SOURCE: Levin, Carole. “Lady Jane Grey: Protestant Queen and Martyr.” In Silent but for the Word: Tudor Women as Patrons, Translators, and Writers of Religious Works, edited by Margaret Patterson Hannay, pp. 92-106. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1985.

[In the following essay, Levin argues that Grey was a stronger figure than history has given her credit for, a woman of considerable learning whose letters, prayers, and scaffold speech show her to be courageous and uncompromising in her religious beliefs.]

John Dudley, Duke of Northumberland, attempted to subvert the Tudor succession and make his daughter-in-law, Jane Grey, queen of England in 1553. The attempt failed, and Lady Jane was executed the following year at the age of sixteen. By the end of the sixteenth century, the English people perceived Lady Jane Grey as the ideal young victim: beautiful, modest, deferential, quiet, and passive. This image, presented in 1599 by Thomas Decker and John Webster in their play, The Famous History of Thomas Wyatt, was further developed by seventeenth-century historians and passed into popular historical mythology, thus making Lady Jane Grey so endearing, especially to the Victorians. Many later historians, such as David Mathew and Barrett L. Beer, have continued to accept the conventional notion of Lady Jane Grey as a weak, powerless victim of political intrigue. But though the myth has clear historical roots, Lady Jane Grey was actually a far stronger figure than this picture would lead us to believe. One of the best educated women of the Tudor period, she was in fact a Protestant queen and martyr of great courage and forthrightness whose life and writings represent a rigid and uncompromising Protestantism that made her one of the best known women of her age.¹

Lady Jane Grey's modern biographer Hester Chapman has presented this alternative view: “She was … of the stuff of which the Puritan martyr is made: self-examining, fanatical, bitterly courageous, and utterly incapable of the art of compromise in which the Tudors specialized.”² David Mathew agrees with Chapman about the intensity of Lady Jane's religious conviction, but is less impressed with her intellectual abilities: “Lady Jane had one great quality, a burning religious zeal which lit up the character of a rather simple girl.” Mathew also describes Jane Grey as passive, and adds that while she was “beautifully educated and very learned,” he doubts that she was at all intelligent (p. 144). Beer characterizes Lady Jane as “easily manipulated … confused and bewildered” (p. 156). I would argue that Mathew and Beer are wrong in their summations of Jane Grey's character. To understand why Lady Jane Grey was more than simply a political pawn, it is necessary to examine carefully both her background and the uncompromising stance of piety she exhibits in her writing.

Most of Lady Jane Grey's works were written during the last six months of her life, while she was a prisoner in the Tower of London. The concerns she expressed in her prayers, letters, and dying speech demonstrate what constituted a religious life, how one could combat the temptations of despair and appropriately prepare for a tranquil death. These concerns link Jane Grey with other political and religious dissidents who sojourned in the Tower and also confronted these issues in their writings.

Lady Jane Grey, the granddaughter of Henry VIII's younger sister Mary, was born in October 1537. Since Henry VIII had only one son, Edward, it was a time of insecure succession. From the time of her childhood many people considered her an important pawn who might, with luck, even become a queen. Her education was appropriate to one of her position and her times. It not only reflected the Reformed church, but also the impact of humanism on attitudes toward women's education. In the first half of the sixteenth century the upper classes considered educating their daughters fashionable, and Lady Jane learned to read as a small child. By the time she was seven, her first tutor, Dr. Harding, had begun her instruction in Latin and Greek as well as a smattering of such modern languages as Spanish, Italian, and French.³ Lady Jane Grey was also to spend a considerable amount of time in biblical and classical study.

Soon after the death of Henry VIII, Lady Jane Grey joined the household of his widow, Catherine Parr. Indeed, such an upbringing away from home was normal for persons of high station at the time, and since Jane Grey was a princess of the blood, the dowager queen's household would be one of the few considered suitable for her. Within a few months of the king's death, Catherine married her former suitor Thomas Seymour, younger brother of the Lord Protector, Edward Seymour, Duke of Somerset, and maternal uncle to the new king. Many people were scandalized, but Thomas Seymour had plans for attaining power in his nephew's reign, and marriage to the dowager queen could be quite useful. So could control of Lady Jane Grey, and Seymour negotiated with her parents, Henry and Frances Grey, accordingly, promising to arrange a marriage between Jane and her cousin Edward VI. For her parents, having Jane in the queen's household became potentially very important, since through this marriage she would become queen of England.

