Jane Boleyn: The True Story of the Infamous Lady Rochford (35 page)

A costume design by Hans Holbein the Younger.

Therefore she appreciated that her tone must be one of humility; she must be self-deprecatory and she must not forget to flatter and praise the recipient. Her letter, which has survived, is a masterpiece. It had to be. She began by calling herself “a poor desolate widow without comfort.” Her “special trust” after God and the king lay in Cromwell. He was, she said, well known for displaying a “gentle manner to all them that be in such lamentable case” as that in which she found herself. She really wanted two things: some of George’s former possessions and a better deal on her jointure payments.

She beseeched Cromwell to approach Henry for her. If only the king “of his gracious and mere liberality” would return George’s “stuff and plate,” which was “nothing to be regarded” by him, it would be “a most high help and succor” to her. She then moved on to her jointure, reminding Cromwell of Henry’s lavish contribution, explaining that she found it very hard “to shift the world withal” on just a hundred marks a year. She needed more, she said, entreating Cromwell to “inform the King’s Highness of these premises” and make the king think “more tenderly” of her. The minister’s assistance in this matter would, she felt certain, be “a sure help.” He had it in his power to transform her current existence. If he did, he would be rewarded by God, who favored those who “doth help poor forsaken widows.” As for Jane herself, she offered Cromwell her “prayers and service” for the rest of her life. She then signed the missive as “Jane Rocheford,” with her usual rather old-fashioned flourish on the
R.

She could do no more; it was up to Cromwell. And he did help her. Clearly, he went to Henry on her behalf, and the king, perhaps mindful of his donation to her jointure, put pressure on Thomas, as did the minister. The result was, for Jane, a great relief. She still did not get the promised lands but she did get a rise in her living allowance. Grudgingly, Thomas bowed to the king’s will on the very day he heard from his royal master. Despite his finances becoming “much decayed,” he agreed to pay Jane one hundred pounds rather than one hundred marks, although he was quick to justify the original sum by referring to the jointure document itself to prove he had not cheated her. One hundred marks had been stipulated for her to receive while he was alive. She had only been entitled to two hundred marks after his “decease,” and the latter he would now freely increase to three hundred marks. Jane had, he thought, been treated generously. As a young man, he maintained, he had managed on fifty pounds despite his wife having a baby every year, thus implying that his daughter-in-law was simply avaricious.

Jane, however, felt she had achieved a fairer settlement, for the time being anyway. In the long term, a new accommodation might well be possible. Cromwell had brokered the new deal, and he had done so because of her own prompting. Now in her early thirties, she was still reliant on the power of men but that was to be expected in her society. The difference, however, was that this time the aid had come because she herself had initiated it. She had not quietly taken the hundred marks and settled into genteel obscurity, hoping that Lord Morley might stir himself sufficiently to arrange a second marriage for her. As a widow with an assured income, she was not a bad catch, possibly for a younger son, but she was not a good one either. Unlike Brereton’s widow, who had property from her first marriage, Jane had no lands of her own, her brother being first in line for the Morley estates. Only her jointure, hardly princely, stood between her and penury, or humiliating dependence on her family. So far she had produced no children, and that would also lower her worth in an age when the bloodline had to be perpetuated.

Jane had spent almost two decades at court. She had been at the heart of power. She had been present while the Boleyns had changed her world, and she had been there on those state occasions that flaunted their changes, and themselves, to the entire court. She had known the most powerful and influential figures of the country, including the king himself. Of course, the fallout from failure had been dramatic, the deaths of George and Anne were still raw but to leave all of that excitement behind forever would be yet another loss.

Perhaps there was an alternative. Jane’s hundred pounds brought her a measure of security. It was not huge but it was far more than the majority of the population, toiling away in isolated villages, would dream of in their lifetimes. Yet it would not give her all she had been used to, and it might mean that she would have to leave the environment where she had passed so much of her life. If there was a way to stay at court, to carve out a career for herself rather than as an appendage to a new husband, it would be worth considering. Cromwell had helped her once; maybe he would do so again. But there would need to be a quid pro quo.

CHAPTER
24

A New Beginning

H
OW LONG
C
ROMWELL
took to position Jane in Jane Seymour’s privy chamber eludes us, but she was soon installed there and it was more than a case of déjà vu. When she had last strolled through those intimate rooms, it had been to greet and serve her own sister-in-law, whose vivacious presence could not yet have been entirely eradicated or forgotten. But Jane’s world had moved on. She had to forge a new life for herself, to draw a curtain over the ghosts of yesterday.

And by being back in the royal privy chamber, she had a chance to do just that. She was at court again and she had a role. It was up to her whether she would make a success of it, but perhaps a little of Anne’s singular grit and determination, which even Cromwell ruefully acknowledged to Chapuys when he extolled “beyond measure the wit and the courage” of both the dead queen and her dead brother, had rubbed off on Jane. She felt at home, despite the changes in personnel.

The main change was that Henry had married Jane Seymour, and with indecent haste. While Anne was taking her last few steps to the scaffold, delivering her short speech praising him for his gentleness and mercy and then fastidiously arranging her skirts, the king was waiting impatiently at Westminster for the news that the French executioner had completed his task. The moment he heard that Anne really was dead and he was free, the bereaved monarch rushed to his barge and went straight to Jane “whom he had lodged a mile from him, in a house by the river.” They were betrothed the very next day and married at the end of the month, a mere eleven days after Anne’s execution. The venue was the queen’s closet at Whitehall, Wolsey’s former palace of York Place that Anne had liked so much. Naturally, Henry did not want his people to believe that he had sacrificed Anne on the flimsiest of grounds to satisfy a personal whim. Instead, he wanted it known that he had only consented to a third marriage, and to Mistress Seymour, “the most virtuous lady and veriest gentlewoman that liveth,” because of the entreaties of “all his nobles and council upon their knees.”

