Crown of Blood

by Nicola Tallis

  Now blind, Jane felt for the block with her hands, but to her alarm found that it was just out of her reach. For a brief flash her composure completely deserted her as she cried out desperately, ‘What shall I do? Where is it?’27 It was a pitiful sight as Jane’s hands snatched at the cold air, and moved by compassion one of those on the scaffold, perhaps Thomas Brydges, guided her hands to rest on the wooden block. Jane composed herself once more, determined to make a courageous end. She ‘laid her head down upon the block, and stretched forth her body’, knowing that she would never rise from it. There was time for just a few more words, and as an indication that she was now ready, Jane cried, ‘Lord Jesus, into thy hands I commend my spirit!’28 The headsman raised his axe; seconds later it fell and severed Jane’s head in a single stroke: ‘And so she ended.’29 Lady Jane Grey, ‘the innocent victim of the sins of others’, was no more.30

  Those who had gathered around the scaffold heard the sickening thud of the axe as it sliced into Jane’s flesh, and were forced to witness a sea of red as the scaffold became drenched in ‘an abundance of blood’.31 Though saddened, they could walk away from the scene of devastation, but there was one final indignity for this young girl who had lost her life at the age of seventeen. Her body, broken by the executioner’s axe, lay on the blood-soaked scaffold for several hours before it was at last removed. The reason for the delay is unclear; perhaps there was doubt over Jane’s final resting place in the chapel. Jane’s remains were at last taken for burial in the Chapel of St Peter ad Vincula. The precise location of her grave is unclear, but presumably she was laid to rest beside her husband, her hated father-in-law, and her queenly predecessors, Anne Boleyn and Katherine Howard, beneath the chancel pavement. No memorial was ever erected to her, a fact that caused astonishment to one of Jane’s Victorian admirers: ‘it is equally extraordinary that no monument of so celebrated a character, or of her husband should exist’.32 However, at the time in which Jane died it was not extraordinary at all. Aside from those who knew her, and despite the claim that Jane’s death ‘appeared hapless and bloody not only to the English people but also to all men of all nations’, in the grand scheme of European politics Jane was almost forgotten, and her death elicited no more than a simple line or two in ambassadors’ reports.33 Nevertheless, one contemporary noted that her execution was met

  [w]ith great sorrow of the people, testifying their compassion for the iniquity of her lot, especially when it became known to everybody 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.34

  A later tale emerged that Jane’s body was secretly removed from the Tower and brought to Bradgate Park, where it was interred in the parish church. This is almost certainly complete fabrication, and is not based on any evidence. In 1876, on the orders of Queen Victoria, the Chapel of St Peter ad Vincula underwent restoration, and during this time many of the remains of the prominent persons buried within were uncovered. During the course of the work, the floor began to collapse and the digging in the chancel had to be abandoned, by which time the remains of neither Jane, nor Guildford, had been discovered. This is why Jane was sadly not afforded one of the beautiful marble stones that others buried in the chancel were. Nevertheless, Jane’s body was assumed to be there, and thus a slab was placed at the foot of the chancel that stated that she and others were believed to be buried nearby. There are no grounds to assume that this was not the case, and though we lack the conclusive evidence that Jane’s skeleton would have provided, she almost certainly still rests in St Peter ad Vincula today. The Victorian historian Thomas Babington Macaulay accurately summarized Jane’s final resting place:

  In truth there is no sadder spot on the earth than that little cemetery. Death is there associated, not, as in Westminster Abbey and Saint Paul’s, with genius and virtue, with public veneration and with imperishable renown; not, as in our humblest churches and churchyards, with everything that is most endearing in social and domestic charities; but with whatever is darkest in human nature and in human destiny, with the savage triumph of implacable enemies, with the inconstancy, the ingratitude, the cowardice of friends, with all the miseries of fallen greatness and of blighted fame.35

  She had spent the last months of her life as a prisoner in the Tower, and never emerged alive from its precincts. Moreover, even death could not free Jane from its walls, and she has, thus far, spent more than 460 years buried within. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that her ghost has reportedly been sighted on a number of occasions.36 Her poignant associations with her prison are as persistent as her memory, which over the centuries has inspired both sympathy and admiration.

