Note 292 — Chapter XIX · THE TRIAL OF QUEEN JANE
Reading edition
Renard, in a dispatch of the 8th February, as given by Griffet, says indeed that “Jeanne de Suffolck, dont elle [Mary] avait épargné les jours, contre l’avis de l’Empereur Charles-Quint, fut sacrifiée à la nécessité d’ôter aux rebelles, & aux ennemis du Gouvernement, une idole qu’ils étaient fâchée de n’avoir pas maintenue sur le trône. Son mari fut exécuté le même jour.”
Besides, Gardiner says that Suffolk himself bewailed “with impatient dolours not only his own woe, but the calamity his folly had brought on his daughter.” Godwin, however (Rerum Anglicarum Henrico VIII, Edwardo VI et Maria, Annals, p. 217), throws the blame of Jane’s troubles more on her mother than on her father: “Hunc exitum habuit Iana, majorum titulis illustris fœmina, sed virtute et ingenii nobilitate longe illustrior, quæ dum Virtici et imperiosæ matris ambitioni obsequitur ... funestum sibi reginæ sumpsit.”
The consensus of historians, nevertheless, lays the blame on Suffolk’s ill-advised attempt at rebellion. Bishop Burnet, writing in 1680 (History of the Reformation, vol. ii. 437) says: “Indeed the blame of her death was generally cast on her father rather than on the Queen, since the rivalry of a crown is a point of such niceness, that even those who bemoaned her death most could not but excuse the Queen, who seemed to be driven to it, rather from considerations of State, than any resentment of her own.... He [Suffolk] would have died more pitied for his weakness, if his practices had not brought his daughter to her end.”