Lady Jane Grey and Her Times

by Ida A. Taylor

If scenes of this kind were not adapted to promote good feeling between belligerents in high places, neither was the spirit of the dominant party in the country one to conciliate opposition. It is not easy, as the figures of the English pioneers of Protestantism pass from time to time across the stage, in these years of their first triumph, to do them full justice. To judge a man by one period of his life, whether it is youth or manhood or old age, is scarcely fairer than to pronounce upon the colour and pattern of an eastern carpet, only one square yard of it being visible. The adherents of the new faith are here necessarily represented in a single phase, that of prosperity. At the top of the wave, they are seen at their worst, assertive, triumphant, intolerant and self-satisfied, the bull-dogs of the Reformation, only withheld by the leash from worrying their fallen antagonist. Thus, for the most part, they appear in Edward’s reign. And yet these men, a year or two later, were many of them capable of an undaunted courage, an impassioned belief in the common Lord of Protestant and Catholic, and a power of endurance, which have graven their names upon the national roll-call of heroes.

Meantime, more and more, the King’s precarious health was suggestive of disturbing contingencies. It may be that, as some assert, his uncle’s death, once become irrevocable, had preyed upon his spirits—that he “mourned, and soon missed the life of his Protector, thus unexpectedly taken away, who, now deprived of both uncles, howsoever the time were passed with pastimes, plays and shows, to drive away dumps, yet ever the remembrance of them sat so near his heart that lastly he fell sick....”[134] But though it is possible that, as his strength declined, matters he had taken lightly weighed upon his spirits, it is not necessary to seek other than natural and constitutional causes for a failure of health. That failure must have filled many hearts with forebodings.

There had been no attempt hitherto to ignore or deny the position occupied by Mary as next heir to the throne. When, at the New Year, she visited her brother, the honours rendered to her were a recognition of her rights, and the Northumberlands and Suffolks occupied a foremost place amongst the “vast throng” who rode with her through the city or met her at the palace gate and brought her to the presence-chamber of the King. Before the next New Year’s Day came round Edward was to be in his grave; Mary would fill his place; and the little cousin Jane, now spending a gay Christmas with her father’s nephews and wards, the young Willoughbys, at Tylsey, would be awaiting her doom in the Tower.

The shadow was already darkening over the King. It is said that the seeds of his malady had been sown by over-heating in his sports, during the progress of which he had sent so joyous an account to Fitzpatrick.[135] Soon after his sister’s visit he caught a bad cold, and unfavourable symptoms appeared. He had, however, youth in his favour, and few at first anticipated how speedy would be the end. Vague disquiet nevertheless quickly passed into definite alarm. In February the patient’s condition was such that Northumberland, who of all men had most at stake, summoned no less than six physicians, desiring them to institute an examination and to declare upon their oath, first, whether they considered the King’s disease mortal, and, if so, how long he was likely to live. The reply made by the doctors was that the malady was incurable, and that the patient might live until the following September.[136] Northumberland had obtained his answer; it was for him to take measures accordingly.

In March Edward’s last Parliament met and ended. “The King being a little diseased by cold-taking,” recorded a contemporary chronicle,[137] “it was not meet for his Grace to ride to Westminster in the air,”[138] and on the 31st—it was Good Friday—the Upper House waited upon him at Whitehall, Edward in his royal robes receiving the Lords Spiritual and Temporal. At seven that evening Parliament was dissolved.

Many hearts, loyal and true and pitiful, will have grieved at the signs of their King’s decay. But to Northumberland, watching them with the keenness lent by personal interest, personal ambition, and possibly by a consciousness of personal peril, they must have afforded absorbing matter of preoccupation. The exact time at which the designs by which the Duke trusted to turn the boy’s death to his advantage rather than to his ruin took definite shape and form must remain to some extent undetermined—his plans were probably decided by the verdict given by the doctors in February; it is certain that in the course of the spring they were elaborated, and that in them Lady Jane Grey, ignorant and unsuspicious, was a factor of primary importance. She was to be the figure-head of the Duke’s adventurous vessel.

The precise date of her birth is not known, but she was now in her sixteenth or seventeenth year—a sorrowful one for her and for all she loved. Childhood was a thing she had left behind; she was touching upon her brief space of womanhood; a few months later and that too would be over; she would have paid the penalty for the schemes and ambitions of others.

The eulogies of her panegyrists have, as a natural effect of extravagant praise, done in some sort an injury to this little white saint of the English Reformation. We do not readily believe in miracles; nor do infant prodigies either in the sphere of morals or attainments attract us. Yet, setting aside the tragedy of her end, there is something that appeals for pity in the very precocity upon which her contemporaries are fond of dwelling, testifying as it does to a wasted childhood, to a life robbed of its natural early heritage of carelessness and grace. To have had so short a time to spend on the green earth, and to have squandered so large a portion of it amongst dusty folios, and in the acquirement of learning; to have pored over parchments while sun and air, flowers and birds and beasts—all that should make the delight of a child’s life, the pageant of a child’s spring, was passed by as of no account; further, to have grown up versed in the technicalities of barren theological debate, the simple facts of Christ’s religion overlaid and obscured by the bitterness of professional controversialists,—almost every condition of her brief existence is an appeal for compassion, and Jane, from her blood-stained grave, cries out that she had not only been robbed of life by her enemies, but of a childhood by her friends.

To a figure defaced by flattery and adulation, whose very virtues and gifts were made to minister to party ends, it is difficult to restore the original brightness and beauty which nevertheless belonged to it. But here and there in the pages of the Italian evangelist, Michel Angelo Florio, who was personally acquainted with her, pictures are to be found which, drawn with tender touches, set the girl more vividly before us than is done by the stilted commendations of English devotees or German doctors of theology. Many times, he says—times when it may be hoped she had forgotten that there were opponents to be argued with or heretics to be convinced or doctrinal subtleties to be set forth—she would speak of the Word of God and almost preach it to those who served her;[139] and Florio himself, recounting the indignities and insults he had suffered by reason of his opinions, had seen her weep with pity, so that he well knew how much she had true religion at heart.[140]

Her attendants, too—in days when her melancholy end had caused each trifling incident to be treasured like a relic by those to whom she had been dear—related that she did not esteem rank or wealth or kingdom worth a straw in comparison with the knowledge God had granted to her of His only Son.[141] It must be remembered that in no long time she was to give proof, by her fashion of meeting death, that these phrases were no repetition of a lesson learned by rote, no empty and conventional form of words, but the true and sincere confession of a living faith.