Lady Jane Grey

by Plowden, Alison

  ‘Why’, protested Feckenham, ‘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?’ ‘And so he saith, “I am the vine, I am the door”,’ retorted Jane; ‘but he is never the more for that the door or the vine. Doth not St Paul say, “He calleth things that are not, as though they were”?’ Surely anyone should be able to recognise figurative speech for what it was. And now she went over to the attack: ‘I pray you to answer me to this one question. 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 till the next day. What took he but bread? What brake he but bread? And what gave he but bread?’

  When Feckenham objected that she was grounding her faith ‘upon such authors as say and unsay both in a breath; and not upon the church’ the reply came again with the authentic ring of total, terrifying conviction: ‘I ground my faith on God’s word and not upon the church … the faith of the church must be tried by God’s word; and not God’s word by the church, neither yet my faith.’

  Feckenham was reluctant to admit defeat in the battle to secure this so desirable convert and continued the argument with ‘many strong and logical persuasions’; but faith, wrote Jane, had armed her resolution against words, and to forsake that faith for love of life, as her old dread Northumberland had done, would still have been the ultimate shame for this eager, vital sixteen-year-old.

  The account of the confrontation with Feckenham, which has come down to us in the robustly Protestant pages of John Foxe, naturally gives Jane the last word and the victory; but Jane herself, who accepted Feckenham’s offer to accompany her to the scaffold, parted from him with some regret, since they plainly could not look forward to resuming their discussion in the hereafter. Unless, of course, he were to repent and turn to God. She would, she told him, ‘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’.7

  Jane seems, in fact, to have been rather disturbed by the realisation that she had come dangerously close to liking a Catholic priest; that she had found him sympathetic, intelligent and cultivated – rather more so than some of the Protestants she had known. In the circumstances it was perhaps just as well that she had so little time to brood over the worrying implications of this discovery, which seem to be hinted at in the prayer she is said to have composed shortly before her execution:

  O merciful God … be thou now unto me a strong tower of defence. … Suffer me not to be tempted above my power, but either be thou a deliverer unto me out of this great misery, or else give me grace patiently to bear thy heavy hand and sharp correction. … How long wilt thou be absent? – for ever? Oh, Lord! hast thou forgotten to be gracious, and hast thou shut up thy loving kindness in displeasure? Wilt thou be no more entreated? … Shall I despair of thy mercy? Oh God! far be that from me. I am thy workmanship, created in Christ Jesus; give me grace therefore to tarry thy leisure and patiently to bear thy works, assuredly knowing, that as thou canst, so thou wilt deliver me when it shall please thee … for thou knowest better what is good for me than I do. Therefore do with me in all things what thou wilt. … Only, in the meantime, arm me, I beseech thee, with thy armour, that I may stand fast … above all things taking to me the shield of faith, wherewith I may be able to quench all the fiery darts of the wicked.8

  The sharp correction was now no longer to be delayed and those last days were taken up with the macabre preparations which had to be made by all high-born victims of judicial execution. The Lady Jane must choose a suitable dress for her final public appearance and nominate two members of her little household to witness her death and afterwards ‘decently dispose’ of her body. The speech which she would make from the scaffold must be polished and copied out for subsequent circulation and publication. Then there were farewell letters to be written and farewell gifts chosen. Her sister Katherine was to have her Greek testament – ‘it will teach you to live and learn you to die’ – plus a long, windy letter of spiritual exhortation, wasted on feather-brained Katherine. To her father, who, together with his brother John, had been brought back to the Tower on Saturday 10 February, she tried to send a message of comfort, though her outraged sense of justice impelled her to remind him that it had pleased God to hasten her death ‘by you, by whom my life should rather have been lengthened’. And, she went on,

  albeit I am very well assured of your impatient dolours, redoubled many ways, both in bewailing your own woe, and especially, as I am informed, my woeful estate; yet my dear father … herein I may account myself blessed, that washing my hands with the innocence of my fact, my guiltless blood may cry before the Lord, mercy to the innocent! And though I must needs acknowledge, that being constrained, and as you know well enough continually assayed, yet in taking [the crown] upon me, I seemed to consent, and therein grievously offended the queen and her laws, yet do I assuredly trust that this my offence towards God is so much the less, in that being in so royal estate as I was, my enforced honour never mingled with mine innocent heart. And thus, good father, I have opened unto to you the state wherein I presently stand, my death at hand, although to you perhaps it may seem woeful, yet to me there is nothing that can be more welcome than from this vale of misery to aspire to that heavenly throne of all joy and pleasure with Christ my Saviour.9

  Jane also wrote a shorter, simpler message to her father in the prayer book which she carried with her to the scaffold: ‘The Lord comfort your grace, and that in his word wherein all creatures only are to be comforted. And though it hath pleased God to take away two of your children: yet think not, I most humbly beseech your grace, that you have lost them; but trust that we, by leaving this mortal life, have won an immortal life. And I, for my part, as I have honoured your grace in this life, will pray for you in another life.’10 There is no record of any letter or message for her mother and none for her husband, although Guildford had also written a little note to Suffolk in the margin of Jane’s prayer book, wishing him ‘long life in this world … and in the world to come joy everlasting’ from his ‘loving and obedient son’.11

