Elizabeth and Leicester

IT HAD BEEN OBVIOUS BEFORE HENRY DIED THAT EDWARD SEYMOUR and John Dudley would play leading parts in the rule of the country. John Dudley’s closeness to the King had endured through the last months of the monarch’s life - increased, even, with the bond of a shared religious policy added to the masculine good fellowship they had previously enjoyed. In the tug of war between conservatives and radicals, each pulling at Henry’s religious settlement, the King (whatever his personal convictions) finally came down on the reformers’ side. This, in the end, was the legacy he wanted to leave his son. (One of his last acts was to order the arrest of the Duke of Norfolk and the execution of his heir: politically and religiously conservative, they were the kind of over-mighty subjects who might threaten the succession of a vulnerable boy.) And if the future were to be a reformed one, there were only a few people who could administer it. As Charles V’s ambassador put it, in the first weeks of 1547, ‘it is probable that these two men, Seymour and Dudley, will have the management of affairs, because, apart from the King’s affection for them, and other reasons, there are no other nobles of a fit age and ability for the task’.

But for the moment, by the sacred ties of blood, the pre-eminent individual was Seymour: a slightly shadowy figure, whose strong religious beliefs and altruistic rhetoric masked both his ambitions and his weaknesses. All the same, the Dudley sons - now often at court, in attendance on their father, if not directly on the young King - were close to the heart of the political intrigues that were bound to mark a royal minority. This grounding in every level of court life would later prove to have been invaluable training for Robert Dudley, enabling him rapidly to rise to the top when Elizabeth’s accession brought him his opportunity. He saw at first hand - still, at this point, from the sidelines, but from the favoured position of one whose own family were riding high - the spites, the slights and the endless spying; the webs woven between the men who mattered; the frantic clamour for place and favour; and the drama of disappointment played out every day. Robert’s nephew Philip Sidney would write of the need ‘that obeys no law and forgets blushing’; his protégé Gabriel Harvey of how the courtier should ‘Learn of the dog how skillfully to treat a Lord or King. Endure anything in the way of wrongs, and fawn none the less.’ Though this was a different kind of court from the one that eventually clustered around the dominant figure of Elizabeth, there were particular lessons to be learnt from these years of a royal minority: lessons about the use of counsel and the machinery of state (now more in evidence than it had been under the powerful Henry); lessons about the extent, and the limitations, of monarchy. Elizabeth, meanwhile, was learning lessons of her own; and they - unlike Robert’s, at this stage - would be traumatic to a degree.

After her father’s death, Elizabeth was sent to join her stepmother Katherine Parr, who had now set up her own establishment at Chelsea. Probably the arrangement pleased her well enough. But Katherine’s life of legendary prudence and piety was about to take a more skittish turn. Before Henry’s eye lighted upon her, she had dreamt of marriage with Thomas Seymour, the younger, less responsible and infinitely more charismatic brother of the Lord Protector. The two resumed their old amour, and were married secretly in April. This - since Elizabeth continued to share a house with her stepmother and her stepmother’s new husband - brought her effectively into Seymour’s guardianship.

Seymour may have loved Katherine both before and after her life with Henry, but marriage appeared to him first as a political opportunity. Rumour claimed that his immediate thought, on the death of the old King, had been to marry either of the two princesses, Elizabeth herself or Mary. It was of course a grandiose and ludicrous fantasy - but he renewed his attentions to Katherine only after it was made clear to him that the council would never sanction this other, yet more inviting, possibility.

Now it seemed as if he might be able to have his cake and eat it too, in some confused way. It is unclear whether the advances he made to Elizabeth were consciously sexual or merely inappropriate - or whether sex was just, in dealing with any woman, his normal modus operandi. He may have seen a nubile teenager when he looked at Elizabeth. A portrait she had painted in her early teenage years is a study of seriousness, her hair demurely smoothed, her lips set, her dark eyes veiled and her fingers clasping a book - but perhaps a Thomas Seymour might find a hint of invitation in that very composure. More certainly, when he looked at Elizabeth he saw a chance of advancement. In this, of course, he would be the first man of many.

In these first months of his nephew’s reign, Thomas Seymour was a disappointed man. He had been given the Lord Admiralship (John Dudley having progressed to Lord Great Chamberlain), and lands, and a barony. But he felt he should have had an equal hand with his brother in the governance of the King and the running of the country. As one contemporary, Sir Nicholas Throckmorton, put it neatly and damningly, he was ‘fierce in courage, courtly in fashion, in personage stately, in voice magnificent but somewhat empty of matter’. Of much wit and little judgement, as Elizabeth is famously supposed to have summed him up . . . but the quote is probably apocryphal, and the assessment is not a teenager’s. On the plus side, Seymour was tall, and bold, and handsome. Very much, in other words, like the future Robert Dudley.

