Guildford Dudley is a difficult historical phenomenon to pin down. His fame rests on the events of a few weeks in the summer of 1553, but these came about in circumstances so unpredictable, so unusual, that everything about his life which precedes them is simply a blank. Guildford has an approximate birthdate; we can guess where he may have been born and raised; a couple of details survive about the education of his siblings. Beyond that, as a member of a large family, intended for some minor role at court, administrating a country estate or some aspect of royal service, he would have left a slender trace of dates: birth, marriage, parentage, promotion, inheritance, service and death. There are no biographical anecdotes about his character or achievements, his ambitions or efforts. Of course, he most certainly did live a full life before the summer of 1553, probably a life typical for a boy of his time, spent in lessons, sports and duty to his king and parents. He just did so in a way that went unrecorded. He was not his father’s heir, or even the spare heir. As the seventh or eighth son born in the family, he was unlikely to inherit much or to distinguish himself, let alone aim at the throne. Nor does any evidence survive to suggest that he was talented in any particular field – but nor does such evidence survive for his brother Robert, who was to become one of the leading statesmen of Elizabeth’s reign. Guildford’s fame was accidental. It was the result of being in a certain place at a certain time, of being the only unmarried son of the Duke of Northumberland in June 1553. His premature death was equally surprising. Just when it seemed that he might have been saved, events beyond his control hastened his end. He may not have fought in battle but he was as much a casualty of dynastic conflict for the throne as Edmund of York in 1460 and Edward, Prince of Wales in 1471. If anything, certain circumstances of his fate parallel the experience of Edward V: both were raised to kingship as a result of their parentage, unable to play an active part in their fates and awaited their end in the Tower. Both were lost kings of England, lost lives and lost opportunities.
For the members of the reformed faith, Edward VI’s death put the spiritual welfare of England in peril. By 1553, the Book of Common Prayer had been established for three years and the colourful panoply of Catholicism dismantled. Churches looked different inside, methods of worship had changed, as had important rites of passage like christenings, marriage and funerals. The old stone altars had been broken up and taken away, to be replaced by a more low-key wooden table, and the glittering candles and jewels of saints’ shrines no longer attracted the prayers of the infirm, asking for their intercession with God. Since Henry VIII had begun to dissolve the monasteries in the 1530s, a new generation of men had taken positions of power, raised in the new religion, reading the works of prominent European Protestants and pushing through reform with Edward VI’s approval. But the terms of Henry VIII’s will named Edward’s successor as his elder sister, Mary, whose ardent Catholicism had led her into conflict with her brother. It was partly to prevent these recent religious reforms from being undone that Guildford Dudley’s brief moment in the limelight came about.
Following the execution of Edmund Dudley in 1510, the family had slowly improved their fortunes. Edmund’s son John had become the ward of Sir Edward Guildford, of Halden in Kent, and grown up in his household, later marrying Guildford’s daughter Jane. Named after his mother’s side of the family, Guildford was the second youngest surviving son of his parents’ thirteen children, arriving at some point in 1535. The family’s bases of Dudley Castle in the West Midlands and Ely Place in London would have defined his childhood, which passed in the usual occupations of sons of the aristocracy: in sports and physical training and an education based on the classical tenets, with a Protestant slant. He would have shared lessons with the brothers who were closest to him in age: John, who arrived in around 1527, Ambrose in 1530, Henry in 1531 and Robert in 1532. He would have benefited from the building works that took place to modernise Dudley Castle in the 1540s and enjoyed hunting, shooting and riding in the surrounding countryside. When they visited London, it would have been to stay in the large and impressive palace of the bishops of Ely in Holborn, of which an eighteenth-century map shows an entrance gate and courtyard beside a walled garden, leading through to a great hall surrounded by service rooms, then a cloister around a quadrangle, joined on to St Etheldreda’s chapel, which overlooked fields. Little else is known about Guildford’s early years apart from the fact that he was described in Grafton’s chronicle as a ‘comely, virtuous and goodly gentleman’.
In 1552, when he was around 17, Guildford’s father, the Earl of Warwick, now Duke of Northumberland, had suggested Lady Margaret Clifford as a potential bride for his son. This would have been a good match for Guildford, as Margaret was a direct descendant of Henry VII, being his great-granddaughter through the line of Princess Mary, also Queen of France, and Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk. Mary had borne two sons who died prematurely and two daughters, Frances and Eleanor. Frances had married Henry Grey, Marquis of Dorset and borne three girls, while Eleanor married Henry Clifford, Earl of Cumberland whom she gave two boys, who also died young, and a single daughter, Margaret. She was 12 in 1552. On 4 July, the Council wrote to both Northumberland and Clifford, encouraging them to ‘grow some good end concerning the marriage between the Lord Guildford and his daughter’.1 Edward VI had thought it a good match and encouraged Northumberland, but the bride’s family objected.2 This failed attempt indicates that the duke was more interested in making a good match for his son than in the royal succession, as the three unmarried Grey sisters had a senior claim to that of Margaret, and yet Northumberland initially preferred the Clifford marriage. Dudley’s three older sons were already married, indicating that the duke was keen o, and Guildford had reached the salient age, so his alliance did not come out of the blue.
The question of Northumberland’s motives has long exercised historians, who have painted him as many things from ruthlessly ambitious to cautiously reactive. In April 1553, when Edward VI’s condition worsened, Northumberland’s actions seemed to suggest that he saw Princess Mary as her brother’s successor. He maintained a regular communication with her about the king’s health and restored her full status, title and arms as a princess of England, which her father had denied her in the 1530s. Mary had every reason to believe that the duke would be loyal to her cause once the death of her brother left the way open for her succession. The duke found a bride for his unmarried son the same month, and the imperial ambassador recorded that ‘during the last few days, the Duke has found means to ally and bind his son, my Lord Guildford, to the Duke of Suffolk’s eldest daughter.’3 On 28 April, the betrothal of Guildford Dudley and Lady Jane Grey was announced at court, and received the approval of king and Council.
And yet the bride herself was reluctant. Having been born in late 1536 or early 1537, Jane was then 16, an ardent Protestant devoted to her studies. She had received a humanist education, studying Latin, Greek, Hebrew and Italian, which was still rare for aristocratic women, although it was gaining ground in certain circles. She had also lived for a time, in 1547–48, in the household of Catherine Parr, known for her reformist influence, and had served as chief mourner at her funeral in September 1548. The dramatist Nicholas Udall relates in his translation of Erasmus’s Paraphrase on the Four Gospels that ‘a great number of noble women in that time in England were given to the study of human sciences and strange tongues.’4 A visiting Roger Ascham famously discovered Jane at the family home of Bradgate Park, in Leicestershire, reading alone while the others had gone hunting. Giulio Raviglio Rosso adds that violence and persuasion were brought to bear upon the girl: ‘urged by the mother, and beat by the father, she was required to content herself.’5
Guildford was not the first husband suggested for her. In 1541 the French ambassador had proposed that she marry Charles, Duke of Orléans, the third son of Francis I, which would have placed her in the line of succession to the French throne, but the young man died of the plague in 1545. In 1551 another union was raised, closer to home. Edward Seymour, Duke of Somerset saw Jane as a potential bride for his eldest son Edward, Earl of Hertford, the king’s cousin. This idea may have been abandoned as a result of Somerset’s fall from grace, but his son went on to conduct a secret marriage with Jane’s cousin, Catherine Grey, which resulted in their imprisonment in the Tower. Even at 16, Jane did not seem ready to become a wife or, perhaps, specifically the wife of Guildford, as she responded by ‘strongly deprecating such marriage’.6
The match seems to have been the work of the two fathers. Henry Grey was in favour, and his wife’s cherished hopes that Jane might marry Edward VI were clearly now impossible. But Frances was close to her cousin Princess Mary and unwilling to usurp her place in the succession. Another family friend, William Parr, Marquis of Northampton, lent his support to the union of Jane and Guildford, although probably more for personal reasons of his own. Parr’s first marriage had been declared invalid and he eventually married his long-term mistress, Elisabeth Brooke, finally setting up home with her in 1551, but the couple feared that if Mary came to throne and restored the old Catholic ways, their marriage would be considered invalid. Indeed, they were right to fear this, as Mary did later declare the marriage bigamous and ordered them to separate. Elisabeth was forced to live on the charity of friends and William was ordered to return to his first wife; if he lived again with Elisabeth he would be executed for bigamy. Foreseeing this eventuality in 1553, the pair urged Northumberland and Grey forward in their mission.
