At once the Council was called together, and a proposal was made that
the Duke of Suffolk should take command of troops to quell the
insurrection, but Jane was insistent that she could not be left in the
Tower without her father for protection, and as his health was not
good, it was finally decided that the Duke of Northumberland himself
should go out to resist the rival forces. But before the Duke went, he
gave Her Majesty into the charge of the Council, and swore with a big
oath that when he returned "Mary should no longer be in England, for he
would take care to drive her into France."
Then with a passionate embrace of his son, Guilford, Northumberland went
to finish his preparations for the resisting of Mary's claim, and on
Friday, the fourteenth, he and his followers rode proudly forth with a
train of guns, and six hundred men, some of them the greatest in the
land. As they passed through the city, they could not but notice the
sullenness and lack of enthusiasm in the great crowds everywhere
gathered to watch them pass, and grew more and more fearful of the
probable defeat of the Duke's project.
Meanwhile Queen Jane, in the Tower, passed the weary hours as best she
could, and executed several minor duties of her royal office, but grew
hourly more depressed with a nameless dread, and at evening came the
news of a great rising in favour of Queen Mary. Still worse tidings came
on Saturday, the sixth day of Jane's disastrous reign. Queen Mary had
already been proclaimed at Framlington and Norwich, and Northumberland
had sent to London for fresh troops, and was speeding as fast as horse
could gallop towards Cambridge, which he reached at midnight, but in
vain! Jane's cause collapsed so completely and so rapidly everywhere
that even such precautions as had been taken for the defence of her
party ended by serving her rivals, and the miserable Duke returned to
the Tower and its comparative safety, a prisoner, in a pathetic plight
brought about by his own wretched ambition.
On the seventh day of Queen Jane's reign, throughout the length and
breadth of England there were again risings for Queen Mary. In all the
streets there were cheering and rioting, and bonfires were lighted,
around which crowds of rough men and women circled, shouting, "Queen
Mary! Queen Mary!" while in the churches the rival queens and rival
creeds were the one subject of discourse.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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