Was Jane Grey Dudley a ‘Real’ Queen of England?

In a previous article entitled Were Edward VI’s Letters Patent on the Succession of 1553 ‘Legal’?, I argued that issues related to the royal succession fall under the jurisdiction and authority of Parliament, not the Crown. From that, I concluded that Edward’s letters patent altering the succession as it was previously established by the Third Succession Act were not themselves ‘legal’ because Edward lacked the authority to intervene directly in succession matters. That in turn raises the question of whether the reign of Queen Jane was itself ‘legal,’ and by extension, whether we should include Jane among the monarchs of England. Did Jane usurp Mary, or did Mary usurp Jane?

I have in the past usually argued that Jane should be counted as a monarch of England, based on several considerations.

• The National Archives of the United Kingdom maintains a separate section labeled ‘Queen Jane’ for storing certain types of official governmental records that survive from the period between 6 July and 19 July 1553. The National Archives is a non-ministerial department of the Government of the United Kingdom, therefore the reign of Queen Jane seemingly has official recognition from the government itself.
• The official website of the Royal Family recognizes and includes Queen Jane among the predecessors of the current king. Therefore, the Crown officially recognizes Queen Jane as a previous monarch of England.
• Certain authoritative law texts include Jane among the monarchs of England.[1]
• The English government and bureaucracy operated between 10 July and 19 July 1553 in the name of and under the authority of Queen Jane. A handful of documents originating from entities not directly involved in the alteration of the succession survive to illustrate this point. They notably include courts-of-law transcripts indicating that the courts were convened in the name of Queen Jane, and the actions taken by those courts and other entities and recorded in those documents were never voided or reversed as ‘illegal’ or as having  been undertaken without proper authority.

But my thinking has changed as I have considered the question more objectively over the past few weeks and months. These are the “cold hard facts”:

• Monarchs of England and the United Kingdom rule by consent of the people.[2]
• The authority to govern the succession lies with Parliament as representative of the people, not with the Crown generally or with any sovereign individually other than Henry VIII.[3]
• Parliament’s last ruling on the royal succession prior to the death of Edward VI was the Third Succession Act of 1544, and that statute law identified Mary Tudor as Edward’s rightful ‘next-in-line’ successor.
• Edward VI’s letters patent nominating Jane Grey Dudley as his successor were not legally valid.
• The people dissented from the rule of Queen Jane and instead rallied successfully to support Mary’s claim and to install her as their queen just nine short days after Jane was first publicly proclaimed as Edward’s successor.

The late Eric Ives, author of Lady Jane Grey: A Tudor Mystery and the only scholarly historian thus far to publish an analysis of both the life of Jane Grey and the succession crisis of 1553, argued that the reign of Queen Jane was legal and that Mary was a usurper. He gave Chapter 22 of his study the revealing title “The Rebellion of Mary Tudor.”[4] If a rebellion is “an open, organized, armed resistance to an established government or ruler,” then one might understandably think Ives correct.[5] But can we properly call Mary’s actions a ‘rebellion’ if Edward’s letters patent naming Jane as his successor had no legal validity? Mary did not ‘rebel’ against a legally established government or ruler. Rather, she acted to disestablish a ruler and a government that had no proper foundation or authority under English law. Mary acted as the rightful sovereign designated by Parliament through the Third Succession Act, and she did so to enforce the terms of that Act. She also had the overwhelming support (‘consent’) of the common people.

If English monarchs rule only with consent of the governed, and if the governed consented to be ruled by Mary rather than by Jane, then the stipulations of the Third Succession Act of 1544 are determinative. The reign of Jane Grey Dudley was not legal, and she cannot rightly be counted among the monarchs of England.

J. Stephan Edwards, PhD
Palm Springs, California
5 June 2024

NOTES:

1. See, for example, Sweet & Maxwell’s Guide to Law Reports and Statutes, 4th edition (London: Sweet & Maxwell, 1962), 28.
2. For further discussion of rule by consent of the people, see Were Edward VI’s Letters Patent on the Succession of 1553 ‘Legal’?.
3. The Second Succession Act of 1536 empowered Henry VIII to name his own successor in the event he approached death without surviving legitimate issue, even as it declared his three-year-old daughter Elizabeth illegitimate. I believe Parliament empowered Henry individually as the incumbent on the throne, not the Crown more generally. That is, the power and privilege of the king to name his own successor died with Henry. See Were Edward VI’s Letters Patent on the Succession of 1553 ‘Legal’? for discussion of this issue. The Third Succession Act of 1544 restored Mary and Elizabeth to the royal succession but simultaneously empowered Henry VIII to limit the ability of either to succeed him. No other English monarch has ever been formally empowered to name his or her own successor.
4. Eric Ives, Lady Jane Grey: A Tudor Mystery (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 225.
5. Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. ‘rebellion.’