No fan of Northumberland, Giulio Raviglio Rosso takes up the narrative with his own interpretation of the duke’s motives:
The Duke having understood the judgment of the physicians, and finding himself with that great authority which he had in the city, immediately designed, any time that it might please God to call Edward to Himself, to seek to raise himself to be master in that realm, as the evidence itself showed clearly thereafter, focusing more sharply on that objective, where his own unjust desire lay, than on any part of his duty, which was very great. And with this intention he determined to give his … son to the first born of the Duke of Suffolk, named Jane.7
It may be that ambition drove the duke, who had been in a position of unparalleled power in recent years. As Jane’s father-in-law, he would be able to control her and retain the position that he was almost certain to lose under Mary, as historian Nicola Tallis believes.8 Eric Ives caricatures the usual ‘script’, the subsequent historical interpretations of Northumberland’s role, with the lines ‘enter Mephistopheles … dragging with him the teenage Jane Grey whom he has forced to marry his son Guildford.’ Around the duke was a ‘gaggle of noble sycophants cowed into supporting him’ until the people rose up to prevent his ‘machinations’ and ‘Jane and Guildford, innocent victims, go to the Tower and death.’9 However, the duke’s recent illness in 1552–53 and his slowness in acting to quash Mary when she attempted to assert her claim have been interpreted by others, including Derek Wilson, as evidence that he would have been happy to relinquish the reins of power and retreat into a quiet retirement.10 It may well have been ambition, though, which drove Jane’s father. Robert Wingfield comments that ‘the timid and trustful duke therefore hoped to gain a scarcely imaginable haul of immense wealth and greater honour of his house from this match, and readily followed Northumberland’s wishes.’11
Yet Rosso was also of the opinion that the former illegitimacy of princesses Mary and Elizabeth was an important concern, even though they had been restored to their places by Henry VIII’s third Act of Succession in 1544. Their inheritance, according to Rosso’s account of Northumberland’s arguments, would create disorder in the realm. The question of their faith appears briefly at the end and reminds us that it is difficult to know how far the duke was a realist, or an idealist, when it came to religion:
… this occasion might be a good device for conducting at last his scheme by those means, and ways, that he carried out thereafter: of which the first, that he used, was, that the infirmity continuing in the King, and the illness worsening more every hour, the Duke persuaded him to make a will, putting it to him as a matter conscience before the eyes, that, when it might please God to call him to Himself, it was an honest thing, and very proper, that he might leave some order to that realm, so that in the future quiet could continue to exist, as it had done in the years passed, and pointing out to him the damage, that the said realm would suffer, whatever time he might leave of it to those heirs either Mary or Elizabeth, his sisters; because the one herself, and the other were declared bastards by state Parliament; and for the relatives of them, which they would possibly have to make with foreigners, as well as on account of religion.12
Exactly what Guildford made of this is unknown. No record survives of his being reluctant, as it does with Jane, but the information surviving about his life, let alone his thoughts and feelings, is almost prohibitively thin. Presumably he was raised as an obedient and dutiful son and it would have been his duty to marry the woman his father chose for him. Jane was a good match. He was marrying into the royal family. She was educated and intelligent; she was a Protestant and, reputedly, beautiful, if rather short. An anonymous witness who saw her in the Tower of the London that summer described her as ‘a beautiful young woman, pretty and endowed with intelligence, educated and well-dressed’, while chronicler Richard Grafton, who knew her, stated that she was a ‘fair lady whom nature had so not only beautified, but God also had endowed with singular gifts’.13 On paper, Guildford appears to have had no cause for complaint, but paper does not take into account the vagaries of the human heart. And yet, had Guildford already been in love, or chosen his own sweetheart, he may have had cause to hope for a marriage of affection, or a ‘carnal’ marriage as it was then known, just as his parents had enjoyed. John and Jane Dudley had married for love and had permitted their son Robert to wed Amy Robsart for the same reason in 1550. Had there been an existing preference on Guildford’s side, they may have been sympathetic, but that is assuming this was a normal marriage, under normal circumstances. The dynastic and religious problems arising in the summer of 1553 were anything other than ‘normal,’ if such a thing can be defined. As Edward VI lay dying, he urged his Council to honour his change to the succession to prevent a national lapse into Catholicism, and the Duke of Northumberland was Edward’s loyal servant. Whether the duke planted the seed of the idea in the king’s mind, or was responding to Edward’s initiative, will probably never be known.
On 25 May 1553, the Feast of the Holy Spirit, three weddings were held in the chapel of Durham Place, an impressive former bishops’ seat on the Strand, which Northumberland had recently acquired. In 1380 the building had maintained twelve chaplains to celebrate divine service and a contemporary description of it includes a vaulted chamber under the chapel, a solar by the chapel entrance and two separate chambers within the vestibule of the chapel itself. There was also a large garden, of about two acres, extending down to the River Thames, which was no doubt utilised for the wedding celebrations. The great hall abutted the river, and was described around 1592 as ‘stately and high, supported with loftie marble pillers. It standeth upon the Thamise very pleasantly’. As recently as April 1551, Durham Place had lodged the French ambassador, when it was well provisioned and ‘richly hanged … and had at his cominge ready sett in the court of the same, for a present from the Kinges Maiestie, certeine fatt oxen, calves, sheepe, lambes and all manner of wyld foule of every sorte, a certain [number] all alive, and also of all manner of freshe fyshe of the best that might be gotten, with wyne allso in his cellar’.14
The day was a significant Dudley-Grey affair, with two pairs of siblings getting married. As well as Guildford marrying Jane, both his and Jane’s sister were also wed. Catherine Dudley was the youngest of Northumberland’s children and possibly still underage when she was united to Henry Hastings, Earl of Huntingdon. A clause in the will of Jane Dudley, who died in 1555, suggests that Catherine was under 12, allowing for the match to be dissolved ‘if it so chance that my Lord Hastings do refuse her or she him’.15 Hastings was then around 17 and had been educated alongside Edward VI. The pair did not repudiate each other in the end, but lived together as man and wife from at least 1559, inheriting the Huntingdon title, although they remained childless. The third couple to marry at Durham House on that summer day in 1553 were Catherine Grey and Henry, Lord Herbert, heir to the Earl of Pembroke. Catherine was definitely 12, nearly 13, having been born in August 1540 and Henry was perhaps a year or two older. Their marriage was not made permanent, though, being dissolved the following year by Pembroke after the Dudley family had fallen from favour. In something of a marital coup, the third Grey daughter, Mary, was also betrothed on this occasion, to a distant relative, Arthur Grey, Lord Grey de Wilton.
King Edward was unable to attend the wedding because of his failing health but he sent Guildford and Jane wedding gifts including cloth of gold, silver, purple, black, crimson and white fabric, a collar of great pearls and enamelled flowers, thirteen table diamonds set in gold, enamelled black, a gold girdle and many other jewelled ornaments.16 The king also gave permission for Northumberland’s brother, Sir Andrew Dudley, his Master of the Wardrobe, to organise the wedding clothes. Jane wore a purple wedding dress with gold and silver brocade, embroidered with pearls and diamonds, her hair hanging loose. Frances, the mother of the bride, was provided with a ‘loose gown of black velvet, embroidered’, while Guildford’s mother Jane was also given clothes and jewels, as was the Marchioness of Northampton, Elisabeth Brooke, second wife of William Parr, who had supported the match.17 But some of the clothing had a macabre heritage, having been forfeited to the king by Edward Seymour, Duke of Somerset, who had gone to his death in the Tower seventeen months before.
There were jousts, games and two masques, one for men and one for women, accompanied by feasting in the great hall. Rosso recorded that it was a ‘very splendid, and royal, wedding, with a large gathering of people, and of the principal [people] of the realm’, among whom the Venetian and French ambassadors were guests. The only sour note was the severe food poisoning experienced by Guildford and a few others after a cook made a mistake when preparing a salad, ‘plucking one leaf for another’.18 He appears to have still been ill in the middle of June. Even if he had not been unwell, it may have been decided that the wedding was not to be consummated at once on account of the couple’s tender age. Jane’s biographer, Nicola Tallis, believes that the pair did share a bed during this time, however, to ensure that the match was legally binding.19
Guildford and Jane remained together at Durham Place, which was now the main Dudley residence in London. It was probably there that Northumberland informed them about the change in Edward’s will and his choice of Jane as queen. This is likely to have happened soon after the king drafted the new document on 21 June and although she had been aware of her former position in the succession, the sudden promotion above her cousins and aunts was unexpected. As she later deposed, the news ‘caught me quite unaware’ and ‘very deeply upset me’.20 Jane wished to leave Durham Place and go to her mother but she was forbidden from doing so. Soon afterwards she fell ill and was given permission to go to Old Manor, Chelsea, now owned by Northumberland, where she had formerly spent happy months living with Catherine Parr. What role Guildford played in this is unclear. It is unlikely that we will ever know whether he was his father’s instrument or if he felt any degree of compassion for Jane. Did they have a personal connection? Had intimacy established a friendship between them? Or did Guildford see her as his ticket to the throne? The truth probably includes elements of all these possibilities. In the absence of contradictory evidence, it seems that Guildford is likely to have followed the example set by his older brothers. The Northumberland-Suffolk coup was a family affair, drawing in John, Henry, Ambrose and Robert Dudley, who would stand by their father and suffer imprisonment with him.