  CHAPTER 24

  God and Posterity Will

  Show Me Favour

  NO SOONER HAD the axe fallen than Jane was being revered as a Protestant martyr by those who had known her. In many contemporary accounts, however, her end was barely worthy of note. The day after Jane’s execution, Renard simply informed his master that ‘Jane of Suffolk was yesterday executed, whilst her husband, Guildford, suffered in public.’1 Her admirers, though, were determined that she ought to be remembered. As historian Hester Chapman put it, ‘The remarkable character and dramatic martyrdom of Lady Jane Grey made her as famous in her own generation as she is today.’2 Grafton wrote that most people believed that Jane was killed because of her father’s crimes, ‘rather than for any guilt or fault that was in her’, and ‘great pity was it, for the casting away of that fair lady’.3 Similarly, John Stow related that Jane’s death was ‘the more hastened for fear of further troubles and stir for her title, like as her father had attempted’, while Commendone praised her as she had ‘submitted the neck to the axe with more than manly courage’.4

  A month after Jane’s death, John Banks was writing to Heinrich Bullinger, whom Jane had so much revered, lamenting her death. Jane, he said,

  [w]as truly admirable not so much by reason of her incredible attainments in literature, by which in the seventeenth year of her age she excelled all other ladies, as by reason of the remarkable firmness with which, though a young girl, she surpassed men in maintaining the cause of Christ; insomuch that she could neither be defeated by any contrivances which the papists imagined against her, nor be deceived by any of their artifices.5

  He continued to explain that Jane had ‘persevered in this confession of faith even to the last’.6 What was more, it was not only Jane who had been affected, but her whole family were ‘now overthrown and almost extinct, on account of their saving profession of our Saviour, and the cause of the gospel’.7 This certainly appeared to be the case, for on the same day as Jane’s execution Renard informed the Emperor that ‘Jane of Suffolk and Guildford, her husband, were to be beheaded, and the whole house of Suffolk would be obliterated by the execution of the three brothers now prisoners, whose death, as they were heretics, would contribute to the firm re-establishment of religion.’8 However, Banks continued to assert that ‘yet all godly and truly Christian persons have not so much reason to mourn over the ruin of a family so illustrious, as to rejoice that the latest action of her life was terminated in bearing testimony to the name of Jesus’.9

  Those who knew Jane were determined to remember her as a pious girl who had been slain for her faith. It was an idea of which Jane herself would have approved, and which she had been only too keen to promote as her end drew near. As Jane had hoped, word of her debates with Dr Feckenham soon spread, and although it is unclear how, her former family chaplain James Haddon was soon writing to Bullinger of it: ‘But as to what regards the lady Jane herself, and what is said in her name, (as for instance, her exhortations to a certain apostate, and her discourse with Feckenham,) I believe, and partly know, that it is true, and did really proceed from herself.’10 Banks had already sent Bullinger a transcript of the conversation in which Jane expressed ‘her opinion with much learning and ingenuity’, as well as a copy of the letters Jane wrote to
her sister Katherine and Harding, with the belief that they seemed ‘worthy of being universally known’.11 However, Haddon begged Bullinger not to make Jane’s words public at that time, and they remained under wraps. Nevertheless, her memory inspired the deepest admiration among the men Jane had once looked up to, who were impressed by her heartfelt religious devotion.

  John Foxe was undoubtedly the most famous of Jane’s contemporaries to capitalize on this image. In the pages of his Acts and Monuments, more famously known as The Book of Martyrs, which was first published in 1563, nine years after Jane’s death, Jane is immortalized, together with her husband, as ‘two innocents in comparison of them that sat upon them. For they did but ignorantly accept that which the others had willingly devised, and by open proclamation consented to take from others and give to them.’12 Foxe also claimed that Jane had inscribed a pretty verse in Latin into the walls of her cell in the Tower using a pin:

  Non aliena putes homini quœ obtingere possunt,

  Sors hodierna mihi, tunc erit illa tibi.

