Nine Days a Queen: The Short Life and Reign of Lady Jane Grey

Ann Rinaldi

Chapter ONE

I don't know what they are going to tell you about me. But be careful what you believe. That was the crux of my sixteen short years on earth and a matter of everyday concern--that I always be careful of what I believed. And whom I believed.

Your life can depend upon it.

This much is true. I was born in the fall of 1537, within a day or so of Edward VI, son of King Henry VIII by Jane Seymour. I was named after her.

I was the great-granddaughter of Henry VII. I was cousin to Edward VI, and it was always thought I should marry him. Three years after I was born, my sister Catherine was born, and five

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years after that my other sister, Mary.

It is not true that I was a prissy little scholar. Yes, I loved to read and even study, but I liked my fun, too. Because of what happened to me, they never speak of me in terms of having had fun, but I did. When at court, I enjoyed a game of quoits. I enjoyed playing with my dog, teasing my sisters, and attending masques and parties.

I had plenty of opportunity, too. My parents were the Duke and Duchess of Suffolk. As if that isn't of enough eminence, my father, Henry, was the third Marquess of Dorset. I grew up at Bradgate, my father's hunting palace. It had some two hundred servants. Outside was a tilt-yard, where my father practiced at jousting; an enormous gatehouse; and two magnificent towers. It was surrounded by six miles of park, beyond which were the slate quarries my family owned, and a lake, and beyond that the forest of Chartley.

The servants' cottages huddled somewhere in between it all. But our manor was surrounded by formal gardens and brooks, ferns, rocks, ancient oaks that loomed against the rose-colored brick walls of the guard house. Bradgate

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was five miles from the city of Leicester. It was built in the old style of castles, for defense. The receiving room was large enough to hold a dozen knights in their bulky armor.

You

would think I could have been happy.

It was an idyllic place for children. But it was as if the gods, or my mother, deemed that I should rarely be happy. Therefore I was always miserable at home.

I don't know what made my mother so harsh. Mayhap that Mary was born a hunchbacked dwarf. Maybe that Catherine was more beautiful than I, and she Only a second daughter. Maybe my mother had just too much royal blood in her. Enough of it can drive you mad. But she managed to enjoy life always, and yet make all of us miserable all the time, but most especially me.

Her scoldings were constant. I never did the right thing, no matter how hard I tried. She ranted and raved at me, calling me names, slapping me and pinching me and beating me.

Mayhap it was that I was fifth in line for the throne. For I came after Edward and his half sisters, Elizabeth and Mary, and then my own mother, who, because she was not young enough

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to bear an heir, would waive her right for me.

But she would torment me first, making me pay for a privilege I never wanted and never dreamed I would ever have.

My mother was the elder daughter of Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, and Mary Tudor, the sister of Henry VIII. Everybody knows Henry VIII was a roaring maniac of a man, demanding what was his and even what wasn't. Gruel and vengeful and lustful and always angry. Six wives it took to becalm him, and when he died, he still went a-roaring to that appointment while on his deathbed. So why should my mother be any different? I do not hope to explain her.

What chance did I have to earn her love?

Love did not figure in the fabric of our days.

I was treated like a boy. Certainly I was educated like one, which didn't displease me in the least--if they had only left me to my Hebrew and Greek and Latin studies, my playing of the virginals, my games of shuttlecock. But no, mother was always there, chiding me to go out riding, hunting, racing off in the forest to drag back some venison. I didn't care for it. I wanted

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to be left to my books. She called me a prissy boots. She called me a white-faced chicken. She called me worse.

Still, somehow I grew to the age of nine years. In a house full of servants, never alone, I yearned for silence. I was groomed by my parents to be queen regent at the very least someday, if I wed Edward VI. I watched my parents' predatory ways as they pursued successful men and well-attached women, fashion, material wealth, and power.

If someone had any of the above, I was to bow and scrape to them. If I didn't, I was punished. Position was all. How they entertained! They had masques and entertainments and cockfights. How they gambled! How they played and rode and hunted and danced. How they traveled, from castle to castle, with a hundred yeomen of the guard at the ready, secretaries, dressmakers, ladies-in-waiting, servants, and footmen.

It was my life, all I knew for nine years. And what right had I to complain? One stayed close to one's parents. One didn't think for oneself. Outside in the world, they were burning heretics

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at the stake, beheading those accused of treason, which could be anything, depending on the mood of the King.

It was my life until the day we were walking in the gallery of one of my father's other country homes that had once been a monastery, taken from the monks when Henry VIII broke with Rome. They said monks killed in the taking haunted it.

My father and I saw the skeleton arm holding the bloody axe. My mother didn't see it. My mother never saw any omen that was staring her right in the face, if it interfered with her pursuit of pleasure. And right after that a message came from the King.

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TWO

T

he messenger brought a letter from the King and a small purse filled with gold sovereigns. He was young and yellow of hair, and dressed in the green-and-white livery of the King. His horse's trappings were of the same colors. Likely he was the son of a nobleman and would be Lord This or Sir That someday. He was handsome, and I smiled at him and sent one servant for a bucket of water for his horse and another servant for a mug of ale, which the messenger, whose name was Robert, drank greedily. He spilled some on his chin, and I gave him my pocket square to wipe it, and he said thank you and stuffed the square inside his doublet.

