On 25th January 1554, Lady Jane Dudley was a prisoner in the Tower of London. Found guilty of treason for her brief reign in July 1553, Jane had returned to the Tower on 13 November from the Guildhall under sentence of death. When Jane had dined with her jailor, Richard Partridge and his friend on 29th August 1553, she had described Mary as ‘…a merciful princes; I beseche God she may long continue’ (1).
Although she had been granted the freedom to walk in the Queen’s garden at the Tower in December, there had been no further sign of the mercy that Jane still believed Mary would show her and two days previously Jane’s brother-in-law, Robert Dudley, had been found guilty of treason for his role in the plot to put Jane on the throne.
Outside the Tower, the Mayor of London received the news of an uprising at Maidstone in Kent (2) and earlier that day, Jane’s father, the Duke of Suffolk had received a summons to court by Queen Mary but as the author of the Chronicle of Queen Jane later reported, he ignored the summons and ‘thence departed himself, no man knoweth whither.’ (3)
Jane did not know it but she only had a few weeks to live.
Sources
1. Nichols, J. G (ed) (1850) The Chronicle of Queen Jane and of Two Years of Queen Mary and Especially of the Rebellion of Sir Thomas Wyatt, Written by a Resident in the Tower of London, Llanerch Publishers, p.24-26
2. Wriothesley, C. (1877), A Chronicle of England During the Reigns of the Tudors, Vol II, p.107.URL:http://archive.org/stream/chronicleofengla02camduoft/chronicleofengla02camduoft_djvu.txt Date accessed: 24 January 2022
3. Nichols, J. G (ed) (1850) The Chronicle of Queen Jane and of Two Years of Queen Mary and Especially of the Rebellion of Sir Thomas Wyatt, Written by a Resident in the Tower of London, Llanerch Publishers, p.36
