The Nine Days' Queen, Lady Jane Grey, and Her Times. Richard Davey
the second was occupied by “knights and honourable gentlemen.” In such a case the tables in the great hall were generally three, the first for the steward, comptroller, secretary, master of the house, master of the fish-ponds, the tutor—if one was attached to the family—and such gentlemen as happened to be under the degree of a knight. In a very large household it frequently happened that as many as a hundred and fifty or two hundred people would sit down to eat at one and the same time, but in most castles, halls, and manors the ladies of the family, excepting on state occasions, ate apart from the men, a separate table being laid for them, and for the chaplain, in the ladies’ chamber, while two others were laid in the housekeeper’s room for the ladies’ women. The Lady Frances usually partook of her dinner in solitary state, waited upon by young gentlewomen and, when they were old enough to do so, by her two elder daughters, who stood on either side of her until she had finished, when they in their turn sat down and were served by gentlewomen. In their infancy, the children, attended by their nurses and gentlemen and women, dined with the housekeeper in her chamber.
All meals were somewhat disorderly, for, forks not being in general use, it was the custom for the gentlemen to pick the daintiest scraps out of the common dish with the tips of their fingers, and place them gallantly upon the platters of the ladies seated nearest them. It was considered ill-bred to lick one’s fingers after this act of courtesy. Proper behaviour was to wipe them daintily upon a sort of napkin or serviette, sometimes, as in Japan, made of tissue paper.
Grace was said both before and after meals, and as most large houses had several chaplains and a choir for the service of the chapel, it was usual for one of the priests, accompanied by three or four of the choristers wearing their surplices, to enter the hall and solemnly chant the Benedicite or Grace, which until Edward VI’s time invariably concluded with a petition for the release of the souls in Purgatory. It was considered impolite to talk during a repast unless addressed by the master or mistress of the feast. The chaplain was employed to read aloud either the Gospel of the day or a chapter from that enlivening work The Martyrology. Occasionally a minstrel was invited to sing an interesting ballad or tell a story; otherwise the clinking of the knives was the only sound heard during meals, which, however copious, were invariably dispatched with the utmost speed. In proportion to the amount of meat very little bread was consumed. “The English bolt their food in dead silence,” remarked the Venetian Ambassador Giustiniani, “and, bread being dear, eat very sparingly of it. They throw their chicken bones under the table when they have sucked them clean.”
When supper, a meal which corresponds with our late dinner, was over, evening prayers were said, and soon afterwards, on ordinary occasions, everybody retired to rest. It should be remembered that artificial light was exceedingly costly and inadequate, as indeed it remained until the beginning of the later half of the nineteenth century. Many who are still in the prime of life can remember the rush tallow dips made and used in old-fashioned country houses and farms in their childhood. In the sixteenth century these were the only lights to be had, except oil lamps and wax candles imported at immense expense from France and Italy, and only kindled on high days and holidays.19 Resin torches were burnt in the great hall; but many complained of the stench and smoke, so that an early departure to bed was not only wise but necessary.
It may perhaps be concluded that we who live at the beginning of the twentieth century would have found life in an English manor in Tudor days insufferably dull and monotonous. Yet there were compensations. Outdoor exercises were many and various. There was the tennis-court, bowls and quoits were much in vogue, and our forefathers practised many other excellent sports, some of which we might well revive. There was hawking, then in the zenith of its popularity; hunting, archery, slinging, mase or “prisoner’s bars,” wrestling, tennis, of which game Henry VIII was exceedingly fond; fivestool ball, football, and golf. Cricket does not seem to have been known, at all events under its present name; but there were a score or so of other popular games and sports, some of which, such as duck-hunting, dog-fighting, and cock-fighting, were exceedingly barbarous. The cruel sport of trying on horseback to pull off the greased head of a living duck or goose suspended by the legs from a cross beam was exceedingly popular at this time.20 Edward VI, in his Journal, mentions it in an entry dated 4th June 1550: “Sir Robert Dudley, third surviving son of the Earl of Warwick, was married this day to Sir John Robsart’s daughter, after which marriage there were certain gentlemen on horseback that did strive who should first carry away a goose’s head that was hanged alive on two cross-posts.” Can we imagine the whole Court of England, King included, assisting at this childish and cruel spectacle?
