Review of Lady Jane (1986) by Jennifer D — 12 Jun 2010

The Doomed Always Make for Good Drama.

There is a tendency, in costume dramas, to oversimplify the hell out of the history. This is especially true in Tudor history, where you've got plenty of people with the same name--Henry VIII had both a sister and a daughter named Mary Tudor, for example--and all sorts of complicated intermarriage. Several people went through three or four titles over their lives at court. The court was swarming with plots and counterplots. Every possible variation of religion was offensive to somebody, and which one could get you in the most trouble varied from monarch to monarch. Henry was declared Defender of the Faith in 1521; in 1533, he cut England off from Rome pretty much permanently. So yeah. I well understand the inclination to, for example, cut Henry's sister Mary and leave the sister who didn't share a name with his elder daughter.

Jane Grey (Helena Bonham Carter) is part of one of those offshoots of the royal line that made English history so confusing for two hundred years and better. Specifically, she is the granddaughter of that older Mary Tudor, Henry VIII's sister. This means, now that her cousin Edward VI (Warren Saire) is dying, that she is of great interest to pretty much everyone. Her cousin Mary (Jane Lapotaire) is in theory next in line for the throne, but she is Catholic and most of the nobles are not, and of course the man she marries will matter a great deal. Her cousin Elizabeth (Princess Not Appearing in This Film) is in theory in line behind her, but she is an uncertain prospect, and no one has much in the way of hold over her. Jane, however, is the daughter of shrewish Duchess Frances Grey (Sara Kestelman) and her ambitious husband, Duke Henry (Patrick Stewart). They agree to marry her off to Guildford Dudley (Cary Elwes), son of Duke John Dudley (John Wood). Jane, the quiet scholar, does not want to marry at all, nor does Guildford, the carouser. But with Edward dying, something must be done to get everyone nice and close to running the country.

Now, of course, they've also got to throw a romance into the thing. Jane did, as shown, have to be beaten into the marriage, as she would have preferred a life of quiet study and prayer; were she Catholic and not Protestant, she would have become a nun. Guildford doubtless married her for a similar reason; his brother Robert (Guy Henry) managed to break free of their father's will in that, if Guildford did not. Both Jane and Guildford had a sister marry in the triple ceremony where they were wed. Funnily enough, Guildford was also the only of his sons to be executed. His marriage to Jane was, of course, the deciding factor. However, contrary to the rosy picture the film painted, the evidence shows that they never did really come to terms with one another. The heartwarming image of them together in the Tower is wrong. Jane was offered, the last day, the option of seeing her husband before their executions. She refused it.

It is a beautiful production, though, for all its flaws and anachronisms. It's true that we don't think Jane looked much of anything like Helena Bonham Carter except in that they were both little. (We have no portrait known for sure to be of her.) Guildford probably wasn't as attractive as Cary Elwes, but then, who was? However, the costumes are great--and it's another picture filmed in part at Hever. They portray Edward with the proper amount of illness; he was, after all, dying at the time. The high-flown styles of clothing we think of didn't really come about for perhaps ten years after these events, but there are at least a couple of outfits Jane's father wears which look spot-on like what Henry VIII wore in his portraits. It is possible, with a practiced eye, to tell the stations of the various characters by what they're wearing. Even some of the economic issues of the time are referenced, though in unrealistic ways sometimes.

I have more sympathy for Jane than anyone else at the time. Most of the people in the complicated pavane that was Tudor politics did at least something to deserve whatever fate they were dealt. Oh, poor Edward was warped so by the people around him that he couldn't really interact with humans, and his sisters weren't exactly unharmed, either. But Jane knew what she wanted out of life, and by all accounts, she was smart enough to get it. Had she not been the great-granddaughter of a king and therefore entangled in things beyond bearing, she might have gone on to live unmarried and in seclusion to study and worship God. Certainly there is no evidence that she went along with her marriage and her father's plans. And we know for a fact that her mother was a cruel, vicious woman who literally beat her daughters into submission. Jane did as she was told because she knew what the consequences were had she not. The film gives Jane at least a few days of illusion that she could do what she wanted. The real world, alas, did not.