  Jane Dudley.

  Deo iuuante, nil nocet liuor malus:

  Et non iuuante, nil iuuat labor grauis.

  Post tenebras spero lucem.13

  Translated into English the words read:

  Do never think it strange,

  Though now I have misfortune.

  For if that fortune change,

  The same to thee may happen.

  Jane Dudley.

  If God do help thee,

  Hate shall not hurt thee;

  If God do fail thee,

  Then shall not labour prevail thee.

  If this was the case then Jane’s words have since disappeared, and it is unclear how Foxe came to know of them. Foxe went on to relate the harrowing tale that Sir Richard Morgan, ‘who gave the sentence of condemnation against her, shortly after he had condemned her, fell mad, and in his raving cried out continually to have Lady Jane taken away from him; and so ended his life’.14 Although no other reports exist to back this up, the circumstances surrounding Morgan’s death are somewhat mysterious, and it is possible that he died insane. Foxe’s story continued to be repeated and circulated, serving to fuel the flames and highlight the terrible consequences of those who had had a hand in Jane’s fall. Finally, he chose to include two short epitaphs written by John Parkhurst, the very same who had once written about Katherine Parr, in which he revered Jane as a martyr who had been cruelly slain.

  Jane’s story quickly gathered momentum in the popular imagination. In 1562 another contemporary, George Cavendish, wrote a poem in which the ghost of Jane placed the blame for her fate solely at her father’s door:

  My sorrows are treble and full of double woe,

  To remember the tragedy, and woeful case,

  That to my father, my husband, and me also

  Is happened, through folly and lack of grace;

  It causeth the tears to run down my face,

  And to lament your misfortune and mine,

  By such blind folly to fall into ruin.15

  It is possible that Cavendish knew Jane; he was certainly familiar with some of those who featured in her story, and thus did not have to look far to find inspiration for his tragic poem.

  Tragedy was destined to become the common theme as the popularity of Jane’s story took hold over the centuries. Shortly after Cavendish, Sir Thomas Chaloner’s elegy was published in 1579. Chaloner certainly knew many of those who were close to Jane, including her great-uncle, Nicholas Wotton, and it is not implausible that he had also met the heroine of his piece, entitled A lament on the death of that most eminent heroine, Lady Jane Grey, daughter of Henry, Duke of Suffolk who was smitten with the axe and died in most steadfast spirit.16 Chaloner’s elegy was incredibly sympathetic to Jane’s plight, and accused Queen Mary of lacking in compassion towards her cousin: ‘Should not a lady once cultivated herself have been moved by another so cultivated as Jane?’17 Chaloner was relentless in his praise for Jane’s looks and her learning, and continually labelled Mary as the villain of the piece. Chaloner and Cavendish were just two among many who attempted to capture the tragedy of Jane’s story through poetry, the works becoming increasingly more pitiful in tone. In 1762, George Keate’s An Epistle from Lady Jane Grey to Lord Guilford Dudley stressed not only the relationship between Jane and her husband, but also Jane’s determination to die for her beliefs:

  Let the Clouds gather, let the Storm

  advance,

  Unmov’d, its bursting Horrors I’ll

  defy,

  And steady to my Faith a Martyr

  die.18

  Jane’s supposedly loving relationship with Guildford added a further strand to her appeal. As well as providing a muse for poets, she also inspired playwrights to take up their pen and cast their heroine on to the stage of the theatre. At the beginning of the seventeenth century Jane was the subject of a play by the famous John Webster and Thomas Dekker, and although, sadly, the script no longer survives, it capitalized on the notion that Jane was deeply in love with her husband. It is probable that the play formed part of the playwright duo’s The Famous History of Sir Thomas Wyatt, which was first published in 1607, and in which Jane and Guildford feature heavily. The idea of Jane and Guildford as star-crossed lovers was taken one step further in the 1690s when John Banks’s Innocent Usurper: or, the Death of Lady Jane Grey was published. The play not only grossly embellished the relationship between Jane and Guildford, but also depicted Guildford threatening suicide unless Jane accepted the crown. However, in the aftermath of the Glorious Revolution, which witnessed the deposition of a monarch, James II, the play never made the stage, and was banned for political reasons. The following century, another tragedy about Jane’s life emerged, this time by Nicholas Rowe. Lady Jane Grey: A Tragedy in Five Acts was first staged at Drury Lane in 1715. Dedicated to the Princess of Wales, Caroline (later Queen Caroline, wife of George II), the play was successful for its day both on stage and in print.19 The Epilogue of the play neatly summed up the essence:

