 Jane was a devout Protestant during the English Reformation, when the Church of England violently rejected the authority of the Pope and the Roman Catholic Church. Known for her piety and education, she corresponded with Protestant leaders in Continental Europe, such as Heinrich Bullinger. A modest person who dressed plainly, her last words before her execution are reported as "Lord, into thy hands I commend my spirit!" Jane's execution by a Catholic queen made her into what the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography terms a "Protestant martyr", and by the end of the century Jane had become, in the words of the historian Eric Ives, "a Protestant icon". Depictions of Jane in the 16th and 17th centuries, such as in John Foxe's Actes and Monuments (1563), published after Protestant Elizabeth took the throne, "presented [Jane] as primarily a figure in a national narrative about an elect nation possessed of a pure Protestant faith which had risen supreme over Catholic Europe".
