Jane Gomm (1753-1822), Lady of the Manor of Rotherhithe was Lady-in-Waiting to George III’s wife Queen Charlotte of Mackenburg-Strelitz. She was born in Saint Petersburg, where she sat for this portrait aged 13, and was one of six children. Her youngest sister Sophia married Charles, Count de Bruhl of the Holy Roman Empire, who was Governor and tutor to the young Prussian prince who later became King Frederick III of Prussia. In 1783 Jane returned to England with her parents and soon after joined the court of George III as a Lady-in-Waiting to the queen. She became the governess to their three youngest daughters, the princesses Mary, Sophia and Amelia for which she was paid £200 per annum from 1786-1816. She never married and divided her time between her London townhouse, off Berkeley Square, and following the court between Kew and Windsor. It was in 1788 at Kew Palace that she witnessed one of the first recorded episodes of George III’s ‘madness’.

Frances Burney, novelist, playwright and ‘Keeper of the Robes’ wrote a salacious journal about court life at Kew in the late eighteenth century, where there are numerous references to Jane. Burney described Jane as ‘sensible, cultivated and possessed of very high spirits’. The queen and the princesses maintained a close rapport with her, such that Princess Sophia asked if she could present the sword to Jane’s nephew when he was commissioned into the army (he was made an officer aged nine and died aged ninety-one with the rank of Field Marshall, holding the record for being the longest serving soldier in the British army at eight-two years). Jane died on 25 June 1822 at her home in Mayfair and was buried underneath the Gomm window inside Bath Abbey (dedicated to her father, who is also buried there). In her will she left her entire estate of Bermondsey and Rotherhithe to her nephew Field-Marshall Sir William Maynard Gomm.

Her earlier family history is also worthy of note: her great-grandfather was Nicholas Rowe (1647-1718), Poet Laureate and first editor of the works of Shakespeare and her grandfather was the cabinet maker William Gomm (1698-1780), a friend of Thomas Chippendale and Giles Grendey, in whose London workshop the famed German ébéniste Abraham Roentgen served his apprenticeship. Her father, also William Gomm (1728-1792) married Marie Jeanne, Comtesse Poggenpohl (painted by George Romney c. 1771) in Saint Petersburg in 1752 where he was Secretary to the embassy. He later followed his good friend Sir James Harris (later Lord Malmesbury) to The Hague where he fulfilled the same role.