Like the story of Mary, Queen of Scots (which Horsley also illustrated), the tragic life of the Lady Jane Grey held an international appeal for artists during the Romantic period. No doubt the outstanding example is Paul Delaroche's heartrending Execution of Lady Jane Grey (National Gallery, London), exhibited at the Paris Salon in 1834. Given this vogue, it is not surprising that the present picture was one of Horsley's most popular. Exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1853, at the Exposition Universelle in Paris two years later, and at the Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition two years later again, it invariably received good reviews. 'The source of this subject', the Art Journal informed its readers when the picture was first shown at the Academy, 'is a memoir of Lady Jane Grey by N.H. Nicolas, Esq., in which she is described as preferring the study of the Phaedo of Plato to the sports of the field. She is seated near the window of her chamber, and Ascham approaches the window from without. The effect proposed and most felicitously made out is that of full daylight. The impersonation of Lady Jane Grey is characterised by gentleness and modesty ... The head of Ascham is a most succesSful study; the figures are beautifully detailed; in short every part of the work is scrupulously careful.' The Manchester Guardian said much the same when the picture re-appeared at the Art Treasures Exhibition. 'Mr. Horsley['s]... "Lady Jane Grey and Roger Ascham" (557) is the most agreeable of the many various paintings of that well-known incident of the fair student who preferred to stay indoors with Plato to following the stag with her stout father and lady mother. There is a sweet virginal serenity in her air, and a pleasant summer stillness about the great oriel into which she has withdrawn with her books; and outside you see the green fields and the hunting party without envying them.'
In treating this theme Horsley adopted one of his favourite motifs, that of a figure seated in a window embrasure reading or otherwise engaged. Further examples are his R.A. Diploma work, A Pleasant Corner (1866), and Truant in Hiding (1870) in the Victoria Art Gallery, Bath. A version of the present picture, the figure of Lady Jane Grey alone in an oval format, dated 1853 and possibly worked up from a study, was sold in these Rooms (as A Good Book) on 25 May 1979, lot 103; and Horsley returned to the theme of the heroine with Roger Ascham in a picture shown at the R.A. in 1867 (no.143).

Roger Ascham (1515-1568) was one of the most celebrated scholars of his day. He was educated at St. John's College, Cambridge, and in due course became a fellow of his college and the University's public orator. Henry VIII granted him a pension, which was continued by Edward VI, and he was tutor to Princess Elizabeth. His Protestantism might have been a danger under Mary, but he enjoyed the patronage of Bishop Gardiner and the Queen made him her Latin secretary, a post he continued to hold when his former pupil, Elizabeth, came to the throne. His published works include Toxophilus, a book on archery (1545), an account of a visit to Germany as secretary to Sir Richard Morysin, English ambassador to the Emperor Charles V (1553), and a treatise on practical education, The Scholemaster, which was left unfinished at his death but published by his widow in 1570. It is here that he describes how, travelling south to embark with Morysin in 1550, he called on Lady Jane Grey at her father's house at Bradgate, Leicestershire, and found her reading Plato while the household was out hunting.

The book which the Art Journal gives as Horsley's source for the subject is the Literary Remains of Lady Jane Grey by the well-known antiquary Sir Nicholas Harris Nicolas (1799-1848), published in 1825.