The Great English Queen-Off: Lady Jane Grey and Mary I in Historical Fiction

Russo, Stephanie

doi:10.1007/978-3-031-35688-9_11

Stephanie Russo⁵

Part of the book series: Queenship and Power ((QAP))

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Abstract

The struggle between Mary I and Lady Jane Grey for the English throne played itself out in just under two weeks in July 1553 and concluded with Jane’s execution on 12 February 1554. Despite the spectacle of two women battling for the right to be England’s first queen regnant, surprisingly little attention has been paid to the way that this conflict has been represented in historical fiction. It is striking, too, that historical novels sideline any consideration of the interpersonal relationship between these Tudor cousins, perhaps reflecting the tendency for the historiography to downplay this relationship. Instead, historical fiction largely reiterates stereotypes about both, with Jane and Mary represented as religious obsessives on either side of the Protestant/Catholic divide. The two women are used as embodiments of contesting ideologies, with Mary representing the world of traditional Catholic conservatism, while Jane has been understood as representing progressive Protestantism. This conservative/progressive opposition goes some way towards explaining why Mary has been unable to escape the ‘bloody’ epithet, while mythology around Jane Grey has been challenged by twentieth- and twenty-first century historical novelists looking for stories about admirable women from history. While Mary’s piety is associated with sexual frustration, fanaticism, and delusion, Jane’s youth and intellectual precocity are frequently celebrated and cast in feminist terms; Mary is perceived as old-fashioned in her pursuit of Counter-Revolution, while Jane is associated with political and religious revolution. Mary has thus been unable to escape mythologizing as “Bloody Mary,” the failed queen destined to be outshone by her sister forever. Historical fiction about Lady Jane Grey has, however, been increasingly willing to challenge the romantic story of the doomed ‘Nine Days Queen,’ with recent novels self-consciously critiquing the effect of Jane’s religiosity on her life and choices.