  The story is told that Guildford had expressed a wish to see Jane once more before they died. This was repeated to the queen, who sent word that if it would be any consolation to them the young couple were to be allowed to meet to say goodbye, but Jane refused the proffered indulgence, saying it would only be upsetting and would disturb their ‘holy tranquillity’ – rather wait until they met again ‘in a better place’. She may have hoped that she would like him better there, but the story has the same odour of sanctimonious sentimentality which hangs over most of the anecdotes which have gathered around Jane, and there seems to be no real evidence that she ever showed the slightest interest in Guildford at any time during their imprisonment, or he in her. Much has been made of the fact that the name ‘Jane’ was carved on a wall of the prison quarters shared by the Dudley brothers, but there is no proof that this was a testimony to anything other than boredom, and no proof that it was even Guildford’s work or referred to Jane Grey – the duchess of Northumberland was also called Jane.

  However, when the unlucky Guildford was brought out of the Beauchamp Tower at ten o’clock on the morning of Monday 12 February on his way to the execution ground on Tower Hill, Jane had stationed herself at her window to see his procession leave. She waited obstinately for its return and presently the cart, containing the decapitated carcase of the tall, strong boy who had wanted her to make him king, lying on the bloodstained straw, the head wrapped roughly in a cloth, rattled past below her on its way to the Tower chapel. The sight moved her perhaps more than she had expected, and it is said that those standing by heard her murmur Guildford’s name and something about ‘the bitterness of death’.

  Guildford Dudley had cried like the child he still was when told of his impending fate, but he died like a gentleman, quietly and
without fuss, and now it was Jane’s turn. Her execution, as befitted a princess of the blood royal, was to take place privately on Tower Green – from Partridge’s house she would have had an excellent view of her scaffold being erected ‘over against the White Tower’ – and as soon as the officials were ready she came out, leaning on the arm of the Lieutenant, Sir John Brydges. Her two attendants, Mrs Ellen and Elizabeth Tylney, were in tears, but Jane herself, wearing the same black gown she had worn to her trial, appeared dry-eyed and perfectly composed, her little prayer book open in her free hand. She climbed the steps of the scaffold and then turned, ready to address the small invited audience which had gathered to see justice done.

  She did not waste words. She admitted again that she had done wrong in accepting the crown. “‘The fact, indeed, 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 in innocency, before God and you good Christian people, this day”, and therewith she wrung her hands, in which she had her book.’ She went on to ask all those present to bear witness that she died a good Christian woman and that she looked to be saved ‘by none other mean, but only by the mercy of God in the merits of the blood of his only son Jesus Christ. … And now, good people,’ she ended, ‘while I am alive, I pray you to assist me with your prayers.’ Even in that last dreadful moment she could find the strength to remain true to her stern Protestant faith and steadfastly reject the age-old comfort of prayers for the dead. Kneeling, she turned to John Feckenham, saying: ‘Shall I say this psalm?’ and then repeated the fifty-first psalm, the Miserere, in English ‘in most devout manner’ to the end, Feckenham beside her following her in Latin.

  Now there were just the final preparations to be gone through. She got to her feet, handed her gloves and handkerchief to Mrs Tylney and her prayer book to John Brydges’ brother Thomas, and began to untie the fastenings of her gown. As the executioner, that nightmare masked figure, stepped forward, Jane, not understanding perhaps that his victim’s outer garments were the hangman’s traditional perquisite, shrank back and ‘desired him to let her alone’. Nurse Ellen and Elizabeth Tylney helped her to take off her dress and gave her a ‘fair handkercher to knit about her eyes’. Now the hangman was kneeling for the ritual asking and receiving of forgiveness. He told her to stand upon the straw, and in so doing she saw the block for the first time. There was nothing left to do but make an end. Whispering, ‘I pray you dispatch me quickly’, she tied the blindfold over her eyes. The world vanished and she was alone, groping in the darkness, crying shockingly, ‘What shall I do? Where is it?’ Someone stepped forward to guide her, and ‘she laid her head down upon the block, and stretched forth her body and said “Lord, into thy hands I commend my spirit!”’12 The axe swung and blood spouted obscenely over the scaffold, soaking the straw and spattering the standers-by.

  The Tower officials, their work done, began to disperse. Perhaps John Brydges was already reading the message Jane had written for him on the flyleaf of her prayer book:

  Forasmuch as you have desired so simple a woman to write in so worthy a book, good Master Lieutenant, therefore shall I as a friend desire you, and as a Christian require you, to call upon God, to incline your heart to his laws, to quicken you in his way, and not to take the word of truth utterly out of your mouth. 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.13

  There seems to be some doubt as to the details of Jane’s burial and a tradition persisted that she had somehow been spirited away to Bradgate, but François de Noailles, the younger brother of Antoine, who arrived in London on 12 February, records having seen her half-naked corpse still lying on the scaffold later that day and commented on the extraordinary amount of blood which had issued from so small a body.14 The delay in moving the body was probably due more to uncertainty or reluctance on the part of anyone in authority to take responsibility for making the necessary arrangements than to deliberate disrespect and there seems no reason to doubt that some time before nightfall on that Monday the butchered remains of Henry VIII’s great-niece were interred beneath the stones of St Peter ad Vincula overlooking Tower Green, there to lie between the bones of two headless queens, Anne Boleyn and Katherine Howard.

