Hi history lovers and welcome or welcome back to the channel, where I bring you new videos
every week on all aspects of the past. Today on History Calling we’re asking, does this drawing
by famed Tudor court painter, Hans Holbein the Younger, show the face of Jane Boleyn,
Viscountess Rochford, the woman who was the wife of George Boleyn and the sister-in-law of
Anne Boleyn and Henry VIII? If you’ve watched or read anything produced in recent years about Jane,
you may well have seen this picture cited as being her, but why has an image which is clearly
inscribed with the words ‘The Lady Parker’ been attached to Lady Rochford? Furthermore,
is this attribution likely to be correct, or this a case of bad historical research
leading to a popular, but heavily flawed theory which has been promoted in the interests of
putting a face to the name of one of the Tudor era’s most scandalous figures? Let’s find out.
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History Calling. There’s a link for that in the description box below,
as well as links to some other videos, books and TV shows which cover Jane’s life and death.
Jane Boleyn was the daughter of Henry Parker, who became Baron Morley in 1518 and his wife,
Alice St John. We don’t know exactly when their famous daughter entered the world. Her biographer,
Julia Fox (whose book is linked below for you), gives the year as being about 1505, but she offers
no source for this and Catharine Davies, who wrote Jane’s entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National
Biography, doesn’t give any year at all. We know however that she was at court by 1522, suggesting
that a birth year of 1510 at the latest and probably a few years earlier, is plausible enough.
We also know that she married George Boleyn in about 1525 or 1526, right around the time
his sister Anne was beginning an affair with King Henry VIII (I’ll leave a video on Henry
and Anne’s relationship linked on screen and below for you). In the Autumn of 1529 George was
knighted and that December, thanks to his father’s elevation to the Earldoms of Wiltshire and Ormond,
he gained the courtesy title Viscount Rochford. This made Jane a Viscountess.
In 1533, Henry married Anne, making Jane the sister-in-law of the monarch and his wife.
Three years later though, disaster struck as Anne was accused of treason and adultery,
including incest with George and in May 1536, both siblings were executed.
Jane has been accused of helping to facilitate their downfall by making the accusations of incest
and this charge has contributed to her bad historical reputation. So too has her later
career as a widow. Staying on at court, she became a lady-in-waiting to Henry’s next three consorts,
Jane Seymour, Anne of Cleves and Katherine Howard, but in 1541 she was accused of helping
Queen Katherine have an extra-marital affair. The two women were executed at the Tower of London on
13 February 1542 and buried next to George and Anne here in the Chapel of St Peter Ad Vincula.
When inside the Chapel, you aren’t allowed to walk right up to their resting places, but you can see
the diamond-shaped grave markers in the floor just in front of the altar, one of which is for Jane. I
have another video on their executions (and one on Anne’s too) which I’ll also leave linked for you.
Despite her remarkable career and her long-term proximity to the very heart of the Tudor royal
family, there are no confirmed, surviving images of Jane and no descriptions of her appearance
that I’m aware of. Remains which are supposed to have be hers were disinterred in the 1870s,
but they tell us little about her looks. One of those present described them as belonging
to a woman about 30-40 years of age, but she had been dug up and moved before and many of the bones
were missing. Those which remained suggested a person ‘of rather delicate proportions’.
This is a subjective description which will mean different things to different
people and which gives no meaningful insight into Jane’s facial features.
With so little documentary evidence as to her appearance, we therefore cannot rule out any
supposed image of her based on things like the sitter’s hair or eye colour, or the shape of her
face. This brings us to the drawing which this video is all about and which you’ll see being
touted in TV documentaries, other YouTube videos and the odd book, as a picture of Lady Rochford.
The fact that Jane’s maiden name was Parker is the only reason Holbein’s ‘Lady Parker’ drawing is
attached to her, but the idea that Jane could have held such a title is founded on a misunderstanding
of how the titles system in England works, for she was never eligible to be called this.
There were and are usually only two ways of getting the title Lady (and that’s Lady with a
capital L, because we’re not using it merely as a substitute for the word woman here).
First, you could be married to a man who held the rank of knight or higher.
In such cases you would be referred to as Lady, followed by either the family surname,
or the title your husband held if it was different to the family surname. So when Jane Parker married
she became Mistress Boleyn. When her husband George was made a Knight, she became Lady Boleyn.
