Eight days into her reign as Queen of England, Lady Jane Gray took personal charge of the keys to the Tower of London and even locked her own supporters inside with her. The end was near, but before her execution, she wrote several messages in her prayer book. Historian Helen Castor explores these notes and learns that Lady Jane was actually steadfast and composed until the day she died.
In 1553, Tudor England, Wales and Ireland were on the brink of bloody civil war when the dying King Edward VI, son of Henry VIII, relinquished the throne, not to his older sister, Mary, but to her cousin, Lady Jane. Gray.
It's a story of intrigue, conspiracies, political maneuvering and a capital preparing to be attacked. It is also the story of a young woman, fiercely manipulated by powerful men in the palace, who ends up losing her life.
The life of Lady Jane Gray is a tragic tale. From the moment Edward VI brings Jane into the line of succession, her terrible fate, in the Tower of London district, is sealed.
Helen Castor is a historian and medievalist who has studied the She-Wolves, women who wielded power in various ways throughout the medieval period. She now sets out to take a close look at the first woman to sit on the English throne, not as a wife, but as a queen regnant. But Helen discovers much more than a story about a Tudor queen. The story of Jane Gray is shrouded in myth, confusion and propaganda. The pictures are not Jane, the well-known stories turn out to be false, and many books disagree on the details. Helen asks why the first woman to be proclaimed Queen of England sparked so many distortions of the truth.
Helen undertakes some Tudor detective work and returns to primary sources in an attempt to separate truth from fiction. She constructs the true story of Jane Gray and these dark characters who surrounded her, tracing her world and the nine days she spent on the throne.
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