Jane Boleyn: The True Story of the Infamous Lady Rochford

by Julia Fox

  Her ladies stepped forward to help her. They removed her mantle, put a linen cap over her hair and bandaged her eyes so that she would not see the ax fall. They gently positioned her head on the block—she already knew what that would feel like—and arranged her skirts modestly around her feet. Then the headsman struck. Mercifully, Catherine’s head came off in one blow; the executioner raised it by the hair for all to see. It was done.

  But it all had to be done again. Once the queen was dead, Gage instructed the guards to throw water over the scaffold, which was then covered in fresh straw. No one wanted the new victim to slip in the blood of the last. Gage then walked back to the royal lodgings. Jane was probably kept either in the king’s or in the queen’s apartments since Walsingham had run out of suitable accommodation for his horde of illustrious prisoners, most of whom, including the Duchess of Norfolk, were still incarcerated.

  It was now Jane’s turn to die. Gage knocked on her door and escorted her down the stairs, past the White Tower—that symbol of royal power, dominating the skyline and meant to overawe London as much as to protect it—and thence to the scaffold. Those watching had a second death to witness and the executioner another task to perform.

  Jane was not a queen, but for this last walk, she was treated royally. Gage conducted the affair with civility and with deference. She had seen nothing of Catherine’s death and, by this time, there was little to see. The queen’s ladies had already wrapped her head in a white linen cloth and laid her small body in a black cloak before carrying her remains, dripping with blood, into St. Peter’s and to her grave.

  From her room in the royal lodgings, Jane had almost certainly heard the cries and gasps of the spectators as Catherine’s head was held up by the executioner. Those last few minutes, while she waited for Gage’s polite tap on the door, were the longest she had ever experienced. But the waiting was finally over and she faced her end with the bravery and composure faithfully recorded by Ottwell Johnson. Like Catherine before her, Jane was met by a sea of familiar faces, people with whom she had once laughed and danced but who now stared impassively, not meeting her eyes. With calm dignity, she ascended the scaffold as Catherine had done before her. The executioner moved forward to seek her pardon, which she gave graciously.

  And then she faced her audience. It was her last chance to speak. Marillac maintained that she gave a “long discourse” but Ottwell Johnson would tell a different tale. There is no word-for-word transcript of her final speech—she was not important enough for that—but Johnson has left us enough to reconstruct it. She began by declaring her complete faith and trust in God. “I have,” she said, “committed many sins against God from my youth upwards and have offended the king’s royal Majesty very dangerously, so my punishment is just and deserved. I am justly condemned by the laws of this realm and by Parliament. All of you who watch me die, should learn from my example and change your own lives. You must gladly obey the king in all things, for he is a just and godly prince. I pray for his preservation and beseech you all to do the same. I now entrust my soul to God and pray for his mercy.” Not once did she refer to the specific offenses that had brought her to the block. Neither did she have anything but praise for Henry, the man who had ordered her death. There were conventions governing final speeches. Anne and George had both adhered to them and so did Jane.

  It was then her turn to have her cloak removed and her hair bound so that nothing would impede the ax. With a final prayer, she knelt down; her eyes were bandaged and the executioner severed her head. Blood stained the straw yet again as he held the head aloft.

  The spectators were free to go home. Justice had been done and had been seen to have been done. They all knew the fate of traitors. The Londoners returned the way they had come, through the portcullises and over the drawbridge across the moat, and back into the narrow, rambling streets of the city, now teeming with glorious life. They had much to tell their families. Ottwell Johnson wrote his note to his brother, convinced that the souls of both Jane and Catherine were “with God, for they made the most godly and Christian’s end that ever was heard tell of (I think) since the world’s creation.”

