History Fix

Ep. 124 Frances Grey: How the Vilified Mother of Lady Jane Grey May Not Have Deserved Her Reputation

• Shea LaFountaine • Episode 124

Share episode

This episode was supposed to be about Lady Jane Grey, the "Nine Days Queen" who was hastily placed on the English throne following the death of Henry VIII's son Edward VI, usurping his older sister Mary. But as I researched Jane Grey, I came across another character entirely who desperately needed her story "fixed." Frances Grey was Jane Grey's mother (and the niece of Henry VIII). History has not remembered Frances fondly. In the almost 500 years since her death, she has been cast as the evil mother figure, the very archetype of female wickedness. But who was Frances Grey really? Was she really as bad as her reputation would have us believe? And what part did she actually play in the tragic fate of her daughter? Let’s fix that. 

Support the show! 

Sources: 

Shoot me a message!

Lady Jane Grey was just 16 years old when she was beheaded at the tower of London in 1554. A secret plot had unexpectedly placed Jane on the English throne, usurping Mary Tudor, the eldest daughter of Henry VIII. Just nine days later, an outraged Mary stormed into London with a crowd of supporters and swiftly took back her throne. Jane was imprisoned in the Tower of London and later executed. If ever there was a political pawn, it was Jane Grey, a child who unwillingly found herself in the middle of a coup to steal an empire. Jane’s fate was undeniably tragic and when searching for suspects on which to cast the blame, several arise. But one in particular may have gotten more blame than she deserved. Over the almost 500 years since all this drama went down, Frances Grey, Jane’s mother, has been cast as evil, controlling, and abusive. She fills the role as the perfect evil villain in the next great historical drama, akin to Cinderella’s evil stepmother or the evil queen in Snow White. As far as constructing a good story goes, it works. Everyone loves an evil mother figure for some reason. But who was Frances Grey really? Was she really as bad as her reputation would have us believe? And what part did she actually play in the tragic fate of her daughter, the nine days queen? Let’s fix that.   


Hello, I’m Shea LaFountaine and you’re listening to History Fix where I discuss lesser known true stories from history you won’t be able to stop thinking about. We are going back to Tudor world today. You guys know I love hate the Tudors. It’s a fun world to get lost in either way. I set out to make this episode about Lady Jane Gray. I haven’t been able to stop thinking about her since the Bloody Mary episode, since the Henry VIII episodes way back when, she’s just always somewhere in the back of my mind. But as soon as I started digging into her story in order to put this episode together, I pretty quickly discovered another person entirely who desperately needed her story fixed. And so I unexpectedly shifted gears. Don't worry, this episode is still about Lady Jane Gray, and hopefully it will scratch that itch I’ve been having, but really this episode is about Jane‘s mother Frances Gray, who not unlike her cousin Mary Tudor, has been unfairly cast as an evil, cruel woman by the game of historical telephone. 


I was chatting with my husband Joey the other day about why he dislikes history. He’s a numbers guy. He likes math and science, and he was explaining to me that what he dislikes about history is the uncertainty of it all. That someone long ago could record something completely false or at least heavily skewed and we would all believe it. And I get that and I agree with him, it happens all the time. So then I tried to explain that the very reason he dislikes history is the same reason I like it or at least the same reason I feel passionate about it, passionate about fixing it. Because he’s right, if someone writes something 500 years ago, and we still have access to that record, that old, weathered piece of parchment or whatever, it seems so sacred, we don’t even hesitate, we believe every word. We’re like, “yeah he wrote this, he wrote this at the time, way back then so it has to be true.” Like, “look how old this paper is, it has to be true.” As if those two things are related. But in reality, if there’s no evidence backing it, if there’s nothing to corroborate it, it doesn’t matter when it was written. It doesn’t matter how old the paper is. It means very little. Especially when the account we’re talking about here was based on a conversation with an upset thirteen year old girl. Have you ever met a thirteen year old girl? They will say anything. We’ll come back to that. 