On 4 July, the imperial ambassador Jehan Scheyfve wrote to the emperor to explain the current situation. He had heard that ‘the King of England has made a will, appointing as true heir to the Crown, after his death, Suffolk’s eldest daughter, who has married my Lord Guilford, son of the Duke of Northumberland.’ Naturally leaning towards support of the Catholic Church and Princess Mary, the emperor’s cousin, Scheyfve was concerned to hear that ‘the Princess has been expressly excluded on religious grounds and because she is asserted to have disobeyed the King and his Council, and infringed the decrees of Parliament.’ Mary had been popular with the English people for decades, as had her mother, Catherine of Aragon, whose cruel treatment by Henry VIII had not been forgotten. The ambassador captured the various rumours that were flying about the court, that the Duke of Suffolk, Jane’s father, was to succeed and that Mary was to be reclassified as a bastard, although Northumberland had recently restored her to her former legitimate position. He believed that the Council had agreed to the changes in Edward’s will ‘rather out of fear than for any other reason’ and that it had ‘demurred and made many difficulties before consenting’. He implied that Mary’s exclusion had been achieved by bribery, that Edward was leaving legacies of thousands of pounds to ensure compliance, which Northumberland was supplementing with gifts of his own.
On the same day, 4 July, princesses Mary and Elizabeth had both been summoned to court by Edward’s Council, supposedly to comfort their brother during his last illness. Scheyfve feared that the Council would seize Mary as soon as Edward died, and so she had been warned to retreat from her present residence at Hunsdon and establish herself in the countryside, at Framlingham Castle in Suffolk. Framlingham was 60 miles from London, well-fortified, among an established Catholic support base and close enough to the coast in case the princess needed to flee the country. Six warships were awaiting Mary’s instructions, two at Leigh and four at Woolwich.21 However, the ambassador was concerned that Northumberland was also arming himself to be prepared for a challenge to the changes in the king’s will:
The Duke of Northumberland has 500 men wearing his livery, the Duke of Suffolk 300 and the other councillors numbers proportionate to their rank and importance; and they have bought up all the arms and armour in the kingdom, not only enough for their own use, but all they could find for sale, in order to keep it out of the hands of the Princess’ friends. The result is that every one is murmuring against Northumberland, saying he is a great tyrant, that he has poisoned the King, and wishes to plunge the kingdom into disturbances and hand it over to the French.22
In addition, Scheyfve reported that pressure was being exerted upon the clerics in the Council who could prove sympathetic to Mary and her faith: ‘The preachers and priests have once more been made to sign certain articles, and they are told that unless they abide by them they shall be deprived of their benefices and pensions, and imprisoned and chastised in exemplary fashion into the bargain.’23 But the duke had yet to make a move: ‘Northumberland is still behaving courteously towards the Princess, as if nothing were about to happen.’24
The French ambassadors Jehan de Montmorency and Jacques de Marnix added their voices to Scheyfvre’s on 7 July. They were as yet unaware that Edward had died, but speculated that Northumberland might be responsible for administering poison to the king:
We have heard that the King has been caused to make a will by which he has appointed heir to the Crown the eldest daughter of the late Duke of Suffolk, who has been married to my Lord Guilford, younger son of the Duke of Northumberland … He has reinforced the watch in London and at the Tower, and has sought to justify his ambition to get the Crown for his son, by prevailing upon the King and most of the Council to act in such a manner that he may not incur the same blame as if he had grasped the Crown himself, and may avoid the suspicion, which is hanging over him, of having poisoned the King, or caused him to be poisoned.25
Exactly what frantic discussions took place behind closed doors in the Council chamber during Edward’s last hours cannot be known beyond what survives in the form of the king’s own device for the succession. Until Edward passed away, both sides carefully watched each other and waited.
When Edward did die, on 6 July, the news was kept a secret. It was not a very well-kept secret, though, and at least one messenger slipped out of the palace to ride and inform Princess Mary. The king’s death had been so long anticipated, and prefaced by so much speculation, that those close to the court did not take long to work out that it had finally happened. While writing their joint letter to the emperor on the following day, the imperial and French ambassadors noted:
While we were writing the above, the Lord Admiral of England, accompanied by the Treasurer and the Earl of Shrewsbury, took over the command of the Tower of London. This would seem to confirm the news of the King’s death, as also the fact that the Council have met in an unwonted place, into which the secretaries were not admitted. Several persons have been sent off in divers directions, it is believed to close the passages. Three or four warships have sailed towards the mouth of the Thames.26
Two days later, the ambassadors informed the emperor that ‘the Council concealed from us the fact of the King’s death, which is nonetheless true and generally known,’ in order to ‘gain time’ to have Jane ‘sworn and accepted as Queen, as the late King’s will directs’.27 By extension, if Jane was queen, Guildford was king, or consort, and his subsequent efforts to be recognised as such suggest that this was not as unwelcome to him as it was to his wife. On 9 July, the archers of the guard swore the oath of loyalty to Jane and were informed that:
the Lady Mary, was not fit to succeed because of the divorce that had separated her father, King Henry, from her mother, Queen Catherine … Lady Mary was unable to administer the kingdom, being a woman and of the old religion; and mutations and changes might take place that would cause the ruin of the country.28
This gender-based motivation for the new device for the succession was echoed in events that took place between Jane and Guildford in the following days.
On 9 July, Jane was summoned from Old Manor at Chelsea, to Northumberland’s house of Syon, formerly the abbey. There she was greeted and banqueted, and found the Council awaiting her, probably the duke and Guildford too, joining forces to persuade her to accept the throne and briefing her about the coming days.29 The following afternoon, attended by a ‘noble train of both sexes’,30 Guildford accompanied Jane by boat to the Tower, perhaps with apprehension, perhaps excitement, as the crown was almost within his reach. At around four or five o’clock, they made a ceremonial entrance, ‘with accustomed pomp’,31 and were greeted by Northumberland, the Council, the Tower’s constables and prominent citizens. Jane’s train was carried by her mother and, Machyn adds, all the guns were set off and there was a great report of the trumpets. Guildford walked alongside her, his cap in his hand. The extravagant descriptions of the pair, reputed to have been recorded by the Genovese merchant Baptista Spinola, who claimed to have been close enough to see the freckles on Jane’s face, frequently repeated in accounts of her life were, in fact, a work of fiction created by an historical novelist in 1909.32
A proclamation was issued on Jane’s behalf, stating her new queenship in accordance to the will of Edward VI. Criers on the street corners ‘published an order given under the Great Seal of England, … which, by the new Queen’s authority’, repeated the bastardy of Mary and Elizabeth and the fears of a foreign alliance. ‘However’, added Scheyfvre, ‘no one present showed any sign of rejoicing, and no one cried: “Long live the Queen!” except the herald who made the proclamation and a few archers who followed him.’33 An apprentice named Gilbert Potter was brave, or foolish, enough to cry out in response that Mary was the rightful queen, for which he lost his ears. 34 On the same day, the ambassadors were formally briefed ‘that the new King and Queen are to be proclaimed this very day in the Tower of London and at Westminster; and we have heard that the Council have quite decided not to allow the Lady Mary to succeed’.35
The crown was conveyed to Jane’s apartments from the jewel house for her to try on, upon which William Paulet said that she ‘could take it without fear and that another also should be made, to crown [her] husband’.36 Jane had not expected this, and it raised a source of contention between herself and her young husband. One of the driving forces behind Edward VI’s alterations to his will, and to religion, was the fear of handing the country over to the rule of a woman, Mary or Elizabeth, who might then make a foreign marriage. England would then come under the control of a prince of France or Spain, and the country would lose its autonomy and, depending upon the queen’s choice of husband, its new religious stance might be compromised, even undone. Yet there was no male heir in the immediate line of descent from Mary, Duchess of Suffolk, as only daughters had survived. Edward had made provision for the inheritance of male heirs borne by Jane and her sisters, but the need was more immediate.
