Jane Grey, second cousin to King Edward VI, was born in October of 1537 to the Marquess and Marchioness of Dorset, fifth in the line of succession for the throne of England. She reigned as Queen for nine days when she was sixteen; less than a year later, on 12 February 1554, she was executed for treason. Though in the eyes of the state her death was at best the unfortunate outcome of a botched political gambit, Jane herself considered her execution to be martyrdom; successive generations, progressively Protestant, have considered it the same.

Jane was not raised with any real hopes of ascending to the throne, but she was raised to be quite conscious of her royal blood. Jane was sent to live at the royal court when she eight years old under the guidance of Catherine Parr, sixth wife of Henry VIII. There she was treated with dignity second only to the King’s own children. When Henry died, Catherine removed to her manor house at Chelsea and shortly thereafter married Thomas Seymour, brother of Edward Seymour, Lord Protector to the nine year old king. For a sum of money which he is supposed to have used to settle gambling debts, Jane’s father sold her guardianship to Thomas Seymour. Thus Jane lived with him, and with Catherine Parr, until the former queen died from childbed fever, and Seymour was executed for treason.

Jane’s parents had counted on Seymour to secure Jane’s marriage to King Edward, and once their schemes were absolutely disappointed they seemed to regard Jane with special resentment. Their cruelty to her during the years following her return to Bradgate was reported by Jane herself in what Chapman calls “one of the most famous conversations in English history” (46). Roger Ascham, once tutor to Princess Elizabeth, encountered Jane while paying a visit to the Dorsets during which all the family but herself were out hunting. He discovered her reading Plato, and when he questioned her evident pleasure in the text, she spoke in great detail of the misery she suffered in her parents’ company, and compared it rapturously to her joy in spending time with her tutor (a friend of Ascham’s, called Aylmer): “When I am in presence of either father or mother...I think myself in hell–till the time comes when I must go to Mr Aylmer, who teacheth me so gently, so pleasantly...that I think all the time nothing whiles I am with him” (Chapman 47).

This conversation has done a great deal to feed the legend of Jane as a “prodigy of Renaissance learning” (Prochaska 34). It is usually mentioned in conjunction with the fact that when she was fourteen she began corresponding with several Swiss Reformation leaders, Zwingli and Bullinger among them; the surviving evidence of this correspondence is called the Zurich Letters. Their writings to Jane, as well as to Aylmer (who prompted the correspondence) describe her glowingly. Haddon, for example, replied thus to her when she sent him her Greek translation of his Latin treatise on marriage: “I do not think that among all the English nobility for many ages past there has a arisen a single individual who, to the highest excellencies of talent and judgment has united so much diligence and assiduity to the cultivation of every liberal pursuit” (Chapman 55). Praise of this sort was remembered by future generations, who chose to depict her as the model of whatever feminine virtues were currently most fashionable. What is often overlooked is the fact that Haddon and the rest addressed Jane on the expectation that she would marry Edward VI and become a great patroness of the reformed faith in England.

The chain of events which led to Jane’s downfall began with her extremely unwilling marriage at the age of fifteen to Guildford Dudley, son of John Dudley, Duke of Northumberland. Northumberland became close to the king after the death of Edward Seymour, Lord Protector, and when Edward became ill with consumption at the age of fifteen, Northumberland was his most immediate supervisor. In light of his failing health, Edward was given his majority at the age of fifteen. Conscious that he would not live to produce an heir, Edward put forth his plan for the succession, which was based on the plan devised by Henry before his death but altered in two very important ways: Edward did not consider his two half-sisters eligible for the succession, nor was he willing to leave his crown to any woman. Therefore Edward’s “Devise” stated that the crown would pass to no one at his death. Rather, the “L. Frauncese” (Francis Brandon, Jane Grey’s’s mother) would become Regent until such time as she gave birth to a son, who would be King. In the likely event that the Duchess had no sons, the Regency would pass to her eldest daughter, Lady Jane, who would reign until she gave birth to a son. If she also failed at this, the Regency would pass to Lady Katherine, then to Lady Mary, then to Francis’ sister Eleanor–and so on, until a Tudor male was produced.

Loades characterizes this behavior “not [as] the thoughts of a practical politician, but of a person pursuing an obsession;” this obsession being the desire to leave his throne to a male heir (233). Northumberland, who immediately understood how impracticable this plan was, convinced Edward to alter the “device” into a legal will, which, instead of entailing the crown to a line of nonexistent males, gave it directly to Jane, “with remainder to any son she might bear” (Loades 240). The unlikely choice of Jane Grey for Edward’s heir seems to have arisen from the fact that Edward considered his sisters’ legitimacy dubious. The next immediate heir was Francis Brandon; grounds for bypassing her were found in the wording of Henry VIII’s plan for the succession, in which, the crown was to pass to the heirs of his niece, but not to Francis herself. Besides all this, it is generally taken for granted that Northumberland argued strenuously for his daughter-in-law, hoping to rule through her.