  The judicial murder of Jane Grey – for no one ever pretended it was anything else – must surely count as one of the most coldly horrifying episodes in English history, but it created no great stir at the time, even among the aggressively Protestant Londoners. Public opinion, which was to play such a significant part in saving the life of her cousin Elizabeth, was not mobilised to help Jane, whose name, so far as it was remembered at all, remained too closely associated with the unpopular Dudleys and their failed coup to rouse much sympathy. There is a tradition that the oak trees in Bradgate Park were pollarded in a gesture of mourning and defiance when news of Lady Jane’s beheading reached Leicestershire, and John Foxe preserves the story that Richard Morgan, the judge who had sentenced her, died six months later in a raving delirium, crying: ‘Take the Lady Jane from me! Take away the Lady Jane!’15

  Roger Ascham remembered her, of course. So did John Aylmer, who rose to become bishop of London under Queen Elizabeth, and so perhaps did John Feckenham, who was to spend most of the rest of his long life in prison for his religious beliefs, dying in the concentration camp for Catholic priests at Wisbech in Cam-bridgeshire in 1585, almost the last survivor of his generation. Ironically enough, the most generous tribute paid to Jane at the time of her death came from Monsignor Giovanni Francesco Commendone, who had been sent by the Pope to report on the situation in England and who said of her 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’.16 John Foxe included her in his gallery of Protestant martyrs, and a somewhat perfunctory regret for the ‘casting away’ of a fair lady whom both God and nature had endowed with so many singular gifts and graces is expressed in the contemporary histories. In general though, for reasons both personal and political, it became increasingly tactless to mention the Suffolk family in polite Elizabethan circles.

  The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries resurrected, canonised and dehumanised Jane Grey, so that the cool, sceptical early twentieth century found her totally incomprehensible. The later twentieth and early twenty-first centuries should have no such difficulty, having become rather better acquainted with the effects of ideological commitment upon personality, for it is only in terms of total commitment to an ideology that Jane can be understood. Only thus is it possible to recognise the loving, lively, gifted child, consistently starved of natural affection, sublimating all her overflowing urges and energies in devotion to an ideal. Jane, in fact, had all the makings of a true fanatic. In another age she would have been the perfect prototype of the partisan, the resistance or freedom fighter, perfectly prepared to sacrifice her own or anyone else’s life in the furtherance of some cause, be it religious or political.

  On Sunday 11 February 1554 Stephen Gardiner had preached a sermon before Mary in which he asked a boon of the queen’s highness that ‘like as she had before time extended her mercy’ with the result that through her gentleness conspiracy and rebellion had grown, ‘she would now be merciful to the body of the commonwealth, and conservation thereof, which could not be unless the rotten and hurtful members were cut off and consumed’.17 On the following morning, as Jane and Guildford Dudley went to their deaths, gallows were being erected all over London, in the suburbs of Bermondsey and Southwark, in Cheapside and Fleet Street, Smithfield and Holborn, Tower Hill and Leadenhall, and as far west as Charing Cross and Hyde Park Corner. On the 14th the hangings began and soon all the city gates were decorated with severed heads and dismembered corpses in an in
tentionally grim reminder of the consequences of unsuccessful rebellion. The obliteration of the whole house of Suffolk was also now proceeding to what Simon Renard still regarded as its long-overdue conclusion, and on Saturday 17 February Henry, duke of Suffolk, was taken by river from the Tower to Westminster for his trial, who ‘at his going out went out very stoutly and cheerfully enough’ but returned ‘with a countenance very heavy and pensive, desiring all men to pray for him’.

  Suffolk, whose only excuse for his erratic behaviour apparently was that he had felt himself slighted by the Council since the Northumberland affair, had told his judges that he thought it no treason ‘for a peer of the realm as he was to raise his power and make proclamation only to avoid strangers out of the realm’. This might have been a good point, but he spoilt it by going on to boast that he had resisted the queen’s lieutenant in the person of the earl of Huntingdon and by these words ‘confessed himself guilty of treason’. He also rather unsportingly tried to blame his brother Thomas for having persuaded him to seek sanctuary in Leicestershire, saying that ‘it was to be feared he should be put again in the Tower’, but ‘being in his own country, and amongst friends and tenants, who durst fetch him?’ As he went on to admit that he had once said ‘at his table over his supper that he would undertake, for need, only with a hundred gentlemen, to set the crown upon Courtenay’s head’, it is hardly surprising that he should have been convicted and condemned.18