Scarcely had Lady Katherine returned to the maternal roof from Baynard’s Castle than she had to undergo the trying ordeal of hearing of the executions of her father and uncle, and of witnessing the callous manner in which these tragedies were treated by her mother. The Lady Frances’s mourning for her husband or her daughter could not have been of long duration, for well within the first three weeks of her widowhood, regardless of the tragic fate of her daughter, her husband, and her brother-in-law, this heartless woman put aside her mourning robes, and, gaily attired, allowed herself to be led to the hymeneal altar by a ginger-headed lad of twenty-one, young enough to be her son and of such inferior rank that the Princess Elizabeth, in her indignation at so unequal a match, cried out: “What? Has the woman so far forgotten herself as to mate with a common groom!” “A common groom,” however, Mr. Stokes was not. He was a member of a fairly good yeoman family and had been appointed secretary and groom of the chambers to the princess some two years earlier, during which time he must not only have won her confidence, but been on terms of so unusually intimate a kind, that had his first child been born alive, which fortunately it was not, it might have claimed the paternity of the Duke of Suffolk, and have added another complication to the many as to the succession, the result of the irregular wills[60] made by Henry VIII and Edward VI, who both appointed the Lady Frances and her daughters the immediate heiresses to the Throne, in the event of the deaths without issue of the former king’s daughters, Elizabeth and Mary. Perhaps the real reason why Lady Jane Grey never wrote to her mother in the last months of her life and never mentioned her in the letters to her sister Katherine and to her father, nor even on the margin of the Prayer Book (still in the possession of the nation) in which she has recorded her last thoughts, was that she was well aware of some scandal attaching to the Lady Frances in connection with the “base-born” Mr. Adrian Stokes. There are portraits, both in one canvas, facing each other, of Mr. Adrian Stokes and the Lady Frances, at Chatsworth. The gentleman is distinctly plain and common looking—he might indeed be a groom, with his ginger hair, his colourless eyes and rather silly expression. He wears a very rich doublet of black velvet, furred with ermine; whereas the Lady Frances, a buxom, but sour and ill-tempered looking lady, bearing a strange resemblance to her uncle, Henry VIII, is attired in a dress of black satin, with a jewelled pattern. She wears the well-known Mary Stuart coif and some fine jewels. In the corner of the picture figures the date “1555” and the words, “Adrian Stokes, aged twenty-one, and Lady Frances Duchess of Suffolk, aged thirty-six”—she looks fully ten years older.