Edward died on 6 July 1553, and by the tenth of that month, Jane Grey was proclaimed Queen in London (Loach 170). She was completely ignorant of the scheme to place her on the throne until a week or so before Edward’s death; when she learned of it, she became ill from anxiety. When the King’s death was at last announced and her succession proclaimed, she collapsed, crying, and declared that she did not want the crown. The angry rebukes of Northumberland and her parents eventually stopped her protests, and she promised to “govern the realm to His glory” (Luke 268). Her throne, however, was immediately in jeopardy. Anticipating Mary’s resistance, Northumberland had originally planned to bring both Jane and her cousin to the Tower of London: his daughter-in-law to be crowned, and Mary to be imprisoned. Mary was warned, however, that Robert Dudley was riding with three hundred men to capture her, and with the assistance of Nicholas Throckmorton, escaped Northumberland’s agents.

When Jane undertook her first public procession through London as queen, the public receiving her was quiet, and did not cheer. Mary, on the other hand, was enormously popular with the people, and when she staged her uprising against Jane she had the assistance of many Catholic nobles from the North. With their assistance she overwhelmed the forces of John Dudley and Henry Grey, Jane’s father. Mary offered pardon to those who would turn from Jane’s cause to her own, and all the Privy Councilors signed a document pledging her unanimous support. Jane, relieved to relinquish the crown, was imprisoned in the Tower.

Jane wrote immediately to Mary, knowing that she was likely to be forgiven as soon as she had a chance to make the truth of the situation plain. She had never coveted Mary’s crown and had accepted it only under the duress of wiser and more cunning politicians. Mary knew her cousin well enough to suppose all these disclaimers to be true; she probably had every intention of releasing her, until Henry Grey attempted a second uprising in Jane’s name. He had been pardoned once when Francis Brandon pleaded for his life; he was not given a second chance.

The impression of Jane Grey as a martyr stems primarily from the fact that Mary sent her personal confessor, Dr. Feckenham, to remonstrate with Jane in the weeks before her death; the assumption is that Mary offered to spare her life if she would embrace Catholicism. While this would not be impractical–Protestants would probably not form plots around Jane if she were not Protestant–most modern historians find it unlikely that any such offer was made. Jane, nonetheless, saw her execution as a result of her faithfulness to the Reformed faith. This was neither an illogical nor hysterical attitude, since Northumberland most likely prevailed upon Jane to accept the crown by emphasizing the need for a Protestant monarch; all the consequences of Jane having done so were therefore incurred by her faithfulness to the New Learning. She wrote several letters in the days before her execution, all of which attest that this was her attitude toward her death; in a note to the Lieutenant of the Tower, she wrote “Live still to die, that by death you may purchase eternal life” (Luke 401).

There is little question that Jane was intelligent and accomplished beyond the standard for girls of her time, and none at all that she was passionately devoted to the Reformed (Protestant) faith. Neither is there any debate whether she was truly innocent of complicity in the political machinations that lead to her death. There is, however, a tendency to forget “that she was only sixteen” at the time of her death (Lingard, qtd. Prochaska 37). Her biographers sometimes adopt the attitude of hagiographers, regaling Jane as the most brilliant figure to emerge from the Tudor dynasty, more remarkable even than Elizabeth. One historian has so tired of this tradition that in rather exasperated tones he has declared Jane “a rather simple girl” and a “bluestocking” whose most defining characteristic was a “preoccupation with religion” (Matthew 131-133).

It is probably not unfair to say that Jane was “preoccupied” with the Reformed faith; Chapman asserts that Jane was “of the stuff of which Puritan martyr is made: self-examining, fanatical, bitterly courageous, and utterly incapable...of compromise...” (56) The conflict between Jane’s force of will and the ambitions of her parents and their allies led directly to her destruction–and Jane’s force of will stemmed directly from her religious conviction. I suspect that the misery of her brief life fed the intensity of her devotion to the New Learning, and made her less unwilling to give that life up than she might otherwise have been. Nonetheless, it would be hard to begrudge her the conviction that she died for a worthy cause, as this conviction allowed her to face her death with enviable composure and contentment. The truth would hardly have been as comforting, since Jane Grey was, in effect, a martyr: to ruthlessness, political expediency, and other people’s ambitions.