  The courtiers and the councilors returned to their barges to be rowed back to Westminster. It was already past ten o’clock; there was no need for the torches that had been so necessary on their outward journey. They could get on with their business. Henry was expected back in London within a matter of hours. Always reluctant to be close to any death he had ordered, he had spent the night at Waltham Abbey in Essex, a monastery that he had just confiscated but that had always kept special apartments for him in case he happened to be hunting in the area. He had been less than twenty miles from Great Hallingbury. Still stung by his ungrateful wife’s treachery, he would expect to hear a full account of all that had been done that morning. Chapuys was to say that the king was “in better spirits” after Catherine’s execution and to remark on the court’s “much feasting” in the buildup to Lent, but the strain of the whole affair had aged him. Two months later, Marillac noted, on seeing the king, how old and gray he had suddenly become. Chapuys too often found him “sad, pensive, and sighing,” despite his initial resurgence.

  For Gage and Walsingham, there was the cleaning up to supervise. The scaffold was washed down again, then dismantled. The executioner was sent on his way with his fee and the victims’ outer clothes as a perquisite, and the guards dismissed to their quarters. Catherine and Jane were buried together, close to Anne, in the chancel beside the altar. With George nearby, Jane was finally reunited with the husband she had lost. It was a fitting destination.

  His tasks completed, Gage was free to return to court and resume his duties as a trusted councilor and the comptroller of Henry’s household. Walsingham walked back to his newly constructed lodgings, which were located just inside the walls and to the south of St. Peter’s. Both men had fulfilled their duties honorably. Ordinary life could resume now. There would once again be processions, banquets, music, and dancing. Yielding to the entreaties of his grateful council, Henry would take a sixth and final wife in Katherine Parr. No tears would be shed for the king’s jewel of womanhood or for her confidante. They had to be banished from conversation and thought.

  Like so many other families in Henry’s England, the Morleys had no choice but to accept their loss. With his daughter’s mangled body putrefying in its makeshift grave, Lord Morley settled down to what he did best: he shut himself away in his library and worked. The result was a translation of Boccaccio’s De claris mulieribus. Written between 1361 and 1375, Boccaccio’s Latin volume tells the story of 104 exceptional women, ranging from Eve to Queen Joanna of Naples. While praising some for their high moral standards or filial piety, Boccaccio castigates the majority for their immorality. Morley translated his accounts of forty-six of them, all classical figures.

  Morley worked hard in the months following Jane’s death and presented his completed and exquisitely decorated manuscript as his New Year’s gift to Henry in 1543. Ostensibly, it was his way of distancing himself from his daughter’s crimes and recognizing the justice of her execution, his unique equivalent of riding through the streets in the wake of Catherine’s brothers. If her own father was so horrified by Jane’s flagrant depravity as to write on the immorality of women and the need to keep them firmly under control, then he must obviously have agreed that she was indeed “that bawd” and her death well deserved.

  But a close comparison of Boccaccio’s Latin with Morley’s English rendition suggests that he did not completely disown her after all: it is possible to discover a veiled valediction skillfully camouflaged within his work. Although his translation is usually precise, there are instances where he changes a word or phrase or adds an interpolation of his own. And it is in his passage on Polyxena that we can glean a hint of his true feelings. When Troy fell, Polyxena, the daughter of Hecuba and Priam, was sacrificed by Achilles’ son, Pyrrhus, so that the gods would send the victorious Greeks the winds they needed to re
turn home. She was the counterpart to Iphigenia, who had been killed for a similar purpose when the wars first began.

  Morley inserts a complete phrase of his own when describing Polyxena’s death: “O, that it was against all good order…that so sweet a maiden should be devoured by the hands of Pyrrhus for to satisfy for another woman’s offence.” Clearly, the “sweet maiden” was Jane. The other woman could be Hecuba because of her involvement in the death of Achilles; it could be Helen, the cause of the Trojan Wars; or Morley could mean Catherine Howard, in whose service Jane had died. Morley went further yet. Boccaccio talks of Polyxena as a willing victim, an important concept in both Greek and Roman literature, as a sacrifice was deemed useless if the sufferer struggled and fought. He speaks of the girl offering her “throat” to Pyrrhus “with a deeply constant heart,” to the admiration of everyone around. Morley, however, translates the word iugulum as “neck,” not as “throat.” The two words have the same root, but the subtle difference between them surely relates to how the two women died: Polyxena’s throat was cut, Jane’s head was severed. And Ottwell Johnson remarked on Jane’s considerable “constancy” when facing the ax.

