The Curse Of The Nine-Day Queen

Lady Jane Grey was put on the English throne by her scheming father-in-law, deposed by her power-hungry cousin and condemned to death by her own father’s treason. Nicola Tallis tells the story of a tragic victim of her royal blood.

- Nicola Tallis

On 13 November 1553, the 17-year old Lady Jane Grey became the youngest royal woman to be condemned for treason in British history. Her trial – staged at Guildhall in the heart of the city of London – was a very public humiliation. For Jane, its outcome was a personal catastrophe.

How had it come to this? A mere four months earlier, some of the most powerful men in England had conveyed Jane, the great-niece of Henry VIII, to the Tower of London, where they proclaimed her queen. But now here she was, facing her accusers, her nine-day reign well and truly over, her very life hanging by a thread.

The seeds of Jane’s spectacular fall from grace were sown, earlier in 1553, by one of Edward VI’s last acts as king of England. Edward was a committed Protestant and when he succeeded his father, Henry VIII, as king in 1547, he immediately took it upon himself to impose religious reforms upon his people.

But championing Protestantism in his lifetime wasn’t enough for Edward. He wanted the work to continue after his death, and that meant preventing his fiercely Catholic elder half-sister, Mary, from succeeding to the throne. His solution was to author a famous document, ‘My Devise for the Succession’, in which he excluded both Mary, and his other half-sister, Elizabeth, on the grounds of their illegitimacy (as his father had done before him). Lady Jane Grey, a fellow Protestant who had sat third in the line of succession, suddenly found herself anointed Edward’s heir.