Catherine Grey Elopes and Honeymoons in The Tower.

In this series:

• Catherine Grey Elopes and Honeymoons in The Tower.
• Lord John Gray to Sir William Cecil, November 7, 1563.
• An Anonymous Account of Lady Catherine Grey's Final days.

Tudor politics was a dangerous game. A young woman, like Catherine Grey, who had royal blood that could see her forwarded to replace Elizabeth I on the throne of England, was in way over her head simply by being alive. To elope with the young Earl of Hertford, rather than ask permission of the Queen, was worse than foolish on both of their parts. Catherine soon found herself pregnant, without allies and imprisoned in the Tower where she remained for the rest of her short life, dying on January 26, 1568, age 27. Our account comes from Ellis's Original letters, illustrative of English history¹:

The Queen went one morning to Eltham to hunt, when Lady Jane [Seymour] and Lady Catherine, according to previous concert, leaving the Palace at Westminster by the stairs at the orchard, went along by the sands to the Earl's house in Chanon Row; Lady Jane then went for a priest, and the parties were married. The Earl accompanied them back to the waterstairs of his House, put them into a boat, and they returned to the Court time enough for dinner in Master Comptroller's chamber. Having consummated his marriage Lord Hertford travelled into France. The pregnancy of Lady Catherine became apparent, and was soon whispered through the Court. She first confessed it privately to Mrs. Sentlowe, and afterwards sought Lord Robert Dudley's chamber to break out to him that she was married, in the hope of softening the anger of the Queen: but Elizabeth committed her to the Tower, where she was afterwards delivered of a son. Lord Hertford was summoned home to answer for his misdemeanor; when, confessing the marriage, he also was committed to the Tower.

Her son Edward was born on September 21, 1561, and remained with her in her apartments. Then followed a truly Tudor turn of events. Her illegitimate husband, the young Earl of Hertford, was also imprisoned in the Tower or given overnight visiting privileges. (Stories vary.) In the words of Davey’s The Tower of London²:

Elizabeth's fury may be conceived when she learnt that on February 10, 1563/4, the young Countess had given birth to another child, in the Bell Tower, who, like his elder brother, was baptized in St. Peter's, two Tower warders acting as godparents. He received the name of Thomas, after his great-uncle, the Lord Admiral. Elizabeth was so fiercely infuriated by this event that she resolved to settle matters once and for all, and Hertford was condemned to pay a fine of 15,000 marks, a mere excuse for the confiscation of his estates.

The plague having broken out in London, during the summer of 1563, members of Catherine's family pled with the Queen to allow her to live under house arrest in the countryside. The request was granted and she was released from the Tower, during the late summer of 1563, to live in house arrest with a family member, in Pirgo. The Earl her husband remained in the Tower. Documents while she was there indicate a single child was with her but she had also to be newly pregnant. No such evidence would seem to be available to tell us when exactly she returned or whether her child had been delivered there.

The children of Hertford and Grey were declared to be the issue of an adulterous relationship.

All of that said, Catherine and the children’s lodgings in the Tower were not dank and clammy. The following is a list of her furnishings provided to William Cecil, at the time Elizabeth’s Principal Secretary.

A List of the furniture with which the Lady Catherine's prison chamber in the Tower was supplied, in August 1561, from the Wardrobe there, will not be unamusing to the reader: It consisted of five pieces of Tapestry to hang the chamber; three window pieces of the like stuff; a sparver for a bed of changeable silk damask; a silk quilt of red striped with gold ; a bed and boulster of downe with two pillows of downe; one white linnen quilt stuffed with wool ; four pair of fustians, the one of six breadths the others of five; two carpets of Turkey making; one small window carpet; one chair of cloth of gold raised with crimson velvet, with two pommels of copper gilt, and the Quenes Arms on the back; one cushion of purple velvet; two footstools covered with green velvet; one cubbard joined; and one bed, one boulster, and a counterpane for her woman. It must be owned that this List looks royal ; but some marginal notes in the hand writing of Sir Edward Warner the Lieutenant of the Tower, declare the whole to have been old, worn, broken, and dilapidated. Sir Edward Warner in a Letter to Sir William Cecill Sept. 8th. 1563, says that the Lady Catherine did further injury to this furniture "with her monkeys and dogs."³ [Original letters, illustrative of English history]

The list was written before the second pregnancy. Sir Edward Warner, who compiled it, was the Keeper of the Tower. As a result of the second pregnancy, he found himself there as a prisoner.

1 Ellis, Henry. Original letters, illustrative of English history (1827). 272. Citing MS. Lansd. Num. 7. art. 32.

2Davey, Richard. The Tower of London (1910). 321.

3Ellis, 274.

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