The Final Resting Place of Lady Jane Grey

Paraphrasing the nineteenth-century antiquarian Nicholas Harris Nicolas, it is a singular fact that not one of the many biographers of Lady Jane Grey writing prior to 1825 alluded to the interment of her body, yet the traditional assumption is that she was buried in the Chapel of St Peter ad Vincula within the Tower of London.[1] No extant sixteenth-century source explicitly identifies where Jane was buried, and perhaps as a result, the tradition has been questioned only once previously, as discussed below. Tradition, myth, legend and even fabrication of primary sources have until recently figured significantly in shaping our understanding of Lady Jane Grey, leaving us with a muddled mixture of fact and fiction that scholars have only recently begun to disentangle.[2] This article re-examines the available evidence de novo to challenge the tradition that Lady Jane Grey was buried within the Tower and identifies a likely alternative final resting place.

The absence of any documentation to locate Jane’s grave is perhaps not surprising, since the reformist doctrines held by Jane’s early hagiographers dissuaded them from bringing attention to her place of burial. The Protestant martyrologist John Foxe, for example, rarely mentions the location of his many subjects’ graves, unless it is to identify that place as a dunghill, a field, or some other ignominious space.[3] Reformism eschewed religious observances for the souls of the dead and opposed veneration of even the most pious of departed believers. And in direct opposition to Roman Catholic practices, reformism denounced the collection and use of any relics associated with deceased persons of piety as well as the building of shrines over the site of those persons’ tombs or graves. There was thus little incentive to identify the precise location of Jane’s grave. There may even have been a positive disincentive for so doing to prevent any persons from falling into the perceived errors of veneration of Jane and of pilgrimage to her tomb.

The tradition that Jane was buried beneath the floor of the Chapel of St Peter ad Vincula, like so much of the mythology surrounding her name, emerged long after her death. As noted, no contemporary chronicler makes any mention whatsoever of her burial, noting only that she was executed within the Tower. Henry Machyn, a London-based diarist of the mid-Tudor period with a particular interest in funerals, failed even to mention the executions of Jane and her husband Guildford, much less their burials, though he does record the executions of Jane’s father Henry Grey and his brother Thomas. Machyn remained silent regarding Henry’s place of burial but identified that of Thomas as the Church of All Hallows Barking.[4] All other sixteenth-century eye-witness chronicles, including Richard Grafton’s Chronicle at Large of 1569, Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland of 1577, and John Stow’s Chronicles of England of 1580, conclude their accounts of Jane Grey at the moment of her execution and without mentioning the burial of her body.

The assumption that Jane was buried in the Chapel of St Peter-ad-Vincula perhaps derives from an ambiguous description in the eye-witness Chronicle of Queen Jane which states, “[Guildford’s] carcass thrown into a cart, and his head in a cloth, he was brought into the chapel within the Tower.”[5] When writing one of the first histories of the Tower of London in 1825, John Bayley interpreted the Chronicle to mean that Guildford was actually buried within the chapel, but he avoided making the same claim regarding Jane and Henry Grey. And while it may initially seem logical that Guildford’s body was indeed brought into the chapel for purposes of burial, it is equally possible that the body was brought into the chapel simply because the building stood empty between services. The chapel was thus an ideal facility for securing the body from the curious-minded residents and workers in the Tower and from relic seekers until a final resting place could be found.

Only one other place of burial for Jane Grey has ever been suggested. Thomas Russell Porter, a Leicestershire antiquarian and early historian of the Charnwood Forest that includes Bradgate Park, proposed in 1854 the possibility that Jane’s body may have been quietly removed from the Tower for burial in the Grey family chapel at Bradgate.[6] Porter took as his source an anecdote related to him by the Reverend Andrew Bloxam, vicar of St James Church in the Leicestershire village of Twycross, approximately ten miles west-southwest of Bradgate. The source for Bloxam’s anecdote is unknown, however. There is no evidence surviving at Bradgate or elsewhere to support Bloxom’s claim that Jane’s remains may lie at Bradgate. Its chapel was extensively restored in the nineteenth century without discovery of Jane’s tomb or any commemorative marker. Indeed, though Bradgate Park remains a popular tourist site associated with Jane Grey, the Bradgate Park Trust consistently avoids any claim today that Jane may have been buried there.

