We only have hints at how Sudeley behaved, but assuredly his execution did not follow this usual script. According to one account, as Sudeley laid his head on the block he was overheard asking a servant to ‘speed the thing that he wot [knew] of’. The messages to the princesses were then discovered and there appears to have been a struggle. A Swiss witness wrote to a friend saying that Sudeley had died most unwillingly.
What is also apparent is that the Council was extremely disturbed by whatever had occurred, and not surprisingly so. The regime was about to impose an evangelical Prayer Book on a largely unwilling population. Princess Mary, who remained stubbornly conservative in religion, was going even further than Bishop Gardiner in arguing that this was illegal, and that Henry’s religious settlement could not be overturned while Edward was still a minor. Hugh Latimer, Katherine Suffolk’s spiritual adviser, had articulated the government’s response in a sermon at court that Lent, arguing that Edward’s precocious Godliness meant that he wasn’t a ‘minor’ in the usual sense. But Sudeley’s messages had undermined this claim, suggesting that Edward, far from being a spiritual father, was the puppet of malign forces from which he needed protection. They had also hit another raw nerve: they reminded everybody that Mary was Edward’s heir under their father’s will. The obvious means to attack Mary’s claim was the 1536 Act of Succession, which had declared Mary illegitimate. It had, however, also declared Elizabeth illegitimate, making it nigh impossible to use the act against one sister without excluding the other. That risked proving divisive amongst evangelicals, since Elizabeth conformed to her brother’s religious decrees. If she had been executed along with Sudeley for arranging her marriage without the King’s permission, the problem would have been solved. But inconveniently, she remained alive.
The Council now needed to discredit Sudeley’s actions as forcefully as it could. Latimer was employed to give the sermon, and it proved excoriating. Sudeley was damned from his pulpit as ‘a man the farthest from the fear of God that ever I knew or heard of in England’, and one who had died, ‘irksomely, strangely, horribly’.17 It is not Latimer’s words, however, but the epitaph Elizabeth is said to have given Sudeley that is remembered. On hearing of his beheading she is reported to have said that he had died, ‘a man with much wit and very little judgement’. The same assessment could have been made of Jane’s father, who, despite his intelligence, had allowed himself to become so closely involved in Sudeley’s reckless plans. But he had survived Sudeley’s folly and the wheel of fortune was turning. His days in the political wilderness would soon be over, and those of his three daughters with him.
* Under Queen Mary, Baker would forget his evangelical past and burn his former co-religionists, earning his nickname, ‘Butcher Baker’.
Chapter VI Northumberland’s ‘Crew’
The ten-year-old Edward Seymour, Earl of Hertford, rode his horse hard. The skinny, long-limbed boy was the son that Somerset hoped to see married to Jane Grey. On this day, 5th October 1549, he knew, however, that his father’s status as Lord Protector, and perhaps his life, depended on the message he carried. There were two men with whom Somerset formed the ‘Mighty Tres Viri’ (triumvirate) of the Protectorate: one was John Dudley, Earl of Warwick. The previous day, however, he had marched through the city with members of the nobility and Privy Council, the early moves in an attempted coup against Somerset. The second, Sir William Herbert, commanded the royal army in Wiltshire along with Lord Russell. It was to them Hertford now rode for help. The forest of turrets and gilded weathervanes of Hampton Court soon disappeared from view as his horse raced west.
It was autumn, and the roads were quiet, but the tumultuous events of the summer had taken their toll on the standing of the Lord Protector. That June the country had been rocked by rebellions. The risings were triggered on Whit Sunday, 10th June, by the forced introduction of the new Prayer Book, which was written in English for the first time. In parts of Cornwall where little English was spoken, congregations could not understand what their priests were reading to them. In Devon, where they could, they declared the government’s service a ‘Christmas game’. Something that looked very like the Mass and could be called the Mass remained. But the new Communion service reflected the evangelical view that Christ was not present, body and blood, in consecrated bread and wine. To the Devon parishioners it seemed a parody. The following day, in the Devonshire village of Stamford Courtney, the congregation forced their priest to say the Mass once more. This defiance lit a tinderbox of anger against the ruling elite that spread rapidly, even in areas where the new religion had taken root.
Just as the great men were stripping the churches of gifts made by parishioners, but which they had condemned as idolatrous, so they were also expanding their estates at the expense of the rest. They had bought up farms, and enclosed the common land that saved the new landless peasants from starvation when paid work dried up. By the end of May huge crowds had been plundering the houses of unpopular gentry near Bradgate (where the Grey sisters were based), killing deer in parks and tearing down enclosures. Henry VIII would not have hesitated to crush these rebels without mercy, but when Harry Dorset, as the local nobleman, received his orders from the Council on 11th June, he was warned only to prevent the gentlemen under his command behaving in a manner that might be considered confrontational.1 To Somerset it was self-evident that the big landowners were greedy and he believed that enclosures were contributing to inflation. In anticipation of a government investigation that would lay the issues to rest, and against the pleas of colleagues on the Council, he had negotiated with the rebels and granted pardons wherever he could. This, however, had been interpreted as weakness.
By 2nd July, the riots had spread across the Midlands, the Home Counties, Essex, Norfolk, Yorkshire, and Exeter was under siege. Within ten days Norwich was also threatened with an army of 16,000 at its gates. William Parr, the Marquess of Northampton, was sent to negotiate with them, but the rebels had attacked the government forces as they slept in the city. They fought the rebels through the darkened streets, outnumbered ten to one, before retreating with heavy losses. England was left on the brink of civil war.
Jane, Katherine and Mary had sat through sermons that summer explaining the terrible wickedness the rebellions represented, although only the elder two could understand anything of what was being said to them. The rebels, they were told, were sinning against God and King. The social order reflected the divine Chain of Being and if the demands of the King or the nobleman were unjust, the yeomen and peasants had, nevertheless, to endure their suffering, peaceably, accepting it as a punishment for their sins. To do otherwise was to overturn good order, and where ‘there is any lack of order’, observed one Tudor writer, ‘needs must be perpetual conflict’. Lucifer had brought disorder into the cosmos when he rebelled against God, and fear of chaos fed into horror stories of lawlessness during the Wars of the Roses. If the rebellions continued the gates would open ‘to all abuse, carnal liberty, enormity, sin and babylonical confusion’. The Grey sisters were warned: ‘No Man shall sleep in his house or bed unkilled.’2
From Bradgate on 17th August, Dorset had written to the Privy Council asking that they send his brother, Lord Thomas Grey, to help him keep order in the county. But more bad news had come by return of post. Lord Thomas could not be spared: the King of France, Henri II, had seized the opportunity offered by the crises to declare