left England, she had no chance whatsoever of becoming Queen.

In the event, the escape plan went badly wrong. Mary was supposed to steal away in the night on a small trading vessel, which would come up the Blackwater to Maldon in Essex, near where she was staying, on the pretext of selling corn. The vessel was to take her out to the Imperial fleet lingering off Harwich, ostensibly on the hunt for pirates, for the crossing to Flanders. In response to local unrest and rumours that the Emperor was planning to invade England on Mary’s behalf, the country was in a heightened state of alert with roads, harbours and creeks carefully watched. Nevertheless, Mary could have made her escape if she had not dithered when it came to the crucial moment. She was still in the middle of her packing, she told the Imperial agent, Dubois, she needed more time. The controller of her household, Sir Robert Rochester, fuelled her fears, exaggerating the dangers. Dubois could wait no longer, slipping out of England as silently as he had entered. ‘What shall we do? What is to become of me?’ Mary kept repeating, once she realized that prevarication had lost her the chance of rescue.

She had no alternative than to make the best of the situation in England. She placed all her hopes on Edward’s coming of age and proving more reasonable than his Council, but in this she was to be sadly disabused. He was a cold, imperious little prig, promising to be every bit as autocratic as his father. She was shocked and saddened to receive a blistering letter from him accusing her of denying his sovereignty. Her crime was the more heinous because she was his sister, he told her, giving an unacceptable example to his subjects. ‘I will see my laws strictly obeyed,’ he concluded, ‘and those who break them shall be watched and denounced.’ It did not bode well for her future.

In March 1551 she reluctantly obeyed a summons to court, arriving at her London lodging, the Hospital of St John at Clerkenwell, attended by a vast train of gentlemen and ladies, all ostentatiously sporting a black rosary. It was a reminder, if any were needed, of her loyalty to the old religion. Her following was already referred to as the ‘Marian faction’. Londoners flocked to welcome her, showing the Council that she was as popular as ever.

She received a less fulsome welcome at court, where she was forced to defend herself during more than two hours of heated argument with Edward and the Council. She could not have broken his laws, she insisted, since as a minor he had not made those laws. ‘There are two things, body and soul,’ she told him. ‘Although my soul belongs to God, I offer my body to the King’s service; might it please him to take away my life rather than the old religion.’ Edward had no wish to make a martyr of his sister and any further moves against her were forestalled by the Emperor’s threat to declare war on England if Mary were forbidden to practise her religion. It was a bluff, but not one the English could afford to call.

It was all the more suspicious, therefore, when in February 1553 Northumberland suddenly switched tack and started courting Mary’s favour. When she visited the ailing Edward at court, the new Imperial ambassador told Charles, ‘the Duke of Northumberland and the members of the Council went to receive her even to the outer gate of the palace, and did duty and obeisance to her as if she had been Queen of England.’

Northumberland must already have guessed that Edward’s disease was fatal. His plan was to lull Mary into a false sense of security that, in the event of her brother’s death, she would be Queen with his assistance. It is unlikely that she was fooled even for a minute, as Northumberland systematically began making plans to hijack the crown. He was confident that he could manipulate the King to do his bidding when the time came. He was less sanguine about the Council, some of whose members actively disliked him, were wary of his ambition and suspicious of his intentions. The Imperial ambassador was keeping a close eye on Edward’s decline, while at the same time reporting to Charles the ominous news that Northumberland ‘has found means to ally and bind his son, my Lord Guildford, to the Duke of Suffolk’s eldest daughter, whose mother is the third heiress to the crown by the testamentary dispositions of the late King, and has no heirs male’. It did not take a genius to work out what this presaged.