What happened next is familiar to any amateur of Tudor history, though our knowledge comes from a very limited number of sources: the testimonies of Elizabeth’s attendants, Kat Ashley and Thomas Parry, extracted under pressure and the less reliable for it. How the Lord Admiral would come bursting into her bedchamber early in the morning, pulling back the bedcurtains to ‘make as though he would come at her’ while she scooted away - all this in the name of play; how, if he caught her getting dressed, he would ‘strike her on the back or buttocks familiarly’. Next, he appeared ‘bare legged’, in his nightgown; tried to snatch kisses from Elizabeth even as she lay in bed.

Kat Ashley told him he went too far, for ‘These things are complained of, and my lady is evil spoken of.’ He answered hotly that he meant no evil, that he would not leave off. That Elizabeth was like a daughter to him . . . And Elizabeth? She tried (so her servants asserted) to hide, to avoid him, to get away. Small wonder, for these approaches can only have been disconcerting (to put it at its lowest) to a girl of thirteen or fourteen - out of childhood but not yet into maturity. But her feelings were clearly mixed - it would soon be reported that she blushed when his name was mentioned, showing ‘a glad countenance’, that she loved to hear him praised. Modern ideas about exploitation, about power and sexuality, should not obscure the fact that women as young as Elizabeth (or Juliet!) were married in the sixteenth century, and that Seymour was a famously attractive man.

Katherine seems to have been as uncertain as anybody over what her husband intended, or how best to respond. That, at least, is the best explanation for the fact that (as Kat Ashley told it) she sometimes joined in Seymour’s mock assaults on their stepdaughter, helping him tickle Elizabeth in bed, and once holding her when, in the garden, he cut her dress into pieces. You could, perhaps, take her participation as proof that Seymour’s behaviour was innocent . . . or proof that Katherine was trying to demonstrate it was innocent. Trying to convince herself, maybe.

But by the spring of 1548 the matter had gone beyond a game. If Kat Ashley’s tearful testimony is to be believed, there came a time when the Queen Dowager, ‘suspecting the often access of the Admiral to my Lady Elizabeth’s Grace . . . came suddenly upon them, where they were all alone, he having her in his arms. Wherefore the Queen fell out, both with the Admiral and with Her Grace also.’ As well she might have; the more so since Katherine by this time was five months pregnant with Seymour’s child, and in a state of some vulnerability. After a difficult interview between the woman and the girl - in which the younger ‘answered little’, suggesting she did feel herself guilty - Elizabeth was sent away, to the household of Sir Anthony Denny. It was hardly a punitive measure, since Lady Denny was Kat Ashley’s sister, and the household a prominent and congenial one. The affection between Elizabeth and Katherine had been strained but not broken, if we heed the exchange of loving letters, in which Elizabeth thanked the Queen for the ‘manifold kindnesses’ she continued to show: ‘thank God for providing such friends for me’. But, as so often in her life, sexuality had threatened to spoil a relationship important to her. Thanks to Seymour’s ambition and/or lack of control, the tentative experimentations of an adolescent girl had been distorted into something very risky.

On 30 August, at her husband’s castle of Sudeley, Katherine gave birth to a daughter. Both mother and baby seemed to be doing well, but within a few days Katherine developed puerperal fever. She died on Elizabeth’s fifteenth birthday. Seymour was at Sudeley, as was Elizabeth’s young kinswoman Lady Jane Grey, but Elizabeth herself remained at Cheshunt with the Dennys - possibly because of her health. Elizabeth had been ill about midsummer, remained unwell and edgy through into July, and was sick in bed when Kat Ashley told her Katherine was dead. (Her new tutor, Roger Ascham - who had succeeded to the post earlier in the year when Grindal had unexpectedly died - had hoped to return to Cambridge for the summer, but could not get Elizabeth’s permission to go, ‘for she favours me wonderfully’; a prime example of the way she would cling to her favourites.) Her illness may well have been emotional in origin; the first but not the last of the nerve storms that would continue to plague her throughout her life. The symptoms - migraine, panic attacks, menstrual problems - certainly fit that diagnosis, but some contemporaries suspected otherwise. It was suggested that Elizabeth had miscarried Seymour’s baby. Later there would be other tales of a country midwife summoned to attend on a very young and obviously noble lady; of a child born only to be killed at birth. For none of this is there any evidence - and improbable tales of secret pregnancies would continue to haunt Elizabeth’s career.

