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THE CHIEF VICTIM of Wyatt’s rebellion was not Elizabeth, in whose name the rebels had acted, but Lady Jane Grey, the wife of Northumberland’s son Guildford Dudley. A prisoner in the Tower, she was obviously innocent and had played no part in it. But she had been a Protestant figurehead once and might be again. She could not be allowed to live. It was only with the greatest reluctance and under pressure from the very members of the Council who had originally supported Northumberland’s coup that Mary was forced to agree to her execution. It would elevate the girl to legendary status – that of Protestant Queen, heroine and martyr.
No trial was considered necessary, as Jane had already been tried and condemned for high treason in usurping the crown after Edward’s death in 1553. With the executioner carrying the axe before them, Jane and those accused with her – her husband Guildford, his brothers Ambrose and Harry, and Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury – had walked from the Tower to Guildhall for the trial. Accompanied by her two ladies, Jane had dressed entirely in black lined with velvet, a black velvet book dangling from her waist and another book of devotions in her hand. They pleaded guilty and were duly sentenced to a traitor’s death: the men to be hanged, drawn and quartered, Jane to be beheaded or burned at the Queen’s pleasure. As was customary, the condemned returned to the Tower with the headsman’s axe turned towards them.
Swept to power on a wave of popular enthusiasm, Mary was inclined to be merciful, at least to the young people. She was fond of Jane, despite her outspokenness; indeed, they were both inclined to speak their minds, and Mary probably respected this, whereas she felt she could never trust the sly and hypocritical Elizabeth. ‘The Queen’s majesty is a merciful Princess,’ Jane commented appreciatively when she learned that her sentence was suspended. ‘I beseech God she may long continue and send his bountiful grace upon her.’
Predictably, Jane was disgusted at Northumberland’s conversion to Catholicism, especially if it was done to win a pardon: ‘Woe worth him! he hath brought me and our stock in most miserable calamity and misery by his exceeding ambition,’ she cried, adding:
Like as his life was wicked and full of dissimulation, so was his end thereafter. I pray God, I, nor no friend of mine, die so. Should I, who am young and in my few years, forsake my faith for the love of life? Nay, God forbid! Much more should he not, whose fatal course, although he had lived his just number of years, could not have long continued. But life was sweet, it appeared; so he might have lived, you will say, he did not care how.
While her eldest daughter was a prisoner in the Tower, Frances Brandon was basking in the Queen’s favour, often given precedence over Elizabeth at court. Places had been found as maids of honour for her younger daughters, Catherine – who had been sent home after Pembroke had had her marriage to his son annulled – and Mary. There is no evidence that Frances pleaded for her daughter’s life, or even visited her in the Tower, nor would it have been in character, but she might have done.
Free at last from her dominating parents, Jane spent the intervening months quietly, devoting herself to her studies. She had ‘the liberty of the Tower so she could walk in the Queen’s garden and on the hill’. She was permitted a staff of four, including her old nurse, Mrs Ellen, and two gentlewomen, Mrs Tilney and Mrs Jacob, to wait on her. She had the Queen’s assurance of her life and eventual liberty. Then events spiralled out of control and her thoughtless, selfish father – forgetting the Queen’s clemency which had allowed him his life and liberty – became implicated in the plot against the Spanish marriage. Suffolk won little support when he tried to incite anti-Spanish sentiment in Leicestershire and with the failure of the uprising he was eventually found cowering in a tree on his estate.
Jane’s execution was to take place on 9 February 1554, but there was a delay since Mary was determined to try to save her soul. She sent Dr Feckenham, the new Dean of St Paul’s, to do his best to win over the strong-minded girl. Jane told Feckenham frankly that he was wasting his time, that ‘she had taken leave from all earthly matters so that she did not even think of the fear of death and that she had prepared patiently to accept it in the way in which the Queen would be served to command; it was quite true that it would be painful to her flesh as a mortal thing, but her soul was happy to abandon this darkness and ascend to the eternal light, as she was confident, putting her trust in God’s mercy alone.’
