* Heylin, p. 33. Godwin, p. 341. Stowe, p. 619. Baker, p.
318. Holingshed, p. 1094.
** Fox, vol. iii. p. 31. Heylin, p. 34. Burnet, vol. ii. p.
270. Stowe, p. 621.
*** Dépêches de Noailles, vol. iii. p. 124.

The lady Elizabeth had been, during some time, treated with great harshness by her sister; and many studied instances of discouragement and disrespect had been practised against her. She was ordered to take place at court after the countess of Lenox and the duchess of Suffolk, as if she were not legitimate:[*] her friends were discountenanced on every occasion: and while her virtues, which were now become eminent, drew to her the attendance of all the young nobility, and rendered her the favorite of the nation;[**] the malevolence of the queen still discovered itself every day by fresh symptoms, and obliged the princess to retire into the country. Mary seized the opportunity of this rebellion; and hoping to involve her sister in some appearance of guilt, sent for her under a strong guard, committed her to the Tower, and ordered her to be strictly examined by the council. But the public declaration made by Wiat rendered it impracticable to employ against her any false evidence which might have offered; and the princess made so good a defence, that the queen found herself under a necessity of releasing her.[***] In order to send her out of the kingdom, a marriage was offered her with the duke of Savoy; and when she declined the proposal, she was committed to custody under a strong guard at Wodestoke.[****] The earl of Devonshire, though equally innocent, was confined in Fotheringay Castle.

But this rebellion proved still more fatal to the lady Jane Gray, as well as to her husband: the duke of Suffolk’s guilt was imputed to her; and though the rebels and malecontents seemed chiefly to rest their hopes on the lady Elizabeth and the earl of Devonshire, the queen, incapable of generosity or clemency, determined to remove every person from whom the least danger could be apprehended. Warning was given the lady Jane to prepare for death; a doom which she had long expected, and which the innocence of her life, as well as the misfortunes to which she had been exposed, rendered nowise unwelcome to her. The queen’s zeal, under color of tender mercy to the prisoner’s soul, induced her to send divines, who harassed her with perpetual disputation; and even a reprieve for three days was granted her, in hopes that she would be persuaded during that time to pay, by a timely conversion, some regard to her eternal welfare. The lady Jane had presence of mind, in those melancholy circumstances, not only to defend her religion by all the topics then in use, but also to write a letter to her sister[v] in the Greek language; in which, besides sending her a copy of the Scriptures in that tongue, she exhorted her to maintain, in every fortune, a like steady perseverance.

* Dépêches de Noailles, vol. ii. p. 273, 288.
** Dépêches de Noailles, vol. iii. p. 273.
*** Godwin, p. 343. Burnet, vol. ii. p. 273. Fox, vol. ii.
p. 99, 105. Strype’s Mem. vol. iii. p. 85.
**** Dépêches de Noailles, vol. iii. p. 226.
v Fox vol. iii. p. 35. Heylin, p. 166.

On the day of her execution, her husband, Lord Guildford, desired permission to see her; but she refused her consent, and informed him by a message, that the tenderness of their parting would overcome the fortitude of both, and would too much unbend their minds from that constancy which their approaching end required of them: their separation, she said, would be only for a moment; and they would soon rejoin each other in a scene where their affections would be forever united, and where death, disappointment, and misfortunes, could no longer have access to them, or disturb their eternal felicity.[*]

It had been intended to execute the lady Jane and Lord Guildford together on the same scaffold at Tower Hill; but the council, dreading the compassion of the people for their youth, beauty, innocence, and noble birth, changed their orders, and gave directions that she should be beheaded within the verge of the Tower. She saw her husband led to execution; and having given him from the window some token of her remembrance, she waited with tranquillity till her own appointed hour should bring her to a like fate. She even saw his headless body carried back in a cart; and found herself more confirmed by the reports which she heard of the constancy of his end, than shaken by so tender and melancholy a spectacle. Sir John Gage, constable of the Tower, when he led her to execution, desired her to bestow on him some small present, which he might keep as a perpetual memorial of her: she gave him her table-book, on which she had just written three sentences on seeing her husband’s dead body; one in Greek, another in Latin, a third in English.[**] The purport of them was, that human justice was against his body, but divine mercy would be favorable to his soul; that if her fault deserved punishment, her youth at least, and her imprudence, were worthy of excuse; and that God and posterity, she trusted, would show her favor.

* Heylin, p. 167. Baker p. 319.
** Heylin, p. 167.

On the scaffold she made a speech to the bystanders; in which the mildness of her disposition led her to take the blame wholly on herself, without uttering one complaint against the severity with which she had been treated. She said, that her offence was not the having laid her hand upon the crown, but the not rejecting it with sufficient constancy; that she had less erred through ambition than through reverence to her parents, whom she had been taught to respect and obey: that she willingly received death, as the only satisfaction which she could now make to the injured state; and though her infringement of the laws had been constrained, she would show, by her voluntary submission to their sentence, that she was desirous to atone for that disobedience into which too much filial piety had betrayed her: that she had justly deserved this punishment for being made the instrument, though the unwilling instrument, of the ambition of others; and that the story of her life, she hoped, might at least be useful, by proving that innocence excuses not great misdeeds, if they tend anywise to the destruction of the commonwealth. After uttering these words, she caused herself to be disrobed by her women; and with a steady serene countenance submitted herself to the executioner.[*]

The duke of Suffolk was tried, condemned, and executed soon after; and would have met with more compassion, had not his temerity been the cause of his daughter’s untimely end. Lord Thomas Gray lost his life for the same crime. Sir Nicholas Throgmorton was tried in Guildhall; but there appearing no satisfactory evidence against him, he was able, by making an admirable defence, to obtain a verdict of the jury in his favor. The queen was so enraged at this disappointment, that, instead of releasing him as the law required, she recommitted him to the Tower, and kept him in close confinement during some time. But her resentment stopped not here: the jury, being summoned before the council, were all sent to prison, and afterwards fined, some of them a thousand pounds, others two thousand apiece.[**] This violence proved fatal to several; among others to Sir John Throgmorton, brother to Sir Nicholas, who was condemned on no better evidence, than had formerly been rejected. The queen filled the Tower and all the prisons with nobility and gentry, whom their interest with the nation, rather than any appearance of guilt, had made the objects of her suspicion; and finding that she was universally hated, she determined to disable the people from resistance, by ordering general musters, and directing the commissioners to seize their arms, and lay them up in forts and castles.[***]

* Heylin, p. 167. Fox, vol iii. p. 36, 37. Holingshed, p.
1099.
** Fox, vol. iii. p. 99. Stowe, p. 624. Baker, p. 320.
Holingshed, p. 1104, 1121. Strype, vol. iii. p. 120. Dép. de
Noailles, vol. iii. p. 173.
*** Dép. de Noailles, vol. iii p. 98.