Jane’s birth would have been a cause of both celebration and disappointment. She was born into a world in which male children were by far the more desirable, but daughters could be useful too. This would become glaringly apparent when the country erupted into joyous celebrations when Jane Seymour gave birth to the King’s longed-for male heir, ‘the goodly prince’ Edward, in the year following Jane’s own birth.78 Any disappointment which Jane’s parents might have felt at her sex may have been overshadowed by relief at the fact that the baby was healthy, which boded well for future births. There was every reason to hope for sons.
Unfortunately no details of Jane’s christening survive, but it is likely to have taken place roughly three days after her birth.79 It was almost certainly conducted in a similar manner to that of her mother’s, which was performed with the utmost grandeur. According to the account of Frances’s father, the Duke of Suffolk:
The road to the church was strewed with rushes; the church porch hung with rich cloth of gold and needlework; the church with arras [a wall hanging made of a rich tapestry fabric] of the history of Holofernes and Hercules; the chancel, with arras of silk and gold; and the altar with rich cloth of tissue, and covered with images, relics, and jewels ... The font was hung with a canopy of crimson satin, powdered with roses, half red and half white, with the sun shining, and fleur de lis gold.80
Jane’s name was chosen as a compliment to the Queen, Jane Seymour, who was probably also asked to stand as godmother to the child. However, it is highly unlikely that the Queen herself attended Jane’s christening; she would instead have sent a representative on her behalf. There is no indication as to who Jane’s godfather was, but it would certainly have been someone of high standing. It may have been the King himself, or perhaps his chief advisor, Thomas Cromwell.
Following her birth, Jane would have been given into the immediate care of a wet nurse, whose responsibility it was to suckle her.81 This was an established practice among royal and noble families – one that had been in use for centuries – as high-born women who breastfed their own children were thought to be unfashionable. The woman appointed for the task would have been carefully chosen and in all likelihood have had previous experience, as well as children of her own who she was feeding at the same time.82 The name of Jane’s wet nurse has not survived, but she was doubtless handpicked by her mother. The wet nurse was responsible for overseeing Jane’s everyday care, and remained with her until she was old enough to be weaned. In accordance with customary practice, Jane’s nursery staff would have also included several rockers, whose job it was to take turns to rock the infant Jane to sleep in her cradle. Her every need was attended to, the arrangements for which were put in place by her mother. Lady Frances had very little to do with Jane’s everyday care, for relatively soon after Jane’s birth she was churched. This ceremony of purification traditionally took place forty days after a woman had given birth, and was a necessary part of sixteenth-century ritual that allowed a woman to resume her place in society and her conjugal relationship with her husband. From then on, all responsibility for Jane’s care rested with those appointed to nurse her. Though it is by no means certain, it seems possible that Jane’s nursery was at least initially established at Dorset House, the likely setting for her birth. Alternatively, the rural Bradgate Park may have been seen as preferable to London.83
Jane’s arrival in the world was of great significance to her family, for in this tiny girl rested many of her parents’ hopes for the future. As the infant Jane lay in her cradle, her parents may already have been making plans for the glittering future that they foresaw for her. She had royal blood in her veins, and they would do all that they could in order to ensure that their ambitions for her were realized. At the time of Jane’s birth, both of the King’s daughters had been declared illegitimate. Thus, though it was not officially regarded as such, Jane’s could be considered the stronger claim to the throne. As Jane grew, so too did her importance, and the pressure her parents put on her to succeed.