Lady Jane Grey, eldest of three daughters of Lady Frances Brandon and Henry Grey, Marquis of Dorset and Duke of Suffolk in right of his wife, was a pert and precocious girl of fourteen. Her mother was Henry VIII’s niece, elder daughter of Mary, the Dowager Queen of France and Duchess of Suffolk; her father was a descendant of Edward IV’s commoner Queen, Elizabeth Woodville, whose first husband and the father of her two eldest sons had been a Grey. Jane was one of the best-educated women of the Tudor period: her education, a generation on from Mary’s, had been far more exacting, at the hands of reformist tutors from Cambridge University. Like Edward, she was a fervent Protestant. Indeed, she had never known or practised the old religion. She was already corresponding with notable Protestant scholars in Switzerland and learning Hebrew so that she could read the Old Testament in the original.

The only kindness and affection Jane seems to have received during her strict upbringing had been during a spell in the household of the Queen Dowager, Katherine Parr, who took the serious, studious girl under her wing. Katherine’s fourth husband, the dangerously volatile Lord Admiral Thomas Seymour, younger brother of Protector Somerset, had bought Jane’s wardship, promising her ambitious parents that he would marry her to the King. Of course, the scheme came to nothing, as he had neither the power nor the ability to bring it off. Fond as he was of Lady Jane, Edward had always maintained that when he married it would be to a foreign princess ‘well stuffed’. Somerset had had his troublesome brother executed for high treason after his failed attempt to capture the person of the King, and Jane was returned to her parents’ strict disciplinarian regime.

The Suffolks were not unusual in treating their daughter with severity, in an age that believed that to spare the rod was to spoil the child. Vives had recommended that daughters, in particular, needed a firm hand. Children were also expected to show their parents unquestioning obedience and deference. Jane was highly intelligent, articulate and opinionated and a little too forceful in voicing those opinions, often to the outrage of the adults around her.

When Mary thoughtfully sent her a gift of gorgeous fabric for a new gown for the visit of the Dowager Queen of Scotland, Mary of Guise, to the English court – a visit, incidentally, which Mary boycotted, to the irritation of Emperor Charles, who felt she showed poor political sense in not making an appearance – Jane, who affected the plain garb and lack of adornment of a Protestant maiden, turned her nose up, saying, ‘What shall I do with it?’ ‘Marry, wear it!’ one of her ladies reproved her. On another occasion in Mary’s private chapel, Jane asked her companion why she genuflected before the altar. When she explained that she was showing reverence before the sacrament – the Real Presence, according to Catholic theology – Jane mockingly asked how that could be, when the baker had made the communion bread that morning?

When the Lady Elizabeth’s Cambridge tutor, Roger Ascham, paid a visit to Jane at her home in Leicestershire, she assumed an air of superior disdain at the activities of her parents, who were hunting in the park, while she was curled up with a copy of Plato. She was a typical adolescent at odds with her parents, complaining to the sympathetic Ascham about her lot in life. She loved learning, she told him, because her tutor, John Aylmer, was such a pleasant contrast to her parents. Nothing she ever did pleased them.

For when I am in the presence of either Father or Mother, whether I speak, keep silence, sit, stand or go, eat, drink, be merry or sad, be sewing, playing, dancing, or doing anything else, I must do it as it were in such weight, measure and number, even so perfectly as God made the world; or else I am so sharply taunted, so cruelly threatened, yea presently sometimes with pinches, nips and bobs and other ways … that I think myself in hell.

When Northumberland offered his fifth and only unmarried son, Guildford, to the Suffolks for Jane’s hand, they had no hesitation in accepting, presumably because he was holding out the prospect of the crown for their daughter. Jane herself objected strongly to the proposed marriage, because she was already contracted to Lord Hertford, the eldest son of the late Duke of Somerset. When argument, blows and threats failed to sway her, her mother whipped her until Jane gave her sullen consent. Jane already disliked the Dudleys and, despite his tall, fair good looks, she was to find Guildford a spoilt, petulant Mummy’s boy.

A sumptuous double wedding between Jane and Guildford and her sister Catherine and Lord Herbert, son of Lord Pembroke, whom Northumberland wanted to woo as an ally, took place at Durham House on the Strand on Whit Sunday, 25 May 1553. Neither Mary nor Elizabeth was invited and by this time Edward was far too ill to attend. He could not sleep for a harsh, racking cough, he was running a continuous high fever, he had broken out in ulcers and his whole body had begun to swell. He showed his approval, however, by sending gifts of ‘rich ornaments and jewels’ to the brides and kitted out the company in gold and silver tissue and rich fabrics from the royal wardrobe. Jane wore a gown of gold and silver brocade embroidered with diamonds and pearls.

