Jane Seymour, the Haunted Queen

by Alison Weir

  It was an emotional parting, for Jane was convinced that she would not see Father again, and from the worried expressions on her brothers’ faces, they feared that too. Together they stood on the King’s landing stage and watched as the barge sailed out of sight up the Thames. When it had gone, Jane dabbed at her eyes and walked blindly into the covered gallery.

  * * *

  —

  Chapuys had not yet been formally presented to Jane, for he had been ill with a fever, which struck her as rather sad, having happened at a time when some of the things he had worked for were coming to pass. But now he was better, and she was to receive him. She dressed carefully in a new red damask gown with the outline of a crown cleverly woven into the bodice, and cloth-of-gold sleeves.

  After mass on Sunday, the day before she was to make her state entry into London, Henry himself brought the ambassador to the Queen’s apartments and formally presented him to her. Chapuys bowed low and kissed her hand.

  “I congratulate your Grace on your marriage, and wish you prosperity,” he said, regarding her kindly with those warm, sensitive eyes. “I have no doubt that, although the device of the lady who preceded you on the throne was ‘The Most Happy,’ you yourself will bear the reality.” She smiled at his courtly turn of phrase. “I am sure,” he told her, “that the Emperor will be rejoicing as much as the King himself does at finding so virtuous and amiable a wife, the more so since your brother was once in his Imperial Majesty’s service.”

  Jane was impressed that Chapuys knew about that, but Edward must have told him, for it was fourteen years since he had been deputed, with Father, to attend the Emperor when he visited England.

  Chapuys was still congratulating her. “It is almost incredible to see the joy and pleasure that Englishmen are displaying at your Grace’s marriage, especially as they believe that you are continually trying to persuade the King to restore the Princess to his favor.”

  “As indeed I am, my lord ambassador,” she replied, looking around nervously to see if Henry was listening. But he had moved away and was talking and laughing with Margaret Douglas and Mary Monteagle.

  “It is not your least happiness,” Chapuys was saying, “that without the labor of giving birth, you have gained such a daughter as the Princess, from whom you will receive more joy and consolation than from any child you could have yourself.” That was rather extravagant, she thought, and then it came to her, in an instant of clarity, that Chapuys—who had never been known to display an interest in any woman—cherished feelings for Mary. Nothing else, not duty or loyalty, could explain his utter devotion to her. “I beg your Grace to favor her interests and deserve that honorable name, the Peacemaker.”

  “I will do that,” she assured him, “and I will labor especially to earn that name.” There was a long pause. She was nervous, at a loss as to what to say, and her mind had gone blank, but there was Henry, suddenly at her side, come to her rescue.

  “You must forgive her Grace,” he said. “You are the first ambassador she has received, and she is not yet used to such receptions. I feel sure that she will do her utmost to obtain the title of Peacemaker, as besides being naturally of a kind and amiable disposition, and much inclined to peace, I believe she would strive to prevent my taking part in a foreign war, if only out of the fear of being separated from me.” Jane smiled at him gratefully. She realized he must have heard at least part of the conversation about Mary, and was relieved that he had not been angered by it.

  Chapuys gave a little bow in her direction. “I see that your Grace has chosen a wife of virtue and intelligence, who bears her royal honors with dignity. I congratulate your Grace on this new felicity, and rejoice at the removal of all the obstacles to the long-desired alliance between England and Spain. I assure your Grace that you can rely on the firm friendship of the Emperor. Truly, God has shown special care for you. Many great and good men, even emperors and kings, have suffered from the arts of wicked women, and it is greatly to your credit that you detected and punished conspiracy before it came to light. Would you not agree, Madam?”

  Jane smiled as Henry thanked Chapuys, but she deemed it wise to say nothing.

  “I see that her Grace adds discretion to her other virtues,” the ambassador observed.

