Mary Rose (23 page)

His religious beliefs appear to have been on the conservative side, but he played no active part in the disputes which divided the court and Council on that issue in the 1540s. The six chaplains who appeared at his funeral went in different directions over the next few years, and his will is ambiguous. However, it does seem that he employed and patronised men of more radical views than his own, and he was mourned as a supporter of the gospel by the religious exiles who had taken refuge from the Act of Six Articles on the Continent.
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It seems that this was partly due to his well-known dislike of Bishop Stephen Gardiner, and partly to the evangelical tendencies of his Duchess. Catherine was conventionally pious, as he was, but increasingly from 1540 onwards filled their houses at Tattershall and Grimesthorpe with protestant sympathisers, one of whom, Alexander Seton, was disciplined for a radical sermon in 1541.
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Her close association with Queen Catherine Parr after 1543 moved her further in the same direction, and the death of the Duke seems to have freed her from whatever inhibitions that relationship had imposed upon her. In June 1546 she was accused of supporting the imprisoned Protestant Anne Askew, and at the beginning of the following year was named by Chapuys as one of the Queen’s most dangerous friends.
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She was said to rule Lincolnshire through her clientage network, but most of her time when not at court must have been spent in bringing up her two sons, both of whom died as adolescents in Cambridge in 1551. At that point the Brandon Suffolk title became extinct, and the dignity was conferred on Frances’s husband, Henry Grey, Marquis of Dorset, in October of that year. In 1552 the thirty-three-year-old widowed Duchess married her Chamberlain, Richard Bertie, and the pair of them went into exile as soon as the papal authority was restored at the beginning of 1555. After a somewhat traumatic journey through North Germany, they ended up as guests of the King of Poland, and their son (the appropriately named Peregrine) was born during their exile.
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They returned on Mary’s death, and seem to have enjoyed good relations with William Cecil. On the other hand their increasing Puritanism distanced them from the Queen, and Catherine never became intimate with Elizabeth. Instead she confined her attentions increasingly to Lincolnshire, where she and her husband enjoyed significant influence in spite of the fact that he held no office beyond that of Justice of the Peace. Her latter years were increasingly affected by bad health and she died on 19 September 1580, being buried at Spilsby church near her home. Richard died in 1582.
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Peregrine, of course had no claim to the throne, and neither did Henry or Charles, his half-brothers, because their parents transmitted none, but it was otherwise with the children of the French Queen. The Earl of Lincoln having died in 1534, that meant Frances and Eleanor, and the former of these was included in the extraordinary provision for the succession which Henry made by Act of Parliament in 1544. This statute (35 Henry VIII, cap. 1) declared Edward to be his father’s heir, but then went on to say that in default of the birth of further sons to either of them, the Crown should pass to his natural daughters, Mary and Elizabeth, in that order, the only condition being that neither of them should marry without the consent of the Council.
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They were not legitimated, and this was quite without precedent, because the common law had always forbidden the inheritance of bastards, and it was questionable whether statute could override the law in such a fashion.
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Should all of his children die without progeny, the throne was to go to the children of his sister Mary, which meant Frances because Eleanor had died in 1539. This was remarkable in that it ignored the children of his elder sister, Margaret. These in 1544 consisted of her granddaughter by James V, Mary, who was already Queen of Scotland in her own right, and her daughter by her second marriage, Margaret Douglas, by then married to the Earl of Lennox. These children were unquestionably legitimate, and the only reason for their exclusion could have been that they were ‘alien born’, that is born outside the realm of England, but if that was the reason, then that was equally unprecedented. It seems more likely that the real reason for ignoring them was Henry’s instinctive dislike of the Scots; however, none of this was specified in the Act. What was specified was that the arrangements so made could be altered or confirmed by the King’s last will and testament, thus placing them firmly with the field of the royal prerogative, and opening the way for his son to do the like.
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For the time being this was simply accepted, and Frances can have had little expectation of it becoming controversial.

