The Great Cloud of Witnesses · The Reformation
Lady Jane Grey
1537–1554EnglishEnglish Reformation
The teenage queen of nine days who refused to trade her faith for her life.
Summary
- Lived 1537–1554, English.
- Stood in The Reformation (1500–1600).
- Hangs on The Martyrs.
- Tradition: English Reformation.
The life
Jane Grey was a great-granddaughter of Henry VII, raised by ambitious parents and educated far beyond what most princes received. The scholar Roger Ascham visited her home and found the family out hunting while Jane sat alone reading Plato in Greek; she told him her books were the only place she was not scolded. At fifteen she was married off, and when the dying Edward VI's advisers set aside his Catholic sister, Jane was proclaimed queen. She reigned nine days before the country rallied to Mary I.
Convicted of treason, she might still have been spared: Mary sent a chaplain to convert her, and Jane debated him steadily and would not move, writing to her sister in the blank pages of a Greek New Testament to live so that she would not fear death. She was beheaded in the Tower in February 1554, aged about sixteen, blindfolded, briefly unable to find the block, and asking those watching to guide her hands to it.
What was happening while he lived3 moments · 1500–1600
- 1534Luther's complete German BibleWith a team of Hebrew and Greek scholars, Luther finished the whole Bible in German, printed at Wittenberg by Hans Lufft. He hunted words in butcher shops and marketplaces to get the sound right. His Bible carried the Saxon chancery German he wrote in into every corner of the language, one of the strongest single forces in the making of standard written German, though not its sole origin.
- March 1536Calvin's *Institutes*, first editionA twenty-six-year-old French exile published a small six-chapter handbook at Basel explaining the faith to a hostile king. He kept enlarging it for the next twenty-three years; the 1559 edition runs to four books and eighty chapters. That same year he was pressed into staying in Geneva against his own wishes.
- 1555–1556The Oxford firesUnder Queen Mary I, roughly 280 Protestants were burned in under four years. Hugh Latimer and Nicholas Ridley died together at Oxford on October 16, 1555; Foxe records Latimer telling Ridley they would that day light such a candle in England as would never be put out. Thomas Cranmer, who had signed recantations under pressure, took them back at the stake on March 21, 1556, and held his right hand in the fire first.
Go further
Read them yourself. Public-domain works are free to read in full; the rest open where the book can be found.
Search Lady Jane Grey at the Internet Archive · every work MannaFest cites
Why this one hangs here
Was queen for nine days at fifteen, and at sixteen chose the block over changing what she believed.
Hangs on The Martyrs: The witnesses who paid with their lives, from the arena at Carthage to the present day, and the confessors who paid with everything short of their lives.
Standing beside himThe Reformation · 19 on this stretch of wall
Argued that Scripture belonged to the people in their own tongue, and set in motion the English Bible that carries his name, made by his Oxford circle a century and a half before Tyndale. They burned his bones, and the river carried the ashes to the sea.
Preached Christ as head of the church in Prague's own language, and sang at the stake in 1415.
.jpg%3Fwidth%3D480&w=3840&q=75)
Sent ninety-five theses against indulgences to his archbishop, and later, before the emperor, would not take back a word of what he had written.
Finished what Tyndale could not and printed the first complete English Bible from a press, and four years later put the Great Bible in every parish church.
Put the church's prayers into plain English, then took back his own recantation and burned for it.
Translated the New Testament from the Greek so a plough-boy could read it, and paid for it at a stake in 1536.