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 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.
For more about the historical figures in this novel, please see my website, www.susanhigginbotham.com, and my blog, History Refreshed, at www.susanhigginbotham.com/blog.
Further Reading
Adams, Simon. Leicester and the Court: Essays on Elizabethan Politics. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2002.
Beer, Barrett. Northumberland: The Political Career of John Dudley, Earl of Warwick and Duke of Northumberland. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1973.
Berkhout, Carl T. “Adrian Stokes.” Notes and Queries, March 2000.
Bridgen, Susan. London and the Reformation. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989.
Edwards, John. Mary I: England’s Catholic Queen. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2011.
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.
Websites of Interest
The Lady Jane Grey Internet Museum
www.bitterwisdom.com/ladyjanegrey/
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.
Some Grey Matter by John Stephan Edwards
www.somegreymatter.com/
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 on religious tolerance?
4.Desperate to save her family, Frances tells Mary what she knows are dubious stories about Edward VI being poisoned and encourages Jane Grey to do the same. Did this make her a less sympathetic character to you?
5.Prisoners facing execution in Tudor England were expected to express their penitence on the scaffold and to profess their loyalty to the monarch, even if the prisoner believed his sentence was unjust. Most of the people executed in this novel dutifully follow this convention. Could you have done this?
6.Despite his misgivings, John Dudley carries out the dying Edward VI’s wishes and puts Jane Grey on the throne. Setting aside for the moment the hindsight that informs us of the disastrous consequences of his decision, do you believe he was right to do so? Or should he have honored the provisions of the dead Henry VIII’s will?
7.Though Henry VIII is dead when Her Highness, the Traitor opens, he casts a shadow over the novel. In what ways does the king continue to influence events?
8.Frances tells her stepmother that her relationship with the Lord is no different no matter whether she goes to mass, and Jane Dudley readily changes her religion in hopes of seeing her sons freed. Others choose to die for their religious beliefs. Are there principles, religious or otherwise, that you would never compromise?
9.Certain characters in this novel, especially Frances Grey and John Dudley, have traditionally been depicted hostilely by novelists and by popular historians. Were you surprised to see them treated differently here? What about the depiction of Jane Grey, who has often been depicted as meek and helpless?
10.What sort of ruler do you think Jane Grey would have been if Mary had not claimed the throne?
11.Mary promises to spare Jane’s life but executes her after Henry Grey participates in Wyatt’s rebellion. Was her action necessary to prevent future rebellions, as she tells Frances? As a ruler, would you have spared Jane’s and Guildford’s lives?
12.At the end of her life, Jane Dudley writes, “For whoever trusts to this transitory world as I did, may happen to have an overthrow as I did.” How, if at all, does Jane’s reversal of fortune change her? What about Frances’s reversal of fortune?
13.Which heroine did you prefer, Frances Grey or Jane Dudley? Did your feelings about them change as the novel progressed?
14.Most of the writings in this novel, such as Jane Grey’s letters, Northumberland’s last letter, Somerset’s prayer composed on the eve of his execution, and Jane Dudley’s letter to Lady Paget and her will reflect the actual words of the historical figures involved. Likewise, Somerset’s, Northumberland’s, and Jane Grey’s execution speeches are drawn from contemporary reports. Did you find that this brought you closer to the characters?
15.Henry Grey loves his daughter Jane dearly but puts her life—and his own—at risk by joining Wyatt’s rebellion. Do you believe that he willfully blinded himself to the consequences of his actions, that he underestimated Mary’s strength of will, or that he was simply naïve?
16.Frances Grey has often been criticized for her hasty marriage to Adrian Stokes. Did you find the motives given here to be convincing? Do you think she found happiness in her second marriage?
Acknowledgments
When I left behind medieval England (for the time being) to write about the Tudors, I worried that those I had enjoyed discussing history with online might fall silent. Happily, I found that I was wrong: the conversations only grew livelier. I would like to thank those with whom I have discussed the Greys and the Dudleys in the course of writing this novel. A special thanks must go to Judith Field, a commenter on my blog who pointed out that the discrepancies involving the date of Frances’s marriage to Adrian Stokes could be accounted for if the marriage were a secret one.
I would also like to thank Simon Neal, who has done a number of transcriptions of contemporary documents for me, thereby saving both my eyesight and my sanity, and Dr. John Stephan Edwards, who kindly answered some questions I had about Jane Grey. Several of my Facebook friends in a long-buried thread provided translations of a short Italian passage; I am grateful for their assistance.