After the wedding she was ill and thankfully – for once – returned home with her mother. Pembroke, meanwhile, warned his son not to consummate the marriage with Lady Catherine, so that it might more easily be annulled: it was only the beginning of the strange marital history of this unfortunate young woman, who, ironically, was to end up making a secret, controversial marriage with her sister Jane’s cast-off fiancé, Lord Hertford, to become the distant ancestress of a twentieth-century queen regnant.

It was obvious to the Imperial ambassador that Northumberland was aiming at the crown and had decided to take up arms against Mary, using religion as an excuse. The matter was becoming international, because as Scheyfve warned the Emperor, Northumberland was prepared to barter Ireland to the French in exchange for their support. It was a short-term strategy, because, of course, the French King Henri II’s only concern was to advance the claim to the English throne of his son’s betrothed, Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots, granddaughter of Henry VIII’s elder sister, Margaret.

Not approving of his sister’s rackety marital history – a case of the pot calling the kettle black, if ever there was one – and angry at the Scots’ reluctance to betroth the infant Mary to his son Edward, Henry in his will had relegated Margaret’s descendants last in line of succession, after his own three children and the descendants of his younger sister, Mary, in the House of Suffolk. The Stuarts, after all, were foreigners, and he had no wish to see England become an appendage of their kingdom of Scotland. Indeed, it was this overturning of the natural order of succession by Henry VIII which probably put the idea of advancing the Suffolk line into Northumberland’s head in the first place.

It was all the prompting Charles needed to increase the Imperial diplomatic presence in England, sending Jehan de Montmorency, Sieur de Courrières, Jacques de Marnix, Sieur de Thoulouse and the career civil servant Simon Renard, the real leader of the group. Ostensibly they were to enquire after the King’s health, but in reality they were to do what they could, by tact, persuasion and propaganda, to ensure that Henri II was not given the means to turn England into a French province. They were to do all in their power to secure the crown for Mary Tudor, who could be relied on to uphold Habsburg interests. They were to remind Edward’s Council that England’s best interests had always been served by an Imperial alliance and that France was their ancient enemy. They were instructed to make contact with Mary, who was to make any necessary compromise concerning religion, even to keeping the status quo, and to promise to marry an Englishman of the Council’s choice, if that’s what it took to win the crown. In other words, she was to use political guile as a means to an end. It was not something which came naturally to her.

Northumberland had nearly everything in place for his intended takeover. The physicians had given up on Edward and rumours abounded that he was already dead, poisoned by Northumberland. To quell the rumours, Northumberland had the desperately sick boy with his shaven head held up at a window for the public to see. To buy the extra time needed to finalize his plans, he dismissed the physicians and brought in a female quack, who promised a quick cure. It seems that she was giving Edward potions containing arsenic, which prolonged life and greatly increased his suffering. His swollen body suddenly showed signs of gangrene at the extremities, his skin became discoloured, and his hair and nails fell out. It was agony for him to turn over in bed, as his body was covered in sores.

It remained to persuade Edward to sign the ‘Device for the Succession’ that Northumberland had drawn up. It was understandable that Edward would not want Mary to succeed him and overturn the Protestant state he had set his heart on, but Northumberland also had to persuade him to exclude the Protestant Elizabeth, his ‘Sweet Sister Temperance’. If Northumberland ever considered including Elizabeth in his schemes, he had dismissed them. Elizabeth Tudor was far too clever and independent and he knew that he would never be able to control and manipulate her, as he hoped to do with the younger and seemingly more compliant Jane. He managed to convince Edward that he could not exclude one sister and not the other, that they were both unworthy to succeed him, being bastards and of the half blood. Besides, they might endanger the kingdom’s independence by marrying foreign princes.