Jane was not the only courtier to see that Henry adored Queen Jane as he had formerly adored Anne, even if, perhaps, his love was softer and less intensely physical this time. And most of the court approved of the substitution. On the very day after Anne’s death, Cromwell made a note to remind himself to contact Sir William Kingston and Anthony Anthony, presumably to thank them for all they had done to make her execution run smoothly, and to contact Sir John Gage, a man who would play an important role at the end of Jane’s life. Gage was a capable soldier and administrator but not a supporter of Anne Boleyn. In fact, he had resigned his post as vice-chamberlain of Henry’s household and had kept an extremely low profile while she had been queen. With Anne now safely dead, however, he was notified that his return to mainstream politics would be welcome and was quickly ensconced in the Queen’s Council. Sir John Russell summed up the feelings of many when, in a letter to Honor Lisle’s husband, he said that the king had “come out of hell into heaven for the gentleness in this and the cursedness and the unhappiness in the other.” Russell went on to advise Lord Lisle to be sure to congratulate Henry on being “so well matched with so gracious a woman as is reported,” a comment that, Lisle was informed, would “please the king.” No doubt Honor busied herself in deciding on the most appropriate presents to send to the current queen as she had done to the former. She would choose with care, for she was keen to place her two daughters at court.

Cromwell too knew that the royal couple seemed well suited. And that was the rub. Once he had realized the extent of Henry’s involvement with Mistress Seymour, he had been prepared to act against Anne. As a living reminder of Katherine’s humiliation and with her advanced ideas on the proper use of monastic funds, she was somewhat of a problem anyway as royal policies shifted. Cromwell took the sole credit for bringing about Anne’s fall when he chatted to Chapuys, whereas in fact he had worked with Nicholas Carew and supporters of Princess Mary to engineer it. If the king wanted Jane Seymour, he must have her, and Cromwell had been willing to join forces with those who were working to the same end, particularly if it would cool their antagonism toward him personally. The trouble was—and this was where Jane Rochford might be useful to him—Mistress Seymour would not come alone. Cromwell would deal ruthlessly with Mary, Carew, and their allies in due course but he would not be able to take the same measures with the highly ambitious Seymour brothers who were at court with their recently elevated sister. No sooner had Thomas and George Boleyn disappeared from the scene, along with the ever-present and influential Norris, than Edward and Thomas Seymour surfaced. Edward, the elder, had been at court for some years, first as a page of honor to Henry’s sister, Mary Tudor, on her marriage to Louis XII, then as an esquire of the king’s household, an esquire of the body, and then a gentleman of the privy chamber. An able soldier, he had the makings of a particularly able courtier. And his brother came too. Although younger and less capable than Edward, Thomas was just as thrusting and ambitious and, within five months of his sister’s wedding, joined Edward in the king’s privy chamber. They quickly gained offices, perquisites, and in Edward’s case, titles. Five days after Henry lovingly looked into Jane Seymour’s eyes at the wedding ceremony, he bestowed the title of Viscount Beauchamp on her brother. Chapuys found Edward Seymour conducting him to the king’s chamber just as George Boleyn had done such a short while before.

Cromwell could keep a wary eye on the Seymours only up to a point. And he could not wander in and out of the queen’s private rooms. Jane could. When she had begged him for help with her jointure payments, Jane had promised Cromwell her prayers and her “service.” A source of information from behind closed doors might well be invaluable to the minister. To build up intelligence through personal contacts was sensible; after all, it was how Chapuys often operated. While we have no concrete evidence that Jane was reinstated as a lady of the bedchamber through Cromwell’s machinations, it is certainly likely. The bargain would have suited both of them. She would be content to be back, despite the horrific events she had endured, and he would gain insider knowledge that could be invaluable.

So Jane returned to familiar territory. She was very well acquainted with her new mistress from their days as Anne’s ladies. She has left us no clues about her own feelings as she performed her duties and made obeisance to Queen Jane, previously her equal, as she had done to Queen Anne. Maybe the differences between the two queens made the transition easier for her. Queen Jane was quieter, demure, and of no “great wit,” according to an intrigued Chapuys. Her privy apartments would be calmer and more peaceful, but decidedly less vibrant and exciting, than those presided over by Anne. Nor was Queen Jane a beauty. Of middle height, she was “so fair that one would call her rather pale than otherwise,” Chapuys reported to Charles, and she was not in the first flush of youth. “Over twenty-five,” sneered the ambassador, before ruminating waspishly on the poor morals of Englishwomen, which, he felt, might be shared by Queen Jane. This would be useful should Henry ever want to divorce her, because he would soon find “enough of witnesses” to testify to her premarital sexual romps. Whether the ambassador believed any of this is more doubtful; certainly the new queen had behaved with conspicuous propriety during Henry’s courtship, as Jane was fully aware. And Henry loved her. It would be as well to remember that, and not dwell on the past, if Jane was to stay at court.

In some ways, it was easy to think well of Queen Jane. She clearly portrayed contrasting character traits and sympathies to the volatile Anne, at least in public. To Chapuys’ delight, she promised to do what she could for Mary, not an easy pledge to keep. The ever-hopeful ambassador saw light at the end of the tunnel for the former princess. If she would help Mary and persuade Henry to favor her, he affirmed, Queen Jane would realize Anne’s motto of the “Happiest of Women,” a feat now beyond the dead queen, and earn herself a reputation as a peacemaker in the process. As a Boleyn, Jane Rochford had never commented on Princess Mary’s fate. With George and Anne rotting in their makeshift graves, she still stayed silent. The circumspection she had practiced for so long would not be abandoned yet.