Jane Boleyn: The True Story of the Infamous Lady Rochford (45 page)

And discretion was not Dereham’s watchword. Recklessly, he had boasted of his connection with the queen. Davenport, under pressure again, described a particularly telling incident. When Dereham had come back to court, Davenport related, he “fell out” with Mr. Johns, Catherine’s gentleman usher, and therefore one of her most important male servants, because the queen “favored him” (Dereham) and because Dereham obstinately sat with the queen’s councilors for meals, a place to which he was not entitled. A furious Mr. Johns had sent over a messenger to ask sarcastically whether Dereham was one of the Queen’s Council. “Go to, Mr. Johns,” spat back Dereham, “and tell him I was of the Queen’s Council before he knew her and should be when she hath forgotten him.” The councilors solemnly wrote down all of Davenport’s recollections but it was still not quite enough to nail Dereham for anything more than sleeping with a flirtatious Catherine before her marriage. However, Davenport suddenly delivered the coup de grâce. He asked his jailers to fetch someone from the King’s Council because he had something to tell them. Three council members hurried to the Tower before he changed his mind. What they heard was worth its weight in gold: according to Davenport, Dereham had said that should the king die, “I am sure I might marry her.” It was a capital crime to imagine the king’s death. Davenport had condemned his friend.

He had not condemned Catherine, however. She had already managed that for herself, for she had embarked upon an entirely new relationship within months of becoming queen. Manox and Dereham were her past. Thomas Culpepper was her present. “The Queen 3 or 4 times every day since she was in this trouble,” Jane confessed later, would ask her “what she heard of Culpepper.” Since Jane had become entangled in Catherine’s illicit passion from its early stages, the queen’s disquiet was no surprise. What was surprising was that Catherine had indulged in such folly to begin with. Reveling in the pleasures of the flesh as a girl was one thing but giving way to similar temptation as a queen was quite another, particularly with her own cousin’s death at the hands of the Calais swordsman providing a pertinent reminder of the consequences.

It is true that Culpepper had many obvious attractions and that Catherine had met him and appears to have liked him when she was serving Anne of Cleves. A very distant relation of Catherine’s, he came from a respectable and fairly wealthy gentry family and was well established within the king’s privy chamber. He was also unmarried, probably charming, courteous, and solicitous, and close to Catherine’s age. The contrast between this appealing young man and Henry, with his thinning hair, bloated body, and suppurating ulcers, could not have been more marked. Perhaps, for Catherine, it was as simple as that. Certainly, she was not deterred by an unsavory story associated with the young man that linked him to the rape of a park keeper’s wife whom his attendants “held down for him in a thicket” and then to a “murder committed when some villagers tried to apprehend him for the crime.” She told Jane that she “trusted Culpepper more than her own brother.” In fact, she more than trusted him. She loved him. She said as much in her one surviving, incriminating letter to him. “I heard you were sick,” she wrote, “and never longed so much for anything as to see you. It makes my heart die to think I cannot be always in your company. Come when my Lady Rochford is here, for then I shall be best at leisure to be at your commandment.” She signed it, “Yours as long as life endures, Catherine,” scarcely the tone to be expected of a queen to a subject, not least since at the time the word
company
had a well-known sexual resonance.

Catherine’s desire for Culpepper led her to abandon caution. It was to cost the queen her life, but it was also to cost Jane hers. We shall never know whether Jane realized what she was getting into when the Culpepper fiasco commenced. The most viable explanation for Jane’s behavior is that what started innocently enough developed, with terrifying speed, into a deadly vortex of deceit and intrigue. When the queen first ordered her to take a note, a token, or a verbal message to Culpepper, Jane had to make a split-second decision. She had no real reason to think that the queen’s request was connected to a passionate affair. Attendants were expected to run errands; that was part of their function. Indeed, when Culpepper received gifts from Catherine, the queen told a male servant, Henry Webb, to escort him to her apartments. Jane had clawed her way back into a senior post within the royal household and she wanted to stay there. That meant she must obey her mistress. Although not born to rule, Catherine could be as imperious and demanding as her royal husband. To blatantly refuse her instructions was unthinkable.

