"Come down from that, my child," he said. "That is no place for you,"
and then more gently than he had ever spoken to her before, he told her
all. For a moment there was silence while daughter and father stood
clasped in each other's arms in the deserted hall, through the open
windows of which could be heard, borne on the summer air, shouts of
"Long live Queen Mary!" There was a long silence, then Jane looked up
into her father's eyes and there was a gleam of hope in her own as she
asked, wistfully, "Can I go home?"
Poor little victim of the plots of over-ambitious men, never was a more
sublimely pathetic sentence uttered, and oh, the world of longing in
that simple, never-to-be-gratified request!
No sooner had Queen Mary's proclamation been heralded, than everything
was changed for Lady Jane, who was even deserted by her mother and the
Duchess of Northumberland. A few hours before, the Tower guards and
officials had treated her with extreme deference, but now showed a
marked degree of scorn for her whose sovereignty had come to an end. The
tears of her women, their whispered talk, the ominous silence of the
palace, broken only by the distant shouts of the revellers, all combined
to add to the poor girl's misery, and it would not be strange if on that
evening of July 19th, when she was removed from the State apartments, to
another Tower, and declared a prisoner, she had felt that the calmness
even of despair was preferable to the atmosphere of uncertainty of the
last few days of her struggle for a crown.
In her new quarters she was allowed several attendants of good birth, as
well as two serving maids and a lad, and though a prisoner, she was not
in solitude nor in discomfort of any kind, being allowed to walk daily
in the Queen's gardens, and "on the hill without the Tower
precincts"--her meals were those of a most luxurious captivity, and it
must be clearly understood that she was never formally arrested. She was
simply detained at the Tower, to prevent a repetition of the project to
place her on the throne. During the nine days' reign, Guilford, her
husband, seems to have sulked because she had refused to make him King,
or else Northumberland had advised him to keep out of the way, that he
might not be included in any blame for the usurpation of the crown.
However that may have been, we hear nothing of him until after Mary's
proclamation, when he too was imprisoned, but not in that part of the
Tower with Lady Jane.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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