Jane Boleyn: The True Story of the Infamous Lady Rochford (21 page)

Although they were both likely to have been to Beaulieu as part of the court, they saw it with fresh eyes now. The lovely brick house nestled in acres of well-kept parkland. They entered through an arched doorway between the two sides of the gatehouse, above which was fixed the carved stone arms of the king, pronouncing his authority and majesty. With a quick glance upward at the tall, sweeping glass windows on the first floor of the gatehouse, they passed into the inner court around which the main wings of the palace were arranged. There was everything they could possibly want in a residence.

The chapel, with its hangings, glass windows, and two organs, was on the left of the quadrangle. With the soul so well catered for, the body was not neglected, for behind the chapel was an indoor tennis court, which would have appealed to George, always such a keen sportsman.

The other side of the house was just as impressive. The great hall was huge and the kitchens, pantry, and bakehouse were served by fresh water from a newly installed supply with lead cisterns for the waste. Jane and George could live in regal style, although daring to use the king’s flower-decorated bathroom, complete with hot and cold running water, was probably a presumption too far even for the Boleyns.

When they first arrived to see their wonderful new acquisition, George and Jane could make use of some of the myriad soft furnishings, carpets, wooden tables, stools, and cupboards that were stored there. They could sit on the leather chair “painted with the story of Venus,” listening to musicians playing the lute and virginals, while the “clock with a bell” marked the passage of time. They could read some of the many books, such as
Caesar’s Commentaries,
so conveniently left about. And “great coffers bound with iron” came in handy to safeguard their ever-increasing stock of valuables.

But most of all, George and Jane used their own furniture. Jane had grown up among the Parker plate but now she possessed her own. She and George could dine from silver platters and silver dishes, emblazoned with the Rochford arms coupled with those of the king, in a room lit by candles held in their own candlesticks. They could drink from silver and gilt goblets. They had magnificent engraved gilt bowls, great gilt trenchers, and gilt pots. They could use their own intricately worked tablecloth trimmed and fringed with gold thread and with the letters
G
and
B
proudly displayed at each end. Their wealth was on show everywhere Jane looked.

And, on those nights when she and George slept together as man and wife, they could snuggle up behind red and white damask curtains in their superb bed, lying on a soft feather mattress, their heads resting on pillows of down. The painted and gilded wooden bedstead was draped in cloth of gold, its white satin canopy embroidered in tawny cloth of gold embellished with “Rochford knots” and bordered with yellow and white silk fringe. Linen quilts filled with wool and a luxurious yellow counterpane lined with yellow buckram ensured that they would not be cold even in the depths of winter.

All that was needed for complete security until every Boleyn’s dying day was for Anne to give birth to a prince. And for a while, Anne’s pregnancy seemed to be going well. Henry ordered an elaborate silver cradle from his goldsmith, Cornelius Hayes, together with swaddling clothes and bedding of white satin and cloth of gold. George was told to ask for the postponement of a projected meeting with the queen of Navarre, Francis’s sister. Anne was “so far gone with child,” he was to say, that “she could not cross the sea with the king.” Nor could Henry go without her for “she would be deprived of his Highness’s presence when it was most necessary.” Then, quite suddenly, we read no more in the documents about the baby. Anne had miscarried.

T
HE
W
INDS OF
C
HANGE

CHAPTER
17

The King’s Displeasure

O
NE DAUGHTER,
one miscarriage: no amount of spin or propaganda could convert such blatant failure into success. For Henry, it was achingly familiar; he had been here before. For the Boleyns, it could spell disaster. So far, they had all done remarkably well by backing Anne but that in itself courted danger. Should she fall, they would fall with her. And the fall could be catastrophic. No one who risked the king’s displeasure was safe, even those who seemed untouchable. Jane’s memories of Buckingham’s death may have faded as the years passed, but he could not be forgotten, and Wolsey’s pathetic demise was yet more recent. Jane knew that she could have far more serious concerns than a mere reduction in her collection of extravagant clothes, jeweled sleeves, and silk masking stockings if the unthinkable happened. But it did not. Henry’s love for Anne burned as brightly as ever, and while it did, the Boleyns were still at her side.

Not only was the king committed to his wife, he was determined to make sure that everyone else was as well. As Jane watched, the bloodbath began. Opposition, real or suspected, was about to be rooted out across the land, from the teeming streets of London to the smallest hamlet in Cornwall or the tiniest village in Yorkshire. As far as Henry was concerned, his people should be grateful to him. He had saved himself from an adulterous marriage, them from the usurped power of the pope, a man who was no more than the bishop of Rome; and, Henry stated, only he himself would deliver the true gospel to all his subjects. He was a David, he was a Solomon; above all, he was right. The Boleyns agreed with him; or at least, Anne, George, and Thomas did and the rest of the family acquiesced. As did most of the population. Cromwell made sure of that. With acts on the statute book making it treason to deny that the succession rested in Henry’s issue by Anne and, a little later, to deny that the king was head of the church, Cromwell was equipped with a full arsenal of ammunition. He used it.