Let’s talk about who Frances Grey, the mother of Jane Grey, was and her connection to the Tudors. So the Tudors, in case you’ve missed like absolutely everything I’ve ever talked about, the Tudors were a ruling family, a dynasty in England starting with Henry VII who never really should have been king to begin with. He was not like anywhere near being in line for it. He won it in battle essentially and through an advantageous marriage. The War of the Roses, it’s coming soon I promise, the inspiration for the Game of Thrones series, it’s on my list. But, you know, spoiler alert, Henry Tudor kills Richard III, wins the throne, usurps the throne, whatever, becomes the first Tudor monarch, King Henry VII. He has four children with his wife Elizabeth of York who was Richard III’s niece by the way. You can’t make this stuff up. He killed her uncle, stole his throne, and is like “marry me” and she’s like “sure.” They have four surviving children. Arthur is the oldest and the heir to the throne, although he dies before getting there, then Margaret, then Henry who will become King Henry VIII, and finally Mary. The youngest daughter, Mary, Henry VIII’s younger sister, is Frances Grey’s mother. 


But Mary was never supposed to marry Frances’ father at all. Mary was actually supposed to marry the King of France, Louis XII. My goodness that got confusing, Mary marry Frances France. Yikes. And she did actually, Mary Tudor (the sister of Henry VIII not the daughter) married France’s King Louis XII when she was 18 years old as a part of a peace treaty that her brother had arranged with France. Mary wasn’t into it. She was 18 and Louis was 52 which was like a very old man back then and he was in poor health. She’s like “seriously dude, you’re going to marry me off to this gross old man for the sake of some political alliance?” But Henry promised her that she could choose her next husband when Louis died which, by the looks of things, might actually be quite soon. And so that’s what convinced her to go along with it, not that she had a choice anyway but Mary married the king of France in 1514 becoming the Queen of France for just 82 days. Yeah Louis died 82 days after their wedding without having produced an heir to the throne. Mary actually, at that point went into a 40 day period of seclusion to determine if she was pregnant or not. Like, basically locked away for forty days, no funny business. Because if she was pregnant, that was the heir to the French throne and they had to be sure it was actually the late Louis’ baby. But she wasn’t pregnant. So some other guy, Francis I, takes the throne, she’s essentially free of her duties now in France. That worked out very nicely for her. 


Henry had promised her that she could choose her next husband and she is determined to hold him to that. In letters that she wrote to him after Louis died, she reminded him of this and threatened to join a nunnery if he didn’t stick to his word. So Henry sends a close friend of his named Charles Brandon, the Duke of Suffolk, to France to congratulate the new king and also to bring Mary back to England. Now this is perfect for Mary because she already had a huge crush on Charles Brandon. Charles and Henry were close friends since childhood. This is her big brother’s friend whom she has admired since she was a girl. And here he comes to whisk her back to England and here she is in a rare position to choose her own husband which was not common at the time at all. Henry must have at least had suspicions about his sister’s secret feelings for Charles because he made him promise before he left to go retrieve Mary that he would not, under any circumstances, propose to her. And Charles promised and then pretty much immediately broke that promise. Jessica Brain writes for History Extra quote “The couple then went on to marry in secret in Paris on 3rd March 1515 with only ten guests, one of whom was King Francis I. Such a union proved daring, not only as it meant that Charles’s promise to Henry was unfulfilled but also he had married a princess without the consent of the king, technically constituting an act of treason. When news arrived in England about the forbidden marriage taking place, Henry was livid and the Privy Council subsequently advised that Charles should be imprisoned and subsequently executed. Fortunately for Brandon, Mary was Henry’s favourite sibling and with the intervention of Cardinal Wolsey, Charles was able to escape the prospect of being beheaded and instead faced a substantial fine which included the dowry from Louis XII and the gifts given to Mary by King Louis. With the settlement agreed, the couple were officially married on 13th May 1515 at Greenwich Palace attended by royal courtiers and of course, Henry VIII himself. Charles also secured a papal bull from the Pope legitimising the marriage, which had been viewed by many as Mary marrying below her station,” end quote. 


Mary and Charles’ first child together was Frances, born in 1517, the niece of the king. So, just for some context, Henry’s first surviving child with his first wife Catherine of Aragon was Mary who will go on to become Queen Mary I, and she was born in 1516. So Frances and Mary were cousins with only a one year age difference. Frances seems a fitting old timey girl's name now but at the time it was a very unusual name. No one was naming their daughter Frances in England at that time. It was a female version of the male name Francis, with an i instead of an e, who of course was king of France at the time, Francis I. And so a lot of people think they chose this unusual name because of Mary’s ties to France as the dowager Queen of France but who knows.


