In 1553 Lady Jane Grey was married to Lord Guildford Dudley, as part of a plot to alter the succession of the throne to the Dudley family. Although she did become Queen on the death Edward VI, her reign only lasted nine days before she was deposed in favour of Mary I. The following year, Mary agreed to the execution of a young woman whose only real fault was to possess royal descent.

This portrait, inscribed as Lady Jane Grey, is in fact copied from a painting now known to be of a Flemish Lady.

Her contribution to English history was the revelation of a beautiful, devoted, unselfish, Christian spirit under circumstances in which the main springs of human action are almost certain to be revealed.
- Conyers Read, The Tudors.

Additional Information on
Lady Jane Grey (b.1537 r.1553 d.1554)

Lady Jane Grey was proclaimed Queen upon the death of Edward VI by his Lord Protector, Earl of Northumberland in an attempt to secure a Protestant succession to the English throne. It is said that Northumberland persuaded Edward to make Lady Jane (granddaughter of Henry VIII's sister Mary) his heir whilst on his death bed - claiming that Henry VIII's marriages to Catherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn had been invalid and hence Mary and Elizabeth were illegitimate. The unwilling Lady Jane reigned as Queen for only nine days before she was deposed by Mary. Mary had her imprisoned and after being found guilty of treason was condemned to death. She was executed on Tower Green in 1554.

QUOTATIONS

Whatever might be the cause, she preserved the same appearance of knowledge, and the contempt of what was generally esteemed pleasure, during the whole of her life, for she declared herself displeased with being appointed queen, and while conducting to the scaffold, she wrote a sentence in Latin and another in Greek on seeing the dead body of her husband accidentally passing that way.
- Jane Austen, The History of England