For Jane Grey it may have been important for other reasons. The Protestant faith in which she had been raised would be further developed under the influence of Catherine Parr, a humanist with Erasmian and Protestant sympathies who had strong ties with Reformers. Parr's book, Lamentacion of a Sinner (1547), was “contemporaneous and controversial,” argues William Haugaard,⁴ and clearly explicated Protestant attitudes toward the old and new faiths. Roland Bainton describes Lamentacion as “one of the gems of Tudor devotional literature” (p. 165). For Parr, reading the Holy Scripture was of central importance to Christian devotion. Parr argued in favor of justification by faith although she did not reject the importance of good works growing out of faith, as when she claims, “This dignitie of fayth is no derogation to good woorkes, for out of this fayth springeth al good workes. Yet we may not impute to the worthynes of fayth of workes, our justification before God” (in Haugaard, p. 358). These doctrines, central to Protestant theology, will also be found in the later writings of Lady Jane Grey. Undoubtedly, until her death in 1548, Catherine Parr exercised some influence on Jane's development.

After his wife's death, Thomas Seymour dabbled with treason, and he was executed as a traitor in March 1549. By then Lady Jane was back at Bradgate with her parents, who were disappointed that she was not to marry the king and instead had to settle for her betrothal to the son of the Lord Protector, Edward Seymour. But while her political future seemed less bright, she was becoming known both for her outstanding piety and her learning. At this time, she corresponded with such Continental Protestant divines as Martin Bucer and Johann Heinrich Bullinger, and it may have been their influence that gave Lady Jane's theology such a Calvinist tinge.

During this period Roger Ascham visited Bradgate and left a striking picture of this fourteen-year-old young woman in The Scholemaster, which was written for didactic purposes and published in 1570. That his account actually reflects his personal perception, however, is confirmed by letters written by Ascham at the time.⁵ Ascham describes his encounter with Lady Jane Grey: “I found her in her chamber reading Phoedon Platonis in Greek, and that with as much delight as some gentlemen would read a merry tale in Boccaccio.” Ascham asked Lady Jane why she was not enjoying herself with the others who were out hunting. She responded that those “good folk, they never felt what true pleasure meant.” In answering the question as to how she learned the nature of this true pleasure, Jane replied candidly,

I will tell you … and tell you a truth which perchance you will marvel at. One of the greatest benefits that ever God gave me is that he sent me so sharp and severe parents and so gentle a schoolmaster. For when I am in 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 honor I bear them, so without measure misordered, that I think myself in hell till time come that I must go to Master Aylmer, who teacheth me so gently, so pleasantly, with such fair allurements to learning, that I think all the time nothing whilst I am with him. And when I am called from him, I fall on weeping because whatsoever I do else but learning is full of grief, trouble, fear, and wholy misliking unto me. And thus my book hath been so much my pleasure, and bringeth daily to me more pleasure and more, that in respect of it all other pleasures in very deed be but trifles and troubles unto me.⁶

Her reply certainly contradicts the traditional picture of a meek and mild Lady Jane. Though mistreated by her parents, she claims to have compensated for this unkindness by exercising her mind and finding pleasure in study. She had enough insight to recognize that she was mistreated, and did not feel the necessity to hide that information from a sympathetic stranger. Unwilling to accept her parents' treatment of her unquestioningly and in silence, she had the courage and forthrightness to speak out.

Two other incidents occurred late in Edward VI's reign that Protestant hagiographers greatly emphasized in their discussions of Lady Jane Grey in the years after her death. Both of these incidents involved her Tudor cousin, the Lady Mary. One occurred when she was visiting Mary. In defiance of the law Mary had mass said in her household. While passing the chapel, Lady Jane saw Anne Wharton make a low curtsey to the sacrament on the altar. Jane asked Lady Wharton why she had curtsied, and whether the Lady Mary was in there. When Lady Wharton replied no, “that she made her curtsey to Him that made us all,” Jane quipped, “Why … how can He be there, that made us all, and the baker make him?” Her satiric levity insulted Mary once it was reported to her, and she “did never love [Jane] after,” John Foxe reports. Lady Jane demonstrated the same blunt integrity in another confrontation with Mary, this time over the issue of appropriate clothing. Mary had sent her cousin a richly elaborate dress as a gift, but, according to John Aylmer, Jane refused to wear it, saying “Nay that were a shame to follow my Lady Mary against God's word, and leave my Lady Elizabeth which followeth God's word.”⁷

Of course most Tudor strategists considered Jane Grey to be more important for her position than for her great learning or her convictions. This concern for her political value became significant in 1553 when it was evident that Edward VI was dying. According to Henry VIII's will, should Edward die without heirs the crown would pass first to his Catholic daughter Mary, and only then to his Protestant daughter Elizabeth. Either of these choices, however, would have meant the end of his career to John Dudley, Duke of Northumberland and de facto ruler of England since the fall of the Duke of Somerset. Whether the decision to upset the succession and overturn Henry VIII's will began with the dying boy-king, who wanted to maintain England as a Protestant country, or with Northumberland, who wanted to maintain his power, is still disputed.⁸ In any event, in May 1553 Lady Jane Grey was married to Dudley's youngest and only unmarried son, Guilford, an alliance that was pivotal in a whole series of marriages Northumberland arranged to augment his position. Though Lady Jane had strongly resisted the marriage on the grounds she was already precontracted to the late Duke of Somerset's son, her parents finally forced her to do their bidding. Edward VI produced a will that omitted both his sisters and made Lady Jane Grey his heir. This attempt to upset the succession failed miserably, and Mary was acclaimed queen without a battle. Jane, who had entered the Tower as queen, remained as prisoner. In February 1554, as an aftermath to the Wyatt rebellion against Mary's Spanish marriage, Jane was executed.