She was quite happy to dispute theology with him, however, defending her Protestant faith publicly in front of Tower officials. Their debate was published with her other writings in 1554, becoming the most powerful contemporary Protestant attack on the Marian regime. Her writings consisted of a letter to a friend newly fallen from the reformed faith – probably her first tutor, Dr Harding, whom she calls ‘the deformed imp of the devil … the unshamefaced paramour of Antichrist … a cowardly runaway’; a prayer composed a few weeks before her death; letters to her father and sister Catherine written when she knew she was to die; and her speech from the scaffold. She would have been aware of their potentially wide distribution and shaped them accordingly, a public testimonial of her beliefs.
Her works reached the English exiles abroad – where she was already much admired by prominent European Protestants with whom she had been in correspondence – and nine years later were incorporated in the first edition of John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments, which lauded her as a Protestant martyr, even though she was condemned for treason, not her religion.
In the prayer she wrote shortly before her death she falters slightly, describing herself as a ‘poor and desolate woman’. She feared that she might succumb to despair, begging God, ‘suffer me not to be tempted above my power’. The night before her death she wrote to her father. She did not gloss over the fact that it was his actions that had brought her to this end – ‘Father, although it hath pleased God to hasten my death by you, by whom my life should rather have been lengthened’ – yet she gave God ‘more hearty thanks for shortening my woeful days’. As regards the coup, she had a clear conscience, although she would acknowledge in her scaffold speech her guilt for loving the world too much and for forgetting God.
Guildford Dudley was to die with his wife. According to one source, he had ‘sent her word that before dying he wished to embrace and kiss her for the last time’. Jane replied that if it would have been ‘a means of consolation to their souls, she would have been very glad to see him, but as their meeting would only tend to increase their misery and pain’ it was better to wait, until they could meet in the next world. On the morning of his execution Jane positioned herself at the window, so that she could see him pass. She was still there when the cart bearing his corpse, the head wrapped in a bloody sheet, passed by on its return journey. Jane herself was to be beheaded within the precincts of the Tower, as befitted a lady of royal blood, so that she would have seen and heard the scaffold where she was to die being prepared over by the White Tower.
On the morning of her execution, Jane emerged leaning on the arm of Sir John Brydges, the Lieutenant of the Tower. She was wearing the same black dress she had worn to her trial. Mrs Tylney and her old nurse followed, weeping. Jane seemed to be quite composed, reading from the prayer book she held in her hand. She mounted the scaffold and turned to address the audience: ‘Good people, I am come hither to die, and by the law I am condemned to the same. The fact, in deed, 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 part, I do wash my hands thereof in innocence, before God, and the face of you, good Christian people, this day.’
As a Protestant, she did not believe in intercession for the dead, but exhorted them to pray for her only while she lived.
She shrank back from the executioner when he approached to take her outer garments, which were his perquisites of office. She turned to her ladies to help her undress. At last she was ready. The executioner knelt down and asked her forgiveness for what he was about to do, then directed her on to the straw.
For the first time, she saw the block and the axe nestling beside it. ‘I pray you despatch me quickly!’ she pleaded. She knelt down. ‘Will you take it off before I lay me down?’ she asked the executioner.
‘No, Madam.’
She tied the handkerchief over her eyes, groping for the block. ‘What shall I do? Where is it?’ she panicked. Someone came over to help her. ‘Lord, into thy hands I commend my spirit!’ she whispered. The axe swung high and then plunged down into the innocent neck of the seventeen-year-old.
John Brydges was holding the prayer book Jane had given him. He opened it to find several inscriptions, ending with the words: ‘Live still to die, that by death you may purchase eternal life … For, as the preacher sayeth, there is a time to be born and a time to die; and the day of death is better than the day of our birth. Yours, as the Lord knoweth as a friend, Jane Duddeley.’
Later that day, Lady Jane was laid to rest under the floor of St Peter ad Vincula between the remains of two headless queens, Anne Boleyn and Katherine Howard. Her nine days’ reign had cost her dear.