With the coming of cinema the visual sense began to dominate the entertainment world. It needed less effort than reading and it was soon cheaper to go to the cinema than to the theatre. Figures from the past came out of the history books and could now be presented against wider and moving décor, while royal personages, famous and infamous, heroes and villains were suddenly more popular than ever. Women of course had to be glamorous. The story of Jane Shore led to four early films about her, the first in 1908 and the last of them in 1922, with Sybil Thorndike in the part of the heroine. After a long gap Jane appeared again, played by Sandra Knight in a second version of The Tower of London in 1962.
The film of 1915, known in England as Jane Shore and in the United States as The Strife Eternal is memorable through the sheer complicated horror of the screenplay, which was credited to both Rowe and Wills. Rowe would certainly not have recognised it as having been partly inspired by his work but the garbled story would have suited Wills through its total disregard of history and biography. For good measure there are two Shore brothers, William and Matthew, there is treachery, jealousy and every melodramatic incident possible. The Duke of Gloucester tries to bribe Jane into sex by saying that if she refuses him her husband will be killed. When King Edward is dying he asks Hastings to look after Jane. They are to get married but the wedding ceremony is interrupted by Gloucester’s order for Hastings’ arrest. Then Jane is arrested too, for witchcraft, this event being overtaken by a snowstorm, the episode invented earlier by Wills in his melodrama and found by his audiences to be deeply impressive. Matthew finds Jane in the snow (of course) and they are to be reconciled, presumably, which seems to be the end; but in fact the film is not complete. A detailed and well-illustrated booklet presenting the whole drama was produced for publicity reasons and fortunately a copy has been preserved in the Bodleian Library; it expresses the atmosphere of the film with all its muddled history and inventions. It is unfair to say that it saves the trouble of watching the film but it is helpful to anyone who feels overwhelmed by the complications of the plot. Only film historians would recognise any names in the cast list, but the film, produced by Barker Motion Photography, obviously combined some vague hints of the true story with the added attraction of swashbuckling excitement and a heavy dash of romantic melodrama.
As the visual sense developed in all spheres and film-making became an essential part of the cultural scene, the inevitable question was asked about Jane as about any heroine from history: what did she really look like? Jane was always one of the most mysterious of royal mistresses and now designers hoped to find a reliable image of her somewhere. But where? Searching through history for clues to her appearance still remains a confusing and disappointing task. In the Middle Ages the art of portraiture was not highly developed in England and had still to catch up with the Italian and French painters, while Holbein did not come to London until 1526. However, it was usual for a royal personage to be painted, often in connection with diplomatic marriage arrangements, and the same was true of certain aristocrats. As mentioned earlier, the handsome King Edward IV is only remembered in painting through disappointingly boring work, although the anonymous painter of the portrait in the Royal Collection seems to have been tolerably interested in portraying the king’s decorative clothes. Edward’s wife, Queen Elizabeth Woodville, known to be beautiful, fared much better, fortunately for her. Nobody would have troubled to produce portraits of Edward’s many mistresses, for none of these ladies lasted long enough. The so-called authentic portrayals of Jane, who lasted about thirteen years at the king’s side until his death, never seeking publicity, seem to have been completed long after her youth or even after her death; most of them were imaginary or unfortunately lost. Even her colouring remains mysterious: the poet Michael Drayton referred to her hair as ‘dark yellow’, while her eyes were grey. Over the centuries her eyes were sometimes blue, her hair was occasionally black but most of the time it remained safely blonde. This was almost inevitable, and in the seventeenth century Robert Burton, in his analysis of beauty as one cause of ‘Love-Melancholy’, emphasised, with many examples from the classical world, the irresistible power of fair hair, among gods, heroes and women. More, in his description of Jane, does not mention details of this kind, being preoccupied with her character, not her physical appearance, but he did indicate that she could have been a little taller.
