Character and Fate of Lady Jane Grey.-Hume. [The Duke of Northumberland had married his son, Lord Guilford Dudley, to Lady Jane Grey, grand-daughter of Henry VII.; and persuaded Edward VI. to set aside the claims of his sisters, Mary and Elizabeth, on the ground of illegitimacy, and to settle the succession upon the Lady Jane. Accordingly, on the king's death, arrangements were made to proclaim her queen (1553). The following narrative of the consequences is taken from Hume's "History of England."] 1. NORTHUMBERLAND found that further dissimulation was fruitless: he went to Sion House, accompanied by the Duke of Suffolk, the Earl of Pembroke, and others of the nobility; and he approached the Lady Jane, who resided there, with all the respect usually paid to the sovereign. Jane was in a great measure ignorant of these transactions; and it was with equal grief and surprise that she received intelligence of them. She was a lady of an amiable person, an engaging disposition, and accomplished parts; and being of an equal age with the late king, she had received all her education with him, and seemed even to possess greater facility in acquiring every part of manly and polite literature. 2. She had attained a familiar knowledge of the Roman and Greek languages, besides modern tongues; had passed most of her time in an application to learning; and expressed a great indifference for other occupations and amusements usual with her sex and station. Roger Ascham, tutor to the Lady Elizabeth, having one day paid her a visit, found her employed in reading Plato, while the rest of the family were engaged in a party of hunting in the park; and on his admiring the singularity of her choice, she told him that she received more pleasure from that author than the others could reap from all their sport and gayety. 3. Her heart, full of this passion for literature and the elegant arts, and of tenderness toward her husband, who was deserving of her affections, had never opened itself to the flattering allurements of ambition; and the intelligence of her elevation to the throne was nowise agreeable to her. She even refused to accept of the present; pleaded the preferable title of the two princesses; expressed her dread of the consequences attending an enterprise so dangerous, not to say criminal; and desired to remain in the private station in which she was born. Overcome at last by the entreaties, rather than the reasons, of her father and father-in-law, and above all, of her husband, she submitted to their will, and was prevailed on to relinquish her own judgment. 4. It was then usual for the kings of England, after their accession, to pass the first days in the Tower; and Northumberland immediately conveyed thither the new sovereign. All the counsellors were obliged to attend her to that fortress; and by this means became, in reality, prisoners in the hands of Northumberland, whose will they were necessitated to obey. Orders were given by the council to proclaim Jane throughout the kingdom; but these orders were executed only in London and the neighborhood. No applause ensued; the people heard the proclamation with silence and concern; some even expressed their scorn and contempt; and one Pot, a vintner's apprentice, was severely punished for this offense. The Protestant teachers themselves, who were employed to convince the people of Jane's title, found their eloquence fruitless; and Ridley, Bishop of London, who preached a sermon to that purpose, wrought no effect upon his audience. . . [Mary, daughter of Henry VIII., by Catharine of Aragon, having asserted her right to the throne, was on her entrance into London proclaimed queen. Northumberland and two of his accomplices were tried and executed for treason; but Lady Jane and her husband, although also convicted, and sentenced to death, were kept some time in prison, the queen being reluctant to carry the sentence into execution. A rebellion, however, under Sir Thomas Wyatt, broke out the next year, and unfortunately for the hapless pair, some of their friends were concerned in it. The narrative is thus continued by the historian Hume.] 5. This rebellion proved fatal to the Lady Jane as well as to her husband; the Duke of Suffolk's guilt was imputed to her, and though the rebels and malcontents seemed chiefly to rest their hopes on the Lady Elizabeth and the Earl of Devonshire, the queen, incapable of generosity or clemency, determined to remove every person from whom the least danger could be apprehended. Warning was given the Lady Jane to prepare for death; a doom which she had long expected, and which the innocence of her life, as well as the misfortunes to which she had been exposed, rendered nowise unwelcome to her. The queen's zeal, under color of tender mercy to the prisoner's soul, induced her to send divines, who harassed her with perpetual disputation; and even a reprieve for three days was granted her, in hopes that she would be persuaded during that time to pay, by a timely conversion, some regard to her eternal welfare. 6. The Lady Jane had presence of mind, in those melancholy circumstances, not only to defend her religion by all the topics then in use, but also to write a letter to a sister in the Greek language; in which, besides sending her a copy of the Scriptures in that tongue, she exhorted her to maintain, in every fortune, a like steady perseverance. On the day of her execution her husband, Lord Guilford, desired permission to see her; but she refused her consent, and informed him, by a message, that the tenderness of their parting would overcome the fortitude of both, and would too much unbend their minds from that constancy which their approaching end required of them. Their separation, she said, would be only for a moment; and they would soon rejoin each other in a scene where their affections would be forever united, and where death, disappointment, and misfortunes could no longer have access to them, or disturb their eternal felicity. 