To Northumberland, the perfect solution had presented itself in the importation, by marriage, of a young aristocratic English man who had already reached adulthood. Hence Guildford’s union with Jane was as much about preventing the threat of a foreign king, as it was about religion and his father’s ambition. Clearly, he had been privy to the intentions of Edward’s device but his wife had not. Jane does not seem to have realised this until she tried the crown, and her reluctance was to prove a stumbling block. She informed Guildford that if he was to become king, it would be by an Act of Parliament; in the interim, she offered him the Duchy of Clarence. As the ambassadors related to the emperor:
Guilford tried to induce his wife to cede her right to the Crown to him, so that he might not only be consort and administrator [administrateur], but king in person, intending to have himself confirmed as such by Parliament. But she refused to do so, and gave him the title of Duke of Clarence, which is reserved for the younger son of the king. He already had himself addressed as ‘Your Grace’ and ‘Your Excellency,’ sat at the head of the Council board, and was served alone.37
Guildford was caught in a difficult position between his parents and his wife. Determined to assert the majesty he felt was his due, according to the ambassadors, he dined in state, alone, and attempted to preside over Council meetings. Their report is based on rumour, though, as they were not present in the Tower and did not have access to Guildford or his immediate circle. Scheyfvre spoke little English and was dependent upon reports from other ambassadors and merchants. Their value lies in recording the chaotic mood of the moment, as contemporaries in London watching events unfold. The extent to which Jane’s refusal angered Guildford’s mother is clear from her order that he should desist from sleeping with her until she complied, and urged him to return to Syon House.38 Whether of out affection, pique or level-headed loyalty to the path upon which they were now embarked, Jane intervened to prevent his departure. How Guildford really responded to the situation is unknown. He must have been briefed by his father about what to do in the coming days, before Northumberland and his other sons departed for Norfolk, in an attempt to apprehend Princess Mary.
In Northumberland’s absence, his plans crumbled. His prestigious talent had been to be the co-ordinating glue, driving and uniting all elements and, although Jane had been proclaimed queen, and oaths of loyalty sworn, this proved insufficient once he had left. Yet the duke had no choice: Mary had assembled a significant number of troops in East Anglia and sent a letter to London declaring her queenship. Supremely able as he was, Northumberland’s plot crumbled because he could not be in two places at once and lacked a second-in-command of equal calibre. As Cardinal Commendone noted, Jane’s father, the Duke of Suffolk, was ‘not held as a man of great valour and therefore lacked authority’.39 Northumberland was aware of the risk he was taking, foreshadowing his own downfall at the final Council dinner, and told his colleagues that ‘if we thought that through malice, conspiracy or dissension leave us, your friends, in the briars and betray us, we could as well sundry ways foresee and provide for our safeguards as any of you by betraying us can do for yours.’ His life, that of his family and his army, and the continuance of the reformed religion they had fought for, now depended upon the ‘constant hearts, abandoning all malice and envy’ of the Council and he warned them that God would not acquit them of ‘the sacred and holy oath of allegiance made freely by you to this virtuous lady … who by your and our enticement is rather of force placed therein than by her own seeking and request’.40 He had taken a huge gamble and knew he was now dependent upon the support of the men he left behind. It was a valiant effort: he could hardly have said more, but it did not prove to be enough.
Between 19 and 20 July, the Council moved against Northumberland. On the 19th, it issued a letter to Lord Rich bearing signatures by sixteen leading councillors, asking him to remain loyal to Queen Jane, but on the following day, it met at Baynard’s Castle and declared in Mary’s favour. The motivation appears to have been recognition of Mary’s claim over Jane’s but also the conviction that Northumberland had acted out of self-interest, ‘which moved the Duke to seize the Crown of England in order to transfer it to his own house’,41 as the ambassadors wrote to the emperor’s son, Prince Philip, who would become Mary’s husband. Scheyfvre also reported that the duke’s unpopularity was to blame and that it was generally believed that he was responsible for the late king’s death:
he took into consideration his extreme unpopularity in this realm, and decided to kill the late King Edward, as every one supposes and the course of the malady demonstrates. It is generally said that he poisoned the King, and whether it was that the poison was not intended to act at once, but only gradually, or whether the King’s constitution was too weak to resist, in any case his hair and nails fell off, he as it were dried up, and died between eight and nine on the evening of the 6th instant.42
As soon as Jane’s father heard of the Council’s defection, he left the Tower, having been persuaded by his daughter to remain in London, broadcasting ‘I am but one man,’ and declared in favour of Queen Mary. Then he returned to the Tower and entered his daughter’s chamber while she was at dinner, sitting under a canopy of state, and tore the hangings down. Jane and Guildford found their status change dramatically. They now became prisoners and were removed from the royal apartments, to the gentlemen gaoler’s lodgings in Jane’s case and the Bell Tower for Guildford. Jane’s mother and ladies in waiting were permitted to return home, which they did at once, but Suffolk found himself confined under lock and key.
Seeing that the tide had turned against him, Northumberland had no choice but to accept the Council’s word, although he was keen to stress that all his actions had been fulfilled with their express permission, and he had the Great Seal upon his documents as evidence:
And although the Duke, wherever he had passed, had caused my Lady and the lords who supported her to be declared traitors to the Crown, and had burnt two villages belonging to the said lords, yet when he had seen and considered the Council’s letters he summoned the Earl of Huntingdon, the Admiral, my Lord Grey and others of his chief followers, and declared to them loudly that all he had done up to that time had been enacted with the authority, consent and knowledge of the Council, in proof of which he had documents sealed with the Great Seal of England. However, as the Council had changed their minds, he did not wish to differ from or combat their decisions, supposing that they had been moved by good reasons and considerations; so for his part he intended to follow their advice and conform, and he begged the lords, who had been called together, to do the same. This they decided to do, and the Duke in person then stood by the herald who made the proclamation, crying out three times in a loud voice that my Lady Mary was Queen of England.43
On 25 July, when Northumberland returned to London empty handed, he was arrested and sent to the Tower. Abandoned by all their London supporters, there was nothing for Guildford and Jane to do but pray for clemency after Mary’s now-inevitable arrival.
The new Tudor queen entered London around seven on the evening of 3 August. The city and its leading dignitaries, most of whom had sworn allegiance to Jane the previous week, turned out to greet her. She passed through Aldgate, where streamers had been hung and the length of the street from Leadenhall to the Tower was laid with fresh gravel.44 The city guilds displayed their banners in prominent support, trumpets sounded, the guns of the Tower were fired and the mayor handed her the sceptre ‘in token of loyalty and homage’.45 Mary looked in a gown of purple velvet, the kirtle thick with gold embroidery, and pearls and precious stones around her neck and upon her head. She paused at the gateway of the Tower to be greeted by its officials and to meet with the Council.
Inside the Tower, Guildford would have guessed the meaning of the cannons being fired. He may even have seen part of the proceedings. The Bell Tower was situated in the south-west corner of the complex, on the Thames side, right by the entrance by which Mary would have arrived. To the east, its windows would have given views over Tower Green and the site of executions, where Guildford must have anticipated his actions would soon lead him. Constructed in the late twelfth century, the Bell Tower was a squat, solid thick-walled addition to the Tower complex, topped by the curfew bell that was sounded each night to prompt the inhabitants to return to their quarters. Guildford may have been aware that the Bell Tower had been the place of incarceration for the martyrs Thomas More and John Fisher, whose last days had been spent in excruciating discomfort before their execution in the year of his birth. A few days later, he was joined there by his brother Robert, while Northumberland and the other Dudley siblings, Henry and Ambrose, were incarcerated in other locations nearby. There, they waited for the axe to fall.
