Jane Boleyn: The True Story of the Infamous Lady Rochford

by Julia Fox

  Suddenly that help became necessary. Henry flirted with another woman a few months after the miscarriage. We do not know her identity but she certainly gave Anne cause for concern. Chapuys, ever eager to pick up on any gossip that might mean Anne’s influence was waning, was soon onto the scent. He wrote to Charles about “a young lady whom this king has been accustomed to serve,” expressing hopes that this girl might succeed in destroying Anne for she was, he reported, sympathetic to Mary. He reported that the lady in question had sent a message to the princess, “telling her to take good heart,” since “her tribulations will come to an end much sooner than she expected,” and that “should the opportunity occur,” she would, she assured Mary, “show herself her true friend and devoted servant.” From Chapuys’ point of view, it could not have been more promising.

  Anne’s response was to try the direct approach; it had always worked before. She went straight to Henry, demanding that her rival be sent away immediately for not treating her “with due respect in words or deeds.” This time, however, all she managed to do was to infuriate her husband. Not prepared to be taken to task by his wife, the king “went away in a great passion, complaining loudly of her importunity and vexatiousness.” It was at this point that Jane came into the picture. She and Anne were close enough for the queen immediately to turn to her, above all her ladies, for help. Caution required such sensitive discussion was kept within the family. Jane could be trusted. Together they plotted about how best to deal with the interloper and they hatched a plan: Jane would pick a quarrel “or otherwise” with her so that Henry, finding the fracas all too tiresome and preferring a quiet life, would dismiss the girl from court. As Chapuys mentions that Jane “joined a conspiracy” to that effect, the family machine was obviously involved too. Since this crisis had happened at the moment when Henry, with Cromwell in the vanguard, was dealing with such high-profile antagonists as More and Fisher, it was a courageous action on Jane’s part. But she knew that her own fortunes were so inextricably bound to those of the Boleyns that the risk had to be taken.

  Unfortunately, the plan backfired. It was Jane who was exiled, not Anne’s rival. Henry’s rage must have terrified her. He had changed. The truly beautiful young king, with his slender body and chivalric values, who had so entranced all who saw him, had long since vanished. His waist had thickened, his muscles were less toned, his hair was thinner, his good humor less reliable. It was no longer advisable to count on his laughing, as he once had when his standard-bearer, Sir Andrew Flamock, “having his belly full,” broke wind, excusing the loud noise as merely complementing the sound of the king’s hunting horn. The old prophecy that he would be “mild as a lamb” at the beginning of his reign but “more fierce than a lion” toward the end of it seemed to be coming true. Unexpectedly, it was Jane who felt the full force of that ferocity. The result was that on that October day in 1534, Jane left court under a cloud. We do not know where she was sent, although Beaulieu is a possible destination. At that time, Henry was not using the palace for himself or his family, as the former princess was living with Elizabeth, and the king had never considered it a suitable venue for Katherine’s enforced rustication. To be removed to Beaulieu was not too terrible a fate for Jane. The Boleyns had other residences, though, and it is very likely that she divided her time among them. To be banned from the court did not mean that she could not reside anywhere else in the capital. Anyway, Jane hoped that with luck it would not be too long before Henry relented and she was allowed to return to the court itself. There is no record of when she did, and Chapuys tells us that she was certainly not reinstated three months later.

  However, no doubt to the ambassador’s disappointment, although not to his surprise, Anne’s rival sank into oblivion, for the queen quickly regained her husband’s affections. “The young lady who was lately in the king’s favor is so no longer,” Chapuys reported to the emperor regretfully. As the Boleyns perceived, the relationship between Henry and Anne was volatile, which was probably what gave it its spice, so blazing rows simply burned themselves out. They were but the “lovers’ quarrels” about which the shrewd ambassador had already informed his master. With her sister-in-law as beloved as always, it is likely that Jane was back in the queen’s apartments again before too long.