As the name of Jane Shore became famous or infamous during the late fifteenth century and later, many engravings were made, perhaps from sketches or lost portraits, but they may not have had much relation to truth. The Archive Collection in London’s National Portrait Gallery includes many attractive images of Jane, some with attributions or references, most without. Some became well known through constant reproduction, especially the early portrayal of her penance by Edward Scriven, based on a painting by Walter Stevens Lethbridge, in which she casts her eyes up to heaven as though yearning pathetically for forgiveness.
In this context nothing can equal the drawing made by William Blake in 1778 when he was a young man of twenty-one. The figures of Jane and those accompanying her are all strategically placed, while the draping of the penitential sheet that she wears over her ‘kirtle’, a shift or petticoat, seems to follow the rhythm of her walk. Blake never made any direct or detailed reference to this work, not even in his notes to the catalogue of his 1809 exhibition, where it is given as Number XVI, the last in his list of drawings. He presumably regarded it as one of his ‘Historical Inventions’ and uses its inclusion to make a point that he regarded as important: ‘This Drawing was done about Thirty Years ago, and proves to the Author, and he thinks will prove to any discerning eye, that the productions of our youth and of our maturer age are equal in all essential points.’ Blake had obviously been attracted to this moment in Jane’s life by her lonely, dignified independence: she had broken the rules of middle-class Christian morality, been deserted by friends and punished severely, all of which surely explains why he chose to perpetuate her memory: she was the kind of character who interested him. It is the most memorable of all the imaginary and imaginative portrayals of Jane, although it does not pretend to be a likeness; in his poem ‘Jerusalem, Part II’, Blake had written one line that could be relevant to the way he saw her: ‘Every Harlot was once a virgin: every Criminal an Infant Love.’ The work illustrating Jane’s penance is now in the Tate Britain Gallery in London.
For at least two centuries after Jane’s death the engravers were certainly busy, reproducing portraits of her by successful artists such as Lethbridge and Scriven. Blake disapproved (could he have been envious?) of his successful contemporary, the Italian-born Francesco Bartolozzi, who was responsible for many attractive images of Jane. The Archive Collection of the National Portrait Gallery includes work by him and by many unknown engravers reproducing equally unknown paintings or sketches, most of them reasonably attractive.
These portraits, all created after Jane’s youth and even after her death, include one of Jane apparently defending herself against an accusation of witchcraft at a court held in the Tower of London, ordered or at least threatened by Richard III, of which there seems to be no record: possibly it never took place. The image shows Jane wearing a dashing hat with a brim, enhanced by jewellery and a white plume, clad in smart clothes which look much more Elizabethan than medieval. If any such trial took place – and the print concerned is wrongly dated 1482, before Edward’s death, in fact – Jane would surely have escaped any trouble because she looks so confident and dignified. It has been assumed that Richard III ordered her penance because in the end there was no reliable proof that Jane and Edward’s widowed queen had together used witchcraft to bring about his withered arm: everyone knew that it had always been in that condition.