Henry begot no more children after 1544, and in the summer of 1553 Edward was dangerously ill, a minor and still unmarried. However, he had a will of his own, and was determined not to be bound by his father’s settlement. Above all he was determined to prevent any female from succeeding to the Crown. Before his illness became serious he had addressed the hypothetical question of what would happen if he were to die childless, and come up with a school exercise known as his ‘Device’.
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By the terms of this both Mary and Elizabeth were excluded as illegitimate, and Frances simply for being female. The Crown was to pass to any son whom she might bear, and failing that to the son of any daughter of hers. This was thinking long-term, because Frances had lost her only son as an infant and had not conceived for a number of years. Her eldest daughter, Jane, was fifteen and unmarried, while Catherine and Mary were younger still. As Edward’s health deteriorated, the Device was simply not real politics, providing as it did for a regency in the event of no eligible male having been born. Something had got to be done, and either Edward or the Duke of Northumberland, who was his mentor at that stage, came up with the idea of including Jane Grey herself in the order of succession.
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This could be done simply by amending the wording to read ‘the lady Jane and her heirs male’ as opposed to ‘the heirs male of the Lady Jane’. It meant overcoming the King’s prejudice against female rulers, but that was done. He liked Jane, and approved of her godliness, so if a woman had got to succeed, better her than the notoriously conservative Mary. The device was passed to the law officers as the King’s will, to be translated into Letters Patent.
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There were a number of problems with this. In the first place Frances had not resigned her right to her daughter, and should undoubtedly have taken precedence, and in the second place it was not clear that Edward, as a minor, could even make a valid will. Above all, there was Henry’s unrepealed Act of Parliament making a totally different dispensation. Frances, however, did not press her claim, and it seems that nobody could stand the idea of the Duke of Suffolk as King Consort, so that when Edward died on 6 July, Jane was duly proclaimed. She was by then safely married to Guildford Dudley, the Duke of Northumberland’s fifth son, so no question of consent arose and the Protestant succession seemed to be guaranteed for the foreseeable future. Or it would have been, had it not been for Mary, who rallied the aristocracy to her lawful cause, and overturned Jane’s government in a matter of days.
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The unfortunate Jane was consigned to the Tower, and executed the following February following Sir Thomas Wyatt’s rising which was deemed to be aimed at replacing her on the throne. Her father, the Duke of Suffolk, who was most unwisely involved in the rebellion, was executed at the same time, and his lands forfeited to the Crown.
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His widow, Frances, retreated to her dower lands and played no further part in public life before her own death in 1559.

Meanwhile the King’s last succession Act continued in force, and when Mary’s marriage to Philip of Spain failed to produce any offspring, Elizabeth became the heir, much to Mary’s disgust.
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It was, however, by popular acclaim that Henry’s younger daughter succeeded her sister in November 1558, and that inevitably raised the Suffolk claim to the succession again. If the succession Act were ignored, then the next in line was Mary, Queen of Scots, a Catholic and married to the Dauphin of France; but in that event some would argue that she had a better claim than Elizabeth herself, since her legitimacy had never been questioned. This meant that the 1544 Act remained very much alive, and as the Queen evaded pressure to marry, Catherine Grey’s claim was widely canvassed.
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Most extraordinarily she became an object of interest to Philip II of Spain, who believed her to be a good Catholic, and who was desperate to prevent Mary of Scotland from succeeding to England and thus creating an Anglo-Scottish bloc under French protection. At the very beginning of Elizabeth’s reign there were plots and rumours of plots, involving Catherine’s abduction from England and marriage to a Habsburg prince – perhaps Don Carlos.