  * * *

  —

  Jane clung to Henry as he entered her, moving her body in rhythm with his. Their lovemaking was prolonged and tender, but there was always a point where he seemed to lose all awareness of her and it ended in a rush. But he was affectionate afterward, and tonight, when he was spent, he subsided next to her and grasped her hand.

  “Jane, I do love you. It’s like coming into harbor after long days of tempest.” He raised himself on one elbow. “Did you know that on the day after Anne died, King François offered me the hand of his daughter, Madame Madeleine? I said that, at sixteen, she was too young for me, and besides, I’ve had too much experience of French bringing-up with Anne, and would never, ever have taken a French bride.”

  For a moment, Jane was too busy rejoicing that he had passed over a French princess for her to comprehend what else he was telling her.

  “What do you mean, French bringing-up?”

  His face flushed in the dawn light. “Well, her light ways with men, for a start—and other things that I forbear to tell you.” He was prudish when it came to talking about intimate matters.

  She sat up, her hair tangled about her bare shoulders. “Now you do have me intrigued!”

  “It is not fit for a lady’s ears.” His lips pursed primly.

  “Are you telling me that you knew something was amiss all along?”

  He sighed. “Jane, I had my suspicions from the first time I bedded her. She had vaunted her virginity, but she knew practices no virgin should know.”

  “Practices?” Jane could not imagine what he was talking about.

  “Strange ways to please a man—except they did not please me! I realized she had lied to me, that the virtue she had so long trumpeted had been mere pretense. And she had learned those things in France.”

  Jane was little wiser. “I’ve heard that the French court is a byword for licentiousness.”

  “There’s no doubt of that,” Henry agreed, swinging his legs over the side of the bed and pulling on his nightshirt. She noticed that the bad place on his shin was less inflamed. “François keeps a maîtresse-en-titre, who rules over his court just like a queen.” He grinned. “Fear not, that is one French custom I shall disdain to adopt!”

  “I should hope so!” Jane laughed. Yet still she wondered what he had meant about Anne’s “practices.” They could not have been very nice, whatever they had been.

  * * *

  —

  Jane’s stomach was fluttering with nerves at the prospect of appearing in public on the morrow. When she arrived for a private dinner hosted by Edward in his apartment, she feared she would not be able to eat at all. But a goblet of good Bordeaux wine steadied her, and she was distracted from her anxiety by the arrival of Master Cromwell in company with Chapuys, friends despite their political and religious differences.

  Nan was the only other woman at table, and she played her part to perfection as hostess, effortlessly directing the servants, steering the conversation and sometimes expressing her own, rather strident views.

  “The Princess Mary has to see sense!” she declared.

  “I am doing my best!” Cromwell said. “Messire Chapuys and I were discussing this earlier.”

  Chapuys turned to Edward. “We agree that it would do great good, not only to the Queen your sister and all your kin, but also to the realm and all Christendom, if the Princess were restored to her rights; and I beg that you will use your good offices in those interests.”

  “Indeed I will,” Edward said, his manner a trifle stiff. He was diffident about Mary; he wanted to see a Seymour king on the throne.

>   Cromwell leaned forward, lowering his voice. “You may not all be aware of just how hard I have worked for the marriage of the Queen and the restoration of the Princess. You, Eustache, will recall the displeasure and anger the King showed me on Easter Tuesday. Well, it was for fear of that displeasure that I thought up and plotted the affair of the late Queen, in which I took a great deal of trouble.”

  Jane froze. Thought up? Plotted? “But you had evidence laid before you, did you not, Master Cromwell?” Her voice was hoarse.

  “Indeed, I did, Madam, and I acted upon it.” He smiled at her. She feared he was dissembling. Which had come first—the proofs, or his plotting? And what had he meant when he said he had thought up the affair? She dared not ask, for she did not want to know the answer. She had not forgotten the fatuous questions that had been put to her by the Council. She had thought then that they had been trying to construct a case and had very little to go on.

  Chapuys was watching her. “I think Master Cromwell meant that he had already seen the evidence, and decided it was time to act on it.” Cromwell nodded sagely.

