Royal claimant Lady Jane Grey has left an abiding impression in English literature and romance. The limited amount of material from which to construct a source-based biography of her has not stopped authors of all ages filling the gaps with the fruits of their imagination.
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In Elizabethan ballads, Jane's story is a tale of innocence betrayed. In one ballad Jane, in denouncing her executioner Mary, declares "For Popery I hate as death / and Christ my saviour love." Jane is now not only an innocent but a martyr to the Protestant cause, and appears as such in Foxe's Book of Martyrs. On no certain evidence, she was also idealised in another way by Roger Ascham as noble and scholarly. But the greatest Elizabethan tribute to her came in Thomas Chaloner's Elegy, published in 1579. Here she is peerless in her learning and beauty, comparable only with Socrates for her courage and quiet resignation in the face of death. He even suggests that she was pregnant at the time of her execution, an assertion that appears nowhere else, presumably to make Mary, the great villain of the piece, appear all the more heartless.
From martyrology and poetry, Jane finally made it on to the stage in the early Jacobean period in Lady Jane by John Webster and Thomas Dekker, where she takes on the role of a tragic lover. This theme was taken up later in the century by John Banks, a Restoration playwright, in his Innocent Usurper: or, the Death of Lady Jane Grey. Here Jane is only persuaded to accept the crown after her husband, Lord Guilford Dudley, threatens to commit suicide if she does not. First performed after the Glorious Revolution, there is also a strong anti-Roman Catholic dimension to Bank's play, which presumably appealed to the audiences of the day.
More plays and poems followed in the 18th century, when a small Janeite industry began to take shape. In the early Hanoverian period she takes on the role of political heroine as well as martyr, scholar and tragic lover, putting down her Plato and taking up the crown only to save English Protestantism. The 1715 she-tragedy entitled Lady Jane Grey: A Tragedy in Five Acts, by Nicholas Rowe, emphasizes the pathos of Jane's fate. Jane's growing reputation was not just a popular phenomenon. Gilbert Burnet, Whig historian and self-publicist, described Jane, with considerable exaggeration, as 'the wonder of the age' in his History of the Reformation, a phrase subsequently taken up by Oliver Goldsmith his History of England, published in 1771. Even the sober David Hume was seduced by the tragedy of Jane and Dudley.
It was not until the early nineteenth century that John Lingard, a Catholic historian, ventured a word or two of counter-adulation about Jane, saying that she 'liked dresses overmuch', and reminding her promoters that she was only sixteen. However, her popularity as a subject for tragic romance increased even further in the nineteenth century, an age of mass printing, where her story appears in a variety of media, including popular magazines and children's books.
Jane was recast time and again to suit the inclinations of her audience. After the French Revolution, the evangelical movement alighted on her as a symbol, marked not for her romance but for her piety. In 1828 The Lady's Monitor declared that she inherited "every great, every good, every admirable quality, whether of mind, disposition, or person." The radical thinker and philosopher William Godwin called her "the most perfect young creature of the female sex to be found in history" in his own hagiography of Jane published under the pseudonym Theopilius Marcliffe. Mark Twain used Jane as a minor character in his 1882 novel, The Prince and the Pauper.
In 1833, Paul Delaroche created The Execution of Lady Jane Grey (le Supplice de Jeanne Grey), regarded as the most famous portrait of Jane, which depicts a clandestine execution in a dimly-lit room or dungeon. It is historically inaccurate in most respects and was influenced by the restoration of the French monarchy after the French Revolution. Jane is shown wearing a white garment resembling laced French undergarments, similar in colour to that worn by Marie Antoinette at her execution in 1793. Jane's actual execution took place in the open air of the Tower of London. Two years later, George Whiting Flagg chose to name his representation of a woman being blindfolded Lady Jane Grey Preparing for Execution rather than for Mary, Queen of Scots.
Jane Grey is the only English monarch in the last 500 years for whom no proven contemporary portrait survives.[1][2] A painting in London's National Portrait Gallery was thought to be Jane for many years, but in 1996 it was confirmed to be of Catherine Parr, Henry VIII's surviving widow with whom Jane lived for a time.[3]
A portrait believed by some experts to be of Jane was discovered in a private home in 2005. Painted 40 to 50 years after Jane's death, the 'Streatham Portrait' (so called for the area of London in which it resided for decades) depicts a young woman dressed in a red gown, adorned with jewels and holding a prayer book.[1] The National Portrait Gallery came under fire after it purchased the painting for a rumoured £100,000 in 2006.[2]
In 2006, Tudor historian David Starkey's interest was piqued by a miniature portrait of a young Tudor woman he found while leafing through a book of Tudor miniatures. Owned by Yale University's Yale Center for British Art, the miniature painting's details convinced Starkey the miniature is a portrait of Lady Jane Grey painted by Levina Teerlinc, Henry VIII's court painter.[3] Other art historians and Tudor experts disagree with his conclusions.[4]
There have been three film versions of Jane's life, in which she has been played by:
In versions of The Prince and the Pauper she has been played by:
Jane was also played by Sarah Frampton in the BBC TV series Elizabeth R (1971).
Jane also appears in two episodes of The Sarah Jane Adventures, Lost in Time parts 1 and 2 which take place on her last day as Queen. She is played by Amber Beattie.
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