It was during her last months in the Tower that Jane accomplished the slender body of writings for which she is known. These include a letter to a friend newly fallen from the Reformed faith (probably her first tutor, Dr. Harding), a prayer composed within a few weeks of her death, letters to her father and sister Katherine written when she knew she was condemned to die, and her speech from the scaffold. A few days before she was executed, in the presence of Tower officials, Lady Jane Grey debated Dr. Feckenham, Mary I's confessor, about Christian doctrine. Feckenham had hoped to convert the sixteen-year-old prodigy, but the attempt proved fruitless. The debate was recorded and is also included in accounts of Jane Grey's works.⁹

While Lady Jane Grey was politically of little importance at the time of her execution in 1554 (Elton, pp. 380-81), once she died she immediately became a symbol of Protestant heroism and martyrdom. The publication of her work in 1554 was, considers John King, “the most powerful contemporary Protestant attack on the Marian regime.”¹⁰ In the decades after her death Protestant writers told and retold the story of her patience, her courage, and her willingness to testify for the true church. Writing in 1555, John Bradford used the example of Lady Jane's death to demonstrate “that life and honour is not to be set by more than God's commandment” (in Foxe, VII, 238). An Italian residing in England during Mary's reign was also impressed; he described Jane's execution as causing “great sorrow of the people, especially when it became known to everybody that the girl, born to a misery beyond tears, had faced death with far greater gallantry than it might be expected from her sex and the natural weakness of her age.” He added that at the actual moment of her death, she “submitted the neck to the axe with more than manly courage.”¹¹

Within a year of her death a doggerel poem purporting to be Lady Jane's last words, in which she laments her death in bad rhymes, was sold in London in broadside, and went through more than one edition. More significantly, there were immediate editions of her actual writings published by English Protestants abroad during Mary's reign, and her writings were also published in a variety of collections under Elizabeth. The most complete collection appears in Foxe's account of her life in his Actes and Monuments, popularly called the Book of Martyrs. This edition would, in fact, probably have reached the most people, since Foxe's work was one of the most widely read books in the Elizabethan period.¹² Foxe's edition may also have been the most accurate, given the sources that were available to him (King, p. 437).

Lady Jane Grey's writing, completed while she was in the Tower under sentence of death, are part of a larger genre of Tower writing that was accomplished in the early Tudor period. Such people as Sir Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, were among those who wrote verse while in the Tower in the reign of Henry VIII. Perhaps the most famous writer to produce significant works while in the Tower was Sir Thomas More, who wrote A Dialogue of Comfort as well as a series of letters, mostly to his daughter, Margaret Roper, during his imprisonment. In A Dialogue of Comfort and the letters to Margaret, More expresses the concern over how a Christian ought to behave when his strength is tested by such adversity as he was experiencing. Another underlying theme to his work is More's preparation to meet his death appropriately, if his death was indeed what God willed. Though More was Catholic, and Lady Jane Grey was Protestant, Jane Grey's Tower writings reflect many of the same concerns.¹³

Lady Jane Grey's writings are a clear exposition of Protestant theology. She believed in salvation through faith alone, in the Bible as the sole authority, that the only two sacraments were baptism and the eucharist, and that the latter was taken as a memorial only. She writes in the tradition of early English Protestants who extravagantly denounce those who do not agree with their theology, yet who are also cognizant of their own unworthiness—aware that, despite any deeds they might do, they are still miserable sinners whose salvation will come only through faith in Christ.¹⁴ Jane Grey expressed either contempt or pity for those who do not follow these precepts. Though some of her writings express a confidence that borders on arrogance, near her death she also revealed the temptations, especially to despair, with which she had to wrestle. Her writings suggest that this theology provided her great comfort as she faced her own death. One temptation never occurred to her apparently: born after the break with Rome, Jane Grey was raised her whole life as a Protestant. Since she knew no other way of worship, she did not feel any temptation to turn to Catholicism when Protestantism was under attack and personal danger was acute, and she scorned those less stalwart than herself.

