Lady Jane Grey: How the Nine Day Queen lost her head, but found her face

Woman studying an old painting
Lady Jane Grey put under scrutiny by Rachel Turnbull, of English Heritage
(Image credit: English Heritage)

English Heritage (EH) and Courtauld scientists believe they may have discovered the face of Lady Jane Grey, who famously ruled England for nine days in 1553 before she was beheaded, aged 17, at the behest of her cousin Mary Tudor, who deposed her.

‘This painting was part of the historic collection at Wrest Park, having been acquired by Anthony Grey, 11th Earl of Kent, in 1701, as an image of Lady Jane Grey. It remained the defining image of the Nine Days Queen for more than 300 years, until its attribution was thrown into doubt and its identity rejected,’ explains Peter Moore, curator at the Bedfordshire estate. When Wrest was sold in 1917, much of its collection, including this portrait — artist unknown — went to auction.

Nowadays, Paul Delaroche’s execution scene comes to mind when most people think of Lady Jane — at the block in white, helpless and blindfolded. However, this and all other known depictions of her were painted after her death — nearly 300 years later in Delaroche’s case.

New tree-ring dating to the Wrest painting has revealed that its oak panel dates to the Nine Days Queen’s lifetime and also bears a cargo mark identical to one used on a royal portrait of her predecessor, Edward VI, with dendrochronologist Ian Tyers confirming that if this portrait is Lady Jane, it would be the only one known to have been painted during her lifetime.

Meanwhile, XRF and infra-red reflectography show that the sitter’s clothing and headwear has been altered since the portrait was first painted, making it more plain, in black and white and with the addition of a scarf over her shoulders. ‘It is possible that we are looking at the shadows of a once more royal portrait of Lady Jane Grey, toned down into subdued, Protestant martyrdom after her death,’ confirms Rachel Turnbull, EH senior collections conservator. Slightly more aggressively, her eyes, mouth and ears have been deliberately scratched out — a common form of religious or politically motivated vandalism.

‘This is such an interesting picture posing so many questions and, if this is Jane Grey, [it is] a valuable addition to the portraiture of this young heroine, as a woman of character — a powerful challenge to the traditional representation of her as a blindfolded victim,’ adds author Dr Philippa Gregory.

The work is among seven paintings returning to Wrest Park (six on loan) and is now on display there for the foreseeable.

Annunciata Elwes

Annunciata grew up in the wilds of Lancashire and now lives in Hampshire with a husband, two daughters and an awful pug called Parsley. She’s been floating round the Country Life office for more than a decade, her work winning the Property Magazine of the Year Award in 2022 (Property Press Awards). Before that, she had a two-year stint writing ‘all kinds of fiction’ for The Sunday Times Travel Magazine, worked in internal comms for Country Life’s publisher (which has had many names in recent years but was then called IPC Media), and spent another year researching for a historical biographer, whose then primary focus was Graham Greene and John Henry Newman and whose filing system was a collection of wardrobes and chests of drawers filled with torn scraps of paper. During this time, she regularly gave tours of 17th-century Milton Manor, Oxfordshire, which may or may not have been designed by Inigo Jones, and co-founded a literary, art and music festival, at which Johnny Flynn headlined. When not writing and editing for Country Life, Annunciata is also a director of TIN MAN ART, a contemporary art gallery founded in 2021 by her husband, James Elwes.