THE AUTHOR

     Sir Thomas Chaloner (or ‘Challoner’, sometimes called ‘The Elder’ to distinguish him from his stepson of the same name) was a courtier active primarily as an ambassador during the reign of Elizabeth I. He is best known as the first to translate Erasmus's Praise of Folly (Moriæ Encomium) into English, as well as for his own original compositions of epic poetry in Latin. Chaloner was a friend of many who had known Jane Grey personally, including Walter Haddon, John Cheke, and William Cecil. It is not known whether or how well Chaloner himself actually knew Jane, though he probably met her on more than one occasion. Chaloner was involved in the investigations into Thomas Seymour’s conduct in 1549 and may have met her briefly in the course of those duties. He was not a party to the events of 1553, as he was away on ambassadorial duties in France during the summer of that year. Chaloner died in 1565 at age 44.

     Deploratio acerbæ necis heroidis prœstantissimæ D[ominæ] Janæ Grayæ, or Elegy on the untimely death of the most Protestant divine Lady Jane Grey, was written sometime after the accession of Elizabeth I in 1558, since it refers retrospectively to Mary’s death. The Elegy was first published in 1579, well after Chaloner’s own death, in a larger collection of his epic and elegiac poetry and epitaphs entitled De republica Anglorum instauranda libri decem ... (London: Thomas Vautrollerius, 1579).

     The poem is an elegy in imitation of the classical Latin elegiac poem, which consists of pairs of lines, called couplets. Each couplet consists of one line in dactylic hexameter paired with a second line in dactylic pentameter. These metrical parameters make it exceedingly difficult to translate Chaloner’s Elegy into English while maintaining those parameters.

THIS TRANSLATION

     I am not aware of any English translation faithful to Chaloner’s Latin-language original ever having been published in English. The only instance of a semblance of translation is that of Thomas Gibbons in his Memoirs of eminently pious women, who were ornaments to their sex, blessings to their families, and edifying examples to the Church and the world (London: J. Buckland, 1777)[1]. Gibbons’s effort is less a true ‘translation’ than an ‘interpretation’, however, since it incorporates a large amount of material not found in Chaloner's original while simultaneously altering significantly both the content and meaning of existing portions. Whereas Chaloner’s original contained forty nine couplets, for example, Gibbons's interpretation is well over twice as long at one hundred twenty couplets. Similarly, Gibbons mentions John Dudley numerous times in his translation, though Chaloner never explicity refers to Dudley.

     The translation presented here is my own. And although it is admittedly a flawed one (since my skill in Latin has declined through lack of use), it is my hope that it will add to the limited body of primary source material available on Jane Grey Dudley and that readers will find it useful. And if a reader spots any translation errors that do exist, I would be very grateful if they would forward their correction to me (full credit will be given in a footnote).

     Translating Chaloner’s Latin text posed a number of problems. Firstly, it is utterly impossible to maintain the original elegiac form without significantly altering the content, as noted above and as Gibbons demonstrated. My translation is therefore in prose, though it is presented below in pairs of lines so as to correspond to the Latin original. Additionally, Chaloner littered his poem with a large number of extraneous or improperly placed punctuation marks, the effect of which is to imply odd or inappropriate content within various clauses. Lastly, Chaloner used non-standard spellings or abbreviated forms of many words, probably in order to meet the demands of the metrical requirements of elegiac couplets. I have therefore had to make ‘best guesses’ in several instances.

     Words enclosed in [brackets] are only implied in the original, but I have inserted them in the translation for the sake of reader clarity.

Nec quia non semper manifestò Numen in iram,
        Idque statim surgit, Numen inerme putes.

Thomas Gibbons, Memoirs of eminently pious, women, who were ornaments to their sex, blessings to their families, and edifying examples to the Church and the world (London: J. Buckland, 1777), 58–70.

Thomas Chaloner, De rep. Anglorum instauranda libri decem... (London: Vautrollerius, 1579), 296–299.

Divine (noun): a specialist, expert, authority, or leader in the field of theology.

Pallas Athena was the Greek goddess of heroic endeavor and the companion of heroes.

My thanks to Meg Twycross of Lancaster University (UK) for correcting my translation of this phrase.

Another of many names for Pallas Athena.

Aganippe was the fountain of the Muses on Mount Helicon. Presumably Chaloner refers here to the poetic Muses themselves, rather than to their fountain.

Classical Latin panegyrists offered effusive and often exaggerated praise for living persons with the intention that others might emulate the supposed heroic deeds of that person. In contrast, elegists mourn a deceased person through somber poems of mourning and remembrance.

Elizabeth I, Mary I’s younger half-sister and youngest daughter of Henry VIII. The reference here is to heaven giving the rule of England to Elizabeth out of displeasure at Mary’s treatment of Jane and her co-religionists.

The concept obscured by Chaloner’s florid poetry is that Jane, knowledgeable of the belief in Christian salvation and heavenly reward, was able to overcome her fears in the hours before her execution by relying on surety of salvation.

Chaloner’s original uses Nemesis’s more obscure alternate name, Rhamnusia, probably to meet the demands of poetic meter. Rhamnusia/Nemesis was the Greco-Roman goddess of divine indignation and retribution, who punished excessive pride, evil deeds, and undeserved happiness or good fortune, and the absence of moderation; the personification of the resentment aroused in both gods and men against those who committed crimes with impunity.

