Hi history lovers and welcome or welcome back to the channel, where I bring you new videos
every Friday on all aspects of the past. Today on History Calling we’re asking what did
Lady Jane Grey look like? She was arguably the first Queen of England (depending on whether
or not you choose to recognise her reign), but after her family’s failed attempt to
put her and keep her on the throne in 1553 instead of Mary I, Jane was ultimately executed
in February 1554, becoming one of the Tudors’ greatest tragedies. In this video we’ll
take a quick look at Jane’s life, explain why most images of her can be discounted as
true likenesses, how we know the one supposedly contemporary description of her is fraudulent
and most importantly of all, why the so-called Streatham portrait now held in the National
Portrait Gallery in London is believed by many to be her and by many others, including
historian David Starkey, to be a red herring. I’ll explain this painting’s known history,
why the sitter’s clothing and jewellery are important, what science can tell us about
the age of the portrait and what that faded golden inscription above her shoulder says.
Stay til the end to hear whether I think it really is Jane.
Before we start, please remember to subscribe to the channel with notifications switched
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a link for this in the description box below and I’ll also leave links there for some
books about Jane Grey’s life if you’d like to learn more about her.
Lady Jane Grey was born in either 1536 or 1537 and was the eldest of three surviving
children (all girls) of Frances Brandon and Henry Grey, marquess of Dorset, later Duke
of Suffolk. On her mother’s side, she was the granddaughter of Charles Brandon, also
Duke of Suffolk and Princess Mary Tudor, dowager Queen of France and younger sister of Henry
VIII. This gave Jane a real, but seemingly quite distant claim to the English throne,
as King Henry decreed that should his own three surviving children (Mary, Elizabeth
and Edward) all die without issue, the throne was to go to the descendants of his sister
Mary, in order words Frances Brandon and her children.
The old King died in January 1547 and was succeeded by his 9 year old son, Prince Edward.
This event led to a great change in Jane’s life too, as she went to live with Henry’s
widow, Queen Catherine Parr and her new husband, Thomas Seymour, who was also Edward’s maternal
uncle and who planned for a time to marry Jane off to the boy King. Nothing came of
this, but if you’d like to learn all about Edward’s life, I have a video on him which
I’ll leave linked on screen and in the description box. Catherine died of childbirth complications
in September 1548 and Thomas was sent to the block the following March for attempting to
seize control of the King. Jane then returned here, to her parents’ home at Bradgate House.
Four years later, on 21 May 1553, she was married to Lord Guildford Dudley, son of the
Duke of Northumberland. Within weeks of the marriage however, Jane’s whole world would
fall apart. The 15 year old, ardently Protestant King Edward was by now dying and he’d decided
he was unhappy with his father’s arrangements for the succession, for he didn’t want the
crown to go to his Catholic half-sister Mary, or his apparently illegitimate half-sister
Elizabeth. In fact he wasn’t crazy about the idea of a female ruler at all. Instead
he drafted a new document, his Device for the Succession, which skipped over his sisters
and Frances Brandon and initially left the crown to Jane’s sons. When it became clear
that he would die before she could produce a boy, he altered his Device and left the
crown first to her, then to her male heirs.
The King died on 6 July and despite her reluctance, Jane’s father and father-in-law made a serious
attempt to put her on the throne in place of Mary, installing her in the Tower of London
and proclaiming her Queen. It didn’t work. Mary gathered an army and took the throne
back. Jane, whose reign had lasted just 9 days, never left the Tower again and when
an uprising against Mary, in which Henry Grey, Duke of Suffolk unwisely took part, failed
in early 1554 the Queen had Jane, her husband Guildford and Suffolk, executed. After her
death on 12 February, Lady Jane was buried beneath the floor of the Chapel of Saint Peter
Ad Vincula in the Tower of London, close to two other tragic Tudor queens, Anne Boleyn
and Katherine Howard. If you’re interested in any of these events, see my videos on the
life of Mary I part 3 and on the executions of Anne and Katherine. They’re all linked
below.