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These rumours began to die away after the death of Francis II returned Mary to Scotland in August 1561, and in any case Catherine herself pre-empted them by a clandestine marriage in November of December 1560 to Edward Seymour, Earl of Hertford, the twenty-year-old son of Protector Somerset, a marriage which incidentally confirmed her Protestant credentials for the next round of the succession dispute. In 1561 she became pregnant and the secret of her wedding was revealed. Elizabeth was furious because one so close to the royal family should have obtained the Queen’s consent to such a union, which manifestly she had not done. Elizabeth had no time for Catherine anyway, and committed her to the Tower, where she was joined a few weeks later by her unfortunate husband, who seems to have been an innocent party to the deception.
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Edward, Lord Beauchamp, was born in the Tower in 1562, and an inquiry instituted into the lawfulness of the marriage. Given the Queen’s attitude this inevitably found against the couple, and Catherine remained in confinement until she was released into house arrest in 1563. This dampened the enthusiasm of some of her supporters, but by no means all and her claim to the succession continued to be advanced in Protestant quarters down to her death in 1568, particularly in the parliament of 1566.
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Thereafter the Suffolk claim faded in to the background. Lord Beauchamp was considered to be illegitimate, and was in any case outlived by his father, while Thomas, who had been born after his mother emerged from the Tower, was both a younger son and a bastard. Mary, Catherine’s sister, lived until 1578 but never inherited her sister’s pretensions. She married humbly, again without the Queen’s consent, and spent some time in prison as a result, but she was deformed and no one took her seriously as a claimant to the throne.
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Eleanor’s daughter, Margaret, was married suitably to Henry Stanley, the fourth Earl of Derby, and presumably obtained Elizabeth’s consent to that union because she was not punished for failing to do so. Neither she nor her son ever put forward any claim, and no one did so on their behalf. Apart from some notional speculations in the 1590s, when the issue was very much alive owing to the Queen’s failure to marry, the Suffolk line effectively died with Catherine. This left an embarrassing situation, because Henry’s Act had simply specified that the Crown was to pass to the next lawful heir in the event that the Suffolk line failed. The most conspicuous claimant was Mary, Queen of Scots, whom Elizabeth persistently refused to exclude until she was eventually executed for conspiring against the Queen’s life in 1587.
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However, it was clear long before that that Mary was unacceptable to the Protestant elite, and after Catherine’s death various alternatives were canvassed. The Howards had a claim, going back through the female line to Thomas of Woodstock, the sixth son of Edward III, and the Earl of Huntingdon a rather less remote one derived from his grandmother, Margaret, Countess of Salisbury, the daughter of George, Duke of Clarence (Edward IV’s brother). Margaret Tudor’s second marriage to the Earl of Angus was represented at this stage by Arabella Stuart, the granddaughter of Margaret Douglas, and the most remote claim of all was that proposed on behalf of the Infanta of Spain by Robert Parsons, which derived from a marriage by John of Gaunt, Edward III’s fourth son, in the fourteenth century.
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Of these the Infanta, the Earl of Huntingdon and Arabella Stuart were seriously supported by different interest groups, but the front-running contender was Mary’s son, James VI of Scotland, whose father was Henry, Lord Darnley, Arabella’s uncle, who had died in 1567.
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James had been brought up as a Protestant, and thereby avoided his mother’s fatal weakness, was unquestionably legitimate, and was an adult of proven competence. Elizabeth had made it clear that she did not consider his mother’s fate a bar to his claim, and although she would not explicitly recognise him, by 1600 he was in touch with Robert Cecil, the Queen’s powerful secretary, who had undertaken to smooth his passage.
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So when Elizabeth died in 1603, James succeeded peacefully, and the long-running Tudor succession drama had finally come to an end. The 1544 Act was never repealed, because that would have raised questions about Elizabeth’s own right to the throne, but it was quietly forgotten about. By the time that Edward Seymour’s son, William, succeeded his grandfather as Earl of Hertford in 1621, it was no longer an issue and Mary Tudor’s ghost was at last laid to rest.

2. Alleged to be the wedding portrait of
Mary and Charles Brandon, it is probably
later in date. By an unknown artist.