Dropsy is a generalized swelling of the body and especially the joints caused by fluid retention. ‘The stone’ as an early-modern medical diagnosis included gallstones and urinary (kidney, bladder) stones, but was also sometimes used to include a variety of poorly understood abdominal and urinary complaints.

Aonia is the Roman name for a portion of Bœotia, within which lay the Helicon mountains, home of the nine Muses. Thus an ‘Aonian garland’ is a Muse’s garland.

The Muses, who lived on Mount Helicon and granted inspiration to poets.

Yet another name for the nine Muses, this one derived from the legend that the sisters were fathered by King Pieros of Macedonia.

The Cyclopes were a race of giants and thus had giant hearts. They were also known for their strength, especially as depicted in Homer’s Iliad.

‘Tene’ as used here by Chaloner is a non-standard spelling of the adjective ‘tenuis, tenue,’ meaning ‘thin, fine, delicate, fragile’. His non-standard spelling should not be confused with the imperative of the verb ‘teneō, tenēre’, which is also spelled ‘tenē’, meaning ‘hold’. In the absence of macrons, the length of the second syllable can be determined through examination of the meter. The second syllable of the first line of an elegiac couplet is short (‘tene’) rather than long (‘tenē’).

The Latin poetry is here very convoluted. In less rigid translation, the sentence might be rendered thus: ‘Being familiar with evil, didn’t Jane feel sorry for those fallen from God’s word in the same way she would have felt for followers of God’s word, even though her own fall was the result of their cruelty?’ The poetic point is that Jane was exceedingly magnanimous and forgiving.

Chaldea was the Roman name for a Semitic portion of ancient Babylonia. The ‘Chaldean’ language referred to here is Aramaic, one of the Semitic languages of the Bible and the language many scholars believe was Jesus of Nazareth’s native tongue.

Literally, ‘the Ausonians’. Ausonia was the Greek term for southern Italy.

‘Tuscan’ was the Renaissance name for the Italian language.

Refers to Saint Jerome of Stridon, a father of the Christian church, a scholar in Greek, and translator of the Vulgate Bible from Aramaic, Hebrew and Greek to Latin. Jane is known to have read extensively from among the works of Jerome.

‘Pentaglotte’ is a non-Latin term adopted by Chaloner that I have translated rather freely. A Pentaglot is a five-language dictionary, or a person able to write in five languages.

The ‘noble duke’ is of course Jane’s father, Henry Grey, a descendant of Elizabeth Woodville, consort of King Edward IV, by her first husband, Sir John Grey of Groby.

Jane inherited royal blood from her mother, who was herself the granddaughter of Henry VII and the daughter of a dowager queen of France. The reference to ‘ill-omened stars’ reflects the pervasive Tudor-era belief in astrology and the importance of the position of the constellations relative to the timing of an individual’s birth, i.e., Jane was born when the stars were in an unlucky alignment.

Chaloner seems to mean that the potential good of Jane’s reign (‘the deed’) was destroyed by her having been placed on the throne illegally by the Privy Council. Alternatively, he may be saying, albeit cryptically, that Jane’s reign was ended because the Council failed to capture Mary in order to prevent her pressing her own claim to the crown.

Chaloner is the only source to suggest that Jane may have been pregnant at the time of her execution. Since Jane was held in separate quarters from her husband, Guildford Dudley, and since the two were not allowed to meet between 19 July 1553 and their execution on 12 February 1554, she would have been in at least her third trimester at the time of her death. Such an advanced pregnancy cannot have gone unnoticed and without comment by contemporary Protestant polemicists and anti-Marian propagandists. We must therefore assume that Chaloner was exaggerating in order to achieve maximum pathos, despite his earlier denials.

Polyxena was a daughter of King Priam of Troy. According to medieval versions of the story of the Trojan War, Achilles fell in love with Polyxena and proposed marriage. He arranged to meet her brother Paris and her mother Hecuba in the temple of the god Apollo to discuss the proposal, but instead he was ambushed and killed.

Neoptolemy is the Greek name for Pyrrhus, the son of Achilles (not to be confused with Pyrrhus of Epirus, the king of Macedonia who defeated the Romans at the Battles of Heraclea in 280 BC and Asculum in 279 BC). Achilles fathered Pyrrhus through Deidamia, daughter of King Lycomedes of Scyros, while hiding among the women at that court. Later exposed by Odysseus, Achilles went with Odysseus to join the war at Troy, before Pyrrhus was born. Pyrrhus joined his father in the Trojan War many years later. After his own death, Achilles’s ghost appeared to Pyrrhus and demanded that he kill Polyxena as a pre-condition for the gods’ allowing the Greeks to leave Troy at the end of the war. Pyrrhus did so, and he also killed her father King Priam of Troy. Many years after the war, Pyrrhus was himself slain by Orestes, son of Agamemnon, the commander-in-chief of the Greek forces during the war. (Agamemnon was earlier slain by his own wife, Clytemnestra, and the lover she had taken during his lengthy absence fighting in Troy.)