It fell first for Northumberland. He was summoned to trial in Westminster Hall on 18 August, and faced a panel of judges who, until recently, had been his colleagues on the Council, and the very men who had betrayed him. He repeated his statement of capitulation, asserting that he had acted on the Council’s authority, ratified by the Great Seal, but it was not enough to save him. He was to be made a scapegoat for the more extreme religious reforms of recent years, accused of not just attempting to usurp the line of succession but of ‘seducing’46 Edward into heresy. Recognising that his fate was inevitable, the duke issued a plea for his sons, insisting that ‘they went by my commandment, who am their father, and not of their own free wills’. Scheyfve’s account lists the formal proceedings and ceremony of the occasion:
The old Duke of Norfolk, Earl Marshal of England, stood to represent the Queen as President of the Court. He was seated on a seat with a dossal, adorned with a pall and royal mantle, raised upon a high scaffolding. On his right sat the Lord High Treasurer, the Earl of Arundel, and several Lords of the Council and peers. On his left were: the Lord Privy Seal, the Earl of Shrewsbury, the old Chancellor, Cobham, Paget, and several others …
The Duke was then brought in, under safe escort, preceded by one carrying the axe of justice, and stood before his judges. The recorder read out his deposition and confession from among the documents of the trial, and asked if he maintained all that was stated therein, so that judgment might be given according to custom … The Duke raised his hand in sign of taking his oath; then he fell on his knees and appealed to the Queen for mercy, saying that all he had done was by the advice, consent and command of the Council; he confessed the occasion of it and reiterated his confession. He proffered three requests: one that the Queen’s Councillors and judges should intercede with her to obtain grace and pardon for him; the second that certain Councillors might be deputed to hear certain matters he wished to declare; the third that time might be granted to him to reconcile himself with God and the execution of the sentence deferred for a few days. Thereupon the Duke of Norfolk, without consulting the judges or commissioners or taking their votes or advice – as indeed there was no need, as the Duke made a full confession – pronounced sentence against him; by which he was condemned to be hanged, his heart to be drawn from his body and flung against his face, and quartered.47
Condemned alongside Northumberland were his eldest son John Dudley and William Parr, Marquis of Northampton, who had encouraged the marriage. The executions of the duke and his eldest son were set for the morning of 21 August. They had time to prepare for their fate, to recant their sins and resign themselves, therefore making the good death that was considered so critical. This was one of the requests Northumberland made at his trial and, in the wake of what followed, indicates the genuine nature of his religious faith in the light of pressure that might be exerted upon him in his final days.
What is perhaps most controversial, and confusing, about Northumberland’s entire career, is what happened in the last twenty-four hours of his life. Taken from his cell before eight o’clock on the appointed day, he was not led to the scaffold on Tower Green as he had been expecting, but instead taken into the small church of St Peter ad Vincula nearby. This was a new church, rebuilt by Henry VIII in 1519–20 but its short history had already identified it as place of sudden death, having received the headless corpses of Anne Boleyn, Catherine Howard, Thomas More, John Fisher, Thomas Cromwell and others. There, the duke and his eldest son knelt to receive communion in the fully restored Catholic rites. Following this, Northumberland publicly recanted:
Truly, I profess here before you all that I have received the sacrament according to the true Catholic faith, and the plagues that is upon the realm and upon us now is that we have erred from the faith these sixteen years. And this I profess unto you all from the bottom of my heart.48
How the historian should interpret the duke’s actions lies within the context of contemporary beliefs in the afterlife. There have been many reactions to his end, ranging from sympathy to condemnation, but the duke cannot be judged out of the context of time which produced texts such as Artis Moriendi. Some have speculated that he had no choice. Perhaps he was indeed a devoted Protestant who had urged through extreme religious reform in recent years, and made this concession to the new queen in the hope of buying clemency for his sons, or in the belief that he might later have the opportunity to make a private revocation for the benefit of his soul. If this is the case, his gamble paid off, as the sentence of execution passed on his heir, John Dudley, was never carried out and all his other sons, save for Guildford, were released. Or perhaps he had in fact secretly harboured Catholic sympathies and his career at the side of Edward VI was driven by ambition and hypocrisy, although this seems unlikely. The recantation was certainly an act required by Mary as the final humiliation of the man who attempted to depose her, but was also a way of resetting the religious dial, in her attempt to return the country to its pre-Reformation worship. What better way to convince her subjects of their heresy than a full and frank recantation by the architect of change? Having established at his trial that the duke was entirely to blame for the state of the country’s heresy, the queen required him to reject all his former actions.
This also ensured that the Protestant faction would not be able honour the duke as a religious martyr. Even at the last minute, he may have been hoping that his sentence would be commuted, and was writing letters to prominent members of the Council, pleading with them to influence the new queen in his favour. Taking Catholic Communion which, after all, he would have done frequently during his younger years, may have been a price he was prepared to pay for his freedom. He may not have known on 21 August that this was not the bargain. Perhaps Mary had not even made up her mind at that point. Some have concluded that Northumberland was playing a canny game to the end, just as many of his contemporaries would do, paying public lip service for the sake of his sons, while holding his true faith in his heart, trusting God to understand the reason for his actions.
However, the most plausible explanation for the duke’s failure to challenge Mary’s order to recant can be found in the notion of the good death. Northumberland had had time to come to terms with the fact that he was about to die. He was a dead man walking and he knew it. His eyes were upon the heavens, no longer concerned with the problems and quarrels of mortal life. As scaffold speeches of the era confirm, the usual practice was to die fully accepting the authority of the reigning monarch, even when that monarch was wrong. Anne Boleyn had urged the crowds to loyalty to Henry VIII, and stated that he had enacted justice upon her in his God-given wisdom, even though she was almost certainly innocent of the crimes of which she had been convicted. A full acceptance of Mary’s authority was necessary for the duke’s soul to be at peace. To die with such a serious unresolved conflict, fighting against the monarch who was God’s anointed, would jeopardise his salvation. The duke must have accepted that it was God’s will that Mary became queen, and that to oppose her wishes would have been treason and heresy. It was rather too little, too late, but it was his attempt to counter his resistance to what had turned out to be Divine Will. In the context of his devout belief in God and the importance of making a good death, his actions make perfect sense.
But this was not all. Northumberland had the opportunity to make amends to those he had wronged in life:
The Duke recanted, and summoned the two sons of the late Duke of Somerset to come before him; he asked their pardon for the injury he had done to their father, the Protector of England, and confessed that he had wrongly and falsely procured his death. He did the same with several others against whom he had exercised revenge.49
Then, the imperial ambassador related:
he confessed and received the holy sacrament, heard mass devoutly and performed all the customary acts of devotion according to the ancient religion, declaring loudly before those who were in the Tower that since he had forsaken God and the Church to follow the new religion he had done no good, and his actions had been unfortunate. He confessed publicly that he had continued in error for three or four years, and went so far as to approve the authority of the Roman Church, using words that avowed the said authority.50
Schefyre did not see Northumberland’s actions as heresy, but rather as gestures made in a genuine desire to help his country:
The Duke’s Christian death has been misinterpreted and denounced by the heretics, who say he did as he did out of hypocrisy, in the belief that he might incline the Queen to show him mercy. But small attention is paid to the sayings of heretics and misguided men, and the truth is generally accepted and recognised, namely that the Catholic manner in which he and his accomplices ended their lives, together with their final profession of faith and recantation will assist religious affairs here, and promote them.51
On the following morning, 22 August 1553, John Dudley, Duke of Northumberland went to his execution on Tower Green. His final speech echoed the comments he had made the day before, for the same reasons, asserting Mary’s divine right to rule, even calling it ‘miraculous’:
He repeated the same words on the scaffold, loudly, before the people. He recommended them to obey the Queen, whom he called good and virtuous, saying that she had attained the throne miraculously, by reason of her true right by inheritance, and that therein he acknowledged the hand of God. He exhorted noblemen and people to obedience; and declared that he had received no instigation or persuasion to make the profession, but was moved thereto by his own desire, calling to witness God and his confessor, who had ever heard the same from him. He added that a warning should be taken from the condition of Germany, where rebellion and troubles had followed upon the loss of faith and true religion. He made the sign of the cross, and kissed it [the crucifix] before his death.52
There can be no doubt, according to the standards of his time, that even though Northumberland was executed, he made a good death. His body was interred in the chapel where he had received the body and blood of Christ just twenty-four hours before.
