Lady Jane Grey (1536/1537 – 12 February 1554), also known as Lady Jane Dudley after her marriage, and nicknamed the "Nine Days Queen", was an English noblewoman who was proclaimed Queen of England and Ireland on 10 July 1553 and reigned until she was deposed by the Privy Council of England, which proclaimed her cousin, Mary I, as the new Queen on 19 July. Jane was later beheaded for high treason.
Jane was the great-granddaughter of Henry VII (through his youngest surviving daughter, Mary Tudor), the grandniece of Henry VIII, and the first cousin once removed of Edward VI, Mary I, and Elizabeth I. Under the will of Henry VIII, Jane was in line to the throne after her cousins. She had a humanist education and a reputation as one of the most learned young women of her day. In May 1553, she was married to Lord Guildford Dudley, a younger son of Edward VI's chief minister, John Dudley, Duke of Northumberland. In June, the dying Edward VI wrote his will, nominating Jane and her male heirs as successors to the Crown, in part because his half-sister Mary was Catholic, whereas Jane was a committed Protestant and would support the reformed Church of England, whose foundation Edward laid. The will removed both of his half-sisters, Mary and Elizabeth, from the line of succession because of their illegitimacy, subverting their lawful claims under the Third Succession Act. Through the Duke of Northumberland, Edward's letters patent in favour of Jane were signed by the entire privy council, bishops, and other notables.
After Edward's death, Jane was proclaimed queen on 10 July 1553 and awaited coronation in the Tower of London. Support for Mary grew rapidly, and most of Jane's supporters abandoned her. The Privy Council suddenly changed sides and proclaimed Mary as queen on 19 July, deposing Jane. Her primary supporter, her father-in-law, the Duke of Northumberland, was accused of treason and executed less than a month later. Jane was held prisoner in the Tower, and in November 1553, she was also convicted of treason, which carried a sentence of death.
Mary initially spared her life, but Jane soon became viewed as a threat to the Crown when her father, Henry Grey, 1st Duke of Suffolk, became involved with Wyatt's rebellion against Mary's intention to marry Philip of Spain. Jane and her husband were both executed by beheading on 12 February 1554 at the Tower of London. At the time of her execution, Jane was either 16 or 17 years old.
Early life and education
Lady Jane Grey was the eldest daughter of Henry Grey, Duke of Suffolk, and his wife, Frances Brandon. The traditional view is that she was born at Bradgate House, Bradgate Park, in Leicestershire in October 1537, but more recent research indicates that she was born somewhat earlier, possibly in London, sometime before May 1537 or between May 1536 and February 1537. This would coincide with the fact that she was noted as being in her seventeenth year at the time of her execution. Frances was the elder daughter of Henry VIII's younger sister, Mary. Jane had two younger sisters: Lady Katherine and Lady Mary. Through their mother the three sisters were great-granddaughters of Henry VII; grandnieces of Henry VIII; and first cousins once removed of the future Edward VI, Mary I and Elizabeth I. On her father's side, Jane and her sisters were granddaughters of Thomas Grey, 2nd Marquess of Dorset and his second wife Margaret Wotton. On her paternal grandfather's side, Jane and her sisters were also descended from Elizabeth Woodville, wife of King Edward IV, by her first marriage to Sir John Grey of Groby.Grey, Henry, duke of Suffolk (1517–1554), magnate by Robert C. Braddock in Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004)
Jane received a humanist education from John Aylmer, speaking Latin and Greek from an early age, also studying Hebrew with Aylmer and Italian with Michelangelo Florio. She was particularly fond, throughout her life, of writing letters in Latin and Greek. Through the influence of her father and her tutors, she became a committed Protestant and also corresponded with the Zürich reformer Heinrich Bullinger. Jane had a reputation as one of the most learned young women of her day.
She preferred academic studies to activities such as hunting parties and allegedly regarded her strict upbringing, which was typical of the time, as harsh. To the visiting scholar Roger Ascham, who found her reading Plato, she is said to have complained:
For when I am in the presence either of father or mother, whether I speak, keep silence, sit, stand or go, eat, drink, be merry or sad, be sewing, playing, dancing, or doing anything else, I must do it as it were in such weight, measure and number, even so perfectly as God made the world; or else I am so sharply taunted, so cruelly threatened, yea presently sometimes with pinches, nips and bobs and other ways (which I will not name for the honour I bear them) ... that I think myself in hell.
Around February 1547 Jane was sent to live in the household of Edward VI's uncle, Thomas Seymour, 1st Baron Seymour of Sudeley, who soon married Henry VIII's widow, Catherine Parr. After moving there, Jane was able to receive educational opportunities available in court circles. Jane lived with the couple at Sudeley Castle in Gloucestershire as an attendant to Catherine until Catherine died in childbirth in September 1548. About eleven years old at the time, Jane was chief mourner at Catherine's funeral. After Thomas Seymour's arrest for treason, Jane returned to Bradgate and continued her studies.
