f that time, his head was stuck up on London Bridge.

[Illustration: THE TRAITOR'S GATE, TOWER OF LONDON.]

Fancy the horror of his loving daughter Meg when she heard this! What
could she do? She could not suffer it to stay there, so she bribed two
men and took a boat, and, going down the river, stole her own father's
head, and, wrapping it in a cloth, returned with her gruesome burden to
Chelsea, where she is said to have buried it in the church. Can you
picture anything more awful than the task of this brave woman?

Another of More's daughters was married, too, and she and Meg were both
happy mothers with families of their own; but we may be quite sure that
so long as they lived they never forgot their dear father.

CHAPTER XIV

LADY JANE GREY

There once lived a girl who was called Queen of England for twenty days,
but who was never crowned; who lived a good and innocent life, yet was
beheaded when she was only sixteen. This was Lady Jane Grey. She was a
cousin of young King Edward VI., who succeeded his father Henry VIII.
when he was a little boy of nine. At that time England had lately
established the Protestant religion, the Church of England as we have it
now, and all Roman Catholics had been forced to become Protestants or to
leave the churches to those who were. Edward was a delicate little boy,
and he had only reigned five years when he caught measles. He never
seemed to recover from them; he had a cold afterwards, which settled on
his chest, and it soon began to be whispered that the boy-king must die.
At this there was much talking among the great nobles who were
Protestants, for they knew that the next heir to the throne was
Edward's elder sister Mary, a woman of thirty-eight, a strong Roman
Catholic; and they feared that if Queen Mary sat on the throne all the
Roman Catholics would be restored to their places, and the Protestants
would be persecuted and perhaps murdered, all of which afterwards really
did happen. Mary had a younger sister Elizabeth, who was only twenty,
and she was a Protestant; and if the nobles could have put her on the
throne instead of Mary, all would have been well with England. But that
they could not do, for to set aside an older sister for a younger one
would have been impossible. So they looked around for someone else, and
fixed on little Lady Jane Grey.

Lady Jane was one of the three daughters of a nobleman called the Duke
of Suffolk; she was the eldest, and throu