Page One – The Anglesey Abbey Portrait

If one compares the layout of the Devonshire House ballroom, we see that this is not actually the first time we have seen this painting.

Unfortunately, it is absolutely impossible to make out any details from the drawing, not leading us any closer to determine if it is in fact the Anglesey Abbey Portrait itself.

It does however confirm that it was hanging there from at least 1850.

This is very interesting indeed.

We know that this was the 6th Duke of Devonshire's ballroom at Devonshire House, and that it was formed from two of the 2nd Duke's drawing rooms from William Kent's original design of the 1730's.

The 6th Duke of Devonshire was William Cavendish, 6th Duke of Devonshire (21 May 1790 – 18 January 1858). He ascended to the title in 1811. In fact, it was upon this occasion that we have one of the last observations of the painting that might have been Bess of Hardwick's portrait of Lady Jane Grey. A half-length which was said to be of «a Lady supposed to be Queen» was inventorised at Hardwick Hall in 1811[11].

As we see, it was a half-length portrait, perfectly in keeping with the Anglesey Abbey Portrait.

There is one more mention of the portrait of Lady Jane Grey at Hardwick Hall early in the nineteenth century, from an undated inventory in which it is listed as item number 22[12].

After that it disappears.

It is definitely not at Hardwick Hall in 1860, when Lady Louisa Cavendish Egerton compiled a catalogue of the pictures at Hardwick Hall[13].

Neither did it reappear in any subsequent cataloguing.

Timeline-wise it fits perfectly that the portrait was removed some time right after or around 1811 from Hardwick Hall by the new duke, only for the portrait to decorate his new ballroom.

It is an aestetically very pleasing picture, I think we can all agree on that.

(For J. Stephan Edwards's assessment of the Althorp Portrait, see p. 130-135 of A Queen of a New Invention, for the Madresfield Court Portrait, see p. 136-139.)

The presence of a desk and a book in the Devonshire House Ballroom Edition of the Anglesey Abbey Portrait – if that is indeed what the white whatever-it-is on the left side of the lady is and that indeed is the Anglesey Abbey Portrait – has puzzled me.

They are not present in the miniature, nor in the present-day Anglesey Abbey Portrait, nor in the Ansty Hall Miniature Portrait, though there is something that looks like a desk or a small table in the Ansty Hall Miniature Portrait.

Then something occurred to me:

Fashion.

The Althorp Portrait «has been identified as Jane since at least the beginning of the eighteenth century. It enters the historical record through the Spencer ancestor Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough, a close confidant to Queen Anne and a devoted Whig supporter of the terms of the Act of Settlement of 1701. A paper label attached to the back of the panel and attributed by the Spencer family to the Duchess's own hand identifies the sitter as Jane Grey. The fifth Earl Spencer, a direct descendant of the Duchess, extended the longetivity of the identification to "as far back as the seventeenth century."»[14]

J. Stephan Edwards believes that the Madresfield Court Portrait was probably rechristened as Lady Jane Grey about 1701[15].

These two, have over the years, been very popular representations of Lady Jane Grey.

We might actually here have an instance of an actual portrait of Lady Jane Grey being altered to be more alike paintings who were not of her.

Undoubtedly, all of these people moved in the same circles and knew each other and of each other's most precious works of art.

J. Stephan Edwards writes: «Madresfield Court has been owned by the Lygon family since the sixteenth century, but the family fortunes suffered to such an extent in the seventeenth century that a significant quantity of assets was sold to raise cash. It therefore seems more probable that the painting entered the Lygon collection early in the nineteenth century through an inheritance from the ancestors of Susannah Hanmer Lygon (d.1785), mother of the first Lygon Earl Beauchamp. The inheritance is said to have “transformed the family fortune ... and the collections of the house were enormously increased” as a result.

