I couldn’t stop wondering: What would it have been like to wait upon the woman who had your innocent, sixteen year old sister beheaded? What would it have been like to live under the stigma of a father who died a traitor? How did their experiences mold them? All three Grey sisters showed courage when it counted most. Katherine and Mary Grey must have expected they would share Jane’s fate. Look what happened to the de la Poles and the Plantagenet princes in the tower.
Once the rebels were defeated Katherine and Mary had to know that monarchs could not afford to be merciful when it came to threats to the crown. Lady Jane Grey Preparing for Execution by George Whiting Flagg Imagine what it would have been like to be trapped behind palace walls at the mercy of the Queen your father is determined to overthrow. Queen Mary’s household knew the Grey sisters’ father was involved in the plot. She was attending Queen Mary during the Wyatt rebellion and could hear the cannon fire of the rebel army across the Thames in Southwark. As England’s outrage over the queen’s proposed marriage to Philip of Spain grew, Katherine would have witnessed the unrest. The whole time Lady Jane was imprisoned in the Tower of London, all through Jane’s trial and after she was condemned Lady Katherine Grey was serving as a Lady of the Bedchamber, attending to Queen Mary’s most intimate needs. But the Grey sisters had even more drama to offer: In the years prior to Elizabeth mounting the throne, Katherine and Mary Grey waited on ‘Bloody Mary’. Even more interesting: Elizabeth hated them- understandable since the Greys tried to knock Elizabeth and Queen Mary out of the succession. While researching Queen Elizabeth’s ladies for my first historical novel, The Virgin Queen’s Daughter, I stumbled across the delicious historical tidbit that Katherine and Mary Grey served as Queen Elizabeth’s Maids of Honor.
In my defense, I was ‘on task’ when I discovered my beloved Grey sisters. If researching is a forest, I’m the kid that’s always wandering off of the path chasing a pretty butterfly (or a grisly one, in some cases. We still laugh over the story of the time I called her at midnight to tell her that when Charles II was a boy he took a stick of wood to bed with him like a binkie. “Lady Jane Grey had sisters and one of them was a dwarf!” I don’t even think I bothered to say ‘hello’ when I called my critique partner, Susan Carroll, with the news.
THE SISTERS OF LADY JANE GREY by Ella March Chase
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