Not much is known about Frances’ childhood. We know she lived in Suffolk, her parents were the Duke and Duchess of Suffolk. She had a normal amount of education for a girl of her status. She was a close relative of the king and so obviously of quite high standing in society. We do know that her mother Mary Tudor Brandon died in 1533 when Frances was just 16 years old. And then it got real weird because soon after that, her father, Charles Brandon, married his 14 year old ward, Catherine Willoughby. So this was a young aristocratic girl he had taken into his household. I imagine she would have been sort of like a younger sister figure to Frances. I imagine her father’s marriage to this very young girl soon after her mother’s death would have been difficult for Frances, but who knows. I mean really who knows. Different times. Now, I’m like “she’s fourteen. Someone arrest that man.” But, I guess it wasn’t like that back then. 


Frances got married herself actually right before her mother died in 1533 so she had already left her father’s household before he married his child bride situation. Frances herself was a child bride at only 16 she married Henry Grey who was the 3rd Marques (mar-kwiss) of Dorset. So they got married in 1533. Just for some context, this was the same year that Henry VIII married his second wife, Anne Boleyn. So 1533, Henry marries Anne Boleyn, Frances marries Henry Grey, Frances’ mother Mary Tudor Brandon dies, Frances’ father Charles Brandon marries his 14 year old ward. All the same year. Big year. 


Frances and Henry have three surviving children together, all girls. The oldest is Jane, named after Jane Seymour, Henry VIII’s third wife and current wife when Jane is born in 1537, and then there’s Catherine and Mary, of course, because everyone is either Jane, Catherine, or Mary, everyone but Frances apparently with her trendy new age name. So let’s talk about Jane for a minute, the girl I can’t stop thinking about. Jane was bookish. She was very intelligent. She was highly educated, more than was typical for a Tudor girl. She studied under John Aylmer who is described as a quote “English bishop, constitutionalist, and Greek scholar.” I’m really not sure what makes him a Greek scholar considering he lived in 16th century England not ancient Greece. I guess he studied Greek stuff. I said it before, I’ll say it again, we pretty much still live in ancient Athens, guys. Their philosophy is still kicking. So under the tutelage of John Aylmer, Jane excelled in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew… you know, just the really useful languages and she corresponded, exchanged letters with protestant reformers on the continent, right which is like mainland Europe, not the British Isles. And that’s unconventional. I mean we’re talking about, Jane’s like 10 at this point. She’s a little girl and she’s involved in this kind of scholarly activity and exchange. This really took off starting in 1547, when she was ten, and she went to live as a ward of Catherine Parr and Thomas Seymour.  


And this arrangement is actually super important so we’re going to talk about it for a bit. I’ve mentioned wards before. I mentioned Frances’ father Charles Brandon marrying his 14 year old ward after his wife died. Wards were typically children of nobility who went to live with another noble family to the point where that person actually became their legal guardian for a time. So why was this done. It would have been done most of the time if the ward’s parents had died, if they were orphaned. They don’t throw noble children into orphanages. The crown would have arranged a wardship for them. It also was done sometimes because it was an advantageous arrangement, as was the case for Jane, they were hoping to get something out of it. So, Catherine Parr was Henry VIII sixth and final wife. She was his wife when he died in January of 1547. Very soon after that, a few months later, Catherine married Thomas Seymour. Thomas Seymour was the brother of Henry’s third wife Jane Seymour and he was not a great guy. He was pretty skeezy. But Catherine had sort of always been in love with him, ever since she met him while part of Princess Mary’s household at court. It was like love at first sight. Before marrying Henry in 1453 she actually confessed to being in love with Thomas Seymour. So as soon as Henry was out of the way, they got married. Thomas had an older brother, Edward Seymour, who served as Lord Protector, as regent for the boy king which made Thomas exceedingly jealous. His skeeziness will come clear soon. 


