SYMHC Classics: Lady Jane Grey

This 2017 episode covers a very short time between Edward VI and Mary I when Lady Jane was, at least nominally, Queen of England and Ireland. Whether she had any right to the title is still the subject of dispute.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Saturday. The Nine Day Reign of Lady Jane Gray
ended on July nineteenth, fifteen fifty three, or four hundred
seventy two years ago today, on the day this episode
is coming out. Our extremely frequently requested episode on Lady
Jane Gray originally came out on March sixth of twenty seventy.

(00:23):
Enjoy Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a
production of iHeartRadio. Today's topic is a very very frequent
listener request. That's like an understatement. Yeah, you could say

(00:44):
very about twelve to fourteen more times and it would
still be maybe underselling how much we get this request
A lot, a lot. And this is Lady Jane Gray,
also known as the Nine Day Queen. She came up
very briefly in a past episode by Katie and Sarah
in their episode Elizabeth the First, before she was queen

(01:07):
basically for an incredibly short time between Edward the sixth
and Mary the First. Lady Jane was at least nominally
the Queen of England and Ireland, but whether she had
any right at all to that title is still the
subject of dispute. Even today. I found scholars with polar
opposite opinions on that, and really a lot of what

(01:30):
goes into the story went on behind closed doors and
off the record, so different accounts of it today present
incredibly different interpretations of what happened. What we do know
is that Lady Jane Gray was born in fifteen thirty seven,
but her exact date of birth is unclear. Her birthday
is traditionally noted as having taken place in October, the
same month as King Edward the sixth. Her parents were

(01:53):
Henry Gray and Lady Francis Brandon, and when Jane was born,
Henry Gray was Marcus of Dorset and he would later
become the Duke of Suffolk, and her parents were still
pretty young when they had Jane. They had married at
the ages of just fifteen and sixteen, and they were
only twenty and twenty one when she was born. Jane
and her sisters were Henry the seventh's great granddaughters through

(02:14):
their mother Francis, whose mother was Mary Tudor. Mary Tudor
was Henry the eighth's sister, so this made them Henry
the eight's great nieces. Mary's husband had also been one
of Henry the eight's close friends, so on Jane's mother's side,
the family was very closely connected to the throne, and
the only reason that Francis had not married someone higher

(02:36):
up in the nobility was that her father had been
married before, so she had a lot of older half
siblings to marry off before they got to her. And
just two different biographies that I consulted for this both
started with multiple pages of family trees outwining these relationships.

(02:58):
So if it was a little confusing, welcome to the club,
it is a little confusing. Francis and her daughters were,
at various points very high up in the line of succession.
Henry the Eighth famously had his series of ill feated
wives in offspring, and in fifteen thirty six, two of
those offspring, Mary and Elizabeth, were declared illegitimate with no

(03:20):
claim to the throne because Henry had divorced Mary's mother
and beheaded Elizabeth's Consequently, for about a year before Jane's birth,
her mother Francis was basically next in line. Henry the
Eighth at that point had no sons, his daughters had
been declared illegitimate, and he had no other surviving siblings,
so his niece Francis, while not his child, was at

(03:42):
least a lawfully begotten child and an actual relative. When
Edward was born on October twelfth, fifteen thirty seven, as
his father's legitimate son, he became next in line to
the throne, making Francis second, since Mary and Elizabeth were
still viewed as ineligible rule. However, in fifteen forty three,

(04:03):
Parliament passed an Act of Succession, which received royal assent
the following year, and this legislation made no mention of
Francis or her family, but it restored Mary and Elizabeth
back to the line of succession, regardless of their legitimacy,
should their brother die without an heir. This Act of
Succession also gave Henry the right to name a successor

(04:27):
by testament or in his will, which he did. Henry
the Eighth's will specified that if his children had no
male heir, the next in line after Edward, Mary and
Elizabeth would be Francis's children, since Francis was his legitimate niece.
The fact that Francis herself was not named in the
will as being in the line of succession apparently annoyed

(04:48):
her very greatly, and this is one of the reasons
why in some versions of this story, she's the one
described as being the mastermind, scheming behind the scenes to
put her daughter on the throne. By the time she
was born, Jane didn't have that many steps between herself
and the throne, and apart from her place in the
line of succession, her parents and many other people in

(05:09):
her life hoped she would marry someone quite powerful, perhaps
even then Prince Edward himself, so they groomed her to
that purpose, paying special attention to her education. She was
quite bookish and very precocious, and she developed a widespread
reputation as a scholar. She learned to speak and write

