Her Highness, the Traitor - By Susan Higginbotham Page 0,156
her parents? As Dr. John Stephan Edwards has written in his dissertation, no contemporary English source records Jane’s reaction to her marriage. Giovanni Commendone, a papal nuncio from Italy who arrived in England in August 1553, wrote that Jane was “compelled to submit [to the Dudley marriage] by the insistence of her Mother and the threats of her Father.” As Ives notes, the story of an actual beating appears only five years later, in a pirated account by Raviglio Rosso, another Italian, and the official 1560 text by the same writer mentions no beating. Notably, Jane, in her letter to Mary, made no claim that she was compelled to marry Guildford Dudley by physical force, although it would have been to her advantage to emphasize that she was a reluctant bride. While Jane may not have been happy about her marriage, there is little reason to suppose she was treated differently from other noble girls, who were expected to marry in accordance with their parents’ wishes. Frances herself made her arranged marriage before she was sixteen.
It may well be, of course, that Jane’s parents were strict disciplinarians—as indeed, Tudor parents were expected to be. It may be that they were perfectionists. It may also be that Jane, as an unusually intelligent girl, resented being treated as an ordinary daughter from whom misbehavior or slacking off would not be tolerated. But to damn Jane’s parents as cruel and unloving based on a single outburst by a teenage girl, recalled by a listener years after the fact and after an aura of martyrdom had already settled around Jane, is hardly fair to them—or, for that matter, to Jane, who in later life might have regretted her youthful comments had she been spared her tragic death on the scaffold.
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Gunn, S. J. “A Letter of Jane, Duchess of Northumberland, in 1553.” English Historical Review, November 1999.
Ives, Eric. Lady Jane Grey: A Tudor Mystery. West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009.
James, Susan E. Kateryn Parr: The Making of a Queen. Aldershot and Brookfield: Ashgate, 1999.
de Lisle, Leanda. The Sisters Who Would Be Queen: Mary, Katherine, and Lady Jane Grey. New York: Ballantine Books, 2008.
Loach, Jennifer. Edward VI. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1999.
Loades, D. M. Two Tudor Conspiracies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965.
Loades, David. John Dudley, Duke of Northumberland, 1504–1553. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996.
———. Mary Tudor: A Life. Cambridge, Mass., and Oxford: Blackwell, 1989.
Porter, Linda. The First Queen of England: The Myth of “Bloody Mary.” New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2007.
Skidmore, Chris. Edward VI: The Lost King of England. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2007.
Whitelock, Anna. Mary Tudor: Princes, Bastard, Queen. New York: Random House, 2009.
This site, by Sonja Marie, has an extensive gallery showing how Jane has been depicted by artists throughout the centuries. It is also an invaluable resource for finding books about Jane and the rest of the Tudors.
Maintained by a historian who did his doctoral dissertation on Lady Jane, this site offers a rich array of materials about Jane, including a listing of primary and secondary sources, a transcription of Jane’s prayer book, and a discussion of the various contemporary portraits alleged to be of Jane.
Reading Group Guide
1. Frances overhears Jane’s famous “nips and bobs” speech to Roger Ascham but decides not to confront her daughter. Would you have done so?
2. In begging Lady Paget to intercede for her in saving her husband’s life, Jane Dudley frankly admits that her husband is more dear to her than are her sons. Did her admission make you think less of her?
3. Frances tries to reconcile the kind and charitable Mary she knows with the queen’s burning of heretics. Nearly three hundred people would be burned to death on Mary’s orders before her reign ended. Do you believe Mary was psychologically damaged, or was she merely acting in accordance with the values of her time, which did not look favorably