As ever, my deepest thanks go to my family, particularly to my mother, Barbara Higginbotham, who did not live to see this novel in print. Although my mother would have much preferred me to write about Regency England and to leave all my characters with their heads intact, she gamely read each of my novels upon publication. I inherited my love of books from her and would probably not be writing this today had it not been for her influence. If I ever write that novel set in Regency England, it’ll be for you, Mother—but I can’t make any promises about the heads.
About the Author
Photo by Tim Broyer
Susan Higginbotham lives with her family in North Carolina and has worked as an attorney and an editor. She has written two historical novels set in fourteenth-century England, The Traitor’s Wife and Hugh and Bess, and two set during the Wars of the Roses, The Stolen Crown and The Queen of Last Hopes. Her first novel, The Traitor’s Wife, won the gold medal for historical/military fiction in the 2008 Independent Publisher Book Awards. Susan maintains a popular bulletin board, Historical Fiction Online, and writes regularly about medieval and Tudor England on her blog, History Refreshed.
The Traitor’s Wife
by Susan Higginbotham
From the bedchamber to the battlefield, through treachery and fidelity, one woman is imprisoned by the secrets of the crown.
It is an age where passion reigns and treachery runs as thick as blood. Young Eleanor has two men in her life: her uncle King Edward II, and her husband Hugh le Despenser, a mere knight but the newfound favorite of the king. She has no desire to meddle in royal affairs—she wishes for a serene, simple life with her family. But as political unrest sweeps the land, Eleanor, sharply intelligent yet blindly naïve, becomes the only woman each man can trust.
Fiercely devoted to both her husband and her king, Eleanor holds the secret that could destroy all of England—and discovers the choices no woman should have to make.
Praise for The Traitor’s Wife:
“Conveys emotions and relationships quite poignantly…entertaining historical fiction.”
—Kirkus Discoveries
For more Susan Higginbotham, visit:
www.sourcebooks.com
Hugh and Bess
by Susan Higginbotham
An unforgettable novel of young love set in 14th-century England.
When forced to marry Hugh le Despenser, the son and grandson of disgraced traitors, Bess de Montacute, just thirteen years old, is appalled at his less-than-desirable past. Meanwhile, Hugh must give up the woman he loves in order to marry the reluctant Bess. Far apart in age and haunted by the past, can Hugh and Bess somehow make their marriage work?
Just as walls break down and love begins to grow, the merciless plague endangers all whom the couple holds dear, threatening the life and love they have built.
Award-winning author Susan Higginbotham’s impeccable research will delight avid historical fiction readers, while her enchanting characters brought to life will be sure to capture every reader’s heart.
Praise for Hugh and Bess:
“Following in the footsteps of Jean Plaidy and Norah Lofts…filled with a gentle, dry, very subtle sense of humor.”
—Dear Author
For more Susan Higginbotham, visit:
www.sourcebooks.com
The Stolen Crown
by Susan Higginbotham
It was a secret marriage…one that changed the fate of England forever.
On May Day, 1464, six-year-old Katherine Woodville, daughter of a duchess who has married a knight of modest means, awakes to find her gorgeous older sister, Elizabeth, in the midst of a secret marriage to King Edward IV. It changes everything—for Kate and for England.
Then King Edward dies unex
pectedly. Richard III, Duke of Gloucester, is named protector of Edward and Elizabeth’s two young princes, but Richard’s own ambitions for the crown interfere with his duties…
Lancastrians against Yorkists: greed, power, murder, and war. As the story unfolds through the unique perspective of Kate Woodville, it soon becomes apparent that not everyone is wholly evil—or wholly good.
Praise for Susan Higginbotham:
“Beautifully researched and incredibly captivating, The Traitor’s Wife is a book you won’t want to put down. Susan Higginbotham’s vivid portrayal of life during Edward II’s tumultuous reign makes for fascinating reading. Highly recommended!”
—Michelle Moran, bestselling author of The Heretic Queen
For more Susan Higginbotham, visit:
www.sourcebooks.com
The Queen of Last Hopes
by Susan Higginbotham
History would call them the Wars of the Roses. But the story began with one woman’s fury…
Margaret of Anjoy, Queen of England, does not want immortality. She does not need glory. All she desires is what rightfully belongs to her family—and that is the throne of England. Her husband the king cannot rule, but the enemies who doubt her will and dispute her valor underestimate the force of a mother’s love. Her son is the House of Lancaster’s heir and last hope, and her fight for him will shake the crown forever.
Her Highness, the Traitor Page 38
