Richard Davey

“ This favour being granted, he threw back his cloak, and appeared, a blaze of cloth of gold, of glittering damascened armour and sparkling jewels, to break sixteen lances in honour of the queen. Again, when Queen Mary was his bride, and the court went a-maying at Shooters Hill, he devised a sort of pastoral play, and with Jane Grey’s paternal grandfather, Thomas, Marquis of Dorset, disguised himself and his merry men as palmers, in gowns of grey satin with scallop-shells of pure gold and staves of silver. ”

“ It is, however, unjust, but still possible, to force a man to act as you will, but that he should be obliged to see things in the same light as his King is simply absurd. Yet they are so ignorant here they pass such a thing as this, for religion in this country is simply, believe me, a matter of policy.” Indeed, religion in the sixteenth century was not only in England, but elsewhere, “merely a matter of policy,” a fact which may explain why Lady Katherine Grey, who was a good Catholic under Mary, had become an equally good Protestant under Elizabeth. ”

“ Lady Katherine, unlike her sister Jane, was not blessed (or cursed) with a mother-in-law, for Anne Parr, only sister of Queen Katherine Parr and mother of Lord Herbert, had died some months before her son’s marriage and her husband’s accession to the rank of earl. The young “bride’s” father-in-law, however, must have been the reverse of a pleasant companion—his selfishness, craft, and brutality, like his enormous wealth, were common talk. ”

“ Blanche was a handsome and amiable woman, who used her influence over her mistress to the advantage of others as well as of herself. One day, Lady Katherine asked her to “do” her hand for her, and Blanche, who was probably well aware of all that was going on between young Hertford and her royal client, told her: “The lines say, madam, that if you ever marry without the queen’s consent in writing, you and your husband will be undone, and your fate worse than that of my Lady Jane.” Katherine paid very little attention to the admonition, but went her way to perdition blindly. ”

“ The Lady Frances might easily have been selected as the head of one or other of the numerous parties then existing in England, in order that she should become a possible successor or even rival to Queen Mary. The fact that she was the wife of a “base-born knave” made it almost an impossibility that she could be used as a tool against the queen. The people would never have accepted her as a ruler, nor would they have allowed her offspring, notwithstanding the example of Katherine of Valois and Owen Tudor, to have succeeded to the Throne. ”

“ She felt sure she would become the mother of an heir to the Throne, and it mattered very little to her whom the Lady Katherine married, provided he was of sufficient rank. Notwithstanding that his mother, the duchess, was a very outspoken Protestant, Queen Mary always entertained a great affection for her, addressing her, in her numerous letters, as her “Dearest Nan.” Indeed the early courting of Lady Katherine and Hertford was spent under the most auspicious circumstances, smiled upon by the queen and amidst the most charming and romantic surroundings. ”

“ Lady Katherine Grey’s first appearance at the court of the queen, her cousin, was on the occasion of Mary’s marriage to Philip of Spain in July 1554, when she is mentioned as being among the ladies who rode in that startling red-lacquered chariot, lined with crimson velvet and specially constructed for the purpose, that so delighted contemporaries, and conveyed Her Majesty and her ladies over the very rough roads between London and Winchester, rendered still more dreadful by an almost incessant downpour of rain which had lasted for some weeks. ”

“ So many cross-country journeys on horseback, to and fro, from Bradgate to Hunsdon, Hunsdon to Tilsey, Tilsey to Saffron Walden, from Saffron Walden to London, and then a three-days’ journey back to Leicestershire, either in a litter or on horseback, told unfortunately on the health of the little Ladies Jane and Katherine, and both of them—and no wonder!—were laid up for a week or so with serious illnesses. ”

“ Desire, dear sister, to understand the law of the Lord your God. Live still to die, that you by death may purchase eternal life, or, after your death, enjoy the life purchased for you by Christ’s death. Trust not that the tenderness [100] of your age shall lengthen your life, for as soon as God will, goeth the young as the old. Labour alway and learn to die. Deny the world, defy the devil, and despise the flesh. ”

“ Quadra evidently thought that the people might yet favour Lady Katherine over Elizabeth, who in the first year of his embassy he believed to be more unpopular than she really was. He seemed disgusted at the queen’s levity and indecision: “It is ruining her popularity,” he says; “she is in danger of losing her Crown.” One day she tells him she will never marry any one, and the next she asks him if he thinks there would be much opposition if she married one of her servants [meaning Dudley] , as the duchesses of Somerset and Suffolk had done. ”

“ Although the French greeted the queen heartily, it was noticed that they “became overcast and sour” as they looked on the magnificent but defiant figure of the Duke of Suffolk, as he rode, in his silver armour, on the right side of the queen’s litter, whilst on the left cantered that stalwart nobleman, Thomas Grey, first Marquis of Dorset, who was destined by a curious and unexpected event to become the grandfather of Her Majesty’s ill-fated grandchildren, the Ladies Jane, Katherine and Mary Grey. ”

“ She bore witness, in after years, to the kindness and consideration she had received from Queen Mary, and the precedence accorded to her on all state occasions as a princess of the blood, allowing her to walk before any of the other great ladies of the court, excepting the Princess Elizabeth, the Lady Frances, and Henry VIII’s fourth wife and only surviving widow, Anne of Cleves. Queen Mary, unlike her successor Elizabeth, insisted upon her ladies and maids of honour paying the utmost attention to their religious duties, and was, moreover, very vigilant as to their manners and their morals. ”