Susannah Lygon was one of several distant claimants to the estate of the immensely wealthy William “The Miser” Jennens (or Jennings) of Acton Place, Suffolk. Jennens was a godson of William III and was pro-Hanoverian and anti-Jacobite throughout his life, which spanned the whole of the eighteenth century. Jennens died unmarried, without legitimate issue, and intestate at the advanced age of 97 in 1798. The value of his estate, said at the time to have been greater than that of any other commoner in Great Britain, stimulated litigation on a massive scale filed by a multitude of claimants, both genuine and spurious. The descendants of Susannah Hanmer Lygon, Jennen’s niece at a remove of several generations, found themselves in possession of one third of the Jennens estate in the first decade of the nineteenth century.

The painting was probably rechristened as Jane Grey in the wake of the succession dispute resolved by the Act of Settlement of 1701, and that new identification made it appealing to Jennens.  The rechristening was perhaps prompted in part by the presence in the lady’s hands, once again, of a book that could be read as emblematic of Jane’s perceived piety. Additionally, the veils worn by the sitter lend to the image an air of modesty and chastity, two virtues that began to be strongly associated with Jane early in the eighteenth century.» (A Queen of a New Invention by J. Stephan Edwards, p. 137-138)

The maiden name of Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough (1660–1744), was Jenyns, spelt Jennings in most modern references. She may have been a relation of William ‘The Miser’ Jennens or Jennings. Certainly his father Robert was aide-de-camp to John Churchill, 1^st Duke of Marlborough, Sarah’s husband. There may therefore be some relation between the rechristening of both of these very similar portraits to ‘Lady Jane Grey’.

William ‘The Miser’ Jennens would have been 43 by the time Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough died. He would have almost certainly seen the Althorp Portrait hanging on her walls growing up.

Timeline

This does, however, create a problem timeline-wise.

For the Ansty Hall Miniature to have been in the possession of Anne Cavendish, Countess of Exeter (c.1649–1704), or to have come into her possession in through her marriage in 1662 to Charles, Lord Rich, son of the 4th Earl of Warwick it seems as if the miniature must necessarily predate the popularity and identification as Lady Jane Grey of the other two portraits.

It has all along been my belief, without having anything concrete to back it up with, that the miniature dates to around 1610, after the initially secret marriage of Arbella Stuart to William Seymour, the grandnephew of Lady Jane Grey, prompted (as is my theory) Arbella's Cavendish relatives to cover up the Anglesey Abbey Portrait in a panic.

Timeline-wise, however, this presents a challenge if the miniature has a table/writing desk copied from the Althorp Portrait and the Madresfield Court Portrait – Portraits which would only be identified as Lady Jane Grey and gain popularity at a later time.

Certainly I believe that the Ansty Hall Miniature was in the possession of Lady Anne Cavendish when she married for the second time to John Cecil, later 5th Earl of Exeter in 1670.

After wracking my brain for a solution to this conundrum, the only thing I could think of was ... If the Devonshires changed the Anglesey Abbey Portrait to look more like the Althorp Portrait and the Madresfield Court Portrait, could the little miniature have been changed to look more like the Devonshire Portrait, that is to say, that what looks like a table/writing desk in the corner be a later addition?

I had trouble convincing even myself of this theory, but looking over the Ansty Hall Miniature, the paint is cracking and flaking precisely where the little table is, and only there, indicating that perhaps, indeed, it is a later addition to the picture.

What is revealed underneath the flaking paint could be wood, but it could also be parts of the lady's dark dress. It is impossible to say from the picture.

