Since 1375 the so-called Liber Regalis had laid down how Kings of England were to be crowned, and it dictated the format of the ceremonies ahead. But for Edward’s coronation several significant modifications were made. The first became apparent as the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer, presented Edward to the three estates - the Lords, Commons and bishops - in the congregation beneath him. Instead of asking their assent to his crowning, Cranmer demanded they swear their service to Edward. The significance of this became apparent in the coronation oath, which the archbishop had also rewritten. The ancient promise to preserve the liberties and privileges of the clergy was struck out, and Edward, instead of agreeing to accept laws presented by his people, swore that the people were to accept his laws: in reality the Council’s laws presented under his authority. Henry VIII had regarded his claimed ‘royal supremacy’ over religious affairs his greatest achievement. The arguments used in its support placed him above not only the Pope’s laws, but England’s also. He was the superior legislator who ‘gave’ the law and exercised his ‘imperium’, or ‘command’, over Church and state.1 But this authority was now in the hands of politicians and prelates he had assumed were his lapdogs. Their power, through the boy King, was absolute and would be wielded for a specific purpose. Cranmer’s sermon explained that Edward was to be a new Josiah, the biblical king and destroyer of idols. It was a Year Zero in which a new religious ideology was to be imposed on his people and England’s Catholic past rooted out of his subjects’ hearts and churches.
At the conclusion of the rituals, Jane’s father, Dorset, and her young uncle, the eleven-year-old Henry, Duke of Suffolk, stepped forward. Together they helped Edward hold his sceptre and ‘the ball of gold with the cross’ and presented him to the congregation as their King.2 Propped up like a living doll he represented more than anyone else the central place children now held in the brutal world of adult politics. But Jane, along with her teenage cousin the Princess Elizabeth, would soon join Edward as the tools of ambitious men.
The future for Lady Jane Grey and her sisters was to be dominated by one document: King Henry’s will. Parliament had given Henry the right to bequeath the crown by testament and when he had called for it, on 26th December 1546, he was prepared to use that power. Lying sprawled on the vast state bed at Whitehall, with its gilded frame and rich hangings, the ailing monarch had worked at his revisions for four days. The period between Christmas Day and New Year is a strange hiatus, a time caught between the past and the future, appropriate, perhaps, for the birth of such a document. The seasonal celebrations did not disturb him, but Henry’s councillors and confidants had buzzed around him like flies until, on the 30th, he approved the final changes.
The principal provisions of the will had been confirmed already under the third Act of Succession in 1544. Edward was bequeathed the throne followed by any children Henry had with Catherine Parr. The crown then passed to Edward’s illegitimate half-sisters, Mary and Elizabeth. At that point, however, there was a dramatic change in the line of succession. Just as Henry had ignored in 1544 the common laws on inheritance that excluded illegitimate children from the throne, so he had now refused to be bound by the tradition of primogeniture. The entire Stuart line of his eldest sister, Margaret of Scotland, was excluded from the succession. In the event of the death of his children without heirs, the crown was settled instead on the descendants of his younger sister, Mary Brandon, Duchess of Suffolk. At the stroke of his pen her granddaughters, Lady Jane, Katherine and Mary Grey were named the heirs to Elizabeth.
Henry never chose to explain why he had excluded the Stuarts in favour of the Brandon line. The Kings of Scotland had, however, been enemies of England for generations. Henry had hoped to find a solution to their centuries of warfare in betrothing the infant Mary Queen of Scots to Edward. When the Scots rebuffed him, Henry was faced with the prospect of their Queen being married to a European prince or a Scottish nobleman, and, either way, he did not want to risk England falling into foreign hands. It was to that end that he had made his daughters’ inheritance provisional on their taking a husband in accordance with the wishes of the Privy Council. Curiously, his will did not insist on a similar rule for the Grey sisters. Perhaps he assumed that Frances would have a son or grandson by the time his line was extinct. It would explain why her name was overlooked in the will. It is also possible, however, that Henry’s decision was influenced by his mistrust of her husband.
Harry Dorset was described by a contemporary, as ‘an illustrious and widely loved nobleman’, much admired for his learning and his patronage of the learned.3 But as the rich husband of a royal wife, Dorset did not need to work hard for the status he held, and he had grown lazy and uncompromising. Although he had fought for the King in the wars with France, he had done little more than the minimum required of a nobleman. He preferred to leave the business of fighting to his younger brothers, Lords John and Thomas Grey. Nor was he suited to the snake pit of court politics. Remembered in the seventeenth century as ‘upright and plain in his private dealings’, he hated the dissembling that was part of court life. He had all the arrogance of the ideologue and an imperial ambassador described him a few years later as being without sense. He was happiest with his books, or in the company of ‘good fellows’, men who enjoyed a day’s hunting and a game of cards. This was not the kind of man Henry respected and the new Protector Somerset had no more use for him than the late King had had.4
Somerset was a successful soldier-politician, on whom Henry had relied heavily in the last years of his reign. He was also emerging as a high-minded evangelical, and became known later as ‘the good duke’. Unfortunately this was how he saw himself. The portrait in which he sports a white suit and golden beard, like some heavenly princeling, encapsulates his self-image perfectly. Harry Dorset was not, however, the only member of the extended royal family, to resent Somerset’s power and arrogance. King Edward’s younger uncle, Thomas Seymour, was already looking to Dorset for a political alliance against his older brother. Described by his servant, Sir John Harington, as a fine soldier and a dashing courtier, Thomas Seymour had a magnetic voice, ‘strong limbs and manly shape’. Women fell for him, and men admired him: indeed, once they had succumbed to his charm they never forgot him. Even thirty years after his death his former entourage was bound in friendship by his memory, and ‘the best of them disdained not the poorest’.5 In common with the protagonists of Greek tragedy, however, Thomas Seymour also possessed a fatal flaw: greed and of the most dangerous kind - the greed for power. Somerset had tried his best to engage Seymour’s support for his Protectorship. The younger brother had been brought on to the Privy Council, given the title Baron Seymour of Sudeley, and made Lord Admiral. What the new Baron Sudeley had hoped for most, however, was the post of Governor of the King’s Person, which would have allowed him to share the power of the Protectorship. And in this he was thwarted. Few others wished to see such a division of authority, and so in March, a month after the coronation, Somerset took the post for himself. A furious Sudeley was now determined to block any further advance by his brother, while continuing to seek power for himself. But to achieve this he needed first to raise his profile within the royal family.
Since January Jane and her sisters had seen a new and increasingly regular visitor to Dorset House on the Strand. Jane would have recognised him as a man about court: he was Sudeley’s gentleman servant, John Harington. A landowner and man of considerable subtlety and intelligence, Harington had been sent to prepare the ground for what Sudeley called a ‘friendship’ with Dorset.
Sudeley, meanwhile, was wooing Henry VIII’s widow. Catherine Parr had been in love with Sudeley before she had married Henry and now she was free to make her own choice she clearly found him irresistible. Within weeks of the King’s death the handsome Lord Admiral had the Queen dowager