Her Highness, the Traitor - By Susan Higginbotham Page 0,155

Year’s gift for her father, whom Holinshed described as “somewhat learned himself, and a great favorer of those that were learned.” Henry Grey himself wrote of Jane in December 1551 to Bullinger, “I acknowledge yourself also to be much indebted to you on my daughter’s account, for having always exhorted her in your godly letters to a true faith in Christ, the study of the scriptures, purity of manners, and innocence of life.” Robert Wingfield, in a contemporary account of Mary’s victory that is hostile to Henry Grey, described Jane as the duke’s “favourite daughter.”

It needs to be remembered that Tudor standards of child-rearing were very different from our own: the smart-mouthed children lording it over their hapless parents who are staples of modern television and film would have been regarded with horror by Jane’s contemporaries. The humanist Juan Luis Vives, who had been asked by no less a personage than Catherine of Aragon to advise her on her daughter Mary’s education, wrote, “Never have the rod off a boy’s back; specially the daughter should be handled without any cherishing. For cherishing marreth sons, but it utterly destroyeth daughters.” Even John Aylmer, the tutor whom Ascham recalled Jane speaking of so fondly, wrote letters indicating his belief that the adolescent Jane needed a firm hand.

Frances Grey is a much more shadowy figure than her husband and Jane, but contemporary sources do not support her portrayal as a vicious and rabidly ambitious woman who terrorized her hapless daughter. Though she is often depicted as a dominant figure in making her daughter queen, at least one source, the Marian sympathizer Robert Wingfield, wrote that she was “vigorously opposed” to the match of Jane and Guildford Dudley. Significantly, she never spent any time in prison for her role in the succession crisis of 1553, an indication, perhaps, that she was believed by Mary’s government to have been a reluctant participant. There is no evidence she shared her daughter’s or her husband’s intellectual interests, but there is equally no evidence she discouraged her daughter’s intellectual development or that she resented her because she was not a boy, although she certainly must have grieved for the loss of her infant son. (For that matter, despite the prevailing notion that Frances spent most of her time slaying sad-eyed does when not beating her daughter, there’s no evidence she particularly enjoyed hunting, other than her one recorded absence on a hunting excursion on the day Ascham showed up at Bradgate.) Unlike Anne Seymour, Duchess of Somerset, whose difficult personality elicited negative comments from everyone from Catherine Parr on down, none of Frances’s contemporaries are on record as disliking her. When Sir Richard Morison groused about “Lady Suffolk’s heats” in May 1551, he was referring to the sharp-tongued and quick-tempered Katherine Brandon, not to Frances, who did not bear the Suffolk title at that time.

It is often stated that Frances’s callousness toward her daughter is shown by her failure to plead with Mary for her release and by her remarriage just weeks after the death of Jane and Henry Grey. As we have seen, however, a near-contemporary believed Frances married for her own security. As for the former charge, it is recorded that Frances successfully pleaded with Mary to free her husband in 1553, but it does not necessarily follow that Frances did not plead for her daughter on that occasion or she did not plead for Jane’s life in 1554. There is no evidence Frances visited her daughter in the Tower, but there is likewise no evidence the Duchess of Northumberland, whose desperate attempts to save her husband and her sons are well documented, visited her imprisoned children, either. It may simply be that permission for such visits was denied.

Before her death, Jane wrote a message to her father in her prayer book (Eric Ives has suggested that a purported second letter to Henry Grey, stylistically different from the one in the prayer book, may not be genuine) and another one to her sister Katherine. No letter to Frances survives, but Michelangelo Florio, Jane’s erstwhile tutor in Italian, stated that Jane wrote to her mother. It is quite possible the letter has been lost or Frances destroyed it, perhaps because it was purely of personal, not of religious, value. The absence of a surviving letter, then, does not indicate that Jane and her mother were estranged at the time of Jane’s death.

What of the story that Jane refused to marry Guildford until being beaten into submission by