Lady Jane Grey and Her Times

by Ida A. Taylor

After an engraving.

LADY JANE GREY.

“I wis,” she answered smiling—the smile, surely, of conscious and complacent superiority—“all their sport in the Park is but a shadow to the pleasure that I find in Plato. Alas, good folk, they never felt what true pleasure meant.”

“And how came you, Madame,” asked Ascham, “to this deep knowledge of pleasure, and what did chiefly allure you to it, seeing not many women, but very few men, have attained thereto?”

Jane, nothing loath to satisfy her guest’s curiosity, did so at length.

“I will tell you,” she answered, “and tell you a truth, which perchance you will marvel at. One of the greatest benefits that ever God gave me is that He sent me so sharp and severe parents and so gentle a schoolmaster. For when I am in presence either of father or mother, whether I speak, keep silence, sit, stand, or go, eat, drink, be merry or sad, be sewing, playing, dancing, or doing anything else, I must do it, as it were, in such weight, measure, and number, even so perfectly as God made the world, or else I am so sharply taunted, so cruelly threatened, yea presently sometimes with pinches, nips, and bobs, and other ways, which I will not name for the honour I bear them, so without measure disordered, that I think myself in hell, till time come that I must go to Mr. Elmer, who teacheth me so gently, so pleasantly, with such fair allurements to learning, that I think all the time nothing whiles I am with him. And when I am called away from him I fall on weeping, because, whatever I do else but learning is full of grief, trouble, fear, and whole misliking unto me. And thus my book hath been so much my pleasure, and bringeth daily to me more pleasure and more, that in respect of it all other pleasures in very deed be but trifles and troubles to me.”[107]

Jane’s recital of her wrongs, if correctly reported—and Ascham says he remembers the conversation gladly, both because it was so worthy of memory, and because it was the last time he ever saw that noble and worthy lady—proves that her command of the vernacular was equal to her proficiency in the dead languages, and that she cherished a very natural resentment for the treatment to which she was subjected. There is something irresistibly provocative of laughter in the thought of the two scholars, old and young, and of the lofty compassion displayed by the chidden child towards the frivolous tastes and amusements of the parents to whom she doubtless outwardly accorded the exaggerated respect and reverence demanded by custom. Few would grudge the satisfaction derived from a sympathetic listener to the girl whose pleasures were to be so few and days for enjoying them so short.

When Ascham took leave he had received a promise from Jane to write to him in Greek, provided that he would challenge her by a letter from Germany. And so they parted, to meet no more.

It may be that Lady Jane’s sense of the harshness and severity of her treatment at home was accentuated by the tone adopted with regard to her by many of the leading Protestant divines. To these men—men to whom Mary was Jezebel, Gardiner that lying and subtle Cerberus,[108] and by whom persons holding theological views at variance with their own were freely and unreservedly handed over to the devil—Jane was not only wise, learned, and saintly beyond her years, but to her they turned their eyes, hoping for a future when, at the King’s side, she might prove the efficient protectress and patroness of the reformed Church. Her name was a household word amongst them, and whilst it can have been scarcely possible that she was indifferent to the incense offered by those to whom she had been instructed to look up, it may have rendered the system of repression adopted by her parents more unendurable than might otherwise have been the case.

Bradgate was a centre of strong and militant Protestantism. In conjunction with Warwick, the Marquis of Dorset was regarded by the German school of theologians as one of the “two most shining lights of the Church;”[109] and the many letters sent from England to Henry Bullinger at Zurich—some of them dated from Bradgate itself—abound in allusions to the family, and throw a useful light upon this part of Lady Jane’s life. In these epistles her father’s name recurs again and again, always in terms of extravagant eulogy, and as that of a munificent patron of needy divines. Thus he had bestowed a pension at first sight upon Ulmis, a young disciple of Bullinger’s, doubling it some months later; and his grateful protégé, striving to make what return is possible, impresses upon the foreign master the advisability of dedicating one of his works to the generous Marquis, anxiously sending him, when his request has been granted, the full title to be used in so doing. “He told me, indeed,” he adds, “that he had the title of Prince, but that he would not wish to be so styled by you, so you must judge for yourself whether to keep it back or not.”[110] Bullinger is likewise urged to present a copy of one of his books to the Marquis’s daughter, “and, take my word for it, you will never repent having done so.” A most learned and courteous letter would thereby be elicited from her. She had already translated into Greek a good part of Bullinger’s treatise on marriage, put by Ulmis himself into Latin, and had given it to her father as a New Year’s gift.[111] In May, 1551, another letter records that two days had been very agreeably passed at Bradgate with Jane, my Lord’s daughter, and those excellent and holy persons Aylmer, her tutor, and Haddon, chaplain to the Marquis. “For my own part, I do not think there ever lived any one more deserving of respect than this young lady, if you regard her family; more learned, if you consider her age; or more happy, if you consider both. A report has prevailed, and has begun to be talked of by persons of consequence, that this most noble virgin is to be betrothed and given in marriage to the King’s majesty. Oh, if that event should take place, how happy would be the union, and how beneficial to the church!”[112]