Lady Jane demonstrates this perspective in the letter to a friend who had converted to Catholicism. In the second edition of the Book of Martyrs Foxe identifies the friend as Dr. Harding, Jane's first tutor, and this identification is for the most part accepted.¹⁵ The letter is a vituperative condemnation of Harding for renouncing the Reformist faith. She filled it with biblical allusions of earlier apostates she knows her correspondent will also recognize. The tone and language of the letter appalled many Victorians, and they suggested, on no good authority, that the letter was actually the work of John Aylmer (Nicholas, p. lxxvii). Jane's contemporaries, however, had no trouble believing it to be her own work, and sixteenth-century Protestants applauded her forthrightness. Foxe in his introduction commends Lady Jane's “sharp and vehement” letter, since it came from “an earnest and zealous heart,” and its purpose was “to reduce [Harding] to repentance, and take better hold again for the health and wealth of his own soul” (VI, 418).

In her letter Lady Jane does not spare Harding or show any sympathy for the political pressures he faced; rather, for betraying the true faith, she calls him “the deformed imp of the devil, … the unshamefaced paramour of Antichrist … a cowardly runaway.” For Lady Jane, Harding's denial of the true faith is especially unforgivable because of his role as teacher: “Wherefore hast thou instructed others to be strong in Christ, when thou thyself dost now so shamefully shrink? … Why dost thou now show thyself most weak, when indeed thou oughtest to be most strong?” Reminding him of the fates of other apostates, Lady Jane adds, “Throw down yourself with the fear of his threatened vengeance, for this so great and heinous an offence of apostacy: and comfort yourself, on the other part, with the mercy, blood, and promise of him that is ready to turn unto you whensoever you turn unto him” (VI, 418, 419, 421).

That Lady Jane heartily believed the sentiments expressed in the letter to Harding can be further inferred by her markedly similar response when she heard Northumberland had recanted and accepted the Catholic faith. Jane had nothing but contempt for Northumberland, especially since she blamed him for the woes to her and to her house. These were all done in the name of retaining the Protestant faith, yet he apostated and hoped for mercy. Jane told visitors, “As his life was wicked and full of dissimulacion, so was his ende thereafter. I pray God, I, nor no frende of myne, dye so.” Jane suspected that Northumberland's conversion was not sincere, but accomplished in the hopes of being pardoned. To her this rationale was unworthy of consideration. Even though she was so young, she would not consider apostasy as a means of prolonging life. “Shoulde I, who (am) yonge and in my (fewers) forsake my faythe for love of lyfe? Nay, God forbed!”¹⁶

The tone both of the letter and of this reported conversation castigating those who fall from the faith places Jane Grey squarely in the militant tradition of the early English Protestants.¹⁷ Lady Jane clings strongly to this tradition in her theology as well. She explicated her religious beliefs clearly in her debate with Queen Mary's confessor, Dr. Feckenham, Dean of St. Paul's and Abbot of Westminster. After an initial conversation with her, Feckenham was convinced he might actually be able to bring Lady Jane to his beliefs. He arranged for them to have a public debate on disputed issues of theology. At first Lady Jane was reluctant since, she said, such debates should be for the living and not for the dying; Feckenham, however, finally brought her to agree. The debate was conducted in the presence of Tower officials, one of whom, presumably, recorded its principle points (Chapman, p. 197).

The debate began with Feckenham asking Jane what is required of a Christian man. Jane responded that faith alone justifies. She also recognized the importance of love, but added, however, that “Faith and love go both together, and yet love is comprehended in faith.” Jane Grey did not deny the importance of good works—the necessity to “feed the hungry, to clothe the naked, and give drink to the thirsty, and to do to him as we would do to ourselves”—but she did not see such charity as a means to salvation. Despite any deed, “yet we be unprofitable servants.” Good works were one way of honoring Christ and following his example: “I affirm that faith only saveth: but it is meet for a christian, in token that he followeth his master Christ, to do good works; yet may we not say that they profit to our salvation” (VI, 416).

As well as representing the two sides in the classic conflict about salvation through faith or through works, Lady Jane and Feckenham also expressed opposite views of the sacraments. Lady Jane, as a Protestant, accepted only baptism and the Lord's supper, rather than the entire seven sacraments. Using the Scriptures as her sole authority, Jane claimed she could find justification for only the two sacraments. Feckenham and Lady Jane also disagreed fundamentally on the nature of the eucharist. Jane did not believe that in taking the sacrament she received “the very body and blood of Christ.” Rather, she said, she took the bread and wine to “put me in remembrance.” Feckenham grilled Lady Jane, “Why, doth not Christ speak these words, ‘Take, eat, this is my body?’ Require you any plainer words? Doth he not say, it is his body?” Jane's response was clever but also passionately sincere. “I grant, he saith so, and so he saith, ‘I am the vine, I am the door;’ but he is never the more for that, the door or the vine.” And Jane asked Feckenham in turn, “Where was Christ when he said, ‘Take, eat, this is my body?’ Was he not at the table, when he said so? He was at that time alive, and suffered not til the next day. What took he, but bread? What brake he, but bread? and what gave he, but bread?” Lady Jane was also upset that the Catholic church did not allow the laity to drink the wine of the Lord's supper: “Shall I give credit to the church that taketh away from me the half part of the Lord's Supper … which things if they deny to us, then they deny to us part of our salvation.” Jane ended her discussion of the Catholic method of giving the eucharist with the same extravagant language that marked her letter to Dr. Harding. “And I say, that is an evil church … the spouse of the devil, that altereth the Lord's supper. … To that church, say I, God will add plagues.” Yet Jane's farewell to Feckenham, once their debate ended with them both recognizing the futility of continuing, was gentler: “I pray God, in the bowels of his mercy, to send you his Holy Spirit, for he hath given you his great gift of utterance, if it pleased him also to open the eyes of your heart” (VI, 417).