Portraits of Lady Jane Grey

«Most students of Tudor history are aware that Jane Grey Dudley died at barely seventeen years of age. As a result, there was little opportunity for production of a painted likeness. Portraiture of living persons was still a relatively new cultural phenomenon in England in the sixteenth century, though its popularity there was expanding very rapidly. But they were not often commissioned for sentimental reasons or in any effort to create a remembrance of a beloved relative. Paintings of quality usually cost significant sums of money and thus were largely limited instead to expressions of individual status within some larger social structure beyond the family. Portraits of men of the sixteenth century can often be shown to coincide with elevation to a new political office or title of nobility or to mark participation in some significant public event, such as a military battle. Women’s portraits can similarly often be associated with their marriage or their safe delivery of a male heir into the family. Women and children were seldom recognized as having individual status but were instead subsumed under that of their family. As an illustration of this, we might consider the scarcity of portraits of children from Tudor England. Very few portraits of individual children are known to have been produced, and few such portraits have survived. The exceptions are almost always minor children of the reigning monarch, such as Holbein’s portrait of the future Edward VI as an infant or William Scrot’s portrait of Princess Elizabeth from the 1540s. Since Jane was not the child of any reigning monarch, nor even the grandchild of one, we cannot today expect that any portrait of her would have been produced prior to her reaching the age of eligibility for marriage. For Jane, this did not occur until the winter or spring of 1552-1553, when she reached the age of sixteen. And while Jane may have been viewed at that time by her family and its allies as a potential bride for Edward VI, the king was instead negotiating for a match with Elizabeth of France. Jane did not become a serious candidate for marriage until May of 1553, when John Dudley began promoting her as a successor to the dying Edward. Further, it took some time for an artist to be selected, one or more sittings to occur, and the actual paint-work to be completed. The span between Jane’s marriage in May and her imprisonment in mid July was a very brief one crowded with other concerns that may well have left insufficient time to plan and to create a portrait of her. And it is perhaps noteworthy that every authentic portrait of Jane’s sisters Katherine and Mary actually post-date their own respective marriages by two or more years. There was precious little opportunity for any portrait of Jane to have been produced prior to July 1553, and probably no opportunity whatsoever thereafter.

Yet we have reliable documentation that at least one portrait of Queen Jane was produced before 1559 [...] at least two portraits of Jane did nonetheless survive, the first being the one owned by Bess of Hardwick in 1559 and the second documented in the collection of John Lumley, Baron Lumley in 1590.» Queen Jane, Where Are You? – Some Grey Matter

«Where male courtiers who could claim membership of the Order of the Garter almost uniformly chose the Lesser George to wear around their neck, women chose the miniature. The earliest known English miniature is of Princess Mary as a child painted between 1522 and 1524. Possibly a commission for Katherine of Aragon by Lucas Horenboult, it was painted to celebrate the Treaty of Windsor and Mary's engagement to Katherine's nephew, Charles V. Almost immediately the miniature came to be considered a woman's wearable ornament. The earliest record in an English document of a miniature worn as a jewel is found in the 1529 will of Maud Green, Lady Parr, who describes a jeweled tablet composed of miniatures of the king and queen given to her earlier in the decade by Katherine of Aragon. These miniatures from her former royal mistress Maud passed on to her daughter, Kateryn, who later as queen became the employer of three women miniaturists – Susanna Horenboult, Lievine Teerlinc and Margaret Holsewyther. Miniatures appear with some frequency in aristocratic women's wills, bequeathed to both men and women. In 1565 Elizabeth Brooke, Marchioness of Northampton, left miniatures to both her husband and to Elizabeth Fitzgerald, Lady Clinton, and in 1588, that same Elizabeth Fitzgerald, now Countess of Lincoln, left to Lady Frances Chandos 'my tablett ennamyled with black wherein is my Lordes picture'. In 1582, Lucy Somerset, Lady Latimer, left to her son-in-law, Henry Percy, Earl of Northumberland, 'my black tablet and picture in the same'. In 1622 Lettice Knollys, Countess of Leicester, left to her granddaughter, Frances Devereux, Countess of Hertford, 'my playne Tablett with her father's picture in it'. Frances also inherited a miniature of her grandmother.

