The Execution of Lady Jane Grey
Known as the “nine-day queen”, Lady Jane Grey has become an iconic Tudor victim: virginal, sweet and beheaded at 16, largely because of the machinations of her evil mother. But is any of this true? Leanda de Lisle discovers otherwise …
Lady Jane Grey is mythologised, even festishised, as an innocent girl sacrificed on the altar of her mother’s ambition. But behind the popular biographies of the Tudor Queen lies a different story of misogyny and masochism. It seems the much-maligned mother is in fact the victim.
When I began researching for “The Sisters Who Would be Queen”, my triple biography of Lady Jane and her sisters, Katherine and Mary Grey, I hoped the well-known life of the iconic teenage Queen, would lend some insight to the younger sisters, the forgotten heirs to Elizabeth Tudor. I assumed there would be little new to day about Jane herself. But as I began my research it became clear that nothing written about Jane could be trusted. The first woman to wield the power of a Tudor monarch had been reduced, over time, to an eroticised image of female helplessness. Meanwhile, her conventional mother became the embodiment of the belief that powerful women are monstrous and mannish.
The traditional story runs like this: Lady Jane Grey was born in 1537, the daughter of Henry VIII’s royal niece, Frances, and her husband, Harry Grey, Marques of Dorset. The stout, bejewelled woman in a double portrait by Hans Eworth is still used to illustrate Frances’s nature. “Physically she bore a marked resemblance to Henry VIII,” notes Alison Weir, a best-selling historian, in her book “The Children of Henry VIII“. Here was a woman, “determined to have her own way, and greedy for power and riches,” who “ruled her husband and daughters tyrannically and, in the case of the latter, often cruelly.”
So Jane grew up an abused child, beaten regularly by her unloving mother. In 1553 the 15-year-old Jane was forced (beaten again) to marry the 18-year-old Guildford Dudley, son of the principle figure in the King’s Privy Council, John Dudley. Frances believed the marriage would promote Jane as heir to the dying Protestant King Edward VI. Weeks later Edward did indeed bequeath Jane his throne, in place of his Catholic sister Mary Tudor. Jane was obliged to accept, though she protested through tears that Mary was the rightful claimant.
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