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Notes

1.
Thomas S. Freeman, “Inventing Bloody Mary: Perceptions of Mary Tudor from the Restoration to the Twentieth Century,” in Mary Tudor: Old and New Perspectives, ed. Susan Doran and Thomas S. Freeman (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 78 (78–99).
2.
Susan Doran and Thomas S. Freeman, “Introduction,” in Mary Tudor: Old and New Perspectives, ed. Susan Doran and Thomas S. Freeman (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 9 (1–17).
3.
Freeman, “Inventing Bloody Mary: Perceptions of Mary Tudor from the Restoration to the Twentieth Century,” 86.
4.
Agnes Strickland, Lives of the Queens of England, from the Normal Conquest, Vol. V (London: Henry Colburn, 1845), 441.
5.
H.F.M. Prescott, Mary Tudor: The Spanish Tudor (London: Phoenix, 2012).
6.
Linda Porter, Mary Tudor: The First Queen (London: Piatkus, 2007), 418.
7.
See, for example, Porter; Anna Whitelock, Mary Tudor: England’s First Queen (London: Bloomsbury, 2009); Judith M. Richards, “Reassessing Mary Tudor: Some Concluding Points,” in Mary Tudor: Old and New Perspectives, ed. Susan Doran and Thomas S. Freeman (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 206–24; Sarah Duncan, “‘Bloody’ Mary? Changing Perceptions of England’s First Ruling Queen,” in The Name of a Queen: William Fleetwood’s Itinerarium de Windsor, ed. Charles Beem and Dennis Moore (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 175–91.
8.
Jean Plaidy, in the Shadow of the Crown (New York: Three Rivers Press, 1989).
9.
Philippa Gregory, The Queen’s Fool (London: HarperCollins, 2011), 484.
10.
Suzannah Dunn, The Queen’s Sorrow (London: HarperCollins, 2009).
11.
Suzannah Dunn, The Testimony of Alys Twist (London: Little, Brown, 2020), 275–6.
12.
Julianne Lee, Her Mother’s Daughter: A Novel of Mary Tudor (New York: Berkley Books, 2009).
13.
For more on Mary I’s representation in historical fiction, see: Stephanie Russo, “Still Bloody Mary: Mary I in Historical Fiction,” in Writing Mary I: History, Historiography, Fiction, ed. Valerie Schutte and Jessica S. Hower (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), 217–40.
14.
Nicola Tallis, Crown of Blood: The Deadly Inheritance of Lady Jane Grey (London:Michael O’Mara Books Limited, 2016), 280–1.
15.
Rosemary A. Mitchell, “The Nine Lives of the Nine Days Queen: From Religious Heroine in Romantic Victim,” in Clio’s Daughters: British Women Making History, 1790–1899, ed. Lynette Felber (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2007), 97 (97–122).
16.
Carole Levin, “Lady Jane Grey: Protestant Queen and Martyr,” in Silent But For The Word: Tudor Women as Patrons, Translators, and Writers of Religious Works, ed. Margaret Patterson Hannay (Kent: The Kent State University Press, 1985), 92 (92–106).
17.
Leanda de Lisle, The Sisters Who Would Be Queen: The Tragedy of Mary, Katherine and Lady Jane Grey (London: Harper Press, 2008), 110.
18.
Eric Ives, Lady Jane Grey: A Tudor Mystery (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 4.
19.
Rosemary Mitchell, “Edwardian Postscript: Adapting the Victorian Lady Jane Grey in the Age of the Suffragettes,” in Tradition(s) - Innovation(s) En Angleterre Au XIXe Siècle, ed. Françoise Baillet et al. (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2017), 77 (75–86).
20.
Levin, “Lady Jane Grey,” 105–6.
21.
Emily Purdy, The Fallen Queen (London: Avon, 2013), 10.
22.
Purdy, The Fallen Queen, 10.
23.
Purdy, The Fallen Queen, 237.
24.
Hilda Lewis, I Am Mary Tudor (London: Arrow Books, 1971), 55.
25.
Hilda Lewis, Mary the Queen (London: Arrow Books, 1975), 206.
26.
Hilda Lewis, Bloody Mary (London: Arrow Books, 1975), 235.
27.
Alison Weir, Innocent Traitor (London: Arrow Books, 2006), 13.
28.
Weir, Innocent Traitor, 313.
29.
Weir, Innocent Traitor, 402.
30.
Weir, Innocent Traitor, 403.
31.
Sue MacLeod, Namesake (Toronto: Pajama Press, 2013), 86.
32.
Sue Reid, My Story: Lady Jane Grey (London: Scholastic Children’s Books, 2012), 117.
33.
Caroline Corby, Lady Jane Grey: Queen for Sale (London: Walker Books, 2010), 30 (original emphasis).
34.
Joanne Brown and Nancy St. Clair, The Distant Mirror: Reflections on Young Adult Historical Fiction (London: The Scarecrow Press, 2006), 4.
35.
Corby, Lady Jane Grey: Queen for Sale, 125.
36.
Tallis, Crown of Blood: The Deadly Inheritance of Lady Jane Grey, 103.
37.
Brown and Clair, The Distant Mirror, 29.
38.
Carolyn Meyer, Mary, Bloody Mary (London: HarperCollins, 2003), 234.
39.
Hilda Lewis, I Am Mary Tudor, 373.
40.
Lewis, I Am Mary Tudor, 394.
41.
Lewis, I Am Mary Tudor, 420.
42.
Gregory, The Last Tudor, 60.
43.
Gregory, The Last Tudor, 97.
44.
Ann Rinaldi, Nine Days a Queen: The Short Life and Reign of Lady Jane Grey (New York: Harper Trophy, 2005), 119.
45.
Rinaldi, Nine Days a Queen, 216.
46.
Purdy, The Fallen Queen, 45.
47.
Purdy, The Fallen Queen, 46.
48.
Purdy, The Fallen Queen, 260.
49.
Weir, Innocent Traitor, 380.
50.
Jenna Elizabeth Barlow, “Women’s Historical Fiction ‘After’ Feminism: Discursive Reconstructions of the Tudors in Contemporary Literature” (Stellenbosch University, 2014), 226.
51.
Emily Purdy, Mary and Elizabeth (London: HarperCollins, 2011), 353.
52.
Mitchell, “The Nine Lives of the Nine Days Queen,” 97.
53.
Purdy, The Fallen Queen, 214.
54.
Susan Meissner, Lady in Waiting: A Novel (Colorado Springs: WaterBrook Press, 2010), 167.
55.
Miriam Elizabeth Burstein, “The Fictional Afterlife of Anne Boleyn: How to Do Things with the Queen, 1901–2006,” Clio 37, no. 1 (2007): 18 (1–26).
56.
Weir, Innocent Traitor, 277.
57.
Weir, Innocent Traitor, 329.
58.
Stephanie Russo, ‘Still Bloody Mary’, 217–40.
59.
Freeman, “Inventing Bloody Mary,” 99.
60.
Plaidy, In the Shadow of The Crown, 384.
61.
Plaidy, In the Shadow of the Crown, 383.
62.
Diana Wallace, The Woman’s Historical Novel: British Women Writers, 1900–2000 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 137.
63.
Suzannah Dunn, The Lady of Misrule (London: Little, Brown, 2015), 109, 110.
64.
Dunn, The Lady of Misrule, 178.
65.
Dunn, The Lady of Misrule, 254.
66.
Katherine West Scheil, Imagining Shakespeare’s Wife: The Afterlife of Anne Hathaway (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 192.
67.
Dunn, The Lady of Misrule, 179.
68.
Dunn, The Lady of Misrule, 78.
69.
Catherine Gallagher, Telling It Like It Wasn’t: The Counterfactual Imagination in History and Fiction (Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 2018).
70.
Stephanie Russo, The Afterlife of Anne Boleyn: Representations of Anne Boleyn in Fiction and on the Screen (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), 263.
71.
Lucy Lancaster, Gloriana Nascent: An Alternative Tudor History (Las Vegas, 2018), 135.
72.
Lancaster, Gloriana Nascent, 126.
73.
Lancaster, Gloriana Nascent, 222.
74.
Cynthia Hand, Brodi Ashton, and Jodi Meadows, My Lady Jane (New York: HarperTeen, 2016), x.
75.
Hand, Ashton, and Meadows, My Lady Jane, 151.
76.
Hand, Ashton, and Meadows, My Lady Jane, 470.
77.
Hand, Ashton, and Meadows, My Lady Jane, 474.
78.
Hand, Ashton, and Meadows, My Lady Jane, 438.

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Macquarie University, Sydney, NSW, Australia
Stephanie Russo

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Independent scholar, Beaver Falls, PA, USA
Valerie Schutte
Southwestern University, Georgetown, TX, USA
Jessica S. Hower

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Russo, S. (2023). The Great English Queen-Off: Lady Jane Grey and Mary I in Historical Fiction. In: Schutte, V., Hower, J.S. (eds) Mid-Tudor Queenship and Memory. Queenship and Power. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-35688-9_11

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-35688-9_11
Published: 20 September 2023
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-031-35687-2
Online ISBN: 978-3-031-35688-9
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