Henry Grey, 1st Duke of Suffolk

He was the son and heir of Thomas Grey, 2nd Marquess of Dorset (1477–1530) by his wife Margaret Wotton (1487–1541), daughter of Sir Robert Wotton (c. 1463–1524) of Boughton Malherbe in Kent. Through his father he was a great-grandson of Elizabeth Woodville, the wife of King Edward IV, by her first marriage to Sir John Grey of Groby.

Henry Grey was best known for his zeal for the Protestant faith. The Swiss reformer Heinrich Bullinger dedicated a book to him in 1551 and frequently corresponded with the family. In Parliament and on the Privy Council, Grey pushed for further Protestant reforms. He is credited with making Leicestershire one of the most reliably Protestant counties in early modern England.

Seriously ill, and fearing his own death, King Edward VI granted Northumberland's request for the marriage of Suffolk's daughter Lady Jane Grey to Northumberland's son, Lord Guildford Dudley, on 25 May 1553. Edward later altered his will to make Jane his designated successor. Edward died on 6 July 1553, and three days later Suffolk, Northumberland, and other members of the Privy Council proclaimed Jane queen.[3] This proclamation failed; not by a large-scale rallying of forces in the country to Henry VIII's eldest daughter, the future Queen Mary I, as is often thought, but by a wavering Privy Council switching its allegiance to Mary during Northumberland's absence on campaign against her. The decision was led by Henry FitzAlan, 19th Earl of Arundel, and William Herbert, 1st Earl of Pembroke. Arundel had been imprisoned earlier by Northumberland for having sided with the previous Protector, Somerset, but it is not clear why Pembroke revolted; especially since his son and heir, Henry Herbert, having married Henry Grey's other daughter, Catherine, the same day as Jane's wedding. The country was divided in its loyalties to the two contenders for queen at the time.[4]

By his wife's friendship with the new Queen Mary, Grey and his daughter and son-in-law temporarily avoided execution. However, Mary had Henry Grey beheaded on 23 February 1554, after his conviction for high treason for his part in Sir Thomas Wyatt's attempt (January – February 1554) to overthrow her after she announced her intention to marry King Philip II of Spain.

A mummified head, reputedly that of Henry Grey, 1st Duke of Suffolk, which was found in 1849 at Holy Trinity, Minories and later passed to St Botolph's Aldgate where it was eventually buried in 1990

According to Walter George Bell (writing in 1920),[5] the severed head of the Duke was discovered in a vault in the Church of Holy Trinity, Minories in London in 1851, preserved by the tannin-rich oak sawdust used to pad the basket on the scaffold on which he had been executed 297 years earlier. Bell believed the head might have been hidden by the Duke's widow to prevent it from being exposed on a spike on London Bridge. Both of them had worshipped in the chapel at Holy Trinity. The church was closed in 1899 and deconsecrated and the head found a new resting place at St Botolph's Church, Aldgate, to which Holy Trinity Parish had been annexed. In 1920, the vicar of St Botolph's kept it in a glass box inside a locked cupboard and was willing to display it to historians, but not to "mere tourists".

The head was examined in the late 19th century by Sir George Scharf, former Keeper of the National Portrait Gallery, who noted a strong resemblance between its features and those in the portrait of the duke then in the possession of the Marquess of Salisbury at Hatfield. However, Bell also notes a scandal at Holy Trinity in 1786 in which a sexton had been found sawing and chopping up coffins in the vaults and using the wood to stoke the fire in his quarters. Many of the bodies had been partly dismembered in the process and Bell warned his readers that the surviving head might well have resulted from this debacle.

In later years, the head was sealed in a vault in the crypt at St Botolph's, until a planned conversion of the space into an office resulted in an archaeological investigation of the site between April and July 1990. The archaeologists recovered the head from the vault and it was buried in the churchyard by the parish.[6]

• Robert C. Braddock, "Grey, Henry, duke of Suffolk (1517–1554)", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004,
• Eric Ives, "Lady Jane Grey, A Tudor Mystery", Wiley-Blackwell 2009,