Episode 070 of the Renaissance English History Podcast was with Tudor Times on John Dudley.
This episode is the regular monthly feature with Tudor Times on their Person of the Month, John Dudley. Famous as the Tudor Villain who masterminded the plot to put Lady Jane Grey on the throne (which subsequently got them all killed) there’s more to him than that one act. Melita talks us through the rest of his life.
Tudor Times Person of the Month Feature:
http://tudortimes.co.uk/person-of-the-month/john-dudley
Learn more about John Dudley through these sources:
Edward VI: The Lost King of England
Review of the book by Hillary Mantel here.
Crown of Blood: The Deadly Inheritance of Lady Jane Grey
Lady Jane Grey: A Tudor Mystery
All Things Robert Dudley website on the Dudley family
https://allthingsrobertdudley.wordpress.com/
Rough Transcript: Episode 71 – Tudor Times on John Dudley
Speaker 2: (00:08)
Hello and welcome to the Renaissance English history podcast. I’m your host, Heather Tesco. And I’m a storyteller who makes history accessible because I believe it’s a pathway to understanding who we are, our place in the universe and our connection to our own humanity. This is episode 70, we’re doing another joint episode with Melita Thomas of Tudor times. This one’s on John Dudley. Just a quick note that the Renaissance English history podcast is a proud member of the Agora podcast network, which you can learn more about and discover some new favorite podcasts@agorepodcastnetwork.com. Remember, you can get links to more information, resources and sign up for my mailing list@englandcast.com. At the end of this episode, Melita mentioned several resources for Dudley, for example, and I’ve included those links on the website in the show notes for this episode. So now let me introduce you to Melita. Melina is a co founder and editor of Tudor times a website devoted to tutor and Stuart history from the period between 1485 and 1625.
Speaker 2: (01:13)
You can find it@tutortimes.co.uk Melita, who has always been fascinated by history ever since she saw the 1970s series, Elizabeth R with Glenda Jackson also contributes articles to BBC history, extra and Britain magazine. And we started off the interview by me as usual, asking her to tell us a little bit about John Dudley’s life and why she chose him as the person of the month. This month, Dudley is famous under his title of Duke of Northumberland as perhaps one of the great two divisions. Um, he’s held responsible for the attempt to put lady Jane Gray on the throne, which resulted in, in Jane’s death at the age of 17. And he was seen in his time as a tyrant and a sort of greedy ambitious man. Um, I think he’s, he’s perhaps more complex than that and his, his background. He was a son of one of Henry, the seventh closest advisers.
Speaker 2: (02:12)
And so he had to overcome the hurdle of the fact that Henry the sevenths, um, advise that Edmund Dudley was executed for treason in the early part of Henry, the X rain as Dudley senior was blamed very much for Henry the seventh rather. Um, what should we say, repressive financial regime. So it was quite handy to throw it, have somebody to throw to the dogs, which Henry the eighth, um, ruthless from an early age did. So young Dudley was overshadowed in his early life by the fact that his father had been executed for treason. Um, three reason we picked him for the, the person of the month is because, you know, partly because of that achievement to go from being the son of a traitor, to being most powerful man in England, when he was Lord president of the council and effectively the region, Fred with the sex, he’s sort of an archetype for the rise of what they called the new men.
Speaker 2: (03:12)
They weren’t an aristocratic birth. Um, but they, he achieved his position through a good deal of hard work and loyal service to the state, but also quite a bit of, um, intriguing ambition. Um, so yeah, he’s, he’s a complex character actually. Um, I can’t say I’ve particularly warmed to him, but there are some positive aspects to his character as well. And I think he was, he comes across as a very, um, very intelligent, very driven man, very, very skilled in administration, uh, quite a very strong and forceful character. And I can imagine that he was probably rather a bully actually. And that’s how he got his way, because he would have, you know, overwhelming force of character.
Speaker 3: (03:58)
So like his background and his family, it seems that scheming and these kind of potentially treasonous activities were something that kind of ran in his family. And it seems like some families just kind of are like that, like the Howard’s as well. Why do you think that is what with him
Speaker 2: (04:17)
To be fair? I think it’s, it’s probably the case that every family in tutoring and had a few relatives who can integrate it wasn’t it was a Parana pool. Um, I think certainly Dudley senior, his father was there’s no evidence at all that he was in any way treasonable he was carrying out Henry the seventh orders and yes, he probably lined his pockets. I’m pretty sure he lined his pockets, but he wasn’t doing anything that the King wasn’t wasn’t aware of or, or, or happy about. He was accused of trees. And as a way of deflecting unpopularity away from the King, you know, the late King to on, onto another individual to end, to give everybody a feel good factor when Henry the eighth came to the throne. So it’s a bit harsh that he was considered to be a traitor and John Dubby, the son, I think, yeah, I think he was a risk taker.
