Saturday Matinee: Art of History

Lindsay Graham
There are more ways than ever to listen to history daily ad free. Listen with wondery in the Wondry app as a member of R@r.com or in Apple podcasts. Or you can get all of history daily, plus other fantastic history podcasts@intohistory.com. i was very lucky to have had a humanities teacher in middle school who made sure to pack as much art history into the curriculum as possible. Seeing these great works, talking about their composition, their symbolism, their beauty and originality was already wonderful, but tying them into the history we were also studying made them even more powerful.

Many of these pieces cannot be understood outside their historical contexts. The bayou Tapestry, St. Francis in ecstasy, liberty leading the people, Guernica, the Detroit industry murals, all of these are commentary on different crossroads we face throughout history. So on today's Saturday matinee, I'm excited to bring you an episode from the podcast art of history. Now, you might think that podcasting about art might be as sensible as dancing about architecture, but host and art historian Amanda Madagas does an admirable job of painting you a portrait about a portrait like the one that's the subject of today's episode.

Paul Delaroches the execution of Lady Jane Grey from 1833, young Lady Jane was Queen of England for just nine days before being executed as a traitor, too soon for her even to have been crowned. I hope you enjoy. Be sure to search for and follow art of history link in the show notes to make it easy for you.

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Amanda Matta
Hello and welcome to the Art of History podcast. My name is Amanda Matta. I have a degree in art history, and today we are going to be looking at a painting called the execution of Lady Jane Grey. Jane Grey. If you're not familiar with her story, it is sadly a very short one, but it is a crucial part of understanding english history and like the history of the british monarchy because, yeah, this was a pivotal moment and things could have gone very differently if her story ended in a different way than what it actually did.

So this story will also overlap slightly with another episode we've done, or probably a few of them, but namely the Elizabeth I episode about her early years. We're going to be referencing a lot of the same incidents that happened in at least the first half of that episode. So the perfect companion piece to today's podcast episode. So Lady Jane Grey, she was born in sometime in the autumn of 1537. Unfortunately, when it comes to women, even women in noble families, we don't often know their exact date of birth at this time.

She was born in Leicestershire, that much we do know. And she was the daughter of a woman named Francis Brandon and a man named Henry Grey. She had two younger sisters. They were named Lady Catherine and Lady Mary. Those lady titles before them, that's what's known as a courtesy title, because the girl's father, Henry Grey, was a prominent figure at the Tudor court.

He served, among other things, as King Henry III's sword bearer at the coronation of Anne Boleyn in 1533. He was also at Anne of Cleves arrival to England in 1540. Another past subject of an art bite on this podcast. And he was also present at the capture of Boulogne in 1545. At the time of Jane's birth, he was known as the Marquis of Dorset.

Lady Jane, because of her father's high position at court, was likely named after Queen Jane Seymour, who was the wife of Henry VIII. Now, Henry VIII happened to be Lady Jane's great uncle. She and her sisters were directly descended, actually, from the Tudors through the female line. Jane's mother was born Frances Brandon, and she was the child of Henry VII's daughter. So her mother was Mary Tudor and her father was Mary Tudor's second husband, Charles Brandon I, Duke of Suffolk.

Now, just to flesh out this family tree a little bit more, because I hate when I can't like place people. Jane's grandmother, then Princess Mary Tudor, of course, was a younger sister of King Henry VIII, and this made Jane a great granddaughter of Henry VII. And as the great niece of Henry VIII, she was a first cousin, once removed, of all of his children. So that included Edward, Mary and Elizabeth. It was Edward that she was closest to both in, like, friendship wise and in age.

I think they were just about a year apart, and Jane did receive an excellent education. She earned herself, actually, a reputation as one of the most learned young ladies of her era, probably next to her cousin Elizabeth. During this era, it was somewhat fashionable, actually, to educate your noble daughters just as well as your sons and instill them with these humanist world philosophies. Like her cousin Elizabeth I, Jane studied the classical languages of Greek, Latin and even Hebrew, and she learned French and Italian. She was known as a dedicated student, but apparently felt that her education and upbringing were rather strict.

She once complained to a visiting tutor that when I am in the presence either of father or mother, whether I speak, keep silence, sit, stand or go, eat, drink, be merry or sad, be sewing, playing, dancing or doing any thing else I must do it, as it were, in such weight, measure and number, even so perfectly as God made the world, or else I am so sharply taunted, so cruelly threatened. Yea, presently, sometimes with pinches, nips and bobs and other ways which I will not name for the honour I bear them, that I think myself in hell. So that's not great. Hearing that about Francis and Henry Grey, it sounds like they were kind of employing some very disciplinary tactics to ensure that Jane did keep up with this reputation of being a very learned and accomplished young noblewoman. And yet it seems like Jane also enjoyed intellectual pursuits.

Once, she was asked why she wasn't outside presumably everyone else in the household was because the weather was nice. And she replied, I wist all their sport in the park is but a shadow to the pleasure that I find in play doh. Alas, good folk, they never felt what true pleasure meant. I realize with my cold, it might have sounded like I said, play doh, like the toy from the nineties and early two thousands. No, that was Plato.

Plato the philosopher. So she's literally saying, I enjoy reading philosophy more than being outside and hunting and riding and things like that. Jane was also a devout Protestant. Now, of course, this is the time when the great divide between the catholic and protestant faiths in England has happened. And through her father, who was known as a very devout religious Protestant, and her tutors, Jane picked that up, and that is the side that she falls on.

Now, in 1547, King Henry VIII, he dies. Shortly thereafter, Jane's father removes himself from court. He did not get along with the new men leading the show. Remember the new king that Henry VIII left behind? His son Edward, was just nine years old, and he required a regency to oversee his reign.

So he was the king, but he had these men around him essentially leading the government. One of them was called the Lord Protector. He was the one calling the shots. And his name was Edward Seymour. Seymour and Henry Grey did not get along.

And so, rather than possibly being sent to court as a young woman might have been at this time, instead, in the spring of 1547, ten year old Jane was sent to be brought up in the household of Thomas Seymour, who is the lord protector's brother. But he does not hold any influence at court at this time. And again, this is something you'll remember if you've listened to the Elizabeth I episode. So both of these men, both Seymours, they were uncles of the young king Edward. Their late sister was his mother, Jane Seymour, Henry VIII's third wife, and Jane Grey's namesake.

So I said she was sent to be brought up in Thomas Seymour's household. This was relatively common in the Tudor period. Aristocrats. Children would be kind of educated and, yeah, brought up in households of families that had a higher status to their own. Presumably they would learn etiquette there, learn how to behave at court.

So when they did eventually go, they would be prepared and they would be in a better position to carve a path for their future, whether that meant finding an employer or maybe an artistic patron or a spouse, a husband or a wife. I think the goal here was to connect Jane better to families that would help her move up at court, even though her father didn't get along with the lord protector. And I say that because Thomas Seymour, even though he didn't have much of a role in King Edward's reign and government, he was still a very ambitious man. He had actually recently married Catherine Parr, who was Henry VIII's 6th wife and his widow. She was still married to him at the time that he died.

Together, Catherine and Thomas did oversee some of Jane's education for a little while. At this point, Jane was third in line to the throne. She was behind Edward's two sisters, Mary and Elizabeth. Well, half sisters. And Seymour saw her as an asset, like a pawn, almost, and an asset that would only increase in value over time, and especially if some of his plans came to fruition.