  In the interim, enforced absence did at least allow a chance for contemplation, since hers was not the only problem to beset the Boleyns over those months. So far, they had all pulled together but cracks had started to appear in the Boleyn facade. Jane understood that the family was a team but Mary forgot it. In the dispatch in which he announced Jane’s exile, Chapuys gleefully told Charles that Mary Carey had also been sent from court as well. She was, he said, “guilty of misconduct” and was pregnant. Widowed when William Carey died of the sweat, Mary, like Jane, had been with Anne through those endless years of waiting as Henry wriggled out of his union with Katherine. She had been there to share in Anne’s glorious coronation, albeit in a place lower than Jane’s. Now she shared Jane’s disgrace. But there was a fundamental difference. While Jane’s removal was due to loyalty to the family cause, Mary’s was for baser reasons: she had fallen in love and secretly married William Stafford, a scion of the minor gentry. This would not do. She had failed in her duty. Semiroyal now, she could have been married off advantageously for the Boleyns. Thomas was furious, George was furious, Anne was incensed. Sister or not, Mary was cut off at once. Although joined only through marriage, Jane had proved herself a more dependable Boleyn than Anne’s own flesh and blood, especially when trouble had loomed. In the face of Boleyn anger, there was no way in which Jane could have helped her former masking partner, even supposing she had wanted to. This was not her dispute. Mary needed to make her peace herself. That, of course, was easier said than done. In comparative poverty and at her wits’ end, Mary did the only thing possible: she wrote to Cromwell, as one day so would Jane. The tone of entreaty so apparent in their letters is remarkably similar.

  Calling herself “a poor banished creature,” Mary begged for the chief minister’s aid “for the love that well I know you do bear to all my blood.” Acknowledging that she and Stafford had been “hasty” and “bold” in marrying without the royal consent, she accepted that they deserved “high displeasure…both of the king’s highness and the queen’s grace.” She had, she said, been unable to stop herself. “Love overcame reason,” she confessed, “for my part I saw so much honesty in him, that I loved him as well as he did me.” In a sentence that proved she appreciated only too well that family ambition might have produced a more suitable husband, she wrote that she “could never have had one that should have loved” her more deeply, even though she “might have had a greater man of birth and a higher.” Their devotion was such, she wrote, that “I had rather beg my bread with him than be the greatest queen in Christendom.” And his feelings were “in the same case with me; for I believe verily he would not forsake me to be a king.” She begged Cromwell to intercede with her mother and her father for their blessing and to ask Norfolk and George “to be good to us.” She dared not write to either directly, as “they are so cruel against us.”

  Above all, Mary knew that her sister, the woman who had replaced her in the king’s bed, was totally implacable. The only way to move her was for Cromwell to approach the king and persuade him to intervene, presumably for old times’ sake.

  And, good master secretary, sue for us to the king’s highness, which ever was wont to take pity, to have pity on us; and that it will please his grace of his goodness to speak to the queen’s grace for us; for, so far as I can perceive, her grace is so highly displeased with us both that, without the king be so good lord to us as to withdraw his rigor and sue [plead] for us, we are never like to recover her grace’s favor: which is too heavy to bear.

  Yes, Mary knew her sister through and through. We will never be privy to Cromwell’s reply, or to what the Boleyns said to one another behind closed doors as they fumed over Mary’s conduct, but she was not forg
iven and brought back into the fold until after Anne’s death. Then, all was different, as her children represented the future. For the moment, however, as Jane walked in the gardens or sat calmly sewing in her comfortable but tense exile while she waited for news from George or from friends at court, she can only have looked on Mary’s fate and learned from it. To cross the family was unwise even for those who believed themselves at its heart, like Mary, or for those who thought themselves influential within it.

  That was Norfolk, Anne’s uncle, and he was another niggling worry for the Boleyns, something else for Jane to ponder as winter set in. Premier duke he might be, head of the powerful Howard clan he certainly was, but his wings had been clipped by the rise of his niece who, if anything, took after her wily great-grandfather, Geoffrey, in values and courage. In the early days, Norfolk had been a vital ally, especially as they all worked together to destroy Wolsey. The cardinal was gone now, his corpse rotting in his grave at Leicester Abbey. Norfolk could never again be quite as useful, and as the years had passed, that fact had become plain both to the Boleyns and to the duke himself.