The more prevalent assumption that Jane was interred within the Chapel of St Peter ad Vincula is not supported by any surviving grave marker from the period at that location either, though many of the graves of persons executed for treason were deliberately left unmarked. The modern marker that includes her name, along with those of several other persons, was installed only after the completion of an extensive restoration of the entire chapel undertaken between August 1876 and June 1877. As part of the restoration process, the chapel’s flooring was removed, whereupon workers discovered sinkholes likely to lead in future to collapse of the floor around the altar. The supervisory committee therefore ordered the removal of “every spadeful of earth” from the area, with careful sieving to recover any remains so that they might be appropriately reinterred once the sinkholes were filled.[7]

The restoration of the chapel and the required excavations were overseen by a small group of government officials with no formal training in archaeology or scientific excavation techniques. In contravention of modern archaeological methodologies, the supervising committee directed the excavations in accordance with a map drawn up in advance by committee member Doyne C. Bell, Secretary to Her Majesty’s Privy Purse. Bell’s map indicated where he assumed certain graves must lie. Bell based his assumptions on ancient tradition and determined prior to the excavations that the remains of Jane Grey, Henry Grey, and Guildford Dudley, as persons of high status, must necessarily lie in a place of honor at the left front of the altar.[8] But excavations carried out on 9^th and 11^th November 1876 failed to uncover any remains that could in any way be associated with Jane, Henry, or Guildford.[9] Those same excavations did nonetheless seemingly confirm the final resting places of Queen Anne Boleyn, Jane Boleyn (Viscountess Rochford), Margaret Pole (Countess of Salisbury), and even John Dudley (Duke of Northumberland).[10] Undeterred by the absence of any remains of Jane, Henry, and Guildford, Bell “assumed with much probability” that they had nonetheless been interred precisely where he expected.[11] He did not offer any explanation for the absence of their remains.

The Chapel of St Peter ad Vincula was and is a Royal Chapel, but it also was and remains a parish church for the many people who have lived and worked within the Tower. And as with any English parish church during the Tudor period, all parishioners who died in the faith were eligible for burial in the consecrated ground associated with the Chapel, both within and without the actual sanctuary structure.[12] The surviving portions of the Registry of Burials for the Chapel of St. Peter reveals that hundreds, perhaps thousands, of persons were interred in or near the chapel over the centuries. But careful review of the Registry fails to uncover any mention of the interment of Jane Grey. The Registry is incomplete for the turbulent Tudor period specifically, however. A note on the first leaf of the Registry and datable to 1652 states, ‘This Book was brought into a present form out of the old parish Books and loose papers and other books from sundry Ministers gotten and procured and entered into this book and three calendars for the easy finding out the parts inquired for by Thomas Michell.’ Those portions of the Registry still surviving in 1652 revealed only a mere handful of people known to have been buried within the Chapel during the whole of the reigns of Edward VI and Mary Tudor.[13]

Circumstantial evidence derived from two vastly different sources supplements the lack of documentation and, when considered as a whole, mitigates against the Chapel as Jane’s place of burial. The first of these circumstances involves Tudor-era religious doctrines and practices related to the burial of the dead. Christian beliefs then and now emphasize the eventual bodily resurrection of the dead, so that great importance is placed on burial in consecrated ground. But such interment in consecrated ground was and is reserved to only those persons who died within whatever denomination held jurisdiction over the respective burial ground. The bodies of persons dying outside that faith or denomination, especially heretics, were ordinarily barred from such burial.

At the time of Jane’s death in February 1554, the Chapel of St Peter-ad-Vincula fell under the episcopal authority of the Bishop of London, the Roman Catholic Edmund Bonner.[14] Yet Jane famously died a staunch adherent to reformist doctrines and denied most Roman Catholic beliefs and practices, including especially those related to observances for the dead. It would have been a significant desecration of consecrated ground for Jane Grey, as well as Guildford Dudley and Henry Grey, to have been buried as heretics within the Chapel of St Peter. And burial in a place of honor immediately in front of the altar could only be considered sacrilegious. On religious grounds alone, it seems unlikely that Jane’s remains, as well as those of her husband and father, lie within the Chapel.