The Marquess of Dorset and his family did not spend the whole year at Bradgate; political and social duties brought them a great deal to London, especially in the early spring and summer months. In London they inhabited a mansion at Westminster, not far from Whitehall Palace. The town residence of the Marquess of Dorset was not, as usually stated, situated in Grey’s Inn. At no time did his branch of the family of Grey possess property in or near the Inn which bears their name; it belonged from a remote period to the house of Grey de Wilton, who sold it, in Edward IV’s time, to the Carthusians of Sheen, from whom it was confiscated at the Dissolution and subsequently granted by the Crown for the purpose which it still serves. Thus Grey’s Inn did not fall to Lady Frances, although she was presented by her uncle the King with nearly all the other property owned by the Carthusians in and around London. It has also been said that the Marquess of Dorset had a house in Salisbury Place, Fleet Street, but this is another popular error. This property passed to the Earls of Dorset in 1611 and is connected, not with Lady Jane and her family, but with many worthies of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Henry, Marquess of Dorset, had his town residence on the Thames above Whitehall,21 precisely where stood, until quite recently, Dorset Place—the name by which the house was known in Lady Jane’s time. After the execution of Suffolk it was seized by the Crown and eventually, in the last days of the sixteenth century, cut up into three separate houses, one of which was inhabited by John Locke the philosopher, who died in it. By a curious coincidence, Locke had previously lived at Salisbury Square. Dorset Place must have been a very large house; we know from contemporary evidence that it had a fine garden and a broad terrace overlooking the Thames. Here Lady Jane Grey certainly lived for a good many months of her life, and here she formed the acquaintance of the Reformers Bullinger and Ulmer, or ab Ulmis. She may also have lived for a time in yet another house owned by the Marquess, near the Temple, of which no trace now exists.
The Dorsets were in the habit, especially in the winter season, of paying country visits to their numerous relatives—to Princess Mary at Newhall; to the Lady Frances’ stepmother, Katherine, Duchess of Suffolk, at Wollaton; to Dorset’s sister, the Lady Audley, at Walden; to his orphan wards and cousins the Willoughbys, at Tylsey; and to Lady Jane’s paternal grandmother, the Dowager Marchioness of Dorset, either at her house at Croydon or at Tylsey, where at one time she presided over the household of the young Willoughbys.
The entertainment of such important personages must often have been a doubtful pleasure to hosts of limited means, for they never stirred abroad without a numerous escort of male and female servants and a guard of thirty or forty retainers mounted on horseback and armed to the teeth. Carriages were but little used as yet, and people of quality had to journey from place to place on horseback, the elderly ladies being provided with the quaintest but most inconvenient and perilous of side saddles, while the young girls and children rode pillion either in front of or behind their nearest male relatives or some trusty yeoman. In cold or damp weather the ladies and children and their female attendants travelled in a huge and very heavy covered vehicle22 not unlike a Turkish araba or a modern omnibus in shape. This was furnished with leathern curtains and lined with mattresses and cushions, and could often contain as many as twelve persons, six on either seat facing each other. To protect themselves from the cold the ladies wore cloaks and vizors, or “safeguards.”23 The first genuine statute for repairing roads dates only from 1668. Before that the roads were, like those of modern Turkey, universally execrable, and over them this ponderous vehicle, with its enormous wheels, moved at a snail’s pace: it is not surprising that most people preferred the hackney, even in winter time. Yet in spite of all its inconveniences, this old-world fashion of travel was not without charm, especially in genial weather, when the passage of a lordly cavalcade added much to the life of our highways and verdant lanes and lent to the ever lovely English landscape a picturesqueness