“ Miss Agnes Strickland and other historians have fallen into the error of stating that Mary Tudor appointed the Lady Frances, Duchess of Suffolk, to be one of her women of the bedchamber, and her two daughters, the Ladies Katherine and Mary Grey, maids of honour. A little reflection will show that such appointments were as impossible in Mary’s time, as it would be, in our day, for Her present Majesty, to name the Duchess of Fife and her children, or the Princess Louise, Duchess of Argyll, to similar positions in her household. ”

“ Lady Katherine, who had been intimate with the Countess of Feria, an Englishwoman by birth, and a close friend of Queen Mary, was strongly prejudiced against the Princess Elizabeth, who, she had been assured, was no daughter of Henry VIII, but a mere result of Anne Boleyn’s intimacy with Smeaton the musician. Notwithstanding, therefore, the queen’s advances, on more than one occasion Lady Katherine Grey, according to Quadra, the Spanish Ambassador, answered Elizabeth disrespectfully. ”

“ Being considerably over forty when Charles Brandon was in his nineteenth year (it will be remembered that he was a mere child at the time of the battle of Bosworth) , she fell a victim to the youth’s fascinations, and married him, to the amazement of the Venetian ambassador, who comments upon the affair in a note to his government, saying: “In this country [England] young men marry old ladies for their money, and here, for instance, is the Duke of Suffolk, who, at nineteen, married a lady, for her wealth, in whose house he dwelt, and who is old enough to be his grandmother.” ”

“ Love, like Justice, is reputed blind; and between All Hallows and Christmas, 1560, a year after the death of the Lady Frances, Hertford solemnly pledged his troth to Katherine and presented her with a plain gold ring, which opened with a secret spring in several linked compartments, on each of which he had engraved different Latin distichs of his own composition. ”

“ The Spanish ambassador wrote to King Philip, early in the year, that he was amazed by “the new queen’s flightiness,” and remarks that “there is no understanding this woman. She will surely come to trouble of her own making.” Elizabeth was at her wits’ end to know exactly what to do.
Her equanimity was greatly disturbed by the question of the succession, and she was advised on all hands to marry, and by having an heir of her own, so to speak, succeed herself. ”

“ Katherine was the only child of the lately deceased William, Lord Willoughby d’Eresby by his second wife, Doña Maria de Sarmiento y Salinas, a Spanish noblewoman and a faithful and tried attendant upon Queen Katherine. It seems incredible that such a pious woman should have approved of so unnatural an alliance, but in Tudor times the voice of Nature herself was often hushed, and that of personal and political interest alone heard. ”

“ Elizabeth welcomed her bereaved cousins with much apparent sympathy. She was, or pretended to be, most affectionate to them, and even called Lady Katherine “her daughter,” although, as Quadra, the Spanish ambassador, says, “the feeling between them could hardly have been that of mother and child.” “But,” he goes on to say, “the Queen has thought best to put her [Lady Katherine] in her chamber and makes much of her in order to keep her quiet. She even talks about formally adopting her.” ”

“ To crown all these objections, Sir John informs the council that his house is the last in which the Lady Katherine would be safe; “for all the times in the night they may come to the windows of every chamber in my house, or talk with her or deliver letters unto her, or if she were so disposed, she may either let them into her chamber, or go out to them at the loops of the windows, they are so great and wide.” ”

“ The gentleman is distinctly plain and common looking—he might indeed be a groom, with his ginger hair, his colourless eyes and rather silly expression. He wears a very rich doublet of black velvet, furred with ermine; whereas the Lady Frances, a buxom, but sour and ill-tempered looking lady, bearing a strange resemblance to her uncle, Henry VIII, is attired in a dress of black satin, with a jewelled pattern. She wears the well-known Mary Stuart coif and some fine jewels. ”

“ In 1553 the Duke of Northumberland, then all powerful, induced Edward VI, in the last weeks of his reign, to make a Will, in which he set aside the Princesses Mary and Elizabeth, his sisters, even stigmatizing them as bastards, and thus reversing his father’s testament; and named Lady Jane Grey, his cousin, and in default of her, her sisters Katherine and Mary Grey, as his immediate and legitimate successors. ”

“ That Lady Katherine Grey, on account of her supposed leaning towards Catholicism and her friendship for the Ferias, was regarded by the Spanish King as the most likely medium for realizing his hopes, was well known.
As will be seen in the course of this biography, many and curious were the intrigues, of which Lady Katherine was the centre, for retrieving Spanish ascendancy in the British Isles; but by far the most astonishing and fantastic (and the earliest) was a plot—evolved in 1558 or early in 1559—for secretly abducting Katherine to Spain. ”

“ The Duke of Somerset, when protector, had reduced the household expenses of Edward VI to about half what they had been in the reign of his father, Henry VIII. Queen Mary, being economically inclined, although aware that she must make a great figure if she wished to captivate Philip of Spain, did not restore things to the splendid state in which they had been in her father’s time. She reduced the number of her servants and attendants, but in a measure increased the splendour of their costumes. ”

“ The Lady Frances and her husband, the Duke of Suffolk, [55] never seem to have destined Lady [94] Katherine, as they did her sister Jane, to play any very conspicuous part in history. Jane they set aside and educated, coached—or better, “crammed”—to be the head of the Protestant party in England, and, as such, either to share the Throne with her cousin, Edward VI, or else to occupy it alone, instead of the Catholic Princess Mary, or of Elizabeth, whose religious opinions were not at this time clearly defined. ”

“ Farther away from the throng of lords and ladies, the hearty citizens of London pressed against the barriers, whilst rich burghers, and British and foreign merchants, with their wives and daughters, filled the special seats allotted to them, that commanded a finer view of the towers of Westminster than did the richer canopies of the court folk. ”