  Chapuys, who usually rubbed along reasonably well with Norfolk, was quick to report a growing rift between uncle and niece. “I am informed on good authority,” he told Charles, “that the said lady [Anne] does not cease night or day to procure the disgrace of the duke of Norfolk, whether it be because he has spoken too freely of her or because Cromwell, desiring to lower the great ones, wishes to commence with him.” Never one to mince words, the queen could be acidly sharp when talking to her uncle, and perhaps because she felt Norfolk was insufficiently deferential toward her, she indulged in altercations that Jane, while in the queen’s apartments, was likely to have witnessed. When Anne used “shameful words” to him, in a way in which “one would not address a dog,” a humiliated Norfolk “was compelled to quit the chamber.” Once outside, he was sufficiently incandescent to complain “to one to whom he did not generally show good-will.” Momentarily careless, he let his polite facade drop far enough to utter “reproaches” against Anne, and call her a “grande putain.”*14 Rumors of the confrontation spread throughout the court remarkably quickly, as any gossip concerning the queen always did. And Anne’s high handedness endeared her to no one.

  As the months went by without Anne becoming pregnant, one previous action returned to haunt her. Anne had persuaded Henry to allow Norfolk’s daughter, Mary, to wed the king’s illegitimate son, the Duke of Richmond, without paying for the privilege. Normally, Henry would have expected Mary to come provided with a large dowry in order to marry within the royal family but he had been willing to forgo such payments in this case. “The king’s grace had never a penny for my lord of Richmond,” wrote Norfolk’s estranged duchess to Cromwell, “for Queen Anne got the marriage clear for my lord my husband, when she did favor my lord my husband.” Since the betrothal was arranged long before she became queen, Anne had probably consulted her own family before suggesting a policy that had seemed so beneficial. It was a clever move to reward Norfolk, despite his initial uncertainty of the value of the union to his house, binding Richmond to the Howards and preventing a foreign match that could turn the boy into a rival. The marriage took place in the same month as Anne’s coronation, so Jane may well have been one of the guests. But with no son from Anne, the one Henry did have, whether born out of wedlock or not, was the apple of his father’s eye. As he was fourteen when they married, Richmond and Mary Howard were considered too young to consummate their union but they would soon grow up. The day might come when Norfolk’s grandson would sit on St. Edward’s Chair; perhaps the clever move was not quite so clever after all.

  To turn Norfolk into an outright enemy could be short sighted but so far it had not come to that. Not quite. Anne and George recognized that their religious ideas were far more radical than Norfolk’s and that he was bound to be jealous, and probably wary, of Cromwell. The offices Cromwell held, such as master of the king’s jewels and chancellor of the exchequer, were no indicators of the minister’s true power. That lay in his relationship with the king, who relied on him and trusted him to get on with the daily grind of state business just as once Henry had placed his faith in Wolsey. To be wary of Cromwell was indeed a sensible precaution. Then, as the entire court could not fail to be aware, the great duke had his own personal problems in the shape of his formidable wife, who refused to countenance his ongoing adulterous affair. Although forcibly kept from court, the duchess was adept at causing scenes and creating friction, writing vituperative accounts of her tribulations to Cromwell. It was hardly surprising that Norfolk was not enamored of women as forthright as his niece. Still, as even Jane knew, the ambitious duke would never put himself at risk by opposing Anne, unless the king tired of his wife and she became vulnerable. For as long as she was adored by her husband there was no imminent peril, but Norfolk and his arrogant son, the Earl of Surrey, a close friend of Richmond’s, could prove dangerous foes if Henry’s eyes ever alighted on another pretty woman and the queen produced no son.

