In early 2007 I earned a Ph.D. in early modern European history, with an emphasis on Tudor–Stuart England, at the University of Colorado at Boulder. My doctoral dissertation was entitled ‘Jane the Quene’: A New Consideration of Lady Jane Grey, England’s Nine-Days Queen, in which I examined the life of Lady Jane Grey in an effort to understand her actions during her brief reign as Queen of England in July 1553. Carefully distinguishing between authentic and reliable primary sources and near-contemporary propaganda, I sought to establish a more authentic analysis of Jane and her actions. Although Jane was, in a broader Tudor context, unusually well educated, her classical education resembled that of a handful of aristocratic girls in her generation, but its content led her to emphasize the role of political leadership. Contrary to later assertions, Jane was not an extraordinarily pious Protestant, nor was she perceived as such by her contemporaries. Her acceptance of Protestantism developed gradually, and by her last years she was committed to that faith. Jane’s family interactions were tense, and she may have resisted her marriage to Guildford Dudley. I further argued that once Jane accepted the crown, she drew upon the sense of personal authority she had
hrough her humanist education and her religious studies to assert her right to reign without naming her husband as co-ruler. Though her reign was brief, she participated actively and shaped events. Upon losing the crown, she transferred her sense of authority to religious expression, thereby retaining her ‘voice’. Jane’s eventual execution came as a consequence so prevalent in Tudor England of the interdependence between the spheres of politics and religion. Lastly, I concluded by analyzing the evolution of a fictionalized Jane as a historical and literary figure in an effort to explain the persistent popularity of a short-lived and failed queen, as well as the impact of the resulting myth on both popular biographical and academic historiographical descriptions of her, both of which repeat the legend of Jane Grey as an innocent puppet manipulated by her father, John Dudley, and the Privy Council.
I first became interested in Jane Grey many years ago after reading Mary Luke’s highly fictionalized biography of Jane Grey. Though published as ‘history’, it is actually a work of historical fiction. I was nonetheless captivated by the story of a young woman seemingly ‘used and abused’ by the adults around her. The Paramount Pictures release Lady Jane (1986) piqued my interest still further. From what little I knew at that time about Tudor history, it seemed clear that the film bore little or no resemblance to historical reality. I set about, as an amateur, the task of uncovering the ‘real story’ of Jane Grey.
I first read Hester Chapman’s biography of Jane. It was still, in the mid 1980s, about the only readily accessible work available. Chapman, writing in the pre-feminist era, correctly observed that ‘Jane the historical figure’ and ‘Jane the figure of romantic imagination’ had become blurred together over the past four centuries. She suggested a need for a careful reassessment of the historical record in order to separate fact from fancy. Alison Plowden’s two subsequent works on Jane Grey (1986 and 2003) were quite successful commercially, but they lacked serious historiographic analysis, repeated much of what had previously been said (sometimes word–for–word), and failed to make use of the many readily accessible primary source materials that have been too long overlooked. She perhaps cannot be faulted for this as she was writing for a general audience rather than a scholarly one. Because no academically trained historian had yet undertaken a full-length analytical study of Lady Jane Grey, Ms. Plowden’s works stood until 2009 as the best available up to that point.
In 1999, I left a previous career track to pursue a long-delayed ambition to study history in an academic research capacity. I returned to school at San Francisco State University and completed a B.A. in History in January 2001, and an M.A. in European History in June 2002. By the end of the M.A., I knew that I wanted to concentrate on Tudor–Stuart history and the history of women. I thus applied to and was accepted at the Univeristy of Colorado at Boulder, where Dr. Marjorie McIntosh was doing outstanding work in those fields. I completed the coursework and comprehensive exams for the Ph.D. degree in the spring of 2005. My research and paper on the Fitzwilliam Museum’s portrait of an Unknown Lady by Hans Eworth is the result of a third-year seminar project under the supervision of Dr. McIntosh. That paper was presented at the 2005 annual meeting of the North American Conference on British Studies. A somewhat truncated version appeared in the magazine History Today in December 2005.
For my Ph.D. thesis (or dissertation, as it is called in the U.S.), I wanted to pursue a topic that would hold my interest for the duration of the project, yet one related to both Tudor–Stuart England and the history of women. I thus returned to my old interest in Jane Grey. I completed a summer of archival research in the UK in 2005, thanks to generous funding provided by the University of Colorado Center for British and Irish Studies Ogilvy Research Travel Grant program, the Beverly Sears Graduate Student Grant Program, the Patricia Peterson family, and the Department of History. My research took me to the British Library, the National Archives Public Record Office, the Surrey History Centre, and the Leicestershire and Rutland Record Office. I wrote the dissertation over the next year, defended successfully in November 2006, and filed in late January 2007. I was awarded a doctoral degree in British History on 11 May 2007. Later that year, I was honored by having my thesis/dissertation chosen by the Graduate School at CU–Boulder as Best in the College for the Humaniaites for 2007.
I am now living in Palm Springs, California while pursuing the publication of my Ph.D. dissertation as a book. I have also recently been involved in assisting in the identification of the sitters depicted in a number of sixteenth-century portraits, most of which have been proposed by various art historians as pictures of Lady Jane Grey (see Portraits of Lady Jane Grey). Over the past few years since earning my degree, I have published several articles on Jane Grey, as well as on other topics. I am now engaged in revising my book manuscript in hopes of seeing it published in 2013. As a kind of scholarly sideline, I continue to conduct research on sixteenth-century portraiture of women (see, for example, my recent article on the portrait of Mary Rogers, Lady Harington).
I am always happy to address questions on Lady Jane Grey, women of the Tudor period, or Tudor/English/British history more generally. I am especially interested in assisting students with work that they may be doing on this period or these topics.