Speaker 2: (05:13)
He was, he was a military commander who it looks from what you can see that he would take a calculated risk and he would deliver on it. So he’d, he’d weigh up, you know, a number of, um, important, uh, military campaigns that he was involved in and it weigh the odds and he would, he would take it. He would take a chance based on, on, on good odds, but where he came undone perhaps was underestimating that his opponent, um, Mary, she actually had a very high appetite for risk as well. That’s not, not the persona that people imagine offer, but when you actually look at how she lived, lived her life, she was a risk taker and, and Northumberland probably, you know, in the, in the of the time assume that a woman wouldn’t wouldn’t take that kind of risk. Yeah. And I was thinking, I mean, I was saying before, I think he had a strong personality, but I also think he like many people who are strong, charismatic people follow him.
Speaker 2: (06:09)
He was, he was a natural leader. So what motivated him, do you think, you know what I first thought about that question? I thought, well, you know, greed and ambition, because that’s the obvious answer, but I think there is a more complex element to it. I was certainly financially, he was, he was very inquisitive and, you know, I think it’s obviously connived at his stepfather being defrauded of, of money. And it’s fairly clear that, um, let’s see, when, when people owed him money, he was quite prepared to send the heavies in there. You know, there’s definitely an element that he was, he was quite ruthless like that, but I think he was also, um, I think the example of his father made him nervous. As I said before, the Dudley senior he’d served him very faithfully, but that, that wasn’t enough. He still was executed for treason.
Speaker 2: (07:03)
And I think Dudley, who was obviously very conscious about his father, he wrote about his, his poor father who had been badly treated. I think he realized that when Edward the sixth was dying, he was afraid that if marijuana became queen, even if he hadn’t done anything wrong, he would be the scapegoat for the religious policies that have been followed under Edward, that Mary was, was bound to reverse. So I think it was possibly a preemptive strike, uh, because he, you know, he saw the example of his father before him, but I don’t know that, but that’s, that is the conclusion I I’ve come to. Yes, he won, he wanted to be top dog and he didn’t want to be, uh, to lose out, but I think he was afraid that he would end up, um, executed anyway. Interesting.
Speaker 3: (07:52)
What was his personal life like? You know, I think, I just think about him plotting his son, you know, this whole situation. Like what, what was his personal life like? Other than that,
Speaker 2: (08:02)
He was, he and his wife were deeply attached to each other. She was her name was Jane Gifford or Guilford Howard discussion on how to pronounce that one. And she was the son of his guardian. So, so when his father was executed, his mother Elizabeth Gray, she was married to actually the Kings half uncle of the Plantagenet. So which, which brought him sort of into the orbit of the Royal family, because Henry was, was very fond of his uncle. Um, so we don’t know anything about his relationship with his mother because he was the ward of Surette would Gifford, uh, who, and then he married Gifford’s daughter Jane, and they were, they were devoted to each other. They had 13 children, rather astonishingly unpleasant ideas. And there you go. Uh, and at the end, when, um, when he was imprisoned and his wife, Jane, she was, you know, she pleaded for his life, um, farm, or she, she wrote that she was more, more worried about him than she was about her children, because he was such a good man and she’d been so devoted to him.
Speaker 2: (09:04)
And, you know, she was, um, obviously loved him very much, but the whole family life seems to have been very happy. All of the Dudley siblings were very close to each other throughout the lives. They’re the ones whose, who survived into older age. Um, and they, they S he seems to have been unusually close to his children. So that’s, uh, you know, that’s, that’s a positive, um, positive aspect, the obvious stuff that he’s known for. Tell me about the, the lady Jane Gray plot, the whole kind of situation with that. And, you know, just the background. Yes. It’s, it’s interesting. There’s have been some different interviews [inaudible] of late on, on, you know, what, who was responsible for what, but just as a, as the background. So in 1544, parliament passed an act of succession, which designated Henry the eighth successes as firstly, his son, Edward, as was the case under the common law.
Speaker 2: (10:02)
And he was to be followed if he had no children by Henry, the eighth elder daughter, Mary, and any children’s she might have. And then by the younger daughter, Elizabeth apt also gave Henry the power to nominate further successes. Sure. Should it transpire that Elizabeth, you know, that none of his children had had children of their own. So because there were, there was sort of a choice. Yeah. Successes after that, after Henry’s own children, there were the descendants of his elder sister, Margaret, but that was the King of Scotland or his half sister, Margaret Douglas, the Countess of Lennox, although the dependence of his younger sister married a French queen now, Henry for whatever reason, decided that he preferred the descendants of his youngest sister, probably because he didn’t want Scotland to be anywhere near the, near the succession. But he didn’t, he didn’t nominate his actual niece Francis probably because he thought her husband, Henry Gray was an idiot.