  Jane’s enforced exile from court, if anything, gave her even greater leisure to think about these tensions. She was sure that she would regain the king’s favor in the end, that it was simply a matter of patience, but rifts within the family would not be healed easily and enemies made could not be unmade. Whether she heard from or even visited her father and mother over these months is unknown. If she did go to Beaulieu, it is entirely possible that she took the opportunity to make the journey to Great Hallingbury, which was not that far away, and walked through the gardens and the orchard or sat by Lady Morley’s pond. Her infant nephew, her brother’s son, another Henry, was likely to have been brought up in Jane’s childhood home, so on any visit she could have seen him too as she chatted to her sister-in-law, Grace, in those familiar rooms, surrounded by the tangible mementoes of her grandmother. Since her marriage to Lady Shelton’s son, Jane’s sister, Margaret Parker, had left the Morley household but she too probably came home for the occasional visit or wrote about her new life and her own children. Jane remained childless, something else that no doubt preyed on her mind. Time was running out. To be a barren wife, while not uncommon, was a great misfortune as it jeopardized the continuation of the family line, and although physicians were aware that either partner could be the root cause of childlessness, most men tended to blame the woman, who was supposed to be too moist to retain her husband’s seed. George, and certainly his father, would have hoped that Jane could fulfill her function and produce the Boleyn heir. Anne was not unique in watching for her monthly “courses.”

  Then, out of the blue, William Foster, Jane’s scholar at King’s College, Cambridge, asked for her aid. With all that was going on within the family, this would be an added burden. Foster had become involved in a scramble for jobs, in particular one concerning the priory of Swaffham Bulbeck in Cambridgeshire. The story was complicated and, had Jane not had more pressing matters to contemplate, amusing. The small priory owned the nearby parish church with the right to appoint the parish priest, and when the post fell vacant, the prioress, Joan Spylman, who was conducting an illicit and long-standing affair with a friar, Father Bassam, nominated her lover who would then be conveniently close. The scandal was notorious for miles around; the nuns all knew that Bassam had been “naughty” with their prioress. Despite her strenuous efforts on his behalf, however, her friar fancied moving on to higher places, in fact to a King’s College parish in the gift of the provost, Edward Foxe. Bassam persuaded Foxe to give him the King’s College parish in exchange for Swaffham but this in turn meant an exchange with a Fellow of King’s who had already been promised it. All seemed well; the Fellow accepted the swap, which should then have gone ahead, but disaster struck in the person of Dr. Thomas Leigh, Cromwell’s commissioner, who visited Swaffham Bulbeck as part of the general visitation of all the monasteries ordered by the king. Dr. Leigh said that no exchange could occur while the status of monastic property was under review. When a few months
later, Parliament enacted that all foundations with an annual income of less than two hundred pounds should be closed, Swaffham Priory fell into that category and so lost its right to appoint the new clergyman for the local church. The Fellow who had agreed to the swap, therefore, realized that his chance of obtaining the Swaffham living was so slim that he surrendered it to young Foster. All Foster had to do was to figure out a way to get it.

  With his connection to Lady Rochford, the “special patroness” of his studies, Foster thought he would be home and dry. His sponsor was not simply a noblewoman but a member of the foremost family in the land, linked by marriage to the king. He was confident that with her aid his benefice was in the bag. Surely she would approach the king and queen for him, and as a quick glance around his surroundings at Cambridge proved, the royal couple could do whatever they wished, even bypass the implications and small print of the recent act. There was no reason for him to think otherwise. Evidence of the monarch’s wealth and might was all-encompassing. Whenever he entered King’s College Chapel to pray, he knelt beneath the great vaulted ceiling amid glowing shafts of light, gently diffused through breathtaking stained-glass windows. These had been superbly fashioned by the artistry of Henry’s glaziers into ethereal depictions of the saints and the Virgin and the holy figures of the Bible. He knew that Italian craftsmen had nearly finished carving an intricate organ screen on which the initials of Anne and Henry were prominently displayed, sometimes intertwined as signs of their love, and with Anne’s falcon badge, together with the bulls of the Boleyns, clearly visible. In the event, it was not his reasoning but his timing that was at fault. Naturally, when he contacted her, Jane did her best. Patronage implied obligations. She passed the letter on to Cromwell, who gave some help, which Foster appreciated, but unfortunately even the great minister’s hands were tied because the king was busily closing the smaller monasteries and confiscating their lands and goods. Jane could not give more help either. She was too busy struggling to preserve her own position to be of any use to Foster, who left Cambridge shortly afterward, certainly by October 1536. He never did get the benefice of Swaffham, although there is every chance that he was the William Foster who became Vicar of Billings-hurst in Suffolk. If so, he did owe something to his “special patroness” who had, at least, started him on the road to a career. She could take pride in that.