Stephan Edwards (author of Portraits of Lady Jane Grey Dudley, England’s ‘Nine Days Queen’)
A Lady or a Queen
Whether Jane Grey Dudley should be styled ‘Lady Jane’ or ‘Queen Jane’ depends largely on how much we defer to recognized governmental and other ‘official’ authorities, or whether we instead defer to tradition. My own opinion has changed as my research on Jane Grey Dudley and the succession crisis of 1553 has progressed.
I have argued in the past that Jane should be styled ‘Queen Jane’ on the grounds that numerous governmental and legal authorities number her among the monarchs of England.
• The National Archives of the United Kingdom maintains a separate section labeled ‘Queen Jane’ for storing certain types of official governmental records that survive from the period between 6 July and 19 July 1553. The National Archives is a non-ministerial department of the Government of the United Kingdom, therefore the reign of Queen Jane seemingly has official recognition from the government itself.
• The official website of the Royal Family recognizes and includes Queen Jane among the predecessors of the current king. Therefore, the Crown officially recognizes Queen Jane as a previous monarch of England.
• Certain authoritative law texts include Jane among the monarchs of England.
• The English government and bureaucracy operated between 10 July and 19 July 1553 in the name of and under the authority of Queen Jane. A handful of documents originating from entities not directly involved in the alteration of the succession survive to illustrate this point. They notably include courts-of-law transcripts indicating that the courts were convened in the name of Queen Jane, and the actions taken by those courts and other entities and recorded in those documents were never voided or reversed as ‘illegal’ or as having been undertaken without proper authority.
But my thinking has changed as I have considered the question more objectively over the past few years. These are the “cold hard facts”:
• Monarchs of England and the United Kingdom rule by consent of the people.
• The authority to govern the succession lies with Parliament as representative of the people, not with the Crown generally or with any sovereign individually other than Henry VIII. That monarch remains the only one explicitly authorized by Parliament to name his own successor (Second Succession Act).
• Parliament’s last ruling on the royal succession prior to the death of Edward VI was the Third Succession Act of 1544, and that statute law identified Mary Tudor as Edward’s rightful ‘next-in-line’ successor.
• Edward VI’s letters patent nominating Jane Grey Dudley as his successor were not legally valid, for a number of reasons.
• The people dissented from the rule of Queen Jane and instead rallied successfully to support Mary’s claim and to install her as their queen just nine short days after Jane was first publicly proclaimed as Edward’s successor.
If English monarchs rule only with consent of the governed, and if the governed consented to be ruled by Mary rather than by Jane, then the stipulations of the Third Succession Act of 1544 are determinative. The reign of Jane Grey Dudley was not legal, and she cannot rightly be counted among the monarchs of England. She should therefore be styled ‘Lady Jane Grey Dudley.’ And in a very rare example of accuracy in the traditional narrative on the life of Jane Grey Dudley, tradition inadvertently adopted that style. The majority of authors writing since 1554 has consistently referred to her not as ‘Queen Jane,’ but rather as ‘Lady Jane.’ In this instance, the tradition is correct.
