9 Days Queen Lady Jane Grey

Jane Grey’s tragedy was her royal blood. As Henry VIII’s great-niece she stood perilously close to the throne and from early childhood was used as a pawn in the deadly power game of Tudor politics. Jane was not happy at home – she once famously remarked that she thought herself in hell in her parents’ company – and sought consolation in her studies and the uncompromising Protestantism fashionable in the l550s. When it became clear that her cousin Edward VI was dying she was forced into marriage with a son of the powerful John Dudley Duke of Northumberland and confronted with the news that the king had made her his heir. So began her reign as the Nine Days Queen, leading to her imprisonment in the Tower and execution at the age of sixteen. Alison Plowden reveals with insight and skill the complex intensity of the woman behind the myth, the brilliantly gifted child who was developing into a passionate, forceful young woman.

This new book tells the tragic story of Jane's life and death. While also revealing her to be a woman of intelligence, steady faith and unusual strength of conviction.

At fifteen years of age, upon the death of her cousin, Edward, Lady Jane Grey was forced to accept the crown of England. She was queen for only nine days, however. Edward's eldest sister, Mary, soon challenged Jane for the throne, with tragic results. This is the true story of a bright and intelligent young woman who was manipulated and betrayed by the ambitious people who surrounded her.

I had freckles. I had sandy hair. I was too short. Would my feet even touch the ground if I sat on the throne? These are the words of lady Jane Grey, as imagined by celebrated author Ann Rinaldi. Jane would become Queen of England for only nine days before being beheaded at the age of sixteen. Here is a breathtaking story of English royalty with its pageantry, privilege, and surprising cruelty. As she did in her previous novel Mutiny's Daughter, Ms. Rinaldi uses powerful, evocative writing to bring to life a teenage girl caught in the grip of stirring times. Ages 12+

The tragedy of Lady Jane Grey is unquestionably one of the most poignant episodes in English history, but its very dramatic completeness and compactness have almost invariably caused its wider significance to be obscured by the element of personal pathos with which it abounds. The sympathetic figure of the studious, saintly maiden, single-hearted in her attachment to the austere creed of Geneva, stands forth alone in a score of books refulgent against the gloomy background of the greed and ambition to which she was sacrificed. The whole drama of her usurpation and its swift catastrophe is usually treated as an isolated phenomenon, the result of one man’s unscrupulous self-seeking; and with the fall of the fair head of the Nine Days’ Queen upon the blood-stained scaffold within the Tower the curtain is rung down and the incident looked upon as fittingly closed by the martyrdom of the gentlest champion of the Protestant Reformation in England. Such a treatment of the subject, however attractive and humanly interesting it may be, is nevertheless unscientific as history and untrue in fact. An adequate appreciation of the tendencies behind the unsuccessful attempt to deprive Mary of her birthright can only be gained by a consideration of the circumstances preceding and surrounding the main incident. The reasons why Northumberland, a weak man as events proved, was able to ride rough-shod over the nobles and people of England, the explanation of his sudden and ignominious collapse and of the apparent levity with which the nation at large changed its religious beliefs and observance at the bidding of assumed authority are none of them on the surface of events; and the story of Jane Grey as it is usually told, whilst abounding in pathetic interest gives no key to the vast political issues of which the fatal intrigue of Northumberland was but a by-product. To represent the tragedy as a purely religious one, as is not infrequently done, is doubly misleading. That one side happened to be Catholic and the other Protestant was merely a matter of party politics, and probably not a single active participator in the events, except Jane herself, and to some extent Mary, was really moved by religious considerations at all, loud as the professions of some of the leaders were.

Published information on Lady Jane is scant and contradictory; here, primary sources including JaneOCOs own letters illustrate the drama of a high-born, high-minded and intelligent young lady sacrificed on the pyre of ambition by her kin. The teenaged Lady"