  Morley did not callously dismiss his daughter from his mind. The Catherine Howard inference is impossible to miss in his insertion; so is his respect for Jane’s bravery in adversity. Perhaps too he hoped that just as Polyxena’s death marked the end of the turmoil of war, Jane’s would presage peace, a return to normality after the storms of religious change and factional jockeying for power. In that, he was to be disappointed.

  In his own way, though, he had paid what tribute he could to his daughter. He was not the only person to remember her. In the very year in which her daughter mounted the scaffold steps, Lady Morley made an unprecedented gift toward cost of the bells at St. Giles, Great Hallingbury. John Tonne, who originally came from Sussex but worked extensively in Essex, cast a new bell for the little church. To imagine that Alice Morley thought of Jane every time the bell was rung may be fanciful. Equally, it may be true. And John Tonne’s bell, the sole survivor of those early ones, is still there. It rings to this day.

  EPILOGUE

  History Finds a Scapegoat

  WHEN JANE PLACED HER HEAD on the block, she did so as “that bawd, the lady Jane Rochford,” a convicted traitor. She died because she had helped Catherine Howard pursue her wicked, lascivious life, or so it was said. What she did not die for was her Boleyn links, or for anything that she might have said or done in connection with the fall of Anne or George, and there is no suggestion of that in the Act of Attainder against her. As the years passed, her posthumous reputation, already tarnished by her relationship with Catherine, deteriorated further: a myth evolved, seeing her execution as a much deserved, if belated, retribution for giving false testimony against her own husband and sister-in-law. Eighteenth-century histories and biographies are littered with slurs. She was a “wicked woman,” a “scandalous woman,” a woman of “infamous character.” She became “the infamous lady Rochford, who justly deserved her fate for the concern which she had in bringing Anne Boleyn as well as her own husband to the block.” Her death was “the judgment of Heaven.”

  This myth, which makes Jane’s name synonymous with deceit and betrayal, did not develop overnight. It can be traced back to its source: John Foxe, the doyen of the Protestant historians of Elizabeth I’s reign. Within forty years of Jane’s death, he named and shamed her in his Actes and Monuments, the work that charts the origins and progress of the Reformation and immortalizes those martyred for their Protestant beliefs. Jane does not figure in the 1563 edition of Foxe’s work but she does become a marginal note in that of 1576. Foxe does not bring her into his discussion of the fall of Anne, and when he talks of the execution of Catherine Howard in the main body of the text, he merely mentions Jane as dying with her. It is the marginal comment that castigates Jane: “It is reported of some that this Lady Rochford forged a false letter against her husband and Queen Anne her sister, by the which they were both cast away. Which if it be so, the judgment of God is here to be marked.” The same note appears in the 1583 edition, again in the margin and not in the text itself.

  Foxe, if indeed the note was his rather than the printer’s (as is often the case with marginal additions), must have latched on to the false letter idea from somewhere. Had Jane given direct evidence at the trials of Anne and George, his source would be clear. However, Jane did not appear in person at either trial. Chapuys actually said that the absence of witnesses was unusual. All he did say, and it is significant, is that the smart money was on George’s acquittal until he read aloud from the paper that he was handed, referring to Henry’s lack of potency. This was the only time, that we know about, when Jane’s name cropped up at the Boleyn trials. When we look into who else was in a position to know what testimony was given or produced in the Tower hearings, information that Foxe could have used, we continue to draw a blank. Sir John Spelman, who sat on the bench throughout, did not touch on Jane at all. Instead, he wrote in his notebook that the incriminating evidence against Anne came from Lady Wingfield. He could hardly have confused “Rochford” with “Wingfield.” According to John Husee, the chief informant was the Countess of Worcester; he did not say it was Jane. And Cromwell, who we can be sure prepared the case, simply made general remarks on the disgust at Anne’s conduct felt by the ladies of the bedchamber. Had Jane been his star witness for the prosecution, there was no reason for him to withhold her name. In fact, he had everything to gain by proclaiming it to the rafters.

