Читать книгу The Sisters Who Would Be Queen: The tragedy of Mary, Katherine and Lady Jane Grey - Leanda Lisle de - Страница 15

It was late in the summer of 1550 when the Princess Elizabeth’s former tutor, Roger Ascham, arrived at Bradgate. He was en route to take up a post to the English ambassador at the court of Charles V. Ascham had come principally to say goodbye to his wife Alice, and the Astleys, Elizabeth’s former governess and her husband: all based at Bradgate since the break-up of Elizabeth’s household following Sudeley’s arrest. But Ascham also hoped to see Jane, to thank her for a letter of reference she had sent to his new employer. A prime purpose of Jane’s education was to coach her to perform on the public stage and the letter demonstrates she was already playing the role of a great patron. As Ascham would discover, however, the thirteen-year-old was finding the pressure intense.

Jane was expected to excel in all fields, including dance and Greek, manners and philosophy, but the duty of obedience was the lesson she was finding hardest to absorb. ‘Unless you frame yourself to obey, yea and feel in yourself what obedience is, you shall never be able to teach others how to obey you,’ her future nephew, Philip Sidney, would explain to his son.¹ The harder this lesson was taught, however, the more Jane struggled against it, and she had begun to avoid her parents’ company. When Ascham reached the house he was told that the entire household was hunting in the park, save for Jane who had chosen to stay behind. He found her alone in her chamber looking ‘young and lovely’. She had just broken off from reading Plato’s Phaedo, which describes the courage Socrates displayed in the face of death. ‘When I come to the end of my journey,’ Socrates says as he prepares to take hemlock from the executioner, ‘I shall obtain that which has been the pursuit of my life.’² Many lesser students struggled with the Greek and, perhaps, with its arguments for the immortality of the soul. But to Ascham’s amazement it was apparent that Jane read it ‘with as much delight as gentlemen read a merry tale in Boccacio’.^*

Ascham chatted with Jane for a while, before summoning up the courage to ask why she was reading Plato instead of being in the park with everyone else? Jane smiled and replied that ‘all their sport in the park is but a shadow to that pleasure that I find in Plato! Alas! Good folk, they never felt what true pleasure meant.’ Ascham, oblivious to the authentic voice of the teenage know-it-all, was delighted to find a young woman with such a love of philosophy, and he wondered what might have drawn her to it ‘seeing not many women [and] very few men, have attained thereunto’. At that, however, Jane seized the opportunity to launch an attack on the wrongs she believed she was being dealt at the hands of her parents.

I will tell you, and tell you a truth which perchance ye will marvel at. One of the greatest benefits that ever God gave me is that he sent me so sharp and severe parents and so gentle a schoolmaster. For when I am in presence of either father or mother, whether I speak, keep silence, sit, stand or go, eat, drink, be merry or sad, be sewing, playing, dancing or doing anything else, I must do it, as it were, in such weight, measure and number, even so perfectly as God made the world, or else I am so sharply taunted, so cruelly threatened, yea, presently sometimes with pinches, nips and bobs, and other ways, (which I shall not name, for the honour I bear them), so without measure misordered, that I think myself in hell, till time come that I must go to Mr Aylmer, who teaches me so gently, so pleasantly, with such fair allurements to learning, that I think all the time nothing whilst I am with him. And when I am called from him, I fall on weeping, because whatever I do else but learning is full of grief, trouble, fear and wholly misliking unto me. And thus my book hath been so much my pleasure, and brings daily to me more pleasure and more that in respect of it, all other pleasures, in very deed, be but trifles and troubles unto me.³

