Jane Boleyn: The True Story of the Infamous Lady Rochford (27 page)

One of the most worried was probably Jane, for she knew a secret. Anne’s salvation, and that of the Boleyns, depended on her enticing Henry back into her bed and away from his latest fancy. As soon as she had regained her strength, she simply had to become pregnant once more. But, as the queen had once confided to Jane, that was not as straightforward as it might seem. All assumed that the larger-than-life king was virility epitomized. His wife knew otherwise. In fact, there were times when he found it difficult to perform at all, his sexual prowess highly erratic. An incredulous Jane passed on the news to her own husband, little realizing that the day would come when possessing such intimate knowledge would help to seal George’s fate.

By now, Jane, like Thomas and George, was unhappily conscious that Henry’s new favorite was more than a passing fling. It was serious. The woman was Jane Seymour, daughter of Sir John, who had welcomed Anne and Henry to Wolf Hall on the progress the previous summer. Her two brothers, Edward and Thomas, were ambitious and, in Edward’s case anyway, disturbingly able. That was an additional cause for anxiety. Mercifully, Jane Seymour lacked Anne’s intelligence and perspicacity. However, with her brothers behind her and backed, as she was soon to be, by members of the court tired of Boleyn dominance, arrogance, and advanced religious views, the whole situation quickly developed into a crisis for the Boleyns. They could even glimpse replication of the family-machine approach that had so assisted Anne. If they wanted to use it, the shrewd Seymours and their supporters had a clear blueprint already mapped out for them of how to succeed in supplanting one wife for another. And use it they did.

Just like Anne before her, Jane Seymour refused to become the king’s mistress, but unlike the vivacious Anne, she did so sweetly. Sweetness was her trademark. Probably even the Boleyns did not know exactly when Henry became besotted with the woman who was such a contrast to Anne, but from the reports of the vigilant Chapuys, she was undoubtedly on the scene by February, just after the disappointment of the queen’s latest miscarriage. As the weeks passed, Henry became more and more infatuated. Jane Seymour behaved expertly; she did not put a foot wrong. When Henry sent her a tempting present of a purse filled with sovereigns together with a letter, she would accept neither. She kissed Henry’s missive and gave it back to the messenger, asking him to remind the king that she was “a well-born damsel, the daughter of good and humble parents without blame or reproach of any kind.” Nothing, she protested, mattered as much to her as her honor and “on no account would she lose it even if she were to die a thousand deaths.” Instead of giving her money at that time, she asked that Henry would save it until God sent her an “advantageous marriage.” Such modesty was music to Henry’s ears, so different, yet so similar, to Anne’s approach almost a decade ago. To find out that the king was putting pen to paper again compounded the Boleyns’ despair.

And for them, as the Marchioness of Exeter cheerfully informed Chapuys, matters were going from bad to worse. Henry was so touched by Mistress Seymour’s response to his note and the gift that he comfortingly assured her that he would only speak to her in the presence of her relatives. He would be scrupulous. To make such discourse easier, he proposed that their meeting place should be the room just requisitioned from Cromwell that he had assigned to Edward Seymour and his wife and which happened to have private access. Naturally, the carefully tutored young lady regretfully declined this too. And, equally naturally, Henry admired her virtue still more.

Anne and the family viewed Henry’s actions with dismay. Yet it was also very difficult for any of them to find consistency or coherence in Henry’s behavior. Chapuys jubilantly told Charles that the king had not spoken to Anne for weeks even before the miscarriage. He really could see light at the end of the tunnel in the form of Anne’s removal. But it did not occur. She was still there in April. The family land portfolio was increased too when Anne was given grants of land, as were Thomas and George. Perhaps the storm was subsiding again; Henry always had been fickle. Plans were made for the queen to be at his side on a forthcoming trip to Calais and, most significantly, Chapuys was inveigled into publicly acknowledging her. Jane knew just how much that precious moment meant to her husband and his sister. Coming to the palace at Greenwich to discuss foreign policy issues, now so much easier with Katherine out of the equation, Chapuys agreed to go into the chapel. Anne was there already. George escorted him and watched the ambassador’s encounter with his sister. Anticipating an acrimonious confrontation, many courtiers flocked to the scene to see “what sort of mien” queen and ambassador would adopt. If hoping for fireworks, they were disappointed. Carefully maneuvered so that he was behind the door as Anne emerged, the two came face to face as she returned the “reverence” Chapuys made to her. Sensibly, she was at her most gracious, “affable and courteous” to the man who frequently called her “the Concubine” in his many dispatches to the emperor.

