The opinion which her contemporaries formed of this lady, and which is
to a great extent shared by their posterity, was not the true view of
her character. She was by no means the meek, gentle, spiritless being
whom novelists, and even historians, have usually depicted under her
name. On the contrary, she was a woman with a very decided will of her
own, and with far more character than her husband, who had set his weak
mind on being proclaimed King. This Jane bluntly refused, though she
was willing to create him a Duke. Through all her letters now extant
there runs a complaining, querulous strain which rather interferes with
the admiration that would otherwise be excited by her talents,
character, and fate. My business in the story is to paint Lady Jane as
the Protestants of her day believed her to be; but it is hardly just not
to add that they believed her to be made of softer and more malleable
material than she really was. The fact of her having been persuaded, or
rather forced, to accept the Crown, has given this erroneous impression
of her disposition. It was the only point on which she was ever
influenced against her own judgment; the instigator being Lord Guilford,
who in his turn was urged by his ambitious, unprincipled father, and his
equally ambitious and unprincipled mother, in whose hands his weak,
affectionate, yielding temperament rendered him an easy tool. The
probability is, that had Jane been firmly established as Queen, she
would have shown a character more akin to that of Elizabeth than is
commonly supposed, though undoubtedly her personal piety was much more
marked than that of her cousin. It seems rather strange that the child
of parents, morally speaking, so weak as Dorset and Frances, should have
displayed so strong and resolved a character as did Lady Jane Grey.
Born at Bradgate, 1536-7; married at Durham House, London, May 21, 1553;
beheaded on Tower Hill, February 12, 1554.