In Streatham portrait, how is the Background discussed?
Lady Jane Grey was the great-granddaughter of King Henry VII through his youngest daughter, Mary, and first cousin once removed of King Edward VI. After Edward's death, a Protestant faction proclaimed her queen over his Catholic half-sister, Mary. Two weeks later, Mary, with the support of the English people, claimed the throne, which Jane relinquished only nine days after being installed. Jane and her husband, Lord Guildford Dudley, were imprisoned in the Tower of London on charges of high treason. Jane's trial was conducted in November, but her sentence of death was suspended. In February 1554, Jane's father, the Duke of Suffolk, who had been pardoned, participated in Wyatt's rebellion. On 12 February, Mary had Jane, then aged 16, and her husband beheaded; Jane's father suffered the same fate two days later.Jane was a devout Protestant during the English Reformation, when the Church of England violently rejected the authority of the pope and the Roman Catholic Church. Known for her piety and education, she corresponded with Protestant leaders in Continental Europe, such as Heinrich Bullinger. A modest person who dressed plainly, her last words before her execution are reported as "Lord, into thy hands I commend my spirit!" Jane's execution by a Catholic queen made her into what the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography terms a "Protestant martyr", and by the end of the century Jane had become, in the words of the historian Eric Ives, "a Protestant icon". Depictions of Jane in the 16th and 17th centuries, such as in John Foxe's Actes and Monuments (1563), published after Protestant Elizabeth I took the throne, "presented [Jane] as primarily a figure in a national narrative about an elect nation possessed of a pure Protestant faith which had risen supreme over Catholic Europe".Jane was long thought to be the only 16th-century English monarch without a surviving contemporary portrait; one was documented in a 1590 inventory, but is now considered lost. Some identified as her were later deemed to be of other sitters, such as one of Catherine Parr, the last of the six wives of Henry VIII, which was identified as Lady Jane Grey until 1996. Other works, such as The Execution of Lady Jane Grey (1833) by Paul Delaroche, were painted years or centuries after her death. As a result, Cynthia Zarin of The New Yorker writes, "the blank where [Jane's] face should be has made it that much easier for succeeding generations to imprint their political and personal fantasies on her".
Depictions of Jane Tower of London Mary Lady Jane Grey six wives of Henry VIII Elizabeth I King Henry VII Catholic Church English Reformation The New Yorker Dictionary of National Biography Wyatt's rebellion King Edward VI pope Lord Guildford Dudley Heinrich Bullinger Paul Delaroche Duke of Suffolk Roman Catholic Church first cousin once removed John Foxe The Execution of Lady Jane Grey Oxford Dictionary of National Biography London Eric Ives Catherine Cynthia Zarin J Edward VI Catherine Parr Church of England lost Protestant Actes and Monuments last words