THE BLOG
Extra material for The Lady Of Misrule
Nine things you (probably) didn’t know about the Nine Days Queen…
1. She wasn’t queen for nine days. (Let’s start with the biggie.) Not strictly speaking. There were nine days from her being proclaimed to her being detained; but there’d been four days before that, from Edward V1’s hushed-up death, from The king is dead to Long live the queen. Add it all together and you get unlucky thirteen.
2. We don’t know Jane’s birth date, nor are there any authenticated likenesses of her. Historians are pretty sure that she was sixteen when she came to the throne, and contemporary accounts have her as diminutive. Don’t be fooled, though: her intellect was formidable – she was, already, at sixteen, a scholar of Europe-wide repute – as was her ambition, albeit for her country rather than for herself. She was committed to the reformist cause and although she hadn’t wanted to be queen, she did very much want a protestant England.
3. She was England’s rightful queen. Or you could say that, and you’d be kind of right. The late king had chosen her as his successor, and he was entitled to do so. His father – Henry V111 – had nominated the princesses Mary and Elizabeth to follow in line if the boy-king died without an heir of his own… but the princesses were their father’s choice rather than his legitimate heirs. He’d bastardised them in his convoluted efforts to wipe his first two marriages from history; and because they were deemed illegitimate, they had no legal claim to the throne. But Henry V111 had passed a law so that a king could choose his successor(s), which then allowed him to ‘choose’ Mary and Elizabeth, to reinstate them to the line of succession without his losing face (something that he was never keen to do..) by having to backtrack over those marriages. The problem was, as the law stood, any subsequent king could then also make such a choice. Which Edward did. (And it seems he really did: the evidence is that he worked at his choice over some months before his death – this was no deathbed panic.) For reasons which remain a mystery (his half-sisters’ supposed illegitimacy? Mary’s catholicism?), Edward chose Jane, the eldest child of his cousin.
4. As queen, Jane refused to grant royal status to her young husband; he wouldn’t be king, she said, which caused an almighty row with her powerful in-laws. She stuck to her guns. Because nowhere in the late king’s ‘device’ (as his kind-of-will was known) had it said anything about her husband being king. Married though she (very recently) was, Jane alone was to be sovereign. She suggested that her husband become the Duke of Clarence. Or, presumably, lump it.
5. Jane’s position, as queen, looked unassailable. No one saw Mary Tudor’s victory coming. Because Mary and whose army? Mary Tudor was a country-residing gentlewoman. Jane had the support of all of England’s councillors and of the church, the Royal Guard, the Navy, and she held the Tower, which was the nation’s armoury.
6. When it all went wrong, Jane didn’t need taking to the Tower – she was already there. She’d arrived shortly after having been proclaimed, as was tradition: the new monarch secures the Tower. (And now Mary was on her way – the common people of England lining the roadsides to cheer her on – to do just that.) All Jane’s supposed supporters and her family fled the Tower (her father having taken down the canopy above her throne); she was left there with her husband and mother-in-law. Divested of her small change, she was escorted across the green into custody.
7. The circumstances of her detention were comfortable. She lived in the house of the Gentleman-goaler, Nathaniel Partridge. A friend of Partridge’s who came to dine, one evening, was surprised to find Jane there at the table, and he left an account of her as informal in her manner, chatty, eager for news of the outside world, the fast-changing religio-political situation.
8. No one expected Jane to be executed. Her trial – and the inevitable indictment – was a formality. Mary Tudor – and this is something you probably didn’t know about Mary Tudor – was at this point considered merciful to a fault. Jane would be held for a while, then – when Mary’s reign was better-established, perhaps married, perhaps with an heir on the way – quietly released.
9. It was Jane’s father who sealed her fate. Remember him? – taking down her canopy, telling her that she was no longer queen before hot-footing it to freedom and basking in some of Mary Tudor’s mercifulness. Well, he was stupid enough to get himself back in trouble, a mere five months later. He was involved in an uprising which almost certainly wasn’t in favour of Jane – there was never any mention of Jane, and, really, why would there have been? Jane was a spent force, a convicted traitor. The rebels probably favoured Elizabeth, Mary’s protestant half-sister. But the clear, central involvement of Jane’s father in the plot showed that she would remain a focus – however unwilling – for potential future dissent. The Wyatt rebellion had been very serious indeed: London under seige, the Tower bombarded, everyone inside Mary’s palace – her ladies, her servants – barricading the doors and arming themselves with whatever was to hand. It had been a very near miss for Mary. From then onwards, everything had to change. Order had to be asserted and Jane Grey, handily already convicted as a traitor, paid the price.