Page:Archaeologia Volume 13.djvu/94

70 of Suffolk, and lately married to Guildford Dudley, his youngest son.

This lady Jane he and his adherents actually proclaimed queen on the death of Edward the VIth.

Overpowered, however, by the superior interest of the princess Mary, he was arrested at Cambridge, July 35, 1553, conducted to the Tower of London, and beheaded on the 22nd of August following; so that this curious piece of sculpture must have been done in less than a month's time. The inscription, it should seem, has been left unfinished. His name, in the spelling of the age, is under the crest of the lion and bear and ragged staff. It is difficult to ascertain what is meant, if no pun is couched under them, by the following lines:

taking it for granted that a pun is intended, the Roses easily separate themselves in the division of his brother Ambrose's christian name.

Plate IV. Fig. 1, 2, contains a repetition, taken from different sides of the room, of the royal title of the amiable and unfortunate lady Jane Gray.

She had, perhaps, a latent meaning in this repetition of her signature Jane, by which she at once styled herself a queen and intimated that not even the horrors of a prison could force her to relinquish that title.

The magnanimity of this illustrious claimant and victim of royalty, to the very last, is thus recorded in Howe's Chronicle, p. 622. "The 12th of February, (1554) being Monday, there was a scaffold made upon the greene for the lady Jane to die upon, who with her husband was appointed to have been put to death on the Friday before,