Lady Jane Grey Queen was Queen of England for a whopping nine days before she was beheaded.
Blame John Dudley, the lord chamberlain to King Edward VI, for getting her into such a mess.
Dudley was an ambitious man. He had Edward’s complete trust and was fortunate enough that the king was in the process of dying.
Edward was a Protestant, and Dudley quickly devised a scheme to maintain his power with the royal family before Edward’s Catholic sister Mary could come to the throne.
His 17-year-old daughter-in-law, Lady Jane Grey, was the great-granddaughter of Henry VII, which he figured was a good enough lineage to make her the perfect vehicle for his plan.
Dudley convinced the dying Edward to sign documents that skipped royal succession over both of his half sisters, Mary and Elizabeth, making Lady Jane queen of England upon his death and saving England from the scourge of Catholicism.
It worked—for about a week and a half, anyway—until Mary challenged the succession and was quickly recognized as the legitimate ruler.
Lady Jane had never wanted to be queen in the first place, but she and her husband were thrown into the Tower of London and beheaded within the year.