Unaffected by respect for gender, he embarked on the first of a series of high-profile prosecutions with that of a woman: Elizabeth Barton, the Holy Maid of Kent. Her fame had developed some time before he chose to act. It had all started when as a young servant girl, she had suddenly succumbed to a mysterious sickness, in the course of which she had visions of “heaven, hell, purgatory, and the state of souls departed.” Her recovery had been as dramatic as the onset of her illness. During one of her trances, voices had told her to go to the Church of Our Lady of Court in the village of Street in Kent. Once there, she had lain in front of a statue of the virgin. Then the miracle had begun. “Her face was wonderfully disfigured,” the spectators had said, “her tongue hanging out, and her eyes being in a manner plucked out, and laid upon her cheeks.” Eventually, she “came to herself again, and was perfectly whole.” The bystanders had been convinced that God had cured her. The trouble was that once the Holy Maid had become a nun at the convent of St. Sepulchre in Canterbury, not only had her visions and trances continued, but she also gained the additional power of prophecy. And her prophecies had been uncomfortably linked to the consequences of Henry’s likely second marriage. He would die within six months “in a plague of unheard-of severity,” she had said, if he really did marry Anne; indeed, she had seen the place in hell that was already reserved for him.

Elizabeth Barton had become the talk of the court. There is no proof that Jane met her, but she would have known all about her, for her fame spread. She was fashionable and she seemed genuine. There was even a book written about her. Despite the fact of Henry’s obvious survival beyond the six months that she had foretold, there were plenty prepared to listen to what else she had to say. And she was voluble. She maintained that Wolsey had ascended into heaven through her penance, she knew when the king would die, she knew that she would “receive the crown of martyrdom,” she knew about angels and popes and abbots, and she knew about “a golden letter” written by Mary Magdalene. It was heady stuff and it had to be stopped.

Stopped it was. Cranmer questioned her, Cromwell interrogated her. Between them, they managed to extract a confession that she had “never had a vision in her life, but feigned them all.” It could not, of course, be allowed to end there. Cranmer might well tell Henry that people were delighted that Barton’s calumnies had been exposed but the difficulty was that she had passed them on. Cromwell set about discovering who had listened. His detective work caused panic. Particularly satisfying to the Boleyns was that one of the prominent courtiers exposed for taking too much interest in the ramblings of Elizabeth Barton was the Marchioness of Exeter, one of Katherine’s supporters. The marchioness was forced to write a groveling letter of apology to Henry. She was, she said abjectly, “the most sorrowful and heavy creature alive” since she had “been so unfortunate as to offend the king and his laws, or be in danger of his indignation or displeasure.” She was sufficiently desperate to point out that she was only a woman, “whose fragility and brittleness is easily seduced and brought to abusion and light belief.” “I will receive my Maker,” she wrote to Cromwell, “that I never offended” the king, “even in thought; but if I have offended through simplicity and lack of knowledge, I submit myself, accepting his gracious pardon.” The marchioness was lucky: she escaped with humiliation and a considerable fright rather than a grim sojourn in the Tower as the headsman sharpened his ax.

Barton and her immediate circle were not so lucky. Jane knew precisely what had happened to them because George, Thomas, and her father could give her a firsthand account. All three were summoned to the Parliament, which passed the Acts of Attainder against the nun and her alleged accomplices, thereby condemning them to death. While an Act of Attainder meant that evidence was simply presented to Parliament so that the government avoided the need for an open trial with the unpredictability of a jury verdict, the sentence would still be carried out publicly. Gawping crowds, accustomed to the carnage of such things, but curious to see a nun and five members of the clergy executed, watched them drawn from the Tower to Tyburn, one of London’s most notorious execution sites. There, they were granted the relatively merciful end of hanging and beheading. The government could have insisted that they suffer an infinitely slower and more painful death usually accorded to traitors.

The sheer terror of such an end proved an excellent deterrent to many as Cromwell beavered away to ensure conformity. Henry’s subjects were ordered to take the oath accepting the legality of Anne’s marriage and the succession of her children. Most of those in the city of London did so on the very day that Elizabeth Barton was hanged. There is no record of whether Jane was required to take the oath but she would certainly have done so if necessary. Henry issued Suffolk with full authority to imprison without bail any who preached or spread “or otherwise set forth pernicious opinions and doctrines, to the exaltation of the power of the bishop of Rome.” That too was a crime. Every careless word could be reported and Cromwell’s spies were all around. The minister himself was inundated with messages about miscreants of every type and every degree of seriousness. Sir Francis Bryan happily reported the capture of a certain George Taylor who had called Henry a heretic and said that he would play football with the king’s crown if he had it. Despite Taylor’s pleading that he had been drunk at the time, Bryan felt that his execution would be “a very great example and the safeguard of many.” He even suggested the most appropriate towns for the displaying of Taylor’s four quarters, one of which, coincidentally, was Jane’s manor of Aylesbury. In Suffolk, Margaret Chancellor was reported for calling Anne “a goggle-eyed whore” and praying that she would never have another child by the king. Hugh Lathbury, a hermit, was another casualty for saying that Katherine would soon be queen again. He was obviously disturbed since he also said that he had seen her recently in Lincolnshire “and she would make ten men against the king’s one,” but his mental state did not save him. Nor was royal mercy likely to be extended to Friars Hugh Payn and Thomas Hayfield, who “in great pain and sickness” begged for forgiveness for praying for the pope “by name after the old custom,” until they heard such prayers were forbidden.