The Sisters Who Would Be Queen: The tragedy of Mary, Katherine and Lady Jane Grey. Leanda Lisle de

of white velvet.’⁷ Their parents were careful, however, not to spoil them. Over-indulgence was believed to make children physically and morally soft, with potentially disastrous results. Loving parents instilled discipline early with good manners considered essential. The girls were taught to stand straight and show respect to their elders, to speak only when they were spoken to and to respond promptly to commands. They had to eat nicely, observe the correct precedence at table and show gratitude for any praise they were given. At night, if their parents were at home, they would go to them to say goodnight and kneel to ask their blessing.

      The duty of obedience was considered a particularly useful lesson for girls since they were expected to remain submissive to their husbands after they had left the care of their fathers. But the thinking on what women were capable of was changing. Baldassare Castiglione’s bestselling Book of the Courtier argued that women were as intelligent as men, and suggested they could learn to control their ‘emotional’ natures through the exercise of will and reason. A Grey family friend later translated the book into English.⁸ In the meantime, other Englishmen such as Richard Hyrde were already promoting female education, and for a brief period that would end with the generation of the Grey sisters, the education of women remained fashionable.⁹ Both Frances and Dorset were determined that their daughters would be given the opportunity to develop practical and intellectual skills of the highest order.

      Of the former, the humble business of cooking and sewing remained important. Even noblewomen were expected to know something about the more expensive dishes created in their kitchen and to be able to make clothing. Frances sewed shirts and collars as New Year gifts for the King and her friend Lady Lisle’s quince marmalade was amongst her best-received presents to Henry, who liked it ‘wondrous well’.¹⁰ As future courtiers the sisters also received regular lessons in dance and music: the lute, the spinet and the virginal were all popular choices of instrument for girls destined for court. But it was in the sisters’ academic studies that Lady Jane Grey, in particular, was to excel, with strong encouragement from her father.

      Dorset had received a brilliant education in the household of the King’s illegitimate son, the late Henry Fitzroy, Duke of Richmond. He had learnt eloquent Latin from a pupil of Erasmus, and French from John Palsgrave, the greatest scholar of the language in England. It had left Dorset with a love of scholarship that was renowned during his lifetime and which he was determined to pass on to his children. As soon as his daughters had learned to read, write and understand basic mathematics they made a start in French and Italian. Over half a century later Dorset’s youngest daughter, Lady Mary Grey, still kept copies of Palsgrave’s French grammar and dictionary in her library, along with the Book of the Courtier and an Italian grammar.¹¹ By the age of eight Jane, and later Katherine, were also learning Latin and Greek, subjects that Aylmer was particularly well qualified to teach. A visitor to Bradgate, the radical divine Thomas Becon, described him as ‘singularly well learned in both’.

      But Aylmer was much more than a mere language teacher. The point of education in the sixteenth century was not simply to learn to read, write and understand ancient languages. It was about moulding good subjects of God and the King. Jane and Katherine’s Greek and Latin were a means to help reinforce lessons of moral, social and religious truth indoctrinated from the cradle - literally so. The visitor, Becon, insisted that as soon as a child was capable of speaking in sentences they should be taught phrases such as: ‘Learn to die…’¹². Jane would, years later, repeat the phrase in her last letter to Katherine and reflect on its meaning. This was to be a good Christian in this world, and so to achieve the reward of absolute happiness with God in the next. Unfortunately, what it was to be a good Christian, and where the path to eternal life lay, remained a matter of lethal debate. Since Jane’s birth in 1537 new divisions had arisen between those, like the ideologue of the royal supremacy, Bishop Gardiner, who adhered to Henry’s Church but remained conservative in his core beliefs, and those who saw the King’s reformation as the gateway to more drastic change.

      The term Protestant only began to be used in England in the mid-1550s.¹³ The more usual term for those we would now think of as Protestant was ‘evangelical’. They were so named because they wished to return to the ‘evangelium’ or ‘good news’ of the gospel, stripping away Church traditions they believed had no biblical basis in favour of a more fundamental reading of Scripture. There was no real orthodoxy within the English evangelicals, with individuals adhering to beliefs of varying degrees of radicalism, and people were careful not to express their views openly if they did not accord with the King’s. Dorset’s were later regarded, however, as being at the more radical end of the spectrum and Frances shared her husband’s beliefs. The ground was being prepared for an ideological struggle in which the Grey sisters, members of the first generation to be raised as evangelicals, were being groomed to play a significant role.

      For Jane, being the elder of three sisters did not mean merely doing things first. She was the most important in rank. It was Jane in whom the Dorsets invested the lion’s share of their time and money, and to whom everyone else paid the most attention. While Jane was growing up - and until her death - the younger sisters remained in the shadows. They were at home, therefore, playing with their pets and learning their prayers, waiting for their own turn in the spotlight, when Jane, at nine, took her first steps on to the great national stage that was the King’s court.

      In 1546, Jane’s mother was serving as a Lady of the Privy Chamber to Henry’s sixth wife, Catherine Parr. From time to time she could, therefore, bring Jane to court with her, to prepare her for a role as a Maid of Honour, serving the Queen. The court was the hub of political, cultural and social life in England. For a young girl such as Jane, however, it must have been often a confusing place. She could never be sure what lay behind a smile, or if what was said was what was meant, but amongst the gossiping courtiers and scheming bishops, the Queen, at least, struck a sympathetic figure. Catherine Parr was warm-hearted and intelligent, with a calm manner that invited confidence and respect. She was also a highly sensual woman: the kind that most attracted Henry. She wore gorgeous scarlet silks, bathed in milk baths, scented her body with rose water, and her breath with expensive, cinnamon lozenges. Beside this delicious vision, the fifty-five-year-old King appeared monstrous. It must have been difficult for Jane to imagine Henry as the ‘perfect example of manly beauty’ he had been described as in his youth. Pallid and obese, he was almost unable to walk on legs ruined by injuries acquired hunting and jousting. He spent most of his time in his private lodgings suffering fevers, but occasionally would emerge to be wheeled down the corridors of the royal palaces on chairs of tawny velvet; his eyes pinpoints of pain.

      Henry did not have long to live, and with Edward only in his ninth year, it was apparent that all the blood spilled to secure the future of the Tudor dynasty could prove wasted. In the end he had exchanged the unknown consequences of female rule only for the familiar weaknesses of a royal minority. A young boy could not hope to fill the shoes of the old tyrant. Others would wield power on Edward’s behalf when he became King, and a ferocious struggle for that power had already begun. Although Jane was too young to grasp the subtleties of the shifting circles of interests manoeuvring around her, she surely understood that the most important battle lines concerned her faith. She knew too that the Queen was the leading evangelical at court. Catherine Parr had been wed twice before to old men and, still only in her early thirties she found in religion a passion that was absent in her marriages. She made energetic efforts to spread the new teaching in the universities and every afternoon evangelical chaplains preached to her ladies and their friends at court. Afterwards the women would sit with their guests and discuss what they had heard. There was a frisson of danger to this, for any divergence from the King’s beliefs risked accusations of heresy. And just how deadly that could be, Jane Grey’s family was soon to witness.

      A group of religious conservatives on the Privy Council were plotting that summer to bring down their evangelical rivals. They intended