With Katherine’s death came the possibility, again, of Elizabeth’s marrying Seymour. Seymour, at least, obviously thought so. When he refused to disband his wife’s household of ladies, there was debate as to whether they were to attend on his second royal wife, or merely on the ever-present Lady Jane Grey. His thoughts of Elizabeth must be seen in the context of his ever more frantic political forays; for Thomas Seymour, by now, was even travelling to the West Country to assure himself that the fleet would be on his side in the event of his launching a coup against his brother. So noticeable had his intentions become by late autumn, when Parliament reassembled, that the Lord Privy Seal, Lord Russell, took the occasion to warn Seymour that if he - or any other Englishman - attempted to set himself so far above his peers as to marry either of the princesses, he would ‘procure unto himself the occasion of his utter undoing’. (So much for the theory put forward by Seymour - and those who came after him - that ‘It is convenient for princesses to marry, and better it were that they are married within the realm than in any foreign place.’)

Thomas Seymour was in fact (possibly encouraged by John Dudley, who hoped to divide the brothers) using presents and pocket money to win the affection of the young King, who was kept by the Lord Protector under a somewhat oppressive regime, and planning in the end to take possession of the King’s person, by force if necessary. In the middle of January 1549 he burst into Edward’s bedroom with a party of armed men and, when the barking of Edward’s pet spaniel aroused the guards, shot the dog dead. The council had almost no choice but to arrest him, and to call in for questioning his associates, who by now included Kat Ashley and Elizabeth’s cofferer Thomas Parry. Seymour had bribed or flattered these key members of Elizabeth’s household into support of his plans; nor did it seem that Elizabeth heard of his ambitions unwillingly. But the key question was, with precisely what provisos had Elizabeth even tacitly conceded she and Seymour might possibly marry? With Elizabeth’s favourite servants on their way to the Tower, her household was taken over by Sir Robert Tyrwhit, with instructions from the council to obtain evidence of Seymour’s treasonable activity. He had, he said confidently, good hopes ‘to make her cough out the whole’.

But in Elizabeth Tyrwhit had met his match. Parry and Kat Ashley talked quickly, terrified, and Elizabeth, once her first tears were over, was brought to confirm the basics of what they had to say. They ‘all sing one song’, Tyrwhit reported disgustedly. Yes, Seymour had quizzed Parry about exactly what lands and possessions Elizabeth had. Yes, she had been in contact with the Admiral, but only about matters of business, open for anyone to see. Yes, there had been rumours, but was that her fault? Hardly. Even if it were true that Kat and Parry had discussed the possible marriage between themselves, the point - the only real point - was that (as Elizabeth declared) Kat Ashley ‘would never have me marry, neither in England nor out of England, without the consent of the King’s Majesty, Your Grace’s [Somerset’s] and the Council’s’. Elizabeth’s servants - frailer (and more vulnerable to threat) than she was - were none the less loyal to her, by their lights, and she (as Tyrwhit wonderingly noted) remained wholly committed to them. Indeed, the whole long night she wept when she heard Kat Ashley was to be taken away from her, the way she clung to familiar faces over the next months, foreshadowed the way she would hold fast to Robert Dudley, clamping him in fetters at the same time as she gave him his opportunity.

In February she had to hear the distasteful news that Kat had been pressurized into blabbing details of those early-morning romps. Elizabeth was never one to take humiliation lightly. She wrote indignantly to Somerset. She had to accept the further indignity of hearing that Lady Tyrwhit would replace the disgraced Kat Ashley. But effectively, she had got away with it; had kept her head, literally. It was only Seymour who, faced with thirty-three counts of treason, was sentenced to the death penalty. His brother refrained from any effort to save him - urged to this harshness by John Dudley. Elizabeth, as Tyrwhit reported, ‘beginneth now a little to droop’. But when, on 20 March, Seymour’s head was cut off, she was safe in the country.