Even though both Jane and King Edward were children. He was nine years old, she was ten. Thomas began scheming to marry Jane off to the king. Maybe this would have happened well into the future and a betrothal would have done for the time being, we don't know. But that was his plan.

Marrying Jane off was seen as something that would only increase his own influence at court. He was very, very jealous of his brother's influence over their nephew, King Edward, and he. He ultimately wanted to take his place as lord Protector. He thought that should be his job. So Jane continued growing up in his household into a very cultured young woman, very smart.

And her protestant faith, too, was only growing. And it was strengthened by the influence of Catherine Parr, who I keep saying I need to do an episode about, and it just never. I always do this. But Catherine Parr, very interesting woman, very devout woman, and somebody who really propelled Protestantism into the mainstream in England. Sadly, Catherine Parr died in childbirth the following year, in September 1548, and Lady Jane was sent home after acting as chief mourner at Catherine Parr's funeral.

So clearly the two were pretty close. However, before too long, Jane returned to Thomas Seymour's household at his request. So it seems like even though the person she was closest to was no longer in the picture, he still wanted to have her under his influence. Now, Seymour at this time may be spurred on by Catherine's death, because there is a hint of desperation here. He starts to set his plans in motion.

And his plan, ultimately the goal is to get closer to the nucleus of power at his nephew King Edward's court. And Jane was still an integral part of these plans. On the night of January 16, 1549, he tried unsuccessfully to break into Edward's power alice apartments. His goal was to abduct the king, marry him off to Lady Jane Grey and then marry himself off to Elizabeth, the king's half sister. Instead.

Thomas was arrested. He was found out when I think, a dog barked and alerted everybody to his presence. He was sent to the Tower of London and he was executed on Tower Hill on March 20, 1549. Now I will direct you once again to the episode Elizabeth I, the early years, to see how this plot affected Elizabeth, because this is a turning point in her story as well. You'll remember that I said Jane's father was not interested in being at court while Edward Seymour, not Thomas.

Edward Seymour was the lord Protector, and he did. He largely avoided being caught up in all of this drama. He was interrogated four times by the king's council and he even used Jane in his own like testimony almost. He offered to have her marry the Lord protector's eldest son, Lord Hartford, I guess, to prove that the family had no interest in her marrying Edward. There were no remaining schemes involving Jane.

This was his idea of proving that. And I guess it worked because he was let go. Jane was sent home to live with her parents again and there was no remaining hope of her marrying the king. I don't know if her parents ever wanted that for her, if that was their place or if it was just Thomas Seymour's. But certainly it wasn't going to happen now.

So Jane is back at home, and that's probably the best place for her because at her cousin King Edward's court, things are not going well. The Lord protector, he has made a hot mess for himself. The country, England had no money. They were almost bankrupt. And most of the members of the Privy Council, which is the body of men who advise the king, they had all turned against Edward Seymour.

The new, like, kind of emerging man at court was called John Dudley. He would later become the Duke of Northumberland. So that's just the title that I'll use for him, even though I don't think he gets it till later. Northumberland, essentially, he engaged in a little bit of court packing. He crammed the Privy Council with his friends and basically they all moved together and decided to overthrow the protectorship.

So Edward Seymour is starting to feel the walls closing in around him. He knows that his days are numbered as the head of the council. And so he moves King Edward, who at this point is, what, nine, no, ten or eleven, moves him to Windsor Castle, which is very fortified. It's a good place to, like, outlast a siege, essentially. And he says, this is for the king's protection.

However, at Windsor, Castle, there is a lack of provisions. This was kind of impromptu. It was not well planned, and Seymour and Edward nearly starved to death. Eventually, he relented and stood down and he was arrested and charged with, you guessed it, treason. Just the second of many people who will be charged with treason in this episode.

It would take a few years for Edward Seymour to meet his fate, but just like his brother, Seymour would be executed at the Tower of London in January 1552. Around this time, Jane's father gets a little bit of an elevation in title. He is made the Duke of Suffolk, and he gets that title because the previous holder of that dukedom dies. The previous holder of the dukedom of Suffolk happened to be the younger half brother of Jane's mother, Francis Brandon. So Charles Brandon dies.

He was the last duke of Suffolk. No sons. And I guess in the court machinations, sometimes what you do to help somebody get some influence is you give them a title. So because Henry Grey's wife's younger brother was a duke, now he gets to become a duke, basically, is how that works. And the title actually was granted with this caveat attached to it.

He was Duke of Suffolk, de jor uxoris, meaning by right of his wife. So there was this recognition that it was Jane's mother who was the one who, like, was blood related to the last person who had that title, but it was the husband who got it. He would actually be the last ever Duke of Suffolk, for reasons we will discuss later in the episode. Spoiler alert. As a result of this elevation of her father, Jane now found herself constantly at the royal court of her cousin, King Edward.

It is safe to say that things at court were going much better under this new protectorship situation, which was led by John Dudley, than they were under the past one King Edward, too. He was growing up and he was starting to take on more royal duties. Excuse me, Uber eats and have more influence over decisions that were made in his name. So things are looking up. Edward is even continuing and amplifying the protestant religious reforms that had been begun by King Henry VIII as part of this, and to ensure that there would be no backsliding once his reign was over, Edward started to think about who his eventual successor would be.

Now, this isn't. It's hard to tell why he started thinking about this or when he started thinking about this. Edward had always been somewhat of a sickly child, and now he was 15 years old and he fell ill with a fever and a cough. He had probably been thinking about the succession a little bit before that. But in the Tudor times, a fever and a cough like that was enough to make you think, oh, God, the end is near.

So Edward started writing. He would eventually produce a couple different drafts of his revision to the line of succession. I will post picture of one of them, which he wrote in his own hand on the instagram. Now, the problem with the line of succession, and the reason he wanted to fix it, was that his oldest half sister, the first in line to the throne, Princess Mary, was a Catholic. She was the daughter of the spanish princess Catherine of Aragon, who had become Henry VIII's first wife, therefore very catholic, inherited it from her mother, and she was fiercely loyal to her mother's memory, above all.

And since her father had divorced her mother and kind of sent her away to a nunnery for the rest of her life, I think it's safe to say that Mary resented both him and his religious reforms. And, you know, sure, she could be passed over in the succession, but the next person in line was Elizabeth, Edward and Mary's half sister, who was a Protestant. And Edward knew that passing over Mary and giving the crown to Elizabeth would just cause his two sisters to fight. It would just cause a civil war, and he did not want that. He truly felt, it seems, that a safer option would be to skip over both of them entirely and just hope that they accepted this and did not cause a fuss.

So his eye turned towards the third in line, his cousin Jane, whose claim to the throne could have been argued to be even stronger than that, or Mary of Mary or Elizabeth, because both of them, at one point or another, had been kind of disowned, disinherited by their father. They were princesses at this point, but they had been both declared illegitimate and removed from the succession by Henry VIII. So in the first version of Edward's will, which he wrote before, it was kind of accepted that his illness, his fever and cough, were going to prove terminal. This version does pass over both Mary and Elizabeth, but it stopped short of outright naming Lady Jane as his heir. Instead, it named the male heirs of either Jane's mother, Lady Frances Grey, or if she didn't have any sons, you know, her daughters were like teenagers by now.

