Jane Boleyn: The True Story of the Infamous Lady Rochford (31 page)

C
ARVING A
C
AREER

CHAPTER
23

Taking Stock

H
ENRY’S OFFICERS
set about their task methodically. Every last item George owned was recorded. It was the king’s now, and he could not be cheated. The silver dishes, the candlesticks, the gilt trenchers and pots, and the elaborately embroidered furnishings were all carefully packed to await the king’s pleasure. Once they were securely stored with his other goods, Henry might not even bother to glance at them. But when the executioner held George’s bleeding head aloft to display to the watching crowds, Jane was not just a widow, crying furtive tears for her dead husband, knowing that he had gone to his execution a totally innocent man. She was infinitely poorer.

Even her own personal possessions were rifled through by Henry’s diligent scribes as they listed all that she had. She kept many of her things in a chest “in the chamber over the kitchen,” probably the kitchen at Beaulieu, the palace that had so charmed George that he had moved his household in with remarkable speed. But that had been in happier days, when Jane could have watched as he played tennis or went hawking and when they could have sat together talking in the candlelight before sleeping together as man and wife. Those times could not come again. Instead, Henry’s men turned their attention to the chest in the kitchen. A note was made of her prayer book edged with silver and gilt, of a book covered in black velvet and with its silver clasp, and a book covered in crimson velvet. Her clothes were enumerated too. She had ten pairs of sleeves for her gowns, all of rich materials. Among them she had a pair of crimson velvet worked in gold, two pairs made of cloth of silver, a couple in tinsel or thin cloth of silver or gold, some in yellow or white satin, a pair in white damask, and a pair in black velvet complete with eight sets of laces tipped with black enamel for fastening. She had intricate placards, the stiff panels that she loved to display beneath open skirts or gowns. These too were in satin, damask, and velvet. She had two pairs of knives sheathed in black velvet. Henry’s servants scrupulously wrote down that she had some broken beads, probably rosaries, of gold and white bone and gold and pearls. They did not forget the fabulous white silk stockings embossed in gold that she used for the masques she so loved. They were nothing if not thorough. It was humiliating in the extreme, emphasizing that she was no longer the queen’s sister-in-law, but the unimportant widow of a convicted traitor. Perhaps she was allowed to keep much of this; we do not know.

What she certainly could not keep were the proceeds of George’s offices or any of the land he had so painstakingly accumulated over the years. The vultures were soon out for those. Nothing was too small to be worth the asking. Robert Barnes, who was burned as a heretic four years later, wrote a begging letter to Cromwell asking him to procure for him the keepership of Bedlam, which he had heard, erroneously, was worth forty pounds per annum. The Earl of Sussex fared much better. He carried off the lion’s share, gaining the stewardship of Beaulieu and some of George’s Essex manors. Andrew Flamock, who had made the king laugh when he broke wind, gained the constableship of Kenilworth in Warwickshire and Sir Thomas Cheyney became the new warden of the Cinque Ports and constable of Dover. George’s fall was a welcome bonanza for them. Jane’s father, apparently not too squeamish to care about profiting from his daughter’s distress, did quite well too. He received some minor offices in Beaulieu and the keepership of the park at King’s Hatfield. At least they stayed in the family. Also staying in the family were the manor of South Kent, the lordship of Rayleigh and lands around Penshurst, which had been sold to Thomas already. Yet the one part of the family that they did not stay with was Jane herself. She saw every last vestige of George’s estates snatched from her grasp.

Any who owed money to her late husband now owed it to the king, not to her. As George had faced death, concern about his debts and his obligations had played on his mind. He had hoped that the king would settle them for him but could have been under no illusions about Henry’s generosity. Perhaps the king did show compassion to the man with whom he had once played cards and bowls. If he did, we have no record of it. What Jane knew, however, was that she would not see a penny due to her dead husband. Instead, Henry would ensure that everything went into the royal coffers. George Lovekyn of East Greenwich may have thought he might escape the £100 he owed to George. He did not, he had to pay it to the king. And the archbishop of Dublin fared worse, enduring a long period of anxiety. Owing George £400, he repaid £250 and gave a further £50 “to redeem a gold cup of the said Lord Rochford’s,” leaving £100 outstanding. The archbishop had arranged for that to pay for a house of his that George wanted, but after the execution he could not even get the house back. Unfortunately, the king was now demanding the full £400. For Jane, whose finances had plummeted, recovering any of George’s money would have been so very useful.

All she could count on was her jointure, the document signed at her marriage and designed to give her security should George die. On her wedding day at Great Hallingbury it had been perfectly natural for her to envisage herself as eventual mistress of the Boleyn estates when her husband took them over some time in the future. That would include Blickling and Hever, the two jewels in the Boleyn crown. Her jointure was a form of insurance policy that she would have preferred not to cash in, certainly not at this stage of her life. It would, after all, mean living on much reduced means and Jane was not used to thinking about costs and living expenses. Over her years at court, she had come to take the considerable rewards of royal service very much for granted. But her situation was changed beyond recognition now and she had to rely on Thomas to keep his part of the bargain.

And that was the problem. Thomas had just lost his only son and his daughter to the headsman. With his personal position at court so unenviable, he would have to practice his extensive diplomatic skills in minimizing the damage their fall had caused him. Perhaps had Jane produced a grandson for him as a living reminder of his dead heir, he would have felt, and behaved, differently. In that case, the Ormond ancestral horn would have found a home. In Ormond’s will, he had bequeathed a rather special item to his grandson, Thomas. The item was an ivory horn tipped with gold at both ends, together with a white silk ribbon decorated in gold to support it, both of which were to be handed through the family from father to son “to the honor of the same blood.” Ormond had received the horn from his own father and, as he had only two daughters, Margaret Boleyn and Anne St. Leger, left it to Margaret’s son, Thomas. It should have passed to George and then to George’s son.

