Perhaps the most tragic figure in English history was Lady Jane Grey, “The Nine Days Queen.” This abused pawn of Tudor-era intrigue owed her misery almost entirely to her grasping and malicious mother, Frances Grey, Henry VIII’s niece. Even at a time when children of the aristocracy knew little of parental love, Jane had an especially brutal mother bent on using her to the best advantage.
The quiet, studious girl, raised at a time when the failure to honor and obey one’s parents was considered a sure path to damnation, did once allow herself the luxury of revealing her horrendous situation to her tutor: “I will tell you, and tell you a truth which, perchance, you will marvel at … 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 weigh, measure and number, even as perfectly as God made the world, or else I am so sharply taunted, so cruelly threatened, yea, presented sometimes with pinches, nips and bobs, and other ways (which I will not name for the honor I bear them) so without measure misordered, that I think myself in Hell.” Yet her mother’s greed consigned her to an end worse still.
Henry VIII’s successor, the boy king Edward VI, was dying and with him the hopes of one John Dudley, Duke of Northumberland, the Lord Protector of England. As a sort of regent, Dudley had set England on a course of extreme Protestantism. He and his plans would be doomed, however, if Edward was succeeded by his half sister, the staunchly Catholic Mary Tudor. Desperate, Dudley conspired with Frances Grey to have his son Guildford marry her daughter in 1553. He then persuaded the dying king to exclude both his sisters, Mary and Elizabeth, from succession and name his Protestant cousin, Jane, the king’s heir.
The self-effacing girl, all of 15, was horrified at the prospect, fainted and was gleefully slapped awake by her mother. Eventually, Frances bullied the terrified teen into the marriage. She was queen of England for nine days before “Bloody” Mary Tudor claimed her rightful throne. Jane was banished to the Tower of London, completely abandoned by her mother, who was absorbed with saving her own skin.
Frances did find time to plead successfully with her cousin the queen to pardon her husband, the Duke of Suffolk, for his part in the usurpation plot, but didn’t bother putting in a good word for her daughter Jane. On her way to the chopping block, Jane first was forced to observe the body of its previous victim: her 19-year-old newlywed husband, Lord Guildford Dudley, whose body lay on a stretcher, his severed head ensconced between his thighs. Lady Jane was decapitated without ever hearing from her mother.
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