The Nine Day Queen

The warm white satin that pressed against her body as her maids held her was unsettling. Their weeping was almost silent to Jane as she thought how similar this dress was to the one she wore on her wedding night. The marital embrace between her and husband was long behind her now but a similar embrace with death was just ahead of her. How appropriate it should be to wear white to one’s death, after all to lie in the grave was to be married to the soil while her soul was commended to God.

“Are you ready, my lady?” The gentle voice of Sir John Brydges woke her from her morbid thoughts.

 

Jane nodded slowly, her strong resolve only making her handmaids cry all the more. She supposed she had been ready for some time despite the constant assurance that her cousin, the merciful Queen Mary, would spare her life. But, as fate would have it, it was the wrong family member that sealed her death sentence. In an attempt to return the nation’s faith to that of her predecessor, Edward VI, her father had joined the Wyatt Rebellion and when their plot was eventually revealed, the conspirators were arrested and executed. She had never desired to be queen and yet those who had placed her on the throne had their heads on display as traitors and she, no more than a pawn in the Tudor game of chess, stared with cold eyes at her fate before her in the form of a wooden block and scattered straw. How could she even hope to stay on the English throne when her adversary was a lioness, born of Spanish and English blood, and she was merely a mouse? Why was she here, in the Tower of London, a usurped and forlorn queen when she could have been a lowly servant, a nobody? Surely, a long, simple life was better than the life she had been given; a noble pressured by her blood into accepting a crown that seemed to crush her. She could have lived out her humble life none the wiser to the treachery of nobles and the vengeance of a Tudor queen. What she wouldn’t give now to be a peasant girl, the lowest of the low, who never felt the stare of hundreds of unfaithful eyes, dwarfed by the throne unfit for her, too weak to hold the orb and sceptre that seemed to burn her hands. In those last days, she had begged with the god that she believed to be always beside her to protect her. She never heard a reply.

Nine days she had seemingly ruled England. Subjects that were never hers dragged her down as they brought Mary up. She was torn from the throne but she had neither the strength nor the will to hold onto it. The fight was over before it barely begun. And in those nine days, her war was lost.  

There was a warm touch on her arm as Brydges urged her to her knees. Her maids were still sobbing and moaning, crying as if it were their lives to be taken. She was nearly angry at the weak-willed women for their hysterically sorrowful behaviour instead of being grateful they weren’t condemned with the same fate.

Jane knelt upon an embroidered, tasselled pillow, almost insulted by it as if her brief luxuries were being flaunted in front of her, ‘what could have been’, it seemed to say. No, she would have preferred the harsh wood of the scaffold, a final reminder of what she had been reduced to.

“Forgive me, my lady,” said the executioner as the blindfold was tied around her head.

“I forgive you, as God has,” she whispered in reply as her sight was taken from her.

She swallowed, aware that she had but seconds left in her short life. Jane reached out her pale arms, expecting to feel the solid wood at her fingers, splinters pressed into her palms, yet there was nothing but cold air to grasp.

In that moment, her resolve, her strength shattered like a dropped sheet of glass. Hysteria rose in her voice and her body trembled. She didn’t deserve to die. Her faith had kept her going this far but in those few seconds when her blind hands fumbled and the chilled air brushed her arms, it was as if God had turned His back.

“What shall I do?” She cried. “Where is it?”

Her voice was cracked and she was no longer bitter towards the maids but could feel their emotion, the painful lump in her throat that made it difficult to breath, the sting of tears in her unseeing eyes.

Then, the gentle touch returned, as if it were the hands of God, guiding her to Paradise in these last few moments on Earth. The hands, on hers, showed her where the block was and her heart raced, finally touching the splintered wood as if she was touching the door to Heaven. Words of prayer, jumbled and hurried, were scattered through her mind, calling out to the Lord in the last moments as her neck rested against the carved out indentation on the block. Without her sight, she heard everything; the intense weeping of the maids, the mutter of prayer from Sir John and the shifted weight of the executioner as he lifted the axe.

“Lord, into thy hands I commend my spirit,” she whispered, her own voice the softest of all she heard around her. Jane even heard the blade slice through the air, if it were possible, before the sudden bright light behind her eyes.

The blood soaked into the straw and spread out across the scaffold, seeping into the cushion her warm body still rested on. As the shell of Lady Jane Grey slumped to the ground, the head of the nine day queen stilled, preserved with prayer on her lips.

Based on the depiction of Lady Jane Grey’s execution by Paul Deroche, 1833