CHAPTER 2
Rejoiced All True Hearts
IN 1536 THE London that Jane was born into was one of the most vibrant and sophisticated cities in Europe, with a rapidly expanding population of approximately 50,000 people.1 It was fast becoming a centre for trade and industry, and art and literature were beginning to flourish following the development of the printing press by Wynkyn de Worde, which was established in Fleet Street, transforming the city into one of the most desirable locations of the Renaissance.2 Splendid churches were scattered across the city, from the imposing Westminster Abbey where Jane’s great-grandparents, Henry VII and Elizabeth of York – who would later be hailed as founders of the Tudor dynasty – lay entombed in the magnificent new chapel of Henry’s creation, to the great St Paul’s Cathedral with its towering spire towards the east. The city was also crammed with the beautiful and majestic palaces of the royal family and the nobility: Dorset House and Suffolk Place, the London residence of Jane’s maternal grandfather, were just two of the fine examples. The streets were alive and bursting with people pushing their wares on every passer-by; all sorts of produce, from meat and fish to the finest silks and perfumed gloves, was available. However, the rapidly expanding population was beginning to lead to overcrowding, as well as poor sanitation and living conditions. This resulted in an increase in crime, with thieves lurking in the shadows of street corners, waiting to pounce on an unfortunate victim as they tumbled out of the nearest inn or brothel in the Southwark stews. A contemporary ambassador observed that ‘The subjects of this realm are wont to live in pleasure-seeking and intemperance, haunt taverns and become wholly idle and disorderly’, and there was certainly an element of truth in this.3 Life expectancy hovered between thirty and forty years old, and infant mortality was high. It was not unusual, even among the nobility, for families to have experienced the untimely loss of at least one child or family member, and indeed, there were numerous examples of this within Jane’s own family.4 The streets of the capital were incredibly narrow and in a constant state of congestion, with traffic from horses drawing the litters of the nobility to and from their townhouses, while cats, dogs, chickens and pigs were a common sight. Hordes of people from all walks of life flooded the city’s thoroughfares: foreign merchants on business, bedecked in costly outfits displaying the latest European fashions, to beggars who limped through the streets with genuine or false injuries, attempting to extract money from sympathetic passers-by. At the time, London Bridge, crammed with shops and houses, was the only bridge over the river, so many people chose to travel by water, which was infinitely quicker. Boats could be commandeered complete with a boatman for a penny, and the King and many of the nobility maintained their own barges and staff for this purpose. Thousands of swans glided along the Thames, while passengers sailing under London Bridge cannot have failed to notice the Bridge Gate, on which the decomposing severed heads of traitors were displayed in a chilling reminder of the fate of those who dared to cross the monarch.
The capital also served as the backdrop for the splendour of the royal court, which was fast becoming one of the most glittering in Europe, and of which Jane’s family was an integral part. At the time of Jane’s birth, her great-uncle, Henry VIII, had been on the English throne for twenty-seven years. A ‘worthy King’ who was ‘liberal and handsome’, the forty-five-year-old Henry was a commanding presence; the very embodiment of monarchy to his subjects.5 Only later would he gain notoriety for having six wives and becoming grossly overweight.6 The events of Henry’s reign would prove to be pivotal in shaping Jane and ingraining her religious beliefs. She was born as the cogs of the Reformation in England were starting to turn; initiated by Martin Luther in Germany and spreading to the rest of Europe under the influence of other leading evangelicals, the reformed faith had recently caused England to be divided by Henry’s decision to split from the Catholic Church, headed by the Pope in Rome. He had instead established the Church of England with himself at its head, and th
is was to have profound consequences for both Jane and her family, as well as for the King’s subjects. The decision was momentous; not only did it split the country, but as time would reveal, it also shattered Henry’s own family, causing great bloodshed. Though in essence the King’s personal beliefs remained intrinsically traditional, such a drastic move demonstrated that he was willing to accept the authority of only one man in his realm: his own. Furthermore, as the years passed, the divide between Catholics and reformers, or evangelicals (the term Protestant was not used in England until the 1550s), became ever more apparent.
Henry’s break with Rome had been fuelled by his desire to rid himself of his first wife, Katherine of Aragon – a close friend of Jane’s maternal grandmother and godmother to her own mother – for her failure to provide him with a living son.7 By 1527 almost two decades of marriage had produced only one living daughter, Mary, the King’s only legitimate heir.8
Princess Mary was born on 18 February 1516 at Greenwich Palace. Despite her father’s disappointment at her sex, Henry was proud of his daughter, and for the first ten years of her life Mary grew up within the security of a happy family with parents that doted on her. Following the example of her mother, who was a devout and religious woman, Mary would grow to be fervently pious, and remained devoted to the Catholic faith until her dying breath. Conspicuously, when she was two years old she called out her first recorded word: ‘Priest!’9 Proud of her Spanish heritage, Katherine cherished hopes that her daughter would marry into her native country, and her wishes appeared to be granted when in 1521 her nephew, the twenty-two-year-old Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, made an offer of marriage to the five-year-old Mary.10 Although Mary was too young to be wed, and the marriage was not due to take place until she was twelve years old, Charles travelled to England the following year, where a formal betrothal took place. It was then that Mary met her royal cousin for the first time: he was to be a constant figure in her life, and one whose support and approval she would always seek. The marriage between the two cousins, however, never took place, for unable to wait for Mary to mature, in 1526 Charles married the twenty-three-year-old Isabella of Portugal.