The second source of circumstantial evidence involves the burial of Jane’s father, Henry Grey, following his execution for treason on 23 February 1554. Like his daughter Jane, Henry Grey was a staunch proponent of doctrines held heretical by the Roman Catholic Church, though unlike her he has never been considered a martyr for the reformist cause. Nonetheless, his status under the Marian regime as a heretic should have precluded his burial in the consecrated ground of the Chapel. And like Jane, there is no mention in the historical record to indicate that Henry Grey was interred there. A tradition exists that Henry Grey was buried instead in the Church of Holy Trinity Minories, near the Tower. That tradition was even noted—but not supported—by Bell’s account of the search for Jane’s grave in 1876.[15]

The Church of Holy Trinity Minories was originally part of a nunnery of the Order of St Clare and lay in the Portsoken ward of the ancient City of London, approximately five hundred yards north of the Tower.[16] The convent was closed at the time of Henry VIII’s Dissolution of the Monasteries, and the king granted the Minories estate to the Bishop of Bath and Wells in 1539, after which the estate became known as Bath Place.[17] The estate returned to the Crown in May 1548, and Edward VI subsequently awarded it to Henry Grey in January 1553.[18] Grey immediately sold the Minories in May 1553 to his brothers Lord John Grey and Lord Thomas Grey, his maternal half-brother George Medley, and John Harrington of Kelston as joint owners for the sum of £400.[19] The Grey family thus owned a church and its associated burial ground, both conveniently situated within easy walking distance of the Tower of London, at the time of the executions in February of 1554.[20]

When the burial crypt beneath the Church of Holy Trinity was cleaned of accumulated debris in 1850-51, a severed head was discovered in a niche in the wall of the crypt. It was neatly preserved in a wooden box filled with sawdust. The sawdust had effectively mummified the head, and evidence remained at the neck of an executioner’s blade.[21] The head was examined by several persons considered capable at that time of identifying it, and Sir George Scharf, Director of the National Gallery, deemed it to be the head of Henry Grey. Scharf based his identification on a comparison to a portrait then thought to depict Henry Grey.[22] Scharf’s identification was later contested by E. M. Tomlinson, a vicar of the Church of Holy Trinity Minories late in the nineteenth century and an author of a history of the church.[23] Nonetheless, the head remains identified today as ‘The Head of Henry Grey, Duke of Suffolk.’ It is in the possession of the Church of St Botolph’s-without-Aldgate, having been transferred there following passage of the London Government Act of 1899, under which the Minories was reassigned from the Parish of Whitechapel to that of St Botolph’s-without-Aldgate (since 1907 part of the City of London civil parish).[24]

Whether the head is indeed that of Henry Grey cannot today be confirmed without examination using modern forensic techniques. But if Henry Grey was in fact interred in the church attached to the Minories estate owned by his three surviving brothers, it seems likely that Jane Grey and her husband Guildford Dudley were similarly interred there. In the religious and political circumstances, it seems altogether logical that the surviving members of the Grey family and/or their agents would have removed the bodies of their reformist kin to the Minories conveniently situated so close to the Tower, thereby avoiding the issue of the burial of heretics in a chapel consecrated to the Roman Catholic faith.

There is no direct evidence to support any specific conclusion, however. And it is unlikely that any future archaeological efforts would resolve the issue. The soil beneath the floor of the Chapel of St Peter-ad-Vincula is very damp and all but certain to have entirely dissolved even the bones of one so young as Jane, though likely not those of her father.[25] And what remained of the disused former Church of Holy Trinity Minories was destroyed during the London Blitz of World War II. As is the case with the date and location of Jane’s birth, the best we can reasonably achieve regarding her burial is to suggest the likeliest possibilities, which are that she was indeed interred in the Chapel of St Peter as tradition dictates—and in direct and noteworthy contravention of the religious practices of the day—or that she (along with at least her father and perhaps her husband) was instead buried quietly in the Church of Holy Trinity Minories near to the Tower of London.

J. Stephan Edwards, PhD, FSA
Palm Springs, California
10 January 2025

NOTES:

[1] N.H. Nicolas, Literary Remains of Lady Jane Grey, (London, 1825), xcii-xciii.

[2] See, for example, John Stephan Edwards, “On the Birth Date of Lady Jane Grey,” Notes and Queries 54, no. 3 (Sept. 2007), 240–242; “A Further Note on the Date of Birth of Lady Jane Grey,” Notes and Queries 55, no. 2 (June 2008), 146–148; Leanda de Lisle, “Faking Jane: On Lady Jane Grey & a historical forgery uncovered,” The New Criterion, September 2009, 77-79; John Stephan Edwards, “The Spinola Letter” in Portraits of Lady Jane Grey Dudley, England’s ‘Nine Days Queen’: Revised Edition (Palm Springs, CA, 2024), 193-197.

[3] John Foxes, Actes and Monuments of the latter and perillous days … (London, 1563, 1570, 1573, and 1583).

[4] Henry Machyn, The Diary of Henry Machyn, Citizen and Merchant-Taylor of London, 1550-1563, edited by J.G. Nichols ( London, 1848), 57 and 61. The Church of All Hallows Barking lies immediately adjacent to the traditional public execution site on Tower Hill and is sometimes known as All Hallows-by-the-Tower.

