Thomas Chaloner’s ‘Elegy on the Death of Lady Jane Grey’

THE AUTHOR

Sir Thomas Chaloner (or ‘Challoner,’ sometimes called ‘The Elder’ to distinguish him from his stepson of the same name) was a courtier active primarily as an ambassador during the reign of Elizabeth I. He is best known as the first to translate Erasmus’s Praise of Folly (Moriæ Encomium) into English, as well as for his own original compositions of epic poetry in Latin. Chaloner was a friend of many who had known Jane Grey personally, including Walter Haddon, John Cheke, and William Cecil. It is not known whether or how well Chaloner himself knew Jane, though he probably did meet her at least once. Chaloner was involved in the investigations into Thomas Seymour’s conduct in 1549, for example, and he may have met her briefly in the course of those duties. He was not a party to the events of 1553, however, as he was away on ambassadorial duties in France during the summer of that year. Chaloner died in 1565 at age 44.

THE ELEGY

Deploratio acerbæ necis heroidis prœstantissimæ D[ominæ] Janæ Grayæ, or Elegy on the untimely death of the most Protestant divine Lady Jane Grey, was written sometime after the accession of Elizabeth I in 1558, since it refers retrospectively to Mary’s death. The Elegy was first published in 1579, well after Chaloner’s own death, in a larger collection of his epic and elegiac poetry and epitaphs entitled De republica Anglorum instauranda libri decem … (London: Thomas Vautrollerius, 1579).

The poem is an elegy in imitation of the classical Latin elegiac poem, which consists of pairs of lines, called couplets. Each couplet consists of one line in dactylic hexameter paired with a second line in dactylic pentameter. These metrical parameters make it exceedingly difficult to translate Chaloner’s Elegy into English while maintaining those parameters.

THIS TRANSLATION

When I originally created this page in June of 2009, no English translation faithful to Chaloner’s Latin-language original had yet been published. The only instance of a semblance of translation is that of Thomas Gibbons in his Memoirs of eminently pious women published in 1777.[1] Gibbons’s effort was less a true ‘translation’ than an ‘interpretation,’ however, since it incorporated a large amount of material not found in Chaloner’s original while simultaneously altering significantly both the content and the meaning of existing portions. Whereas Chaloner’s original contained forty nine couplets, for example, Gibbons’s interpretation was well over twice as long at one hundred twenty couplets. Similarly, Gibbons mentioned John Dudley numerous times in his translation, though Chaloner never explicitly referred to Dudley.

The translation presented here is my own. It is admittedly flawed since my skill in Latin has declined through lack of use, but I hope that it will add to the limited body of primary source material available on Jane Grey Dudley and that readers will find it useful. I deliberately chose not to attempt to translate Chaloner’s original into elegant English but chose instead to present the whole as a direct ‘word-for-word’ translation. I based my decision on a number of reasons. Firstly, it is utterly impossible to maintain the original Latin elegiac form when translating the poem into English without significantly altering the content, as noted above and as Gibbons demonstrated. My translation is therefore in prose, though it is presented below in pairs of lines so as to correspond roughly to the Latin original. Too, an elegant English translation requires a level of fluency in Renaissance Latin that I do not possess. Additionally, Chaloner littered his poem with a large number of punctuation marks, the use and/or placement of which may appear extraneous or improper by modern standards and may confuse a translator like myself unfamiliar with their use in Renaissance Latin poetry.[2] Lastly, Chaloner used non-standard spellings or abbreviated forms of many words, probably in order to meet the demands of the metrical requirements of elegiac couplets. I have therefore had to make ‘best guesses’ in several instances.

N.B. May 2024 – Dr Dana Sutton, Professor Emeritus of Classics at the University of California-Irvine, has shared with me his own recent and superior translation of the Elegy, and he informs me that he hopes to publish it in the near future, probably online. And although he has very kindly and very generously given me permission to use his translation here in full, I have chosen instead to retain my inferior effort and only to use his translation as a guide for amending the more egregious errors in my own. I will add a link here to his translation when he publishes it.

(Words enclosed in [brackets] below are only implied in the original. I have inserted them in the translation for the sake of reader clarity. Numbers enclosed in brackets refer to explanatory notes placed at the bottom of the page.)

