Lady Jane the Person
Lady Jane Grey or as she is often designated Queen Jane, was daughter of Grey Marquis of Dorset who derived himself in a direct line from Lady Grey who married King Edward the IV. Her mother was the eldest daughter of Mary Queen (dowager of France and sister of King Henry the VIII) who had taken as her second husband Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk. Lady Jane was born at Bradgate in Leicestershire about the year 1537.
Therefore, ‘fortune’ visited her at the cradle, if not at her grave, being born of a family on both sides royal and possessed of immense wealth. She was also blessed with both beauty and implanted with the seed of superior intelligence. At an early age she evidenced talents of an extraordinary power. She wrote and spoke English with peculiar accuracy before her contemporaries had passed the basics and was fluent in French, Italian, Latin and especially Greek while yet but a child. She likewise obtained a competent knowledge of Hebrew, Chaldee and Arabic so when the famous scholar Ascham was introduced to her as an instructor he found her already better informed than many men of professed scholarship. From him we learn she was of a calm temper and possessed a quick apprehension and firmness of judgment that enabled her to become mistress not only of languages but of the sciences too.
Although blessed with these high endowments, she possessed still greater mildness and humility which subdued every appearance of ostentation or the undue display of learning which often accompanied others of similar intelligence. She says very humbly to Henry Bullinger:
“I come now to the praises which your letter lavishes on me. I ought neither to claim nor in any manner allow them. Whatever the Divine goodness has bestowed upon me, I acknowledge it all to have been received from Him. If there be any thing about me which has some appearance of virtue, He and He alone is its Great Author and I wish you most excellent man to entreat Him in my name by your continual prayers, that He may so guide me and all my sentiments in this respect, that I may not become unworthy of his great benignity.” (Ellis pg. 183)
She spoke of her love of reading merely as a source of secret happiness and professed that when mortified by the undeserved reproach of her parents, she returned with double pleasure to the lessons of her tutor and sought in Demosthenes and Plato that delight which was denied her in all other occupations of life with which she mingled, but little and seldom of her own accord.
Ascham therefore records her account to him in her own words:
“Her parents the duke and duchess, with all the household gentlemen and gentlewomen were hunting in the park. I asked her why she should lose such pastime. Smiling she answered me.”
“All their sport in the park is but a shadow to the pleasure that I find in Plato. Alas good folk they never felt what true pleasure meant.”
“And how, came you madam to this deep knowledge of pleasure and what did chiefly allure to it, seeing not many women and but very few men have attained thereunto? I will tell you quoth she,”
“and tell you a truth which perchance you will marvel at One of the greatest benefits that ever God gave me, is that he sent me so sharp and severe parents and so gentle a schoolmaster. For when I am in presence of either father or mother, whether I speak, keep silence, sit, stand or go, whether I eat, drink, be merry or sad, whether I be sewing, playing, dancing or anything else, I must do it as it were in such weight measure and number even so perfectly as God made the world or else I am so sharply taunted, so cruelly threatened, yea presently sometimes with pinches, nips and bobs and other ways which I will not name for the honor I bear them, so without measure mis-ordered that I think myself in hell till time come that I must go to Mr Elmer. He teacheth me so gently, so pleasantly with such fair allurements to learning that I think all the time nothing while I am with him. When I am called from him, I fall a weeping because whatsoever I do else but learning, is full of grief, trouble, fear and whole mis-liking unto me. Thus my book hath been so much my pleasure and bringeth daily to me more pleasure and more so that in respect of it all other pleasures in very deed be but trifles and troubles unto me.”