It was unlikely she was gonna have any sons, but it was possible. In the event that that didn't happen, it would then go to the male heirs of either Jane or her sisters, Catherine or Mary. So that would be the next person, hypothetically, to inherit the english crown. Just a few months later, after this version was approved, Edward's condition took a turn for the worse. And people assumed that he was going to die.

So as none of his cousins had had time to produce a male heir, a son, he took it upon himself to write a whole new version of the line of succession. And in this one, upon his death, the throne would go directly to Lady Jane Grey. Now, the reason it went to her instead of her mother. Actually, Francis Brandon had been written out of the succession by Henry VIII, for reasons that are kind of unclear. I'm not 100% sure on why, but presumably Edward was just continuing his father's wishes in skipping over Francis Grey and giving it directly to Jane.

This version of Edward's, essentially his will, despite leaving his crown to a woman, was still a little bit sexist. Even though it specified that Jane would become queen when Edward died. It went on to say that after her, the crown would then only pass to her male heir. If she did not have any sons, say she had daughters. Instead of going to her children, the crown would go back up and go to a son of one of her sisters, if one was produced.

So it was very particular about who would become the next king or queen. Well, in their mind, it was going to be a king after Jane of England. And I find that fascinating. It was so picky. For what reason?

Jane was really seen as a placeholder, and she was never really intended to be the one calling the shots. And we will see that pop up again in a little while. That pickiness may have been because Edward's new line of succession was. It wasn't a secret. It was created and witnessed by the entire privy council, and it was signed by at least ten of England's most senior lawyers.

So this thing was official, all above board. It was not a secret. It was not like it was. We were good to go. Right.

That's what Edward thought. Even though he was gonna die. Something less above board was going on, on the side, however, and that has to do with what John Dudley, the Duke of Northumberland, is up to now. Remember, he is the head of Edward's privy council, which makes him, after the king, the most powerful man in England. Just before Edward's new line of succession was complete, Dudley went ahead and had Jane Grey married off to his own son, a man named Lord Guildford, or Gifford Dudley.

I think I'm gonna say Gifford because that sounds better, but it's spelled Guildford, just so you know. So Lady Jane is married off. And now when Edward dies, the country is not going to just gain a new queen. In Dudley's mind, it would also be gaining a king. And that would be his son, a king that would be under the influence of the Duke of Northumberland.

And so the thinking here for Dudley is that his own influence is going to continue past Edward into the next reign. Jane was 16 when she was married off as part of this plan that happened on May 25, 1553, and Gifford was 18. The wedding was actually a triple whammy. Jane's sister Catherine and her new sister in law, Catherine Dudley, were all married off in the same ceremony at Durham House. Now, we don't know much about Jane and Gifford's marriage such that it was, but Jane did describe herself once as a wife who loves her husband.

So she would have approached marriage, especially because she was a devout Protestant with kind of this sense of duty and this idea that she knew her place, she knew her role, however dutiful she was as a new wife. However, she did also write that she kind of begrudged the control that her new mother in law, the Duchess of Northumberland, had over her new husband, Gifford. So it sounds like the newlyweds would have been getting orders on how to behave, what to do from all sides, because the Duke of Northumberland undoubtedly would have been also issuing orders to his son. I think it's safe to say that that is why this marriage took place in the first place. Now, King Edward died very shortly after, on July 6, 1553.

So he really secured his new line of succession just in time. It had been finished just a few weeks earlier. And from this moment on, Lady Jane Grey became queen of England. You may have heard her referred to as the nine day queen, although that is technically inaccurate. And this is one of the pet peeves I have about history, because if you date Jane's reign from the exact moment that she actually became queen with Edward's death, she would really be the 13 day queen, which I think sounds just as cool as the nine day queen, but whatever, I guess.

So from the time that a monarch dies, their successor is immediately. Is immediately monarch. There does not have to be a proclamation or a crowning. It just kind of passes to the next person. But Jane doesn't know that she's queen yet.

She would not be summoned to learn of this until July 9, when she was. Yeah, summoned is a good word. She was summoned to the Northumberlands London residence, Scion House, and there she was told that, according to Edwards instructions, she was now queen of England. I am going to take a short break, and when we come back, we will find out how she felt about that. News history Daily is sponsored by Mint Mobile thought experiment.

Lindsay Graham
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Amanda Matta
Lady Jane Grey has just been told she is the Queen of England. This to say it was a huge shock to Jane was an understatement. She became very distressed in some versions of the story. She even fainted upon being told that she was queen, and shortly after the privy councilors knelt before her to swear allegiance, her husband and parents arrived. She later recorded kind of what she did and how she was feeling in this moment.

She wrote, quote, declaring to them my insufficiency. I greatly bewailed myself for the death of so noble a prince. That would be her cousin Edward. And at the same time, I turned myself to God, humbly praying and beseeching him that if what was given to me was rightly and lawfully mine, his divine majesty would grant me such grace and spirit that I might govern it to his glory and service and to the advantage of this realm. So she paints a picture of herself, not as a woman who was glad to now be queen, not as somebody who was eager to wield power, but as somebody who, if she must, if this was her duty, she would do it.

It. The next day, on July 10, Lady Jane Grey was officially proclaimed Queen Jane. Her husband Gifford, her parents, the Duchess of Northumberland, her mother in law, and other ladies of her court entered the Tower of London on a procession to prepare for the official coronation. And this process, it's rather more sped up than the last coronation we saw. Where there was were, oh, gosh, I don't even know.

Seven, eight, nine months between Queen Elizabeth II dying and King Charles III being officially crowned. At this time, it was customary for new english monarchs to stay in the Tower of London from the time that they acceded to the throne to the time that they were officially crowned. Consorts also did this. Anne Boleyn, for example, stayed in the tower on the eve of her own coronation. And the Tower of London, it's not just everyone thinks of it as just a prison, but it really wasn't.

It began its life as a very sumptuous royal palace in the time of the norman conquest. It's over a thousand years old, by the way, and over time, the Tower of London, it's kind of gained more and more functions in the british monarchy. Aside from being a royal residence, it was also the place where royal arms were created, you know, weapons. It was the royal mint until the 18 hundreds. I think all of the coins of the realm were minted there.

It was the place that housed the crown jewels. And, yes, it was also a prison. But that is not the context that most monarchs, most monarchs would have approached the Tower of London at this time. Now, for this procession to be proclaimed and crowned, Queen Jane was wearing a green velvet dress embroidered in gold with a long train that was carried by her mother. She also wore a white jeweled headdress.

And I have an artist's recreation of what she would have looked like on the instagram on her neck. I love that we have this detail. She wore something called a chin clout, which is a type of scarf of black velvet striped with small chains of gold, garnished with small pearls, small rubies and small diamonds furred with sables, and having thereat a chain of gold, enameled green, garnished with certain pearls. So she is being dressed in the jewels that belonged to the queens of England, I think it is safe to say, even after kind of being decked out and paraded through London in this way, though, Jane seems to have been reluctant to accept the fact that she was queen. When she was approached with the crown to, you know, be crowned queen, she refused to put it on.