Lady Jane, on the other hand, was born in lawful wedlock, a good Protestant who shared Edward’s vision for England, and she was already married to an Englishman. It seems that Edward shared his father’s belief in the uselessness of women for sovereignty. The original idea was for him to leave the crown ‘to the Lady Frances’s heirs male if she hath any before my death’ and otherwise to ‘the Lady Jane’s heirs male’. But time had run out and there were no male heirs. Northumberland had persuaded Frances to cede her claim to her eldest daughter, conveniently married to his son, so that now the wording was easily altered from ‘the Lady Jane’s heirs male’ to ‘the Lady Jane [’s deleted] and her [insert] heirs male’.

When summoned to the dying King’s bedside to ratify the Device the Lord Chief Justice, Sir Edward Montague, the Solicitor-General and the Attorney General refused to do so. The Act of Succession of 1544, which gave Henry VIII the right to nominate his successors, made it treason to alter its provisions. As he was a minor, it was illegal for Edward VI, only sixteen at the time of his death, to make a will, while to allow the King a right to alter the succession without parliamentary approval was an unprecedented abuse of royal power. Edward expressed his extreme displeasure at the judges’ refusal to do his bidding and Northumberland threatened them with death unless they complied. They gave in. The Council was next summoned to the King’s bedside to swear to serve Queen Jane as their lawful sovereign. Archbishop Cranmer was one of the few who gave his consent to the Device willingly; most were bullied into doing so.

The final part of Northumberland’s takeover plan was to lure both Mary and Elizabeth to Greenwich on the pretext of seeing their dying brother. Once there, he would seize and imprison them, perhaps even put them to death. Elizabeth was fond of her brother, but not so fond that she was prepared to place herself in Northumberland’s power. She sent back an excuse that she was too ill to travel. Mary was torn. She wanted to go to her brother and offer what comfort she could. On 3 July, however, a friend at court warned her that it was a trap. She left her manor of Hunsdon in Hertfordshire next day, with the excuse that there was sickness in the household, but after travelling south as far as Hoddesdon, she suddenly turned tail and with a couple of ladies and a handful of gentlemen rode fast towards East Anglia with Northumberland’s fourth son, Lord Robert Dudley, in hot pursuit.

The rebellion had begun.

On the night of the 5th, Mary took refuge with Sir John Huddlestone at Sawston Hall near Cambridge, where Mass was defiantly celebrated. Next morning after she left, her pursuers set fire to the house. Watching the blaze, she promised the dismayed Huddlestone that she would build him a new and grander house. She continued towards Thetford disguised as a serving maid, riding pillion behind one of Huddlestone’s men. They covered the twenty-eight miles without stopping to Hengrave Hall, the home of the Earl of Bath near Bury St Edmunds. On 7 July she arrived at Euston Hall, near Thetford, the home of her friend, Lady Burgh. It was there that Robert Raynes, a City goldsmith apparently sent by Sir Nicholas Throckmorton at the instigation of William Cecil, caught up with her and advised her that her brother had died on the evening of 6 July. She found the gates of Norwich, the second city of the kingdom, closed to her, since the citizens had not had confirmation of the King’s death. She pressed on to Kenninghall, which was sufficiently close to the coast to permit her escape to Flanders in the last extremity.

There was no official announcement of the King’s death because Northumberland hoped to conceal it to gain more time; the only problem was what to do with the body, which was rapidly decomposing. There is a possibility that he had Edward buried hastily in some unmarked grave and a similar-looking boy substituted for the period of royal obsequies – interesting, in view of later ‘sightings’ of the boy-King, amid recurring rumours that he was not actually dead.