If she had done, Jane’s career would have been over. It would have meant permanent withdrawal from court to the tranquillity, or boredom, of Blickling. When her jointure had been agreed, Jane had rejected that lifestyle. Alternatively, she could have gone to the king and told him that his wife was communicating with one of the gentlemen in his privy chamber. But should it have come to the queen’s word against hers, there would have been no contest. Henry could easily have dismissed the missives as innocuous and blamed Jane for tale-bearing. Even had she decided to risk it, the sheer practicality of gaining access to the king posed almost insuperable obstacles. As a woman, especially one about whom a whiff of treason might still linger, she could not approach him directly. She would have needed a male go-between. Cromwell would have been the ideal choice but the minister had perished. As for her father, Jane knew his interests were intellectual rather than political. Lord Morley was not unworldly: he came to court when required, he fulfilled his duty by sitting on the various panels of peers, he was not averse to accumulating ex-monastic property despite his religious convictions. In particular, he was contentedly settling into his new estate of Markhall in Essex, the childhood home of Alice Middleton, Sir Thomas More’s widow, which he had purchased in 1538, the very year that Jane’s jointure was agreed. However, he was at his happiest when engrossed in his books and his translations. Never one to raise his head above the parapet, he was hardly likely to break the habit of a lifetime now. Clearly, Jane did not approach her father, nor is there any hint that she consulted her brother, Sir Henry Parker. She was on her own, as she had been during other key episodes in her life, and she chose the path of silence. For her, it was much trod.

And once she had decided to take that first message, and that message became part of a series, Jane had passed the point of no return. “Come when my Lady Rochford is here,” the queen had written to Culpepper. What may have started harmlessly had taken on a momentum of its own and Jane could not extricate herself. It was now too late to crave country air or to attempt to see the king. Her situation was actually worse than that of John Hall’s when he listened, probably with mounting horror, to his sister’s unsolicited confidences. Mary Hall had heard Catherine’s lovemaking and had helped her procure the key to the maidens’ chamber, but Catherine then had been as free as a wild bird—she had not been the king’s wife. When Jane became immersed in Catherine’s intrigues, the bird was caged and the king kept the key. Because she had not acted immediately, Jane had drastically reduced her options. If she opened her mouth now, charges of misprision of treason would loom and all of the property she had so painstakingly regained since George’s death would be forfeit yet again.

All she could do, even though her danger intensified when Catherine’s romance went beyond the letter stage to nocturnal trysts, was to go along with it, do her best to minimize the dangers and hope that, somehow, it would not be discovered. Paradoxically, as Jane may have realized, should Catherine become pregnant, the baby could be their savior. Henry was still sleeping with his wife, his optimism undiminished; if Catherine did have a child, it could as easily be Henry’s as Culpepper’s. And, should it be a boy, Henry would be so overjoyed that Catherine would be his precious jewel forever. If that were so, the loyal Viscountess Rochford’s place within the bedchamber would be secure too.

But this scenario had depended on secrecy. The exposure of Catherine’s youthful adventures had jeopardized everything. For the few days that the archbishop and the councilors questioned the queen about her years at Horsham and Lambeth and about Manox and Dereham, Jane was in limbo. Catherine told her that if the Culpepper “matter came not out, she feared not for nothing.” Unfortunately, too many of those already rounded up knew enough about it to make sure that come out it would. It was just a question of time.

CHAPTER
31

“That Bawd, the Lady Jane Rochford”

A
WEEK AFTER
H
ENRY
had sat back in his small barge while his bargemen rowed him upriver from Hampton Court to Westminster and his waiting councilors, the Culpepper fiasco was out in the open. It could hardly have been otherwise. Catherine, Jane, and Culpepper must each have known that their chances of escaping detection were slim once the councilors really set to work. According to Marillac, the French ambassador, it was Dereham who first blew the whistle. Desperate that his forceful interrogators should believe his protestations that he had not slept with Catherine after her marriage to the king, he said that “Culpepper had succeeded him in the Queen’s affections.”