She wrote that her counselors, the people around her, told her that she, quote, could take it without fear, and that another also should be made to crown my husband. Which thing I, for my part, heard, truly with a troubled mind and with ill will, even with infinite grief and displeasure of heart. Did you catch that small detail in there? I don't think this is what Jane is like protesting to in the second half of that little passage. But her courtiers, as they're crowning her, they're saying, and don't worry, we're gonna get a crown made for your husband, too, so that we can make him king.

Like they're telling her this. The plan was to have Gifford Dudley be crowned King alongside Jane, and here is why. That, as a plan, I think, illuminates things in terms of the motivations of the people around Jane. So if you've ever heard me, perhaps on TikTok, where, if you didn't know, I have an account where I talk about the royals. If you've ever heard me explain why, for example, Queen Elizabeth II's husband was only ever known as Prince Philip.

He was not a king. It's because there is only one type of king title that is available in the british monarchy. Women have two titles available to them. They can either be the queen consort, which is the wife of the king, or a queen regnant, not regent. A regent is something different, but a regnant who is the one actually reigning.

Any man who becomes king is assumed to be king regnant. There is not a king consort title. So any man who gets crowned king automatically is higher ranking than his wife. That's just kind of how it works. Even if that wife, like Jane Grey, was.

Was the one who was the queen, by right, the one who was born into the role. So historically, whenever this issue has arisen, the queen will typically give her husband some lesser title to that of king. An exception would be Mary I, who, a couple years after this, is going to marry Philip of Spain, who is a king in his own right. So they had, like, this joint king and queen thing going on, but even then parliament was like, okay, no, no, no. We can't have this guy have too much power.

And they wrote laws that would prevent him from being the king of England. So there's always some sort of, like, limitation put on the consort of a queen regnant Jane, though fun fact, is technically the first queen regnant, like, in british history, there are some before her who, like her reign. They've been disputed. Mary the first would go on to become the first, like, undisputed queen regnant. But Jane is the first one that they're actually trying this out with intentionally.

So I'm willing to bet, I would put money on it, that this was always Dudley's plan, that he was going to intentionally play around with the titles here and marry his son off and make him king and just assume that Jane would give way to this as the correct way of doing things, because once her husband was crowned king, he should be the one calling all the shots in terms of traditional gender roles of the day, that's how it worked. So I think that when Edward's privy council was accepting Jane as the next in line to the throne, aside from preferring that she had a son that they could give the crown to, I think they were always planning for her to have a husband who would then be the one actually doing the work of ruling the country. It's entirely possible that Jane would have gone along with this plan, but at the moment she's being crowned, she refused to have Gifford crowned on the same day. She did not let them go find a crown for him. She said that she wanted an act of parliament to be carried out to designate him as the king, rather than relying on her own authority as queen to make him the king.

And so I think far from that being Jane saying, no, no, I'm the one with the power, I actually think that was her appealing to a higher power, appealing to doing things by the book, because, after all, she was just a woman, she was a Protestant, she was a very obedient daughter, it seems. I think she was just trying to do everything by the book so that everything was sealed, the I's were dotted, the t's were crossed, all of that. So in the meantime, she did make Gifford the Duke of Clarence. His family was not happy about this. In fact, her mother in law, the Duchess of Northumberland, ordered Gifford back to their house, to Sion house in London, presumably so that she could order him to, like, go back to Jane and demand to be made king.

But Jane, good on her. She did insist that Gifford stay with her. That flex of her power must have felt good because it was, you know, it was just against her, her rather overbearing mother in law, you know, I think that one she would have allowed herself to enjoy. Sadly, we will never know how this issue would have been resolved if Jane had been able to continue her reign, because much more pressing matters quickly came to her attention. Very soon after she was proclaimed queen, Jane's cousin, Princess Mary, who, remember, is the eldest daughter of Henry VIII, wrote to the privy council demanding to be made queen.

She did not accept the new order of succession, and she did this knowing that to many across the country, she was still a very beloved princess. Her mother had been very popular in her day, especially among Catholics and among people who didn't agree with the protestant reforms or how they were carried out by the king's advisors. Mary and the people in her corner would have recognized that she still had a very healthy amount of public support. Support. And a lot of people, too, just like on a legal basis, thought that the succession was not criminal, but like a travesty, especially given the kind of distasteful combination of annulments and disinheritance, stuff that had gone on with Henry VIII.

People just wanted to go back to the natural order of things. So Jane's privy council members, they did underestimate Mary. They underestimated, quote, the strength of support for the catholic princess. And they sent a reply to Mary. They backed Jane initially, and they advised.

I hate this. They advised Princess Mary to be, quote, quiet and obedient. So that's the kind of men we're working with here. They think that's the virtue that a woman should have in order to be in this game. And, you know, technically, they are in the right here.

Edward legally designated his successor, as is his right to do. The fact that Mary and a portion of the country disliked that decision, it wasn't as legally sound as it could have been. However, the tide quickly turned as the council realized, oh, Mary might not be willing to just shut up and go away. She's serious. They tasked Jane's father in law, the Duke of Northumberland, to raise a small army and go take care of the Mary problem.

They wanted him to capture her. This was supposed to all go down at Framlingham Cowboys. That's a hard one to say. So in reply, Mary said, okay, I see what you're doing, and I'm gonna do it better. She raised an even larger army of her own.

And even though John Dudley, the Duke of Northumberland, like, he was not a man to be messed with, he was England's, like, top military guy, he decided the fight was not worth it, and he backed down. He retreated. So again, it's so hard at this point to overstate Mary's popularity here. The pendulum really had swung away from protestant reform, and, like, all the way to her side, there's just this desire for the true heir to, like, come back and make everything right again. So even before John Dudley had time to make it back to London, Jane Grey, the new queen, had lost the support of her privy council, which you can't make it if you don't have those guys.

Their goal was probably just to preserve their own skins at this point, in the event of another handover of the crown. If that were to happen, they would have been seen as committing treason and supporting a usurper to the throne. So they are all quickly turning over to Mary's side. And on July 19, 1553, Mary I was proclaimed queen. London turned out to celebrate her.

Even Jane's own father, Henry Grey, rushed to proclaim Mary Queen. So this is making it kind of official on Tower Hill. And he left Jane and Gifford inside the tower. Even Jane's mother and her ladies in waiting left them to go outside and show support for Queen Mary. So this is really dismal at this point, everyone is literally just trying to save their own heads, because it dawned on them that in Mary's eye, they may have just carried out a small coup, you know, no big deal.

So the first task of Queen Mary's new reign, we have already pivoted very hard, is to sort out all of the guilty parties here, the ones who had, in her mind, conspired to remove her from the succession and continue England on the path to becoming a firmly protestant nation. When Mary triumphantly processed into London on August 3, she immediately released all of the Catholics who had been imprisoned in the Tower of London by her father. And she had Jane and Gifford indicted on a charge of treason. That indictment happened on August 12. But then she did something kind of interesting.

It would have been very easy for Mary to just scapegoat Jane and Gifford, you know, remove the people who had technically usurped her, but instead, she chose a different scapegoat to kind of like, immediately answer for the treasonous act of denying her her crown. And that man was Jane's father in law, John Dudley, the Duke of Northumberland, the one who had led the army against Mary. He was executed quite swiftly, actually, on Tower Hill on August 26 2nd. But this is not an episode about the execution of John Dudley. This is an episode about the execution of Jane Grey.