Years later, Ascham recorded this conversation in his memoir The Schoolmaster, and used it to support his thesis that pupils did better if their tutors treated them kindly. The passage has been misused since, however, as ‘proof’ of the cruelty of Jane’s parents - and especially of Frances - in contrast to the kindliness of Aylmer. Jane, like many girls her age, may well have preferred the world of books to that in which she was forced to engage with demanding adults, but Ascham’s image of a kindly Aylmer and bullying parents was never an accurate one, and has been used in a way that would surely have appalled him. The reason for the later slandering of Frances’s reputation, in particular, is shameful. Since the eighteenth century she has been used as the shadow that casts into brilliant light the eroticised figure of female helplessness that Jane came to represent. While Jane is the abused child-woman of these myths, Frances has been turned into an archetype of female wickedness: powerful, domineering and cruel. The mere fact that Frances was with the rest of the household in the park, while Jane read her book, became the basis for a legend that she was a bloodthirsty huntress. The scene in Trevor Nunn’s 1985 film, Lady Jane, in which Frances slaughters a deer on white snow, is inspired by it and establishes her early on in the film as a ruthless destroyer of innocents: a wicked Queen to Jane’s Snow White.

A letter Ascham wrote to Jane only a few months after his visit gives a more accurate idea of his feelings at the time than later recollections, which were coloured by subsequent events and the desire to promote his arguments on teaching. That Ascham thought Jane remarkable is evident in this letter. He told her that in all his travels he had not yet met anyone he admired more: he only hoped that Katherine, who at ten remained a beginner at Greek, would one day follow in her footsteps. He had nothing but good words, however, for both her parents, who, he noted, delighted in her achievements. Dorset had invested in Jane all the hopes a nobleman normally placed in a son, and in the sixteenth century that inevitably meant a rigorous, even harsh, educational regime.

Jane’s favourite writer, Plato, was well heeded when he said that children were born for their country, not for themselves - especially if they were destined for high position. Jane was suffering, certainly, but she endured no more than the standard lot of the elite of children and young adults destined to be England’s future leaders. The Brandon brothers, much loved by their mother, could not even eat lunch without also being obliged to feed their minds. Before they sat for their meals, the boys were expected to read passages of Greek, then, while ‘at meat’ they disputed philosophy and divinity in Latin. When the meal concluded, they had to translate the Greek passages they had read at the beginning. Jane chafed at such demands, but the supposedly ‘gentle’ Aylmer was in complete agreement with Jane’s parents that she needed discipline to flourish. As he observed, Jane was ‘at that age, [when] as the comic poet tells us, all people are inclined to follow their own ways’. And he asked the advice of leading divines on how best to ‘provide bridles for restive horses’ such as this spirited girl.⁴

A still more revealing insight into the household at Bradgate is given in the contemporary letters of exiled German divine, John of Ulm, to the Zurich pastor Heinrich Bullinger. Although Ulm admired Dorset, and was supported financially by him, Jane’s father emerges from this correspondence as a man of immense vanity. Dorset was forever showing off his ‘eloquent’ Latin, to learned men, ‘with whom he mutually compares his studies’. These included the family’s Cambridge-educated chaplain, James Haddon, and the preacher John Wullocke, who would later play a leading role in the Scottish Reformation. While Jane’s modern biographers frequently describe Frances as the dominant partner in the marriage, it is Dorset’s obsession with his royal connections that is also striking. ‘He told me he had the rank of Prince,’ Ulm confided in Bullinger, adding that, although Dorset didn’t wish to be so styled in public, he was content to be referred to as such in private. Ulm urged Bullinger to flatter Dorset with a dedication to a forthcoming theological work, the fifth part of his Decades, on Christian perfection. Ignoring Frances, despite her importance as Henry VII’s granddaughter, he added that Bullinger should also cultivate Jane, as the heir of the great ‘Prince’.

That autumn, as Ulm waited for Bullinger’s promised fifth Decade, he translated a portion of the pastor’s treatise on Christian marriage from German into Latin for Jane. She responded enthusiastically, retranslating it into Greek and presenting it to her father for the New Year of 1551. ‘I do not think there ever lived anyone more deserving of respect than this young lady, if you consider her family,’ mused Ulm, ‘[or] more learned if you consider her age; or more happy if you consider both.’⁵

It was in late April or early May of 1551 that the copies of Bullinger’s fifth Decade on Christian perfection at last arrived in England. As promised the dedication read: ‘[To] the most illustrious Prince and Lord, Henry Grey, Marques of Dorset…a vigorous maintainer of real Godliness’.⁶ Dorset had recently left for Berwick, on the volatile border with Scotland, where he served briefly as Warden of the Three Marches responsible for keeping order in the region. But Ulm followed. He reported back to Bullinger that Dorset had arrived in the north with numerous preachers, as well as 300 cavalry. Ulm had delivered the treatise to him and then headed for Bradgate, where ‘a most weighty and eloquent epistle’ had arrived for Jane, along with another copy of the Decades.

