“Forthwith she untied her gowne. The hangman went to her to have helped her off therwith, then she desyred him to let her alone, turning towards her two gentlewomen, who helped her off therwith, and also her frose paste” (this most singular term means a matronly head-dress) “and neckercher, geving to her a fayre handkercher to knytte about her eyes. Then the hangman kneled downe, and asked her forgiveness whom she forgave most willingly. Then he willed her to stand upon the strawe, which doing she sawe the blocke. Then she sayd I pray you despatche me quickly. Then she kneled downe saying, ‘Will you take it off before I lay me downe?’ And the hangman answered her, ‘No, madame.’ She tied the kercher about her eyes. Then feeling for the block, saide ‘What shal I do, where is it?’ One of the standers by guyding her therunto, she layde her head downe upon the block, and stretched forth her body, and said, ‘Lord, into thy handes I commende my spirite,’ and so she ended” (Holinshed, and Chronicles of Queen Jane and Queen Mary).
No wonder that good old Foxe could not refrain from shedding tears when he recounted this tragedy, but sad as is the story of Jane Grey’s death, her life and its close are amongst England’s glories. Heroines are rare in all times and in all countries, but in Jane Grey we can boast of having had one of the truest and noblest of women, a perpetual legacy to us for all time. The name of Jane Grey shines out like some brilliant star amid the storm wrack that surrounds it on every side. Amidst all the bloodshed, crime, and cruelty of this sanguinary age of English history to read of that gentle spirit, that marvellously gifted, and most noble, pure, and gifted being, is like coming suddenly upon a beautiful white lily in the midst of a tangle of loathsome weeds.
Fuller, of “English Worthies” fame, has, in his quaint manner, summed up Jane Grey’s life in these words: “She had the birth of a Princess, the life of a saint, yet the death of a malefactor, for her parent’s offences, and she was longer a captive than a Queen in the Tower.” Both Jane and her husband were buried in the chapel of St Peter’s of the Tower.
The news of the Queen’s approaching marriage with Philip of Spain set half the country in a blaze. The men of Kent rose, headed by Sir Thomas Wyatt, as did those of Devon, led by Sir Peter Carew. As we have already seen, the Duke of Suffolk headed another rising in Leicestershire, but he was soon defeated and captured, and together with his brother Lord John Grey was taken to London and imprisoned in the Tower, on the 10th of February, two days before his daughter, Jane Grey’s, execution. It was only four months before, that Suffolk had received his daughter at the fortress as Queen of England, and he must have felt more than the bitterness of death at the thought that it was owing to his conduct in again leading an armed force against Queen Mary that Jane’s life, as well as his own, were sacrificed.
Five days after Jane had met her death on a scaffold which stood close to her father’s prison, he himself was taken to his trial at Westminster Hall. It was noted that when he left the fortress the Duke went “stoutly and cheerfully enough,” but that on his return when he landed at the water gate, “his countenance was heavy and pensive.” This is scarcely to be wondered at for he had been sentenced to death, and was beheaded on Tower Hill on the 23rd of the same month.
In the brief speech which he delivered to the people before his death the unfortunate Duke admitted the justice of his sentence, saying, “Masters, I have offended the Queen and her laws, and thereby I am justly condemned to die, and am willing to die, desiring all men to be obedient; and I pray God that this my death may be an example to all men, beseeching you all to bear me witness that I die in the faith of Christ trusting to be saved by his blood only, and by no other trumpery, the which died for me, and for all men that truly repent and steadfastly trust in him. And I do repent, desiring you all to pray to God for me that when you see my head depart from me, you will pray to God that he may receive my soul.”
Of Suffolk, Bishop Burnet writes; “That but for his weakness he would have died more pitied, if his practices had not brought his daughter to her end.”
Although it is probable that Suffolk’s body was buried in St Peter’s Chapel, his head is believed to be in the Church of the Holy Trinity in the Minories, a building which is within the ancient liberties of the Tower. The Duke’s town house was the converted convent of the church of the nuns of the order of Clares, so called after their foundress Santa Clara of Assisi. They were known as the “Sorores Minores,” whence the name of the district—the Minories. This building had been made over to Suffolk by Edward VI., and the present church of the Holy Trinity actually stands upon the site of the old convent chapel. This interesting edifice is now (1899) threatened with destruction, and in a few years it is extremely probable that the ground upon which it stands will be covered with warehouses or buildings connected with the London and North-Western Railway.
The head was found half-a-century ago in a small vault near the altar, and as it had been placed in sawdust made of oakwood, it is quite mummified, owing to the tannin in the oak. There is the mark of the blow of a sharp instrument above the place where the head was severed from the neck, and Sir George Scharf, than whom a better judge of an historical head whether on canvas or in a mummified state, never existed, wrote of it thus: “The arched form of the eyebrows and the aquiline shape of the nose, correspond with the portrait engraved in Lodge’s series from a picture at Hatfield; a duplicate of which is in the National Portrait Gallery.” This grim memento mori may some day find its way to the Tower, where it would be an object of much interest, although, if Suffolk’s ghost be consulted, it would perhaps plead for this melancholy relic of frail mortality to be placed in consecrated ground.
It was during Wyatt’s rebellion that the Tower was attacked for the last time in its history. Wyatt had defeated a force commanded by the old Duke of Norfolk and Sir Henry Jerningham, at Rochester, and from thence marched on to Gravesend, where he was met by some members of the Privy Council who had been sent to find out the exact nature of his demands: “The custody of the Tower, and the Queen within it!” was his modest request.