Lady Jane Grey was beheaded at 17, seven months after her reign

Lady Jane Grey was beheaded on Tower Green, inside the Tower of London, on the morning of 12 February 1554, aged about 17 — seven months after a reign that lasted just nine days, the shortest of any English monarch. Her husband, Guildford Dudley, was executed on Tower Hill, outside the walls, shortly before; his body was carted back into the Tower, past where she waited.

Jane’s reign began on 10 July 1553, when she was 16, because the dying Edward VI wanted to keep his Catholic half-sister Mary off the throne. The Privy Council soon switched sides, and even Jane’s father accepted Mary to save himself. Mary at first spared her cousin. What doomed Jane was her father’s part in Wyatt’s Rebellion, a failed Protestant rising early in 1554, which made a living Protestant claimant too dangerous. Mary offered her life if she converted to Catholicism; she refused.

John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, drawing on earlier eyewitness narratives, has her tell the small crowd:

“Good people, I am come hither to die, and by a law I am condemned to the same.”

Blindfolded, she lost her bearings and groped for the block, asking “What shall I do? Where is it? Where is it?” until a bystander guided her to it. Thirty-three years later another queen, Mary, Queen of Scots, went to the block at Fotheringhay.

The painting that got the scene wrong

The moment became famous through Paul Delaroche’s The Execution of Lady Jane Grey, painted in 1833 and a sensation at the Paris Salon of 1834. Its gloomy vault and radiant white satin, symbolising innocence, are invention: as the National Gallery points out, Jane would have been executed outside. The canvas nearly died too. Damaged in the 1928 Thames flood and believed destroyed for decades, it was rediscovered in a Tate basement in 1973 and is now one of the National Gallery’s most popular paintings.