(05:30):
both Latin and Greek, and she also spoke French, Hebrew,
and Italian. She was also deeply religious, and specifically deeply Protestant.
In fifteen forty seven, her parents also placed Jane as
a ward in a very prominent family, that of Lady
Catherine Parr, last wife of Henry the eighth and very

(05:50):
recently his widow after she remarried Thomas Seymour, Baron of Sudley.
Sending a child to live with a high placed family
was a pretty typical practice of among the nobility. Although
at age ten Jane was a little younger than usual
for this. Lady Catherine was also Princess Elizabeth's guardian, so
for a time, both Jane and Elizabeth were raised in

(06:12):
the same household. Although they did get to know each
other because of the difference in their ages, they weren't
particularly close, and Elizabeth was also completely aware of the
fact that Jane was a potential threat to her own
place in the line of succession. Since there were no
questions of Jane's legitimacy or her parentage to get in

(06:32):
the way of her approval as a potential monarch, for
about a year, Jane had access to the same tutors
and social interactions as Elizabeth did, and it may have
been during this time that Jane's father and her guardian
began planning for a potential marriage to Edward, who had
become king after Henry the Aid's death on January twenty

(06:53):
eighth of fifteen forty seven. But Jane's time in this
household didn't last very long. Parr died due to complications
from childbirth in fifteen forty eight, and Jane stood in
the role of her chief mourner during the funeral ceremonies. Afterward,
Jane went home for a while, but after some back
and forth between her father and Thomas Seymour, she returned

(07:16):
with her. With Catherine's death, her royal wealth had reverted
back to the crown, so Thomas basically wanted to keep
Jane as a ward as a mark of his continued status,
so it wasn't like he lost in one fell swoop
all of his marks of social well offness. Finally, Jane's

(07:38):
father agreed to send her back to Thomas Seymour, but
that did not last long either. In fifteen forty nine,
Thomas Seymour was arrested and charged with treason in an
alleged plot to kidnap the king and marry Elizabeth himself.
He had also, at one point the year before, been
found embracing her too much scandal. He was executed on

(07:59):
March twentieth, and Jane once again went home in October
of fifteen fifty one. So a couple of years later,
Jane's father became the Duke of Suffolk, and this gave
Jane a lot more access to the highest echelons of
the nobility without needing to be someone else's ward to
get there, and from that point she was often at court.

(08:20):
Still with a lot of the people around her angling
for her to marry the king eventually. At this point,
they were both only fourteen years old, and while it
wasn't unheard of for people to get married that young,
especially among the nobility and the monarchy, all the various
approvals that would be required for a royal marriage to
take place stood in the way, along with there being

(08:42):
lots of other potential candidates for Edward's wife, all of
whom would, in one way or another, suit some kind
of political end, so in addition to obstacles, there was competition. However,
wiping all of this off the slate is the fact
that Edward's health started to fail, so the idea of
him marrying Jane completely fell apart, and we're going to

(09:04):
talk about that after we first paused for a little
sponsor break. Edward the sixth had only been nine years
old when his father, Henry the eighth died, and at
first Edward Seymour, the Duke of Somerset, had been Edward's regent. However,

(09:24):
if that last name Seymour sounded familiar, Edward Seymour's youngest
brother was Thomas Seymour, the same one we talked about
before the break, who was executed for treason after an
alleged plot to kidnap the King. His brother's regency did
not last long after that. The Duke of Somerset's replacement
as regent was John Dudley. John Dudley was the Duke

(09:46):
of Northumberland, who had a lot of influence over the
young King, understandably because he was still at that point
a child. In some accounts, literally everything that happened with
Jane after this point was a result of Northumberland's nefarious
scheming and his undue influence over the King, But in

(10:06):
other accounts, as Edward gained in some experience and some maturity,
he was taking the initiative for at least some of
it on his own. In November of fifteen fifty two,
King Edward the six got sick, and by the following
February people were becoming seriously concerned about how long he
was going to live. In the opinion of his doctors,

(10:27):
he had tuberculosis, and although he did recover somewhat, it
was clear that he was still very ill. As the
King's health declined, Northumberland started trying to figure out how
to secure his own claim to power. Since it was
not likely he would have nearly such an advantageous place
if Mary or Elizabeth became queen. And this was especially