David Starkey has discussed this formative episode in Elizabeth’s history, noting that ‘Almost all the men that she subsequently loved, or pretended to love, resembled Seymour. And all the affairs ended in the same way, in frustration and, in the case of the last [Robert’s stepson, Essex], again in death.’ To a psychologist - he says - Elizabeth might seem the victim of abuse, who herself would become a kind of abuser. To the eyes of a religious age, on the other hand, she would simply have learnt a great truth: that sex is sin and sin is danger. Both explanations, as he says, are far too simple. But there can be no doubt that her relationship with Thomas Seymour both affected and foreshadowed that with Robert Dudley - and perhaps not least in this: that marriage with royalty had been too dangerous an advancement for Seymour’s rivals to stomach; a rehearsal for the way Robert Dudley’s contemporaries would regard the possibility of Elizabeth’s marrying him. (Anne Boleyn, too, of course, had died for daring to mate too high.) Nor can the similarities have failed to strike Elizabeth herself: is it conceivable that, in the curbs she would eventually place upon Robert, she was trying to protect him in some way? Aspiring to marry her, after all, had brought Thomas Seymour to the block, as well as bringing Elizabeth herself into the spotlight of a dangerous and damaging inquiry. Paradoxically, the episode can only have reinforced the link in her mind between sex and danger: teaching not only that sex brought danger, but that the dangerous was somehow sexy. It is possible that Robert would not have held her interest so long had she not known he was both forbidden fruit, and a man from an ambitious family.

As the dust of the Seymour affair settled, Elizabeth retreated for the moment into her own household and what seemed a life of almost monastic study. Kat Ashley’s husband John later recalled the companionship of the household that centred on Elizabeth and her tutor, Ascham: the ‘free talk’ and ‘trim conferences’, the ‘friendly fellowship’ and ‘pleasant studies’ of Aristotle and Cicero. The picture was an idyllic one, somewhere between a reading group and an office awayday. Spoiling the image slightly are Elizabeth’s continued bouts of illness, which do indeed sound as if they may have been nervous in origin. But, in so far as she could lose herself in study, she was wonderfully placed to do so. Ascham described how the beginning of the day was devoted to the New Testament in Greek, followed by Greek literature and Latin literature, both carefully chosen to polish Elizabeth’s style, and by oral studies in the modern languages. Ascham praised not only his pupil’s aptitude but the ‘simple elegance’ of her personal appearance. With hindsight it seems odd to hear Elizabeth - Edward’s ‘Sweet Sister Temperance’ - praised for her contempt for adornment (though plainness was the fashion in the advanced Protestant circles to which the Dudleys also belonged).

But in the January of 1550 Ascham left Elizabeth’s service in a squabble that casts a slightly odd light on all his eulogies. He had, as he wrote to Cheke, been overcome by the ‘court violence’ that impinged on her circle. In the curious settlement left behind by King Henry - government by nobles, without clear division of authority, tough religious reform urged through by a King Edward who was still in his minority - neither court nor country was easy.

The rebellion which broke out in the summer of 1549 was, on the face of it, a poor man’s revolt against poverty - against the enclosures and speculation of the landowning classes; against the inflation that made the lives of common people a misery. But the fact that it was led by a landowner, Robert Kett, shows that it cannot be seen so simplistically. The rebels hoped to appeal to the ‘good duke’ Somerset to right their wrongs; but it was Somerset, as Lord Protector and head of the government, who ordered Dudley to put down the rebellion. When Dudley rode towards the Midlands in August, his sons Ambrose and Robert (the latter little more than sixteen) rode with his army.

It was no toy soldiery. The armies that faced each other, government and rebel, were each perhaps ten thousand strong. When conciliation failed, and the battles moved into East Anglia, it came down to savagery. Robert was there as his father led the fighting through the streets of Norwich; there when his father used all his gifts of speech and drama to rally the quaking city. Nominally, at least, the teenaged Robert was in command of a company of infantry; and though it would be Ambrose who first took on the role of the family soldier in the decades ahead, Robert did well enough in the military campaigns of his young manhood to be able to see himself as his father’s son. Later, he could still see himself as a warrior, even when advantage and affection kept him home, at Elizabeth’s side; and he still chose to have his likeness drawn with the gauntlet and helmet of armed chivalry.

As the victorious army rode back towards London, it became obvious that the young Dudley brothers were being blooded politically, as well as militarily. Perhaps they were already no strangers to this game, but this was to be politics with the gloves off. It has been speculated that it was the internecine bloodshed of the Kett rebellion that led Dudley to decide the time had come for Somerset’s rule to end. But he did not go quietly. October 1549 saw a series of frightening and dramatic scenes, with Somerset effectively kidnapping his nephew and taking the young King by night to Windsor on a plea of safety. When the dust settled, Somerset was in the Tower, and government was in the hands of John Dudley.