NOTES:

1. Thomas Gibbons, Memoirs of eminently pious, women, who were ornaments to their sex, blessings to their families, and edifying examples to the Church and the world (London: J. Buckland, 1777), 58–70.
2. My sincerest thanks to Dr Dana Sutton, Professor Emeritus of Classics at the University of California-Irvine for his very useful observations on the now-archaic uses and functions of punctuation marks in Renaissance Latin poetry. Personal communication, 26 April 2024. Dr Sutton notes, for example, that a comma could be used in Renaissance Latin poetry to instruct any person reciting the poem aloud to insert a brief pause, known as a caesura, in his/her delivery in accordance with the demands of the poetic meter. Modern translators, however, might understand that same comma to indicate that the words or phrases to either side should not be construed together, even though the original author did not intend such separation.
3. Thomas Chaloner, De rep. Anglorum instauranda libri decem… (London: Vautrollerius, 1579), 296–299.
4. My thanks to Dr Veronique Helmridge-Marsillian for her correction of my earlier translation of “heroidis præstantissimæ.”
5. Pallas Athena was the Greek goddess of heroic endeavor and the companion of heroes.
6. My thanks to Meg Twycross of Lancaster University (UK) for correcting my translation of this phrase.
7. Another of many names for Pallas Athena.
8. Aganippe was the fountain of the Muses on Mount Helicon. Presumably Chaloner refers here to the poetic Muses themselves, rather than to their fountain.
9. Classical Latin panegyrists offered effusive and often exaggerated praise for living persons with the intention that others might emulate the supposed heroic deeds of that person. In contrast, elegists mourn a deceased person through somber poems of mourning and remembrance.
10. This couplet suggests that Mary incurred the wrath of Jupiter for her actions and so was rewarded by Jupiter with a short life. Mary died in November 1558, just 5 years and 4 months after becoming queen.
11. The concept obscured by Chaloner’s florid poetry is that Jane, knowledgeable of the belief in Christian salvation and heavenly reward, was able to overcome her fears in the hours before her execution by relying on surety of salvation.
12. Chaloner’s original uses Nemesis’s more obscure alternate name, Rhamnusia, probably to meet the demands of poetic meter. Rhamnusia/Nemesis was the Greco-Roman goddess of divine indignation and retribution, who punished excessive pride, evil deeds, and undeserved happiness or good fortune, and the absence of moderation; the personification of the resentment aroused in both gods and men against those who committed crimes with impunity.
13. Dropsy is a generalized swelling of the body and especially the joints caused by fluid retention. ‘The stone’ as an early-modern medical diagnosis included gallstones and urinary (kidney, bladder) stones, but was also sometimes used to include a variety of poorly understood abdominal and urinary complaints.
14. Aonia is the Roman name for a portion of Bœotia, within which lay the Helicon mountains, home of the nine Muses. Thus an ‘Aonian garland’ is a Muse’s garland.
15. The Muses, who lived on Mount Helicon and granted inspiration to poets.
16.  Yet another name for the nine Muses, this one derived from the legend that the sisters were fathered by King Pieros of Macedonia.
17. The Cyclopes were a race of giants and thus had giant hearts. They were also known for their strength, especially as depicted in Homer’s Iliad.
18. ‘Tene’ as used here by Chaloner is a non-standard spelling of the adjective ‘tenuis, tenue,’ meaning ‘thin, fine, delicate, fragile’. His non-standard spelling should not be confused with the imperative of the verb ‘teneō, tenēre’, which is also spelled ‘tenē’, meaning ‘hold’. In the absence of macrons, the length of the second syllable can be determined through examination of the meter. The second syllable of the first line of an elegiac couplet is short (‘tene’) rather than long (‘tenē’).
19. The Latin poetry is here very convoluted. In less rigid translation, the sentence might be rendered thus: ‘Being familiar with evil, didn’t Jane feel sorry for those fallen from God’s word in the same way she would have felt for followers of God’s word, even though her own fall was the result of their cruelty?’ The poetic point is that Jane was exceedingly magnanimous and forgiving.
