Jane Grey, Queen for Nine Days

Jane Grey (executed 12 February 1554)

I never realized, until starting this daybook in women's history, the eerie juxtaposition of dates--the death of Elizabeth of York on 11 February 1503 and the execution of her great-granddaughter, Jane Grey, fifty-one years and one day later, on 12 February 1554.

Jane Grey, painted c. 1590
(Although there are many purported images of Jane Grey,
historian Eric Ives believes this one to be her
"best likeness")

The story of Jane Grey is, in large part, what drew me, first, to an interest in the Tudors, then to an interest in English history and literature, and ultimately to my teaching, research, and writing about early-modern women. 

I was in fifth grade, and I had checked a book on Jane Grey out of the public library. I remember lying in the bedroom I shared with my sister, completely engrossed in Jane's story. (At the time, we were living at 1127 West Ave. H-7 in Lancaster, California, for what it's worth.)

I knew nothing at all about Jane Grey--and so her end, beheaded in the Tower at age sixteen or seventeen, came as a complete shock. I lay on that bed in my bedroom sobbing for her, at the injustice of it all. I often wonder what book I was reading that day--I'd love to know what it was so I could find a copy of it now. It certainly changed my life.

Given the current interest in all things Tudor, I am assuming that the broad outline of Jane Grey's life is fairly well known--her traumatic childhood, the unscrupulous manipulation of powerful men, who put her on the throne, her brief "reign," and her subsequent fall. She was "officially" proclaimed queen on 10 July 1553 and then unproclaimed on 19 July, when Mary Tudor was proclaimed queen in London by the Privy Council. Jane was arrested, tried for, and convicted of treason in November.

Or so the story usually goes.

A letter signed "Jane the Quene" (upper left corner) written during her brief reign

There are almost too many books about Jane Grey, if that's possible--fiction, non-fiction, and purported works of non-fiction that are, in reality, fiction, if not fantasy. As a correction to all the crap, I wholeheartedly recommend Eric Ives's Lady Jane Grey: A Tudor Mystery, an exceptional work by a renowned scholar of Tudor history, whose biography counters the "story" of Jane Grey as it has usually been told.

Contrary to the conventional "nine days queen" label I've used here, for example, Ives argues convincingly that Jane's reign was actually thirteen days, not nine, and that, again contrary to the long-accepted story of her life as utterly determined by powerful men, as I've noted above, she is not to be regarded as "a hapless victim of political intrigue." She is a determined actor and agent in unfolding events. Ives is particularly good on Jane's education and scholarship, and his book ends with an excellent analysis of the "afterlife" of her story--how Jane Grey, the historical person, became "Jane Grey," romanticized victim and martyr.

Less well known, too, is Jane's intellectual history. She received an excellent humanist education, was steadfastly committed to her Protestant faith, and is now regarded as the author of several important compositions, including letters and a prayer. While Ives is very compelling in his analysis of the works attributed to Jane, particularly the way her letters and exhortation to her sister may have been rewritten after her death, you may want to look for yourself. I've found an excellent selection in Women's Works, vol. 2: 1550-1603, edited by Donald W. Foster--included are a selection of letters, the proclamation of her succession, the transcript of a purported interview while Jane is in the Tower, the "exhortation" she may--or may not--have written to her sister, and a note to her father, copied into the  prayerbook she carried to the scaffold.

And here's my complaint of the day: Penguin Books is now publishing a new English Monarchs series, which will include Oliver Cromwell (though he certainly was not a monarch) but will not include Jane Grey. Things like this get me crazy.

Jane's prayer book with a note to her father
(bottom margin, beginning "For as muche as you have desired so simple a woman
to wrighte in so worthye a booke")

Elizabeth of York: She Might Have Been Queen

Elizabeth of York (born 11 February 1466 and died 11 February 1503)

The daughter of Edward IV, the Yorkist king of England, and the niece of Edward's younger brother, King Richard III, Elizabeth of York became the wife of another English king, Henry Tudor, the first Tudor monarch.

Elizabeth of York, c. 1500, 
National Portrait Gallery, London

There is a great deal of popular historical fiction about the Wars of the Roses, and there are more than a few television dramas about the Lancastrians, Yorkists, and Tudors, so I don't need to say much about the rise of the Tudor monarchy here. But what is often unsaid--or unnoticed--is the place of Elizabeth of York in all of this.

After the defeat of Richard III at the battle of Bosworth--and given the disappearance and probable murder of Edward IV's two sons, the "Princes in the Tower"--there was still a viable Yorkist claimant to the throne in 1485, even after Richard's defeat: Elizabeth, the eldest surviving daughter of Edward IV.