Few political figures have been the subject of such diverse opinions as John Dudley. He has (under his last title, Northumberland) been vilified for more than four centuries as ruthless, cruel, in the end cowardly as well, and above all as overweeningly ambitious. Yet some, recently, have seen him very differently - so differently that to reconcile the two opinions is impossible, in the context of this, the next generation’s story. Even so, the problem itself casts a kind of pall over anyone attempting to follow the Dudley family through the early 1550s. Certainly, the question of his heritage would not be forgotten by Robert’s contemporaries. His rise was watched by the hostile eyes of those who remembered the days when it was said that ‘the great devil Dudley ruleth’. Yet despite the ‘black legend’ that has grown up around the Dudleys, John Dudley was a loyal as well as an able soldier and administrator; one who - faced with the dangerous challenges of a child king, and, in Somerset, a weak and untrustworthy co-ruler - tried to educate that king for kingship as fast and well as possible, and to forge a collegiate relationship with even the most unpromising of colleagues. Many modern historians are inclined to suggest that while Somerset had been arrogating near-royal authority, Dudley ruled through council and in the name of the rightful monarch; and that if Edward had lived, history might have seen his mentor very differently.

Robert must have remembered his father, later, as powerful and, yes, ambitious. He must have felt he had large shoes to fill. But it seems possible (though Robert, like Elizabeth, seems hardly to have spoken of his disgraced parent) that he would also remember his father as fiercely loyal to the monarchy; as blamed unfairly. Here, then, may lie the explanation for Robert’s odd blend of touchiness and fidelity.

As the star of the Dudleys rose that autumn of 1549, Elizabeth came up to court for the Christmas festivities. Her complete rustication had not lasted long. She was preferred to Mary by the new elite, being, as the Habsburg ambassador put it, ‘more of their kidney’. Indeed, a year later it was reported that John Dudley was to divorce his wife and marry her. It was an extraordinary story and unlikely - but again, Dudley’s motive was thought to be that through Elizabeth he could ‘aspire to the crown’. One wonders at what stage she wearied of being regarded as a means to an ambitious end.

A few weeks later Elizabeth was finally granted possession of the formidable land holdings that should have come to her from her father’s death, including a swathe of manors and lands to the north-west of London, and Durham House in London for her town residence. (In the spring of 1553 she agreed, rather reluctantly, to hand the latter over to the Dudleys in return for the recently refurbished Somerset House - the keeper of which was Robert Dudley.) It was, if not a kingdom, at least a fiefdom. But she had sole possession only for her spinsterhood, her virginity.

Of John Dudley, the Habsburg ambassador wrote home that he was ‘absolute master here. Nothing is done except at his command.’ And his command had altered life for King Edward - and for his entourage, presumably. There were still the intensive lessons, still the emphasis on the reformed religion; more emphasis than ever on statecraft, since John Dudley seems to have been trying to fit his charge to assume the real rulership. But there were also more shooting, more tilting, more water tournaments and military displays, mock battles and mastiff baitings recorded in the young King’s journal. All these were fitting arenas to display the talents of the young male Dudleys; for John Dudley packed the royal apartments with his followers. Robert was learning another useful lesson - about the importance of proximity to the monarch’s person.

But in 1550, for Robert, private life came to the fore. He was betrothed to the daughter of a Norfolk landowner, Amy Robsart, at whose Norfolk house the Dudleys had stayed on their way to put down the Kett rebellion. It is possible the two knew each other already; they were much of an age, Amy perhaps a year the elder. It would seem to have been a love match - a carnal marriage, as William Cecil (now John Dudley’s secretary) would later put it disapprovingly. Certainly the eighteen-year-old Robert might have attracted any girl - many years later one observer, besotted with the ‘proportions and lineaments of his body’, called him ‘the goodliest male personage in England’. As for his side of the bargain, although John Dudley could now have made far grander alliances for his children, Amy was her father’s heiress, and by this alliance Robert would become a significant landholder in the contentious territory of Norfolk. They were married at Sheen on 4 June - the day after Robert’s eldest brother John was married to the daughter of Somerset, now out of the Tower and restored to a seat in government, in a limited way. John’s wedding was public and formal; Robert’s seems to have been marked by bucolic festivity. A live goose was tied to a pole (as King Edward noted in his diary), and the young male guests competed to cut off its head. The elder John Dudley, plagued by ever-worsening bouts of ill-health, was too unwell to be present at the ceremonies.

