LITMIR.BIZ

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of Ambleteuse in the Pale of Calais. The enemy was already advancing, Dorset was told. The town would, in fact, be lost before Lord Thomas had even arrived.³ With the seriousness of the situation by then apparent even to Somerset, the policy of pardoning rebels was abandoned. The government used foreign mercenaries to crush the rebel armies, and it had been a bloody business. Dorset’s kinsman, Lord Grey of Wilton, claimed he had never seen men fall so stoutly as the rebels he faced in Devon on 28th July. But fall, they had. Two and a half thousand were killed in the west. Then came the turn of the east.

      John Dudley, Earl of Warwick, commanded an army of 12,000 professional soldiers and German mercenaries against Norfolk farm boys with hopes of ‘an equal share of things’. Three thousand men died outside Norwich at Dussindale on 27th August. But there were casualties on both sides.

      Fighting under Warwick, Dorset’s brother-in-law, Sir Henry Willoughby, whose wife had died eighteen months earlier, was mortally wounded. His children, playmates of Katherine and Mary Grey, were now orphaned. Of all the deaths it was his that touched the Greys most, and the family took in his children. Thomas, the eldest, who was the same age as Katherine, had come to live at Bradgate as Dorset’s ward. The younger two Willoughby siblings, bossy Margaret, who was Mary Grey’s playmate, and the baby Francis, their mother’s godchild, were placed with Dorset’s half-brother, George Medley (his mother’s son by a first marriage). The dreadful slaughter in Norfolk marked the end of England’s last great popular revolt.⁴ But it had marked also a loss of faith in Somerset. The duke had ignored, and even insulted, his colleagues as he grew into his role as alter rex. He had involved the country in ruinous wars with Scotland and now France. His decisions had opened the gates to disorder and brought England to the brink of civil war. For that he would not be easily forgiven.

      The night after Hertford had left carrying his father’s message to the army in Wiltshire, Somerset took King Edward from Hampton Court to the more secure location of Windsor Castle. It was dark and Edward, who had been told Somerset’s enemies could kill him, carried a little sword to defend himself. It was the night’s chill, however, that presented the most immediate danger, and by the time the eleven-year-old had arrived at Windsor he had caught a cold. As he shivered in the gloom of the castle, with few provisions and no galleries or gardens to walk in, his cousin young Hertford had reached the armies in the west. Sir William Herbert, the third member of Somerset and Warwick’s ‘Tres Viri’, was immediately recognisable by his red hair, and the high style of a great man at court.

      Herbert had a reputation for violence. It was said that, in his youth, he had murdered a man in Bristol and that when the peasants had invaded his park at Wilton in the summer he had ‘attacked the rioters in person, and cut some of them in pieces’.⁵ True or not it says something of the man that such tales were easily believed of him. But Herbert was much more than a mere thug. His first language was Welsh, and ambassadors sneered that he could barely read English, let alone speak any European tongue; but he was clever, and sufficiently sophisticated to have married the elegant Anne Parr, sister of the late Queen dowager.⁶ It made him a member of the extended royal family. Unfortunately for Hertford this would not, however, help his father. It was Herbert’s brother-in-law, William Parr of Northampton, whom Somerset had kicked off the Privy Council for divorcing his wife.

      As young Hertford soon discovered, Sir William Herbert had no intention of bringing the royal army to aid Somerset. The message the boy carried to Windsor on 9th October instead marked the end of the Protectorate. Herbert and his co-commander, Lord Russell, urged Somerset to step aside, ‘rather than any blood be shed’. Somerset had no option but to comply and he threw himself on the mercy of the Council. Soon afterwards Edward was obliged to order his uncle’s arrest. The former Lord Protector was lodged in the Tower on 14th October 1549. It was only two days past Edward’s twelfth birthday and not yet seven months since the execution of his younger uncle, Thomas Sudeley.

      It was a novelty for the three sisters to have a nine-year-old boy living amongst them at Bradgate. Katherine, in particular, must have enjoyed having a playmate her own age; one who shared the pleasures of the park, as well as the books that Jane always had her nose in. But Thomas Willoughby wasn’t with them for long. He left the family to join Katherine Suffolk’s two sons at Cambridge on 16th November. The sisters ended up seeing more of the younger siblings, Margaret and Francis. The Grey and Willoughby cousins were regularly in and out of each other’s houses that winter, sometimes at Bradgate, sometimes at the Willoughby seat, Wotton, in Nottinghamshire, and often they were all at George Medley’s house, Tilty in Essex. It was there the sisters headed, as they set off from Bradgate towards the end of November 1549 - Mary and Katherine Grey still riding their horses with a servant sitting behind them, holding them tight so they didn’t fall when they tired; Jane treated as an adult, sitting side-saddle with a foot rest to keep her secure. Nurses, grooms and gentlemen servants also rode in the train, while other servants were carried in carts along with the baggage and mail. It was a spectacular sight on the quiet roads and bells rang in the villages and towns ahead to warn people of their arrival. Crowds came out to stare at the passing celebrities, or to offer fresh horses, food and places to rest.

      The sisters enjoyed several days playing with their cousins at Tilty. Little Mary Grey, although much smaller than her friend Margaret, was equally strong-willed, and there must have been some impressive battling for dominance in their games. Then, after breakfast on 26th November, the sisters were mounted again on their horses, and travelled with their mother to the Princess Mary’s house Beaulieu, also in Essex.⁷ They recognised the turreted palace as it came in view, with its great gateway carved with King Henry’s arms in stone. The sisters had visited the princess many times before. Their grandmother, the French Queen, and Catherine of Aragon had been friends as well as sisters-in-law, while their mother had served in Mary’s household when Jane was a baby.

      The princess - small and of ‘spare and delicate frame’ - was now thirty-three. She had suffered with menstrual problems and depression for years, and was regularly bled for them. But her fragile appearance belied a strong voice, ‘almost like a man’s’, and ‘piercing eyes’. She struck a formidable figure, and an unusually independent one. It was very unusual for a woman of her age and wealth to remain unmarried. But she was simply too good a catch to be free to take a husband. Her father had executed men he feared were plotting to marry their sons to his daughter. He didn’t want Edward to have any dangerous rivals. Now, Edward’s Privy Council would have regarded anyone seeking her hand with similar suspicion, and they had the legal veto on any choice she might have made. So she had to remain alone, watching her youth pass, resting her love only in God.

      Mary Tudor must have seemed like a spinster aunt to the Grey sisters: intimidating, but also kindly. She enjoyed giving them presents of necklaces, beads and dresses. She gambled at cards with their mother, and played her lute for them all. It was said that Mary ‘surprised even the best performers, both by the rapidity of her hand and by the style of her playing’.⁸ Jane, who had learned so much about music from Catherine Parr, would have been impressed. But the Mass that the sisters had been taught to despise remained at the heart of Mary’s daily routine: she maintained no fewer than six Catholic chaplains in her household, in the face of government objections. Life had not been easy for Mary since Whit Sunday 1549, when the new Prayer Book came into force. But she had not expected it to be so. She had demonstrated her contempt for the government’s decree by having a high Catholic Mass said that day at her chapel at Kenninghall in Norfolk. The Council had tried subsequently to link her to the Devonshire rebels. When that had failed they demanded she cease having Mass said publicly in her chapels. She refused, arguing she had broken no laws, unless they were new laws of their own making: and she did not recognise these since the King, her brother, was not yet of an age to make them. For the time being her Hapsburg cousin, the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V (the nephew of Catherine of Aragon), protected her from retribution. But Mary was pessimistic about the future. Warwick had used conservative support to overthrow Somerset, and had looked

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