But Elizabeth of York did not inherit the throne both her father and uncle had occupied (and that one of her brothers might have occupied, if one of them had lived). Instead, she was married to the victor of Bosworth, the man who became king of England.

Although her own mother, Elizabeth Woodville, and Henry's mother, the formidable Margaret Beaufort, were important political manipulators and power brokers, Elizabeth of York played no real role other than the one crucial for a queen consort--she produced male heirs to the throne, Arthur and Henry (who would become Henry VIII), as well as two daughters who grew to adulthood, Margaret and Mary.

Her daughter Margaret became queen of Scotland, and her daughter Mary, briefly, was queen of France. As queen, Margaret Tudor was also regent of Scotland for her husband, James IV, though she was unable to retain that role for her son, after James's death.

In the next generation, Elizabeth of York's two granddaughters, the daughters of Henry VIII, became queens of England, not as consorts but ruling in their own right: Mary I and Elizabeth I. Elizabeth of York was the great-grandmother to two other queens regnant, Mary Stuart, queen of Scotland (the descendant of Elizabeth's elder daughter Margaret) and Jane Grey, who "ruled" England for nine days (the descendant of Elizabeth of York's younger daughter, Mary).

Still grieving the death of her older son, Arthur, in 1502, Elizabeth of York gave birth to a baby girl, named Katherine, her seventh and last child, on 2 February 1503. The baby died on 10 February, and Elizabeth the next day, her thirty-seventh birthday.

There are several good biographies available, but I recommend Arlene Naylor Okerlund's Elizabeth of York. If you'd prefer a shorter read, there's a chapter on Elizabeth of York in Lisa Hilton's Queens Consort: England's Medieval Queens.

Katherine of Valois, a Mother of Queens

Katherine of Valois, queen of England (died 3 January 1437)

The daughter of Charles VI of France and Isabeau of Bavaria, Katherine of Valois was born in 1401. By the terms of the Treaty of Troyes, the French king had named Henry V of England as his heir and successor, the peace sealed by the marriage of the French princess and the English king on 2 June 1420.

Despite the peace treaty, Henry V was back in France a year later, in June of 1421, continuing his military campaign. He died there in August of 1422, leaving his infant son, Henry, to succeed him as the English king; the baby would also become king of France when Charles died two months later, in October 1422.

The Marriage of Katherine of Valois and Henry V,
miniature from a fifteenth-century manuscript

Widowed at age twenty and after just a little more than two years of marriage, the young dowager queen began a relationship with a member of her household, Owen ap Tudor, probably around 1430.

The couple may have married, although the legal status of their marriage isn't clear, and knowledge of Katherine's remarriage wasn't widespread even at the time of her death. (After Katherine's death, her husband was arrested and charged with violating the Royal Marriages Act of 1428, which prohibited the marriage of a queen dowager without royal consent. He was eventually pardoned.)

What is certain is that the couple had at least four children, including a son named Edmund, who would later marry Margaret Beaufort. Their child, Henry Tudor, would become the first Tudor monarch, Henry VII, in 1485.

The two Tudor queens who would eventually rule England--Mary and Elizabeth--are not the only female monarchs who can look back to their foremother, Katherine of Valois. Katherine's great-granddaughter Margaret Tudor, Henry VIII's sister, would become queen of Scotland in 1513, and her granddaughter (Katherine's great-great-great granddaughter), Mary Stuart, would become queen regnant of Scotland in 1542.

And there are still more queens who are direct descendants of Katherine of Valois--Henry VIII's second sister, Mary Tudor, was briefly queen of France; and Jane Grey, this same Mary Tudor's granddaughter, was, for a few brief days, queen of England. 

The relationship between Henry V and Katherine of Valois is perhaps best known through Shakespeare's fictional version of it in Henry V. A brief but authoritative account of her life, from the Encyclopedia Britannica, is available online. There is, unfortunately, no full-length biography of her life, but there is an excellent chapter on Katherine of Valois in Lisa Hilton's Queens Consort: England's Medieval Queens.

And one curious note: Katherine of Valois' elder sister, Isabella of Valois (1389-1409), preceded her on the throne of England: Isabella became queen of England in 1396, at the age of six, when she married Richard II of England--yes, you read that correctly, she was married to the thirty-year-old Richard when she was six, an earlier effort to resolve the conflict between England and France by means of marriage between an English king and a French princess. After Richard's death in 1400, there was some pressure for Isabella to marry the very Henry whom her sister would later wed. The young princess refused; she eventually returned to France, married a second time, and died in childbirth at age nineteen.