THE MYTH OF FRANCES BRANDON THE CHILD ABUSER
I BELIEVED I HAD SUCCESSFULLY DEMOLISHED THE VARIOUS MYTHS concerning Frances in my triple biography of her daughters Jane, Katherine and Mary Grey, but one piece of ‘evidence’ is still used to support the old tropes.
The accusations of child abuse against Frances are built on a story, related about Jane almost a decade after she died, in a book called The Schoolmaster, written by Elizabeth Tudor’s one-time tutor, Roger Ascham. It describes the thirteen-year-old Jane reading the Phaedo of Plato in Greek at her family home at Bradgate in Leicestershire while the rest of the household are out hunting. Interrupted briefly from her quiet study, Jane explains that she loves learning because her lessons with her kindly tutor are a respite from the abuse of her parents, who pinch and nip at her if she doesn’t perform every task perfectly. ‘One of the greatest benefits that God ever gave me, is that He sent me so sharp, severe parents and so gentle a schoolmaster’, Ascham recalls her saying. Frances’ modern-day detractors refer to these as ‘Jane’s own words’. They are, of course, no such things. They are reported speech, written by Roger Ascham.
As I described in The Sisters Who Would be Queen, while Roger Ascham really did meet Jane, when he wrote to her referring to their meeting a few months later he commented only on her parents’ pride in her work.
Her ‘gentle’ tutor, John Aylmer, was meanwhile writing letters to a Swiss theologian complaining that the teenager ‘was at that age [when] . . . all people are inclined to follow their own ways’, and asked how best to ‘provide bridles for restive horses’ such as this spirited girl.
So why did Ascham tell this story? His book, The Schoolmaster, was intended to promote a kindlier method of teaching than the beatings commonly delivered to recalcitrant pupils. But it is also notable that Ascham began writing The Schoolmaster in 1563, the year Katherine Grey had her second son, and while the MP John Hales was writing his book supporting Katherine’s claim as Elizabeth’s heir. It was obviously helpful that the passage about Jane chimed with elegies and ballads that were being published and republished that year, also praising her virtues and blaming her execution for treason either on the ambition of her father and father-in-law, or on Mary I’s cruelty. Ascham recalled that it was William Cecil, that great protector of Katherine Grey’s claim, who suggested, that summer, that he write his book.
The Schoolmaster was published (posthumously) in 1570, during the aftermath of the 1569 Catholic rising in favour of the rival claims to the throne of Mary, Queen of Scots. That same year a fraudulent letter appeared in a new edition of Foxe’s Martyrs, from ‘Jane’ to her father, blaming her death on his actions. A final point to make about the Ascham story is that, in common with an Italian story describing Jane being bullied by her parents into marrying Guildford (for more on which see the Appendix on Guildford), Frances is only ever mentioned in conjunction with her husband, not as the dominating figure she has become in modern literature, in which she has been used very much as Mary I has been used with Elizabeth I, that is as the shadow that throws the heroine into a more brilliant light.
It is quite probable that Frances and her husband were strict – loving parents of this period were expected to be ‘sharp, severe, parents’. But Jane’s Italian tutor, Michel Angelo Florio, observed that Jane was particularly close to her mother and in 1559, when Frances died, both her remaining daughters were at her side.