So Jane went to live as a ward of Catherine Parr and Thomas Seymour. And this was advantageous because Catherine was the step mother of the heir to the throne, Henry’s only surviving son, nine year old Edward VI. And Thomas was his uncle. And so she’s placed within the inner circle of the new king here. And it appears the hopes were that 10 year old Jane would someday marry 9 year old Edward. Yes they were very closely related, by my calculations Edward was Jane’s first cousin once removed, the first cousin of her mom Frances. Historian and author Susan Higginbotham writes in her blog “History Refreshed: New Perspectives on Old Times quote “Henry VIII died in 1547. Shortly afterward, the Greys performed the first act for which history has damned them—agreeing to Thomas Seymour’s request that they put Jane Grey in his wardship, in the hopes that Thomas would broker a match between Jane and the young king, Edward VI. This has been taken as proof of the Greys’ insatiable ambition, but what noble parent, given the opportunity to match their daughter with a king, would have passed up the chance? Like any other girl of her class, Jane would have been brought up with the expectation that she would marry for the good of her family. This was a two-way street: Jane would have also expected that her parents do their best for her future by marrying her to a high-status groom. Whether Jane was aware of these plans for her is unknown, but there is no reason to assume that the possibility of marriage to the king, her first cousin, would have displeased her,” end quote. 


Jane is flourishing academically during this time. She’s also very advantageously placed within the inner circle of King Edward VI. The princess Elizabeth, later Queen Elizabeth I, also lives with her stepmother, Catherine Parr, for a time at the same time as Jane. Elizabeth would have been something like 13, Jane 9, so they were somewhat close in age. But, here’s where Thomas Seymour’s skeeziness starts to show. Just months before he married Catherine Parr and right after the king died, when Elizabeth was only 13 years old, Thomas sent her a letter asking her to marry him. This was not okay. You can’t just marry a princess cause you want to, you have to get like council permission and all that, remember Charles Brandon almost got executed for doing this. According to Professor Suzannah Lipscomb writing for History Extra quote “Elizabeth rejected his proposal elegantly, also by letter, saying she was too young (she was 13 years old; he, at 38, was 25 years older than she) and would be in mourning for her father for two years,” end quote. Translation, leave me alone you creepy old man. Not that 38 is old but, you know what I mean. She was 13. So fast forward, Thomas marries Catherine Parr, probably just to get closer to Elizabeth who was her step daughter. Poor Catherine, she genuinely loved this guy, for some reason. While Elizabeth was living with Catherine and Thomas, a lot of scandalous stuff went down. A lot of grooming, very Jeffrey Epstein Ghislaine Maxell. I was going to launch into it here but it’s just too long of a side road to go down so I’m going to mini fix it. If you aren’t on the patreon yet, patreon.com/historyfixpodcast you might want to be for this one. That’s going to come out of Wednesday. It is scandalous. There are barely clothed early morning bedroom visits. There is tickling, there is spanking, there is wrestling. It gets real weird. But this episode is not about Elizabeth and her Jeffrey Epstein step-parents. So, I’ll mini fix it. Back to Jane.   


Remember Jane is living with Catherine Parr and Jeffrey Epstein, I mean Thomas Seymour, starting in 1547. But Catherine Parr dies in September of 1548 and so Jane goes back to live with her parents. I don’t know if she was abused by Thomas like Elizabeth or not. I don’t think so. There’s no evidence of that. But Catherine dies and her parents are like “eh, this guys a little too skeezy” and they bring Jane back home. But skeezy Thomas goes “um, you can’t do that, I’m legally her ward. She has to be returned to my household.” And so they send Jane back and she moves into Catherine’s old apartments. Thomas is still planning to arrange a marriage between Jane and boy King Edward VI. So I’m sure that helps persuade her parents to send her back. It must have felt much less like she was being kidnapped by a pedophile which was actually what was happening. But also, the scandal with Elizabeth hasn’t come out yet. That won’t come out for another six months. And what ultimately brings all that out is another scandal that happens. King Edward has become rather distrustful of his two Seymour uncles, one who has been serving as Lord Protector and the other who is apparently sexually abusing his sister. Edward starts to distance himself from them. Thomas ain’t having it. He wants to be Lord Protector, he wants to control the king, he wants the power. He snaps. He breaks into King Edward’s apartments in the middle of the night in an attempt to kidnap him. How that would help the situation, I don’t know, but that’s his plan. He’s going to kidnap and control the King somehow. But, when he breaks in, this is sad sorry, when he breaks in, Edward’s dog starts barking at him and so he shoots the dog to quiet it so it won’t alert the guards. But, the gunshot alerts the guards who spring to action and apprehend Thomas. He is convicted of treason for trying to kidnap the King and also for trying to marry Princess Elizabeth without approval from the council. This is when that whole scandal comes out. And he is executed, beheaded, in 1549. 