There are many more of these unsourced reproductions which can only supply a partial answer to the question, What did Jane look like? A few paintings exist which are as controversial as almost everything else about this mysterious woman, and none more so than the anonymous works preserved at Eton College and Queens’ College, Cambridge, assumed to have been acquired by both establishments because she is said to have dissuaded Edward IV from any action he might have taken against them. Few welcome remarks have ever been made about these portraits although one was cited in an early tourist account (1818) of ‘England, Wales & Scotland’. The apparently learned author, Thomas Welford, Esq FSA, FLS, refers to Eton College as ‘a beautiful building near Windsor. In the Provost’s apartments is a portrait of Jane Shore upon a panel, supposed an original’. This terse sentence is all this long-forgotten writer has to say about Eton, leading Nicolas Barker, who quoted it in Etoniana, 2 December 1972, to add ‘surely the strangest description of the College ever written’.1
The so-called ‘learned author’ was presumably referring to the best-known portrait of Jane accessible today which was included in the 2004 edition of the Dictionary of National Biography accompanying the relevant entry. Undoubtedly the artist could not have known much about her appearance or character, for her expression is sour: one cannot imagine that Jane ever looked like that. However, efforts had been made to give her the fashionable look favoured in her time, with her forehead made higher by shaving her hair at the front, a treatment that can be seen in other contemporary portraits of women. The unknown artist had given her a small pursed mouth and omitted any possible sign of charm from her expression. The jewellery, an important part of the portrait, appears also in the portrait at Queens’ College, Cambridge, and in several engravings: two rows of pearls high up, close to the neck, while below them is a heavy necklace set with jewels and carrying a pendant which hangs slightly above the high-placed, youthfully firm bare breasts. Far preferable is the engraving by Bartolozzi, who may well have set aside some reality for the sake of charm: the jewellery is the same as in many other likenesses, but there are extra jewels in her hair and there is even a hint of a smile on a young and pretty face.
The view among art experts today is that the paintings at Eton and Cambridge have little to do with Jane as she was in reality; they are thought to be at the most copies, possibly of some earlier likenesses but made to look like the fashionable portraits from the sixteenth-century School of Fontainebleau showing Diane de Poitiers, mistress of Henri II of France. Perhaps this is correct, for the high forehead, the jewellery and the bare breasts are common to both the English and French portraits, even if Diane looks sexily attractive and Jane does not. Perhaps however it took the Italian Bartolozzi to remember that Jane had once been a beautiful and attractive young woman. In the seventeenth century Nell Gwynn was luckier, being painted by Sir Peter Lely, although it must be admitted that many of his women sitters look very much like each other.
During the early nineteenth-century Romantic period in France, English subjects were popular with dramatists and also apparently with some painters. Eugène Delacroix painted an imaginary portrait of Jane, said to be now in private ownership in Switzerland, according to information received from Geoffrey Wheeler.
So what was the reality of Jane’s appearance? Was it that reality of remembered beauty described by Keats in a letter to his friend Benjamin Baily dated 22 November 1817: ‘What the imagination seizes as beauty must be truth, whether it existed before or not’? It has to be imagined also from what is known of her life, her character and how others reacted to her. In 1933 C.J.S. Thompson divided his description of her existence into two parts – Jane Shore in History and Romance and Jane Shore in Poetry and Drama. He also included portraits and engravings of Jane, few of them reliable and none of them attractive. Forty years later, in 1972, Nicolas Barker published his groundbreaking discoveries in Etoniana, with detailed references to all his sources, while Sir Robert Birley, formerly Head Master of Eton, contributed Jane Shore in Literature, followed by Some Further Appearances, admitting the danger of using the word ‘final’. In December 1981 Professor James Lowell Harner listed in Notes and Queries some seventy-seven items of literature relevant to Jane, including ballads and chapbooks, poems and dramas of many kinds, some perhaps close to history, some merely revisions of known texts and some clearly invented. He also added novels based on her story, details of the early films, together with articles in academic journals and several relevant PhD dissertations. He added for 1972 his own unpublished PhD dissertation: ‘Jane Shore: A Biography of a Theme in Renaissance Literature’. All these details build up the elements for a life and understanding of the mysterious Jane, but there can never be a gallery of authentic portraits representing her fabled beauty.
Taking a further look back, the great actresses of the eighteenth century no doubt after some professional advice brought Jane a new lease of life, and transmitted their version of what she had possibly looked like and how she might have dressed, although actors and actresses preferred on the whole to appear in the clothes of their own era. Fortunately prints of Mrs Oldfield, Sarah Siddons, Mary Ann Yates and others as they took part in Rowe’s successful play about Jane can all be seen in the National Portrait Gallery and some at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. They cannot be regarded as portraits of Jane, but they represent something of her personality and the ambiance about her that remained mysterious and intrigued the theatre audiences. They seem to prove the validity of the proverb: ‘Seeing’s believing, but feeling’s the truth’. Those who drew these representations of Jane, either from real life, based on their own theatre experience, from memory or from imagination and hearsay, transmitted something about her which has to be accepted even centuries after her death, for there is no other way of knowing at least something about her presence. In the end it is only possible to be aware of her essence from what the poets and dramatists wrote about her, whether they admired or criticised her.
