I am thrilled to present this lovely article, especially written for TUDORTASTIC, by Leanda De Lisle, the author of “The Sisters Who Would be Queen.”

I asked her to write an article about Mary Grey, as she has already written articles about Jane (read here) and Katherine Grey (read here) for other sites.

________________________________________________

Mary Grey

by Leanda De Lisle

A manuscript, lost for over four hundred years, has helped me lay to rest a Tudor mystery.  What had Queen Elizabeth done with the body of her cousin and one time prisoner, the now forgotten Tudor princess, Lady Mary Grey?

Lady Mary Grey was born in about 1544, the youngest of three sisters. Under the will of Henry VIII, they were the heirs to his daughter, Elizabeth. The eldest sister, Jane, is the best remembered. She was sixteen, ‘young and lovely’ when she was bequeathed the throne by Edward VI in 1553.

Edward wanted to exclude his Catholic sister Mary Tudor from the throne, and he preferred that his Protestant cousin Jane found a new dynasty, than Elizabeth, the daughter of the ‘stewed whore Nan Boleyn’.

Mary was only nine years old when Jane became Queen.  Well educated, Mary was already learning French and Italian, although she had not yet started Latin and Greek as her sisters had. Jane, something of a prodigy, was even learning Hebrew and possibly Arabic. Mary might have followed suit one day, but the family that had risen so high was about to experience a violent turn in fortune’s wheel.

Mary Tudor overthrew ‘Jane the Queen’ only nine days after she was proclaimed Queen in London. Seven months later, following a revolt, in which their father was involved,  Jane was executed, although still no more than sixteen or seventeen years old. Their father was beheaded later the same month.

Mary Grey never forgot Jane. As an adult she kept with her always a copy of John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, which described Jane’s brave death and recorded her last letter to their sister Katherine. It instructed Katherine to ‘despise the flesh’ and follow her to Protestant martyrdom.  But neither Katherine nor Mary would despise the flesh. They both desired love and marriage – Mary even after she saw the heavy price Katherine paid for love at Elizabeth’s hands.

Just as Mary never forgot Jane, nor had Elizabeth, who became Queen in 1558. She remembered very well that Jane had leapfrogged her claim, as well as that of Mary Tudor, and she feared that one day she might be overthrown her in favour of one or other of the remaining Grey girls. The most likely reason for this to happen would be for Katherine or Mary to marry and have a son, while Elizabeth did not.  The Queen was therefore determined that neither of the Grey sisters ever marry.  In 1560, however, Katherine wed in secret Edward Seymour, Earl of Hertford, a nobleman of royal blood.

A passionate and pretty young woman of twenty, Katherine proceeded to have sex with her husband in almost every royal palace in England. She became pregnant and when she was eight months gone Elizabeth finally noticed. Katherine was thrown into the Tower where Jane had been executed, and there she give birth to a son. The Queen declared the child a bastard, and after Katherine managed to conceive a second child in the Tower, she was separated from her husband and her elder son, and sent to a remote country house prison.

Despite this, in 1565, Lady Mary Grey also fell in love and planned to marry. At nineteen Mary Grey was not pretty like her sisters. Indeed she was very far from fitting the traditional idea of a princess. Mary, described by the Spanish ambassador as ‘crook backed and very ugly’, was also so small it has been suggested she may have been a dwarf. Pretty or not, however, Mary had something of the best characteristics of both her sisters, with Jane’s intellectual curiosity and Katherine’s warmth. The man she fell in love with was prepared to risk his life for her. His name was Thomas Keyes, and he was the burly Sergeant Porter in charge of palace security.

Mary hoped if they married the Queen would not perceive it as a threat. Her husband, as a commoner, would  never have been accepted as a King. And together they made an odd couple. One courtier later described it as ‘monstrous’ that the ‘least of the all the court’ would marry,  ‘the biggest gentlemen of this court’: the dwarf and the giant is how it has been characterised.  But marry they did, in a tiny room in Mr Keyes’s quarters at Whitehall palace. Elizabeth and most of the court were out enjoying the grand wedding of Henry Knollys, (grandson of Mary Boleyn) to the heiress Margaret Cave.  But gossip about Mary’s marriage soon reached Elizabeth’s ears.

It was fully expected the couple would be, ‘punished, as it may give such terror to all her Majesty’s subjects’. They were incarcerated in separate prisons and interrogated by the Privy Council. The records of their interviews are still extant.  This is Mary: asked when the marriage took place, she answers,

‘The day of the marriage of Mr Knollys – I was married about nine o’clock at night by candle-light.’

‘Where?’

‘In the Sergeant-Porter’s chamber’

‘Who was present?’

‘The Sergeant’s brother, the Sergeant’s son, a gentlewoman, Mrs Goldwell, and the priest, apparelled in a short gown.’

‘What was he like?’

‘He was old and fat and of low stature’

Did the Sergeant-Porter give you anything?’

‘Yes, a ring’

Various other love tokens that Keyes had given Mary in the course of their courtship were also mentioned: two little rings, a further ring with four rubies, a diamond with a chain, a little hanging bottle of mother of pearl. Elizabeth ordered that the Sergeant Porter remain in the Fleet prison, while Mary was sent to a series of country house prisons. Their marriage appears to have been consummated since Bishop Grindal, the Bishop of London, refused to annul it at Keyes’s request the following year. The poor man was said to be in agonies in the confined spaces of the Fleet and he hoped that if the marriage was disallowed he and Mary might be allowed to retire, separately, to the country.

It was only in 1570 that the tormented Keyes was deemed sufficiently punished to be let out of the Fleet. He had requested that if his marriage could not be annulled he should be allowed to live with his wife, but that was refused. He died the following year. Mary was left devastated and angry. In a portrait of her painted that year, she defiantly shows her wedding ring.

Mary was only released from prison in 1573. But eventually she was able to set up her own household near Aldersgate, London. She even appeared at court. She had proved a survivor, the only one of the three sisters to die a free woman. In her will, dated April 17^th 1578, she requested only that the Queen have her buried where she thought ‘most fit’. No one knew where that was until I found the lost manuscripts describing her funeral. They reveal that the Queen decided she should be buried at Westminster Abbey, as befitted her royal status.

The funeral took place on May 14^th, with Mary’s body bought in procession to the Abbey. The heralds had done great banners of arms and a dozen poor women, dressed in black, led the procession. These were the traditional bedesmen who, before the Reformation, used to pray for the soul of their benefactor. There were four pallbearers for the tiny coffin on its chariot, and behind it was the chief mourner, Susan, Countess of Kent. She was the daughter of Katherine, Duchess of Suffolk, Mary’s step grandmother.

The names of those who attended the funeral are a roll call of figures from the lives of the sisters.  There is a Mistress Tilney: Elizabeth Tilney had been one of Lady Jane Grey’s Ladies in Waiting, and had accompanied her to the scaffold. There is Sir Owen and Lady Hopton, Katherine’s last jailors, with whom she left her dying messages for her husband, and her pleas to Elizabeth to be merciful to her children. There were also the members of the Goldwell family, and Mary’s oldest friend, Margaret Willoughby, who had lived with the sisters as a child.

Mary was buried in her mother’s tomb, without her own name inscribed on it. But there she still lies surrounded by the Kings from whom she was descended and the Queens whose rivals the sisters had been.

______
You can buy her book on amazon.com!