Needless to say, Jane goes back to live with her parents at this point. The next year, something happens that will impact her mother, Frances Grey’s reputation in irreparable ways. If you remember, this episode is actually about the misrepresentation of Frances Grey. So let’s get back to that. Higgenbotham writes quote “It was in August 1550, however,  that Frances made the biggest mistake of her life, at least in terms of her historical reputation. She went hunting with the rest of the household, and left her daughter Jane behind to greet a visitor, Roger Ascham. It was then that Jane made her famous complaint about her parents, recalled by Ascham years later, after Jane and her parents were all dead,” end quote. Roger Ascham was an English scholar and writer. He had served as Princess Elizabeth’s tutor for a few years leading up to this encounter with Jane. So the rest of the family goes off hunting, Jane stays behind with Roger Ascham cause she’s a scholar and she likes talking to other scholars. And here is what she supposedly tells him, which he writes down much much later. Quote, “For when I am in presence either of father or mother; whether I speak, keep silence, sit, stand, or go, eat, drink, be merry, or sad, be sewing, playing, dancing, or doing any thing else; I must do it, as it were, in such weight, measure, and number, even so perfectly, as God made the world; or else I am so sharply taunted, so cruelly threatened, yea (yay) presently sometimes with pinches, nips, and bobs, and other ways (which I will not name for the honour I bear them) so without measure misordered, that I think myself in hell, till time come that I must go to Mr Elmer; who teacheth me so gently, so pleasantly, with such fair allurements to learning, that I think all the time nothing whiles I am with him. And when I am called from him, I fall on weeping, because whatsoever I do else but learning, is full of grief, trouble, fear, and whole misliking unto me. And thus my book hath been so much my pleasure, and bringeth daily to me more pleasure and more, that in respect of it, all other pleasures, in very deed, be but trifles and troubles unto me,” end quote. 


That’s what Jane told Ascham. These were complaints she had about her parents, notice parents. She says “when I am in presence either of father or mother.” But no one cares about the father part for some reason. Everyone latches on to the mother part. And this is used to absolutely eviscerate Frances Grey’s character. Higgenbotham writes quote “The impact of Ascham’s recollection on Frances’s reputation simply cannot be understated. Historians and novelists alike have used it to construct an image of Jane’s entire childhood as more Dickensian than anything that Dickens himself could have imagined, brightened only by Jane’s brief stay at Katherine Parr’s household. Any possibility that the adolescent Jane, like other intelligent adolescents, might have been exaggerating her complaints, that she might have spoken less harshly of her parents with time and maturity, or that her parents might have had genuine cause (by contemporary standards) for disciplining her has been ignored by all but a handful of writers,” end quote. 


We see this account, told by an upset 13 year old girl, keep that in perspective, we see it blossom in the writings of future historians and authors when discussing Frances Grey. They take serious license in elaborating on her character based on this. In her biography of Jane Grey, author Mary Luke mentions Frances shaking her infants which there is absolutely no evidence of. A biography about Frances’ friend Bess of Hardwick, accuses Frances of cruelty to her servants, although we have no records of any of them ever complaining of that. And actually, Frances will go on to marry one of her servants after the death of her husband which suggests the complete opposite was true. We see a reputation arise that Frances was like obsessed with hunting just because she went on this hunting trip one time, the time Jane made her complaint to Ascham. And she gets twisted into this like bloodthirsty huntress in a really offputting sort of violent way. Higgenbotham writes quote “Frances’s one recorded absence on a hunting trip has given rise to its own series of legends. Although no one actually knows whether Frances enjoyed hunting or whether she went on hunting trips merely out of a sense of social obligation, this has not stopped authors like Hester Chapman from droning on about “her tireless enjoyment of open-air sports and indoor games,” or Alison Weir from assuring us that Frances was “never happier than when she was on horseback,” or Mary Luke from writing, “At Bradgate she could slaughter and maim to her heart’s content.” Luke also mentions the Greys’ dining “in the hall hung with the heads of Lady Frances’ unfortunate victims.” One can only hope that Luke was referring to deer,” end quote.  


