[3] The attempt to secure a Protestant succession failed, and although King Edward was briefly succeeded by Jane Grey, the Privy Council of England changed sides and proclaimed his half sister, Mary.

When Frances died on November 20, 1559, she left a life estate in most of her property to Stokes, while Mary received only a small inheritance yielding a modest income of £20 a year.

In December 1560, however, Katherine Grey secretly married Edward Seymour, the eldest son of the Protector Somerset, incurring the Queen's unrelenting displeasure.

[9] On 16 July 1565,[10] while the Queen was absent attending the marriage of her kinsman, Sir Henry Knollys[11] (d. 21 December 1582), and Margaret Cave, the daughter of Sir Ambrose Cave,[12] Mary secretly married the Queen's sergeant porter, Thomas Keyes, son of Richard Keyes, esquire, of East Greenwich, Kent, by Agnes Saunders, the daughter of Henry Saunders of Ewell, Surrey.

The Queen confined Mary to house arrest with William Hawtrey (d. 1597) at Chequers in Buckinghamshire, where she remained for two years,[18] while Keyes was committed to the Fleet.

Her stay with the Greshams was an unhappy one, however, as Sir Thomas was now half blind and in constant physical pain, and his wife, Anne, bitterly resented Mary's presence in the household.

By February 1573, she was established in a house of her own in London in St Botolph's Without Aldgate, and by the end of 1577, she had been rehabilitated to the extent that she was appointed one of the Queen's Maids of Honour.

She left her mother's jewels to her step-grandmother, the Duchess of Suffolk, gifts of plate to Lady Arundell and to Adrian Stokes's wife, and money to her godchild, Mary Merrick, a granddaughter of her late husband, Thomas Keyes.

[9] The Queen granted her an imposing funeral in Westminster Abbey,[25] with the Duchess of Suffolk's daughter Susan Bertie, now Countess of Kent, as chief mourner.

[28] Leanda de Lisle's biography The Sisters Who Would Be Queen: Mary, Katherine, and Lady Jane Grey; A Tudor Tragedy was published in 2009 and was a NY Times bestseller.