The Nine Days' Queen, Lady Jane Grey, and Her Times. Richard Davey
can never hope to restore. On the other hand, delicate folk must have dreaded these excursions, and it is not surprising to learn that on one occasion, in 1550, after a ten hours’ ride in very bad weather to Newhall, on a visit to Princess Mary, the Lady Jane was taken very ill, and kept her room for many days.
The Dissolution of the monasteries and the general troubles of the Church had no doubt greatly attenuated the quaintness of English life on the high roads by the time Jane had attained girlhood. No longer did the Lord Abbot or Prior, with his princely train of ecclesiastics on their gaily caparisoned horses and mules, pass through the leafy lanes on their way to pay visits of duty or ceremony. Lady Jane can never have seen the Abbot of Leicester, for instance, he who attended the death-bed of Wolsey, go forth with all his monks to pay his respects to the Prior of the rich house of Ulverston, for both abbeys were suppressed before she was a year old. She was not familiar with the begging friars, with their sacks and their jokes; and the pardoner, the palmer, and the pilgrim had also faded into the near past long before she began to toddle on the green slopes of Bradgate. Still she must have often witnessed the procession on Corpus Christi, when her own native village was enlivened by garlands of flowers and on every house front hung a linen sheet decked with bunches of bright flowers. She may even have walked with the rest of the children of high and low degree in the annual procession of Our Lady on Assumption Day, for throughout the reign of Henry VIII this festival was observed.
The roads were still full of colour in the summer months, with packmen and peddlers, troops of armed men—not unfrequently dragging along between them some poor wretch, tied by the wrists, to his fiery doom at Leicester or London—with travelling caravans, with itinerant mountebanks and jugglers, and occasionally with a troop of showmen hastening to exhibit dancing bears or learned dogs and pigs at some neighbouring village fair.
The suppression of the monasteries had a disastrous effect on travelling in Henry VIII’s time, comparable only to what would happen nowadays if all the first-class hotels in the country were suddenly closed. The Marquess and Marchioness of Dorset, as they journeyed with their children from Bradgate to London, must have heartily regretted the hospitality they had enjoyed in their own young days at many a lordly abbey and wealthy priory now laid in ruins. The inns were picturesque enough, but none too luxurious; still the beds were generally comfortable, and the cooking, according to the taste of the day, was excellent. Conti, an Italian traveller who visited England some few years after Henry VIII’s death, was much struck by the cleanliness of the parlours and the softness of the feather beds he met with in our country hostelries. The fare, too, he found abundant, and the wines, “sack,” and beers often of superlative quality—facts to which Shakespeare has not failed to allude. The innkeepers were great gainers by the Dissolution, for such rich travellers as did not care to trouble their peers looked to them for board and lodging now that they were no longer able to put up at a religious house. We may be sure that the Dorsets and their people were familiar and welcome guests at all the chief inns along the roads they travelled.
Aylmer, who became Bishop of London in Elizabeth’s time, is usually described as Lady Jane’s earliest tutor. This is a patent error, for Aylmer, who was born in 1521, would have been far too young, in Jane’s infancy, to be appointed tutor to the children of the Marquess of Dorset. It is more likely that Dr. Harding, who was chaplain at Bradgate when Jane was born, had the honour of teaching his patron’s daughters their alphabet. He was reputed a learned man, and posed at one time as a staunch Protestant; but he resembled his employers in having a chameleon-like facility for changing the colour of his opinions according to the state of the religious barometer in regal quarters. Under Henry VIII he was a schismatic and a firm believer in transubstantiation and in the wisdom of invoking saints; when Edward came to the throne he turned quasi-Calvinist. Very early in Mary’s reign he became, much to the unspeakable horror of Lady Jane, a penitent Papist. Aylmer, a far more estimable man and a greater scholar, appeared on the scene at Bradgate as tutor after the accession of King Edward, when Jane was in her twelfth year and ripe to receive his learned instruction in theology and classic lore.
