Just nine days after Jane acceded the throne, Mary Tudor overthrew her in a coup that had popular support. But she was, like Jane, a clever girl, and might have followed suit if it were not for the catastrophe that befell the family. Although well-educated, she had not yet started learning Latin and Greek as her sisters had. Mary Grey was eight when Jane became ‘Jane the Queen’ with the support of the Protestant elite. The pious Edward preferred Jane, granddaughter of Henry’s sister Mary, to both his half-sisters: the Catholic Mary Tudor and Elizabeth, whose mother Anne Boleyn had been executed on charges of betraying his father with numerous men, including her own brother. She was 16, ‘young and lovely’ when King Henry’s son Edward VI bequeathed her the throne in 1553. The eldest sister, Jane, is the best remembered. They represent an English dynasty that never was. Under the will of Henry VIII, backed by statute, Mary and her two elder sisters, Katherine and Jane, were the heirs to his daughter Elizabeth. But Mary was a more significant figure than her stature in literature suggests. She was the dwarf who married a giant, the curious youngest sister of the tragic ‘nine days queen’, Lady Jane Grey. If Mary Grey is recalled today, it is as a historical footnote. What did Elizabeth I do with the body of her forgotten heir, Lady Mary Grey – a princess whose life is buried in obscurity, along with the secrets it carries? The discovery of manuscripts lost for 400 years has given me the answer to a small Tudor mystery. It now hangs at Chequers, the Prime Minister's country home Lady Mary Grey defiantly shows off her wedding ring in a portrait painted in the wake of her husband¿s death.
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