  So if Foxe did not alight on Jane from what he could discover about the trials, he did so in another way. Several possibilities spring to mind. We know that he used documents and oral recollections, so one informant might have been the young George Wyatt, grandson of Anne’s love, the poet Sir Thomas Wyatt. Writing toward the end of Elizabeth’s reign, George Wyatt penned an account of the life of Anne Boleyn, which was eventually published in 1817. In this highly partisan story, Wyatt clearly wished to vindicate the queen who, he gushes, was not only of “rare and admirable beauty” but had a “heavenly flame burning in her.” Although he does not allude to any letters, he includes a damning reference to Jane, saying that she was the witness to the alleged incest between George Boleyn and Anne. Wyatt calls her George’s “wicked wife, accuser of her own husband, even to the seeking of his own blood.” Conveniently ignoring the comparative penury to which Jane would instantly be reduced by “seeking his own blood” in such a dramatic way, Wyatt goes on to suggest that she was a hostile witness “more to be rid of him than of true ground against him.” Jane’s later execution after the Catherine Howard debacle, “the judgment that fell out upon her,” was a “just punishment by law after her naughtiness.” By dying as she had, Jane had provided every man and his dog with the chance to impugn her. Yet after resoundingly maligning Jane, Wyatt proceeds to contradict himself by reporting that he had heard that George was “condemned only upon some point of a statute of words then in force,” which somehow contrived to “entangle” or “bridle” the truthful. His idea of exactly what had actually happened in the trials is patently hazy.

  Another potential source for Foxe was George Constantine, a former servant of Henry Norris, who fell afoul of Cromwell for remarks he was purported to have made to the Dean of Westbury. In 1830, Thomas Amyot, treasurer of the Society of Antiquaries, was handed an alleged transcript of Constantine’s “Memorial” (answer) to Cromwell with details on Anne’s fall and, crucially, George’s trial. “I heard say,” writes Constantine, “he had escaped had it not been for a letter.” If authentic, this suggests that talk of a letter had surfaced, although Constantine gives no information on its contents, sender, or recipient and emphatically does not say that Jane was involved.

  Furthermore, Constantine’s “Memorial” may be a forgery. The original document has never been seen; all that was ever produced was the transcript, which Amyot received from the infamous John Payne Collier. A journalist, theater cri
tic, literary reviewer, essayist, and subeditor at the Morning Chronicle, Payne Collier wrote a History of English Dramatic Poetry and Annals of the Stage in three volumes. Unfortunately, he regularly tacked on inventions of his own to the sources he claimed to have rediscovered. So, although his transcript may be genuine, it is better to reserve judgment. Even if true, however, the document does not implicate Jane; it merely gives a hint of the origin of a possible letter known to Foxe.

  Where letters do figure significantly is in a document sent by Alexander Ales, a Scottish Protestant, to Elizabeth at the beginning of her reign. In what was in reality a plea for money, he tells Anne’s daughter that he wants to write “the history or tragedy of the death” of her “most holy mother.” Blaming Anne’s death primarily on the failed embassy to the German princes, when George had been unable to negotiate a possible alliance, Ales also refers to Stephen Gardiner, “a most violent persecutor of all the godly” and then ambassador to Francis, passing on to Cromwell the news that “certain reports were being circulated in the Court of the King of France, and certain letters had been discovered, according to which the Queen was accused of adultery.” An additional letter, it transpires, was supposed to be from Anne to her brother, telling him that she was pregnant. In spite of this, Jane’s name never surfaces and Ales, keen to impress Elizabeth, explains away all of this circumstantial froth, but the idea that there were letters, some of which were possibly forged, has materialized.

  We do not know whether Ales’s own epistle ever reached the hands of Elizabeth, but it would certainly have been read by Sir William Cecil, her secretary of state and chief councilor, among whose official papers it is now preserved. A zealous Protestant, Cecil was Foxe’s patron in publishing the Actes and Monuments. And Foxe’s printer, John Day, who may himself be the author of the marginal note about Jane that first appeared in 1576, had run a secret underground press for the Protestants not far from Cecil’s country house at Stamford in Lincolnshire during the Catholic Mary Tudor’s reign. Once Elizabeth was queen, Day continued to work closely with Cecil, to the point where one historian has called him Cecil’s “tame printer.”