gh her mother she was a cousin
of King Edward's, and of his sisters Mary and Elizabeth, too. If Edward
had had no sisters, Lady Jane would have been Queen after him. The
nobles had wanted her to marry Edward, who was just her own age; but the
boy had been too ill to think of marrying, and now he was going to die,
and it was too late to make any arrangement of that sort. His guardian,
the Duke of Northumberland, was a powerful and ambitious man, and he
planned a scheme by which he would be still more powerful. He persuaded
Edward that Lady Jane must reign after him, for if she did not England
would suffer; and Edward, who loved the Protestant religion, consented.
He made a will saying that Lady Jane was to be Queen instead of his
sisters Mary and Elizabeth. Of course, he had no right to do this, for a
king cannot say who is to reign after him; the throne must go to the
next heir. But Northumberland thought if he and all the nobles declared
Lady Jane Queen, they could force the people of England to acknowledge
her. Then the clever Northumberland went further; he got Edward to
consent to the marriage of Lady Jane to Northumberland's only son, young
Lord Guildford Dudley. Dudley was then a boy of seventeen, and Lady Jane
only fifteen, but that was quite old enough for marriage in those days.

Lady Jane had lived very quietly up to this time; she was a gentle
little girl who loved her books, and never thought of thrones and kings
and queens. When she was quite young she could speak French and Italian,
wrote Latin, and understood Greek, Hebrew, Chaldee, and Arabic. This was
the more wonderful because in those days ladies were not supposed to
know very much; if they could do beautiful tapestry work and ride and
sing a little, it was considered quite enough. There is a story told of
Lady Jane that one day when a very clever man named Roger Ascham came to
stay with her father, he found her sitting in a window-seat reading a
book. Outside stretched the beautiful park, with its green grass and
great shady trees, and the voices of the visitors and the other little
girls who were amusing themselves came in at the window; but Lady Jane
sat curled up, as many little girls do nowadays, reading diligently, and
never taking any notice of the bright world outside. And the book she
was reading was the work of an ancient Greek philosopher called Plato,
who wrote very interesting books, but ones that are hard even for
grown-up people to under