THE LADY KATHERINE GREY, two years younger than her unfortunate sister, the Lady Jane, was born in August 1540, and, according to tradition, not at Bradgate Hall in Leicestershire, but in London, at Dorset Place, Westminster, a mansion which the Duke of Suffolk, her father, then Marquis of Dorset, had purchased and rebuilt in the finest Tudor architecture of the period, having a very long gallery and terrace, overlooking the Thames. It was considerably altered towards the close of the sixteenth century, when it was divided into three separate houses, and in one of these Locke the philosopher lived and died. A relic of the existence of this palace was extant only a few years ago, in the name of a little street called Dorset Place, which was pulled down for modern improvements when the new War Office and its adjacent edifices were built. There is, needless to say, no registered record of Lady Katherine’s birth, and we know very little of how her childhood was spent. The hygienic and more humane methods of rearing children, which are now in vogue, were then unknown. Lady Katherine’s little limbs must have been swathed in swaddling clothes, precisely as were those of all her infant contemporaries. She was certainly not nursed by her mother—which would have been against all precedent in royal circles of society—but by some country foster-mother, possibly the Mrs. Helen who performed the same office for Lady Jane, and who attended that unfortunate princess on the scaffold. A foster-mother in the family of the great position of the Dorsets was in many ways a personage. Her costume was rich; her board and lodging expensive, even luxurious; and the children she nursed were taught to consider her almost in the light of a mother, and this, many years after the very necessary functions which she had performed for their benefit had ceased. The child’s costume as she grew up was cut on absolutely the same pattern as that of her mother, of which it was a miniature reproduction, without, however, the train or _manteau de cour_, which the Lady Frances only wore on state occasions. At five years of age, Lady Katherine wore long petticoats and a dress of brocade reaching to the feet, a ruff, and a little white cap, tied in a bow under the chin. There is still in existence a list or inventory of the toys which were in the possession of Princess Elizabeth when she was an infant at Hunsdon. They included a number of dolls of all sizes, one or two mechanical, “that could speke” and even walk (evidently imported from Italy), a wooden horse on rockers, a set of marionettes, some little cooking utensils, and no doubt most popular of all, a kind of Noah’s Ark, containing “beesties and Noah with hys familie.” With similar toys, doubtless, the little Lady Katherine and her sister Jane frequently did play.