SYMHC Classics: Lady Jane Grey

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Speaker 1: 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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, 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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, 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, 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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, 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 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 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 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 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, 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, 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 that's the most important thing on earth, you would be more invested in it.

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Speaker 2: 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 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 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 us on this Saturday. Since this episode is out of the archive, if you heard an email address or a Facebook RL or something similar over the course of the show, that could be obsolete now. Our current email address is History Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. You can find us all over social media at missed in History, and you can subscribe to our show on Apple podcasts, Google podcasts, the iHeartRadio app, and wherever else you listen to podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio.

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