On the morning of the 12th of February 1554, Lady Jane Grey — great-granddaughter of Henry VII, a girl who had been made queen without wanting it and never crowned — was led out of her lodgings in the Tower of London to a scaffold raised within the walls, on Tower Green.
Her age is genuinely uncertain, because no record of her birth survives. Tradition puts it in the autumn of 1537, which would make her sixteen. A body of more recent argument, resting partly on Michelangelo Florio’s statement that she was seventeen when she died, places her birth in late 1536 or early 1537. Historic Royal Palaces gives her as seventeen. Sixteen or seventeen is as close as the record allows, and the difference matters only because so much writing about her has been willing to pick whichever number sounded more affecting.
Her husband, Lord Guildford Dudley, had been taken out to Tower Hill at about ten o’clock and beheaded there with a single stroke. His body was loaded into a cart, his head wrapped in a cloth, and brought back inside the Tower for burial. The contemporary account, the Chronicle of Queen Jane and of Two Years of Queen Mary, is plain and brief about what Jane saw: she did see his dead carcase taken out of the cart, as well as she did see him before alive going to his death. That is the whole of it. The story as it is usually told — Jane at a window, crying out “Oh, Guildford, Guildford” — is repeated by serious historians, Eric Ives among them, and Historic Royal Palaces carries it with the word “reportedly”. The Chronicle does not record the window, and it does not record the cry.
The Horror
Jane had not sought the throne. Edward VI’s device for the succession set aside both his half-sisters and named her, and for a long time the whole scheme was laid at the door of her father-in-law John Dudley, Duke of Northumberland. Since the 1970s many historians have attributed the device, and the insistence on carrying it out, to the dying king himself. Northumberland’s ambition is not in doubt; sole authorship of the plan is.
She was proclaimed queen on the 10th of July 1553 and deposed on the 19th, when the Privy Council changed sides and proclaimed Mary. That is where the nine days comes from. Counted from Edward’s death on the 6th of July, her reign was nearer thirteen days, and “the Nine Days’ Queen” is a later coinage rather than anything her own century called her. The words most often put in her mouth when she was told she was queen — that the crown was not her right and pleased her not — belong to the retellings; no contemporary account consulted here carries them.
She went back into the Tower as a prisoner, and was tried at the Guildhall on the 13th of November 1553 and condemned. Mary did not kill her then. What changed was her father: in January 1554 Henry Grey involved himself in Wyatt’s rebellion against Mary’s marriage to Philip of Spain, and put his family at the centre of a Protestant rising for the second time. Jane died for what she could be used to represent rather than for anything she had done. She said as much on the scaffold, drawing a careful line between the act committed in her name and her own part in procuring it. Good people, she began, I am come hither to die, and by a law I am condemned to the same. The deed against the queen was unlawful, and her consent to it was too; the seeking of it she washed her hands of before God and before them. She asked for their prayers, said she would be saved by no other means than the mercy of God, and recited the Miserere — Psalm 51 — in English to the end. The Chronicle says she came forth being nothing at all abashed.
Then the hangman asked her forgiveness, as the form required, and she gave it. She tied the kerchief over her own eyes; no one blindfolded her. And blind, kneeling, she could not find the block. She felt for it and met nothing, and said: “What shall I do? Where is it?” The Chronicle records that one of the standers-by guided her to it. It does not name him, and the accounts that do name him — the Lieutenant of the Tower, or his deputy — are doing something the primary record does not support. She laid her head down and said, “Lord, into thy hands I commend my spirit.” And so, in the chronicler’s phrase, she ended.
There is no need to add anything to that, and a good deal of what has been added is traceable. Richard Davey’s 1909 account gave the world an hour’s harrowing delay between the two executions, a procession of two hundred yeomen, a masked axeman and a detailed description of her clothes. The Chronicle mentions no delay and no procession — only the lieutenant leading her, and her two gentlewomen weeping.
The Modern Relic
In 1833 the French painter Paul Delaroche finished The Execution of Lady Jane Grey, shown at the Paris Salon of 1834, and it is the reason most people can picture this morning at all. A blindfolded girl in white satin gropes for the block while an older man guides her hand with something like fatherly care and her women collapse against the wall behind her.
Almost none of the staging is right. The execution happened outdoors and Delaroche set it in a dark vaulted interior, lit and dressed as a stage designer would dress it. The Norman columns behind her do not belong to the place where she died. The white satin is his invention. So is much of the emotional weather: the National Gallery’s own entry notes that the historical record has her going to her death bravely, not in the collapse the picture shows. Delaroche named his source in the Salon catalogue as the Martyrologe des protestants of 1558, a martyr’s book rather than a chronicle, and the figure guiding her hand he identified as Sir John Brydges, Lieutenant of the Tower — a name the contemporary account does not give. What the painting does keep, and keeps exactly, is the blindfold she tied herself and the hands reaching for wood that was not where she expected it.
The canvas was left to the National Gallery in 1902, passed to the Tate, damaged in the Thames flood of 1928 and given up as lost. It was found again at the Tate in 1973, rolled up, by a curator looking for something else, and it hangs in the National Gallery today.
She is traditionally said to lie in the chapel of St Peter ad Vincula inside the Tower, alongside Anne Boleyn, Catherine Howard and Margaret Pole, and Historic Royal Palaces states it plainly. It is worth knowing that the certainty is thinner than it sounds. No contemporary source records her burial; the only excavation, during the chapel’s restoration in 1876 and 1877, turned up nothing that could be identified as her; and the memorial pavement that carries her name was laid during that same Victorian restoration, more than three centuries after the fact. Of the four women named on that floor, only Jane was certainly a teenager. Catherine Howard’s birth year is unrecorded and she was probably around twenty; Anne Boleyn was a woman in her thirties; Margaret Pole was in her sixties. What they have in common is not their age but that the Tudor state found each of them easier dead, and that Jane, who was the youngest and had chosen least, is the one the painters came back for.