So there’s so much creative license being taken here which is a really dangerous thing when it comes to history. I read you what 13 year old Jane said, what her complaints about her parents were, according to Roger Ascham’s memory years later. That what all this is being based on. There is no evidence of baby shaking, or cruelty to servants, or like ripping off a rabbits head with her teeth or whatever they were trying to get at with the stuff about loving hunting. Jane talks about nips and bobs. Nips and bobs? Y’all I got nips and bobs in the 1990s, please. I know we aren’t nipping and bobbing our kids these days but until like very recently this is how parenting was done for all of time. I’m not sure how a 13 year old’s complaints of nips and bobs got so horribly twisted into Frances being this like bloodthirsty abusive mother. I’m not really seeing it even in what Jane said there and that is what we are basing literally this whole woman’s reputation on, nips and bobs. But I don’t think what Ascham wrote alone would have been enough to tarnish Frances’ reputation. I think that came about because of what happened to Jane soon after, the horribly tragic fate of this innocent girl and the need to blame someone for it. So let’s go there now. 


We know there were earlier plans to marry Jane off to the King Edward VI. But those fell apart after Thomas Seymour’s treason and after the older uncle Edward Seymour was replaced as Lord Protector. He was replaced by a man named John Dudley. To clarify, Lord Protector is essentially king regent. They were acting as king because Edward was still a child. Edward Seymour, the former regent was actually executed for treason just like his brother Thomas in 1552 for plotting to overthrow the new guy, John Dudley. These Seymour bros were some jealous conniving dudes. So Jane’s marriage to the king is kind of out the window. But her parents still want her in that inner circle and so they marry her off to Guildford Dudley who was the son of John Dudley, the new regent to the king. 


Right around this same time 1553, it becomes clear that Edward VI, who is still only 15 years old, is dying, probably from tuberculosis. And he does something rather shocking right before he dies. He altered his father’s plan that he had set out for succession to the throne. Henry had planned for the crown to pass to Edward of course and then to any male heirs that Edward would someday have. But if Edward didn’t have any male heirs, it would pass instead to Mary, Henry’s oldest surviving child. So Edward is now dying at 15 without any heirs at all. The crown is supposed to pass to Mary next. But, last second plot twist, Edward alters the line of succession and he out of literally no where, he puts Jane Grey in line for the throne next. I say Edward, but remember it’s really John Dudley, the Lord Protector, the regent, who is making the decisions. Edward was still too young when he died to rule without a regent. The reason given or assumed at least at the time is that Mary is Catholic. Mary is very very Catholic and England does not want a Catholic monarch. They have tried very hard to separate themselves from Catholicism, the protestant reformation, the Church of England that Henry created in order to divorce his first wife. They don’t want a Catholic queen and Jane is protestant, fine. But what about Elizabeth? Elizabeth is protestant. Why not put her on the throne? And what about Frances? Frances had more ties to the throne than her daughter Jane. Frances was Henry VIII’s niece. So that logic doesn’t make sense. But when you look at the other motive there, Jane was married to John Dudley’s son. She was his daughter in law. If Jane were to become queen regnant of England, he would still hold a lot of power and influence over the monarchy. Also, any son that Jane might have, his grandson, would become the next king of England. It would put a Dudley on the throne. 