But just when Jane might begin to hope that Anne would weather the current uncertainty, George missed out on an honor that would once have been unquestionably his. When a vacancy arose for a new Knight of the Garter, George was a clear contender. He could have joined his father, a member of that august order for more than ten years. George’s rival, Sir Nicholas Carew, was currently in the Seymour camp. The king allowed Carew to be elected, Anne’s influence not withstanding. She did not have “sufficient credit to get her own brother knighted,” reported Chapuys with obvious satisfaction.

It was a body blow, all the more damaging because it was so blatant. And it was with this snub to brazen out that the Boleyns took their places for the traditional May Day jousts at Greenwich. As both Anne and the king watched the proceedings, George, still a keen sportsman, faced Henry Norris on the field. It was all good humored and ostensibly quite normal. What was not normal was the peculiar behavior of the king. To everyone’s surprise, including Anne’s, he left the jousts abruptly to travel to Wolsey’s old palace of York Place in London. Spurning his barge, he rode back, having ordered Norris and a mere handful of attendants to accompany him. Anne and George were left behind at Greenwich, unable to make sense of the king’s conduct, but presumably after a hurried conference between them, George rushed to London in desperate pursuit of his brother-in-law to try to find out what was happening. Blissful ignorance was not to last. On the following day, May 2, 1536, brother and sister were taken, separately, to the Tower. Accompanied by Norfolk, Anne was rowed in full daylight, a stark parody of her triumphant entry into the city for her coronation. Then, the banks had been lined with spectators agog to catch a glimpse of their new queen; now, anyone by the side of the river was treated to a sight that was barely credible as she was moved from palace to prison. Anne and George’s nightmare was about to begin. So was Jane’s. And the origins of her own posthumous vilification started to take shape.

CHAPTER
21

The Edge of the Precipice

N
EWS OF
A
NNE’S DISGRACE
spread like wildfire and so did the rumors. Chapuys, in his report to the no doubt astonished emperor, asserted that her imprisonment was “by the judgment of God.” He managed to find out who was first taken, although the details of their offenses were still hazy. The Concubine was incarcerated for adultery “with a player on the spinet of her chamber,” he said. Norris was arrested too, “for not having revealed the matter,” and so was George Boleyn, but even the sharp Chapuys could not work out what George was supposed to have done. Roland Bulkeley, rushing the news to his brother, Richard, the chamberlain of North Wales, threw in additional victims for good measure: Thomas Boleyn, “one of the king’s privy chamber, and sundry ladies” were also captured, he wrote, all with a treason charge hanging over them, but he assessed Norris’s crime more as having “a do with the Queen.” The bishop of Faenza was convinced that Anne’s mother was another detainee.

In fact, these tendencies toward exaggeration were not that far from the truth. Thomas and his wife escaped detention but the existence of a complete list of the grants accumulated by Thomas and George, which was compiled after March 3, 1536, suggests that George’s father had every reason to feel threatened. For the king to have demanded an account of everything that he had given to Thomas and George over the years meant that Henry was considering taking it all back; if George fell, his property would be subject to confiscation, of course, but clearly the king was pondering the arrest of Thomas too. At any rate, the sheer speed of the arrests that did occur was staggering. The young musician, Mark Smeaton, was actually the first behind the walls of the Tower, escorted there on May Day, followed by Henry Norris at dawn the next day, then Anne, and then Jane’s husband a few hours afterward. But it did not stop there. Two days later, the bewildered prisoners were joined by Sir Francis Weston and Sir William Brereton and, on Monday, May 8, by Sir Richard Page and Anne’s early love, Sir Thomas Wyatt. It appeared that no one was safe. The question on many a lip during those tumultuous days was who would be next?

