LITMIR.BIZ

       Chapter VIII Jane and Mary

      The chapel at the Princess Mary’s palace of Beaulieu lay across the courtyard, opposite the great hall. Inside it had a distinctive layout, with a large ante chapel at right angles to the body of the main chapel. As Jane crossed by this ante chapel she noticed, to her irritation, a consecrated Host was placed on the altar in a golden receptacle known as a ‘monstrance’. In Catholic belief the Host was the transformed body of Christ, but to Jane its veneration was the idolatrous worship of a piece of unleavened bread. When Mary’s servant, Lady Anne Wharton, walking beside her, dropped to one knee and made the sign of the cross, Jane asked sarcastically whether ‘the Lady Mary were there or not?’ Lady Wharton replied tartly that she had made her curtsey ‘to Him that made us all’. ‘Why,’ Jane retorted, ‘how can He be there that made us all, [when] the baker made him?’¹

      Lady Wharton reported her exchange with Jane to Mary, who is said by the martyrologist John Foxe, to have ‘never loved her after’. There is no evidence of that, and Mary later showed fondness for the younger Grey sisters, particularly the affectionate and easy-going Katherine. But the princess had good reason to be both angry and concerned that Jane had insulted her religious beliefs in her own house. At the time of the Grey sisters’ last recorded visit to Beaulieu, in November 1549, Mary had guessed already that the fall of the Protectorship had marked only the beginning of her misfortune. After the peace treaty with France six months later, in March 1550, the regime had less to fear from Mary’s protector, the Emperor Charles V, and was becoming increasingly radical. The religious changes Jane’s father, Dorset, was promoting were the most extreme England would witness before the Puritan Commonwealth a century later. Music was being expunged from churches; art was similarly attacked and tombs destroyed along with their exhortations to pray for the dead. A horrified visitor from Europe described the newly stark appearance of England’s churches, with ‘no images in relief, nor pictures, no crosses, no sepulchres raised above the ground…in place of the altar is a table set with a cloth but without candles’, on the white surfaces of the church walls were written passages from the Bible, ‘in the middle of which one sees the arms of the King’. In Oxford, bonfires were consuming nearly every book in the university library.² At the same time Mary found her right to have Mass said publicly in her own chapels was under attack.

      Dorset’s closest political ally, Parr of Northampton, had led the case against Mary within the Council, arguing that it had been agreed that ‘she alone might be privileged with but two or three of her women’. Northampton, described by Roger Ascham as ‘beautiful, broad, stern and manly’, was cut from similar cloth to Dorset. A sophisticated courtier, educated alongside Dorset in the household of the late Duke of Richmond, he shared Dorset’s passion for hunting, learning and, above all, religious reform. The two marquesses are linked in the sources from this period like Tweedle Dum with Tweedle Dee. Together they were always at the King’s side and Mary knew that Edward, like Jane, was already showing himself a fervent evangelical. Edward’s public note-taking during sermons and his recent striking out of the mention of saints in the oath of a new bishop, had all advertised his enthusiasm for the new religion. She must have feared that, like Jane, he too would attack the practice of her beliefs in her own house, in due course.

      By Christmas of 1550 the Council had ordered the arrest of Mary’s chaplains for saying Mass in her absence. But worse followed when Mary visited Edward for the seasonal celebrations. Her warm greeting for her thirteen-year-old brother was met with exactly the confrontation she had surely feared would soon come. With the two marquesses, Dorset and Northampton, standing by to witness her humiliation, Edward cross-questioned his older sister on whether she was having the Mass said publicly in her chapel. She burst into tears under his assault and, to the embarrassment of the two marquesses, the shocked boy then also began to cry. They wrapped up the meeting as quickly as they could, affirming ‘that enough had been said and…that the King had no other thought except to inquire and know all things’.³ But it was not to be the end of the matter.

      Mary’s household was a magnet for Catholic dissenters. The Masses she held attracted an important following at court and in the areas in which she lived, while even ‘the greatest lords in the kingdom were suitors to her to receive their daughters into her service’: amongst them the family of Edward’s old playmate, Jane Dormer.⁴ It was a problem that needed to be addressed, and Edward followed up what he had said to Mary with a letter demanding she obey his laws on religion.⁵ Despite his tears he had not relented. Mary, arguing he was still not of an age to overthrow his father’s religious settlement, continued to have Mass said, even laying on extra services ‘and with greater show’.⁶ But in March 1551 the young King informed Mary that he had suffered her stubbornness long enough and that henceforth she could only hear Mass in her private apartments.⁷ When she persisted in having her Mass said in the chapels there were consequences.

      At Easter 1551 several of Mary’s friends were arrested after attending Mass in her house. By July she feared she was on the point of being imprisoned or even murdered and considered fleeing abroad. In the end she decided that it was her duty to stay. It was August 1551, the month following the death of the

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