The assurance in her faith that Jane expressed in the debate with Feckenham wavered in a prayer she wrote shortly before her death. Though still very stylized in the tone of early English Protestant writings, the prayer expresses her personal doubts and fears, giving us more of a hint of the woman behind the theology. In her prayer she described herself as a “poor and desolate woman.” The exuberance of language, the piling on of image after image that is typical of Lady Jane Grey's other religious writings is very marked here. Passionately, she proclaimed, “I, being defiled with sin, encumbered with affliction, unquieted with troubles, wrapped in cares, overwhelmed with miseries, vexed with temptations, and grievously tormented with the long imprisonment of this mass of clay, my sinful body, do come unto thee, O merciful Saviour, craving thy mercy and help, without the which so little hope of deliverance is left, that I may utterly despair of any liberty.” Jane, who had nothing left to her but her faith, begged God to “be merciful unto me now, a miserable wretch” (VI, 423).

The temptation that Jane wrestled with, that she most feared she would succumb to, was despair. She feared losing her faith in God's presence: “How long wilt thou be absent? for ever? O Lord, hast thou forgotten to be gracious? … Is thy mercy clean gone for ever? … Shall I despair of thy mercy, O God?” While she assured God she would not despair—“Far be that from me”—the possibility was so real for Jane that she had to pray for strength against it. “O merciful God, consider my misery, best known unto thee, and be thou now unto me a strong tower of defence. … Suffer me not to be tempted above my power.” Jane felt she could not achieve such strength on her own, and that God knew better than she what would be the best for her: “Give me grace, therefore, to tarry thy leisure, and patiently bear thy works. … Only, in the mean time, arm me, I beseech thee, with thy armour, that I may stand fast” (VI, 423).

Apparently, Jane found that her prayer was answered; she was able to exhibit both an honest appreciation of her situation and a serenity to meet it. Both of these attitudes are expressed in the letters she wrote to her father and her sister Katherine the night before her execution. In her letter to her father, she did not gloss over the fact that it was his actions in joining Wyatt's rebellion that were bringing about her death. She began her letter, “Father, although it hath pleased God to hasten my death by you, by whom my life should rather have been lengthened,” yet she also assured him that she gave God “more hearty thanks for shortening my woful days.” Indeed, insisted Jane, “I may account myself blessed.” In the matters of the attempted coup, Lady Jane had a clear conscience since she was “constrained, and, as you wot [know] well enough, continually assayed,” but “mine enforced honour blended never with mine innocent heart.” Jane had heard that her father was not only “bewailing” his “own woe,” but “especially, as I hear, my unfortunate state.” Thus while Jane clearly assigned to her father his share of responsibility for bringing on her death, she apparently did not want him to feel too despondent. She knew that both she and her father were soon to die, but “although to you perhaps it may seem right woful, to me there is nothing that can be more welcome, than from this vale of mesery to aspire to that heavenly throne of all joy and pleasure with Christ” (VI, 417-18).

The same resignation, even joy, at meeting her death is present in the letter she wrote her sister Katherine. Although it contains advice, the letter is also a statement about her own life and the way she regarded it as it was ending. The letter was written in some blank pages at the end of the New Testament, a book, she assured Katherine, that “shall teach you to live, and learn you to die.” Knowing the Bible would give Katherine more than the possession of great lands, because with God's Word she will be the “inheritor of such riches, as neither the covetous shall withdraw from you, neither shall they steal” (VI, 422). Lady Jane Grey, about to be executed at sixteen, recognized that youth was no guarantee against the necessity of facing death: “And trust not that the tenderness of your age shall lengthen your life; for as soon (if God call) goeth the young as the old.” As it turns out, this advice was pertinent to Katherine as well; she died at the age of twenty-eight after years of imprisonment for her imprudent marriage to Edward Seymour, Earl of Hertford.¹⁸

Though Lady Jane Grey believed herself innocent of the charge that led to her execution, she would also acknowledge in her scaffold speech guilt for loving the world too much and for forgetting God. She does not want Katherine to make the same mistake. “Defy the world, deny the devil, and despise the flesh, and delight yourself only in the Lord.” Lady Jane also advises Katherine to do what she had evidently managed though with some difficulty herself: “Be penitent for your sins, and yet despair not: be strong in faith, and yet presume not. … Rejoice in Christ, as I do.” Jane also alludes to the fact that, had she converted to Catholicism, she might have prolonged her life. She tells her sister, however, that such a choice would have been an unworthy one: “I pray God grant you, and send you of his grace to live in his fear, and to die in the true christian faith, from the which (in God's name), I exhort you, that you never swerve, neither for hope of life, nor fear of death” (VI, 422).