Such has been the curiosity about Jane that she was even introduced into various twentieth-century films and television productions of Richard III. Shakespeare did not include her in his tragedy and merely allowed some of his characters to make cynical or disapproving remarks about her; he may have distrusted the rumours that she worked secretly, surprisingly no doubt, with Queen Elizabeth Woodville by taking messages to Hastings before Richard was declared king. Perhaps Shakespeare did not care for a woman who had been condemned as a harlot, but she was undeniably present in the background to the play, undeniably also as anathema to Richard. In any case the decisions by some recent producers that Jane should be visible, silent and smiling, were little more than an experiment that is not likely to be repeated.
In the early chapbooks the resourceful but forcibly economical editors and printers often needed illustrations of Jane, and, as mentioned earlier, they often used whatever images were available, notably those of Queen Elizabeth I. Occasionally they included crude drawings of Jane dressed in a penitent’s robe. Presumably these images must have convinced the uneducated readers that the figure did somehow actually represent Jane. This seems to have been Jane’s fate – one can never see her as she truly was, one has to accept some degree of approximation. Even in the twentieth century people in the city of London wanted to remember Jane and see an image of her if they possibly could. The directors of Barclays Bank, convinced, as were many other Londoners, that she had often walked down Lombard Street, where their head office was situated, commissioned from the sculptor Alan Gourley a series of curved metal panels representing early scenes of city life. They were erected in the entrance hall at 54 Lombard Street, their head office until May 2005, and included make-believe scenes from Jane’s life. A few well-known lines from Shakespeare’s Richard III were added: ‘Shore’s wife hath a pretty foot and cherry lip, A bonny eye, a passing pleasing tongue’. The panels were moved to 33 Old Broad Street during redesign work and finally put into storage.
Occasionally tantalising references to portraits of Jane are found in unexpected places, but in the end the portraits themselves have always vanished. For instance in 1868 the National Gazetteer of Great Britain and Ireland mentioned ‘Southam-with-Brockhampton, a hamlet in the parish of Bishop’s Cleeve, hundred of Cleeve, count Gloucester, 2 miles N.E. of Cheltenham. It is situated near Cleeve Cliff, and its principal attraction is Southam House, built by Sir J. Huddlestone in Henry VII’s time. The interior contains relics of great antiquity, with portraits of Jane Shore, Edward VI., &c’. (Did the editor mean Edward IV?)
The two villages are now linked together as Southam and the old house has become a luxury hotel. The newly refurbished bedrooms ‘are named after the Kings and Queens of England and other historic families’. Those who make use of the ‘good function rooms and leisure facilities’ can enjoy views over Cheltenham racecourse but they will not see any portrait of Jane, which must have disappeared a long time ago. Perhaps there is a bedroom named after Edward IV.
As an icon, Jane nowadays represents not so much the wife who disobeyed the Church and the social rules of her time by deserting her husband and going to the arms of a lover, for this happens every day now and if it is sad, it is no longer shocking; Jane is still relevant because she represents a truly independent woman, a rare figure in the fifteenth century.
