A Child's History of England (Online exclusive)

Lady Jane Grey (1537-1554), portrayed here, symbolises the tussle between Catholicism and Protestantism in sixteenth-century England and the uncertainty of which would triumph. Edward VI appointed Jane Grey, his cousin, as his heir in order to ensure a Protestant succession. She was proclaimed Queen at Cheapside on 10 July 1553 and ruled for nine days, whereupon Mary Tudor assumed the throne. In February 1554 Jane was beheaded in the Tower of London for treason, too prominent a possible figurehead for Protestant discontent to be allowed to live. Charles Dickens’s account first appeared in Household Words in 1853 as part of his serialised Child's History of England, a book included in the British school curriculum well into the twentieth century. Following a long tradition of sympathetic treatment, Dickens portrays Jane as a reluctant queen and a tool in the hands of her elders, and the signing of her death warrant as Mary’s ‘most cruel act, even of her cruel reign’. Jane’s story aroused sympathy both at home and abroad, with three near-contemporary inter-related and sympathetic Italian accounts of her troubles in addition to British coverage by Raphael Holinshed in his Chronicles and John Foxe.