Frances Grey

frances grey

First, let me make it clear that I take no credit for busting the two myths that I am about to discuss: both have been previously addressed by other authors. Nonetheless, whenever I do a search on Frances Grey, Duchess of Suffolk (née Brandon, mother of Jane Grey), I run across them, so I will discuss them here in an effort to counter all of the nonsense that a search brings up.

Myth #1: Adrian Stokes was half Frances's age. Adrian Stokes, Frances's second husband, is often said to have been half her age. In fact, Carl T. Berkhout has found that Laurence Nowell, a contemporary of Stokes, recorded the exact day and hour of Stokes' birth in a horoscope: 8 p.m. on March 4, 1519. This makes Stokes less than two years younger than Frances, born on July 16, 1517. Both parties, therefore, were in their mid-to-late thirties when they married.

But what of the story that Frances married Adrian Stokes in March 1554, just weeks after the executions of her daughter Jane and of her first husband, Henry Grey, Duke of Suffolk? Although it has been suggested recently that the marriage to Stokes took place in 1555, not in 1554, and that the 1554 date arose because of a misunderstanding of new style/old style dates, an inquisition post mortem on Frances indicates that the couple married on March 9, 1554, at Kew. It gives precise birth and death dates of Frances's and Adrian's daughter, Elizabeth, her place of birth and death, and the ages of Katherine and Mary Grey—and because it uses regnal years, not calendar years, it is unlikely that there was confusion over new style/old style dates. While it is possible that this information is incorrect, as it sometimes is in inquisitions post mortem, it also seems likely that the dates could have come from Adrian Stokes himself, who would have known this information better than anyone else.

There is, however, evidence that contradicts the March 1554 marriage date. A land grant to Frances dated April 10, 1554, makes no mention of Stokes. As late as April 21, 1555, Frances was still thought to be free to remarry: Simon Renard, the imperial ambassador, passed along the news that the Earl of Devon had been proposed as a husband for her. Still, no contemporary source states that the couple was married in 1555, and the date given in the inquisition post mortem for Elizabeth Stokes's birth, July 16, 1555, is more compatible with the 1554 wedding date. It seems more likely, then, that Frances and Adrian married in 1554, not 1555. Why Frances remarried so quickly is unknown, but it seems likely, as Elizabeth I's early biographer William Camden wrote, that she married "for her security," that is, to distance herself from the succession.

Myth #2: A double portrait of a double-chinned woman and a much younger man is that of Frances and Adrian. As readers of Josephine Tey's The Daughter of Time know, a bedridden Inspector Grant spots a portrait of Richard III and decides that he must have been a decent chap after all, and proceeds to assemble evidence to that effect. The portrait below has caused many an author to do some reverse Inspector-Granting with Frances. Richard Davy, for instance, notes the "very sinister expression" in Frances's eyes.

All of these physiognomic efforts, however, have been wasted, for the portrait was re-identified in 1986 by Susan Foister as being that of Mary Neville and her son, Gregory Fiennes--not of Frances and Adrian at all. An actual portrayal of Frances Brandon--the figure on her tomb in Westminster Abbey--could not be more different from the portrait that is still misidentified as her on various sites.

Sources:

Carl T Berkhout. Notes and Queries. London: Mar 2000. Vol. 47, Issue 1.

Karen Hearn, ed., Dynasties: Painting in Tudor and Jacobean England 1530-1630.

Eric Ives, Lady Jane Grey: A Tudor Mystery

Leanda de Lisle, The Sisters Who Would Be Queen: Mary, Katherine, and Lady Jane Grey.

Copyright © 2011 Susan Higginbotham

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