Legacy
Back to Lady Jane. History has traditionally seen Lady Jane Grey as an unfortunate teenager whose relation to the royal family saw her thrust as a pawn into the maelstrom of Tudor politics. She lived at a time when the country was divided between Catholic and Protestant, and was exploited to try to secure the wellbeing and continuing prosperity of her family, for which she paid the ultimate price. Although her reign would have been constantly dogged by challenges to her legitimacy to rule, she surely couldn’t have done a worse job than the tyrannical Catholic zealot, Bloody Mary.
The mess that England was in back in 1553 was due in large part to Henry VIII. Although his religious reforms actually proved popular, despite their selfish motivation, his six marriages left three half-siblings with wildly-differing views on one another’s legitimacy. Edward could not name his Protestant half-sister Elizabeth as his successor, as doing so would recognise the legitimacy of Anne Boleyn’s marriage to Henry, which would raise questions about the legitimacy of his own birth, which came from Henry’s next marriage to Jane Seymour. The way Henry went about the Reformation also brewed dangerous enmity amongst Catholic subjects.
Although we don’t know how complicit Lady Jane was in being named Edward’s successor, it is unlikely that a 16-year-old girl in such a misogynistic period could have had much influence over affairs at court. The few sympathetic contemporary sources describing Jane mean that it is hard not to feel extremely sorry for her. After all, the death of anyone so young is a tragedy, let alone one who appears to have been callously used by her own family and then abandoned to the most bloodthirsty queen in English history. She was martyred not only by Catholicism but Tudor politics.
Lady Jane’s tragic life has inspired countless artists and writers over the years. She became especially popular in the Victorian period, from which Delaroche’s highly-stylised portrayal of her execution above is taken. In 1563, her story was included in The Book of Martyrs by the famous English martyrologist, John Foxe, which was a text detailing the terrible suffering Protestants had to endure from Catholics. As well as inspiring Elizabethan and Jacobean ballads, Jane’s life was also the subject of Nicola Vaccai’s 1836 opera, Giovanna Gray. The story of Jane’s life, however murky in places, certainly deserves to be remembered.
Where did we find this stuff? Here are our sources:
Ashdown, Dulcie M. Tudor Cousins: Rivals for the Throne. Stroud: Sutton, 2000.
Davey, Richard. The Nine Days’ Queen: Lady Jane Grey and Her Times. London: Methuen & Co, 1910.
Ives, Eric. Lady Jane Grey: A Tudor Mystery. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009.
Jenkins, Simon. A Short History of England. London: Profile, 2011.
Loades, David M. Mary Tudor: History of a Dynasty. Oxford: Blackwell, 1989.
Newcombe, D. G. Henry VIII and the English Reformation. London: Routledge, 1995.
O’Day, Rosemary. The Routledge Companion to the Tudor Age. Abingdon: Routledge, 2010.
Weir, Alison. Children of England: The Heirs of King Henry VIII. London: Vintage, 1997.