A royal portrait Parr excellence
QUESTION Is the portrait of Katherine Parr in the National Portrait Gallery actually Lady Jane Grey?
This full-length portrait hung for many years at Glendon hall in Northamptonshire and was considered to be a portrait of henry Viii’s sixth wife, Katherine (sometimes spelled Catherine) Parr.
At the behest of sir Roy strong, director of the National Portrait Gallery from 1967 to 1973, it was re-identified as Lady Jane Grey. But in 1996, it was renamed Katherine Parr again.
Lady Jane Grey (1537-54) was one of the great tragic figures of English history.
The great-granddaughter of henry Vii, she was proclaimed queen after the death of her cousin, the Protestant Edward Vi, son of henry Viii, on July 6, 1553, in an attempt to prevent his Catholic halfsister Mary from taking the throne.
however, the country rose in favour of the direct royal line and nine days after 16-year-old Jane had ascended the throne, the Privy Council proclaimed Mary to be Queen.
Following rural uprisings in her name, Jane was taken from the Tower of London and beheaded on February 12, 1554.
Glendon hall once belonged to sir Ralph Lane, who married Maud Parr, a cousin and lady-in-waiting to Katherine Parr.
The painting appears to be by the same hand as a contemporary painting of Mary i, which has been associated with the artist known as Master John as the result of evidence citing a specific payment.
The portrait was bought by the National Portrait Gallery in 1965. sir Roy concluded it was a contemporary portrait of Lady Jane Grey, based on its likeness to a late 16th-century portrait in the gallery that was supposedly a direct copy of a now lost original of Jane.
‘We knew it was a very important painting of a Tudor princess and, making a comparison with a later engraving of Jane Grey, we were convinced this must be of her,’ he said.
in 1996, Dr susan James, a Cambridge postgraduate in Tudor history, published research demonstrating that the portrait was Katherine Parr.
her proof was three jewel inventories she had unearthed during research for her biography of the last wife of henry Viii. The key item was a crown-headed flower brooch with two diamonds, one ruby, one emerald and three hanging pearls pinned to the sitter’s bosom.
The inventories identified it as belonging to Catherine howard, henry Viii’s fifth wife, and passed to Katherine Parr, whom he married in 1543.
Dr James also concluded sir Roy’s dating of the portrait as 1547, when Jane would have been ten, was wrong. she dated it to 1543 or 1544, when Parr would have been in her early 30s and Lady Jane would have been only about six.
Despite the importance of the finding, it was released with little fanfare — perhaps to protect the reputation of sir Roy.
he was magnanimous about the change in attribution. ‘i am absolutely the last person to be insulted by advances in scholarship,’ he said. Kate Greenslide, St Davids, Pembrokeshire.
QUESTION Is it true that a ‘safe’ cigarette was suppressed by the big tobacco companies in the Sixties?
This was a claim made by the late James Mold, a scientist working for Liggett & Myers Tobacco Co. in North Carolina.
in 1992, Mold said that from 1954 he had worked on Project XA, an attempt to produce a safe cigarette.
he claimed his team had identified the main cancer-causing ingredient in tobacco smoke and rendered it harmless, a process involving coating the tobacco with palladium.
The project didn’t determine ways to prevent other diseases linked to cigarette smoking, such as emphysema. According to Mold, Liggett & Myers saw merit in the project, stockpiling ingredients and developing an advertising campaign for a product called ‘Tame’ cigarettes.
Mold said the project was dropped because it proved companies knew how dangerous cigarettes were, thus opening the doors to litigation.
‘i think they were concerned they’d have everybody suing them because they’d be admitting they’d been making a hazardous cigarette,’ he said.
Greg Forde, Cheltenham, Glos.
QUESTION Is the word cancer (illness) associated with cancer (star sign)? When was the disease identified?
ThE first description of cancer, the disease, can be found in the Edwin smith Papyrus. This was an ancient Egyptian medical text named after the dealer who bought it in 1862.
The word cancer was coined by Greek physician hippocrates (460-370BC), the ancient Greek Father of Medicine. he used the terms carcinos and
carcinoma to describe non-ulcer forming and ulcer-forming tumours. The word comes from karkinos, meaning crab, and is said to have been applied to such tumours because the swollen veins around them resembled the limbs of a crab.
Canker was the usual form in English until the 17th century when it was superseded by cancer. Galen (AD 130-200), another Greek physician, used oncos (Greek for swelling) to describe tumours. This lives on in the word oncologist (a medical professional who specialises in the treatment of cancer).
The naming of the star sign cancer was independent. The zodiac is the term used to describe the circle of 12 divisions of celestial longitude centred on the path of the sun. While proposed by the Babylonians in 1000 BC, we use the names given to the star signs by Greek astronomers.
Cancer is again named after the crab. its use is traced to the story of herakles. Karkinos was a giant crab dispatched by the goddess hera to aid the hydra in its battle with herakles at Lerna.
The hero crushed it with his foot. But, as a reward for its service, hera placed it among the stars as a constellation.
Dr Ian Smith, Cambridge.