The face of JANE BOLEYN? | The Lady Parker | Hans Holbein the younger | Anne Boleyn’s sister-in-law

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 themed shooter court painter hans holbein the younger show the face of gian by countess rochford the woman who was the wife of george berlin and the sister-in-law of amberlynn and henry viii if you've watched or read anything produced in recent years about gian 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 lily rochford furthermore is this attribution likely to be correct or is 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 feast to the name of one of the tudor era's most scandalous figures let's find out [Music] [Music] for more videos on the tutors and much else remember to subscribe to the channel and switch on the notification bell so you never miss one of my uploads please also give this video a thumbs up and follow me on instagram where my username is 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 berlin was the daughter of henry parker who became baron morley in 1518 and his wife alice singean we don't know exactly when their famous daughter entered the world her biographer julia fox whose book is linked blue for you gives the year as being about 1505 but she offers no source for this and catherine davies who root 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 berlin 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 dan'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 viking rochford this median of i countess in 1533 henry married anne making jane the sister-in-law of the monarch and his wife three years later though a disaster struck as anne was accused of treason and adultery including incest with george and in may 1536 both siblings were executed gian 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 lydian wedding to henry's next three consorts james seymour anne of cleves and catherine howard but in 1541 she was accused of helping queen catherine have an extramarital affair the two women were executed at the tour of london on the 13th of february 1542 and buried next to george and anne here in the chapel of saint peter at 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 jean i have another video on their executions and one on anne's 2 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 jain and no descriptions of her appearance that i'm aware of remains which are supposed to have been hers were disinterred in the 1870s but they tell us little about her looks one of those presents described them as belonging to a woman about 30 to 40 years of age but she had been dug up and moved before and many of the booms were missing those which remained suggested a person quote of rather delicate proportions this is a subjective description which will mean different things to different people and which gives no meaningful insight into gene'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 color 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 title 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 leary and that's lily 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 berlin when her husband george was made a knight she became larry berlin when he then became vicent rochford she became vicantus rochford or lily rochford for short the other way to be known as a lady was to be the legitimate daughter of a duke a marquis 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's surname one famous example of this layout would be lady jane grey and her sisters who were the daughters of henry marquess of dorset leader 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 march nest 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 of 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 ambulance mother lady elizabeth howard for instance who was both the daughter of a duke and the wife of a night litter viking litter 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 gian parker and from 1518 onwards her mother alice would have been known as liddy morley so the drawing in question can't be of her either before her marriage gian 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 ann berlin also famously played rules 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 carrie 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 did 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 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 seal or by gift to henry fitz allen 12th earl of arendelle 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 the first of england before being inherited by his younger brother charles the first charles gave it to philip herbert fourth earl of pembroke in 1627 or 28 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 book of pictures done by hans holbein of certain lords ladies gentlemen and gentle women in king henry viii his time their names subscribed by sir john cheek secretary to king edward vi which book was king edward vi sir john cheek then was the man who said that this image showed lily parker my cheek 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 lily parker was supposed to be attached to this drawing sheik'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 cheek 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 cheek was correct and that this individual carried the surname parker unfortunately for those arguing for the gene identification it is unlikely that john cheek knew her or that he would have mistakenly referred to her as a lady before her marriage or even by her maiden name cheek was born in 1514 and became a tutor to the then prince edward leader edward vi in 1544 having previously studied and worked at cambridge university he was therefore a 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 berlin jane as we've seen died in 1542 and the dates of cheek'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 jean 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 surname for when we look at the dates during which holbein was in england and the time period during which gian 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 gian you'll recall married george in 1525 or 1526 so not only was she not a lady during holbound'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 ladder 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 lily parker appears this strongly suggests that this portrait dates to the 1530s or early 1540s as do the rounded french hood and high collar dress the sitter is tired 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 religion as a candidate to be lady parker then who is our mystery lady more likely to be although jane berlin was never liddy 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 eight in 1523 and who we knew was dead by 1549 because in that year her husband married elizabeth calthorpe or calthrop have seen both spellings sir henry was the first of elizabeth's three 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 suggests 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 catalogs perhaps because holbein died in 1543 six years before elizabeth became lady parker and because elizabeth then became lily woodhouse in 1552 through her second marriage something cheek would have been aware of however it's possible holbein drew elizabeth years before her first marriage but that by the time cheek saw the picture it was between 1549 and 1552 when she was lily parker and so he labeled it as such so to sum up i don't believe this image to be of jane berlin for four reasons first although she was born a parker she didn't hold the title of liddy 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 that the color of the paper the drawing is on we can deduce that this picture was created in the 1530s or 1540s when jane was a berlin and lily rochford third john cheek 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 have been able to recognize her sisters in law than jean herself and those sisters-in-law both held the title of lily 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 gene a book about hans holbein written by gs 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 jean 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 jean the world 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 lily rochefort 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 tutors in general try one of these options next whatever you choose please enjoy and until next time keep learning

Channel: History Calling

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Keywords: what did jane boleyn look like, who was jane Boleyn, the face of jane Boleyn, portrait of jane Boleyn, what did lady rochford look like, jane parker Boleyn, Jane Parker, Tudor scandal, Tudors documentary, who was lady Rochford, the boleyn family, anne boleyn's sister in law, henry viii's sister in law, who was george Boleyn’s wife, kings and queens of England, the forgotten Boleyn, the other boleyn girl, George Boleyn, Viscount Rochford, Anne Boleyn, History Calling

Id: RgzPmuUA5EA

Length: 18min 1sec (1081 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 10 2022