Her life was no average rags-to-riches story. Jane had not had a deprived childhood: there was no shortage of money in the Lambert household, but it was never wasted on useless things such as fashionable clothes for a teenage girl – they would come later, it was assumed, when she was a safely married woman. Shore was not a poor man, but his impotence may have meant that he did not know how to deal with an unsatisfied wife, and the result may have been a lack of generosity towards her. It is known that when she had escaped from the marriage she was particularly delighted with the ‘gay apparel’ she now possessed, and nearly all the engravings of her, plus the Eton portrait, show her wearing impressive jewellery. Her story is of great interest to all women, not only to feminists: she was an essentially feminine person who wanted a normal relationship with a normal man; through her flight from William Shore she was unconsciously trying to tell everyone that the arranged marriage could not necessarily work, it was a ‘civil contract’ indeed, a business arrangement, potentially unnatural and leading only to infidelity and unhappiness. It so happened that the man who became her long-term partner also happened to be king of England, hardly a ‘normal’ profession. Yet he himself had married for love, and despite lifelong political and social objections to his choice of queen, the marriage had been happy. Many royal mistresses who are remembered now were ambitious seekers after power and publicity, ready to grant favours to others provided they received due appreciation in return. They were nearly all insecure, the exceptions being Nell Gwynn and Dorothy Jordan, who were professional women; Jane herself was only partly secure, for the Lambert parents, people typical of their times, had brought her up with nothing more than marriage in view and therefore she could not have escaped unhappiness and poverty after the king’s death. She accepted a second husband, for how else could she have supported herself?
Her formal education had been minimal, but then she presumably learnt fast, observed and listened as the years with Edward passed. By the time he died she would have developed into a person quite different from the unhappy teenage bride who had fled respectability: she had matured in all ways but now she was without support, a fact seized upon by Richard III, who realised how vulnerable she was. He took advantage of this, especially by removing Hastings from the scene as soon as he could, otherwise Hastings, although a married man, might even have become her regular lover. His wife could even have accepted the situation: most aristocratic wives did so. In the crisis time immediately after Edward’s death Jane was alone, and that should not be forgotten. She did not spend much time lamenting her fate, even if the ballad-writers picked up that theme and developed it to the full. If Jane had learnt something about independence, she still had to accept a second marriage; there was no alternative for her, and she was not drawn to a repentant life in a convent. There seems to have been no other way of escape for a solitary woman in the late fifteenth century and there is no way of knowing the attitude of her parents, who may or may not have helped her.
The end of the twentieth century brought some reminders of what she had achieved when close to Edward IV. Earlier mentions had been scanty, none by Polydore Vergil or Dominic Mancini, while the editor of The Great Chronicle of London ended his account of Edward IV’s reign with a few disparaging lines about ‘a woman named [blank] Shore’ whose movable possessions were taken by the sheriff of London and she ‘lastly as a common harlot was put to open pennance, for the life she led with the said Lord Hastings and other great estates’.2 The editor, assumed to have been Robert Fabyan, had not troubled to add a Christian name, for ‘Jane’ had not been invented and he obviously knew no other. In the margin he added simply ‘Uxor Shore’. These stern comments were ignored by the later poets and dramatists who saw Jane as their heroine, their icon, and the images they created, although obviously not visual, brought her to life.
In the twentieth century professional academic historians tended to mention Jane in a few terse sentences or footnotes. Understandably she did not interest them, for there is no evidence that she tried to intervene in affairs of state. However, a very different chronicler, Roy Strong, in his Story of Britain,3 quoted again the words of More about Jane’s skill in reconciling differences between the king and others, inevitable in any assessment of her persona. Queen Elizabeth Woodville had dutifully given her husband ten children while Jane, who had no royal bastards, was, accordingly to this author, ‘hugely intelligent and attractive’; she had become the personal diplomat who somehow knew how to deal with the king’s problems encountered while doing so much to bring administrative order to the country after the Wars of the Roses. Roy Strong implied that Edward deserved to escape the fate of being ‘one of England’s great forgotten kings’, but he had hardly survived as a famous one. Just as Louis XV of France, four centuries later, is less remembered than his long-term mistress Madame de Pompadour, it has been Jane Shore’s legendary ‘life’ in literature, and her reputation as ‘the merriest’ of Edward’s mistresses, that have helped her king to survive among those who care about English royalty but are not themselves professional historians. In his survey Strong referred to no other royal mistresses, apart from a passing mention of Alice Perrers, and memorably described Jane as ‘an influence for the good’.