Speaker 2: (11:08)
And there isn’t there’s no, no other way of putting it really. He was, he all the descriptions of him. Um, there’s very positive stuff about his, um, his piety and his learning and his generosity and all the rest of it. But, you know, every description of him suggested he really was not the sharpest sharpest knife in the drawer. He was a poor military commander and just, you know, Henry the eighth was a good judge of, of, um, ministers. And he, and he never let Henry Gray anywhere near his, his council. So I’d refer to him as Henry Gray, but at the, at the time that the will was made, he was Marcus of Dawson. So, so that was death. He was to be succeeded by his children. And then by the children of his niece, Francis of own, the oldest was a daughter Jane and the gray family were Protestants and Edward, the sixth as he, um, he obviously didn’t live to grow up and he became more and more firmly Protestant as he, as he got older.
Speaker 2: (12:09)
And he was concerned now, whether this was his own idea or whether it was put into his mind by North Umberland has been a question and we’ll, we’ll never know exactly, but he decided that he should cut his sisters out of the succession. And he decided, first of all, he was going to name a only male as he was, you know, at 15 years old, he was a, he was an, a rank misogynistic. He was scouting. He was scouting around looking for male heirs, but there weren’t any, because Jane had no brothers, she wasn’t married. None of her sisters were married. Her, there was nothing but women to choose from. So Edward had to give in and decided it was going to be Jane herself in any, any, as she subsequently had. And surprisingly, very soon after, uh, Edward came up with this scheme, uh, North ambulance son married Jane.
Speaker 2: (13:01)
Now I notice it’s not a thing, isn’t it now the, the late and very well regarded professor Ives, his opinion is this is, this was just a perfectly ordinary marriage between, um, members of the nobility and had no ulterior motive at all, which I don’t think is a view that most people would have would have. Now we’ll probably all have then in fact, because there was talk at the time that it was, it was highly, highly suspicious, that Northumberland was clearly plotting something. Um, so I mean, it was clearly at Edward wanted this to happen, but as I say, whether he completely came up with the idea himself or whether it was suggested to him, which is certainly not impossible, because as I said before, North hundred had a very strong personality, but regardless of where the idea came from, it was not, it wasn’t legal because Edward, for a number of reasons, first, he was a minor.
Speaker 2: (13:56)
So he couldn’t actually make a will in law second, even though he persuaded the judges to draw it up as a thing called letters, patent, which are direct orders from the King, they don’t have the force of law that is gross than an act of parliament, but couldn’t, he could not overturn it out to parliament by, by letters patent. So what needed to happen was for Edward to live until parliament could pass a new succession act, but didn’t so Northumberland, um, decided, you know, he was, he was going to take the chance anyway and persuaded, bullied, encouraged the rest of the council to agree with him. And Jane was proclaimed as queen and nobody in the country also talking on the idea. Uh, so he probably assumed that Mary having been cut out of the succession would either just give in or that she would, um, you know, perhaps, uh, go abroad to her European relatives.
Speaker 2: (15:01)
But he certainly doesn’t seem to have been expecting that she would raise an army, which she very promptly did had a huge amount of public support. So North ambulate, so it was decided by the council of, of queen Janus as they turned her. But, uh, an army would have to be raised to go and try to capture Mary, uh, and Northumberland was obliged to lead it. He had hoped to stay back in London, but the weight of all of the rest of the council and Jane herself, was it sh he should lead it. It was, it was no good Jane’s father trying to lead it because he’d already, um, failed notably in any kind of military expedition. Whereas Northumberland was a, was a very fine, uh, military leader, but he, you know, there was no public support for it. Um, Mary Mary’s support was so great that Northumberland gave in without actually, um, fighting, uh, he was arrested, carried off to the tower and, um, quite swiftly executed.
Speaker 2: (16:01)
And that was, that was the end of him. I mean, he gambled any lost, it was a bold move. So on the surface, just with that, he sort of seems like a, you know, this villain, like you’ve called him earlier, that he’s known as, and you said that he was very close with his family. What else? Redeeming quality, what are the redeeming qualities? Does he, you know, whether, you know, not so much a personal thing, but as I say, he was, he was a very competent adminis administrator. He was a, he was a good, he was a good, um, military military leader. Um, whether that’s a virtual or an opera, I mean, in his time it would certainly have been considered a virtue, but he also, um, one rather nice story is that when, when James the fifth died after the battle of Solway Moss, he was by count line.
