By Ben Felsenburg
She’s remembered, if at all, as the pre-eminent footnote of English history. But has posterity been cruelly dismissive of Lady Jane Grey? The teenage monarch who reigned for just nine days is a sketchily known character and, truth be told, most of us aren’t quite clear what she was doing on the throne in the first place.
All that is changed thanks to Helen Castor’s refreshingly purposeful new series, England’s Forgotten Queen: The Life and Death of Lady Jane Grey (Wednesday, BBC4, 9pm).
A Cambridge University historian, Castor tells Jane’s story with authority, but in a blissfully direct, plain-speaking manner. I’m particularly grateful for the time the scholar takes to sketch out the family tree that explains the succession so that we can understand how in 1553, after the early death of Edward VI, there was no one else to succeed the king if the dreaded Papists were to be kept out of power.
Meanwhile, Edward’s Catholic elder sister had her own designs on the kingdom, but what chance did the ill-connected Mary have as underdog? Of course we all know how that turned out, but it’s to Castor’s credit that she makes a slim but fascinating and too little-known chapter of history into a racily watchable three-part tale.
Just one quibble: the little drama-reconstruction scenes are ludicrously bad am-dram. Is there any reason not to have saved on the budget and stuck to the perfectly entertaining words of Castor and her colleagues?