So when you consider all that, it becomes a lot clearer how Jane’s name got thrown out there. Jane was proclaimed queen shortly after Edward’s death and goes to the Tower of London to await her coronation. But before the coronation can take place, Mary storms into London, she has gathered all these supporters, and she storms into London wearing this elaborate velvet purple gown that just reeks of royalty. And there’s no battle or anything like that she just sort of waltzs in and everyone is like “yeah, okay, what were we thinking, of course your the queen,” and she takes the throne. Jane and her father Henry Grey and John Dudley and his son, Jane’s husband, Guildford Dudley, are all arrested and imprisoned in the Tower of London. Frances flies into a frenzy. She manages to get a meeting with Queen Mary, they were first cousins, only a year apart, they were buddies. Mary was actually Frances’ godmother. She manages to get a meeting with Mary and get her husband out of prison. She negotiates his release. But not Jane’s. And she is judged harshly for this now. But we don’t know. She may have tried and was unsuccessful in getting Jane out. We have no idea. We do know that Mary did not intend to have Jane executed. She knew none of this was Jane’s doing and she planned to release Jane after her coronation. But before that could happen, an unfortunate event took place. 


In January of 1554, a politician named Wyatt the Younger declared a revolt against Queen Mary. He was anti-Catholic and he opposed her succession to the throne. A rebellion broke out that sought to put protestant Elizabeth on the throne instead. Elizabeth had nothing to do with this. Jane’s father Henry Grey who Fances managed to get out of prison, he stupidly joins the rebellion. It fails, Henry gets captured. He, along with the other rebels, is accused of treason and set to be executed, beheaded, as was the punishment for treason. Originally, Mary was planning to let Jane go but now that her father had taken part in this rebellion against her, it’s too risky, and she decides that she has to execute Jane too. All because her stupid father joined this stupid and unsuccessful rebellion. And for some reason it’s her mother that everyone loves to hate. 


So Jane, and her husband, and her father were all executed in Februrary following the failed revolt. This puts Frances in a very bad situation. I mean she’s tragically lost her husband and her daughter so she’s heartbroken over that I’m sure. But she also has two other young daughters to care for and the family is in ruin at this point. Her husband tried to overthrow the Queen. You don’t get to really come back from that. She fell on Mary’s mercy for help and Mary kept her at court but not like, to take care of her. It was more to observe her and keep an eye on her and make sure there was no more funny business. Frances and her daughters, Catherine and Mary, lived in poverty throughout the rest of Mary’s reign. And it was precarious because they were all potential claimants to the throne which made them a threat to Mary which was a very dangerous thing to be. So to lessen that threat, Frances remarried well below her station. Just, for context, because I was sort of thinking of her as an old lady at this point but Frances is still only 37 years old here. She married her Master of Horse, one of her servants, named Adrian Stokes. And she probably did this because it made her, and her daughters and any future children much less of a threat. You don’t get to marry your servant and then become the next queen. But also, they appear to have had a very happy marriage. Elizabeth was reportedly jealous of their happiness. Elizabeth who was sexually abused by her step parents as a 13 year old and imprisoned by her sister as a 20 year old, so, yeah, lot of trauma there. But whatever, Frances and Adrian Stokes seemed to have had a happy marriage.


Frances died in 1559 at the age of 42 and was buried at Westminster Abbey. She has a really nice effigy which is like a carved sculpture of her laying on top of her tomb that is still at Westminster Abbey, it’s the only known surviving contemporary image that we have of Frances is this effigy statue. And that was put there by her second husband and former servant, Adrian Stokes. So, if anything I think that’s a testament to the fact that they were sort of a solid couple, that he would do this for her after her death, which says a lot about Frances and directly contradicts claims others have made since that she was this evil woman who was cruel to her servants and her children. 


So where did this bad reputation come from? The only primary source we have, the only shred of any record of it we have is that account recorded by Roger Ascham based on what 13 year old Jane reportedly said about her parents while they were out hunting that day. How did it get so twisted against Frances? I think, it’s kind of like what I talked about last week with Joan of Arc, Frances’ story is like a life told backwards. Her reputation was sealed not by who she actually was but by what happened to her daughter Jane, poor, innocent Jane. Over the centuries, Jane’s character developed more and more as a helpless victim, a pawn. And with that evolution of Jane, Frances evolved naturally, Cinderella style, into the evil mother figure, the archetype of female wickedness that we love to throw into all the stories. But when you really look at it, it wasn’t Frances’ fault at all. Jane may have been a pawn but Frances wasn’t playing the game. That was Thomas Seymour and John Dudley and her own father, Henry Grey. These men who wanted power are the ones who played Jane like a pawn, put her in harms way, got her killed. Frances had more claim to the throne than Jane did. If she was after power, she would have been against crowning Jane queen. She would have insisted instead that she was the successor to the throne. So why are we sabotaging Frances and turning a blind eye to the men who are really at fault? Because this is what our society does to women. Don’t even get me started down this road again, this episode has already gotten too long. Revisit episode 104 about Aspasia of Miletus or episode 107 about Bloody Mary for more on this. 