It is only fair to remember this about Jane, and not to be overwhelmed by the more melancholy works of the earlier poets and dramatists who were moved by her situation but did not see all aspects of her personality. She was more than just one name in the long list of Edward’s mistresses; Drayton and Rowe in particular had realised this, for the former wrote about the potential boredom of middle-class married life and the latter promoted her into a heroine of the new ‘domestic’ tragedy, the ‘shetragedy’, a term which he claimed to have invented. If Rowe’s presentation of her had not been so impressive, with its barely mentioned overtones about the inequality of women, his play would not have travelled the world in the way it did. Although no clear image of Jane has survived showing us what she looked like or precisely what good works she performed, over many centuries the shadows have at least begun to fade, and if her real life may probably never move into the full glare of publicity – something she never wanted – Sir Thomas More’s much-quoted phrase is still justified, ‘for yet she liveth’.
ENVOI
Jane has not disappeared. During her lifetime she survived several contrasting periods of existence: a normal family background at first, despite the uncertainties of war, then a violent and risky breakaway to a completely changed life which brought several years of happiness; then a second violent break, a few surely happy years, then finally poverty and loneliness. She still remains mysterious. However, in the end she may have experienced something like peace. During her very last years she may have lived briefly close to her own family again in the countryside, for there is one place where unexpectedly an image, if not a portrait of her, can be seen, in the village of Hinxworth at the northern tip of Hertfordshire.
In the twenty-first century Hinxworth still possesses most features of the ideal English village: cottages and small houses with well-kept thatched roofs, a welcoming pub, also thatched, neat gardens, wild flowers in the hedges, surrounding lanes with well-maintained farms situated some way from the roads with their rows of trees, and notably the small, simple, beautifully maintained church of St Nicholas. It is approached through a short avenue of lime trees leading towards the large churchyard which includes just a few ancient lichened headstones and hardly any modern ones.
Some parts of the building date from the early fourteenth century and so when John Lambert decided to retire to this village in the late fifteenth century, he and his family would attend what was for them a fairly modern church. It is known from his will that he had had a chapel in his own house, which had been true of his city home in Silver Street and presumably also of the house he bought in this village, possibly the grand and well-preserved Hinxworth Place of today. It seems likely that if members of his family came to stay, they might all have gone to St Nicholas’ church together, but in any case they are all together there now, commemorated in a set of brasses affixed to their tomb, which is marked by a large slab of marble in the floor of the chancel, a few feet from the altar itself. This setting was described by the seventeenth-century antiquary Henry Chauncy in History of Antiquities in Hertfordshire. The brasses, ordered apparently by the eldest Lambert son John, show eight figures in all, two large ones representing John Lambert and his wife Amy, and beneath his figure a row of much smaller ones, led on the left by that of a tall man, presumably the eldest son, John. Since John Lambert the elder seems to have had only three sons, the fourth figure has been taken to represent Jane’s second husband, Thomas Lynam, John’s son-inlaw, mentioned in his will. Opposite this row of men, beneath the figure of Amy, is a tall female figure wearing the married woman’s headdress, assumed to be Jane. Behind her is one small figure thought to represent her little daughter, Julian Lynam, also mentioned in her grandfather’s will; when he died, in 1487, she would have been about three years old. This is the only record of her that has survived, for she may have died young. In addition to the figures, the marble slab is embellished with various coats of arms and the individual merchant’s mark originally used by John Lambert. The link between the Lambert-Lynam family and the Hinxworth church was discovered, like so much else in this story, by Nicolas Barker whose research is described in Etoniana in 1972,4 enhanced by reproductions of the brasses on the tomb, including one set out in diagrammatic form.