Before embarking on her flight, Mary had sent a message to Scheyfve informing him of her intentions. Showing a degree of resolution not apparent in her previous aborted escape, she was all for proclaiming herself Queen as soon as Edward’s death was confirmed, but the Imperial diplomats considered this unwise. Right from the start, they were pessimistic about Mary’s chances of success and thought that to declare herself Queen would be to provoke Northumberland. All the forces of the country, they believed, were in his hands and he would certainly send them against her if she gave him the excuse. It seemed that he held all the cards. ‘The actual possession of power was a matter of great importance,’ they maintained, ‘especially among barbarians like the English.’ Mary was unlikely to succeed, they told Charles, without help from abroad and they knew that the Emperor had no forces to spare. His overt interference would only draw in the French, making England a battlefield. Charles was quite resigned to her failure, indicating to his ambassadors that he would recognize Jane’s regime, while urging them to obtain some guarantees for Mary’s safety.

Meanwhile, the Duchess of Northumberland visited Lady Jane and told her that Edward had made her his heiress. It was the first indication the young woman had that her marriage was part of a nefarious scheme to wrest the crown from the rightful claimant. Later, she admitted to Mary that she was greatly disturbed and oppressed by the news. ‘For whereas I might take upon me that of which I was not worthy, yet no one can ever say that I sought it as my own, or that I was pleased with it or ever accepted it.’

On the evening of 9 July she was brought to Syon House, the former priory at Isleworth on the Thames which Northumberland had appropriated, where she was greeted by him and other leading nobles. They did her ‘such reverence as was not at all suitable to my state, kneeling down before me on the ground, and in many other ways making semblance of honouring me … acknowledging me as their sovereign lady’. She had a fit of hysterics, falling to the floor and bewailing the loss of Edward, then protesting that the crown was not hers by right. The company was just beginning to lose patience when she was persuaded to calm down and take her place under the canopy of estate.

The next day, Jane made her official entry into London to take up residence in the Tower, as was customary for a new sovereign. Pathetically, she had been made to wear wooden platform shoes, to make her look taller and more important. The Italian Baptisa Spinola watched her pass and, in lieu of an authenticated portrait, his description is the best we have of this ill-fated girl:

Today I saw Lady Jane Grey walking in grand procession to the Tower. She is now called Queen, but is not popular, for the hearts of the people are with Mary, the Spanish Queen’s daughter. This Jane is very short and thin, but prettily shaped and graceful. She has small features and a well-made nose, the mouth flexible and the lips red. The eyebrows are arched and darker than her hair, which is nearly red. Her eyes are sparkling and reddish brown in colour. I stood so near her grace that I noticed her colour was good but freckled. When she smiled she showed her teeth, which are white and sharp. In all a gracious and animated figure. She wore a dress of green velvet stamped with gold, with large sleeves. Her headdress was a white coif with many jewels. She walked under a canopy, her mother carrying her long train, and her husband Guildford walking by her, dressed all in white and gold, a very tall strong boy with light hair, who paid her much attention. The new Queen was mounted on very high chopines to make her look much taller, which were concealed beneath her robes, as she is very small and short. Many ladies followed, with noblemen, but this lady is very heretical and has never heard Mass, and some great people did not come into the procession for that reason.

Criers stood at the street corners declaring Mary’s unworthiness to be Queen, as a bastard and a Catholic, but according to Scheyfve few showed any sign of rejoicing and no one cried ‘Long live Queen Jane!’ other than the herald and a few archers accompanying him, who did so without conviction.

For once Mary had ignored Imperial advice and followed her own instincts. They served her well. Her route from Hunsdon across a large sweep of East Anglia to Kenninghall had been deliberately charted – probably by the senior men of her household, Sir Robert Rochester, Sir Francis Englefield, Henry Jerningham and Edward Waldegrave, gentlemen with an ‘affinity’ in the area – to take her to sympathizers from whose lands she could raise forces. Kenninghall itself had belonged to the Duke of Norfolk before his attainder at the end of her father’s reign and the many Howard retainers in the area were adherents of the old religion, so that they flocked to her support. On 9 July she received a second messenger at Kenninghall confirming Edward’s death. Mary now summoned her household and announced the end of Edward’s reign and the inauguration of her own. An East Anglian gentleman who witnessed the scene said that everyone present ‘cheered her to the rafters’.

