NOTE.—The following brief account of Henry VIII’s Will may aid the reader in understanding the complications to which it gave rise. By this famous testament (dated 26th of December 1546 and revoking all his previous Wills), King Henry VIII provided that, in case he himself had no other children by his “beloved wife Katherine [Parr] or any other wives he might have thereafter,” and in the event of his only son, Edward [afterwards King Edward VI], who was to be his immediate successor, dying childless, that prince was to be succeeded by his eldest sister, Princess Mary; and if she, in turn, proved without offspring, she was to be succeeded by her sister, King Henry’s younger daughter, Elizabeth. Failing heirs to that princess, the Crown was to pass to the Lady Jane Grey and her sisters, Katherine and Mary Grey, successively, these being the daughters of Henry’s eldest niece, the Lady Frances Brandon, Marchioness of Dorset. In the event of the three sisters Grey dying without issue, the Throne was to be occupied successively by the children of the Lady Frances’s sister, the King’s other niece, the Lady Eleanor Brandon, Countess of Cumberland. The Scotch succession, through Henry’s eldest sister, Margaret Tudor, Dowager Queen of Scotland, was set aside, and the name of the young Queen of Scots [Mary Stuart] omitted from the Will, preference being given to the Ladies Grey, the daughters of Henry’s niece, because he hoped that the betrothal of Mary Stuart, then only six years of age, to his son Edward, might be arranged, and the desired union of England and Scotland brought about in a natural manner. It is curious that Henry’s nieces, the Ladies Frances and Eleanor, are not named in the Will as possible successors to the Crown, although their children are. Probably the King thought that, considering the number of claimants in the field, both ladies would be dead, in the course of nature, long before they could be called upon to occupy the Throne. In 1553 the Duke of Northumberland, then all powerful, induced Edward VI, in the last weeks of his reign, to make a Will, in which he set aside the Princesses Mary and Elizabeth, his sisters, even stigmatizing them as bastards, and thus reversing his father’s testament; and named Lady Jane Grey, his cousin, and in default of her, her sisters Katherine and Mary Grey, as his immediate and legitimate successors. The consequences of this unfortunate “Devise,” as it is called, were, as all the world knows, fatal to the Lady Jane and her family.