With her execution set for the following day, Jane busied herself writing farewell letters. As her father was now also imprisoned in the Tower, Jane wrote a final message to him in the prayer book she had read from as she walked to trial at the Guildhall the previous November. At some point this prayer book had been passed to her husband, Guildford, who also inscribed a message to his father-in-law. Jane also had written a long letter to her younger sister, Katherine. Her letters finished, maybe Jane read the prayer she had written at some point during her imprisonment.
In the Queen’s Chapel, the court listened to a sermon by the Bishop of Winchester, the author of the ‘Chronicle of Queen Jane’ describing how,
‘he axed a boone of the quenes highness that like as she had before tyme extended hir mercy, partyculerly and privatlie, so thorough her lenity and gentylnes moche conspyracye and open rebellion was growen…that she wolde nowe be mercyfull to the body of the commonwealth, and conservation therof, which coulde not be unless the rotten and hurtfull members therof were cut off and consumed. And thus he ended soone after; whereby all the audience dyd gather ther should shortly follwe sharpe and cruell execution.’ (1)
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.54