From the outset Katherine of Aragon took an active interest in her daughter’s education, ensuring that the curriculum arranged for Mary provided her with a thorough grounding in all subjects. When she was nine years old, Mary and her household were established at Ludlow Castle on the Welsh Marches, and it was here that she was to be instructed in the art of government. Despite the physical distance between mother and daughter, the two remained close; as Mary grew she would demonstrate that she was very much her mother’s daughter. When it became clear to Katherine that she would bear her husband no more children, there was no doubt in her mind that Mary, as her husband’s only legitimate child, was his natural successor. What was more, Katherine ensured that Mary knew it too. There was, though, virtually no precedent for a female monarch in England, and Henry had no intention of starting one now.
Henry saw Katherine’s failure to produce a son to succeed him as God’s judgement that his marriage to her was unlawful, on the grounds that she was his dead brother Arthur’s widow.11 Katherine, on the other hand, declared that her first marriage had never been a true one because it had never been consummated. Thus began the most famous separation case in English history, as the King started proceedings to have his marriage to Katherine annulled. What was more, he had already found a replacement: her name was Anne Boleyn.
Anne Boleyn was the daughter of Sir Thomas Boleyn by his wife Elizabeth Howard. Through the auspices of her father, who had a diplomatic post abroad, in 1513 Anne was fortunate enough to secure a place in the household of Margaret of Austria in Brussels, and eventually moved to Paris to serve the French Queen, Claude.12 While she was in France, Anne had been exposed to ideas of religious reform expressed by the King’s sister, Marguerite d’Angoulême; Anne’s family – particularly her father – were also supporters of reform. It was not long before Anne had formed her own reformist opinions, opinions that would continue to develop as she began reading books that were banned in England, and that she later encouraged Henry VIII to read too.13 At the end of 1521 Anne returned to England, and the following year she was serving in Queen Katherine’s household, where she eventually caught the King’s eye. In 1526 Henry began pursuing Anne, and having fallen passionately in love with her, he resolved to make her his wife. He began by ordering an investigation into the validity of his first marriage, enlisting the help of his chief advisor, Cardinal Wolsey, and appealing to the Pope. The King hoped that his marriage would be annulled, but Katherine refused to comply. She insisted that her marriage to the King was good and valid, a conviction she maintained for the rest of her life. She loved her husband, and was determined not to do anything that might jeopardize her daughter Mary’s right to succeed her father. After all, her mother Isabella of Castile had been a queen regnant, and she saw no reason why Mary could not also rule in the same way, an idea that was abhorrent to the King. Katherine was distraught at the breakdown of her marriage and fought tirelessly to save it. Jane’s cousin the Princess Mary was also deeply affected by these events, and the stress impacted so badly on her health that it caused her problems for the rest of her life. A Venetian ambassador would later remark that ‘Few other women in the world of her rank ever lived more wretchedly.’14
At the onset of her parents’ marital troubles, Mary’s happy family life was shattered. With Katherine refusing to bow to the King’s demands, Mary sided with her mother, thus causing a breach with her father that had terrible personal consequences for her. Katherine, however, had instilled in Mary her right to rule as her father’s heir, and had no intention of allowing her to give this up. Public sympathy was with Katherine, who had spent more than two decades in England and was beloved by the people, who also loved her daughter. Anne Boleyn was unpopular, and Chapuys frequently referred to her as ‘the Concubine’, while Frances’s mother, who championed Katherine, once reportedly used ‘opprobrious language’ about her.15
The proceedings for the annulment dragged on unresolved for years, delayed by the fact that since the Emperor Charles V’s troops had sacked Rome in 1527 while on campaign in Italy, Pope Clement VII had been imprisoned in the city and was under the Emperor’s control. Due to the Emperor’s close familial relationship to Katherine, Clement did not dare to offend him, and was therefore unable to deliver a verdict in Henry’s favour. Henry and Anne became increasingly frustrated by the delay. Furthermore, Anne perceived that while he did the King’s work, Wolsey was no friend to her, so she encouraged the King to order his arrest when the annulment failed to materialize quickly. Wolsey was already a sick man, and on 29 November 1530, he died at Leicester Abbey on his way to imprisonment in the Tower of London. He was replaced in the King’s favour by a member of Wolsey’s own household, Thomas Cromwell, who was a member of the Privy Council by the end of 1530, and whose rise was swift. Cromwell now took over the supervision of the King’s annulment, and for the next ten years would be one of the most powerful men in the kingdom.