[5] The Chronicle of Queen Jane, edited by John Gough Nichols (London, 1850), 55.

[6] Thomas Russell Porter, ‘Lady Jane Grey’, Notes and Queries ccxxxiv, (1854), 373. See also William Kelly, ‘Was Lady Jane Grey buried at Bradgate?’, Notes and Queries 2^nd series ccviii (1859). 512.

[7] Doyne Courtenay Bell, Notices of the Historic Persons Buried in the Chapel of St Peter ad Vincula in the Tower of London, (London, 1877), 20. The supervising committee included Bell as Secretary to Her Majesty’s Privy Purse,  Gerard J. Noel as First Commissioner of Works, Colonel G. Bryan Milman as Resident Governor of the Tower, Spenser Ponsonby-Fane as Comptroller of the Lord Chamberlain’s Office, Algernon Bertram Freeman-Mitford as Secretary to H.M. Office of Works, and Frederic J. Mouat, a surgeon and Inspector for the Local Government Board.

[8] Bell, Notices, 52. According to Roman Catholic tradition, burial close to the altar affords the deceased greater physical proximity to the holiest place within the sanctuary and thus greater proximity to God. Burial on the left or sinister side affords slightly less prestige than burial on the right or dexter side.

[9] Bell, Notices, 176,

[10] Bell, Notices, 19-29.

[11] Bell, Notices, 183.

[12] Bell, Notices, 15. The grounds immediately in front of the Chapel once served as the cemetery for those residents of the Tower who were otherwise ineligible, usually for reasons of social status, for burial inside the walls of the Chapel. Any exterior grave markers were removed, however, and the outdoor burial ground was largely paved over prior to the nineteenth century. Burials within the Chapel were prohibited after 1853.

[13] Archives of the Tower of London, Burial Registry, f.115r-v.

[14] Edward VI placed the Chapel of St Peter-ad-Vincula under the jurisdiction of the Bishop of London in 1551. That jurisdiction was later confirmed by Mary I in October 1555 but revoked by Elizabeth I. The Chapel is today a Royal Peculiar under the direct jurisdiction of the Crown rather than of any bishop.

[15] Bell, Notices, 184.

[16] Comparison between modern and eighteenth-century maps suggests that the Church of Holy Trinity Minories was located on a site now occupied by Hammelworth House, No. 9 St. Clare Street, EC3N.

[17] Edward Murray Tomlinson, A History of the Minories, London (London, 1907), 80. See also Anthony Paul House, ‘The City of London and the Problem of the Liberties, c1540 – c1640’, PhD diss. (Oxford University, 2006), 73.

[18] The National Archives (TNA), ‘Letters patent granting Henry, Duke of Suffolk, capital house called le Mynery house’, E 328/400.

[19] TNA, ‘Letters patent granting licence to Henry, Duke of Suffolk, to alienate capital messuage called le Mynery howse’, E328/399. See also Tomlinson, A History of the Minories, 112-113.

[20] Though Henry Grey was executed on 23 February 1554, the parliamentary act confirming his attainder of treason and the confiscation of his estates and those his brothers, including the Minories, was not passed until several months later in the session of 12 November 1554 to 16 January 1555. See 1 Philip and 2 Mary c.20, “An act for the confirmation of the attainders of Henry, late Duke of Suffolk, his brethren, and diverse others.”

[21] William Quekett to the Editor, The Times of London, 14 October 1879.

[22] Walter George Bell, Unknown London (London, 1919), 7 and 12-14.

[23] Tomlinson, A History of the Minories, 306. The portrait that Scharf used for comparison to the mummified severed head was identified at the time as Henry Grey, Duke of Suffolk and attributed to Johannes Corvus. It is currently identified as Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester by an unknown English workshop. See National Portrait Gallery (London), NPG 247.

[24] Electronic communication, Gary Caughey, Church Warden, St Botolph’s-without-Aldgate, London, 17 May 2008. The resting place of the head today is reportedly known only to the successive rectors of St Botolph’s, with the outgoing holder of the office passing the information along to the new incoming rector.

[25] For a detailed explanation of this phenomenon, see Bell, Notices, 27, on the failure in 1876 to discover the bones of the teenage Queen Katherine Howard. It must be noted that several adult skeletons of the Tudor period did survive the damp soil conditions, so the absence of the bones of Henry Grey cannot be explained by that circumstance.