Monday, 10 July 1553 - Jane is proclaimed Queen

“And she [Jane Grey] left Sion, a palace of the Duke on the river Thames, in front of which is a palace of the Duke of Suffolk, both 7 miles distant from London. With a great retinue of Noblemen she was brought to the Tower and was received at the door by the Duke who, kneeling, put the keys in her hands. And although the number of people assisting to the ceremony was very big, no cheering was heard.”

(Commendone, Successi d’ Inghilterra, 1554)

“Hungate, I am truly sorry that it was your lot to be so immature and thus rashly to throw yourself away in this embassy.”

(John Dudley’s words to Thomas Hungate, 10 July 1553)

Poor Thomas Hungate. Having confronted the Council in London with Mary’s letter demanding they recognise her as queen or face the consequences, he was duly arrested and sent to the Tower. His ‘immature’ actions, as the duke of Northumberland put it, cost him his liberty but only for a matter of days. Hungate backed the right cause though by the 10th there was no certainty Mary would become queen. Particularly as, whilst Hungate was being transported by water to the gloomy fortress, the King’s death was being announced in London and Jane declared queen.


Jane was taken from Syon to the Tower, a fortress held by her supporters. This was bad news for Mary. As the papal envoy Commendone later explained,

“Any one who has to succeed to the English Crown, before his coronation, must forcibly dwell there [the Tower] 10 days and the reason if it is, as they say, that owing to its outstanding importance, he will be proved with certainty to be the rightful successor to the Crown once master of the Tower; otherwise the Council would refuse to grant its consent.”



Jane, beautifully attired in a gown of green velvet embroidered with gold and with her train bore by her mother, arrived at the Tower by around three o’clock in the afternoon. Some two or three hours later, Edward VI’s death was officially announced in London. It was common knowledge already that he was dead; the official announcement came as no surprise. If Londoners had got used to the news of Edward’s death they had not come to terms with the idea of ‘Queen Jane’. Few showed joy. Twenty years earlier, Londoners were said to have kept their caps firmly on their heads and the tongues still in their mouths when Anne Boleyn had been presented to them as their queen in her coronation procession. Uncomfortably for the Council, the vast majority of whom had been present at the same procession, the crowds repeated the same antics. It was time for the propaganda. Do you not know that the Lady Mary and the Lady Elizabeth are mere royal bastards and thus unfit to rule, they told the people? Do you all not know that the Lady Mary was born from a most offensive union to God – that her mother, Katherine of Aragon had first married Prince Arthur and then engaged in an incestuous union with his brother? (The Marquis of Winchester allegedly exclaimed, “Bastard, bastard, incestuous bastard Mary shall never reign over us!”) Do you not know that the Lady Mary was a follower of that religion which sought to suppress the English and take their rights – the religion which was governed by foreigners and not by the English sovereign, the natural ruler of these dominions? Their arguments were repeated continuously and with much zeal but proved ineffective. The Londoners remained silent.



Whilst Jane was dressed in the gowns and jewels that had one adorned Henry VIII’s ill-fated queens, Mary’s mother included, her men were rushing to various corners of the realm to proclaim her publicly. The council were issuing letters to local officers warning them to act against any disturbances they encountered and to ensure Jane’s accession was public knowledge. But Mary had still not been caught – for all his efforts, Robert Dudley had failed – and this was of deep concern to the duke and his allies. News reached London that Mary was calling for support and, worse still, receiving it in respectable numbers. Very shortly the duke would realise that if a job needs doing it is best done yourself, and thus joined the fight.


At Kenninghall where Mary was still residing, a number of supporters arrived having received their summons. Amongst them was Sir Henry Bedingfield and his brothers. A man once recommended to the duke, Bedingfield was also a Catholic and connected to the Howard family, the head of which was currently imprisoned in the Tower. Bedingfield would prove to be a man Mary could depend upon; in 1554 she appointed him as Princess Elizabeth’s jailor. Frustratingly the first list of men who supported Mary was drawn up on the 14th making it hard to indicate who were first to reach Kenninghall. But Sir Henry undoubtedly was there in the early days and was remembered for this in an account of the whole affair written by Robert Wingfield in 1554. Kenninghall was now getting rather cramped. A larger, better fortified household was needed and one which was more magnificent – a suitable place for a queen to conduct her affairs from. Fortunately Mary possessed such an establishment; a place which had been awarded to her just that year. Ironically Mary would win the throne of England from a castle which her brother had given her. Edward must have been turning in his freshly made grave.



(Image - ‘Jane by the grace of God Quene’, The Proclamation of 10 July 1553.)

Sunday, 9 July 1553 – Jane Grey learns of her accession

“She [Mary] wrote to the members of the Council and to the Principals of the Realm expressing her astonishment at their not coming unto her to do homage as to their true and lawful Queen and successor to the Reign. In the meantime she started levying a few men, calling to her support many Nobles of that Kingdom, to protect her against the force of the Duke.”

(Giovanni Francesco Commendone, Successi d’ Inghilterra, 1554)

“Declaring to them my insufficiency, I greatly bewailed myself for the death of so noble a prince, and at the same time, turned myself to God, humbly praying and beseeching him, that if what was given to me was rightly and lawfully mine, his divine Majesty would grant me such grace and spirit that I might govern it to his glory and service and to the advantage of this realm.”