So you're probably wondering, how do we get there? Because at this point, Mary could have executed her and she hasn't. Jane had been deposed since July, and that September, parliament officially revoked her proclamation. And they said she was a usurper. She didn't count.

So today, sometimes when you see lists of british kings and queens, she will not be on it, even though technically, everything was above board. And I think this is a huge injustice to her. For her part, Jane seems to have taken this in stride. Remember, she was really incredulous at the idea that she should be Edward's heir and successor in the first place. She did not want this.

So upon Northumberland's execution, she reportedly said, he hath brought me and our stock in most miserable calamity and misery by his exceeding ambition. So she did not want to be seen as ambitious. In the same way, given this attitude of repentance, all the evidence now pointed to Mary being completely okay with Jane living. She did not want to execute her. She was doing what she needed to do to, like, express that she regretted what happened.

She never thought she was the rightful queen, and she supported Mary. And with Northumberland, the architect of the entire plan, out of the picture picture, Jane did seem likely to remain kind of a political prisoner with Gifford at the Tower of London indefinitely. So this place that had been her palace just a few weeks ago was now her prison. Jane is thought to have been housed in sort of like a townhouse within the Tower of London's walls, like, actually in the Tower of London. Like I said, there are so many different functions that this place has served, and inside there's actually like a little town almost.

She was held at number five, tower Green. Today, it's been completely rebuilt. It does not look like it did in tudor times, but, you know, the site is there as a noblewoman, and I mean a former queen, technically, Jane was allowed some degree of comfort at the tower. She was attended by three gentlewomen, one of whom had been like her nurse from the time she was born, as well as a man surrounded servant. And she was permitted by the lieutenant of the Tower to walk on Tower Green.

At convenient times and at his discretion. The Duke of Northumberland, before his execution, as well as four of his sons, including Gifford, were imprisoned separately from Jane. They were held in Beauchamp Tower. And this you can go visit today while you're there. I love this.

You can still see inscriptions carved into the wall of this tower that are associated with this time that Jane Grey and her husband's family were imprisoned there. The most famous of these is thought to have been made by Gifford, and it reads Jane. It is Jane's name. He carved it into the tower wall while he was a prisoner there. So that's just heartbreaking.

Another Dudley inscription there is one of the most elaborate and famous, like carvings by prisoners in the tower. It's very detailed. I will put a picture of it as well as the Jane carving on the instagram, because this is an art history podcast and we have yet to get to the art today. I will describe it for you because it's just. It's so cool.

It was carved by Gifford's oldest brother, John, who was the Earl of Warwick. It depicts a bear and a staff, which was the badge of the Earl of Warwick, as well as a lion with two tails, which is part of the Dudley family coat of arms. Those two things are surrounded by a border of flowers, roses, gaily flowers, oak leaves and honeysuckle. And these are said to symbolize the names of John Dudley's four brothers. The roses are interpreted as standing for Ambrose.

The gillyflowers are for Gifford, the oak leaves for Robert Dudley, from the latin word robur, for oak, apparently. And the honeysuckle is for their youngest brother, Henry. So evidently these guys had a lot of time on their hands to be carving this stuff into the wall. Jane and Gifford would be taken to trial by the lord mayor of London for high treason. In November 1553, they were proclaimed guilty.

Jane Grey actually pleaded guilty, but Queen Mary was merciful. She was going to give them a reprieve, and she allowed the couple to live out the rest of their day as high status prisoners in the tower. And that's the story of Lady Jane Grey, everybody. Thank you so much for tuning in. Yeah, I wish.

Okay, now, both Jane and Gifford were indeed charged with high treason. Jane did plead guilty, and you really get the sense that she was just trying to appeal to authority here. Do the right thing. Do what was expected of her. And for all of this, she received a sentence.

Sense that Jane should be burned alive on Tower Hill or beheaded as the queen pleases. Burning alive was the typical sentence given to women who were accused of treason. Beheading was seen as a mercy. If the king or queen really wanted to be, you know, a nice guy, they could commute that sentence to beheading instead of being burned alive. How nice.

How nice of them. Now, I know what you're thinking. Mary the first, she has this reputation and history of being bloody Mary, right? She supposedly executed, burned alive so many people who were against her, right, that reputation is completely made up, unearned. She executed.

I don't remember the exact numbers. She executed far fewer people than her father, Henry VIII, did during his reign. Name Bloody Mary. It's a complete fabrication by her political opponents, writing after her death to kind of revise history and make her more unpopular, less. Less appealing.

Right. When it came to her cousin Jane, Queen Mary did suspend her sentence. She again was seemingly trying to spare Jane's life. Above all, she really seems to have seen through what was happening and she doubted that Jane was culpable at all in the acts of truth. Reason that had, like, resulted in her becoming Queen Mary said that her conscience would not allow her to execute her cousin.

But as it always will, the pendulum that had seen Queen Mary once triumphantly reclaim her crown was now swinging in the opposite direction. Mary's Catholicism was becoming a problem, as was her plan to marry the quite frankly detested Philip II of Spain. This would have extended in the eyes of the english population, extended the pope's influence in England, and that was something they did not want to see happen. So both of those things, Mary being catholic and the man she was choosing to marry, made her very unpopular pretty quickly. So a small series of uprisings started to take place.

These were all protestant uprisings, and one of them that took place in 1554 was known as Wyatt's rebellion. This was led by four men. Sir Thomas Wyatt, who was the son of a court poet, Sir James Croft, Sir Peter Carew and Henry Grey, the Duke of Suffolk and Jane's father. You just. You really hate to see it.

You know, this man has made it through two of these, you know, moments where he could be called a traitor, and he's made it out, he's gotten his family through them, and now he has to go and implicate himself in another plot. So I hate it. I hate him. These men, their original plan was to outright assassinate Queen Mary, although they ultimately decided not to do that. Too risky.

And instead, they started multiple small uprisings across England, all at the same time. The big one was supposed to be kicked off in Devonshire, where Philip of Spain was set to land before marrying the queen. The other men would direct uprisings in different parts of the country, and then they would all join up and converge on London and force Mary to abdicate. And then their hope was to replace her with her protestant half sister, Elizabeth. So the conspirators, interestingly, had no plan.

They did not intend to bring Jane back to the throne. That ship had sailed. But Jane's father, you know, he's directly involved here, so that does not look good for Jane. In fact, Henry Grey likely joined the rebellion not for power, but for religious concerns. Like, he was described as a, quote, hardy friend unto the gospel.

And he was a very devout Protestant. But, yeah, still, you hate to see it. His involvement put Jane and Gifford into a very difficult situation, and Jane's existence, unfortunately, became a direct threat to Mary once again in her eyes. And this time, there was no way that Mary was going to let Jane live. So we've come, sadly, to the moment I've been trying to put off for this whole episode.

This episode is way longer than I thought it was going to be. And we have arrived at the moment of the execution of Lady Jane Grey. It seems like Mary, though, was still having misgivings. She really did not want to do, do this because the execution date for Jane and Gifford, who were set to be beheaded on the same day, was originally set for February 9, 1554, but was then postponed for three days. The reason for this delay was so that Mary could give Jane, like, one last chance.

The only way she could do so was to convert Jane to the catholic faith. So Mary sent her chaplain, a man named John Fecnem, to Jane and to try and get her to convert. This gesture. When people were held in the tower before their execution, this was something that was often done, and it was so that the condemned could have a chance to save their soul, you know, so that the monarch could say, well, they saw the light at the last second. At least they're not burning in hell, that kind of thing.

