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one present showed any sign of rejoicing” when Jane was proclaimed, an imperial envoy reported, “and no one cried ‘Long Live the Queen!’ except the herald who made the proclamation and a few archers who followed him.” Any dissension was ruthlessly crushed by Northumberland’s henchmen. One young barman named Gilbert Pot was arrested “for speaking of certain words of Queen Mary, that she had the right title.” He was then set upon a pillory and had his ears lopped off.
    Jane herself was painfully aware of how illegitimate her rule was, and that she was Northumberland’s puppet. Even so, since she had been used for her Tudor bloodline, she was not about to share power with her nonroyal spouse. “I sent for the earls of Arundel and Pembroke,” Jane later wrote to Queen Mary, “and said to them, that if the crown belonged to me I should be content to make my husband a duke, but would never consent to make him king.”
    This decision of Jane’s, which seems to have dominated most of her brief two-week reign, infuriated not only Guildford Dudley, with all his kingly pretensions, but also his mother, the grasping Duchess of Northumberland, who, Jane wrote, “persuaded her son not to sleep with me any longer as he was wont to do.” After that, she related, “I was compelled to act as a woman who is obliged to live on good terms with her husband; nevertheless I was not only deluded by the Duke and the Council, but maltreated by my husband and his mother.”
    While Queen Jane was preoccupied with her pouty husband and nasty in-laws, Queen Mary was a fugitive with few prospects. Even the envoys of her powerful ally and cousin, Emperor Charles V, believed her cause to be hopeless. The Duke of Northumberland seemed invincible.
    “Dudley had with him some three thousand mounted men and foot soldiers, thirty cannon from the Tower, and as many cartloads of ammunition,” wrote Mary’s biographer Carolly Erickson. “He controlled the capital, the government, the treasury, and the queen. No commander was superior to him in experience or skill; he seemed to have every advantage.”
    But, for all that, the people hated him. To most he was a wicked upstart, mad with power. Mary, on the other hand, was Henry VIII’s own daughter—a princess who had endured much pain and heartbreak, and who was now being denied her birthright by a monster. In a steady procession, people began to rally to her banner. It was a spontaneous eruption of support by a people unwilling to see their rightful queen displaced.
    Mary had been reminded by the council that she had been “justly made illegitimate and uninheritable to the Crown Imperial of this realm,” and warned not to bother the loyal subjects of “our Sovereign Lady Queen Jane.” Now Northumberland was preparing to answer her impudence.
    It was Jane Grey’s father, the Duke of Suffolk, who was originally charged with subduing the growing movement aroundMary and capturing her. Upon learning this, however, Jane burst into tears and begged that her father remain with her in London. The task then fell to Northumberland and his sons. “Since ye think it good,” the duke said to the council, “I and mine will go, not doubting of your fidelity to the Queen’s majesty which I leave in your custody.”
    Northumberland was wily enough to know that the men around him were all driven by self-interest, and that by leaving London he was exposing himself to betrayal should events turn in Mary’s favor. Thus, he reminded them that he and his companions were risking their lives “amongst the bloody strokes and cruel assaults” of the enemy with the trust that the council would protect their interests at home. He warned anyone who might violate that trust and “leave us your friends in the briars and betray us” that he could in turn destroy them. More important, it would be a damnable betrayal of the sacred oath of allegiance they had sworn “to this virtuous lady the Queen’s