Speaker 2: (16:48)
At that time, he wrote, he wrote Lyle wrote to Henry the eighth that he’d stood the army down because he did not think it was honorable to prosecute war on a corpse, a without an, a suckling babe. So he was, you know, it was not completely dishonorable. I mean, he could have just met his army and completely overcome the, the, the Scottish forces, which had been so badly molded sole way Moss. So he certainly had a sense of honor. It’s not clear. I mean, he, and he and Somerset who had preceded him as Lord, as you know, that all protector in a younger days, they’d been actually very close friends. And as they’ve sort of come up with a scheme to defraud, um, uh, Northumberland father stepfather, after he moved, he sort of got rid of Somerset from power. He didn’t rush to have him executed or, um, now whether that was because he didn’t want to look like the bad guy or whether it would see he genuinely had some, you know, didn’t want to take that, you know, you can’t know, but he, yeah.
Speaker 2: (17:52)
So I think he was just, well, good, good, and bad. Like everybody, he, it, it was a, it was a very, it was definitely a dog eat dog world. And I think the example he’d seen of his, of his family, and if I should think whole of Henry, the AIX court was suffering from post traumatic stress because you know, all the ones who didn’t didn’t win, they didn’t just lose, they lost their heads. So the stakes were very high. You couldn’t just sort of say, Oh, well, you know, my bid for power didn’t really come off. So I’ll just go and live in the country. It was much more, more brutal than that. So as soon as you’d started to, to be ambitious, you, you, you almost couldn’t stop. So yeah, no, he’s, he’s a complex character. And, um, yeah, I mean, I have to say, I, I think he and his wife sound, um, they’re very, very devoted to each other, but they’re completely, um, convinced that they ought to, to have all the power and power and wealth they wanted.
Speaker 2: (18:49)
Interesting. And where can we learn more about him, funnily enough, it’s not bad. I’m David loads, um, who the late Dave Lhotse died last year. He wrote a biography of him back in the 1980s, um, which I haven’t been able to get hold of, in fact. So I don’t know if it’s out of print, but I’m certainly haven’t been able to get he’s he’s very much talked about in other, in books about other other people. So there’s Chris Skidmore’s biography of Edward, the sex, which is very good. Uh, professor Ives book that I mentioned before, which is called the mystery of lady Jane grey, um, Nicola Tallis just a few weeks ago, published one called the crown of blood, which is about Jane Gray. So, so he’s, he’s, he’s a peripheral character in other people’s other people’s lives. Uh, there’s a, there’s an introductory book by a lady called Christine Hartwig, who, I’m not sure how she pronounces that hard way, who has a website about the Dudleys.
Speaker 2: (19:52)
So that’s a, that’s a, a good overview. But most of the, in fact, there’s an awful lot of, of, of records because he, because he was Lord Admiral, he was Lord Admiral of the fleet at the time that the Mary Rose sank, it happened that he was on the other ship on the flagship, the great Harry, but, you know, it happened right in front of his eyes. So there’s, there’s an awful lot of correspondence about his military career in the, in the letters and papers of Henry the eighth. So you can find out and because he was so involved in litigation, I mean, you know, he was permanently in a court case. Uh, so there’s lots about his financial transactions as well. Interesting. So I’ll put links to all of that stuff up in the show notes about this, so people can come see more. Awesome.
Speaker 2: (20:33)
Well thank you for telling us about him. Yeah, no, thank you. Thank you for listening with the person of the month features that we do it two at a times, because we were looking in a reasonable amount of depth that a lot of different people it’s very interesting. See how, how they all interplay. So when you’re looking at something from the opposite point of view, say last February, when, when it was, um, married the first 500th anniversary, we looked at her and now of course, I’m looking at it from the other point of view to see Dudley’s perspective. And it’s, it is actually interesting to look at all these things from the different, different people’s perspectives.
Speaker 1: (21:08)
Thank you again to Melita Thomas for taking the time to tell us about John Dudley. For more information on him, go to tutor times.co.uk, or see the resources available on the England cast site@englandcast.com. Later on this week, I’ll have the episode on Henry, the eighth foreign policy towards France net. After that we’ll have an entire episode just on the field called the gold. So stay tuned for that. It’s going to be older. Yes. Religious said that, honestly, since I become mom, like I do the corniest stuff, I’m wearing my mom jeans and I’m saying it’s going to be golden, but it is going to want to stay tuned. Alright. Have a great week, everybody. I will tell you [inaudible].
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Heather Teysko is the creator, writer, and producer of The Renaissance English History Podcast, the original Tudor history podcast, started in 2009. She's been writing about history online for over 25 years, since her first site on Colonial American history became number one in history on Yahoo in 1998. In 2019 she created Tudorcon, which is now a yearly event, in addition to writing books, and running TudorFair.com - a whimsical Tudor Merch shop. She has been passionate about Tudor England since she first read Alison Weir's The Six Wives of Henry VIII 20 years ago, and subsequently moved to London after college to spend her time immersed in Tudor history.