The investigation into the queen’s “incontinent living” was entrusted to Thomas Cromwell, who set about his task with assiduous thoroughness and his usual lack of sentiment. He painstakingly examined “certain persons of the privy chamber and others of her side,” basically anyone connected to Anne, to find out exactly what had been going on. One of those questioned was Jane. She was in a unique, if somewhat unfortunate, position for she was the individual most intimately linked to both brother and sister and with freedom of access into the queen’s most private apartments. If anyone had known what went on between Anne and George, and between Anne and those gentlemen who flocked to her chamber, it would be Jane.

When she was ushered into Cromwell’s presence, therefore, she had every reason to be frightened. Her previous experience of rustication from court, the only time so far that she had felt the effects of Henry’s wrath personally, was nothing compared with this. As a noblewoman, she would not face torture, definitely a reassuring thought, but Henry had just proved that imprisoning his wife, a crowned queen and his “own sweetheart,” left him completely unmoved, and Elizabeth Barton’s gender had provided no protection against the death penalty. If Cromwell discovered that she had any knowledge that she should have divulged, then she was in the worst trouble of her life. Jane’s peril was very, very real. Moreover, should she evade an unwelcome sojourn in the Tower, there was her financial status to consider. If George was convicted of treason, all their possessions were subject to confiscation. George would be dead, she would be near penniless, with only her jointure to rely on, and the lands and estates so carefully accumulated would be a thing of the past. She could forget her expensive dresses, her silver and gilt plates, and that glorious bed; she could, literally, be in the street, dependent on her parents’ charity, since she would face a legal wrangle to obtain her jointure should Thomas be arrested too. Jane had before her the example of the plight of Alice More, the executed Sir Thomas’s widow: while she had been allowed by Henry’s gracious mercy to retain a tiny proportion of their former property, the king had kept the bulk. There was no guarantee that he would let Jane keep anything. No woman wanted to be destitute. Jane would not beggar herself if she could avoid it.

However, every potential witness had the considerable handicap of not knowing what information Cromwell had amassed so far or what the scope of his enquiry entailed. Even the prisoners themselves were not told the full extent of the charges. “Do you know wherefore I am here?” Anne had asked the constable of the Tower, Sir William Kingston, her jailer, who feigned ignorance. Although there was a precious minute when she allowed herself to believe that she was somehow being tested by the king only “to prove” her, laughing in the same way that she had in front of the French ambassadors on a happier occasion, she did not maintain that illusion for long. She could not work out quite why she was under suspicion but she understood that a number of men were somehow involved and, in her fear, kept on blurting out incriminating scraps of conversations and events that the loyal Kingston dutifully reported.

One in particular stuck in her mind. On the day before the jousts, she had had an exchange with Norris in her privy chamber. This time the banter had got dramatically out of hand. In her usual fashion, she had teased him over his relationship with Madge Shelton, whom court gossip maintained he would wed. Why had he not married her, she wanted to know? He was a widower, so there was no reason to hold back. When Norris had replied that he “would tarry a time,” she had foolishly retorted that he looked “for dead men’s shoes” for he would have her if any harm befell the king. Norris, stunned by the danger of her thoughtless remark, quickly responded that if any such thoughts crossed his mind “he would his head was off.” He had understood at once that even such ostensibly trivial badinage could be construed as a plot to murder Henry. It was terrifying. Realizing that she had gone way too far and that someone might have overheard their conversation, Anne had rushed him off to her confessor to swear that she was a “good woman.” But it was too late; the damage was done. The king’s life was clearly threatened. This was treason.