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Archbishop Cranmer was the last of Jane’s Council then living in the Tower to leave it, and the leave-taking was a sad one on both sides, for it left Lady Jane alone to meet the sad events then coming thick and fast, with what courage she could summon.

Presently a messenger came to Suffolk, from Baynard’s Castle, to tell him that the nobles gathered together there required him to deliver up the Tower and go to the Castle to sign Mary’s proclamation, and without a moment’s hesitation the wretched man gave up the unequal struggle, and did as he was commanded. Then he returned to the Tower to tell Jane that her queenship was a thing of the past, although there was little need to report so evident a fact.

With nervous excitement he rushed into the Council chamber, where he found Jane alone, seated in forlorn dejection under the canopy of State.

“Come down from that, my child,” he said. “That is no place for you,” and then more gently than he had ever spoken to her before, he told her all. For a moment there was silence while daughter and father stood clasped in each other’s arms in the deserted hall, through the open windows of which could be heard, borne on the summer air, shouts of “Long live Queen Mary!” There was a long silence, then Jane looked up into her father’s eyes and there was a gleam of hope in her own as she asked, wistfully, “Can I go home?”

Poor little victim of the plots of over-ambitious men, never was a more sublimely pathetic sentence uttered, and oh, the world of longing in that simple, never-to-be-gratified request!

No sooner had Queen Mary’s proclamation been heralded, than everything was changed for Lady Jane, who was even deserted by her mother and the Duchess of Northumberland. A few hours before, the Tower guards and officials had treated her with extreme deference, but now showed a marked degree of scorn for her whose sovereignty had come to an end. The tears of her women, their whispered talk, the ominous silence of the palace, broken only by the distant shouts of the revellers, all combined to add to the poor girl’s misery, and it would not be strange if on that evening of July 19th, when she was removed from the State apartments, to another Tower, and declared a prisoner, she had felt that the calmness even of despair was preferable to the atmosphere of uncertainty of the last few days of her struggle for a crown.

In her new quarters she was allowed several attendants of good birth, as well as two serving maids and a lad, and though a prisoner, she was not in solitude nor in discomfort of any kind, being allowed to walk daily in the Queen’s gardens, and “on the hill without the Tower precincts”–her meals were those of a most luxurious captivity, and it must be clearly understood that she was never formally arrested. She was simply detained at the Tower, to prevent a repetition of the project to place her on the throne. During the nine days’ reign, Guilford, her husband, seems to have sulked because she had refused to make him King, or else Northumberland had advised him to keep out of the way, that he might not be included in any blame for the usurpation of the crown. However that may have been, we hear nothing of him until after Mary’s proclamation, when he too was imprisoned, but not in that part of the Tower with Lady Jane.

Even in her secluded apartment, Jane must have heard some gossip of the great outer world in which she no longer played a part, and doubtless knew that Princess Elizabeth had joined her sister Mary, and was to ride into London with her, showing that whatever difference of opinion she had on other matters, she wished the nation to know that she upheld Mary’s succession to the throne. And too, Jane must have heard of the flaunting decorations of the city to celebrate the royal entrance, and of the wild enthusiasm everywhere shown for Queen Mary.