(10:50):
true since if the line of succession proceeded as planned
to Mary, he would be basically out because he was
a Protestant and she was Catholic. At the same time time, Jane,
her parents, and the many other interested parties around her
abandoned the idea of her marrying this ailing king. They're
marrying in his dying soon after having not produced an

(11:12):
air with Jane wasn't a risk that any of them
were willing to take. It's not entirely clear who first
proposed the idea that Jane should marry Lord Guilford Dudley.
He was the fourth and only unmarried son of John Dudley,
Duke of Northumberland. It may have been Northumberland's scheme to
connect the family to somebody who was in the line

(11:33):
of succession, albeit not at the top of the list.
But there's a whole other's school of thought on this
that it was really William Parr Mark was of Northampton
who initially hatched this plan. William Prr had wealth and
property that were at stake, which he would lose if
Mary followed Edward on the throne. So according to this theory,

(11:54):
Northampton thought that if Jane Gray married Northumberland's son, Northumberland
would be more likely to back her own claim to
the throne, and that would help Northampton protect his own
financial interests. Regardless of whose idea it was, the betrothal
of Jane and Guildford was announced on April twenty eighth,

(12:15):
fifteen fifty three. On May twenty fifth, at the age
of fifteen, Jane Gray married Lord Guildford Dudley in a
triple wedding that made multiple connections among the Dudleys and
other families. Gilford Dudley's sister Catherine, married Henry Hastings, who
was an heir to an earl, and Jane's sister, also
named Catherine, married the heir to another earl. Although the

(12:38):
King himself was too ill to attend these proceedings, the
triple wedding was hugely attended by the English nobility. Meanwhile,
as his father had done before him, Edward the sixth
was writing a will to specify who should follow him
on the throne, and there's a lot of speculation and
to how much input he had into this will. As

(12:58):
we said before, it's often retold that this was almost
entirely Northumberland's influence. But Edward was also raised as a Protestant,
and he knew that if his half sister Mary followed
him on the throne, she would roll back what he
saw as the progress of Protestantism in England and would
oversee the return of Catholicism. So while it's incredibly likely

(13:22):
that Northumberland had at least some influence over the young monarch,
who was both ill and as we've noted, not particularly
old at this point, he almost certainly had a real
interest in the outcome. On June twelfth, Edward met with
lawyers and judges and instructed them to take legal steps
to make Jane his heir, skipping over his half sisters

(13:45):
Mary and Elizabeth. He struck through a previous provision in
which Francis, Jane's mother, would rule as governor in the
absence of male heirs. A patent outlining this new line
of succession was signed on June twenty first, make being
an official at least on paper, that if Edward didn't survive,
Jane would be queen. As we mentioned at the top,

(14:07):
of the show. Different accounts take completely different tax on
whether he had any right to do this. Some of
them cite the precedent of Henry the Eighth's own will,
which did specify who should follow him on the throne,
but that Act of Succession that had come out in
fifteen forty three and fifteen forty four clearly specified that

(14:27):
Mary followed Edward in the line of succession. There was
also a fifteen forty seven Treasons Act that specified that
changing the line of succession as it was outlined in
the previous Act of Succession was high treason. So even
at the time, in the opinions of some of the
judges who were involved in this, the only way that

(14:48):
Edward would have the actual authority to name Jane as
his successor would be for Parliament to repeal the Act
of Succession. He was king, but that did not mean
that he was above the law. Edward did, in fact
issue ritz to summon Parliament in September of that year,
most likely to do that very thing get rid of

(15:08):
the Act of Succession, so he would have the legal
leeway to name Jane his heir. However, in spite of
doctors and healers being called in to try to keep
him alive until the Parliament convened, or perhaps because of it,
given how many medical treatments of the day were actually
quite harmful. Edward died on July sixth, the fifteen fifty three,

(15:30):
and in spite of the questionable legality of it all,
Jane was named queen on July seventh. The Mayor of London,
the city magistrates, and the guard all swore oaths of
allegiance to her. Edward's half sister, Mary, however, did not,
even though attempts were made to keep Edward's death a
secret until Jane's succession was secure. Those attempts were not

(15:54):
very successful, and Mary heard about it. Elizabeth presumably did
as well, but she stayed out of this whole thing.
Mary mustered a force to march to London to try
to assert her own claim to the throne, and on
July eighth she proclaimed herself queen from her estates in
East Anglia. She wrote to the council to instruct them
to do the same, and her letter to them arrived