Elizabeth, however, was in higher and higher visibility. The Christmas celebration of 1550 brought her to London ‘with a great suite of gentlemen and ladies’, escorted by a hundred of the King’s horse and formally welcomed by the council - the point being, as Charles V’s ambassador bitterly pointed out, to show that she who had embraced the new religion had ‘become a very great lady’, by contrast with her sister, who so obstinately clung to the old. Fourteen months later, in 1552, she was back with an even greater train: two hundred of the gentry on horse, besides the walking soldiery. As she rode through the park of St James towards Whitehall and the court, along a highway specially strewn with clean sand, John Dudley himself was among her escort. He was now Duke of Northumberland, his eldest son Earl of Warwick, the title the father had previously held. The younger sons automatically became ‘Lord’ Ambrose, ‘Lord’ Robert and ‘Lord’ Guildford Dudley; titles they used by courtesy even after their father’s attainder.

On all these visits, if Elizabeth did not meet Robert - and why would anyone bother to mention it, if she did? - she certainly met Dudleys. And although Robert’s marriage saw him spending some time on those Norfolk estates, he too was climbing the ladder of court in a more modest way, appointed gentleman of the privy chamber in August 1551 and one of the welcoming escort for the Dowager Queen of Scotland in October. In 1552 (the year when, in January, Somerset was finally executed for treason and conspiracy) he was Member of Parliament and Lieutenant of Norfolk, and Master of Buckhounds as well when his eldest brother John was upgraded from that position to Master of Horse.

In 1553 Robert, with his father-in-law, was charged with removing all superstitious objects from the churches in their part of Norfolk - and, more frivolously, with taking on the office of the King’s carvery. Not that this was a sinecure, at a time when every piece of flesh, fish or fowl had its own techniques and its own special vocabulary. You would ‘break that deer’, ‘trush that chicken’, ‘disfigure that peacock’ and ‘splat that pike’. You would ‘undertranch that porpoise’ - not a task many could contemplate with equanimity. All this had to be mastered - and then you had to add the appropriate sauce to each dish. Small wonder that this was regarded as no menial task: John Dudley’s stepfather, Arthur Plantagenet, had been carver to his own half-nephew Henry VIII. None of Robert’s tasks made the wheels of government spin. Still, it was not a bad haul for a young man of only twenty.

But a time was soon coming when life would cease to be so easy for the Dudley clan - and when Elizabeth’s interests would diverge from theirs, radically. So far Mary’s loss of favour had been Elizabeth’s gain (and when in 1553 Mary seemed to be back in favour it seemed, again, to Elizabeth’s detriment). Nevertheless, when push came to shove, they were both the daughters of King Henry - and, as such, had a place in the succession; a place enshrined in their father’s will; a place that now seemed significant, in view of King Edward’s increasing frailty.

In the spring of 1552 Edward had fallen sick of measles and smallpox - from which, however, he seemed rapidly to recover. But that summer’s progress was a demanding one; and by August, it was noted on all sides how ill he looked. By the autumn it was obvious within court circles that the feverish and coughing King was suffering from (probably) tuberculosis. The medicines available included spearmint syrup mixed with red fennel and turnip, and the raw meat of a nine-day-old sow. No wonder (so Hayward later reported) a rumour would spread that Edward was being poisoned - even, that his malady dated from the time Robert was first placed in close proximity to him. But in fact there was nothing John Dudley desired less than Edward’s death. Upon Edward’s life depended John Dudley’s power and safety, and that of his family. He could expect only the harshest treatment from the Catholic Mary.

We should not exaggerate the degree to which the turmoils of the next year should really be put down to John Dudley’s slate. As 1552 turned to 1553 and Edward’s health worsened, the King himself, committed to his position as defender of the new faith, was determined his throne should not pass to Mary. It was in many ways a reasonable decision. Even to contemporaries, without benefit of hindsight, it was obvious that the clashes of Mary’s will with that of her people were likely to bring dissent; and that her complete and proven reliance on Habsburg advice and interests made her a dubious candidate for ruler of an independent country. It remains less clear why it was decided that Elizabeth had to be excluded along with her. Because Elizabeth was too much her father’s daughter to consent to the overturning of his will? Because Dudley knew she would never be his puppet? Or because he knew he would be able to marry his son Guildford to Lady Jane Grey, and fulfil his enemies’ worst suspicions by getting his blood onto the throne that way?

But Guildford did not marry Jane (or Dudley’s daughter Katherine marry Lord Hastings, descended from a brother of Edward IV) until late May 1553. The paper in Edward’s hand which bears the title ‘My device for the succession’ must have been written well before that; and Edward, by this point, was mature enough to be no mere puppet, even of a man as forceful as John Dudley.