Since Jane and George had no son, Thomas was required by the terms of his grandfather’s will to give the precious horn to Sir George St. Leger, Anne St. Leger’s son, to descend through that branch of the family. It was yet another loss for Thomas, a further reminder of what might have been. A later suggestion that George Boleyn, a colorful sixteenth-century church dean, who often took his badly behaved dog into church with him, was George’s son is unfounded. There is no record of Jane’s giving birth and had the dean been George’s illegitimate child, Thomas would surely have been involved in his upbringing, especially after George’s death. If Sir Edward Howard could acknowledge his two bastards, there was no reason for George not to do the same for his. The child would not have been in line for the Ormond horn, as that was for legitimate issue only, but he might have been recognized as kin.

So, with no children as bargaining counters, Jane was entirely dependent on Thomas fulfilling his obligations to the letter. The precise terms of the jointure document, agreed between Thomas and Lord Morley all those years ago, were crucial. Even today, her story can only make sense in the context of these pivotal documents hidden in the archives for almost five hundred years. Unfortunately, the original document itself has disappeared over the centuries, but since it is possible to reconstruct it from other references, we have the same information that Jane had as she considered her new position. For a woman like her, used to the very best that life could offer, the future looked bleak. And Thomas’s typically shifty land dealings did not help.

Her jointure allocated her some lands in Norfolk, including the manor of West Laxham together with the far more important manors of Aylesbury and Bierton and other lands in Buckinghamshire. Thomas had gained Aylesbury and Bierton through his mother’s Ormond legacy and probably had no real intention of handing them over to Jane. His mother, Margaret, was still alive and retained an interest in them and they offered potential sources of profit if they came up for sale. Thomas, always happy to keep or preferably gain property, therefore opted for the clause in the jointure that allowed him to give Jane a hundred marks a year during his lifetime in lieu of the lands. Jane had always known that this would be the case: it was why, even setting aside her emotional loss, it was so much better for her to be a wife than a widow. Since widows were usually given an annual payment of 10 percent of the original amount paid for the jointure, the hundred marks made sense because the cost of the jointure to Lord Morley had been one thousand marks. But the king had then added another thousand marks to the jointure amount as a gift to the young couple. Henry’s present should have been taken into account, so Jane should have received 10 percent of two thousand marks rather than 10 percent of a thousand. Unfortunately for Jane, Lord Morley had not pointed out the anomaly, so Thomas Boleyn, ever eager to retain money whenever possible, had conveniently forgotten Henry’s contribution and was now only prepared to adhere to the bare minimum that had been agreed.

Managing on one hundred marks (sixty-six pounds) per annum would not be easy. George had happily paid fifty pounds for a gold cup, he had willingly spent twenty marks on hawks, and he had thought nothing of pocketing fifty-eight pounds as betting winnings from Henry in a single month. Jane was not used to budgeting. Even her wardrobe would be expensive. Sufficient black satin for a cloak could cost almost five pounds, about the same as for a satin nightgown. Damask was a similar price, silk and velvet even more. At approximately two pounds per yard cloth of gold or cloth of silver would have to be things of the past. If she became ill and needed a good doctor, the costs could be astronomical. Henry had once paid twenty pounds for Princess Mary’s medical expenses. One hundred marks would not go far.

Until now, Jane had been very much under male protection and control, first her father’s and then her husband’s. With George dead, she could call on Lord Morley if necessary but his reluctance to put himself on the line made him a weak ally. In fact, she knew precisely what she had to do if she was to rake in more funds: her best bet would be to enlist Cromwell’s help in persuading the king to take pity on her. As Brereton’s widow, Elizabeth Savage, proved, sometimes the king could be sympathetic. Her husband had not only been a courtier, but he had also amassed extensive land holdings in Cheshire and North Wales, all of which had, of course, been confiscated. Elizabeth Savage did remarkably well and remarkably quickly. Within weeks of Brereton’s execution, Henry returned much of his land to her. Later she knew whom to thank, sending a gelding to Cromwell, when seeking yet more assistance from him. Uriah Brereton was helped too, for he gained some of his late brother’s offices. No, pinning her faith on Lord Morley’s efforts was not the answer for Jane. She must approach the minister.

That is what she did and she did it immediately. There was no point in attempting to meet him; she had to write to him, phrasing her letter with considerable skill in accordance with set conventions. We know fairly accurately what her template would have been, for in the latter part of Elizabeth’s reign, Angel Day, in
The English Secretorie,
produced what amounts to a “teach yourself how to write a letter” manual based on the accepted Tudor norms concerning status, position, and chances of success. When Jane approached Cromwell, her language was that of an inferior to a superior. Well might that have gone against the grain. Her aristocratic lineage and title were important to her and she was used to being closely associated with the woman to whom the king had once denied nothing. Cromwell was a commoner whose lowly origins were a matter for derision. But this was not the moment for standing on her dignity. She was a supplicant, one of the many who turned to Cromwell in greed or despair every day and added to his mountainous correspondence. It was true that she had given him useful information about Anne and George, but the minister had dredged it out of her. She had done nothing to earn a reward, so she knew that she had to swallow her pride or he could choose to ignore her.