That was enough. For Catherine to say to Jane, as she did, that if the “matter” of Culpepper “came out…she would never confess it” and to demand that Jane should “deny it utterly” was pointless. Catherine had already cracked under pressure from Cranmer about Manox and Dereham, her transparent lies quickly exposed. She would fare no better now; neither would Jane. By the time that Henry’s diligent councilors had worked their magic in tracking down every potential witness, they were able to compile a formidable dossier. They had times, places, the names, and statements of those whose suspicions had been aroused, and they were soon ready to take depositions from the three most fatally implicated: Culpepper, Catherine, and Jane. Henry was determined to “find out the bottom of the pot.”

Her normal household dispersed, their ears buzzing with lurid details of their mistress’s immorality, Catherine was taken from a desolate Hampton Court along the Thames to the former nunnery at Syon where she was to live in much reduced circumstances. Three chambers were prepared for her, hung with “mean stuff, without any cloth of estate.” She was cared for by four gentlewomen, one of whom was to be Lady Isabel Baynton, and two chamberers. Jane, of course, was separated from her. Sir Edward Baynton was deputed by the king to be in overall charge of the queen’s establishment. Catherine had to leave behind the more ostentatious trappings of royalty, such as her fabulous jewels. The king even specified the clothes that she was allowed to take with her. She could have six French hoods, six pairs of sleeves, six gowns, and six kirtles. She could wear satin damask or velvet. Her hoods could be edged with gold, but she was to have no precious stones or pearls on any of her garments. It was quite a comedown for this jewel of womanhood. It could have been worse. Culpepper was conveyed to the Tower. So was Jane, and she would have barely enough time to collect her thoughts before the questioning would start.

At least she knew she had not engineered Catherine’s first major encounter with Culpepper. When the queen had initially sent for Culpepper back in April, he was escorted to her apartments by a male servant, Henry Webb. As Culpepper stood in the “entry between her privy chamber and the chamber of presence,” Catherine gave him “by her own hands” a velvet cap “garnished with a brooch,” a chain, and three dozen pairs of aiglettes.
^*18
The gifts were a secret between them. “Put this under your cloak so nobody see it,” the queen advised.

Jane’s role as intermediary began shortly after that. Noticing a cramp ring
^†19
on her finger, which she had been given by Catherine, Culpepper daringly stole it. When Jane told the queen of his playful theft, Catherine took another one from her own finger, asking Jane to take it to him. He needed two, Catherine said, as “it was an ill sign to see him wear but one.” Other than saying that it was “in the progress time,” Culpepper does not date this incident in his confession, and Jane does not mention it at all, but there is no reason to doubt its veracity.

With the progress under way, Jane proved very useful indeed to the queen. Margaret Morton, one of Catherine’s attendants, testified that when the royal party were at Liddington in late July, the queen felt unwell and ordered Margaret to take a “privy letter” to Jane. The note was sealed but not addressed. Margaret was to tell Jane that the queen “was sorry that she could write no better.” Jane then “had her desire the Queen to respite her [give her more time and wait] till the next morning for an answer.” When Margaret returned as ordered on the following day, Jane handed her a sealed letter for Catherine, instructing her to warn “her grace to keep it secret and not to lay it abroad.” About a week later, when they all arrived at the Duke of Suffolk’s Lincolnshire mansion of Grimsthorpe, there was a similar event when Katherine Tylney, one of Catherine’s Horsham friends and now her chamberer, was also sent with a message for Jane. “When should she have the thing she promised her?” Tylney was to ask Jane, whose response was that she would sit up for it and “would next day bring her [Catherine] word herself.” By now, Jane had indeed reached that point of no return.