Jane Grey, Queen of England^[1]

1537 - 1554  (~ 16 years)

• Name	Jane Grey
  Suffix	Queen of England
  Birth	Oct 1537	Bradgate, Leicestershire
  Gender	Female
  Acceded	10 Jul 1553
  Death	12 Feb 1554	Tower of London, Tower Green, London, England
  	Cause: beheaded
  Burial	Tower of London, Chapel Royal, London, England
  Notes	http://www.hull.ac.uk/php/cssbct/cgi-bin/gedlkup.php/n=royal?royal00868 «b»Lady Jane Grey (1537 - 1554) - The 'Nine Days' Queen«/b» Queen Victoria is well known to have had the longest reign in English history, over sixty years, but poor young Lady Jane Grey had the shortest …just nine days. Why was Lady Jane Grey's reign as Queen of England so short? Lady Jane Grey was the eldest daughter of Henry Grey, Duke of Suffolk, and she was the great-grand-daughter of Henry VII. She was proclaimed Queen after the death of her cousin, the protestant King «u»Edward VI <http://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/England-History/KingsandQueens.htm#EDWARD%20VI>«/u». She was actually fifth in line to the throne, but was his personal choice as she was a Protestant. Edwards's half-sister, «u»Mary Tudor <http://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/England-History/KingsandQueens.htm#EDWARD%20VI>«/u», who was the next in line for the throne, was out of favour being a devout Catholic. Edward wanted to keep England firmly Protestant and he knew that Mary Tudor would take England back into the Catholic faith. John Dudley, Duke of Northumberland, was Protector to King Edward VI. He persuaded the dying young king to will his crown to Lady Jane Grey, who by coincidence just happened to be the Duke's daughter-in-law. Edward died on 6th July 1553 and Lady Jane ascended to the throne with her husband Lord Guildford Dudley at her side - she was just sweet sixteen. Lady Jane was beautiful and intelligent and had ambitious plans to rebuild the English economy and return land to the farmers who had been dispossessed by King Henry VIII. But the country rose in favour of the direct and true Royal line and the Council proclaimed Mary Tudor Queen some nine days later. Unfortunately for Lady Jane, her advisors were grossly incompetent, and her father was partly responsible for her untimely execution as he was involved in an attempted rebellion. This was the Wyatt rebellion, named after Sir Thomas Wyatt, who was an English soldier and a so-called 'rebel'. In 1554 Wyatt was involved in a conspiracy against the marriage of Mary Tudor to Phillip of Spain. He raised an army of Kentish men and marched on London, but was captured and later beheaded. After the Wyatt rebellion was quashed, Lady Jane and her husband, who were lodged in the Tower of London, were taken out and beheaded on Tower Green on 12th February 1554. Lady Jane's husband was executed first, and she was led past his body on her way to the block. She died, it is said, very bravely …on the scaffold she asked the Executioner, 'Please despatch me quickly'. She tied her kerchief round her eyes and felt for the block saying, 'Where is it?' One of the onlookers guided her to the block where she laid her head down, and stretched out her arms saying, 'Lord, into thy hands I commit my soul.' And so she died …she had been Queen of England for just nine days …10th - 19th July 1553. The shortest reign of any English monarch, before or since. http://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/England-History/LadyJaneGrey.htm «u»«b»See her biography: «/b» «b»http://www.tudorplace.com.ar/aboutJaneGrey.htm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lady_Jane_Grey«/b»
  Person ID	I18421	Glenn Cook Family
  Last Modified	5 Feb 2013

  
  

  Father	Henry Grey, 1st Duke of Suffolk,   b. 17 Jan 1517   d. 23 Feb 1554, Tower Hill, London, England (Age 37 years)
  Mother	Frances Brandon,   b. 16 Jul 1517, Bishop's Hatfield, Hertfordshire, England d. 20 Nov 1559, Chaterhouse, Sheen, Surrey, England (Age 42 years)
  Marriage	Mar 1533	Suffolk Place, Southwark, London
  Family ID	F8683	Group Sheet  |  Family Chart

  
  

  Family	Lord Guildford Dudley,   b. 1536   d. 12 Feb 1554, Tower of London, Tower Green, London, England (Age 18 years)
  Marriage	21 May 1553	Durham House, London, England
  Family ID	F8795	Group Sheet  |  Family Chart
  Last Modified	30 Nov 2006

  
  

• Photos » Slide Show		Grey, Jane, Queen of England
  		Jane Gray Queen of England portrait by an unknown artis
  		The Execution of Lady Jane Grey by the French Romantic painter, Paul Delaroche, 1833 DELAROCHE, Paul (b. 1797, Paris, d. 1859, Paris) The Execution of Lady Jane Grey 1833 Oil on canvas, 246 x 297 cm National Gallery, London Anglomania was in fashion in France in the 1820s and 1830s. Interest in British history, fuelled by the novels of Sir Walter Scott, was further stimulated by parallels drawn between recent events in France and the turbulent accounts of Tudors, Stuarts and the Civil War. The pictorial representation of British history may have been pioneered in Britain, but it was the Frenchman Paul Delaroche who gained a European reputation with the grand scenes drawn from it which he exhibited at the annual Paris Salon between 1825 and 1835. Popularised through mass-produced engravings, these set pieces, combining ostentatious antiquarianism with the pseudo-realism of bourgeois melodrama, in turn influenced the painters of national history in mid-Victorian Britain. The painting depicts the last moments on 12 February 1554 in the life of the seventeen-year old Jane Grey, a great granddaughter of Henry VII who was proclaimed Queen of England upon the death of young King Edward VI, a Protestant like herself. She reigned for nine days in 1553, but, through the machinations of the partisans of Henry VIII's Catholic daughter, Mary Tudor, she was convicted of high treason and sentenced to death in the Tower of London. Delaroche, who based the painting on a sixteenth-century Protestant martyrology, has falsified the historical account the better to appeal to his contemporaries. Lady Jane Grey, a humanist-educated young married woman, was in fact executed out of doors. Attended by two gentlewomen, probably no less stoical than she, she resolutely made her own way to the block. She could not have worn a white satin dress of nineteenth-century cut with a whalebone corset, and her hair would have been tucked up, not streaming down over her shoulders. But a painting cannot be judged by the criteria of historical accuracy. Much more applicable to this particular picture are the standards of popular melodrama and tableau vivant. As on a stage, the heroine gropes her way towards the audience, gently guided by the elderly Constable of the Tower whose massive, dark, male presence acts as a foil to her own. A spotlight trained on her from above complements the dim stage lighting, reflecting from her immaculate dress and the straw which spills over into the front row of the stalls. The emotions of each actor are carefully delineated and distinguished, and we are left in no doubt as to the character of each even of the lady in the background who turns her back on the terrible sight. --- Keywords: -------------- Author: DELAROCHE, Paul Title: The Execution of Lady Jane Grey Form: painting Time-line: 1801-1850 School: French Type: historical
  		Jane Grey, Queen of England
  		Jane Gray Queen of England portrait by an unknown artis

  
  

• Sources

  [S36] Brian Tompsett, Dept of Computer Science, University of Hull, England(B.C.Tompsett@dcs.hull.ac.uk), Directory of Royal Genealogical Data, (This work is Copyright b 1994-2002 Brian C Tompsett).