Ulm arrived in Leicestershire on 29th May, and spent the following two days, ‘very agreeably with Jane, my Lord’s daughter, and those excellent and holy persons Aylmer and Haddon [the chaplain]’. Katherine and Mary Grey were, it seems, elsewhere, as was their mother. The family owned properties from Cumberland in the north to Devon in the south-west and Essex in the east. They could have been visiting any of them, staying with friends or acting as the guests of local towns. Even the six-year-old Mary was now being given gifts from burghers seeking her goodwill. The Chamberlain’s accounts in Leicester that year record payment of ‘4sh and 4d’ for a ‘gallon and a half of wine, peasecod and apples’ for Mary, though the wine was surely destined for others.⁷

At Bradgate Ulm found Jane, who had just turned fourteen, anxious to show off her language abilities, and was shown a letter she had written in Greek to Bullinger. It fulfilled all the requirements of the formal style drawn from Greek oration and Ulm was impressed by its maturity. Jane was encouraged to write several further letters to Bullinger over the next two years. They resemble the correspondence of the famous Marguerite of Valois, the late Queen of Navarre, with her spiritual mentor, Bishop Briçonnet of Meaux. The Queen, who died in 1549, had been greatly admired for her brilliance and her piety, and she was the perfect model for a Tudor princess such as Jane. But while Jane’s letters are academically impressive, the selfabasement and expansive vocabulary of the high style are unsettling for the modern reader. ‘I entertain the hope that you will excuse the more than feminine boldness in me, who, girlish and unlearned as I am, presume to write to a man who is the father of all learning’, runs one letter from Jane to Bullinger: ‘pardon this rudeness which has made me not hesitate to interrupt your more important vocations with my vain trifles and puerile correspondence.’⁸ Happily, however, the young girl can, sometimes, be spotted through the thick verbiage.

In Jane’s first letter she expressed amazement that Bullinger could find the time, ‘to write from so distant a country, and in your declining age, to me’. Bullinger, at not quite forty-seven, seemed impossibly old to Jane. She was grateful for his ‘instruction, admonition and counsel, on such points especially, as are suited to my age and sex and the dignity of my family’. Jane complained she missed the advice she used to receive from the Strasbourg reformer Martin Bucer, who had died in February. Such religious exiles were the principal source of radical ideas in England, and Jane’s father, along with his friend Parr of Northampton, their leading patrons on the Privy Council. Jane assured Bullinger, she was now reading the Decades every day, gathering ‘as out of a most beautiful garden, the sweetest flowers’.⁹ Amongst these were Bullinger’s comments, in the dedication to her father, on the importance of reading the Old Testament in Hebrew, as well as reading the New Testament in Greek. She was now learning Hebrew, she said, and asked ‘if you will point out some way and method of pursuing this study to the greatest advantage’.¹⁰

Ulm was certain that Bullinger would be impressed with Jane’s ‘very learned letter’, but he had also heard some interesting gossip at Bradgate, which he passed on. ‘A report has prevailed and has begun to be talked of by persons of consequence, that this most noble virgin is to be betrothed and given in marriage to the King’s Majesty.’¹¹ This claim was an extraordinary one. At that very moment, William Parr, Marquess of Northampton, was in France at the head of a diplomatic mission, with instructions to arrange the formal betrothal of Edward to Henri II’s daughter Elizabeth. Ulm, however, repeated what he had learned at Bradgate to other friends in Europe.