(16:16):
two days later. Jane learned that she was queen at
Northumberland's estate outside London. On the ninth, her husband was there,
along with her parents and some of the Royal Council. Reportedly,
her response was that she accepted the crown quote, if
what has been given to me is lawfully mine. In
some accounts she then fainted, and in others she just

(16:37):
fell to the ground and wept. This fainting and or
crying came to be used as evidence that Jane was
very young, holy innocent, completely overwhelmed by circumstance, and was
basically a totally helpless pawn of her parents in Northumberland,
but modern scholars have taken a different interpretation that it

(16:58):
was a very visible, an intentional demonstration of her claim
that she had not been seeking this throne herself that
had been bestowed upon her unsought. She didn't really have
the means to have a press conference to issue that statement,
so instead she fell to the ground and cried so
it would be obvious to everyone from Northumberland's estate. Jane

(17:19):
went to the White Tower of London to formally take
possession of it as monarch. Almost immediately, though, things started
to fall apart as Mary made her own move for
the throne, and possibly because Northumberland was hugely out of
favor with the general public. Mary was finding huge support.
The size of her force grew quickly, including through five

(17:40):
royal ships that mutinied with their men, forcing their officers
to go over to Mary's side. Northumberland started to rally
a force to head Mary off on her way to London,
and Jane's father was initially supposed to lead it, but
he was becoming increasingly ill, so Northumberland took charge of
it himself, but he was so out of favor, and

(18:02):
this whole plot was becoming so increasingly a point of
contention that his men continually deserted him, and the idea
that he would steadfastly support Jane if she was married
to his son did not wind up holding up. By
July eighteenth, he only had three men left, and one
of them was Jane's ailing father. He abandoned his efforts

(18:24):
to protect Jane's claim to the throne on the nineteenth
of July, at which point she was removed. He formally
proclaimed Mary queen on the twentieth. Jane stayed in the
Tower of London, though now instead of being the monarch,
she was a prisoner. And we're going to talk about
the aftermath and how Jane came to become a cultural
figure after we first take a little break for a

(18:46):
sponsor break. Mary the first, who would go on to
be known as Bloody Mary, formally entered London on August third,
fifteen fifty three, and, as the Protestants in the story
had feared, she did return Catholicism to the monarchy and

(19:09):
to the country. Really, she would later refer to fifteen
fifty three as her miracle year. Trials for the accused,
who were charged with treason for their role in trying
to make Jane queen started on August eighteenth. By that point,
the Duke of Northumberland and many of his sons and
supporters had been imprisoned in the tower since July twenty fifth.

(19:31):
All of the accused were convicted in Northumberland, and two
of his men were sentenced to death. Those executions were
carried out on August twenty second. Mary, however, didn't really
want Jane to be executed, even though they were on
totally opposite sides in terms of religion and in terms
of who should be on the throne, and in some accounts,

(19:52):
Jane had actually been rude to Mary over her Catholic faith.
Mary mostly saw Jane as a pawn and not really
that much a threat, so Jane eventually was allowed some
freedom and the tower, including being allowed to walk in
the Queen's gardens starting the December after she was imprisoned. However,
that changed the following February. In fifteen fifty four, Jane's

(20:14):
father joined what came to be known as Thomas Wyatt's
Rebellion against Mary, and even though they had nothing to
do with this rebellion, the fact that it happened and
involved Jane's father meant that Jane and her husband were
no longer viewed as harmless innocence. They were both beheaded
on February twelfth of fifteen fifty four. She was just
sixteen at the time. Jane's father was beheaded for his

(20:38):
role on February twenty third. There are a lot of
people who get beheaded in this story. That's why the
whole Bloody Mary thing happen. Yet the beheadings continue long
after this story is over. Because of the role of
religion in this whole saga and Jane's own steadfast devotion,
she wound up being regarded as a Protestant martyr. While

(21:00):
she was imprisoned in the Tower, she wrote letters to
her family, in her New Testament and in her prayer book.
She wrote to her sister in one of these books, quote,
I have here sent you, good sister Catherine, a book which,
although it be not outwardly tremd with gold, yet inwardly
it is more worth than precious stones. It is the book,
dear sister, of the law of the Lord. It is

(21:23):
his testament and last Will, which he bequeathed unto us wretches,
which shall lead you to the path of eternal joy.
And if you, with a good mind read it, and
with an earnest mind do purpose to follow it, it
shall bring you to an immortal and everlasting life that
shall teach you to live and learn you to die.
Before her death, she sent this New Testament to her sister,