“At this juncture he was going to London…and in a letter wrote…that he had had the honour and happiness of being admitted to converse familiarly with this young lady at court, and…proceeds to mention this visit at Broadgate and his surprise thereon, not without some degree of rapture. Thence he takes occasion to observe that she both spoke, and wrote Greek to admiration…But this rapture rose much higher while he was penning a letter addressed to herself the following month. There speaking of this interview, he assures her that among all the agreeable varieties which he had met with in his travels abroad, nothing had occurred to raise his admiration like that incident in the preceding summer, when he found her a young maiden by birth, so noble in the absence of her tutor and in the sumptuous house of her most noble father, at a time too, when all the raft of the family, both male and female were regaling themselves abroad with the pleasures of the chase. I found, continues he, O Jupiter and all ye Gods, I found I say the divine virgin diligently studying the divine Phaedo, of the divine Plato in the original Greek. Happier, certainly in this respect than in being descended both on the father and mother's side from kings and queens…” (Ascham’s Schoolmaster pg. 134-136)
Therefore, ‘fortune’ visited her at the cradle, if not at her grave, being born of a family on both sides royal and possessed of immense wealth. She was also blessed with both beauty and implanted with the seed of superior intelligence. At an early age she evidenced talents of an extraordinary power. She wrote and spoke English with peculiar accuracy before her contemporaries had passed the basics and was fluent in French, Italian, Latin and especially Greek while yet but a child. She likewise obtained a competent knowledge of Hebrew, Chaldee and Arabic so when the famous scholar Ascham was introduced to her as an instructor he found her already better informed than many men of professed scholarship. From him we learn she was of a calm temper and possessed a quick apprehension and firmness of judgment that enabled her to become mistress not only of languages but of the sciences too.
Although blessed with these high endowments, she possessed still greater mildness and humility which subdued every appearance of ostentation or the undue display of learning which often accompanied others of similar intelligence. She says very humbly to Henry Bullinger:
“I come now to the praises which your letter lavishes on me. I ought neither to claim nor in any manner allow them. Whatever the Divine goodness has bestowed upon me, I acknowledge it all to have been received from Him. If there be any thing about me which has some appearance of virtue, He and He alone is its Great Author and I wish you most excellent man to entreat Him in my name by your continual prayers, that He may so guide me and all my sentiments in this respect, that I may not become unworthy of his great benignity.” (Ellis pg. 183)
She spoke of her love of reading merely as a source of secret happiness and professed that when mortified by the undeserved reproach of her parents, she returned with double pleasure to the lessons of her tutor and sought in Demosthenes and Plato that delight which was denied her in all other occupations of life with which she mingled, but little and seldom of her own accord.
Ascham therefore records her account to him in her own words:
“Her parents the duke and duchess, with all the household gentlemen and gentlewomen were hunting in the park. I asked her why she should lose such pastime. Smiling she answered me.”
“All their sport in the park is but a shadow to the pleasure that I find in Plato. Alas good folk they never felt what true pleasure meant.”
“And how, came you madam to this deep knowledge of pleasure and what did chiefly allure to it, seeing not many women and but very few men have attained thereunto? I will tell you quoth she,”
“and tell you a truth which perchance you will marvel at One of the greatest benefits that ever God gave me, is that he sent me so sharp and severe parents and so gentle a schoolmaster. For when I am in presence of either father or mother, whether I speak, keep silence, sit, stand or go, whether I eat, drink, be merry or sad, whether I be sewing, playing, dancing or anything else, I must do it as it were in such weight measure and number even so perfectly as God made the world or else I am so sharply taunted, so cruelly threatened, yea presently sometimes with pinches, nips and bobs and other ways which I will not name for the honor I bear them, so without measure mis-ordered that I think myself in hell till time come that I must go to Mr Elmer. He teacheth me so gently, so pleasantly with such fair allurements to learning that I think all the time nothing while I am with him. When I am called from him, I fall a weeping because whatsoever I do else but learning, is full of grief, trouble, fear and whole mis-liking unto me. Thus my book hath been so much my pleasure and bringeth daily to me more pleasure and more so that in respect of it all other pleasures in very deed be but trifles and troubles unto me.”
“At this juncture he was going to London…and in a letter wrote…that he had had the honour and happiness of being admitted to converse familiarly with this young lady at court, and…proceeds to mention this visit at Broadgate and his surprise thereon, not without some degree of rapture. Thence he takes occasion to observe that she both spoke, and wrote Greek to admiration…But this rapture rose much higher while he was penning a letter addressed to herself the following month. There speaking of this interview, he assures her that among all the agreeable varieties which he had met with in his travels abroad, nothing had occurred to raise his admiration like that incident in the preceding summer, when he found her a young maiden by birth, so noble in the absence of her tutor and in the sumptuous house of her most noble father, at a time too, when all the raft of the family, both male and female were regaling themselves abroad with the pleasures of the chase. I found, continues he, O Jupiter and all ye Gods, I found I say the divine virgin diligently studying the divine Phaedo, of the divine Plato in the original Greek. Happier, certainly in this respect than in being descended both on the father and mother's side from kings and queens…” (Ascham’s Schoolmaster pg. 134-136)