Uncertain that Bullinger would have time for the task of overseeing Jane’s Hebrew, and anxious that Jane’s language skills be developed by someone steeped in the theology of Switzerland, Ulm wrote to a professor in Zurich called Conrad Pellican, asking him to help teach Jane her Hebrew. By way of incentive he told Pellican that he had heard she was one day to be married to King Edward, and raved about Jane’s ‘incredible’ achievements thus far. These included, he noted, the ‘practice of speaking and arguing with propriety, both in Greek and Latin’.¹²

Jane, it seems, was being trained in the art of rhetoric: the mastery of language as a means to persuade, edify and instruct. It was an area in which a dynamic mind such as hers was likely to excel. But it was also considered suitable only for a woman being prepared for a significant role, such as that of a King’s wife. ‘Oh! If that event should take place, how happy would be the union and how beneficial to the Church!’ Ulm sighed.¹³ He admitted, however, that he nursed a fear that the brilliant religious leader being honed at Bradgate might yet be blasted by a ‘calamity of the times’. People were suffering the economic fallout of Warwick’s deflationary policies and there were major riots again in Leicestershire that summer. It was not revolt, however, but a natural disaster in July that provided the bitterest reminder of just how cruel fate could be. A mysterious disease known as the ‘sweating sickness’ was sweeping England. The epidemics, which vanished altogether after the sixteenth century, would arrive suddenly and disappear quickly. But, while they lasted, they brought illness and death with frightening speed.

Edward recorded in his journal that the sweat arrived in London on 9th July and immediately proved even more vehement than any epidemic he remembered. If a man felt cold ‘he died within three hours and if he escaped it held him for nine hours, or ten at most’. Seventy people died in London the next day, and on the 11th, the King reported, ‘120 and also one of my gentlemen, another of my grooms fell sick and died’.¹⁴ In Leicestershire, a Bradgate neighbour, Lord Cromwell, succumbed and, on the early morning of the 14th, it struck within the Grey family. In their rooms at Buckden, the former palace of the Bishop of Lincoln, Katherine Suffolk’s sons, Henry and Charles, awoke that morning with a sense of apprehension. It was the first symptom of the illness. The brothers were soon seized with violent, icy shivers, a headache and pains in the shoulders, neck and limbs. Within three hours the cold left them and their temperatures rose dramatically. It was then that the characteristic sweating began.

The boys’ mother rushed to her children’s bedside from her estate at Grimsthorpe in Lincolnshire as their pulses began to race and an incredible thirst took hold. But finally exhaustion brought an irresistible desire to sleep. The elder brother, Henry, Duke of Suffolk, was already dead when their mother arrived. The younger, Charles, followed before seven o’clock on the morning of 15th July. Katherine Suffolk was devastated by their loss. Henry, at fifteen, ‘stout of stomach without all pride’; Charles ‘being not so ripe in years was not so grave in look, rather cheerful than sad, rather quick than ancient’.¹⁵ She sat alone in the dark, refusing food. The boys’ tutor Thomas Wilson worried as he saw his mistress lose weight, ‘your mind so troubled and your heart so heavy…detesting all joy and delighting in sorrow, wishing with [your] heart, if it were God’s will, to make your last end’. He begged her to be ‘strong in adversity’.¹⁶

Katherine of Suffolk’s friend and Lincolnshire neighbour, William Cecil, also wrote to her with words of comfort. Her letter to him replied miserably that nothing thus far in her life had made her so aware of God’s power. That she was being punished for her sins she was certain. The preacher Hugh Latimer had even told her which ones: it was her greed in enclosing land and depriving the poor of food. She could not bear to see anyone, she told Cecil. Although she was certain her children were with God and she knew she should rejoice, she found she could not. At Grimsthorpe she kept their clothes and possessions: black velvet gowns furred with sable, fashionable crimson hose, tennis rackets and the rings they practised catching with lances at the tilt. Her shock and dismay, if not her pain, was felt across the evangelical elite. Her sons were amongst the brightest hopes of their generation. The great Latinist, Walter Haddon, the brother of the Bradgate chaplain James Haddon, wrote a eulogy in their memory; the King’s tutor, John Cheke, composed an epitaph, while Wilson wrote a prose biography and several Latin poems, a volume of which was dedicated to Dorset.¹⁷ Jane’s place as a Godly leader, by example, for her generation was now more important than ever.

^* The famous collected tales of love by the Italian author who had inspired Chaucer.