Katherine of Aragon, meanwhile, had been banished permanently from court in 1531 to a range of damp and uncomfortable houses, with the Duke of Suffolk having been given the unenviable task of breaking up her household. At the same time, the Princess Mary’s support of her mother enraged her father, who banned her from seeing Katherine. This caused both Katherine and Mary great sorrow and distress, and mother and daughter never saw one another again.
With the Pope proving to be less than pliable, the King thus decided to formulate his own church, one with Henry at its head and with the authority to annul his marriage to Katherine. And so it was that in January 1533, Henry and Anne were at last secretly married with the support of Thomas Cranmer, a Boleyn adherent who was consecrated Archbishop of Canterbury in March.16 On 7 April, Parliament passed the Act of Restraint of Appeals, which challenged the Pope’s jurisdiction and emphasized the King’s authority as the Supreme
Head of the Church of England. Cromwell drafted the Act, and, significantly, it forbade all appeals to Rome. This meant that Archbishop Cranmer could make a pronouncement on the state of the King’s marriage in England, and it was clear what was afoot. Five days after the Act was passed, Anne appeared in public as queen for the first time, and on 23 May, having summoned an ecclesiastical court in Dunstable, Cranmer declared the King’s marriage to Katherine to have been null and void. This meant that Mary, estranged from her father, was now disinherited. It was a state of affairs that neither Katherine nor Mary accepted, and until the day she died Katherine would continue to declare that she was the King’s lawful wife.
Five days later, the King’s marriage to Anne was affirmed to be lawful. By this time Anne was pregnant with the King’s child, a child that was confidently expected to be a boy. On 1 June she was crowned in Westminster Abbey, with Jane’s father being afforded the great honour of bearing the sceptre.17 His future wife was nowhere to be seen, for, like her mother, Lady Frances disliked Anne Boleyn and had no intention of attending her coronation.
The King’s annulment had important political consequences for Jane’s family, consequences that would in turn impact on Jane. Until the birth of Anne Boleyn’s child, the declaration of the Princess Mary as illegitimate meant that Jane’s mother, Frances, was now superior in status to her cousin by law. Just short of her sixteenth birthday, Frances was now closer to the throne than the King’s own daughter.
THE HIGH HOPES for the outcome of Anne Boleyn’s pregnancy were dashed when on 7 September, between three and four o’clock in the afternoon, she gave birth to ‘a fair lady’.18 The King was bitterly disappointed, but put on a brave face and was hopeful that sons would soon follow. Once again Henry Grey played an important role in the baby’s christening, which took place on 10 September in the Church of the Observant Friars at Greenwich. Henry carried the ceremonial salt, while his mother was granted the honour of becoming the child’s godmother. The little girl, named Elizabeth, now officially became the King’s heir, confirmed in Parliament by the Act of Succession on 23 March 1534. The effect that Elizabeth’s birth had on her half-sister Mary was profound. As a result of her parents’ annulment and the Act of Succession, she had been officially deprived of the title of Princess, and was instead styled the Lady Mary. Furthermore, shortly after Elizabeth’s birth, Mary’s household was dissolved, and she was sent to join the household of her infant half-sister, which was established at Hatfield. Despite the unpleasant circumstances in which she now found herself, Mary soon became fond of Elizabeth, but while at Hatfield she frequently fell ill, most likely as a result of the stress she had suffered, for she continued to refuse to acknowledge her parents’ divorce or her own illegitimacy.
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