(21:45):
and while awaiting her execution, Jane claimed that she had
simply accepted the throne that was offered to her, she
had not sought it herself, which she did to try
to decouple this concept of treasonous from Protestant propaganda. After
her death reiterated the idea that she was wholly innocent
and a religious murder. Once Elizabeth the First, a Protestant,

(22:09):
became Queen. The idea that Jane herself was treacherous mostly faded.
Lady Jane Gray became a highly highly romanticized figure after
her death. Overall, we don't have a lot of her
letters or her personal papers, and it's unclear whether any
of the paintings and engravings that were made of her

(22:29):
during her lifetime or shortly after it are really of her.
A lot of them are just labeled Jane with no
other identifying information, so we know it's a Jane who
lived around that time, but not whether it was this Jane.
Apparently there was a painting that was very clearly labeled
that it was Jane the Queen, but that painting has
been lost. The only eye witness account of her appearance

(22:52):
in writing that contains any detail at all was probably
a forgery made for an early twentieth century biography. So
for a lot of people, their mental image of Lady
Jane's So for a lot of people, their mental image
of Lady Jane Gray comes from Paul Delaroche's portrait The
Execution of Lady Jane Gray, which dates back to eighteen

(23:15):
thirty three, so centuries after all of this happened. So
it was really easy, given all of this lack of
concrete information, for her to become kind of a blank
slate for the heroine in tragic stories and poems. This
was especially true around seventeen fourteen and seventeen fifteen, around
the time of the first Jacobite Uprising, which, to recap,

(23:37):
was a challenge by the House of Stuart against the
reigning House of Hanover. Because Jane's story was all about
the line of succession and religious divisions between Protestants and Catholics,
it mirrored the political situation at the time and it
became incredibly popular. Edward Young's poem The Force of Religion
or Vanquished Love was first published in seventeen fourteen. Three

(23:59):
editions of that poem came out in under two years.
The Tragedy of Lady Jane Gray was first staged in
seventeen fifteen by playwright Nicholas Rowe, which was his last
play and the most successful play of the season. As
we said at the top of the show, there's a
lot of detail we just don't have about Lady Jane Gray,
and a lot of people imagine her and have depicted

(24:22):
her as this sort of completely lacking agency, teenage waif
who was pushed from place to place by parents and
guardians in Northumberland and everyone else. But given her intelligence
and her education, and the fact that she had been
immersed in a very cutthroat nobility since her birth, it's

(24:44):
unlikely that she was the totally unresisting pawn that she's
often depicted as. A lot of more contemporary scholars have
compared her behavior to other people who were within the
nobility and the monarchy and the ways that they displayed
their own sort of cunning efforts to define themselves and

(25:07):
are like, yeah, yeah, there were a lot of things
she didn't have control over, but you know, her continual
assertion of her religious faith and the fact that she
deliberately did things to try to distance her religion from
treason against the monarchy, Like, these were all proactive steps

(25:27):
she took for herself that were quite smart to try
to keep keep the Protestant faith from being tarnished by
her role in all of this. Yeah, that whole cutthroat
angle of the monarchy and the royal whole morass is
why I think I always have a disconnect where I

(25:50):
kind of don't get it because I feel like, and
granted I'm looking at this from a very modern perspective.
But I feel like if I were involved in all
of that, I'd be like, that's cool, I don't need
to rain. That's I'm just gonna go over here and
have like maybe a little shop and be alive. That
sounds fine, Yeah, But I feel like if you are
raised to believe that it is your birthright and that

(26:12):
that's the most important thing on earth, you would be
more invested in it.

Speaker 2 (26:17):
Unless like a hippie like me, that's like, that's cool,
let's just leave this alone. Don't need to have any
of that. Yeah, Like that's it kind of gets on.
A couple things get on my nerves. One is that
a lot of the very basic summaries of this whole
thing leave out that she was actually irrelative. They make

(26:37):
it sound almost like she was a hapless teenager plucked
out of nowhere and stuck into the line of succession,
which that is not really the case. And the other
is how many just seem to portray her as a
blank slate of parental ambition. Yeah, you had no say

(26:58):
in it, when really we know that she was quite
quite intelligent and that she corresponded with scholars in Britain
and on the continent. Like she had, she had a
lot more going on than just a political pawn for
other people to stick somewhere. Thanks so much for joining

(27:23):
us on this Saturday. Since this episode is out of
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(27:47):
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Speaker 1 (27:56):
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