Schefyre could not resist adding a little anecdote about the circular nature of history in the Dudley dynasty:
We have been told that the scaffolding on which the Duke was beheaded was first put up for his father, who lost his head at the same place and on the same day forty-five years ago, for similar crimes and ambition, having attempted to exclude the late King Henry VIII from the Crown and usurp it, after concealing for five or six days the death of the late King Henry VII for that purpose.53
Jane and Guildford were indicted on 12 August but they had to endure a two-month wait to hear their fates. In their quarters in the Tower, they would have been aware of the duke’s execution, hearing the guns announce his death, perhaps even witnessing the fall of the axe from their windows. They may also have been informed about the circumstances of his recantation and perhaps understood why he had done it, perhaps not. Their trials, and those of their immediate circle, were fixed for 13 November, leaving two months of anticipation and agony, which was also an opportunity for them to prepare their souls for death. When the day arrived, they found that a deliberate choice had been made to deny them any privacy, so they embarked upon the demeaning journey through the streets of London, before the very crowds they had hoped would cheer for their coronations a few months before. The procession was headed by an officer carrying a great axe with the blade turned away from the accused, to denote their innocence until the verdict had been passed. He was followed by the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer, whom Mary had loathed for years, for having pronounced against her mother’s marriage, and had wasted no time in ordering his arrest. Guildford came next, under heavy guard, followed by Jane, dressed in black, a Bible in her hands, after which came the other Dudley brothers. Their destination was the imposing fifteenth-century Guildhall, a symbol of legal and political power which had witnessed the trials and condemnations of the former queen, Catherine Howard, and her reputed lovers; the Protestant martyr Anne Askew; Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey and other prominent figures. Cranmer and the Dudley brothers were pronounced guilty and sentenced to be hung, drawn and quartered, while Jane was to be ‘burned alive on Tower Hill or beheaded as the Queen should please’.54
And yet, it seemed that Mary was willing to show leniency to Guildford and Jane, considering them victims of a plot arranged by Northumberland. They returned to the Tower but no date was set for their execution and, as the weeks passed, Jane was permitted to walk within the gardens. Perhaps Guildford was even permitted to see her, as he was able to write a message to her father in Jane’s prayer book: ‘your loving and obedient son wishes unto your grace long life in this world with as much joy and comfort as I wish to myself, and in the world to come joy everlasting.’55 As the new year of 1554 dawned, the pair must have entertained a degree of hope that they might be permitted to live. William Parr, Marquis of Northampton had also been released, and would live until 1571. They had every right to hope; they may well have been pardoned and permitted to live in obscurity, or Guildford could have found a place at Elizabeth’s court. Even the ambassadors were convinced that there was no need for Jane to die:
As to Jane of Suffolk, if for the reasons she gave you, or for others, she does not wish to inflict the pain of death upon her, let her at least consider whether it would not be well to keep her in some safe place where she could be watched and guarded so that there should be no fear of her attempting to trouble the kingdom.56
Within weeks, though, Mary’s marital plans put an end to their hopes.
On 15 January 1554, the official announcement was made that the queen would be married to Prince Philip, son and heir of the emperor. It was exactly what many of her subjects had feared. The predictions made by Edward and Northumberland in the early summer of 1553 were coming to pass: the dismantling of all the religious reforms and a return to Catholicism, followed by marriage to a foreign prince whose influence would reduce England to a mere annexe of another country. As early as the previous August, the emperor had foreseen the dangers of this and advised that the matter be delayed a little:
As to the Queen’s marriage, as we know by your letters that her inclinations are for a foreign alliance, it would perhaps be better to forego this point for the present, as they [the English] are resenting her actions with regard to religion. If we were to pursue the matter now, evil-minded people might take advantage of it to maintain that the Duke of Northumberland’s objections were well-founded.57
Even the following January was to prove too soon, but Mary was 37 and keen to wed. During the negotiations, the first signs came of a worrying deference that England’s queen was expected to show to her foreign husband. The Council informed the imperial ambassador that it did not advise her to sign the nuptial agreement ‘before His Highness had done so, for custom prescribes that the husband shall speak first, not the wife’.58 In a similar vein, Simon Renaud believed that ‘the Queen, being a woman, cannot penetrate their knavish tricks nor weigh matters of state.’59 It was precisely this kind of protocol that led to concern among Mary’s subjects, which soon spread to rebellion. As early as 18 January, Simon Renaud wrote to the emperor concerning a case that highlighted the fear of Spaniards in the west of England. He related that a certain Peter Carew had assembled a group of gentlemen in Exeter to sign a letter to the queen. It stated that they did not wish Philip to disembark in the West Country because they believed that the ‘Spaniards would wish to do as they pleased and violate their daughters’. Instead of enduring this, they preferred to ‘choose death’. Carew excused himself by saying that he ‘had been induced to believe that the Spaniards were coming in arms to England to oppress the people’.60 But he was not the only one. And so, said Renaud, ‘the revolt and commotion … begun’.61
The most dangerous and organised rebellion arose in Kent. Thomas Wyatt, the son of the poet, published a proclamation at Maidstone, near his home of Allington Castle, to the effect that ‘liberty and commonwealth’ were being threatened by the queen’s ‘determinate pleasure to marry with a stranger’. The ambassadors reported that ‘Wyatt is fortifying himself to the best of his ability in a house of his in Kent, laying in stores, munitions and arquebuses’, but they were not convinced by his professed motives: ‘although the rebels are taking the foreign match as a pretext, their real objects are religion and to favour Elizabeth, which were the aims of Carew also, and it is said that the rising is spreading.’62 They championed the young Edward Courtenay, Earl of Devon, a great-grandson of Edward IV, as a replacement monarch, and planned to marry him to Princess Elizabeth, to continue an English, Protestant rule. The queen summoned her sister to court and dispatched the old Duke of Norfolk, Henry Fitzroy’s father-in-law, now aged around 80, to put down the rebels. Norfolk found himself outnumbered and, embarrassingly, many of his men defected to Wyatt. Another strategy was required. Instead, the royal troops sat back and waited, allowing the rebels to reach London before encircling them and capturing their leader.
According to the ambassadors, this rebellion left the queen distressed and unhappy, not just because of the threat to her own person, but because it necessitated a suspension of her marriage plans. Worse for Jane and Guildford, it emerged that her father, the Duke of Suffolk, had given his support to the anti-Spanish faction. He was found, early in February, hiding on his estates, while his brother Thomas was apprehended in a hollow tree, his presence sniffed out by a dog.63 This effectively signed death warrants for them all. Sitting passively in the Tower, waiting and praying as events unfolded outside but powerless to influence them, the pair’s fate was sealed. The decision to order their executions, taken by the queen at the start of February, may have the feel of a knee-jerk reaction, but Mary clearly considered it essential for the security of her realm and marriage.
The executions of Jane and Guildford were scheduled to take place on the same day, 9 February, but they were given a brief reprieve in which Mary intended that Jane should convert to the Catholic faith. This would appear to support the queen’s previous intention towards Northumberland, and her insistence that he took mass before his death. To encourage Jane to her way of thinking, Mary sent her chaplain John Feckenham to visit her in her apartments, and she spent many of her final hours with him. Feckenham was then almost 40, a staunch Catholic who had been a monk at Evesham Abbey until its dissolution in 1540. He had been sent to the Tower by Archbishop Cranmer for resistance to reform around 1549, and there he had pursued reflection and study, so that he was frequently required to take part in theological disputes. The Literary Remains of Lady Jane Grey,64 published in 1825, contains an account of a dialogue between Jane and Feckenham recording the process of questioning he employed in a final effort to save her soul. He asked her what was required of a Christian; whether faith alone was justification for salvation; what was the purpose of good works; what was the nature of communion; and how many sacraments were there. His persuasion failed but Jane respected him and something of a brief friendship flourished, so that she allowed him to accompany her to the scaffold.