20. Chaldea was the Roman name for a Semitic portion of ancient Babylonia. The ‘Chaldean’ language referred to here is Aramaic, one of the Semitic languages of the Bible and the language many scholars believe was Jesus of Nazareth’s native tongue.
21. Literally, ‘the Ausonians.’ Ausonia was the Greek term for southern Italy.
22. ‘Tuscan’ was the Renaissance name for the Italian language.
23. Refers to Saint Jerome of Stridon, a father of the Christian church, a scholar in Greek, and translator of the Vulgate Bible from Aramaic, Hebrew and Greek to Latin. Jane is known to have read extensively from among the works of Jerome.
24. ‘Pentaglotte’ is a non-Latin term adopted by Chaloner that I have translated rather freely. A Pentaglot is a five-language dictionary, or a person able to write in five languages.
25. The ‘noble duke’ is of course Jane’s father, Henry Grey, a descendant of Elizabeth Woodville, consort of King Edward IV, by her first husband, Sir John Grey of Groby.
26. Jane inherited royal blood from her mother, who was herself the granddaughter of Henry VII and the daughter of a dowager queen of France. The reference to ‘ill-omened stars’ reflects the pervasive Tudor-era belief in astrology and the importance of the position of the constellations relative to the timing of an individual’s birth, i.e., Jane was born when the stars were in an unlucky alignment.
27. Chaloner seems to mean that the potential good of Jane’s reign (‘the deed’) was destroyed by her having been placed on the throne illegally by the Privy Council. Alternatively, he may be saying, albeit cryptically, that Jane’s reign was ended because the Council failed to capture Mary in order to prevent her pressing her own claim to the crown.
28. Chaloner is the only source to suggest that Jane may have been pregnant at the time of her execution. Since Jane was held in separate quarters from her husband, Guildford Dudley, and since the two were not allowed to meet between 19 July 1553 and their execution on 12 February 1554, she would have been in at least her third trimester at the time of her death. Such an advanced pregnancy cannot have gone unnoticed and without comment by contemporary Protestant polemicists and anti-Marian propagandists. We must therefore assume that Chaloner was exaggerating in order to achieve maximum pathos, despite his earlier denials.
29. Polyxena was a daughter of King Priam of Troy. According to medieval versions of the story of the Trojan War, Achilles fell in love with Polyxena and proposed marriage. He arranged to meet her brother Paris and her mother Hecuba in the temple of the god Apollo to discuss the proposal, but instead he was ambushed and killed.
30. Neoptolemy is the Greek name for Pyrrhus, the son of Achilles (not to be confused with Pyrrhus of Epirus, the king of Macedonia who defeated the Romans at the Battles of Heraclea in 280 BC and Asculum in 279 BC). Achilles fathered Pyrrhus through Deidamia, daughter of King Lycomedes of Scyros, while hiding among the women at that court. Later exposed by Odysseus, Achilles went with Odysseus to join the war at Troy, before Pyrrhus was born. Pyrrhus joined his father in the Trojan War many years later. After his own death, Achilles’s ghost appeared to Pyrrhus and demanded that he kill Polyxena as a pre-condition for the gods’ allowing the Greeks to leave Troy at the end of the war. Pyrrhus did so, and he also killed her father King Priam of Troy. Many years after the war, Pyrrhus was himself slain by Orestes, son of Agamemnon, the commander-in-chief of the Greek forces during the war. (Agamemnon was earlier slain by his own wife, Clytemnestra, and the lover she had taken during his lengthy absence fighting in Troy.)
31. This appears to be a reference to the River Styx which, according to Greek mythology, separates the Earth from the Underworld. In his Theogeny, the poet Hesiod refers to its “nine loops of silver-swirling waters.” The deceased gained entry into the Underworld by paying a ferryman, Charon, to carry them across the river into Hades.
32. This stanza is one of the more difficult to translate, but Chaloner appears to be equating Jane’s blood, as spilled by “cruel Mary,” with the coins used by the deceased in ancient Greek mythology to pay Charon to ferry them across the River Styx. Through her payment in blood, Jane was purified prior to her arrival at the gates of Heaven. (My thanks to Stephenie Matejcik for alerting me to an earlier mistranslation.)