There is more to Lady Jane Grey — our shortest reigning monarch — than this, the most famous painting of her

It was the shortest reign in the history of England. On July 10, 1553, Lady Jane Grey was proclaimed Queen of England and Ireland, only for the Privy Council to depose her nine days later and place her cousin Mary on the throne. Lady Jane first lost the crown, then her head and, ultimately, thanks to French painter Paul Delaroche, even her dignity.

‘The art around Jane Grey is absolutely dominated by the 1833 portrait of her, kneeling with the executioner on one side,’ says historian Philippa Gregory, the author of The Last Tudor, a novel on the Grey sisters, who finds the painting ‘an absolute classic image of female weakness painted onto a woman who was not weak.

'It’s the most irritating portrait there is: Jane is on her knees. She’s blindfolded. She’s dressed in a white nightgown. It’s silk. It’s off the shoulder. It’s absurd. Her hair is all a mess and all down and, behind her, there’s a woman who ought to be supporting her, but is actually fainting for grief.’

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As for the executioner on the right, clad in red tights, says Dr Gregory: ‘He’s literally saying: “I am the patriarchy.”’ Much truer to the life of the nine-day queen, in her view, is another, far less known painting from about the 1590s, the so-called Streatham portrait, now at the National Portrait Gallery (despite historian David Starkey disputing the sitter’s identification as Grey).

In it, explains Dr Gregory, ‘she’s wearing Tudor clothes. Her hair is under a cap, as it would have been, and under her hand is a book of theology. She was an absolutely outstanding scholar, extraordinary, a child savant. She taught herself Greek and Latin and I think was learning Egyptian writing.

'She had a tremendous interest in theology and was a convinced Protestant, a reformer of the church. She knew that the consequence of not changing her faith would be death — and she took that decision in a very conscious and deliberate, and you may say, saintly way’.

Dr Gregory stops for a moment, then almost explodes with rage: ‘She was a very young woman of extraordinary scholarship and extraordinary courage, and to see her turned into this image of failure and victim-hood is a disgrace.’

Time, then, to set aside 19th-century notions of feminine frailty and romantic death and restore the history of one of Britain’s most brilliant minds.

This feature originally appeared in the print edition of Country Life on July 8, 2026. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.