Lady Jane Grey the would-be urban guerrilla

Eric Christiansen

LADY JANE GREY AND THE HOUSE OF SUFFOLK by Alison Plowden

Sidgwick & Jackson, f10.95

It contains romance, passion, high tragedy, pathos and black comedy, all played out by a richly varied cast of characters.'

That is not unexpected, since the book is not a technical or scientific manual, and the words are those of the publisher. It would be wrong to accuse publishers of being prepared to say anything about any book. They tend to say the same things about the majority of books. This sentence can be applied to the Bible, or the works of Virginia Woolf, or Dick Francis. Here it is applied to a sort of history book, in order to make it sound exciting.

If we were told that the book was devoid of romance, passion, high tragedy etc etc, it would be untrue, but interesting. An unromantic, dispassionate, non-dramatic approach to the task of narrating the lives of Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, his descendants and collaterals would present the author with more of a challenge. Miss Plowden is aware of that, and in fact she writes far more soberly than the blurb suggests. She has made a respectable living out of Tudor times for over 30 years, and she knows exactly how to strike the ba- lance between fact and fiction which the public demands. At the same time, she is polite to professional historians, which is a most valuable quality in these disrespectful days.

Anyway, this story is about some girls who couldn't say no. Henry VIII's sister Mary, the queen dowager of France, couldn't say no to Charles Brandon and managed to marry him without getting her head cut off, or his. Her daughter Frances, the dowager Duchess of Suffolk, couldn't say no to a Mr Stokes, and they got married and survived also.

Apart from that, things were not so happy. The eldest daughter of Frances, Jane Grey, couldn't refuse the throne of England in 1553, and was beheaded the following year. So was her husband, Guild- ford Dudley, whom she had not wished to marry. Her sisters both came to grief by getting married to the wrong men, and were imprisoned by Queen Elizabeth. Her aunt, cousins, and nephews were also carriers of the fatal Tudor blood, but their matrimonial adventures were no more ill-starred than other people's. We don't learn much about them. And that was the end of the House of Suffolk, in so far as it ever was a House: a salutary warning for anyone contemplating marriage with a member of the Tudor family, if a little late.

The romantic heroine is of course Jane Grey. She was given a good education by a sympathetic tutor in an unsympathetic household, and was designated heir to the throne by the ailing young Edward VI. She lasted as titular Queen of England for no longer than nine days, as a prop to the much hated magnates who had run the kingdom under Edward, and feared for their lives and jobs if his sister Mary should succeed him.

This was a mistake. Mary was stronger than they had expected, and seized Lon- don. Jane was deserted by her backers, imprisoned, and allowed to live only until a rebellion against Mary made her seem dangerous. She met her death with courage and resignation at the age of 16.

She never had a chance to say no, unlike her amorous kinswomen. She was never able to use her remarkable talents to save her own skin. She was bullied into becom- ing a queen and a wife by powerful men and women who saw her simply as a means to an end. She was killed for this, and for being the great-grand-daughter of Henry VII.

I feel very sorry for her, with her classical education and, her freckles, and her religious convictions and the sword hanging over her almost from birth. However, Miss Plowden does her best to dry the moistening eye by stating that

in another age she would have been the perfect prototype of the partisan, the resist- ance or freedom fighter, the urban guerrilla, perfectly prepared to sacrifice her own or anyone else's life in the furtherance of some cause, be it religious or political.

The basis for this claim is that Jane refused to become a Roman Catholic when pressed to do so by an amiable but uncon- vincing priest called John Feckenham. She was clever enough to refute his arguments, and she would have gained nothing by apostasy. She had been brought up as a Protestant, and since she had been sent- enced to death for political rather than religious reasons, there was no need to renounce her convictions. It is not re- corded that she ever tried to impose them on others.

Thus to cast her as a would-be Rosa Luxemburg makes no sense at all. It is the sort of judgment which makes the 16th century unintelligible and the 20th ridicu- lous. But that is the trouble with these `sagas' of romance, passion and high tragedy set in the distant past: the history has to be livened up a bit, and compressed into rather odd shapes.

Here we find the politics of Tudor times simplified into a struggle between 'right- wing', 'reactionary' Catholics and 'left- wing,' 'progressive' Protestants. The 'right- wing Howard faction' is at loggerheads with 'the progressive leaders, Hertford and Lisle' as if these proud peers were trying to dominate the TUC. The labels may seem convenient, but they are not. They make no more sense than describing Enoch Powell as a fanatical Roman Catholic, or poor Tom Driberg as a zealous Puritan. Indeed, there are some strange religious notions floating in the middle of the drama, as when we are told that 'the surviving Dudleys still bore the stigmata of their late father's unpopularity.'

The interest of the book lies not in its errors, nor in the re-telling of Jane Grey's tragedy. That has been recited often enough, and Miss Plowden adds nothing to what can already be found in print, apart from the speculation about Jane the would- be urban guerrilla. Her sketch of what happened to other members of the family covers less familiar ground, and may perhaps fit the description 'black comedy'.

For Jane's sisters were the Protestant alternatives to Queen Elizabeth, as Mary of Scotland was the papist rival. In the early part of the reign they were taken seriously by some malcontents as conceiv- able heirs to the throne, but they ruined whatever chances they had of a coronation or a first-rate execution by falling for unsuitable men and getting married to them in secret. Since Elizabeth had no intention of letting them marry at all, their actions were not wholly illogical, but they were certainly unwise. Catherine Grey, imprisoned for marrying the Earl of Hert- ford, managed to have two sons by him while in the Tower. This brought the further punishment of having the marriage annulled. Mary Grey, who was very small, married a Mr Keys, who was very tall, and they were confined separately to prevent issue. She ended her days as a poor widow, in cheap lodgings near the Barbican, heiress presumptive of England on £20 a year.

These ladies were not as dangerous as Mary Queen of Scots, and their sufferings may have been less than hers, but who can tell? Miss Plowden deserves the last word: Their tenacious attempts to lay claim to a measure of personal happiness and inde- pendence in the face of well-nigh impossible odds have a certain touching gallantry and surely deserve a mention, however brief, in the record of struggling, suffering humanity.