Politics and Power Play in Tudor England
IT was in 1985, just as his Artistic Direction of the RSC was drawing to a close, that Trevor Nunn made his first film in a decade, historical drama Lady Jane. Helena Bonham-Carter, fresh from her breakthrough appearance as Lucy Honeychurch in Merchant-Ivory's acclaimed A Room with a View, took the title role, opposite Cary Elwes as Guildford Dudley.
To what extent the marriage, in early 1553, of Lady Jane Grey and Guildford Dudley, was politically motivated, remains unclear. What is significant, though, is that shortly before his death the same year, Edward VI signed a document, "My devise for the Succession", effectively enabling Grey to succeed him. How much John Dudley, 1st Duke of Northumberland, leader of Edward's government, influenced the King's revision of that legislation, is debated. What the film makes clear, however, is that the union of Dudley's son with the eldest daughter of the Suffolk dynasty would impede a Catholic succession and cultivate Jane's otherwise tenuous claim to the throne.
The film opens with the execution, in 1552, of Edward Seymour, Duke of Somerset, England's Lord Protector, and the elevation to that role of John Dudley (John Wood). The drama moves to a hunting party for the Suffolk household, and our introduction to Lady Jane. She is seated by a window, reading, when Princess Mary's Confessor, Dr Feckenham (Michael Hordern), enters, surprised to find her not participating in her family's "sport". By virtue of her impeccable humanist education, Jane was known as one of the most learned women of her day, and the exchange with Feckenham recalls her meeting in 1549 with scholar Roger Ascham. In The Scholemaster (1570), Ascham described their encounter at Bradgate Park, Leicestershire, her probable birthplace: "I found her in her chamber, reading Phaedo Platonis in Greek, and that with as much pleasure as some gentlemen would read a merry tale in Boccaccio". Jane's debate with Feckenham on the death of Socrates, and the allied notion of sacrifice, prefaces one of the film's key themes - her desire not for power but for freedom to pursue contemplative study, diametrically opposing her to her parents' insatiable appetite for elevation, ambitions at the centre of which they, in collusion with Dudley, manipulatively place their daughter.
We see Jane immersed in two very different worlds. The first is that of her parents, Henry Grey, Duke of Suffolk (Patrick Stewart) and Frances Grey, Duchess of Suffolk (Sara Kestelman), for whom she is seemingly little more than a pawn in their intricate yet dangerous bid for greater political influence. The second is her relationship with Dr Feckenham, who finds in Jane, amid the "many things on which [we] will disagree", a precociously brilliant mentee, and perhaps an intellectual equal. The Platonic sentiment voiced in that first, classically-grounded interaction, "the soul takes flight to the world that is invisible, and there arriving she is sure of bliss", though ostensibly intimating the protagonist's eventual fate, touchingly marks their association throughout. Theirs is an affinity underscored by an emotive metaphysics that always places true feeling ahead of mutual inquisitiveness.
Implicit, though, is Jane's positioning at centre stage in egocentric manoeuvrings of which she wants no part. So blinded are her parents by the social potential of a Suffolk-Northumberland match that her mother birches her as much for disappointing their plans as for her admirable reticence over the union. The early stages of their marriage are fraught. Guildford's friend Thomas (Pip Torrens) can do little to thwart the young Dudley's drinking, and a fracas between the couple and a group of beggars en route to the estate where they spend their first days together leads to an argument that exposes Jane's distance from the realities of life. She describes the man who confronted them on the road (Clyde Pollitt) as "marked" rather than "branded", not understanding how he may have fallen into poverty. Expressing his angry social conscience, Guildford lays the blame at the door of "Your father and my father, and men like them", and their "principle" of making desperation a sin. For Dr Feckenham and for King Edward, Jane's learning is "an example to us all". To Guildford, it simply explains Jane's ignorance, more concerned as she apparently is with ancient thought than with the raw fluidity of the everyday.
Guildford's later apology, though, and their first night together, successively mark the end of Jane's innocence and the beginning of their romance. In the parlour, with Jane having related to a group of expected guests that she and Guildford are "unwell", the couple are left alone. He challenges her to say what, if she could have anything, her choice would be. Remarking that she would will "...our country to remain true to the faith of God as revealed to us in Scripture", Guildford then takes a goblet of red wine and smashes it on the floor, declaring "then it's done". Cue a series of alternating ideals, from an end to slavery to compassion for the young, via the "death of all bishops, cardinals and popes". Each broken glass spills the sacred lifeblood of a given injustice that annotates the "moral" and religious social condition of the day. Theirs is a hypothetical liberalism that would chasten elites and foster collective humility.
None of this, though, can dissuade Northumberland's ruthless machinations, with Jane's "coronation" designed as much to assert the Duke's authority as hers, one he has deftly coaxed from slight to that which, if defied, would see any contrarian be judged "a traitor". For Jane, the spectacle is intolerable, with her eventually urging Guildford to "take me out of here", this prison of arranged hierarchy. So bound up in the theatre of the moment are Dudley, the courtiers, and Jane's parents, that she alone recognises the absurdity of the scene and the political truth that "this is not [my] right". Though faced with a crown she expressly does not want, Jane, with Guildford, is at least now free to enact the laws that inspire them most. At the first meeting of what she calls "Our Council", attended by both Northumberland and her father, her advisers exchange wearied glances, seemingly amused by what they regard as the sentimental fantasy of Jane's policies. Proposals to repeal branding, to return lands taken up during the Reformation to the common people, and the institution of a school to instruct children through patience rather than beatings, are met with thinly-veiled scorn. Her Council acknowledge her "God Given Power", so long as it accords with their superficial image of "progress".
The divisions within Jane's power base effectively signal the beginning of the end of Northumberland's magnificent but destructive obsession. The Spanish Ambassador, Renard (Lee Montague), makes clear to Mary I (Jane Lapotaire) that she may only marry Philip of Spain if "Jane Grey and her husband both die". Only through their removal can the threat be entirely erased. This insistence, and an insurrection led by Henry Grey, culminate in Guildford and Jane's indictment and confinement to the Tower. Dr Feckenham's final meeting with Jane, in which his account of her husband's death is interspersed with the image of her own, is powerfully moving. We are reminded that, whatever the conspiracies into which others have placed Jane, his belief in the strength of her convictions was ever genuine and intractably firm. In Lady Jane, it is not Mary's power that prevails, but the protégé of one who nurtured rather than dictated that silent but transcendent intellect. Through his words, the film's closing line, a unique figure is raised up to that Place overseen by One in whose service Jane's sole aspiration was to place herself.
Though the film's depiction of Jane and Guildford's romance may necessarily owe more to artistic licence than to fact - history alleges, variously, that the couple either disliked one another or spent little time together - its image of the child prodigy seems strongly to reflect contemporary testimony. In mirroring A.F. Pollard's assessment of Jane, in The History of England (1911), as the "traitor-heroine of the Reformation", it shows clearly that events gave Jane's life its drama, but her modest brilliance its distinction. The contradiction and violence of her story muted so much of its potential, but what resonates most vividly is the outlook that always put quiet but assured principle over moral triumphalism.
An impeccably-acted drama, by Bonham-Carter, Elwes and Hordern, especially. Lady Jane is richly complemented by Nunn's intelligent direction and an evocative score from Stephen Oliver.
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