  That contradicted Cromwell’s boastfulness, but she did not like to say so. Henry had been angry with him. That had been the day when Chapuys had acknowledged Anne as queen, and they had all thought that her star was again in the ascendant. Anne had meant to destroy Cromwell. The obvious conclusion was that Cromwell had gone home and plotted her destruction. The proofs—such as they were—had been obtained afterward. And he had not done it to make Jane queen, or for Mary’s benefit. He had done it to save his own skin.

  She toyed with her food, feeling nauseous. The others had seemed to see nothing amiss in what Cromwell had said. The talk had returned to Mary. Pleading an early start on the morrow, Jane departed as soon as courtesy permitted, knowing that she could no longer comfort herself with assurances that Anne had been guilty as charged. What if she had not been guilty at all?

  Chapter 28

  1536

  London was en fête, and crowds were lining the riverbanks, eager to see their new Queen make her state entry into the City. Seated beside Henry in the royal barge, gowned in cloth of gold and dripping with jewels, Jane forced herself to smile as they sailed from Greenwich to Westminster, escorted by a colorful procession of smaller boats, all gaily decked out for the occasion. Behind followed a great barge carrying the King’s bodyguard in their scarlet-and-gold uniforms.

  As the royal procession passed along the river, the people cheered, and warships and shore guns sounded salutes. At Radcliffe Wharf, by Limehouse, they halted at the quayside so that the King and Queen could watch a pageant mounted by Chapuys in their honor to demonstrate his master’s approval of their marriage. Resplendent in purple satin, he was waiting for them in a pavilion embroidered with the Imperial arms, and when the pageant was done, he signaled to two small boats, one carrying trumpeters, the other a consort of shawms and sackbuts, and bade them leave their moorings and provide a musical escort for the royal barge as it resumed its stately progress toward Westminster. The French ambassador, standing on the riverbank nearby, looked on jealously.

  Jane could hardly bring herself to watch as the Tower loomed ahead, stark and sinister, despite its walls being festooned with banners and streamers. As the procession paused to take the salute from the four hundred guns lined up along Tower Wharf, all she could think of was that those same guns had announced Anne Boleyn’s death three weeks earlier. Anne was still there, within those walls, her body decomposing beneath the pavement of the Tower chapel. Thomas had told Jane, with ghoulish relish, that there had been no provision for a coffin, so her bloody corpse and head had been buried in an arrow chest, with little ceremony.

  Jane glanced at Henry, who was standing beside her in the middle of the boat, taking the salute, but if he was troubled by morbid thoughts, he gave no sign of it. Jane swallowed. If she did not pull herself together, she would go mad with anxiety and guilt. The grim fate of Anne was best forgotten; it had not been her doing. But then the nagging voice of conscience reminded Jane that, by willingly poisoning his mind on her friends’ advice, she had helped to convince Henry that he should rid himself of Anne. And when she had told him of her ill-fated pregnancy, she had probably sealed Anne’s fate. But she had never intended her harm.

  Her eyes ranged over the citizens of London, who were crowded all along the banks, shouting their loud approval of their new Queen. They had no moral qualms; nor did Henry. Ah, but did any of them know that Anne’s fall had been thought up and plotted by Cromwell?

  Stop it! she admonished herself, as she smiled and waved to the people. It was irrational that she herself should feel guilty on account of what Cromwell had done. Had she not kept silent about what she had seen at Mireflore? All she had worked for had been an annulment, not Anne’s destruction. And she had believed there was good evidence, until others had expressed doubts—and by then it had been too late. Since then she had searched her soul to discover why she felt so guilty. She had confessed and been absolved. Her chaplain had dismissed her doubts. What was she tormenting herself for?