Lady Jane expressed recognition of both her innocence and her guilt, as of the precepts of her faith, in the final statement she made, her speech given upon the scaffold. Observers reported her calm demeanor as she spoke to the onlookers. Jane's avowal of innocence, which she expressed in her letter to her father, was reiterated, as was the guilt and unworthiness she expressed in her prayer. Lady Jane believed herself guiltless of the treason for which she was condemned, on the grounds that she had been coerced into these actions. “I am come hither to die, and by a law I am condemned to the same. The fact against the queen's highness was unlawful, and the consenting thereunto by me: but touching the procurement and desire thereof by me, or on my behalf, I do wash my hands thereof in innocency before God, and the face of you, good christian people.” Yet she also admitted her sins as well: “I confess, that when I did know the word of God, I neglected the same, loved myself and the world.” As a result, “this plague and punishment is happily and worthily happened unto me for my sins.” While God had been just in so ordering her death, she was also aware of his mercy, “that of his goodness he hath thus given me a time and respite to repent.”¹⁹

To the very last minutes of her life, Lady Jane stayed true to the Protestant precepts in which she had been brought up and from which she derived such comfort. She also believed to the end that faith alone, and nothing else, brought one to salvation. “I pray you all, good christian people, to bear me witness that I die a true christian woman, and that I do look to be saved by no other man, but only by the mercy of God, in the blood of his only Son Jesus Christ.” Since, as a Protestant, she did not believe in purgatory and thus saw only blasphemy in prayers for the dead, she asked the people to pray for her only while she lived: “And now, good people, while I am alive, I pray you assist me with your prayers” (VI, 424).

To this decorous, probably well-rehearsed speech, Foxe added a description of Lady Jane Grey's last moments. After requesting the executioner to “dispatch me quickly,” she tied a handkerchief around her eyes. She misjudged the space, however, and could not then find the block, saying, “What shall I do? Where is it? Where is it?” Those closest to Lady Jane may have been so appalled at seeing someone so young and courageous about to die, that they could not move to help her (Chapman, p. 207). This is the only time Lady Jane Grey ever faltered, and even then it was not her fault; she was blindfolded and literally could not find her way. Finally one of the bystanders guided her. She “laid her head down upon the block … and said, ‘Lord into thy hands I commend my spirit,’ and so finished her life” (VI, 424).

John King suggests that “there is no reason to doubt the authenticity” of the works Lady Jane Grey produced in the Tower or of her final speech. The authorities during Mary's reign were extremely lax in their attempts to stop prisoners' works from being sent out so that they might be published. Lady Jane, in writing her letters, prayers, and scaffold speech, would have been well aware of their potentially wide distribution, and shaped them accordingly; her private words were also public testimonials of her faith (pp. 421-22).

Though the year before the people of London had responded with sullen silence to the proclamation declaring her queen, in the years after her death Lady Jane Grey's writings were frequently published. Her courageous death at such an early age, in a period of such religious conflict and change, was worthy of note. Foxe's portrayal of Lady Jane Grey did much to make the Elizabethans aware of her, and the immensely popular Holinshed's Chronicle continued this picture of the indomitable Lady Jane Grey. Yet Lady Jane's brave death was not an example that her cousin and eventual successor, Queen Elizabeth, wished to acknowledge. As David Mathew states, “Her life and death was a subject on which neither Queen Elizabeth nor Cecil, her great minister, would ever dwell” (p. 160). After all, for the queen, trying to maintain the Anglican settlement, Jane's lack of compromise would hardly be a useful example.

Perhaps in part due to this need for conciliation, by the end of the sixteenth century this portrayal of Lady Jane Grey was beginning to change into the one with which we are more familiar. Though Lady Jane is the heroine of the aforementioned Decker and Webster play the authors deemphasized the strengths of character noted in such previous accounts as Foxe. The Jane Grey of the play is quiet, modest, and deeply in love with her husband Guilford, who speaks far more articulately than she does. In the seventeenth century such historians as Bishop Burnet describe Jane as “so humble, so gentle, so pious” (II, 469). A woman of such tender age who could berate her parents, former tutor, and cousin Mary for not following the high ideals she set for herself may have been too uncomfortable a model by the end of the sixteenth century, as the belief in classical education for women and the need for even young women to battle papists both were lessening. The image of Lady Jane Grey was thus reworked to smooth away the harsh edges, but the resulting picture scarcely does her justice.