7. It had been intended to execute the Lady Jane and Lord Guilford together on the same scaffold, at Tower Hill; but the council, dreading the compassion of the people for their youth, beauty, innocence, and noble birth, changed their orders, and gave directions that she should be beheaded within the verge of the Tower. She saw her husband led to execution, and, having given him from the window some token of her remembrance, she waited with tranquillity till her own appointed hear should bring her to a like fate. She even saw his headless body carried back in a cart, and found herself more, confirmed by the reports which she heard of the constancy of his end, than shaken by so tender and melancholy a spectacle. 8. Sir John Gage, Constable of the Tower, when he led her to execution, desired her to bestow on him some small present, which he might keep as a perpetual memorial of her. She gave him her table-book, in which she had just written three sentences on seeing her husband's dead body-one in Greek, another in Latin, a third in English. The purport of them was, that human justice was against his body, but divine mercy would be favorable to his soul; that if her fault deserved punishment, her youth, at least, and her imprudence, were worthy of excuse; and that God and posterity, she trusted, would show her favor. On the scaffold she made a speech to the bystanders, in which the mildness of her disposition led her to take the blame wholly on herself, without uttering one complaint against the severity with which she had been treated. 9. She said that her offense was not the having laid her hand upon the crown, but the not rejecting it with sufficient constancy; that she had less erred through ambition than through reverence to her parents, whom she had been taught to respect and obey; that she willingly received death, as the only satisfaction which she could now make to the injured state; and though her infringement of the laws had been constrained, she would show, by her voluntary submission to their sentence, that she was desirous to atone for that disobedience into which too much filial piety had betrayed her; that she had justly deserved this punishment for being made the instrument, though the unwilling instrument, of the ambition of others; and that the story of her life, she hoped, might at least be useful, by proving that innocence excuses not great misdeeds, if they tend anywise to the destruction of the commonwealth. After uttering these words, she caused herself to be disrobed by her women, and, with a steady, serene countenance, submitted herself to the executioner. [Queen Mary filled the Tower and other prisons with the numerons objects of her suspicion, many of them among the most distinguished of the nobility and gentry. The Princess Elizabeth was also imprisoned, but made so good a defense that she was soon released. Queen Mary was succeeded by Elizabeth in 1558.] Execution of Mary Queen of Scots.-Lingard. [Mary Queen of Scots having given great offense to her subjects was deprived of her throne and imprisoned in Lochleven Castle. Escaping thence she took refuge in England, supposing that she would be kindly treated by her cousin Elizabeth, then the reigning queen. She had, however, offended the Queen of England by setting up a claim to the English throne on the ground of the alleged illegitimacy of Elizabeth, who was the daughter of Anne Boleyn. Instead, therefore, of finding protection and hospitality, she was made a prisoner, and continued in captivity during nineteen years. In 1587, she was beheaded at Fotheringay Castle, on a charge of being concerned in a conspiracy, the object of which was to take the life of Elizabeth. The following account of the execution is taken from Lingard's "History of England."] 1. MARY heard the announcement of her sentence with a serenity of countenance and dignity of manner, which awed and affected the beholders; but her attendants burst into tears and lamentations. After long and fervent prayer, the queen was called to supper. She ate sparingly; and before she rose from table, drank to all her servants; asking, at the same time, forgiveness of them, if she had ever spoken or acted toward them unkindly. 2. The last night of Mary's life was spent in the arrange ment of her domestic affairs, the writing of her will and of three letters, and in exercises of devotion. In the retirement of her closet, with her two maids, she prayed and read alternately; and sought for support and comfort in reading the passion of Christ. About four she retired to rest; but it was observed that she did not sleep. Her lips were in constant motion, and her mind seemed absorbed in prayer. At the first break of day her household assembled around her. She read to them her will, distributed among them her clothes and money, and bade them adieu, kissing the women and giving her hand to kiss to the men. Weeping, they followed her into her oratory, where she took her place in front of the altar; they knelt down and prayed behind her. 3. In the midst of the great hall of the castle had been raised a scaffold covered with black serge, and surrounded with a low railing. Before eight, a message was sent to the queen, who replied that she would be ready in half an hour. At that time the sheriff entered the oratory, and Mary arose, |