But in this instance, it is believed that Mary was genuinely trying to help Jane live, like, not just trying to help her get to heaven, helping her to, like, give Mary a reason to spare her life. But Jane was unrelenting in her commitment to the protestant faith. To her credit, I think, and she would not give in to the chaplain's efforts. And like all of his reasoning with her, however, she was friendly towards Feckenham, and she said that she would allow him to accompany her to the scaffold. Clearly, even though I still have not accepted it, Jane had accepted her fate.

Fate. And on the morning of February 12, 1554, the executions of Gifford and Lady Jane were finally set to be carried out. Queen Mary sent a message allowing them to meet, to be together one final time. There is kind of some disagreement whether they were able to see each other while they were both imprisoned at the tower. My guess is no, but some people think they might have been able to see each other and speak.

But Jane is believed to have refused this final meeting. They did not see each other on the morning of their executions. And the reasoning was, because Jane could not bring herself to see her husband, she is recorded as saying she felt it would cause less misery and pain if she and Gifford waited to meet shortly elsewhere and live bound by indissoluble ties. Tears I am. This is wrecking me.

So instead, around 10:00 a.m. jane watched from her window at number five tower Green as her husband was taken outside the tower walls to his death. Gifford was beheaded in the public execution grounds on Tower Hill, meaning that Jane would not have seen his. The actual moment of his death. She could not have seen that from her, from her her rooms.

She did, however, see Giffords body being brought back into the tower in a cart with his head wrapped up in a cloth. And she is said to have cried out his name as the cart went past her. An hour later, at 11:00 a.m. it was Janes turn. Rather than her execution being carried out on the public tower hill, she was set to be beheaded on Tower Green.

So what's difference being executed inside the tower, inside the walls was a privileged reserved for people of high rank, or for those who, quote, had dangerously strong popular support to keep them away from the gawping crowds that comes from historic royal palaces. Who manages the Tower of London today? So, as a former queen, Jane was, quote unquote, permitted the honor and privacy of meeting her death on the more civilized tower green. She was not going to be seen by the public. Wearing a black dress, she walked up the steps to the scaffold where she was going to be beheaded.

And she gave a speech to the small crowd who had been allowed to assemble there and witness the execution. She said, good people, I am come hither to die, and by a law I am condemned to the same. The fact, indeed against the queen's highness was unlawful lawful, and the consenting thereunto by me, but touching the procurement and desire thereof by me or on my behalf, I do wash my hands thereof in innocency before God and the face of you good christian people this day. So what she's doing there is admitting that what happened was unlawful, that she was not meant to take the place of Queen Mary, but she is declaring that she had no role in making that happen, or nor did she want it. Basically, she's saying that, yeah, this happened, it was wrong, but I was not the person to blame for it, I guess.

And she would have been saying this not just as a defense to the people who were there watching her be beheaded, but knowing that this was the last thing she was going to do on earth before she faced in her mind the judgment that would either send her to heaven or to hell. So she's insisting on her innocence. And she then recited psalm 51 in English, not Latin, which was another nod to her protestant faith. And she handed her gloves and handkerchief off to her maid. She then gave the prayer book that she carried to the scaffold, to the lieutenant of the tower, as well as took off her gown and her headdress and her collar, and gave those to her ladies in waiting.

The executioner came forward and asked her to forgive him, which is another kind of customary part of public execution. And she granted him forgiveness. And she said, I pray you, dispatch me quickly. This is a reference to the fact that executions, you know, normally it's a pretty simple business. You cut off the head from the body, but they were known to have gone terribly wrong.

Lady Margaret Pole is one person who. The executioner was just not good at his job. And he is said to have hacked her head and shoulder, shoulders to pieces, because he just could not get it right. So gruesome. So it was.

It was wished that if you were to be executed, you would have a swift one. She is also said to have asked the executioner about her head, saying, will you take it off before I lay me down? So she was apparently worried that once she put the blindfold on, that people going to be executed were given, the axeman would strike before she had a chance to put her head on the block. The axeman answered her, no, madam. And so she then put the blindfold on herself in probably the most famous part of this execution.

She then could not find the block. She could not locate where it was on the ground. She was reaching out with her hands and she cried out, what shall I do? Where is it? She was visibly distressed, more so than she had been at.

Just like the fact that she was about to be beheaded. It was probably Sir Thomas Brydges, who was the deputy lieutenant of the tower, who helped her kind of locate the block and get her in position with her head now on the executioner's block. Jane decided that her last words would be the last words of Jesus as they come to us from the gospel of Luke. She said, lord, into thy hands I commend myself, spirit. And she was beheaded in one clean stroke of the axe.

She was 17 years old. She and Gifford were buried beneath the altar of the Towers Chapel Royal. This is the chapel of St Peter ad Vincula, which is a Tudor era church that also houses the remains of Anne Boleyn, Catherine Howard and Sir Thomas More. As for the rest of Jane's family, I told you that her father would be the last Duke of Suffolk. He was found guilty for his part in the Wyatt rebellion.

His titles were all stripped, so they were returned to the crown. They would not pass to anybody else in his family. And he too was executed eleven days after Jane. On February 23, Jane's mother, Frances Brandon, the dowager Duchess of Suffolk, was fully pardoned by Queen Mary, and she was allowed to live at court with Jane's two younger sisters. She married her master of the horse and her chamberlain, a man named Adrian Stokes, in March 1555 and died in 1559.

So now, with that beau neatly tying up the lives of these people, we can finally get to the art. That's what you're here for. It's only been an hour, so Jane and her tragic end have inspired a number of artists to create works showing her final moments over the years. These range from, there's a painting of her in the tower with her ladies, kind of like distressing at what's about to happen. There's one of her with the chaplain trying to convince her to convert to Catholicism, and it's just not working.

Most of the early works depicting Jane Grey showed her as a protestant martyr, a woman who was willing to die rather than renounce her faith. But by the 19th century, where all of these revolutions have happened and all of these ancient regimes in Europe have been toppled, Jane was starting to be seen as more of an innocent victim of politics than a martyr. And I think these depictions are closer to the truth. The painting we're going to discuss in just a moment is one of these. Jane, in my view, was a young girl who was kind of just caught up in the political conflicts of her time, primarily because of her desires to be, I think, a good obesity, obedient daughter and wife.

Her religious piety ended up being her downfall only insofar as it inspired her to kind of adhere to these social norms and gender roles, particularly when it came to, you know, showing deference to your elders and people who she would have, you know, taken upon herself to see as her betters, people who knew better than her. So this characterization, rather than that of strictly a religious martyr, I think, is what we find find in Paul Delaroches painting. The execution of Lady Jane Grey from. 1833 history daily is sponsored by indeed this week was one of my employees four year work anniversary. She was only the second employee I ever hired back when it was just me and one other.

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That's code audioloonial.com for $50 off your purchase. Blue nile.com code audio so in this. Painting, which remember, you can find on the instagram if you're not just googling it. In this painting, Delaroche has used kind of a mix of historical fact and high drama to show this scene happening. It shows the moment just before Jane Jane's execution, when she is searching for the executioner's block and saying, where is it?

