HE grand-daughter of Mary Tudor, sister of Henry VIII., and of Charles Branden, Duke of Suffolk, and daughter of Henry Grey, Marquis of Dorset, was a lady of an amiable person, an engaging disposition, and accomplished parts; and being of an equal age with the late king [Edward VI.], she had received all her education with him, and seemed to possess greater facility in acquiring every part of manly and polite literature. She had attained a similar knowledge of the Roman and Greek languages, besides modern tongues; had passed most of her time in an application to learning, and expressed a great indifference for other occupations and amusements usual with her sex and station. Roger Ascham, tutor to the Lady Elizabeth, having one day paid her a visit, found her employed in reading Plato, while the rest of the party were engaged hunting in the park; and on his admiring the singularity of her choice, she told him that she received more pleasure from that author than the others could reap from all their sport and gaiety.
Her heart, full of this passion for literature and the elegant arts, and of tenderness towards her husband [Lord Guildford], who was deserving of her affections, had never opened itself to the flattering allurements of ambition, and the intelligence of her elevation to the throne was nowise agreeable to her. She even refused to accept of the present; pleaded the preferable title of the two princesses; expressed her dread of the consequences attending an enterprise so dangerous, not to say criminal; and desired to remain in the private station in which she was born. Overcome at length by the entreaties rather than the reasons of her father and father-in-law, and above all of her husband, she submitted to their will, and was prevailed on to relinquish her own judgment.
It was then usual for the kings of England, after their accession, to pass their first days in the Tower, and Northumberland thither conveyed the new sovereign. All the councillors were obliged to attend her to that fortress, and by this means became in reality prisoners in the hands of Northumberland, whose will they were necessitated to obey. Orders were given by the council to proclaim Jane throughout the kingdom, but their orders were executed only in London and the neighbourhood. No applause ensued. The people heard the proclamation with silence and concern; some even expressed their scorn and contempt; and one Pot, a vintner's apprentice, was severely punished for this offence. The Protestant teachers themselves, who were employed to convince the people of Jane's title, found their eloquence fruitless; and Ridley, Bishop of London, preached a sermon to that purpose, which wrought no effect upon his audience.
After the defeat of Northumberland's and another rebellion, 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 colour of tender mercy to the prisoner's soul, induced her to send divines, who harassed her with perpetual disputations; and even a reprieve for three days was granted, in hopes that she should 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 in the Greek language, in which, besides sending her a copy of the Scriptures in that tongue, she exhorted her to maintain in every feature a like steady perseverance.
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 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. 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; that she 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.
TARQUINIA MOLZA.
[1600.]
HILARION DE COSTE.