Susan Higgenbotham has another theory. She writes quote “But there is another reason, I think, why Frances has become such a loathed figure, at least among women – and that is Jane herself. Jane, the girl who preferred reading a book to hunting with the family, is the thinking girl’s heroine. She is the sort of girl who hated gym class, who hated going to family gatherings and having to make small talk with her dreary relations, who spent her lunch hour hiding out in the library. She is the sort of a girl who grows into a reader and, often, into a writer. When female readers and authors come across Jane’s complaint to Roger Ascham, they do not picture just Jane, but themselves. In that situation, poor Frances doesn’t stand a chance,” end quote. 


So we see a problem here. We see a problem where interpreters of history project their own lives onto it. They take it out of context. They take creative license in their retellings in order to force it into a particular storytelling template. Frances going on a hunting trip one time turns into her, for example in the 1986 film “Lady Jane Grey,” it opens on a scene where Frances is killing a deer in this sort unsettling bloodthirsty way, and then it switches to Jane, meek, gentle little Jane reading a book inside the house. It’s like they’re trying to draw a parallel here, a metaphor where Jane is the deer, Jane is the prey, and her mother is hunting her. And this is all based on this one time Frances went hunting. They’ve built this whole villainous character around it. We see Frances portrayed over and over as a cruel tyrant of a mother, void of affection for her daughters, intent on climbing the social ladder, all twisted and forged from the rantings of a 13 year old remembered years later. 


In reality, if we look at what we know about Frances, a different character emerges entirely. Frances provided for her daughters the best possible education. Jane was surrounded by books and learning. She conversed with scholars as a young girl. That’s actually what she was doing when she made those complaints to Roger Ascham. She was allowed to skip the hunting trip in order to stay back and do what she loved doing which was having scholarly conversations with scholars. That doesn’t sound like an abusive or neglectful childhood to me. Frances tried to secure the best possible life for Jane. She sent her to Catherine Parr’s household in order to potentially secure her a marriage match with the King of England. When Jane was later named as the successor to the throne, Frances could have fought that. She had a better claim to it than Jane did. She could have fought and tried to put herself on the throne but she didn’t. After the executions of Jane and her husband, Frances did what she had to do to protect her two remaining daughters. She fell on Queen Mary’s mercy, lived in poverty, destroyed whatever was left of her reputation by marrying a servant all to make her daughters, possible claimants to the throne, less of a threat. I don’t see cruelty in Frances. I see desperation. I see desperate attempts to make the very male dominated world of 16th century England a hospitable place for her three daughters. I see a mother doing whatever she has to do to secure a life for them in a society in which they are powerless. And to a thirteen year old girl, that might seem abusive at times. Jane said quote “whether I speak, keep silence, sit, stand, or go, eat, drink, be merry, or sad, be sewing, playing, dancing, or doing any thing else; I must do it, as it were, in such weight, measure, and number, even so perfectly, as God made the world,” end quote. But why Jane? Why did your mother insist on this kind of perfection from you? Was it out of hate or was it possibly out of love? 


Thank you all so very much for listening to History Fix, I hope you found this story interesting and maybe you even learned something new. Be sure to follow my instagram @historyfixpodcast to see some images that go along with this episode and to stay on top of new episodes as they drop. I’d also really appreciate it if you’d rate and follow History Fix on whatever app you’re using to listen, and help me spread the word by telling a few friends about it. That’ll make it much easier to get your next fix. 


Information used in this episode was sourced from Historic UK, Westminster Abbey, susanhiggenbotham.com, the Tudor Society, Wikipedia, History Extra, and Royal Museums Greenwich. As always, links to these sources can be found in the show notes.