From the reign of Henry VIII, women, too, frequently used the display of miniatures as political statements. In the 1520s, Maud Green, Lady Parr, wore miniatures of Henry VIII and Katherine of Aragon. In 1577, Margaret Douglas, Countess of Lennox, left to Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, 'my Tablett with the picture of Kinge Henrye the eighte therein', while in 1555 Jane Guildford, Duchess of Northumberland, widow of the man who had attempted to establish Jane Grey on the throne two years earlier, left to Jane Hawkes her miniature of Mary I, 'the greate jewell for the girdle withe two greate aggetts sett withe pearle and the quene's picthure within it'. In 1595, Anne Sackville, Lady Dacre, left to her brother 'my jewell of the Quenes Maiesties picture'. Such particular affection on the part of women for miniatures and the early documented interaction between them and this medium would continue throughout the century. Men also owned miniatures but until the last two decades of the century there is no indication that they wore them as jewelry and there are far fewer references to them in men's wills when compared with women's, A rare example of a child wearing a mourning miniature, A Young Boy Holding a Book with Flowers (now in the Weiss Gallery), dates from 1576 and is attributed to the Master of the Countess of Warwick. From surviving portraiture and amply supported by the testaments of their wills, the fashion for wearing miniatures appears to have been a peculiarly feminine one up until the later years of the reign of Queen Elizabeth. From the 1540s on they became a standard article of exchange within women's gift-giving networks and were part of the process of reciprocity of visual images that helped to hold such networks together.» The Feminine Dynamic in English Art, 1485-1603: Women as Consumers, Patrons and Painters by Susan E. James

Jane has always struck me as a bit of a lonely girl. This is hardly a revolutionary interpretation, but whatever one thinks of Roger Ascham's anecdote of finding Jane alone reading while the rest of her family was off hunting and how typical this was of her home life, and what degree of horribleness one assigns her parents, her relationship with them was complicated at best.

They clearly thought nothing of using her as cannon fodder.

No family member visited her in the Tower.

While she may have been close to her cousins, she would not have enjoyed their daily company the way many teenagers do with their friends. No correspondance between Jane and her cousins, if it ever existed, has survived.

She failed to win over her older, sophisticated cousin Elizabeth whom she was undoubtedly eager to impress, considering the circumstances and the fact that Jane spoke warmly and respectfully of Elizabeth later.

She flourished in the household and under the care of Katherine Parr and Thomas Seymour. Within two years they were both dead. Both under horrible, tragic circumstances.

Like many a bit lonely, bookish children, Jane may have found it easier to converse with adults, and she may have formed a friendship with family friend Bess of Hardwick. Perhaps even powerful, outspoken, reformist Bess reminded her a bit of Katherine Parr.

And she may have given her a miniature of herself.

Or she gave it as a gift to her goddaughter Temperance, Bess of Hardwick's daughter.

Bess [of Hardwick]’[s] second child, Temperance, born within the year, also had illustrious god-parents – Jane, Lady Warwick (soon to be Duchess of Northumberland), Lady Jane Grey and Francis Talbot, 5th Earl of Shrewsbury. Such grand sponsors did not ensure the baby’s health, and she died within a few months. Tudor Times | Bess of Hardwick: Life Story (Lady Cavendish)

Either way, the miniature would have ended up with Bess.

And so little Temperance Cavendish becomes the fourth child of Bess of Hardwick to be of importance to us.

Like most 12-year-olds, Jane would probably have been honoured by the task. Like most 12-year-old girls she would probably have been excited by a baby. Jane, in her short life, with what little is recorded of it, still comes across as a giver. In those last days in the Tower it was what she had to give that she focused on. A lovingly written message in her beloved girdle prayer book to the father that had been her undoing and sealed her fate, her Greek Testament, with a little letter, to her sister Katherine, a ring of gold and a pair of gloves to the wife of Heinrich Bullinger, to remember her by.

The girdle prayer book Lady Jane could not bear to be parted with, it followed her to the scaffold.

Of course little Temperance Cavendish passed before a year had gone by, one of only two children of Bess of Hardwick's eight to die young, taking any excitement her short existence had brought with it with her.

She certainly wasn't born under a lucky star, Lady Jane Grey.

In a curious coincidence, but probably nothing more, Temperance was born in 1549, a point in time when Lady Jane Grey's future mother-in-law would still have been known as Jane, Lady Warwick.

In 1549 Jane would have been 12 years old. There is something slightly baby-ish about the features of the girl in the miniature in Tudor garb. In 1549 Jane had also just resided in the household of Katherine Parr, who we know was fascinated by the new art of portrait painting, and patronised a great number of the exercisers of this art.

I think that Bess of Hardwick had a portrait painted based on the likeness of the miniature.

If you look at the Anglesey Abbey portrait, you can see that it is in a feigned oval, as if it were ... painted after a miniature.

The Fashions of the Miniature