We now come to the issue of Jane’s appearance. It used to be thought that we had a detailed
description of her from someone who had seen her in life. This was apparently written by
a Genoese merchant, Sir Baptista Spinola, who witnessed her entering the Tower in July
1553. It says that she was:
very short and thin, but prettily shaped and graceful. She has small features and a well
shaped nose, the mouth flexible and the lips red; The eyebrows are arched and darker than
her hair which is nearly red. The eyes are sparkling and reddish brown in colour. I stood
so near her grace that I noticed her colour was good but freckled. When she smiled she
showed her teeth, which are white and sharp.
As interesting as this description is, unfortunately it’s now believed to be a fake.
It first appears in a book published in 1909 and written by Richard Davey and when she
went looking for the original document in the Genoese archives, where it was supposedly
located, historian Leanda De Lisle was unable to find it, concluding that Davey had invented
the account, using some real details from sources describing that day and others which
made passing remarks about Jane. She writes that ‘Baptista Spinola, is a fiction inspired,
in part, by a real merchant called Benedict Spinola, who was the basis for the character
Baptista Spinola in Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew, and whom Davey further confuses
with a soldier called Baptista Spinola. Davey is a fraudster of the type who faked the Hitler
Diaries, giving people what they wanted where history did not supply it.’ If you’d like
to read De Lisle’s book, again, there’s a link in the description box.
There are many supposed images of this teenage Queen including the ones you see here, but
there is no confirmed portrait of this key figure in English history. Some images, such
as this one of Catherine Parr, were initially thought to be Jane, but were later reidentified.
Others, like this nineteenth-century painting of her execution by the artist Paul Delaroche,
are later imaginings of her looks and of how the events of her life and death unfolded.
The lack of a surviving contemporary portrait is no doubt due to her youth when she died
and to the amount of time which has passed since, which has allowed what portraits there
were to become lost or destroyed. Indeed some may have been deliberately destroyed in view
of the fact that she died in such disgrace.
As you may already know if you’ve seen my video on digging up Anne Boleyn, she and some
of the other execution victims buried in the Chapel of Saint Peter Ad Vincula were temporarily
disinterred in the 1870s, but Jane’s bones were not amongst those excavated and so her
remains could not be used to establish any details of her appearance. It seemed as though
historians would therefore be left to wonder whether portraits of her immediate family
might offer some likeness of Jane, but with no way to know for sure what she looked like.
As of the early 21st century however, an answer to this gap in our knowledge of Lady Jane
may finally have been provided.
In 2006 the National Portrait Gallery in London splashed out a reported £100,000 to buy this
supposed portrait of Lady Jane. Called the Streatham portrait because it was purchased
from a man living in the Streatham area of the city, it was lambasted by historian David
Starkey as ‘an appallingly bad picture and’ he added ‘there’s absolutely no reason
to suppose it’s got anything to do with Lady Jane Grey’. As it stands however, this
is currently the only picture with a serious claim to be Jane. So let’s look at why the
Gallery was convinced enough that it was her to lay out so much money on it and why Starkey,
among others, is convinced that it isn’t Jane.
NPG 6804, to give it its official designation, is described on the Gallery’s website as
being an ‘oil on oak panel’ painting. It’s 33 3/4 inches tall by 23 3/4 inches
wide. The Streatham seller reported that it had been inherited by him from his great-grandfather
and his family had been trying to get the Gallery to authenticate it as a portrait of
Jane since 1923. There are a number of reasons to think that it’s her, starting with the
sitter’s clothing and accessories. The young woman depicted here is wearing a French hood
and a deep red or brown dress with a high, but open neckline which is consistent with
the styles of the 1550s. Compare this portrait to one of a young Elizabeth I painted in around
1545 or 1546 for instance and you see Elizabeth wearing a hood which is broadly similar, but
with a dress in an earlier style, with an open square neckline. Elizabeth is also holding
a book in her hands with another open on a lectern behind her, suggesting the exceptional
academic gifts she was known to have and her studious nature, both qualities which Jane
shared.
If we come back to the Streatham portrait, we see that its sitter also has a black, bound
book in one hand. As well as suggesting a scholarly young woman, this is also one indication
(beyond the fact that she was having her portrait painted at all), that she came from a wealthy
family, as books were expensive objects in this period. The painting suggests more than
wealth though. It suggests extreme wealth; the kind that royalty and precious few others
had in the 1550s. This is signified by the countless precious stones set in gold the
sitter’s dress and hood are studded with and her elaborate jewellery. She can absolutely
hold her own against the dress, hood, necklace and broach we see Elizabeth Tudor wearing
in the mid-1540s and Elizabeth was the daughter of the King. The embroidery on the sleeves
and inside the neckline are further indications that this young woman had serious money behind
her, as they all had to be done by hand and made dresses like this much more expensive
than those of plain fabric would have been.
