Shore, JANE, the famous mistress of Edward IV., was born in London, and was well brought up, and married at an early age to William Shore, an honest citizen, traditionally a goldsmith. After her intrigue with the king began her husband abandoned her, but she lived till Edward's death in the greatest luxury, enjoying great power through his favour, yet 'never abusing it,' as More tells us, 'to any man's hurt, but to many a man's comfort and relief.' Her beauty was more that of expression than of feature, and her cheeks somewhat pale, yet her face was fair beyond others, and 'there was nothing in her body that you would have changed, but if you had wished her somewhat higher.' But her greatest charm was her bright and playful wit. After the king's death she lived under the protection of Hastings, and on his death, it is said, of the Marquis of Dorset; but King Richard III., out of a pretended zeal for virtue and to make his brother's life odious, plundered her house of more than two thousand marks, and caused the Bishop of London to make her walk in open penance, taper in hand, dressed only in her kirtle. More tells us that Richard had first tried to charge her with bewitching him, literally rather than in the sense in which she had done his brother, and the reader will remember the use that Shakespeare has made of this in his tragedy of Richard III. Jane Shore survived her penance more than forty years, dying in the 18th year of Henry VIII. The additional horrors that she died in a ditch since called Shoreditch, and that a man was hanged for sneecuring her contrary to Richard's command, are completely unhistorical, however positive their ballad authority.
Percy printed from the Pepys collection 'The woeful lamentation of Jane Shore,' in wretched doggerel, ascribed to Thomas Deloney. Thomas Churchyard also wrote a poor ballad on the story, inserted in the Mirror for Magistrates, and Drayton has in his England's Heroical Epistles one from her to her royal lover, with a prose description of her beauty in the notes. Deloney's ballad is printed also in the Collection of Old Ballads (1723), with a miserable burlesque song on the same subject.
See 'Some Particulars of the Life of Jane Shore,' by Mark Noble, in Brayley's Graphic Illustrator (1834); and Sir Thomas More's fine picture in his History of Richard III. Nicholas Rowe's drama dates from 1714.