Lady Jane Grey: NIne Days Queen by Alison Plowden

Author:Alison Plowden [Plowden, Alison]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: 16th Century, Royalty, Biography & Autobiography, Executions, England/Great Britain, Nonfiction, History
ISBN: 978-0752467122
Publisher: The History Press
Published: 2011-08-03T04:00:00+00:00

FIVE

JANA NON REGINA

Although my fault be great, and I confess it to be so, nevertheless I am charged and esteemed guilty more than I have deserved. For whereas I might take upon me that of which I was not worthy, yet no one can ever say either that I sought it as my own, or that I was pleased with it.

Jane Grey

Faint echoes of the rejoicing in the city could be heard even inside the Tower, where, so it is said, the duke of Suffolk presently came to break the news to his daughter as she sat at supper, and with his own hands helped to tear down the cloth of estate above her head. Then, ordering his men to leave their weapons behind, he went out on to Tower Hill, saying helplessly, ‘I am but one man,’ and proclaimed the Lady Mary’s grace to be queen of England, before scuttling away to his house at Sheen.1 Jane was left alone in the stripped and silent rooms to listen to the distant clamour of the bells. For her there would be no going home. When Lady Throckmorton, one of the ladies of the household who had gone out that afternoon to stand as proxy godmother for Jane at a christening, returned to her post she found the royal apartments deserted; on asking for the queen’s grace, she was told that the Lady Jane was now a prisoner detained in the Deputy Lieutenant’s house.

It was there, the next day, that Jane suffered another visit from the marquess of Winchester, now peremptorily demanding the return of all the jewels and other ‘stuff’ she had received from the royal stores during her nine days’ reign. The Lord Treasurer went through her and Guildford’s wardrobes with a cold pawnbroker’s eye, confiscating jewellery, furs, hats, a velvet and sable muffler and all the money in their possession. In spite of this, a peevish interdepartmental correspondence concerning the disappearance of ‘a square coffer covered with fustian of Naples’, a leather box marked with Henry VIII’s broad arrow and containing, among other things, thirteen pairs of worn leather gloves, and another box labelled ‘the Queen’s jewels’ dragged on into the autumn.2

While Winchester was busy covering his tracks, Mr Secretary Cecil was doing the filing, methodically endorsing the office copy of a letter signed ‘Jane the Quene’ with the words ‘Jana non Regina’, and the earl of Arundel and William Paget were riding hard for Framlingham to lay the allegiance and excuses of the lords of Council at Mary Tudor’s feet. Mary accepted them both. She had no choice, for, like it or not, she was going to have to rule the country with their help, and on Friday 21 July Arundel and Paget went on to Cambridge to arrest the duke of Northumberland in the queen’s name. ‘I beseech you, my lord of Arundel, use mercy towards me, knowing the case as it is,’ said John Dudley to the man who, barely a week before, had wished he might die at his feet.

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