The Signing of the Death Warrant of Lady Jane Grey

Charles Burt’s print is a faithful reproduction of a painting by American artist Daniel Huntington (1816–1906), created for wide distribution. For this image, Huntington looked back to sixteenth-century English history and the moment when Queen Mary Tudor, who turned back the tide of religious Reformation begun under her father, Henry VIII, condemned to death the pious sixteen-year-old Lady Jane Grey. As a Protestant claimant to the throne, Jane was the tool of her politically ambitious father-in-law; she soon became an icon of the Reform cause as a symbol of the religious persecution cruelly visited on Protestants during the reign of “Bloody Mary.” Jane’s innocent victimhood was recounted in texts from John Foxe’s 1563 Book of Martyrs to popular histories and biographies aimed at a growing female readership in pre-Civil War America. Her calm preparation for death was a popular subject for artists and illustrators in England, France, and the United States, but Huntington focused instead on Mary’s signing of Jane’s death warrant. In doing so, he reinterpreted the queen as Jane’s mirror-image in powerless victimhood: Mary hesitates over the death warrant, reluctant to seal the innocent girl’s fate as compelled by the figure posed menacingly over her, the ambassador who stands in for her powerful consort, Philip II of Spain. Redeemed from true responsibility for Jane’s death, Huntington’s Mary served a contemporary ideal of womanhood that honored a yielding deference to male authority and warned of women’s inherent unfitness for the masculine realm of public affairs.

Huntington’s painting was purchased by New York’s American Art-Union, a short-lived subscription-based organization that aimed to support American artists and foster a national taste in art. The canvas (now unlocated) was won by a subscriber in Ohio in the Art-Union’s annual lottery in 1848, the same year that some 15,000 impressions of Burt’s large engraving were sent out to the organization’s membership. Although the Art-Union professed to promote American subject matter as well as American artists, Huntington’s Signing of the Death Warrant was among several dramatic images from English sixteenth- and seventeenth-century history by various artists that it purchased and engraved, demonstrating the perceived popularity of such subjects. Huntington’s image presumes viewers’ familiarity with Lady Jane Grey’s story; evidently, it was unnecessary to name its central figure in the title inscribed in the print’s bottom margin.

Huntington’s painting was one of a group of English Reformation subjects the artist made in the late 1840s. They marked a radical departure from the New Testament themes and contemplative Christian allegories with which, along with his sympathetic portraits and pastoral landscape images, he had been drawing favorable notice for a decade. The artist, a devout Episcopalian, turned to English Reformation history through a deep concern with the rising international influence of Roman Catholicism which, in tandem with mass Irish Catholic immigration to the United States, aroused the anxiety of many American Protestants. Most of Huntington’s Reformation paintings celebrate persecuted heroines of religious reform, including Queen Elizabeth as an imprisoned princess and Lady Jane Grey herself. Some critics decried the stridently sectarian tenor of these works, perhaps prompting Huntington’s unexpectedly sympathetic portrayal of Mary in The Signing of the Death Warrant, in which she appears as much a victim as the doomed Jane.