Jane's family - the Greys, the Brandons and the Tudors

'There is no more picturesque spot in England than Bradgate Old Manor, the birthplace of Lady Jane Grey. It stands in a sequestered corner, about three miles from the town of Leicester, amid arid slate hillocks, which slope down to the fertile valleys at their feet. In Leland's Perambulations through England, a survey of the kingdom undertaken by command of Henry VIII, Bradgate is described as possessing "a fair parke and a lodge lately built there by the Lorde Thomas Grey, Marquise of Dorsete, father of Henry, that is now Marquise. There is a faire and plentiful spring of water brought by Master Brok as a man would judge agyne the hills through the lodge and thereby it driveth a mylle." He also informs us that "there remain few tokens of the old castelle," which leads us to believe that at the time of Lady Jane Grey's birth Bradgate was a comparatively new house. The ruins show that the mansion was built of red brick and in that severe but elegant form of architecture known as the "Tudor style." Worthy old Leland goes on to say that Jane's paternal grandfather added "two lofty towers at the front of the house, one on either side of the principal doorway." These are still remaining.

In Tudor times the park was very extensive and "marched with the forest of Chartley, which was full twenty-five miles in circumference, watered by the river Sore and teeming with game." Another ancient writer tells us, in the quaint language of his day, that "here a wren and squirrel might hop from tree to tree for six miles, and in summer time a traveller could journey from Beaumanoir to Burden, a good twelve miles, without seeing the sun." The wealth of luxuriant vegetation in the old park, the clear and running brooks that babble through the sequestered woods, and the beautifully sloping open spaces, dotted with venerable and curiously pollarded oaks, make up a scene of sylvan charm peculiarly English. Here cultivation has not, as so often on the Continent, disfigured Nature, but the park retains the wild beauty of its luxuriant elms and beeches that rise in native grandeur from amidst a wilderness of bracken, fern, and flags, to cast their shadows over heather-grown hillocks. On the summit of one of the loftiest of these still stands the ruined palace that was the birthplace of Lady Jane Grey. The approaches to Bradgate are beautiful indeed, especially the pathway winding round by the old church along the banks of a trout-stream, which rises in the neighbourhood of the Priory of Ulverscroft, famous for the beauty of its lofty tower. When Jane Grey was born, this Priory had been very recently suppressed, and the people were lamenting the departure of the monks, who, during the hard winter of 1528, had fed six hundred starving peasants.

Bradgate Manor House was standing as late as 1608, but after that date it fell into gradual decay. Not much is now left of the original structure, but its outlines can still be traced; and the walls of the great hall and the chapel are nearly intact. A late Lord Stamford and Warrington roofed and restored the old chapel, which contains a fine monument to that Henry Grey whose signature may be seen on the warrant for the execution of Charles I.

A careful observation of the irregularities of the soil reveals traces of a tilt-yard and of garden terraces; but all is now overgrown by Spanish chestnut trees, wild flowers, nettles, and brambles. The gardens were once considered amongst the finest in England, Lord Dorset taking great pride in the cultivation of all the fruits, herbs, and flowers then grown in Northern Europe. The parterres and terraces were formal, and there was a large fish-pond full of golden carp and water lilies. Lady Jane Grey must often have played in these stately avenues, and there is a legend that once, as a little girl, she toppled into the tank and was nearly drowned -- a less hideous fate than that which was to befall her in her seventeenth year.

"This was thy home, then, gentle Jane!
This thy green solitude; and here
At evening, from thy gleaming pane,
Thine eyes oft watched the dappled deer
(Whilst the soft sun was in its wane)
Browsing beside the brooklet clear.
The brook yet runs, the sun sets now,
The deer still browseth -- where art thou?"

These sentimental lines were written in the eighteenth century, when deer still browsed in Bradgate Park, whence they have long since departed. Many curious traditions concerning Lady Jane are even now current among the local peasantry. Some believe that on St. Sylvester's night (31st December) a coach drawn by four black horses halts at the door of the old mansion. It contains the headless form of the murdered Lady Jane. After a brief halt it drives away again into the mist. Then again, certain strange [1] stunted oaks are shown, trees which the woodmen pollarded when they heard that the fair girl had been beheaded. The pathetic memories of the great tragedy, reaching down four slow centuries, prove how keenly its awful reality was felt by the poorer folk at Bradgate, who, no doubt, had good cause to love the "gentle Jane."'

Richard Davey - The Nine Days' Queen, Chapter I (Bradgate Hall and the Greys of Groby)

Lady Jane's father was Henry Grey, third Marquis of Dorset, the son of Thomas Grey. In 1530 he took possession of Bradgate, a mansion which combined the amenities of a hunting-palace with the comforts of a private villa. The birthplace of Lady Jane and her sisters overlooked six miles of park and is situated five miles from the city of Leicester.
A rather uncertain and hazardous existence at court and in the French wars, alternating with abortive intrigue for further favours, had given Dorset ambition without stability of purpose. Handsome, affable, cultivated, impetuous and far too easygoing, he had competed for wealth and position with only moderate success. In these days of the rising "new men" he counted himself to the old nobility: for his grandfather, the first Marquis, was the son of Elizabeth Woodville and therefore the stepson of Edward IV, Henry VIII's maternal grandfather.
Three years after he succeeded, young Dorset, who in addition to his marquisate and his other estates in Leicestershire had inherited the baronies of Ferrers, Grey of Groby, Astley, Boneville and Harrington, dissolved his contract of betrothal with Lady Katherine Fitzalan in order to ally himself with the King's elder niece, Frances Brandon; they were married in the chapel of his London house in Southwark. This lady's ancestry combined royal and middle-class blood and, from her husband's point of view, her kinship with the King was of incalculable value; its results were to prove fatal to every member of the family but herself.