Lady Jane Grey, queen of England for only nine days, died on the executioner's block at the age of sixteen. The writings she left behind her are few: a prayer, some letters, a dying speech. Yet they provide us with a rare glimpse of a sustaining theology, and offer us some insight into the mind of one of the best educated women of her age. Elizabethans found in her devout life and brave death an exemplarly model of strength, educated conviction, and unfailing devotion. Though it is true, as many historians have argued, that Lady Jane Grey was a pawn in the political intrigue of 1553, she was also a strongly determined and articulate woman not afraid to speak out for what she believed, no matter what the consequences. Lady Jane Grey is worth noting not only for her political position, but also as an example of a sixteenth-century Protestant woman who died steadfast to her faith.

Notes

1. Thomas Decker and John Webster, The Famous History of Sir Thomas Wyatt in The Dramatic Works of John Webster, ed. William Hazlitt (London: John Russell Smith, 1897), I, see for example, pp. 8, 10, 36, 39, 55, 57, 60. Seventeenth-century historians who developed this view include Bishop Gilbert Burnet, History of the Reformation of the Church of England (1681; new edn., Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1829), II, 469, and Peter Heylin, The History of the Reformation of the Church of England (London: H. Twyford, J. Place, T. Basset, W. Palmer, 1670), p. 148. Lady Jane Grey was the darling of Victorians. See, for example, George Howard, Lady Jane Grey and Her Times (London: Sherwood, Neely, and Jones, 1822); David W. Bartlett, The Life of Lady Jane Grey (Philadelphia: Porter and Coates, 1886); and Richard Davey, The Nine Days' Queen (London: Methuen and Co., Ltd., 1909). For more recent interpretations, see David Mathew, Lady Jane Grey: The Setting of the Reign (London: Eyre Methuen, 1972), and Barrett L. Beer, Northumberland (Kent, Oh.: The Kent State Univ. Press, 1973). Roland Bainton includes a brief sketch of Jane Grey in Women of the Reformation: In France and England (Boston: Beacon Press, 1975), pp. 181-90.

2. Hester Chapman, Lady Jane Grey (London: Jonathan Cape, 1962), p. 56.

3. On educating daughters, see, for example, Frances Murray, “Feminine Spirituality in the More Household,” Moreana, 27, 28 (1970), 92-102; M. J. Tucker, “The Child as Beginning and End: Fifteenth and Sixteenth Century English Childhood,” in Lloyd DeMause, ed., The History of Childhood (New York: Harper-Torchbook, 1975), pp. 229-58; and Pearl Hogrefe, Tudor Women (Ames: Iowa State Univ. Press, 1975), p. 5. Nicholas Harris Nicholas points out that it is questionable whether she had any real proficiency in languages other than Greek, Latin, and French in The Literary Remains of Lady Jane Grey: With a Memoir of Her Life (London: Harding, Triphook, and Pepard, 1825), pp. xii-xiii. See also, Josephine Kamm, Hope Deferred: Girls' Education in English History (London: Methuen and Co., Ltd., 1976), p. 39.

4. William Haugaard, “Katherine Parr: The Religious Convictions of a Renaissance Queen,” Renaissance Quarterly, 22 (1969), 355. On Parr's influence, see John King's essay in this collection.

5. Ascham's description of Lady Jane Grey in The Scholemaster is consistent with his earlier accounts of the meeting. Writing to John Sturm in December 1550 he calls Lady Jane one of the two most learned ladies in England (the other was Mildred Cooke Cecil, daughter of Anthony Cooke and wife to William Cecil). He recounts finding Jane reading Plato, adding that she was “so thoroughly understanding it that she caused me the greatest astonishment.” In a letter to Jane herself written in January 1551 he tells her that of all his travels and all the variety of experience he has had, “nothing has caused me so much wonder” as the visit to Bradgate. Roger Ascham, The Whole Works, ed. J. A. Giles (London: J. R. Smith, 1865; new edn., New York: AMS Press, 1965), I, Part i, pp. lxxi, lxxiv-lxxvi.

6. Roger Ascham, The Schoolmaster, [sic], ed. Lawrence V. Ryan (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1976), pp. 35-36.

7. The Acts and Monuments of John Foxe, ed. Rev. George Townsend (rpt. New York: AMS Press, 1976), VIII, 700 (unless otherwise indicated, all quotes by Jane Grey will be cited in text by volume number and page number of this edition); John Aylmer, An Harborowe for Faithfull and Trewe Subjects (London: J. Daye, 1559), STC 1005.