Mary wrote to the lords of the Council in London commanding them ‘to cause our right and title to the crown and government of this realm to be proclaimed in our city of London’ and throughout the kingdom. Her letter was delivered to Northumberland on the evening of 10 July, in the middle of a great banquet at the Tower. It was read out to Jane and the assembled company, who sat in stunned silence. They had considered Mary a lone woman, a fugitive, who could be discounted. But Mary was not a Tudor and the granddaughter of the great Isabella for nothing. She had evaded capture and defiantly thrown down the gauntlet.

Mary’s proclamation was her first formal action as queen regnant. She now began to assemble her Council, consisting of the leading men of her household – Sir Robert Rochester, Henry Jerningham, Edward Waldegrave, Robert Strelly, Sir Thomas Wharton and others – loyal and devoted followers of long standing. For the conduct of the war she would need to enlarge the Council to include military advisers, peers and gentlemen, whose tenants and servants would form the nucleus of an army. Messengers went out to invite all the gentlemen of the surrounding countryside to come to Kenninghall to swear fealty to their sovereign lady. This produced the likes of Sir Henry Bedingfield of Oxburgh Hall, who eventually became Captain of the Queen’s Guard. Sir Richard Southwell, who possessed thirty manors between Swaffham and Norwich, brought reinforcements of men, provisions and cash. Other gentlemen of substance followed suit and the city of Norwich declared for Mary as soon as it received confirmation of Edward’s death and sent men and money. On 12 July the whole force moved to the great fortress of Framlingham in Suffolk.

Northumberland could not afford to ignore Mary’s challenge. He wrote an insolent letter reminding her that Parliament had declared her a bastard and therefore not fit to wear the crown – a blatant disregard for the Act of Succession of 1544. He warned her to ‘cease your pretence to vex and molest any of our sovereign lady Queen Jane’s subjects, drawing them from the true faith and allegiance due unto Her Grace’. He was aware that every day Mary remained at large, her following grew. Knowing that the Council’s support was grudging and unreliable, Northumberland was reluctant to leave London. ‘The Duke’s difficulty is that he dares trust no one,’ Charles’s envoys reported, ‘for he has never given anyone reason to love him.’

He was ‘the best manne of warre in the realme’, already so feared in East Anglia, owing to his savage repression of Kett’s Rebellion in Norfolk in 1549, that it was believed ‘none durst once lift up their weapon against him’. In the circumstances, however, he had decided to send the Duke of Suffolk in his stead to defeat Mary’s forces. Hearing this, Jane started to cry, begging that her father stay with her in the Tower, and the Council joined her in urging Northumberland to lead the army he had mustered against Mary.

Meanwhile, Simon Renard was working behind the scenes to undermine Northumberland, exploiting the disaffection felt by many on the Council. Unknown to his colleagues, Northumberland had been in secret talks with the French ambassador, Antoine de Noailles, and was prepared to exchange Calais and the remaining English territory in France for the loan of French troops – ironic, since it was to be Mary who earned the opprobrium of losing Calais. On the 12th Renard warned two counsellors, Sir John Mason and Lord Cobham, that the only intention of the French was ‘to stir up trouble and place Mary Stuart on the throne’. It must have given them pause for thought, because they started to collude with supporters of Mary on the Council. Next morning, even before Northumberland left London, they summoned Renard for talks; the revolution behind Northumberland’s back had begun. Only Suffolk’s threats and the fear of Northumberland’s wrath if he returned in triumph kept the Imperialist party on the Council from proclaiming Mary Tudor Queen at once.

When Northumberland left London with his troops on the 14th, he was all too aware as he passed through the streets of Shoreditch that the crowds were silent. ‘The people press to see us,’ he observed, ‘but not one sayeth God spede us.’ Even so, the Imperial envoys were writing to Charles that day: ‘We believe that my Lady will be in his hands in four days’ time … he is strong on land and by sea.’ Indeed, Northumberland had sent five warships to the east coast to prevent Mary’s escape, but he had reckoned without Henry Jerningham’s going to Yarmouth and persuading the crews to mutiny in favour of Mary.