  At Westminster, she and Henry alighted from the barge and walked hand in hand in procession to Westminster Abbey, where they heard High Mass. As the Host was elevated, Jane bowed her head and, for the first time that day, felt a sense of exultation. It brought home to her why she had resolved to become queen, and of the good she hoped to achieve. She remembered Father James, long ago, speaking of Cicero and the concept of the highest good. Which was better: a heretic posing as queen, undermining true religion and plotting against the rightful Queen and her child; or a virtuous queen committed to restoring true religion and the rights of the lawful heir? There was no contest as to where the highest good lay.

  There was to be no procession through the streets of London. Henry had said that must wait until her coronation. She was relieved, because today’s ceremonies had been overwhelming enough, and she was grateful to reach the sanctuary of her apartments in York Place.

  “You did so well, darling!” Henry complimented her, as they sat down to supper that evening. “The people loved you! And when you gladden them with a prince, they will love you all the more.”

  “I pray that happy day will come soon,” she answered. It would be three weeks before she could hope that she had conceived this month.

  Henry smiled at her. “It will not be for the want of trying!”

  He broke his manchet loaf and dipped it into his pottage. “Darling, both Katherine and Anne were crowned within weeks of becoming queen, but you may have to wait. My treasury is so depleted that I cannot afford the expense of another coronation at present. I hope soon to have some of the wealth of the monasteries diverted to my coffers, and then I can give you the coronation you deserve.”

  “I am content to wait,” she told him.

  “It will not be for long. I am planning it for late October, and having a new barge built for you like nothing ever seen before in England. It will be fashioned like the bucentaure, the ceremonial barge the Doge uses when he weds Venice to the sea.”

  “That would be wonderful!” She smiled, wondering how much it was going to cost, and hoping that it would not be paid for with wealth stolen from the Church.

  He served her with some choice morsels of chicken in a sauce of verjuice. “You will sail in your new barge from Greenwich to the Tower, then make a triumphant progress through London, with the usual pageantry, and so proceed to Westminster, to be crowned in the abbey on the following day.”

  She had seen her crown; Henry had kept his word and had it brought to her. As she had hoped, it was the one worn by Queen Katherine, an open coronal of gold set with sapphires, rubies and pearls, and of a great weight. It was be a crown she would happy to bear; it would make her feel a queen indeed. She was painfully aware that she had none of the majesty of Katherine nor the confidence of Anne.

  * * *

 
—

  Jane stood in the gallery above the Westminster Gate at Whitehall, waving goodbye to Henry as he rode in procession to open Parliament. Behind her stood her ladies. Lady Rutland was going out of her way to be friendly, Lady Monteagle was always as charming as her sweet face, and Margaret Douglas seemed nowadays to be nurturing some delicious secret. Jane made a mental note to speak to Margaret—but first she would find out what Henry felt about Thomas Howard’s courtship.

  * * *

  —

  Edward had attended the state opening of Parliament. She had watched him ride to the Palace of Westminster, resplendent in his viscount’s robes, and was pleased when he came to her lodgings shortly before dinner to tell her what had passed.

  “When the Lord Chancellor made his opening speech to both Houses, I was surprised to hear him speak at length about Queen Anne’s crimes,” he said, shrugging off his mantle. “He put it rather delicately, almost lamenting that, having been so disappointed in his first two marriages, the King had been obliged, for the welfare of his realm, to enter upon a third, and said it was a personal sacrifice not required of any ordinary man.”

  “Really?” Jane felt diminished by that. “I don’t think sacrifice played any part in it!”

  “I’m sure it didn’t, but presumably the King felt the need to justify his hasty remarriage before Parliament and the people. He cannot be seen to have acted out of personal desire, which is why the Lord Chancellor asked what man in middle life would not be deterred by the crimes of the late Queen from marrying a third time. And yet, he said, our most excellent Prince, not for any carnal reasons, but at the humble entreaty of his nobility, had again condescended to contract matrimony, and had taken to himself this time a wife of apt years, excellent beauty, and pureness of flesh and blood, whose age and fine form give promise of issue.”