Lady Jane Grey

Jane Grey was a great-granddaughter of Henry VII, raised by ambitious parents and educated far beyond what most princes received. The scholar Roger Ascham visited her home and found the family out hunting while Jane sat alone reading Plato in Greek; she told him her books were the only place she was not scolded. At fifteen she was married off, and when the dying Edward VI's advisers set aside his Catholic sister, Jane was proclaimed queen. She reigned nine days before the country rallied to Mary I.

Convicted of treason, she might still have been spared: Mary sent a chaplain to convert her, and Jane debated him steadily and would not move, writing to her sister in the blank pages of a Greek New Testament to live so that she would not fear death. She was beheaded in the Tower in February 1554, aged about sixteen — blindfolded, briefly unable to find the block, and asking those watching to guide her hands to it.