The day before her execution, Jane wrote to her sister Catherine, giving an insight into the way in which she was preparing for death. She sent Catherine her own copy of the New Testament in Greek, which she described as ‘not outwardly trimmed with gold or the curious embroidery of the artfulest needles, yet inwardly it is worth more than all the precious mines which the vast world can boast of.’ It was the Lord’s ‘last will’, Jane explained, ‘which he bequeathed unto us wretches and wretched sinners, which shall lead you to the path of eternal joy’. If Catherine read the book, she wrote, it would ‘bring you to an immortal and everlasting life’, teach her to live ‘and learn you to die’. In a comment upon their dynastic failure, she added that the book would bring her sister ‘greater felicity than you should have gained possession of our woeful father’s lands, for as if God had prospered him, you should have inherited his honours and manors’. Jane urged Catherine to ‘live to die, that you by death may purchase eternal life and trust not that the tenderness of your age shall lengthen your life.’ At 16, Jane’s faith helped her come to terms with the executioner’s act as the will of her God. In order to do the same, Catherine was to ‘defy the world, defy the devil, and despise the flesh and delight yourself only with the Lord … desire with St Paul to be dissolved and be with Christ, with whom, even in death there is life.’65
Jane warned her sister about being unprepared when death stole up unexpected. Instead, she should ‘be like the good servant and even at midnight be waking, lest when death cometh and stealeth upon you, like a thief in the night, you be found with the servants of darkness sleeping’. Regarding her own death, Jane urged her sister to rejoice that she would be ‘delivered of this corruption, and put on incorruption’, for she was assured that ‘for losing of a mortal life, win one that is immortal, joyful and everlasting’. Catherine should never deny God’s truth, or He would ‘by vengeance make short what you by your soul’s loss would prolong’. By remaining true to Him, she would be welcomed into an ‘uncircumscribed comfort and to his own glory’.66
To her father, Jane wrote more bitterly, opening with ‘it had pleased God to hasten my death by you, by whom my life should rather have been lengthened’, yet she gave thanks for it and accounted herself blessed. She ‘washed my hands with the innocence of my fact, my guiltless blood may cry before the Lord, Mercy to the Lord!’ Although her father may be sorrowful at her death, she assured him that there was ‘nothing that can be more welcome than from this vale of misery to pire to that heavenly throne of all joy and pleasure’.67
In their final days, it is likely that Guildford was preparing himself for death in a similar vein. Yet it is anecdotes about Jane’s piety that survive, not his, so it is difficult to ascertain the strength of his faith. The fact that his mind may not have been wholly fixed upon the eternal, and his difference of approach, are revealed by his request to see Jane one last time on 11 February. Jane refused the meeting, saying that it ‘would only … increase their misery and pain, it was better to put it off … as they would meet shortly elsewhere, and live bound by indissoluble ties’.68 No doubt Guildford also believed in their imminent reunion, but he still felt the need of earthly comfort on the day before his death. It is impossible to deduce whether there was any affection between the young married couple. They had been united too briefly, and against the bride’s wishes, to develop any real depth of feeling, although their shared fate might have bred mutual compassion. The few indicators of an emotional connection may equally point to convention: Guildford’s mother’s insistence that he refuse to sleep with her as a punishment, and Jane’s own choice of her husband’s name for a baby she was to be godmother to. When Jane wrote a letter to Mary in August 1553, explaining how she had ended up claiming the crown, she described herself as ‘a wife who loves her husband’.69 It may have all happened too quickly for any sense of romance; far more likely is a sense of destinies irrevocably united, of two inexperienced young people who had joined forces in a venture that had failed.
Guildford was the first to die. He was taken to Tower Hill at around ten o’clock in the morning. There was a crowd and he shook hands with many well-wishers, including John Throckmorton, who had links to the Grey family by marriage and whose brother was involved in the Wyatt rebellion, and Sir Anthony Browne, who had stayed out of the succession crisis. After this, Guildford was handed over to Thomas Offley, the sheriff in charge of his execution. Jane is said to have watched the process from a window.70 Guildford had no ‘ghostly father’ with him, but made a short speech, which does not survive, before kneeling and asking the people to pray for him, ‘holding up his eyes and hands to God many times’.71 He was killed by a single blow of the axe. Richard Grafton related that ‘even those that never before the time of his execution saw him, did with lamentable tears bewail his death.’72 His body was placed in a wooden box on a cart which, according to the Grafton Chronicle, was seen by Jane on her way outside, the ‘dead carcas, lying in a car in straw was again brought into the Tower, which miserable sight was to her a double sorrow and grief’.73 Another account has Jane declaring, ‘Oh Guildford, Guildford!’ through her window. Guildford was interred in the chapel of St Peter ad Vincula.
Jane was then led out to the green beside the White Tower. The anonymous Chronicle of Queen Jane and of Two Years of Queen Mary includes the speech she delivered moments before her death:
Good people, I am come hither to die, and by a law I am condemned to the same. The fact, indeed, against the Queen’s highness was unlawful, and the consenting thereunto by me: but touching the procurement and desire thereof by me or on my behalf, I do wash my hands thereof in innocency, before God, and the face of you, good Christian people, this day. I pray you all, good Christian people, to bear me witness that I die a true Christian woman, and that I look to be saved by none other means but only by the mercy of God in the merits of the blood of his only son Jesus Christ: and I confess, when I did know the word of God I neglected the same, I loved myself and the world, and therefore this plague or punishment is happily and worthily happened unto me for my sins. And I thank God of his goodness that he has given me a time and respite to repent. And now, good people, I pray you to assist me with your prayers.74
Jane then concluded by reciting Psalm 51 and asking forgiveness for her executioner. Feckenham was on hand to guide her as she was blindfolded and fumbled for the block. Eleven days later her father shared her fate.
Over the coming months, Guildford’s brothers John, Henry, Ambrose and Robert remained as prisoners in the Beauchamp Tower and certain carvings on the wall appear to relate to their period of confinement. The word ‘IANE’ may have been carved by Guildford, or equally by his father, the Duke of Northumberland as he faced separation from Jane Guildford, whom he had married for love thirty years before. That the duke was present, and carved upon the walls, is evident from the Warwick device of the bear and ragged staff set in a border of roses, acorns and lilies, above the name IOHN DVDLI.75 The widowed Duchess of Northumberland and her son-in-law Henry Sidney made constant efforts to ingratiate themselves with Queen Mary, and the brothers were finally released in October 1554. John Dudley died almost at once after arriving at Sidney’s home of Penshurst Place, Henry was killed at the Battle of St Quentin in 1557, Ambrose survived the battle and outlived them all, while Robert went on to become the notorious favourite of Queen Elizabeth I, after she succeeded her sister in 1558.
The Dudley dynasty was dealt a blow by the death of Guildford and, soon afterwards, those of John and Henry. Northumberland had fathered thirteen children, of whom six had died in infancy. Of the seven who survived to adulthood, only two became parents. Mary, who married Sir Henry Sidney, bore seven children, among them the poet Sir Philip Sidney. Robert Dudley had an illegitimate son by his mistress Douglas Sheffield, and a legitimate one by his second wife, Lettice Knollys. On the shoulders of this child, Robert, Lord Denbigh, rested the hopes of the Dudley line but, after the boy died at the age of 3, that branch of the family became extinct. The Sidney family fared little better, but Northumberland’s bloodline continued through the union of Henry and Mary Dudley. Of the seven children born to them, three reached adulthood and although only one son became a father, he had a family of eleven, of which four were boys. These great-grandsons of John Dudley took his genes into the seventeenth century.
It is almost impossible to answer the question of what sort of king Guildford Dudley might have made. The slender evidence of his life has not revealed his character or intentions, but the circumstances of his succession allow for two general assumptions. Firstly, he was still a young man, who had been placed on the throne by his father. In 1553, Northumberland was 48 or 49, an experienced statesman who might anticipate being of active service for at least another decade, health permitting. Guildford and Jane were educated, and Jane certainly had strength of character, but they are unlikely to have cast off the duke’s influence in at least the first few years of their reign. They would have needed Northumberland’s guidance through a period of apprenticeship, while they learned the ropes of government. This suggests a period of governmental continuity, with many of the Council members existing under Edward VI remaining in place. Secondly, Guildford had been raised in the reformed faith, so the acts passed in recent years would not have been challenged or revoked. From what little indicators remain regarding his relationship with Jane, the seeds of potential conflict might be seen in the uncomfortable question of Guildford’s status, as duke or as king. Yet this might have been due to the speed of change, the fact that everything had come about so quickly, that such details had yet to be ironed out. The idea of Guildford’s kingship certainly came as a surprise to Jane but she did raise the possibility of elevating him through an Act of Parliament. If the ambassadors are to be believed, Guildford had a sense of his own position and a determination to achieve it, maintaining his majesty and dining in state, but the validity of their single account of this cannot be taken for granted. The couple might have been able to overcome this question easily, or else it might indicate a deeper, cultural rift, as arose under Queen Mary, with the expected subjection of the wife to the husband. The intimate struggles of a private life which Guildford and Jane never lived, cannot provide answers about their potential success as rulers. All that remains a certainty is the fact of their premature deaths.
Including Guildford and Jane in his book of Protestant martyrs, John Foxe had no doubt as to Jane’s reluctance to claim the throne or the couple’s manipulation at the hands of their parents. To Foxe, they were ‘innocents … such as by just law and faithful witnesses can never be proved to have offended by themselves’. By the terms of Jane’s final speech, she would have disagreed. Did Guildford share the depths of her devotion? Was he as willing to embrace death for his transgressions in life? Did he accept his death as God’s will, or did he long to escape the confines of the Tower and fight another day? There is not enough evidence for us to know.