The late-afternoon sun filtered through the

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giant oaks' branches and cast shafts of light like poured honey onto the green, where peacocks strutted and we stood. I patted his horse's head while it drank from the leather bucket.

One is never too young to make eyes at a boy, especially if he is of noble birth. My nurse, Mrs. Ellen, told me that. Still, all I could think was,

What if mother ever caught me making eyes at Robert!

But then I was so carefully watched, I seldom had the chance to make eyes at any young man.

My parents came out the great front door then and gave the reply to Robert, who bowed and promised to deliver it with all haste.

I watched him ride off. He was graceful and very beautiful on the horse. It wasn't until he'd ridden off that my parents told me what was in the message.

"You're to go and pack," my mother said, "and Mrs. Tilney will accompany you."

Mrs. Tilney was my gentlewoman. Before I had a tutor, she had taught me my letters and sums, taught me how to curtsey, how to behave at table, everything.

"Where?" I asked.

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At first I thought it would be a visit to Princess Mary, that she was ill. She was always ill with one thing or another. Oh, we got along well enough, although she was near thirty by now, but she was a maddening Catholic. Drove you to distraction with her Catholic ways. She was the daughter of Catherine of Aragon, the King's first wife, and was estranged from her father because of her religion.

There was a great fight in England in those days, between the Catholics and the New Religion. King Henry was Catholic, though he had broken with Rome and declared himself the head of the church.

Or was I to visit Princess Elizabeth? Is that what was in the message?

She was the daughter of the Kings second wife, the impertinent and beautiful Anne Boleyn.

King Henry put Princess Mary's mother aside to wed Anne Boleyn. This did not make for good relations between Mary and Elizabeth. Eventually he had Anne's head cut off.

His third wife was Jane Seymour; his fourth, Anne of Cleves; and his fifth, Catherine Howard,

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whose head he had cut off too.

Now he had Katharine Parr. I'd never met her.

Very well, I'd visit Elizabeth. I liked Elizabeth, who was thirteen to my nine, beautiful as her flaming red hair and no less brazen.

Then they told me whom I was going to visit. None other than Katharine Parr, the King's sixth wife. She had requested my presence in her court. And that of Mary and Elizabeth. And even Edward.

"She wants to bring the King's family back together," my mother told me.

Well, she was a brave lady, Katharine. But then, she was brave enough to wed the King in the first place, wasn't she? Rumor had it that she loved Thomas Seymour, Lord High Admiral. He and his brother, Edward Seymour, Prince Edward's uncles, were now friends with my parents.

"I don't want to go," I said. "Why must I?"

That's when my mother grabbed my arm and shook me viciously. "Are you mad? Not go to court when you are invited? After everything we've done for you?"

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My sisters had come out of the house then to watch. A scene always broke the boredom of the day. "I'll go," Catherine said. "Why can't I go?"

Of course she would. She'd prance right into the King's presence chamber and entrance him, beguile him with her flowing yellow hair that the breeze lifted from her shoulders just then. But she hadn't seen the bloody axe that very afternoon, had she?

"Don't you want to see Edward?" Mary asked.

Dear little Mary with her sparkling eyes. She knew how I felt about our cousin Edward, because I'd confided in her after visiting him at Havering Bower, where he was cared for by Lady Margaret Bryan. I did want to see Edward. He was betimes my only friend in the world.

"Court is dangerous," I told my mother.

"Life is dangerous. Besides, you are trained for it." She slapped me. "Everything we've educated you for leads to this moment."

"Go and get ready," my father said. He didn't slap. I loved him for it. But it took me longer than was sensible to understand that the reason he didn't was because she did. And that he was

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more to blame for letting her.

"Can I have the purse of gold?" I asked.

I knew better. They'd put it to their own use, and I'd never see it again. I went. But not before sticking my tongue out at Catherine.

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THREE

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had been trained for court, trained to curtsey, to kneel before the King, to play the virginals and lute with my eyes lowered, to keep my mouth shut and my ears and eyes open and learn what was going on this day with the King. To dance, to simper, to laugh at all the King's jokes and be modest and compliant. Not to act as a spy for anyone who wasn't in favor with the King. Not to look at the bandaged sore on his leg.

It never closed, and they said that Katharine Parr was the only one who knew how to attend to it properly. Once it did close, and they said the King's face went black for twelve days. And he near died.

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But one does not speak of the death of the King, for to do so is treason.

How one is to remain modest when escorted in travel by sixty men at arms, two maids, and a nurse, I do not know. Traveling as such was an embarrassment to me. I would, if I had my way, go dressed as a boy, with the white and green colors of the King, on my own horse. I would ride up to Westminster Palace, dismount, hand the reins to a servant, smile at the dogs that would crowd around me in the courtyard, stride past the men at arms, and go into a back entrance, to the kitchen, and have some ale and meat and bread with the servants, and there really learn what was going on with the King. But my life was not of my own choosing.