As he rode towards Cambridge, Northumberland found the land strangely empty of men to recruit, while gradually his troops began to desert. His son Robert, who had a small affinity in Norfolk as a result of his marriage to Amy Robsart of Syderstone and Wyndonham, had been captured by Mary’s supporters at King’s Lynn. News of spontaneous uprisings in other parts of the country began to reach Northumberland and depress morale. By the time he reached Bury St Edmunds, only thirty miles from Framlingham, he realized that he was so heavily outnumbered by Mary’s forces – which were believed to number at least 15,000 – that he was forced to retreat to Cambridge.

On the 19th the Imperial envoys were writing to Charles that Mary’s ‘forces were reported to be increasing every day, for some helped with money, others with provisions, others with troops and others with ammunition’. That same day, Sir John Mason and Lord Shrewsbury came to tell them the extraordinary news that the majority of the Council had declared for Mary. The Lord Mayor and aldermen of London were commanded to have Mary proclaimed Queen throughout the City. ‘There was such a shout of people that the style of the proclamation could not be heard,’ the London citizen, Henry Machyn, recounted in his diary. An Italian reported that the news was all the more marvellous for being so unexpected. ‘Men ran hither and thither, bonnets flew into the air, shouts rose higher than the stars, fires were lit on all sides, and all the bells were set a-pealing … The people went mad with joy, feasting and singing, and the streets were crowded all night long.’ Northumberland’s erstwhile ally, Lord Pembroke, threw capfuls of gold coins into the crowd, thinking it a good investment.

Lords Arundel and Paget left London that evening in order to deliver the Great Seal of England to Mary. They found her next day at Framlingham, reviewing her troops, having dismounted ‘a frisky white charger’ to walk among the men. Admitted to her presence, they threw themselves on their knees and begged her forgiveness for their disloyalty in supporting Jane, symbolically holding out their daggers with the points towards their stomachs. Mary was always inclined to be merciful to those who had committed offences against herself – as opposed to offences against God and His Holy Church – and readily forgave them. She then invited the household into the chapel, where a crucifix had defiantly been set up on the altar, for a Te Deum, giving thanks to God that the crown was hers without bloodshed. It was a miracle, she concluded, and God must have saved her for His own great purpose.

The coup d’état that brought Mary to power was the only successful rebellion of the Tudor period. It was a pity that she did not stop to appreciate that she had achieved this victory through her own initiative and courage, as well as the loyalty and support of her people. She owed little or nothing to the Emperor, but as the French ambassador shrewdly surmised, she was unwilling ‘to recall that in all her own miseries, troubles and afflictions, as well as those of the Queen, her mother, the Emperor never came to their assistance, nor has he helped her now in her great need with a single man, ship, or penny’. She would continue to depend on Charles, even though she had shown that she had no need of him.

In London, Jane found herself almost deserted in the Tower. As she sat at supper, her father strode into her presence chamber and tore down the canopy of estate, muttering that such things were not for her. After declaring for Queen Mary on Tower Green, he and his wife went home, leaving their daughter locked in the Tower to face whatever fate their heedless actions had brought her to. William Cecil, secretary to Northumberland and the Council, had never agreed with the illegal usurpation of the crown, and now carefully altered the document before him to read ‘Jana non Regina’.

What amazed the Imperial and French ambassadors was the role ‘the people’ had played in recent events. They were impressed by the fact that ‘the English third estate seemed to have a mind of its own’. The English might be ‘barbarians’, but they had an innate sense of what was right and wrong. Legality mattered to them. They were not prepared to see the lawful succession overturned by a tyrant like Northumberland. Although she was half Spanish, a Catholic and known to identify strongly with Imperial interests, Mary was hailed with joy by patriots and Protestants alike, not least because everyone suspected something of how close Northumberland had come to selling his country to the French. Even a woman ruler – whatever handicaps her sex might bring – was preferable to a usurper. Mary was their rightful sovereign, the daughter of old King Henry VIII, and they had always held her in special affection.

‘Vox populi, vox Dei’: the voice of the people is the voice of God. It was something Queen Mary would do well to remember in the challenging times ahead.