Amanda Matta
Where is it? Rather than setting the scene outdoors on Tower Green, Delaroche has instead placed Jane in this kind of very gloomy monochrome interior. Presumably this is inside like a cell at the Tower of London. It is possible that some earlier executions at Tower Green actually happened inside a building that no longer stands there, but it's pretty much assumed and mostly concluded that janes did take place outside, but instead, Delaroche has invented this interior where the architecture is made up of very heavy romanesque features. They would have been found in kind of the earliest iteration of the Tower of London during the reign of William the Conqueror.

Did I say Norman the Conqueror? Earlier, I might have. It's the norman invasion. William the Conqueror Conqueror, just for the record. Anyway, so all of these very heavy, oppressive features kind of lend this really grim backdrop to this scene.

So that kind of tells you right away how Delaroche is feeling about this execution. Jane herself is the focal point of the painting, which is life sized. So imagine that you're being confronted. If you go see this painting, it's in the National Gallery. You're being confronted with a life size lady Jane Gray looking for the executioner's block.

That choice by the artist to depict Jane in the moment when she famously cried out, what shall I do? Where is it? This is another choice that is meant to emphasize Jane's innocence. Both, I think, in terms of, like, her actual culpability in the crimes of which she was accused and in her personality. I think she was a very innocent, meek person.

The man who is directing her towards the block is supposed to be Sir John Bridges, the lieutenant of the tower. And the executioner stands waiting to the right. He's leaning on his axe and he looks very reluctant to do the task he's been hired to do. Just below Jane's outstretched hands, you can indeed see the executioner's block. So her hands kind of guide our gaze down to it, so there's no mistake at what is about to happen.

And the block is laid atop a bunch of straw. It is clean for right now, but, you know, you're very aware that this is going to shortly soak up the blood from her beheading. There's no nice way to say it. Jane is not wearing any jewelry. She's already taken off her outer clothes.

But on her outstretched hand, if you zoom in, you can just catch a simple gold wedding band just hammering home the point that she is a good girl, she's a dutiful wife. And this is. It's all so tragic. Her white underdress, her petticoat is another, like, focal point of the scene. It is depicted in this almost like, ethereal, glowing white.

It's so bright, it's supposed to look like satin. And the focus of light on it helps to reinforce Jane as, like, a saintly figure. She almost looks like an angel here. And she's very vulnerable with her, like, very bright skin. It's all.

She's so perfect and just, like, begging to be. I hate to say the word, but, like, defiled. And, you know, that's what's about to happen to her. It's not at all hard to imagine that this white dress, again, is soon going to be stained with blood. Off to the left, you can see Jane's ladies in waiting.

One is facing the wall, presumably too distressed to watch what's about to happen, happen. And the other one is kind of slumped to the ground. Her eyes are closed, and she holds Jane's gown and her jewels on her lap. So these items are sumptuously decorated. The dress is, like orange, gold and red.

Not the simple black clothes that Jane would have actually worn to her execution. Jane's hair in the scene, too, it's, you know, this golden hair, it's cascading down her shoulder again. But in reality, that would have been pinned up so that it did not impede the executioner's work. Jane's porcelain skin, of course, is supposed to draw your eye, but so are the necks of her ladies in waiting. If you go back to them for a moment, you will see that both of their necks are highlighted.

They're very, very accessible to the viewer. And this foreshadows the fate that is going to meet their mistress in just a minute. All of the figures in this painting, with their life size scale and the dramatic staging, have kind of been compared over the years to actors on a stage. This was probably intentional, for one thing, the spotlighting of Jane as the central figure and the, you know, pockets of shadow across the rest of the scene, they amplify the drama here. It's reminiscent of lighting on a stage.

All of the actors facial features, too, and their poses could just as easily translate to stage actors. Delaroche may have actually been inspired by the theater and by an artistic style specifically known as tableau vivant, literally a living picture. Tableau vivant. These were real life scenes containing stationary, silent actors or models. Usually they were carefully positioned, they were costumed, and they carried props.

These living scenes had gained popularity in the Middle Ages as a means of either illustrating scenes from the Bible or mythology or for just providing entertainment at a royal court. They had a resurgence in the 19th century, partially due to the advent of photography. If you staged a scene like this with actors and models and they held perfectly still, you could then capture that image with a kid camera. Tableau vivant could also be found on parade floats. So the staging of the figures, very intentional, very theatrical.

And reinforcing this sense of drama is actually the physical surface that Delaroche has painted for them, for Jane and her companions to stand on. They're all crammed into this very shallow space. If you look at where the background of the painting is versus the foreground, it's a very narrow area. And the scaffold, you can see the edge of it right at the bottom of the canvas. It almost, like, protrudes into the real world.

And it kind of looks like it could be a literal stage in a theater, that we are just standing right below. This, coupled with the fact that the painting is life size, gives you the sense, if you stand in front of it, that you could step right into the scene. Of course, this makes the gravity of the event unfolding in the picture all the more intense. If you do see this painting in person, it's really a picture that you need to sort of, like, take a minute. It's breathtaking, but, yeah, it's a lot to take in.

And that's how I think Delleroche wanted it to be received. He wanted you to be affected if you were to view this, because, after all, you're looking at the final moments of the Lady Jane Grey's life. He wanted to drive home the point that in the midst of all this spectacle and this drama and, you know, all this historical, you know, we have fun telling these stories. Right in the midst of all that was a 17 year old girl about to be killed for a crime of treason, of which she was almost certainly innocent, at least, you know, in her heart. Deloroche's painting caused a huge sensation when it was revealed at the Paris Salon in 1834.

Audiences really liked it. This salon is coming just a few years after the latest revolution in France, that is the 1830 July Revolution. This deposed king, Charles X of France, who was the last of the bourbon monarchs. He was the brother of King Louis XVI of France, who was the one, you know, that famously was executed during the big French Revolution. Delaroche actually painted numerous other subjects from british history, including one of the princes in the Tower.

He painted one called the Earl of Strafford, led to his execution. And this is a weird one, the death of Elizabeth I. Or I've also seen it called Elizabeth I dying on the floor. It's interesting. Go look it up.

Delleroche also painted one scene that was based entirely on an urban legend. It was called Cromwell lifting the coffin lid on the body of Charles I. This one was exhibited at the 1831 Paris Salon, which was the first to be held after the July revolution. And, of course, Cromwell, Charles I, we're talking about the english revolution here. So he's hearkening back to that.

And Cromwell in that painting was understood to be a stand in for Napoleon. And the painting as a whole would have been read as a commentary on the first French Revolution. So Napoleon, in that, like, reading of the picture, would have been looking down at the body of Louis XVI and reflecting on the way that he had replaced the old regime. That painting irked some of Delleroche's contemporaries, including Delacroix, which was one of his friends and fellow painters. But it really encapsulated a fact that I think we need to know about Delaroche is that he was nostalgic for the old days of monarchy in France.

If we return then, to his painting of the execution of Lady Jane Grey, this can now be read, I think, slightly differently. It draws upon some of those memories of revolution in France, maybe even of the execution of the french queen, Marie Antoinette. Both Marie Antoinette and Jane Grey could be seen as women who were skinned, scapegoated, and used as figureheads for the ambitions and misdoings when it came to overthrowing a regime of the men around them. Delleroche actually completed a separate painting showing Marie Antoinette before the revolutionary tribunal in 1793 that condemned her to death. And in that painting, Marie Antoinette is depicted with sort of this no nonsense air.