CHAPTER III
THE LADY LATIMER
No task is more congenial to the earnest student of history than that of tracing the origin of some important event, and following its gradual development from a trivial incident to its culmination in a great matter destined to alter the fortunes, and even change the faith, of an entire nation. If we would reach a thorough comprehension of the chain of events which led up to the proclamation of Jane Grey as Queen of England, we must now leave her to pursue her Greek and Latin studies and broider her samplers at Bradgate, while we trace the earlier fortunes of those who so ruled her destiny as to compel a simple-hearted and naturally retiring girl to accept a station which, by the time she was constrained to relinquish it, brought her to the lowest depths of misfortune and transformed the regal diadem which she herself had never coveted into a crown of martyrdom.
The Lady Latimer, better known in history as Queen Katherine Parr, influenced the fortunes of Lady Jane Grey more than is usually imagined, for it was to her care that the ten-year-old child was committed (after it had been proposed by the Seymour faction that she should become Queen-Consort of Edward VI and head of the Protestant party in England), in order that her education might be directed and her mind bent towards “the new learning” of which Katherine was secretly a supporter.
Born in 1513 at that lordly Kendal Castle whose ruins still command one of the loveliest prospects in Westmoreland, Katherine Parr, though a simple gentlewoman, could boast royal blood—that of our Anglo-Saxon kings, inherited from her paternal ancestor Ivo de Talbois, who married Lucy, the sister of the renowned Earls Morcar and Edwin. She was also of Plantagenet descent through her great-great-grandmother Alice Nevill, sister to Cicely Nevill, Duchess of York, a lineage that made her cousin four times removed to King Henry VIII himself. We will not enter in detail into the many alliances of the Parr family with the Nevills, Stricklands, Throckmortons, and Boroughs, but we are safe in describing it as a wealthy and honourable county stock, much looked up to in those days.
Katherine’s father, Sir Thomas Parr, married, when his bride was but little over thirteen, Maud Green, daughter of the rich Sir Thomas Green of Boughton and Greens-Norton in Northamptonshire. Lady Parr had a sister, Mary, who, when a mere child, married Lord Vaux of Harrowden, and, dying without issue, left her splendid fortune to her sister Maud. Lady Parr’s eldest son, born before his mother was fifteen, was the celebrated Sir William Parr, ultimately Earl of Essex and Marquess of Northampton. Her next child mated with Mr. William Herbert, who was raised to the peerage in 1551 by Edward VI as Earl of Pembroke six weeks before the death of his wife. Katherine, the third and youngest child of Sir Thomas and Lady Parr, was destined to occupy the perilous position of sixth Queen-Consort to King Henry VIII. When she was a mere child, the proverbial gipsy-woman predicted that “she should one day wear a crown, and not a cap; and wield a sceptre, not a distaff.”24 Sir Thomas Parr died in London in 1517, leaving very scant provision for his two daughters, the bulk of his fortune having been settled upon his wife and son; but both young ladies married wealthy men, and thus were not seriously affected by their lack of means. Anne married at fifteen; and Katherine, long before she was fourteen, was led to the hymeneal altar by Lord Borough of Cantley Hall, Gainsborough, Yorkshire. The bridegroom had already been twice married, and so great was the disparity of age between the couple that Lady Borough was wont to call her eldest stepdaughter “little mother.” Two years after her marriage Katherine became a widow with a very handsome dower. Much of her time of mourning was spent at Sizergh Castle in Westmoreland, the seat of her kinsfolk the Stricklands, where she left several fine specimens of her skill as a needlewoman—notably a gorgeous white satin quilt embroidered with gold—which are still preserved in an apartment known as Queen Katherine’s Room.
We are fortunate in possessing a good many portraits of this lady, and at least one wonderful miniature, formerly in the Strawberry Hill Collection, and which now belongs to Mr. Brocklehurst-Dent of Sudeley Castle. This contains a likeness of Henry VIII painted in a space not bigger than a pin’s head,