Inevitably, over the centuries, the brasses were damaged as members of the congregation walked over them when they came to the altar rail to take communion. In the end a carpet was laid down covering the tomb and on its underside there is a plea for it to be replaced neatly ‘over the lady’, presumably the large figure of Amy Lambert. Some time ago the church representatives asked the Mercers’ Company in the city if they could help with the expense of transferring the brasses to the wall, where they would escape damage; but it was decided in the end to leave them in the chancel beneath their protective carpet, for otherwise these valuable artefacts might have been stolen. However, when a new cloth was recently added to the altar the small carved diagram on the tomb which represented the Lambert merchant’s mark was embroidered on to it, along with other motifs from the church decoration. Copies of the brasses have apparently been placed in the Barbican Centre in the city of London.
So if Jane herself had been no saint, and no early writer seems to have noticed that she showed any obvious signs of devotion, visitors to the church can examine the brasses and read a short account of her life prepared by the Church Recorder in a contribution to The North Hertfordshire Decorative and Fine Arts Society Newsletter of 2003. The date of her death may remain uncertain but her memory has been preserved in an essentially peaceful place where for once tranquility surrounds her. She will be remembered for ever in this quiet village. It may have been the scene of family reunion, and the tomb in St Nicholas’ church is a moving memorial that shows how even a once-broken family can be reunited in death and then remembered. As George Eliot wrote in Adam Bede: ‘our dead are never dead to us until we have forgotten them’.
By a coincidence the dramatist, Nicholas Rowe, remembered for his drama The Tragedy of Jane Shore, produced in 1714, was born at his maternal grandfather’s house in the village of Little Barford, Bedfordshire in 1674, about 20 miles away. It seems unlikely that he ever knew of Jane’s memorial in Hinxworth. Neither would he ever have known that after the later success of his play, his heroine would be remembered, after more centuries had passed, in such contrasting works as early films and academic theses in Germany and the United States.
Soon after her death Jane had been remembered differently, especially in popular ballads and that tradition has never been lost, for in 1954 the Irish poet, Donald MacDonagh wrote what may be the last ballad ever composed about her, ‘The Ballad of Jane Shore’.5 It takes the reader back to her early days in the city of London, along with remembrances of Sir Thomas More’s description of her. Some details are out of date but the fact that they belong in the end to legend rather than to history is an essential part of Jane’s story – after all, some seven centuries have passed since she was close to an English king:
As she went down through Lombard Street
To make her open penitence
Her cheeks that never blushed before
Were warm in her defence.
A linen skirt her only dress
All London stopped and wondering
A taper in the little hand
That once had held a king.
Bare to the waist, as though she rose
From the reluctant, amorous sea,
Raindrops were pearls that garlanded
Her hair’s pale filigree.
Her body, white as waxen taper
Crowned at the head with golden light,
Had ripened in a shop of gold
To be a queen by night;
And she was young and womanly,
None saw her without love or pity,
Now stripped, who lived for gay apparel,
Now shamefaced, who was witty.
Proper she was and fair of body.
A grey eye merry, a slender figure,
An ankle that a man might span
Between a thumb and finger;
And she had been the king’s gay love
Who now must beg forsakenly
From those that would be beggars still
But for her charity;
But love that’s light – once lovers die
Is as a blade that courts the rust:
The evil deed men write in marble,
The comely one in dust.
So poets, dramatists and film-makers have all remembered Jane. The story of her independent behaviour, her sufferings and struggles after Edward IV’s death impressed them, for women, and men too, could learn from her. Women of later centuries, and not only feminists, continue to discover unexpected heroines in history and legend from all times and locations. Among these half-mysterious figures Jane has not been forgotten. In the end that prophetic line by Anthony Chute in the last stanza of his poem ‘Beauty Dishonoured or Shore’s Wife’ has proved especially farsighted:
Her body went to death; her fame to life.