THE TRAITOR'S GATE, TOWER OF LONDON.
Fancy the horror of his loving daughter Meg when she heard this! What could she do? She could not suffer it to stay there, so she bribed two men and took a boat, and, going down the river, stole her own father's head, and, wrapping it in a cloth, returned with her gruesome burden to Chelsea, where she is said to have buried it in the church. Can you picture anything more awful than the task of this brave woman?
Another of More's daughters was married, too, and she and Meg were both happy mothers with families of their own; but we may be quite sure that so long as they lived they never forgot their dear father.
CHAPTER XIV
LADY JANE GREY
There once lived a girl who was called Queen of England for twenty days, but who was never crowned; who lived a good and innocent life, yet was beheaded when she was only sixteen. This was Lady Jane Grey. She was a cousin of young King Edward VI., who succeeded his father Henry VIII. when he was a little boy of nine. At that time England had lately established the Protestant religion, the Church of England as we have it now, and all Roman Catholics had been forced to become Protestants or to leave the churches to those who were. Edward was a delicate little boy, and he had only reigned five years when he caught measles. He never seemed to recover from them; he had a cold afterwards, which settled on his chest, and it soon began to be whispered that the boy-king must die. At this there was much talking among the great nobles who were Protestants, for they knew that the next heir to the throne was Edward's elder sister Mary, a woman of thirty-eight, a strong Roman Catholic; and they feared that if Queen Mary sat on the throne all the Roman Catholics would be restored to their places, and the Protestants would be persecuted and perhaps murdered, all of which afterwards really did happen. Mary had a younger sister Elizabeth, who was only twenty, and she was a Protestant; and if the nobles could have put her on the throne instead of Mary, all would have been well with England. But that they could not do, for to set aside an older sister for a younger one would have been impossible. So they looked around for someone else, and fixed on little Lady Jane Grey.
Lady Jane was one of the three daughters of a nobleman called the Duke of Suffolk; she was the eldest, and through her mother she was a cousin of King Edward's, and of his sisters Mary and Elizabeth, too. If Edward had had no sisters, Lady Jane would have been Queen after him. The nobles had wanted her to marry Edward, who was just her own age; but the boy had been too ill to think of marrying, and now he was going to die, and it was too late to make any arrangement of that sort. His guardian, the Duke of Northumberland, was a powerful and ambitious man, and he planned a scheme by which he would be still more powerful. He persuaded Edward that Lady Jane must reign after him, for if she did not England would suffer; and Edward, who loved the Protestant religion, consented. He made a will saying that Lady Jane was to be Queen instead of his sisters Mary and Elizabeth. Of course, he had no right to do this, for a king cannot say who is to reign after him; the throne must go to the next heir. But Northumberland thought if he and all the nobles declared Lady Jane Queen, they could force the people of England to acknowledge her. Then the clever Northumberland went further; he got Edward to consent to the marriage of Lady Jane to Northumberland's only son, young Lord Guildford Dudley. Dudley was then a boy of seventeen, and Lady Jane only fifteen, but that was quite old enough for marriage in those days.