TRAGIC JANE GREY

Greymouth Evening Star, 17 January 1939, Page 11

TRAGIC JANE GREY

VICTIM OF AMBITIOUS PARENTS.

The personality of Lady Jane Grey remains vague for the amateur reader of history. Her pitiful end rouses an intolerable distress (writes Mary Crosbie in ‘John o’ London’s Weekly). Her pedantry rouses an uneasy distaste. And there, for most of us, she remains; young, dim, piteous, the victim, as she herself said on the scaffold, of other people’s ambition. Mr. John Lindsey, in ‘The Tudor Pawn,’ has gathered together all that is known of her, added a few smiles and tears and gestures, unauthorised by the historical record, but demanded by a film-fed public, and has turned out a credible and creditable narrative. Jane remains the priggish, overeducated, religion-crammed child we have always known. The cold ambition of her parents and of Northumberald stand forth without a glint of ruth in it. Edward VI., the Admiral, Cranmer, Queen Mary (and, in the background, Elizabeth) appear in their familiar colours. All is brightly wrought into a tale that moves easily, a scene that lacks nothing of vivacity. If we do not know any more of Jane after reading it, that is hardly Mr. Lindsey’s fault. “Jane the Queen” is the mere pawn of plotting ambitions. Jane the girl is so wrapped in hard religious doctrine that it is difficult for a free-minded age to penetrate to her reality. Was she drugged by too much learning into a state of spiritual impotence? Did the “nips and bobs” administered by her harsh mother pinch her very soul? Like her cousin, Edward VI.. she, is so nearly the child described by eighteenth century writers for the young that she seems never to have lived outside a. book. SACRIFICED BY HER FRIENDS “Jane Grey’s life, is so far as it was the life of a private individual, had no bearing or significance on the history of her times,” says Mr. Lindsey. “Jane herself mattered very little until her friends and relatives had pushed her into a position for which she was utterly unsuited and which she never wanted. To understand the girl who was slain on Tower Hill it is necessary to know in detail the lives of the men and women who were instrumental in sending her there.” And —“Jane as a human, has little or no significance in English history. Jane, as a sacrifice, is deeply significant. So lie tells of her origins—the marriage of Henry VIII.’s younger sister to Brandon of Suffolk that gave her her dash of Tudor blood; the circumstances leading to Henry s will, that named his sister's descendants as his heirs, after his own children: the various climbing and callous personages who used her as their game; the religious conflict that made her its victim. _. . It. is said that at her home in Leicestershire the oak trees were pollarded after her beheading, and even now a tale is told of a ghostly coach, bearing her headless body, that drives by on St. Sylvester’s Eve. But in the “rows of hideous little houses” that stand in place of the three-shaded park that spread about the manor house where Jane was born, it is likely that she is forgotten utterly.