Frances Brandon was the elder daughter of Charles Brandon Duke of Suffolk (a country gentleman ennobled by Henry VIII) and Henry's younger sister, Mary Tudor, formerly Queen of France, whose marriage to Louis XII lasted three months, leaving her free to give her hand to Suffolk as soon as her period of mourning was over. This young man, Lady Jane's maternal grandfather, was an extremely shady character. He had divorced two wives and buried a third before he married the Queen Dowager, by whom he had two daughters, Frances and Eleanor. In 1533 Mary died and about two years later, in 1535, Brandon married a fifth wife, Lady Katherine Willoughby d'Eresby, by whom he had two sons.

By that time Frances and Henry Dorset had been married two years and she had borne him a son who died a few months later; a daughter followed, who also died. Lady Jane was born in the same year and the same month - the exact date in October 1537 is not recorded - as Edward VI, Henry's son by his third wife, Jane Seymour. Although the Dorsets were disappointed at not having a son, they had important plans for Jane. From their point of view, the dynastic situation was promising, and they were bent on getting the most out of it.

Edward VI, who was to succeed Henry VIII in 1547 at the age of nine, was regarded by many and possibly by Henry himself as his only rightful heir; for his half-sisters, Mary and Elizabeth, had both been declared illegitimate. Some years before Henry died he caused Parliament to pass an Act which enabled him to leave the crown by will and thus, if he saw fit, to cut out his two daughters. In fact, he did not do so. In his will he left the crown to Edward, Mary and Elizabeth, in that order. In the event of none of them having any heirs the succession came to Frances Dorset and her children, and then to her younger sister Eleanor, and hers. So in 1547 Jane was, presumptively, fifth in line for the English throne. (Henry cut out the descendants of his elder sister, Margaret Queen of Scotland, for reasons that have never been explained. But his war with Scotland and the Franco-Scottish alliance may have been the cause.)

Jane's parents brought her up, not only with the rather remote possibility of her becoming Queen Regnant in view, but also with the idea that she might marry her Cousin Prince Edward - for although Henry VIII was negotiating a foreign alliance for him within a few months of his birth, none of these schemes materialised. And so, during the last years of Henry's reign, the Dorsets' hopes for Jane rose very high, and her education was conducted accordingly. Intellectually, she was trained as if she had been a boy; but her parents' treatment of her destroyed much of the happiness she might have derived from such a training; for Frances Dorset was a harsh, grasping, brutal woman who dominated her capricious husband. That these characteristics were shown comparatively early is proved by her attitude towards Jane and her sisters - Katherine was born in 1539 and Mary four years later - whose sex she could not forgive.

It was inevitable that such a woman should rule, even if discreetly, the husband whom his contemporaries described as "young, lusty and poor...with little or no experience" and "a senseless creature", although others praised his love of learning, his generosity and his lack of pride. But Dorset was as casually selfish as his wife was cunning and predatory; and their care for their daughters' education sprang, not from aesthetic or intellectual standards, but from their obsession with material advantages and a desire to be in fashion. Frances ambitions were political, and her temperament was that of a restless, permanently dissatisfied schemer. She was constantly on the move, in order to keep in touch with her richer friends and her Tudor relations. she was much more fitted than Dorset to adapt herself to the ever-changing patterns of religious and political movements controlled by Henry VIII.

In the years immediately before and after Lady Jane's birth these patterns followed a course which was to affect her whole career: By the end of the 1530s, religio-political dissension had divided the ruling classes in three parties, who were striving with one another. The first was that of the papalist, who had condemned the nullity suit brought by Henry against Katherine of Aragon and had tried to withstand Parliament's declaration of his supremacy over the Church, this party was in a minority. The second, the largest and most powerful, was that of the Henricians; they had approved the nullity suit and the king's second marriage and were Catholic in everything but obedience to the Pope. The third party, which was beginning to form when Jane Grey was born and was not described as Protestant till her tenth year, became effective as she grew up. It was of course looked on as heretical and criminal by the other two, although Henry himself patronised some of its leaders; it attracted those interested in the New Learning (of which Jane was to become such a famous example), including her tutors; it put her and her parents in touch with continental and Calvinist intellectuals. Meanwhile the King, who burnt heretics and hanged or beheaded those denying his supremacy, controlled all three parties through ruthlessness, subtlety and prescience.

As the moods and tenses of Henry's policy were reflected in the Dorsets' actions, so Jane's education and point of view were gradually and indirectly affected by such events as the redistribution of monastic lands, the translation of the Bible, the failure of the King's fourth and fifth marriages and the installation of his last wife. Katherine Parr's influence indeed was one of the most important influences in Jane's life; but she did not come under it until her tenth year. Before then - by the age of five - she had acquired some social experience, and was being trained in public behaviour.

To Biography  part 2 - Jane's early childhood

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