The result of Northumberland’s failure to secure Jane and Guildford on the throne was the return of Catholicism. The final will to be cited in this book dates from May 1556, in the middle of this Counter-Reformation, at the height of the Marian burnings of Protestants. Edward, Lord Hastings came from a family whose history had been affected by the turbulence of the Wars of the Roses. His great-great-grandfather had been unexpectedly dragged out of a council meeting by Richard III in 1483 and immediately executed, but his grandfather Edward and father George had restored the family fortunes under the Tudors. Edward was the fourth son among eight siblings, born in 1521. He was a devout Catholic and flourished under the reign of Mary but, after her death, he was imprisoned for hearing mass. When he wrote his will on 10 May, he did not know he had another fifteen years left, but the terms and details of his testament return us to wills of the 1440s, connecting with the faith of former generations and underlining the cyclical nature of history.
Hastings left £20 to be distributed among the poor at his burial and 40s for a preacher, to preach for three consecutive Sundays afterwards. He also requested that four marks were to be distributed among the poor of his parish every Good Friday for three years. To his church, St Giles of Stoke Poges in Buckinghamshire, he left a cope, a vestment and a pair of altar cloths, each bearing his arms, and he left funds for maintenance of the local roads and for prisoners and scholars. The details he set down for the creation of his tomb hark back to an earlier time: he wanted ‘a chapel of stone, with an altar therein, adjoining to the church’ where his parents lay. Within it, his executors should build a stone tomb ‘with the images of my said mother and father in stone’, their arms upon it and a vault below, where he was to lie, with a ‘plate of copper, double-gilt … to represent my image in harness, with the garter, and a memorial in writing of me, with my arms, to be placed upright on the wall of that chapel’. He requested that five chambers should be built, with fires; four for the poor and one for a chantry priest, and requested that his nephew maintain a priest who was to sing for his soul and those of his parents and brother. Within a few years, though, Hastings was to see everything change again so that chantry chapels were never reintroduced. Some became grammar schools while others were sold as houses.
Guildford and Jane’s story has captured the imagination of artists and historians since their deaths. The fact that their stories were so closely linked, and that far more biographical material survived about Jane, has both helped and hindered Guildford’s memory. Had he not been married to her, it is unlikely that his name would have become so well known, yet by virtue of his position in relation to her, he is forever overshadowed. Jane was given a voice early, speaking out in Elizabethan ballads to denounce Mary I’s popery and becoming the subject of Thomas Chaloner’s 1579 ‘Elegy on the Death of Lady Jane Grey’, in which Guildford does not receive even a single mention. He finally makes it into a play of 1607, by Webster and Dekker, although the focus of The Famous History of Sir Thomas Wyat is not upon him and Jane, but on its eponymous hero. Possibly based on an earlier play, Jane and Guildford are presented as a loving couple manipulated by the ambition of others, for which they pay the ultimate price. In the first act, Jane tells Guildford that she already enjoys a kingdom, having him, while he replies that she must become queen. The play has Jane die before Guildford, who is confronted by the sight of her head and, he describes its beauty in somewhat Hamletesque style (which is known to have been performed the same year, 1607):
Do malefactors, look
Thus when they die a ruddy lip
A clear reflecting eye
Cheeks purer than the maiden orient pearl
That sprinkles bashfulness through the clouds
Her innocence has given her this look
The like for me to show so well being dead
How willingly would Guildford lose his head.76
In 1694, Restoration dramatist John Banks used Jane’s story to promote his post-revolution anti-Catholic message. In Innocent Usurper or The Death of Lady Jane Gray, a Tragedy, he gives Guildford quite a different role, making him threaten suicide unless his wife accepts the throne. He comes, passionate and fresh from his wedding night:
What have I felt! what Ravishing Delight!
What Mines of Pleasure hast thou found this Night!
What Mysteries of Love without a Name!
What quenching Cordials, and what killing Flame!
Soft like a Babe she laid me in her Bosom,
Whilst all the night I revell’d in her Arms.
In Dreams of Love, I’ve done the like before,
But always wak’d till now, cheated and poor.
He is enthusiastic to think of his wife becoming queen and himself:
A Crown! where e’er she goes she is the Queen,
And makes her Presence still the Court of Love,
Cupids, like Subjects, waiting on her looks,
Crowns in her Eyes, and Scepters in her Smiles.
She, like the Golden World, in Bed did lie,
Like Conquering Alexander, I lay by;
And what in Ages he cou’d scarce inthrall,
Won in a Night, and Crown’d me King of all.
But her refusal prompts him to threaten suicide, in order to save his father’s honour:
Ha! Then I’ll search amongst the Stars, or dive
To th’ bottom, where this Merciless Virtue grows—
Farewel, O most Belov’d! And yet most Cruel!
Farewel to those false Dreams of Crowns by Day,
And Heav’n by Night; Farewel to Love for ever.
Perhaps when I am Dead, she’ll take the Crown;
Then of necessity, this way’s the best,
To save a Father’s Life, and be at rest.77
Jane prevents him from falling upon his sword and reluctantly agrees to accept the crown. At the end of the play, far from refusing Guildford one last audience, Jane practically had to be torn away from him, illustrating that it is essentially a play about star-crossed lovers than the realities of the Tudor dynastic conflict.
Jane’s reputation really took off in the eighteenth century, her learning, innocence and sacrifice making her a heroine of the Enlightenment, and she featured in works by dramatist Nicholas Rowe, historians Gilbert Burnet and Oliver Goldsmith, and philosophers David Hume and William Goodwin. Jane’s story became something of a favoured tale of the Victorians, presenting an ideal of womanhood as she stumbles, blindfolded, feeling for the block. She is artist Paul Delaroche’s spotless virgin, kneeling in white, her hair spilling about her, prepared for sacrifice. She is the regal lady in brown, holding her prayer book, in the recently discovered Streatham portrait, thought to date from the 1590s. She is Frederick Pickersgill’s pre-Raphaelite heroine in green and gold, reading the first of five huge books piled up in a window seat while the hunt takes place outside. She is kneeling, preparing for her execution in George Whiting Flagg’s of 1835. She is also the subject of an engraving by W. Holl, looking not unlike Queen Victoria in her youth, with a string of pearls across her headdress. She was the subject of operas by Nicola Vaccai in 1836, Antonio d’Antoni in 1848, Timoteo Pasini in 1853, Giuseppe Menghetti in 1859 and Henri Busser in 1891. And, due to his connection with her, Guildford was carried along for the ride.
No actual likeness of Guildford survives. It is in the nineteenth century that images of him started to emerge. In 1827, romantic genre artist Charles Robert Leslie exhibited Lady Jane Grey Prevailed Upon to Accept the Crown at the Royal Academy. The painting implies that she capitulated under Guildford’s influence, placing him by her side, one arm behind her, while the other gestures at papers held by the waiting councillors. He is a typical youth of his moment in time, with something of Shelley about his features, wide and solid in black velvet and a crimson drape. Jane looks up to him in trusting adoration, small and vulnerable in her virginal white gown. Another portrait of the same time places Guildford alone against a silver surround, part of a series in the House of Lords. Created during Pugin’s restoration of Parliament, it is acknowledged to be a copy of a portrait of a young man dating from the 1580s, but represents a more regal interpretation of Guildford. One more nineteenth-century portrait exists of him in the National Trust collection at Tyntesfield House in Somerset. Whether based on a lost original or a work of the artist’s imagination, it shows a slightly hesitant-looking youth, one hand on the hilt of his sword as he stares off into the distance. His features are regular, the eyes dark and the nose prominent, the hair appearing fair under hat and feather, which are much in the style of Edward VI’s headgear. Guildford wears a black and silver striped doublet with a double red edging, furs and gold sleeves, but it is the depiction of an innocent victim rather than an aspiring monarch. In art, as in biographical material, he has always been overshadowed by Jane. But there is something fitting that, just as he was allied to her cause in life, so that union persists for five centuries in death. The pair barely knew each other, sharing only a few short weeks, yet their historical and artistic reputations will be forever intertwined.
It was this romantic aspect of Jane and Guildford’s posthumous love story that gave rise to the 1986 film Lady Jane, starring Helena Bonham-Carter and Carey Elwes. The pair initially resist the match, before accepting it as a dynastic arrangement, only to fall deeply in love and suffer the tragedy of separation and execution. There is no doubt that their stories, in real life, provide an excellent narrative arc, which accounts for the frequency with which artists have used it, seduced by its romance. Yet, despite all this attention, the real Guildford remains something of a mystery:
Guilford: So then we will.
Jane: Yes, we will.
Guilford: We’ll fly.
Jane: We’ll fly.
Guilford: Away, beyond their reach.
Jane: So far …
Guilford: Their touch can’t tarnish us, and at last, we will be …
Jane: Nothing …
Guilford: Nobody …
Jane: Each other’s.
Guilford: Only this time, forever.78