In Van der Doort's inventory of 1639, in the Queen’s Gallery at Greenwich he lists ’37 works delivered by the late Queen’ including No 36. ‘Duke of Alencon, brother of Henry III of France, in a black doublet with red breeches, by a green table, full-length, light from the left, 6ft 6in x 3ft 5in’ (198 x 104cm). This work was sold to Murray from the Queen's Gallery at Greenwich for £4 on 23 October 1651; it appears again at the 2nd Privy Lodging in Whitehall in 1666 (No 218) as ‘Man with short hair in a black habit, cloast breeches and a laced ruff, 6ft 6in x 3ft 5in (198 x 104cm). By 1688, when this portrait appears in the Gallery next the park at Whitehall, our sitter has become a 'Spaniard in a black habit’; later when the portrait appears at Hampton Court he becomes 'Don Gusman, the Spanish Ambassador'. In the Hampton Court inventory of 1861 this identification is corrected in a later to hand to 'A French Noble' (no 593).

There can be no certainty in a chain of this length. Some discrepancies can be easily explained: the present canvas has obviously been extended on both sides, so that its original dimensions match those recorded by Van Doort. Others are more resistant: he doesn’t wear ‘red breeches’ as Van Doort describes; perhaps they have been painted over; there is also the possibility that RCIN 402791 is a version of the painting in Charles I’s collection. The evidence of a connection of some kind is very compelling: the sitter in this portrait resembles Anjou as he appears in the ‘Anjou Tapestries’ (and nobody would describe him as anonymous-looking). The presence in the collection of Charles I of a portrait of a suitor to Queen Elizabeth I hardly needs explaining.

Hercule-François, Duke of Alençon and of Anjou (1555-84) was the fourth and youngest son of Henry II of France and Catherine de Médicis. He was called Hercule until his confirmation in 1566, when he was renamed in memory of his grandfather Francis I. In 1569 he was seriously ill with smallpox which left him permanently scarred. Marriage between him and Elizabeth I was proposed in 1572 as part of negotiations between England and France to counter the power of Spain. He courted the Queen again between 1579 and 1581, though he was only 24 and she was 46. It seemed that in 1576 Hercule-François was planning to join the Protestant Germans and Swiss against his Catholic brother Henry III. Two years later he formed an alliance with William of Orange and the Dutch, but after a dramatic and failed attempt to lay siege to Antwerp he returned to France and an early death.