Free The Last White Rose by Desmond Seward Page A

Northumberland (the son of Henry VII’s extortioner), who persuaded Edward on his deathbed to name as his successor Lady Jane Grey, a great-grandaughter of the first Tudor king and a convinced Protestant. Dudley’s real motive was that she had married his son only six weeks before, but the country did not want the Tudors to be replaced by a dynasty of Dudleys. Ignoring the proclamation of ‘Queen Jane’, 20,000 men rallied to the Lady Mary, who quickly established her right to the throne and was crowned at Westminster Abbey on 1 October.
    To some extent the new queen’s accession was a belated triumph for the survivors of the White Rose party. Despite her ferocity towards anyone unwise enough to profess the Protestant faith, she was the warmest hearted of the Tudors and never forgot the White Rose’s support for her mother Queen Katherine and for herself. Exeter’s son, the Earl of Devon, was released from the Tower, and when Mary’s first Parliament met, his attainder was reversed so that he regained the Courtenay estates. His mother became a lady-in-waiting. The attainder of Lord Montague’s two daughters was also reversed and they recovered some of Lady Salisbury’s lands, specifically in recognition of the services she had rendered the queen during her ‘tender age’. Margaret’s daughter Ursula and her husband Lord Stafford were given back the Duke of Buckingham’s great house at Thornbury.

    The thirty-seven-year-old virgin queen was in need of a king consort. She did not choose a Yorkist husband, however. Although she enquired whether Reginald Pole could be dispensed from his orders, she decided that at fifty-three he was too old. Edward Courtenay, whom she created Earl of Devon and who was privileged to bear the sword of state at her coronation, was so seriously considered, despite being twelve years younger than the queen, that he established a semi-royal household. His candidature was strongly supported by the Lord Chancellor, Bishop Steven Gardiner, and Mary herself took an affectionate interest in him. But after his long imprisonment he plunged into debauchery and lost his chance. Finally, she chose Philip of Spain, although he was just as young as Courtenay.
    The Spaniard was a disastrous choice and her marriage, rather than the burning of heretics, made many Englishmen turn against Queen Mary, despite the popularity with which she had begun her reign. They disliked intensely the prospect of becoming part of the Habsburg Empire. Hoping to replace Mary with her sister Elizabeth, and with Edward Courtenay as king consort, Sir Thomas Wyatt the Younger led a rebellion early in 1554 that was only defeated by the queen’s courage. At first Courtenay supported the plot, but then he lost his nerve and blurted it out to Lord Chancellor Gardiner. 1
    After another spell in the Tower, Courtenay was banished from England, to wander through Italy ‘frequenting courtesans’. The last of his line, Edward died at Padua in September 1556, worn out by overindulgence in women and wine, although some thought he had been poisoned by Spanish agents. (He might have survived had he accepted Michael Throckmorton’s invitation to stay with him at Mantua.) Two months before his death a crackbrained schoolmaster named Cleobury impersonated the earl at Yaxley, a village in Suffolk, proclaiming ‘the Lady Elizabeth Queen and her beloved bedfellow, Lord Courtenay, King’. Cleobury had even found a few followers, but they did not turn up on the day and he was quickly arrested and executed– a story recalling Ralph Wilford’s impersonation of the Earl of Warwick in 1499. 2
    Another ludicrous incident occurred in April 1557 when Thomas Stafford, who was one of the Duke of Buckingham’s grandsons, landed in Yorkshire with several hundred men, seized Scarborough and proclaimed himself Lord Protector. Although he was not even the duke’s heir, Thomas had already had a seal made bearing the royal arms, declaring to anybody who