(Jane Grey’s account of learning the news of Edward VI’s death and her own accession)

Reports that the duke had dispatched an army headed by his son Robert to capture Mary and stop her supporters from getting to her, must now have been known to the lady in question. Thomas Hungate, her servant who had volunteered to deliver to the Council a letter declaring her accession and warning them against supporting Jane, understood the possibility of being captured en route. Fortunately he would succeed in his mission. But his joy would be tempered by his consequent imprisonment. In twenty-four hours time, Hungate would be arrested and taken to the Tower. Later the Council threatened to have various Catholic prisoners in the same facility, amongst them Stephen Gardiner and Edward Courtenay, earl of Devon, executed if Mary persisted in her defiance of Edward VI’s wishes. Mary ignored them.


Letters calling for support were dispatched to allies. The peers of the realm were also advised to cast aside Jane and join Mary, a decision which most did not immediately take. One man, Henry Ratcliffe, second earl of Sussex, was uncertain of what course of action to follow. A conservative in religion, he felt sympathy for Mary’s position. But it was one thing to pity the princess and quite another to support her and oppose the Council who controlled the treasury, the royal fleets, numerous strongholds and of course the capital itself. He later claimed that Robert Dudley, the same man searching out Norfolk for Mary, told him the king was still alive and that Mary was a traitoress attempting to usurp her brother’s throne and deceiving others into aiding her. Understanding Sussex’s reluctance, Mary would soon force his hand by taking as hostage an individual whose welfare Sussex was utterly concerned for.



For some men, Mary’s letters requesting support were unnecessary. They rushed to Kenninghall and offered their assistance unreservedly. They brought arms and had called upon the support of neighbours. Such was the case with Sir Edward Hastings who was described by opponents as a ‘hardened and detestable papist’. Having received his summons from Mary on this date, he proceeded to raise troops in the Thames Valley. Soon he, Lord Windsor and Sir Edmund Peckham would be proclaiming Mary queen in Buckinghamshire, securing the county for her. Generally, Norfolk proved to be Mary’s county. Indeed it seems the whole of East Anglia was sympathetic towards the princess’s cause. This may seem odd at first given that Protestantism had entrenched itself in these parts. Most of the Protestant martyrs of Mary’s reign derived from the east of the kingdom and the rebels of Kett’s uprising of 1549 had made it clear their point of discontent was with Edwardian economic policies, not religious. Yet these same individuals had not forgotten the way they had been dealt with by the government during the events of 1549. The rebels had been utterly suppressed and this persecution, committed only four years previously, was still fresh in the minds of all. Additionally and perhaps most importantly, the man who had been instrumental in destroying the rebellion – the man whose army had defeated the rebels at the battle of Dussindale and caused around 2000 casualties – was none other than John Dudley, duke of Northumberland.


So far in this account of Mary’s course to the throne, one individual important to the events has not been mentioned. The lady in question was just as affected by Edward’s ‘Devise’ as Mary but her name is often overlooked in accounts of this episode. Elizabeth, daughter of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn was once again declared unfit to rule owing to her illegitimacy. Elizabeth had never known a time in her life when she was considered the King’s lawful issue, having been only two when her mother was executed and her father declared her to be his second bastard daughter – the product of another union that was allegedly offensive to God. But like her sister, she was observant and protective of her rights awarded to her in the 1544 Act of Succession and her father’s will. By July 1553 she, along with Mary, was the richest woman in the realm and owned a mass of properties. Like Mary she had been present at one of her own manors when Edward died and like her sister she headed a household devoted to her. But aside from voicing indignation about her brother’s plans, Elizabeth could do very little. She stayed in her household at Hatfield and waited – waited for her sister to succeed; waited for her to fail. As queen, Elizabeth would display unbelievable courage and temerity which matched that exuded by her brilliant parents. But she was indecisive and often reluctant to take a firm stance on certain issues out of fear of the consequences. Only a year later she would take a similar position whilst the rebels of Wyatt’s revolt acted against Mary. Elizabeth was not made of the stuff of martyrs and had her own survival in mind. Her concern was hardly unreasonable or cowardly. Mary too had known times when she would balk in the face of adversity and she would conform, even if it defied her principals, so she could persevere. When Jane’s cause had finally been crushed and the sisters met outside the gates of London, Mary would show no anger or hurt over her sister’s decision to remain quiet in the early days of this troublesome time. But maybe a tiny thread of doubt crept into her mind; a thread which would be spun into something more substantial with every real or supposed act of discontent Elizabeth would later make.



Meanwhile nearer to London, the hapless Jane Grey was finally informed that she was now queen. She had been residing at Chelsea Manor when, on this date, her sister in-law, Mary Sidney (the wife of one of the men present at Edward’s deathbed), told her the news of the King’s death and that she must now go with her to the former abbey at Syon where she would be attended by the duke and other peers. Yet when she got there the men were not present, fuelling Jane’s confusion. Before long, the duke of Northumberland, the marquis of Northampton, the earl of Arundel, the earl of Huntingdon and the earl of Pembroke walked in and informed her of the king’s demise and her own accession. “Which things, as soon as I had heard, with infinite grief of mind, how I was beside myself stupified and troubled”, she later told Mary. After displaying concern about Edward’s changes to the succession and her own ability to govern, she accepted the Crown. If God had called her for this task who was she to question His plans? It was nearly time for her to be taken to London and displayed in public as the queen. She would go from Syon to the Tower, a route also taken by Henry VIII’s fifth wife, Katherine Howard, some eleven years before her. Unfortunately the similarities between the pair do not end there.



(Image - Engraving entitled, "Lady Jane Grey Declining The Crown" by Robert Smirke, 1860).