Jane Foole

[1] In the accounts of Anne Boleyn, bills for caps supplied to her "female jester" are recorded in 1535–36.

[7] She may have been depicted in the painting of Henry the Eighth and His Family (1545), in which the man on the far right is identified as her colleague, court jester William Sommers.

[8] She apparently had a favoured position with Mary and was given a valuable wardrobe and an unusually large number of shoes.

Wardrobe warrants from 1555 surviving in the Bodleian Library mention a gown of green figured velvet (similar to one made for Will Sommers) furred with white hare skins, black knitted hose, another green velvet gown dressed with tinsel cloth, and a fustian-lined Dutch or German-style gowns of crimson and purple striped satin and blue damask.

This style of gown, and the use of striped fabrics, may have made a costume deemed suitable for fools.

Mary gave gilt silver salts as rewards to two women who looked after her, a Mistress Ayer and a woman from Bury St Edmunds who healed her.

Jane Fool appears as a character in Kathryn Lasky’s series Tangled in Time.

Henry the Eighth and His Family (1545); the man at the far-right background is jester Will Somers , and it has been suggested that the woman at the far left is Jane Foole.