Two days after King Edward died, Northumberland had Lady Jane Grey proclaimed, or called queen in London.
On the same day the Lady Mary’s friends had her proclaimed at Norwich.
Some people would have liked Lady Jane best, first, because their dear young King Edward had wished her to be queen; and next, because she was beautiful, virtuous, and wise, and, above all, a Protestant. But then they feared and hated her father-in-law, Northumberland. They remembered that he had persuaded King Edward to order the Protector Somerset to be beheaded. They knew that he was cruel, and jealous, and revengeful; they thought that he only pretended to be a Protestant, and because he was such a bad man, they were afraid to let his son’s wife be queen.
One by one all Northumberland’s friends left him and joined the Lady Mary, who was the rightful queen; and after Lady Jane Grey had been called queen for ten days, she went to her private home at Sion House, a great deal happier than the day when they took her away to make her a queen.
It would have been well if Queen Mary had left her cousin there. But she was of a cruel and revengeful temper, and not content with sending Northumberland to prison in the Tower of London, for setting up her cousin as queen, she sent Lady Jane and her husband, Lord Guildford Dudley, also to the Tower.
But I must tell you a great deal more about Lady Jane Grey, and I will begin her story at the time when she was very young indeed.
As she was only a few months older than her cousin Edward the Sixth, she had the same teachers in everything, and she was like him in gentleness, goodness, and kindness. Her masters found that she was still cleverer than the little king, and that she learned Latin and Greek too more readily than he did. She knew French, and Spanish, and Italian perfectly, and loved music and painting. She used to thank God that she had strict parents and a kind and gentle schoolmaster.
She was married when very young to Lord Guildford Dudley, only a few weeks before King Edward died; and she was very sorry when she found out that her husband wanted to be king.
When King Edward died, Lady Jane’s father, the Duke of Suffolk, and her husband’s father, the Duke of Northumberland, went to Lady Jane, and fell upon their knees before her, and offered her the crown of England, at the same time telling her that her cousin the king, whom she loved very much, was dead. On hearing this she fainted, and then refused the crown, saying, that while the ladies Mary and Elizabeth were alive, nobody else could have a right to it.
Lady Jane Grey refusing the Crown.
At last, however, though the two dukes could not prevail upon her to allow herself to be called Queen of England, her husband and her mother begged her so hard to be queen, that she consented.
I have already told you that she was only called queen for ten days, and that Queen Mary sent her and her husband to the Tower.
They were not allowed to see one another in their prison. However, as they were not beheaded immediately, people hoped that Mary would spare them. But she was too cruel. After she had kept them closely shut up for nearly eight months, she ordered both their heads to be cut off. Dudley was to be executed on Tower-Hill, in sight of all the people; Lady Jane in a court within the Tower, with only a few persons round her.
When Lady Jane knew this, she had no wish to do anything but prepare for her own death next day. She wrote a letter to her father, to take leave of him, in which she said, “My guiltless blood may cry before the Lord, mercy to the innocent!” She left her Greek Testament to her sister Catherine, with a Greek letter written on a blank leaf in it.
Early in the morning of the 12th day of February Lady Jane stood by the iron-barred window of her prison, and saw her dear husband led through the Tower gate to be beheaded. Not long afterwards she was praying near the same spot, and saw a common cart coming from the gate, and in it her husband’s body, all covered with blood.
When she was taken from prison to be beheaded, she spoke kindly and gently to everybody near her. As Sir John Brydges, the keeper of the Tower, led her from her room to the scaffold, he asked her for a keepsake, and she gave him a little book, in which she had written three sentences, one in Greek, one in Latin, and one in English.
She spoke to the officers and servants before she was beheaded, saying that she had never intended to do wrong, that she only obeyed her parents in being queen, and that she trusted to be forgiven.
Her maidens then took off some part of her dress; she knelt down and laid her head upon the block, and her beautiful head was cut off before she was seventeen years old.
The people now were sorry they had allowed Mary to be queen, for they thought that if she could order these two good and innocent young people to be put to death she would not spare anybody whom she might happen to hate. And so it proved, as you will read in the next chapter.