  The palms of virtue heroes oft’ have worn,

  Those wreaths to-night a female brow adorn.

  The destin’d saint, unfortunately brave,

  Sunk with those altars which she strove to save.20

  By the nineteenth century Jane’s story had gathered extraordinary momentum, exacerbated by the creation of a painting that now hangs in the National Gallery. Paul Delaroche’s iconic The Execution of Lady Jane Grey still has an overwhelming impact on modern interpretations of Jane. Exhibited in Paris’s Salon in 1834, the year after its completion, the painting caused a stir, not least because of the memories it triggered in the minds of the French of their own Revolution and the executions of the French royal family.21 A portrayal of Jane’s final moments, the painting depicts a blindfolded Jane being guided towards the block by Sir John Brydges – poetic licence on Delaroche’s part. The executioner looks on unperturbed, while two women (presumably Mistresses Tilney and Ellen) are tormented by grief. The painting is not historically accurate by any means, as is highlighted by the fact that the artist has portrayed Jane’s execution as taking place inside a building. This doubtless served to intensify the dark image of the Tower as a gloomy prison. Significantly, Jane is depicted dressed in white, which not only distinguishes her as the central figure in the painting, but is perhaps also intended to represent her innocence. Delaroche painted a number of famous historical scenes, including The Death of Queen Elizabeth and Cromwell gazing at the body of Charles I, but his image of Jane has sparked enduring admiration and a powerful torrent of sympathy. What is more, Delaroche was not alone, for between 1827 and 1877 twenty-four paintings on the subject of Jane were displayed at the Royal Academy, a testament to the popularity of her story. However, as with Delaroche’s, all of these depictions were based on romantic sensibilities and tragic ideals rather than historical accuracy. Nevertheless, it is the Delaroche image that still inspires its audience, and as Roy Strong asserts, its success ‘is
due to the artist’s oft-used trick of bringing the main action of the picture almost out of the canvas, directly towards the onlooker’.22

  Jane has also been the subject of two operas, and a number of historical novels. This is a trend that continues to this day, and seems sure to endure into the future. Jane featured in William Harrison Ainsworth’s fourth novel, The Tower of London, released in 1840. Though she is not the main character of the book, she is characterized in a highly emotional manner that played up to every other portrayal of Jane as a tragic heroine. Two decades later in Agnes Strickland’s Lives of the Tudor Princesses, Strickland described Jane in suitably glowing terms: ‘Lady Jane Grey is without doubt the most noble character of the royal Tudor lineage. She was endowed with every attribute that is lovely in domestic life, while her piety, learning, courage and virtue qualified her to give lustre to a crown.’23 Though novelistic in tone, Strickland’s work was intended to be a work of non-fiction, demonstrating the appeal that Jane held to writers of various genres.

  In the twentieth century the dramatic 1986 film Lady Jane, written by David Edgar and directed by Trevor Nunn, has had an extraordinary effect on popular perceptions of Jane. It was the third film about her story, and certainly the most powerful.24 The film exacerbates many of the traditional assumptions of her story: that she was badly treated by cruel parents who forced her into marriage; that the match between Jane, played by Helena Bonham Carter, and Guildford, whose part was taken by Cary Elwes, grew into a love story; and that Queen Mary offered Jane her life if she would convert to Catholicism. The film has therefore done much to embed these ideas as facts into popular consciousness. What comes across most strongly, however, is the idea of Jane and Guildford as innocent teenagers manipulated by ambitious parents – it is a powerful, and largely accurate image.