8. The traditional explanation has always been that the whole plot was developed by Northumberland. A recent exponent of this perspective is Beer, pp. 148-49. Wilbur K. Jordan, Edward VI: The Threshold of Power (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1970), p. 517, however, argues that Edward originated the idea of a changed succession and convinced Northumberland to go along with it. See also G. R. Elton, Reform and Reformation: England, 1509-1558 (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1977), pp. 374-75, and Mathew, pp. 135-36, for an appraisal of the evidence.

9. The 1554 edition of Jane Grey's writings, Here in this booke ye have a godly epistle made by a faithful Christian (STC 5153) states that Jane herself wrote the account of the Feckenham debate, but this seems highly unlikely, and Foxe does not mention it. Sixteenth-century editions of her work include Here in this booke (1554), which includes the debate with Feckenham, her letter to her sister Katherine, and her scaffold speech. Her letter to her sister was also published as “An Exhortation written by the Lady Jane, the night before shee suffered” in Otto Werdmuller, A Most fruitefull, pithe, and learned treatise, how a Christian man ought to behave himself in the daunger of death, trans. Miles Coverdale (Antwerp, 1555; London, 1579), STC 25251 and 25253. Thomas Bentley, ed., Monument of Matrones (London: H. Denham, 1582), STC 1892-94, contains the debate, her prayer, and her letter to Katherine. The Life, death, and actions of the most chast, and religious lady Jane Grey (London: Printed for G. Eld, 1615), STC 7281, contains all of her writings including a longer scaffold speech, though the meaning is unchanged. Except for this, the differences between the editions are minimal. I have chosen to use Foxe, since it was best known in its time; see VI, 415-525.

   Lady Jane Grey's writings are also collected with a long biographical introduction in Nicolas, The Literary Remains of Lady Jane Grey.

10. See, for example, not only the account in Foxe, but also the references to Lady Jane Grey in Aylmer and in Holinshed's Chronicles, ed. Henry Ellis (London: J. Johnson, etc., 1808; rpt. New York: AMS Press, 1965), IV, 22; John N. King, English Reformation Literature: The Tudor Origins of the Protestant Tradition (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1982), p. 419.

11. The Accession, Coronation, and Marriage of Mary Tudor as Related in Four Manuscripts of the Escorial, trans. and pub. by C. V. Malfatti (Barcelona, 1956), p. 72.

12. Ruth Hughey, “A Ballad of Lady Jane Grey,” Times Literary Supplement (Dec. 7, 1933), p. 878. On the impact of Foxe, see William Haller, The Elect Nation: The Meaning and Relevance of Foxe's Book of Martyrs (New York: Harper and Row, 1963), p. 14, and D. M. Loades, The Oxford Martyrs (New York: Stein and Day, 1970), p. 30.

13. See, for example, Steven May's unpublished paper, “Tudor ‘Tower Verse’: The Poetics of Imprisonment,” pp. 2-4. I wish to thank Professor May for generously sharing his work with me while in manuscript. On More, see Elizabeth F. Rogers, ed., The Correspondence of Sir Thomas More (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1947), pp. 502, 507-08, 564; Louis L. Martz and Frank Manley, eds., The Complete Works of St. Thomas More (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1976), XII, see especially, pp. lix, lxv, cii, cvi-cvii. I am indebted to Anne Lake Prescott for her help with the works of Thomas More.

14. Catherine Parr describes herself as a “wretche and of my self always redy and prone to evyll” in her Prayers or Medytacions, cited in Haugaard, p. 355. Lady Jane Grey's extravagance of language and wit are also reminiscent of the earlier martyr Anne Askew, see Foxe, V, 548-51.

15. Nicolas does not accept this, however; see pp. lxxvi-lxxvii. King suggests that simply referring to Harding as “a friend” works to universalize the letter (p. 420).

16. The Chronicle of Queen Jane by a Resident in the Tower of London, ed. John Gough Nichols (Camden Soc., 1850; rpt. New York: AMS Press, 1968), p. 25.

17. See, for example, William Tyndale, Doctrinal Treatises, ed. Henry Walter (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1848); Simon Fish, A Supplication of the Beggars (London, 1529), STC 10883; Robert Barnes, A Supplication Unto Henry VIII (2nd edn., London: J. Bydell, 1534), STC 1470. See also, A. G. Dickens, The English Reformation (New York: Schocken Books, 1964); James Edward McGoldrick, Luther's English Connection (Milwaukee: Northwestern Publishing House, 1979); William A. Clebsch, England's Earliest Protestants (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1964).

18. Foxe, VI, 422; for an account of Katherine Grey's life, see Hester Chapman, Two Tudor Portraits (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1960), pp. 149-238.

19. Foxe, VI, 424. Though Lady Jane Grey's speech in some ways follows the formula of scaffold speeches given in the sixteenth century, it is also both individual and passionately sincere. For a discussion of scaffold speeches, see Lacey Baldwin Smith, “English Treason Trials and Confessions in the Sixteenth Century,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 25 (October 1954), 471-98.