When he then became Viscount Rochford, she became Viscountess Rochford, or Lady Rochford for short.
other way to be known as a Lady was to be the legitimate daughter of a Duke, a Marquess or
an Earl. In this instance though, your title would generally be written as the word Lady,
followed by your first name, followed by your family surname. One famous example of this layout
would be Lady Jane Grey and her sisters, who were the daughters of Henry, Marquess of Dorset,
later Duke of Suffolk. There are very few other instances of a woman being entitled to be known
as a Lady although you could, very rarely, be allowed to inherit a title in your own right,
or else be given one, just as Anne Boleyn was in 1532 when she was made the Marchioness of Pembroke
(Lady Pembroke for short). The other notable exception to the rules during
this period were Henry VIII’s daughters, who were known as the Ladies Mary and Elizabeth
after he declared them illegitimate and took the title of Princess off them,
but that whole situation was a real abnormality. For the most part, you needed to have the title
because of who your mother’s husband was at the time of your birth (who was also usually your
father), who your own husband was, or maybe even a combination of both. This was the case
for Anne Boleyn’s mother, Lady Elizabeth Howard, for instance, who was both the daughter of a Duke
and the wife of a Knight, later Viscount, later Earl, so she was a Lady twice over.
To come back to Jane though, as I’ve explained, she was the daughter of a Baron.
Her father wasn’t highly enough ranked to make her Lady Jane Parker and from 1518 onwards, her
mother Alice would have been known as Lady Morley, so the drawing in question can’t be of her either.
Before her marriage, Jane was Mistress Jane Parker and we even have documents which refer
to her as just that. You’ll recall that I said that Jane was at court in 1522;
this was so that she could participate in a fancy dress pageant in which her future sisters-in-law,
Mary and Anne Boleyn, also famously played roles. In the expenditure records for this
pageant Anne and Jane are specifically referred to as Mistress Anne Boleyn and Mistress Parker,
while the married Mary was called ‘Mistress Karre.’ So women, whether single or not,
weren’t routinely referred to as Ladies unless they actually held that title.
One way that those who want this picture to be Jane might attempt to get around the problem of
titles is by saying that even though it was incorrect to refer to her as Lady Parker,
it was done anyway because whoever identified the drawing didn’t know how to refer to her properly.
This of course brings us to the question of who identified it?
You might think it was the artist, Hans Holbein, but in fact the lettering on this drawing wasn’t
written on the paper at the same time the picture was made and instead dates to the 18th century.
Why then, did someone in the 18th century think that this woman was Lady Parker?
The answer lies in the provenance of the drawing. It now resides in Windsor Castle
as part of the royal collection, but it’s gone in and out of that family over the centuries.
It is one of a set of over 80 drawings of members of Henry VIII’s court by Holbein and having
originally been owned by that King, it (along with the others) was passed to his son, Edward VI.
From there it went (presumably by sale or by gift) to Henry FitzAlan, 12th Earl of Arundel, who died
in 1580 and left it to his son-in-law, John, Lord Lumley. We think it was later owned by Henry,
Prince of Wales, son of James I of England before being inherited by his younger brother, Charles I.
Charles gave it to Philip Herbert, 4th Earl of Pembroke in 1627 or 1628, who then gave it
to Thomas Howard, 14th Earl of Arundel. It was brought back into royal ownership by Charles II
in 1675 and has stayed there ever since. Of all these owners, one of the most important is Lumley,
for while the book of drawings was in his possession, it was listed in an inventory
of his goods taken in 1590. This inventory was published in 1904 and describes the book as:
A great booke of Pictures done by Haunce Holbyn of certeyne Lordes,
Ladyes, gentlemen and gentlewomen in King Henry the 8: his tyme, their names
subscribed by Sr John Cheke Secretary to King Edward the 6 wch booke was King Edward the 6.
Sir John Cheke then was the man who said that this image showed Lady Parker. Now Cheke died in 1557,
so we must assume that at the time the 1590 inventory was made there existed a separate list,
now lost, which he had written up and which clearly indicated that the title of ‘The Lady
Parker’ was supposed to be attached to this drawing. Cheke’s own list, or a copy of it,
must still have been in existence in the 18th century, when the inscription was added.
This isn’t an airtight chain of evidence, but equally there is no reason to doubt it and
Cheke is a perfectly plausible candidate to have identified this and many other Holbein
drawings. So now we must ask, how reliable is his information? Well, he is known to have made
errors in his attributions and although they were infrequent, it’s possible that this woman,
whoever she was, had nothing to do with any Parker family. There’s no evidence such a
mistake was made here however and for the purposes of the rest of this video, we’re going to presume
for argument’s sake that Cheke was correct and that this individual carried the surname Parker.
Unfortunately for those arguing for the Jane identification, it is unlikely that John Cheke
knew her, or that he would have mistakenly referred to her as a Lady before her marriage,
or even by her maiden name. Cheke was born in 1514 and became a tutor to the then Prince Edward,
later Edward VI, in 1544, having previously studied and worked at Cambridge University.
He was therefore at court from the mid-1540s into the 1550s and would have known what the ladies
there at that time looked like. This is strong evidence that he was correct when he said that
whoever this woman was, she was known as Lady Parker, but it doesn’t mean that she is Jane
Boleyn. Jane as we’ve seen, died in 1542 and the dates of Cheke’s court career suggest that he may
never even have seen her and that he was thinking of a different woman entirely when he called this
image Lady Parker. Furthermore, as a member of the court and eventually a Knight himself from 1551,
he will have been well aware of how to properly address and refer to women by their titles.
