Chapter 8
Frances Brandon married Henry Grey the same year I married her father. She was technically my stepdaughter, though neither of us pretended the phrase fit, since we’d grown up together.
In the decades since, we had gone on being family in the complicated way that noble households were always family. We were bound less by warmth than by the accident of whose blood had married whose. And we were left to find whatever affection we could manage within that accident.
Jane Grey was Frances’ oldest daughter. And so, in every way that mattered to me, Jane was family of my own.
Not by blood, but by an inheritance too tangled to simply explain.
She had grown into a girl sharper than most scholars twice her age.
She was devout in a way that made my own convictions look almost restrained by comparison.
I remember her best from the Chelsea years, in Katherine’s household. She was not yet eleven and already correcting a visiting chaplain’s Latin without seeming to notice she’d done anything remarkable.
One evening, Katherine and I fell into an argument over predestination.
It was the sort of argument the two of us fell into as easily as other women fell into gossip.
Jane looked up and asked which of us we thought God had predestined to win the argument.
Katherine laughed so hard she had to set down her wine.
I did not have an answer for her then, and I still don’t.
But I have thought of that evening many times in the years since.
I have turned it over the way you turn over anything that seemed unremarkable at the time and became unbearable only in hindsight.
She was a clever, devout child who was sharp enough to out-argue grown women twice her age.
And she was already fluent in exactly the convictions that would one day be used to justify killing her.
King Edward died on the sixth of July. The cough that had never quite cleared finally won the argument his physicians had been losing for months.
He was fifteen years old. I felt nothing so simple as grief for a boy I had never truly known.
I only felt the cold, immediate understanding that whatever came next would come fast, and that the waiting was finally over.
When the council crowned Jane queen upon King Edward’s death, I understood the danger of it before most people in that room had finished celebrating.
Edward’s council had found a legal excuse for cutting King Henry’s daughter, Mary, out of the succession, along with her Catholic faith. Both she and Elizabeth had once been declared illegitimate. And no one wanted to explain why one sister’s illegitimacy mattered and the other’s didn’t.
So Jane solved a legal problem. And it didn’t hurt that she was married to one of the councilor’s own sons.
Jane had childbearing still ahead of her, while Mary and Elizabeth were unmarried.
A dying boy king wanted an heir with a heartbeat as much as he wanted one who shared his faith.
And he wanted it as soon as possible. Conveniently, Jane was already married and young enough to promise both.
I am certain that Jane didn’t want the throne. I need to stress that, because history has not always been generous to her memory. I knew her well enough to know that the crown was placed on her, not reached for.
By every account that reached me afterward, she wept when the council came to tell her she was queen. She reportedly said that the crown belonged to someone else by right and that she was unfit for a burden she had never once asked to carry.
That was not false modesty. Jane was utterly unprepared for the faction closing in around her.
She was a pawn in an ambition that belonged to men far more comfortable with risk than she ever was, her own father included.
Frances’s husband had spent years angling his family closer to power.
Jane’s blood, Protestant conviction, and proximity to the throne made her the instrument of an ambition she had never asked to serve.
I supported her. I will not pretend otherwise, though I have had years to consider whether my support was wisdom or simply hope dressed up as conviction.
My whole life had been built around the belief that England’s future belonged to reform.
And Jane represented that future as purely as any single person could.
I watched the council crown her with something close to relief, as foolish as that relief now looks in hindsight.
For nine days, I believed the country I had spent decades fighting for had finally arrived at the destination I wanted for it.
It was only nine days before the ground began shifting beneath us.
The Princess Mary had her own claim, her own loyal following, and an army that grew faster than Jane’s council had accounted for.
By early August, it was over. Jane’s nine days as queen collapsed into custody, and Mary rode into London to claim a throne that had briefly belonged to a girl not yet seventeen.
Watching that collapse, I understood how much danger sat at my own door.
I had a household well known for reform.
I had a new husband with no great name to shield either of us.
I had an infant daughter not yet a year old.
And I had a reputation for outspokenness that I had spent two decades building without once considering what it might cost me under a queen determined to reverse everything I had helped build.
I had watched queens rise and fall my entire adult life - the first Queen Catherine, Anne Boleyn, Jane Seymour, Catherine Howard, Katherine Parr, and now Jane Grey.
They were girls and women alike, discarded or destroyed the moment their usefulness to someone else’s ambition ran out.
I had always watched from a position of relative safety before. I no longer had that luxury.
Jane remained imprisoned through the autumn, and I clung to some hope that Mary might spare her. Jane had never sought the crown. She had been made a traitor by other people’s scheming rather than her own.
That hope ended in January, when word reached me of an uprising in Kent led by a man named Wyatt.
He’d raised a riot against nothing more than the queen’s own choice of husband.
Queen Mary intended to marry Philip of Spain.
And half of Protestant England believed that a Spanish king consort would be the end of whatever remained of the reformed church.
Frances’s husband joined the rebellion, marching a small force through the Midlands that collapsed before it ever reached London.
He accomplished nothing except sealing his daughter’s fate alongside his own.
Jane had nothing to do with any of it. It did not matter.
Mary’s council decided that a living claimant with Jane’s blood and Jane’s faith was a danger that could not be permitted to continue, rebellion or no rebellion.
They executed her on the twelfth of February, 1554. She was not yet eighteen years old.
I grieved her with a guilt I have never quite set down. I supported a cause without fully reckoning what it might cost the people who served it. Frances lost a daughter and a husband. I lost a girl from my family in every sense but blood.
In the weeks after, I understood that loyalty had become dangerous in a way it had never been before.
Not simply to the woman who held the conviction.
But to everyone bound to her by marriage, by friendship, and by blood too thin to protect and too thick to disown.
I had a husband now. I had a daughter not yet walking.
For the first time in my life, I had built a family I had chosen freely.
Mary’s council settled into power with a thoroughness that left no doubt they intended to undo everything the last reign had built.
I understood that I had considerably more to lose than I had ever had before.
And I was considerably less certain that loving the wrong cause, or the wrong girl, would not cost me all of it.