The Nine Days' Queen, Lady Jane Grey, and Her Times. Richard Davey
and her mother’s country to the utmost. He was obliged, as has been shown, to cast his hazard when the public opinion was strongly against him, the commercial classes of England well nigh ruined, the labourers in a worse condition than had ever been known before, and the nobility jealous and apprehensive. Knowing this, as he did, it is difficult to believe that he would have dared to take up the position he assumed unless he had persuaded himself that, as a last resource, French armed aid would support him. That such a thing was not remotely probable is now evident from the correspondence of the French ambassadors. They were only full of sorrow for “this poor Queen Jane” and feared for the fate of their unfortunate friend the Duke of Northumberland. And yet London itself was in a panic, born of the conviction that 6000 French troops were on their way to keep Jane upon the throne; Northumberland, in fact, presumably believing that his past services to France had deserved such aid, had actually sent and demanded it of the King. If it had been afforded in effective time the whole history of England might have been changed.
We know now, although none knew it then, that the Emperor would have greeted with smooth assurances the victorious Jane and Northumberland, and would have deserted his cousin Mary until a turn of the wheel gave her hopes of success again. There was, indeed, nothing to prevent Henry of France, but groundless fear of his rival, from sending to England the small force necessary to keep Jane upon the throne and defeat Mary. But time-serving cowardice ruled over all. The edifice of Northumberland’s ambition crumbled like a house of cards under the weight of his unpopularity alone, and when Mary the victorious entered into the enjoyment of her birthright, the Frenchman who had plotted and intrigued against her in secret, vied with the imperial ambassadors who had stood by, unsympathetic in the hour of her trial, in their professions of devotion to her and her cause. The people of London, overwhelmingly Protestant as they were, greeted the Queen with effusion and had few words of pity for poor Jane, not because they loved the old observance but because they dreaded the French, and hated Northumberland the tyrannous and unjust servant of France. In the country districts, too, where Catholicism was strong, the enthusiasm for Mary was not so much religious, for all the people wanted was quiet and some measure of prosperity, as expressive of joy at the hope of a return to the national policy of cordial relations with the sovereign of Flanders, which in past times had ensured English commerce from French depredations and the English coast from French menaces, with freedom from the arrogant minister who had harassed every English interest and had reduced to ruin all classes in the country.
The unhappy Jane, a straw upon the rushing torrent, was not raised to her sad eminence that the Protestant faith might prevail, though that might have been one of the results of her rule, nor was she cast down because Catholicism was triumphant, but because the policy which her dictator, Northumberland, represented was unpopular at the time of Edward’s death, and the English sense of justice rebelled at the usurpation and its contriver. Mary, in addition to her inherent right to the succession, which was her strong point, had only her own boldness and tenacity to thank for the success which she achieved. The Emperor, notwithstanding all his sympathy and the enormous importance to him of her success, did nothing for her until she was independent of him, and only promised her armed aid then in case the French should attempt to overthrow her by force.
Northumberland fell, not because the country at large and London above all, was yearning for the re-submission of England to the Pope, but because the eighteen months of his unchecked dictatorship had made him detested, and because he overrated the boldness and magnanimity of the King of France. The English public, by instinct perhaps more than by reason, believed in the ideal policy of Henry VII: that of dexterously balancing English friendship between the rival continental powers, making the best market possible for her moral support, keeping at peace herself and adhering mostly to the more prosperous side without fighting for either. Such a policy required statesmanship of the highest order, and Elizabeth alone was entirely successful in carrying it out. Somerset and Northumberland both failed because they were unequal to it. Each of them took the minister’s view rather than that of a monarch. They were party leaders, both of them, and incapable of adopting the view above party considerations which marks the successful sovereign. They pledged themselves too deeply to the respective foreign alliances traditional with their parties; and in both cases, as a penetrating statesman would have foreseen, their allies failed them at the critical moment.
Mary’s tragical fate was the result of a similar short-sighted policy. When she determined against the wishes of her people and the advice of her wisest councillors, Catholics to a man, to hand herself and her country, body and soul, over to Spanish interests, she ceased to be a true national sovereign; the nice balance upon which England’s prosperity depended was lost, the love and devotion of the people turned to cold distrust, and failure and a broken heart were the result. Not until Elizabeth came with her keen wit and her consummate mastery of the resources of chicanery was England placed and kept firmly again upon the road to greatness which had been traced for her by the first Tudor sovereign.
MARTIN HUME
THE NINE DAYS’ QUEEN
CHAPTER I
BRADGATE HALL AND THE GREYS OF GROBY
There is no more picturesque spot in England than Bradgate Old Manor, the birthplace of Lady Jane Grey. It stands in a sequestered corner, about three miles from the town of Leicester, amid arid slate hillocks, which slope down to the fertile valleys at their feet. In Leland’s Perambulations through England, a survey of the kingdom undertaken by command of Henry VIII, Bradgate is described as possessing “a fair parke and a lodge lately built there by the Lorde Thomas Grey, Marquise of Dorsete, father of Henry, that is now Marquise. There is a faire and plentiful spring of water brought by Master Brok as a man would judge agyne the hills through the lodge and thereby it driveth a mylle.” He also informs us that “there remain few tokens of the old castelle,” which leads us to believe that at the time of Lady Jane Grey’s birth Bradgate was a comparatively new house. The ruins show that the mansion was built of red brick and in that severe but elegant form of architecture known as the “Tudor style.” Worthy old Leland goes on to say that Jane’s paternal grandfather added “two lofty towers at the front of the house, one on either side of the principal doorway.” These are still remaining.
In Tudor times the park was very extensive and “marched with the forest of Chartley, which was full twenty-five miles in circumference, watered by the river Sore and teeming with game.” Another ancient writer tells us, in the quaint language of his day, that “here a wren and squirrel might hop from tree to tree for six miles, and in summer time a traveller could journey from Beaumanoir to Burden, a good twelve miles, without seeing the sun.” The wealth of luxuriant vegetation in the old park, the clear and running brooks, that babble through the sequestered woods, and the beautifully sloping open spaces, dotted with venerable and curiously pollarded oaks, make up a scene of sylvan charm peculiarly English. Here cultivation has not, as so often on the Continent, disfigured Nature, but the park retains the wild beauty of its luxuriant elms and beeches that rise in native grandeur from amidst a wilderness of bracken, fern, and flags, to cast their shadows over heather-grown hillocks. On the summit of one of the loftiest of these still stands the ruined palace that was the birthplace of Lady Jane Grey. The approaches to Bradgate are beautiful indeed, especially the pathway winding round by the old church along the banks of a trout-stream, which rises in the neighbourhood of the Priory of Ulverscroft, famous for the beauty of its lofty tower. When Jane Grey was born, this Priory had been very recently suppressed, and the people were lamenting the departure of the monks, who, during the hard winter of 1528, had fed six hundred starving peasants.
Bradgate Manor House was standing as late as 1608, but after that date it fell into gradual decay. Not much is now left of the original structure, but its outlines can still be traced; and the walls of the great hall and the chapel are nearly intact. A late Lord Stamford