If he thought of Jane at all, he’ll have thought of her as Lady Rochford.
He would never have called her Lady Parker.
Not only does the title of Lady create a problem, so too does the sitter’s surname for when we look
at the dates during which Holbein was in England and the time period during which Jane was still
a Parker, they don’t match up. Holbein resided in the country between 1526 and 1528 and again
between 1531 or 1532 and his death in London in 1543. Jane you’ll recall, married George in 1525
or 1526, so not only was she not a Lady during Holbein’s first trip, she was almost certainly no
longer a Parker either. If we’re getting desperate we might argue that she was wed at the latter end
of this date range and so perhaps Holbein captured her image soon after his arrival and just before
her wedding, however the paper the drawing is made on and the clothing the sitter is wearing
sink that idea too. During Holbein’s initial visit to England the drawings he made were done on white
paper. During his second (when Jane was definitely Lady Rochford), he made them on slightly pink,
or flesh-toned paper and it’s this type of paper on which Lady Parker appears.
This strongly suggests that this portrait dates to the 1530s or early 1540s, as do the rounded
French hood and high-collared dress the sitter is attired in, which (according to the description of
the drawing on the website of the Royal Collection Trust) were both popular fashions in that period.
So if the sitter’s title, surname, clothing and the paper the drawing was made on all
rule out Jane as a candidate to be Lady Parker, then who is our mystery lady more likely to be?
Although Jane Boleyn was never Lady Parker, she had a brother named Henry and from 1533 onwards,
he was a Knight. This meant that his wives would have held the title in question. So let’s look at
what we know about them. Sir Henry married twice, first to Grace Newport, who was born in 1515,
married off to Henry at the age of 8 in 1523 and who we know was dead by 1549, because in that year
her husband married Elizabeth Calthorpe or Calthrop (I’ve seen both spellings). Sir Henry was
the first of Elizabeth’s 3 husbands and they had at least one son together. She then had additional
children with her second husband and ultimately died in 1578 or 1582 (different sources give
different dates). This marital and child-bearing career suggest that she was a youthful bride in
1549, perhaps in her early 20s. The picture could therefore be either Grace or Elizabeth. Grace
tends to be preferred in museum and art gallery catalogues, perhaps because Holbein died in 1543,
six years before Elizabeth became Lady Parker and because Elizabeth then became Lady Woodhouse in
1552 through her second marriage, something Cheke would have been aware of. However it’s possible
Holbein drew Elizabeth years before her first marriage, but that by the time Cheke saw the
picture it was between 1549 and 1552 when she was Lady Parker and so he labelled it as such.
So to sum up, I don’t believe this image to be of Jane Boleyn for 4 reasons. First,
although she was born a Parker, she didn’t hold the title of Lady before her marriage, or in fact
for several years after it. Second, by comparing the dates Holbein was in England with the time
period Jane got married in, by looking at the clothing this woman is wearing and at the colour
of the paper the drawing is on, we can deduce that this picture was created in the 1530s or 1540s
when Jane was a Boleyn and Lady Rochford. Third, John Cheke, who identified this woman as Lady
Parker, would have known that Jane’s title was Lady Rochford and as an experienced courtier,
was very unlikely to have made an error like this. Finally, given that he was at court after Jane’s
death, he is much more likely to been able to recognise her sisters-in-law than Jane herself
and those sisters-in-law both held the title of Lady Parker
and in the case of Grace Newport, held it during the time period when this drawing was completed.
I’d like to finish by adding that until recent years it was actually very rare to find any
reputable scholar claiming that this was Jane. A book about Hans Holbein written by G.S. Davies and
published in 1903 said that it was, but Davies is a real outlier and didn’t even consider her
sisters-in-law as possible sitters, instead saying that as her mother was too old to be
the woman in question and was in any case called Lady Morley by the time of Holbein’s visits,
the only other possibility was Jane. As we’ve seen, that simply isn’t true. In fact the idea
that this picture is Jane is so unpopular amongst modern-day experts that I was really struck whilst
researching this video by how easy it was to find reliable sources which describe it as a picture
of Grace or Elizabeth and how hard it was to find any qualified historian or art curator saying it’s
Jane. The Royal Collection Trust’s website lists it as being probably Grace, as do the National
Trust and the Museum of New Zealand, both of which hold later copies and yet another version is held
by the British Museum which calls it Elizabeth. Have I convinced you though that this isn’t Lady
Rochford, or do you still hold out hope? Let me know in the comments below and if you’d like to
know more about Jane, the problems of identifying portraits, or the Tudors in general, try one of
these options next. Whatever you choose, please enjoy and until next time, keep learning.