Her Highness, the Traitor - By Susan Higginbotham Page 0,154

dignity with which he went to the scaffold, according to an anonymous chronicler who was probably employed at the Tower. The chronicler Grafton, who may have known Guildford, wrote, “that comely, vertuous, and goodly gentleman the lorde Gylford Duddeley most innocently was executed, whom God had endowed with suche vertues, that even those that never before the tyme of his execution saw hym, dyd with lamentable teares bewayle his death.”

Finally, we come to Jane Grey and her family, a subject about which fiction has come to overlay fact so heavily that distinguishing between the two has become difficult if not impossible. In my own attempt to do so, I have been heavily influenced by the research of Leanda de Lisle and Eric Ives, who have done much to clear away the myths that permeate most modern works about Jane and those who brought her to the throne. I am indebted to their research for much of what I say below, though any errors I may have fallen into are of course my own.

There is a widespread notion, stated as a matter of fact in most modern accounts of Lady Jane, that Adrian Stokes was a pretty boy half Frances’s age. A friend of Adrian’s recorded his birth to the hour in a horoscope: Adrian was born on March 4, 1519, making him less than two years younger than Frances, born on July 16, 1517. A portrait of a stout, middle-aged lady and a much younger man, for centuries described as one of Frances and Adrian Stokes, was identified recently as a portrait of Mary, Lady Dacre, and her son, Gregory Fiennes.

Adrian Stokes is named variously as Frances’s steward and as her master of horse, but in either case, such a position in a noble household was a responsible one requiring a man of ability, not a sinecure for the decorative and vacuous. Indeed, privy council records show that in the 1540s, Adrian Stokes served in France as marshal of the garrison of Newhaven (now Ambleteuse), where he had command of ten men.

There is no evidence Frances’s match with Adrian offended Queen Mary or caused Frances’s daughters to be taken from her care, as is claimed by some authors. It seems to have been understood as a means for Frances to distance herself from the royal succession. Queen Elizabeth’s early biographer, William Camden, wrote that Frances’s marriage was “to her dishonor, but yet for her security.”

The most enshrined legend about Frances and, to a much lesser extent, her husband Henry Grey is that they were brutal parents who made young Jane Grey’s life a miserable one. This belief is based chiefly on Roger Ascham’s book The Schoolmaster, written long after the deaths of Jane and her parents, in which Ascham recalled Jane complaining about the “pinches, nips, and bobs” she received from her parents, in contrast to the lessons she received from her kindly tutor, John Aylmer. Yet in a letter to John Sturm written a few months after the visit, Ascham commented only on his admiration for Jane’s command of Greek: “I was immediately admitted into her chamber, and found the noble damsel—Oh, ye gods!—reading Plato’s Phaedro in Greek, and so thoroughly understanding it that she caused me the greatest astonishment.” If anything disturbed Ascham about his recent encounter with Jane, he did not see fit to mention it to Sturm at the time.

Contemporary correspondence by those who knew Jane shows a father who took pride in his daughter’s intellectual accomplishments and who shared her religious views. In July 1551, Jane wrote to thank the reformer Heinrich Bullinger in Zurich for “that little volume of pure and unsophisticated religion” which he had sent to her and her father; both were reading it, she added. Earlier, in May 1551, while Jane’s father was in Scotland, John ab Ulmis wrote to Bullinger that he had been visiting Jane and her mother at Bradgate, where he had been “passing these two days very agreeably with Jane, my lord’s daughter, and those excellent and holy persons Aylmer and Haddon [Jane’s tutor and the family chaplain].” Ulmis went on to gush, “For my own part, I do not think there ever lived any one more deserving of respect than this young lady, if you regard her family; more learned, if you consider her age; or more happy, if you consider both.” The previous year, in December 1550, Ulmis noted Jane was translating a treatise “On marriage” from the Latin to the Greek as a New