Contracts for marriage
Lady Jane acted as chief mourner at Catherine Parr's funeral. Thomas Seymour showed continued interest in keeping her in his household, and she returned there for about two months before he was arrested at the end of 1548. Seymour's brother, the Lord Protector, Edward Seymour, 1st Duke of Somerset, felt threatened by Thomas' popularity with the young King Edward. Among other things, Thomas Seymour was charged with proposing Jane as a bride for the king.
In the course of Thomas Seymour's following attainder and execution, Jane's father was lucky to stay largely out of trouble. After his fourth interrogation by the Privy Council, he proposed his daughter Jane as a bride for the Protector's eldest son, Lord Hertford. Nothing came of this, however, and Jane was not engaged until 25 May 1553, her bridegroom being Lord Guildford Dudley, a younger son of John Dudley, 1st Duke of Northumberland. The Duke, Lord President of the Privy Council from late 1549, was then the most powerful man in the country. On 25 May 1553, the couple were married at Durham House in a triple wedding, in which Jane's sister Katherine was matched with the heir of the Earl of Pembroke, Lord Herbert, and another Katherine, Lord Guildford's sister, with Henry Hastings, the heir of the Earl of Huntingdon.
Claim to the throne and accession
Illness and death of Edward VI
Henry VIII had three children: Mary, who was raised Roman Catholic, and Elizabeth and Edward (the last from the King's third marriage to Jane Seymour, who died in 1537 after complications arising from the pregnancy and birth of Edward), both of whom were raised as Protestant. Following the annulment of his marriage to his first wife, Catherine of Aragon, Mary's mother, in 1533 and the beheading of his second wife, Anne Boleyn, Elizabeth's mother, in 1536, Henry rewrote the Act of Succession twice, declaring his daughters illegitimate. Although Jane Seymour managed to reconcile Henry briefly with his daughters, the monarch's formal reconciliation with them would come only in 1543, at the urging of his sixth and last wife, Catherine Parr. The princesses were reinstated in the line of succession in the Final Act of 1544, although they were still regarded as illegitimate. Furthermore, this Act authorised Henry VIII to alter the succession by his will. Henry's will reinforced the succession of his three children and then declared that, should none of them leave descendants, the throne would pass to heirs of his younger sister, Mary, which included Jane. For reasons still unknown, Henry excluded his niece and Jane's mother, Lady Frances Brandon, from the succession, and also bypassed the claims of the descendants of his elder sister, Margaret, who had married into the Scottish royal house and nobility.
In February 1553 Edward VI fell ill. Although he briefly recovered, in May he suffered a relapse again, and by early June his health had seriously deteriorated to the point that royal doctors informed Dudley and other noblemen close to Edward that he had only a few weeks to live. At the time, Edward's heir presumptive was his Catholic half-sister, Mary. Edward, in a draft will ("My devise for the Succession") composed earlier in 1553, had first restricted the succession to (non-existent) male descendants of Jane's mother and her daughters, before he named his Protestant cousin "Lady Jane and her heirs male" as his successors, probably in June 1553. Aware of his impending death and still with a clear conscience, Edward, guided primarily by Dudley, planned the exclusion of his older half-sister from the line of succession. The king's intentions aligned closely with Dudley's fears: Dudley, who had become for Mary a symbol of the hated Reformation, reasonably believed that Mary might seek to eliminate both him and his family should she come to power. Both the King and Protector Dudley knew of Mary's intense devotion to the Catholic faith; the Princess had half accepted some of her father's reforms, but bitterly disapproved of all those made by Edward, and both Edward and Dudley feared that if she came to the throne, she would re-establish Catholicism, reversing all the reforms made. Mary regarded the Pope's cause as her own, and her Catholic convictions were so strong that when the Edwardian Parliament passed an Act of Uniformity in 1549 that abolished the Roman Rite and prescribed that religious services be conducted in English, Mary defied it by continuing to have the traditional Latin mass celebrated in her private chapels. When Edward and his officials pressured Mary to conform to the Law of Uniformity, the Princess appealed her situation to her first cousin, Emperor Charles V, the most powerful monarch in Catholic Europe, who threatened to intervene militarily in England if the Government continued to interfere with Mary's religion. Edward was warned by his advisors that he could not disinherit just one of his older half-sisters; he would have to also disinherit Elizabeth although she, like Edward, was Protestant. Instigated by Northumberland, Edward decided to disinherit both Mary and Elizabeth, thus contravening the Succession Act of 1544, and appointed Jane Grey as his heir. For more than a year, the Imperial ambassador Jehan de Scheyfye had been convinced of Northumberland being engaged in some "mighty plot" to settle the Crown on his own head, and informed Charles V of the situation.