She's not youthful in the picture. She's not particularly beautiful. She's not particularly queenly in her stance in this scene. But Delaroche does depict her with some degree of respectability. She sort of appears as this, like, stately, respectable widow.

She has this very stoic expression on her face. It's not a caricature by any means, and it easily could have gone that direction up to this point, Delaroche had built his career as an extremely popular artist on these huge, realistic portrayals of famous events from history. They were, quote, often of a tragic nature, but he depicted them with kind of this realism and this acceptance of what was happening in them. Most of the events he depicted took place in the previous few centuries. Delaroche was born in Paris in 1797, and he was trained by the famous history painter Baron Grose from 1818 onward.

He was also friendly with the painter Theodore Jericho, who was a recent subject on this podcast. From the raft of the medusa episode, Delleroche was fairly successful fairly quickly. He first exhibited at the Paris Salon in 1822. Now, three years after the resounding success of the execution of the Lady Jane Grey, the National Gallery notes that hostile criticisms of the works he then submitted discouraged Delarosh from exhibiting again at the salon. So by the mid 1830s, from what I can tell, partly because of his fondness for pro monarchy subjects, Delarosh got very poor reviews.

He, like, took this hard right also into depicting religious scenes, like, with great seriousness. So people just kind of were turned off by this. His final piece to be exhibited at the Salon was Charles I, insulted by Cromwell's soldiers in 1836. So he's kind of doubling down on this anti revolution stuff. After 1837, he would stop exhibiting altogether.

He never showed his works in public again. I think he died in the 1850s. I believe his painting showing Jane's execution, like I said, it takes a different direction than many of his work, works which had this air of austerity about them in this painting. Instead, he dialed the drama up to ten on an event that would have taken place nearly 300 years before. Audiences knew Delleroche for his meticulous attention to detail.

And he was well known for consulting numerous historical accounts in constructing his scenes. Still, in this one, we find him executing quite a bit of artistic license and altering those details to suit his chosen presentation of the event. I think the goal, like I said, was to make Jane look innocent and worthy of being called a martyr, even though it was kind of the politics that ultimately condemned her. And, you know, they say that you have to know the rules in order to break them. And I think the same is true of Deloroche's paintings.

He knew the history of Jane Grey's execution, I'm fairly confident of that. And he bent it in order to get the viewer to see it from his point of view. Incidentally, this same problem has impacted what we know about Lady Jane herself. With so much of her life played out against this backdrop of court intrigue. Many of the, quote unquote, facts pertaining to her life, you know, as they come to us from the historical record, are they're coming from people with agendas.

And this is true of any, you know, writing of history, but it's especially true here because we know so little about Jane, because her life was so short. Facts of her life and her beliefs, they may have been changed in order to sway interrogations or to, you know, decide the outcome of a trial. It's very possible that people were recording what they needed to in order to get by. And we may never know for certain who Jane was. In, like, a personal sense, the story of her.

Tragic and like what we see in Delaroche's painting is what most people associate with her. Now to tie a ribbon on this painting here. The painting was purchased, following the 1834 Paris Salon by a russian nobleman for his collection of art. From him, it passed in 1870 to a british baron. In 1891, he held an auction at Christie's, and his son purchased it for a sum of 1575 pounds.

The sun then bequeathed it to London's National Gallery in 1902, where it was going to remain for the next few decades. Now, in 1928, the River Thames burst its banks and it flooded much of London's riverside, which is where the Tate Gallery is today. It's the Tate Modern. But at that time, the Tate modern was known as the Tate Gallery, and this was where the national collection was housed. And this is where the execution of Lady Jane Grey was residing.

The painting was thought to have been among those destroyed in the flooding. In 1973, the Tate Gallery's curator, Christopher Johnstone, was writing a book on a different painter, a british painter named John Martin, and he was examining some damaged canvases left from the flood back in 1928. He was hoping to find a missing painting by Martin among them, and he found it. He did find it, but it was rolled up inside the execution of Lady Jane Grey. Remarkably, the rediscovered Delaroche canvas was in way better condition than the one he was actually looking for.

That was a painting called the destruction of Pompeii and her culanium. So I don't know. I don't know what that says. But, you know, today the execution of Lady Jane Grey is the one we know. I don't know what that other one looks like.

From there, the painting was transferred to the National Gallery, which had been made a separate entity a few decades before, where you can still see it today. If you do go to London, first of all, go to the National Gallery, go to the National Portrait Gallery. You will see so many pieces I have talked about on this show, but I also highly recommend going to the Tower of London. If you visit the tower, there is a beautiful memorial to the ten people who were executed inside the tower walls on tower Green. Obviously, many more were executed outside the tower walls, but this is a monument just to the ten who lost their lives, you know, right there on that spot.

This is right outside the chapel of St. Peter ad Vincula, which you can also visit. Also highly recommend. The monument consists of a circular stone base, atop which sits a glass disc and a carved glass pillow. I've always thought, I've never read this anywhere, but I've always thought this is a much more honorable place for these ten individuals to lay their heads rather than on the executioner's block.

I will post a picture of this memorial on the instagram, the base in a circle. It reads, gentle visitor, pause awhile where you stand. Death cut away the light of many days. Here, jeweled names were broken from the vivid thread of life. May they rest in peace while we walk the generations around their strife and courage under these restless skies.

On the upper portion, the glass disk are listed the names of the people, seven of them. Nobles who were beheaded near that spot. Jane's name is right there in the middle of them, and she remains the shortest reigning monarch in all of english history. So now you know why she is one of my historical obsessions. It's an absolutely tragic story, one that could have gone so many different ways, and like I said, one that really determined the future of the english monarchy.

Like, imagine Edward hadn't changed his will. Imagine Mary was the undisputed catholic heir, and so many things would have been different. But the one thing I wish would have been different is that Jane would have been allowed to just live out the rest of her days, get some peace, get some time away from that crazy court. But alas, that is not what happened. So I hope you've enjoyed this episode as much as I have, kind of diving into the finer details of a story that you may have known kind of well, to begin with.

Before you go, I will remind you that I will be leading a trip to the United Kingdom, Scotland in June, and then to Germany and Austria in September. If you're interested in just seeing where we're headed or in booking a spot, I'll put the links in the episode description. You only need to pay. I think it's, like, 25% of the total trip cost in order to reserve your spot, and you can find it. So if you're interested in traveling this year, hit me up.

You can also message me with any questions to let me know if you liked the episode or to suggest future topics. You can email me at Art of history pod. Yes. Sorry. I always do this.

Artofhistorypodmail.com. or you can send me a DM on the Instagram, which is artofhistorypodcast on Instagram. I'm gonna go make myself a cup of tea with honey in it, because I. I have wrecked my voice. I did not anticipate this.

Stay safe out there, y'all keep your masks on. This is ridiculous. What's going on? This flu season, and I got my flu shot and my Covid booster, so bad things do happen to good people. Okay, that's all for me today, folks.

I gotta go. Thank you so much for listening, and I will see you in the next one.

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Saturday Matinee: Art of History

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1: Introduction to Art as Historical Commentary

2: Deep Dive into "The Execution of Lady Jane Grey"

3: The Role of Art in Society

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