As interesting as what she is wearing is, what she is not wearing is also important.
We can see the bottoms of all the fingers on her left hand and she has no wedding band,
suggesting a young girl in her teens or early 20s. All of these details fit with the known
facts of Jane’s life in the early 1550s. Still, you might wonder, why have historians
latched on to Jane Grey to be the anonymous sitter over all the other wealthy unmarried
women in the land at this time. The answer is the painting’s inscription. Located above
her right shoulder, in faded gold lettering are the words ‘Lady Jayne’ (I know you
can’t see the whole inscription clearly here, but it’s been professionally checked
and so we know that that’s what it says). This dramatically limits the number of potential
candidates the sitter could be, for there were comparatively few women living in the
1550s of sufficiently high rank to be known as Lady Jane before they were even married
and with the kind of money necessary to own a dress like this. Furthermore, Christopher
Foley, who was the art dealer working for the Streatham family at the time of the 2006
sale to the National Portrait Gallery stated that ‘We checked every Jane in the English
aristocracy in the 16th century’ and there was no one else it could reasonably be. This
inscription and the date of the portrait were and for some no doubt, still are, points of
concern however, for although it shows a woman of the 1550s, it wasn’t painted in that
decade.
Dendrochronology tests, which essentially date wood, have instead established that the
panel on which it’s painted comes from a tree cut down in around 1593, half a century
after Jane’s death. There was also a question mark over whether the inscription was painted
at the same time as the rest of the image, however tests on the paint established that
the gold used in the lettering is contemporaneous with the rest of the portrait and that the
paint was obsolete by 1700, further confirming that the portrait belong to the late 16th
or 17th centuries. Whoever the sitter is then, we would appear to be looking at a copy of
a lost original.
If it’s not Lady Jane Grey though, what other Lady Jane had a sufficiently high profile
that someone would be prepared to pay for a portrait of her to be made 50 years later?
No convincing answer has been put forward and we are left with the likelihood that this
is indeed a copy of an earlier painting of Jane, possibly created in the late Elizabethan
or early Stuart era as part of a set of images showing Protestant martyrs, as Jane was by
then viewed due to the nature of her death. This idea is given further credence by the
fact that the painting has been attacked at some point in its history and the eyes and
mouth scratched at, perhaps in an instance of religious bigotry.
David Starkey has complained that the portrait has no paper trail to take it back to its
original owner, that it is too low quality to be a portrait of royalty and that no jewellery
inventories of items belonging to Jane or heraldry depicted within the image support
the idea that it’s her. To this, those involved in its identification and sale to the NPG
have responded that things like heraldry evidence rarely exist and not all portraits need to
be of high quality to be authentic attempts at a likeness of the subject. One even questioned
if Starkey didn’t want to believe that it is Jane, because he didn’t find the portrait
himself. Admittedly when compared to the work of famous court painters such as Hans Holbein,
it lacks realism and even looks a little cartoonish, but not all painters had Holbein’s skill
and the fact that it is a copy, with no live subject to base it on helps to explain its
low quality as a piece of art.
In the end, having read as much as I could about the painting and in the absence of any
additional evidence, the only person I would bet on the Streatham portrait being is Lady
Jane Grey. I simply can’t see that there was any other very wealthy, unmarried Lady
Jane in the 1550s with a profile high enough to warrant creating a fresh portrait of her
50 years later. I would like to have a history of its provenance, but sadly we can’t have
everything. What do you think though? Do you believe that it is Lady Jane? Let me know
in the comments below and don’t forget to subscribe to the channel with notifications
switched on and give the video a like. If you enjoyed it, you may also like my video
on what Queen Katherine Howard looked like, which examines a number of supposed paintings
of Henry VIII’s fifth wife, or perhaps one of the other videos I mentioned earlier and
which you can see in the end cards here. Whatever you choose, please enjoy and until next time,
keep learning.