Jane Seymour, the Haunted Queen

by Alison Weir

  And yet there was perhaps another reason why he decided to marry Jane. What exactly had passed between them prior to February? Certainly Jane had given Anne cause to be jealous. On June 26, 1536, one John Hill was accused of slandering Henry, saying he was “made sure unto the Queen’s Grace about half a year before”—meaning that, around December or January, he had either asked her to marry him, or—more likely—made her his mistress. As a historian, I would discount this statement as mere calumny, but there is another report that strangely corroborates it. In June, Dr. Ortiz, the Imperial ambassador in Rome, stated that the new Queen Jane was “five or six months gone with child.” It was probably unreliable, garbled gossip, not to be made too much of, and yet it is not beyond the bounds of possibility that Henry and Jane had been lovers in the winter of 1535–6, up until February (when she or her family saw that Anne was vulnerable to the machinations of her enemies, and that a vacancy might soon be created), or that she was pregnant when he married her.

  That would explain the haste with which Anne Boleyn was brought to her death. In 1929, in an otherwise quaintly romanticized biography of Henry VIII, Francis Hackett posed several pertinent questions:

  Why the months of delay in leaving Anne, the hesitation, and then the violent haste? Why the marriage with a nobody? Why, at last, a precipitate marriage without any bargaining for a bride with the French or with the Emperor? Why execution rather than divorce? Anne’s death would have become doubly necessary if Jane were quick with child. All that Henry needed to urge him into a decision was to know that Jane Seymour could become a mother. His mania was to secure a male heir. Their precipitate marriage [took place] within ten days, without any decent preparation, without a word to the public, without anything more ceremonious on Henry’s part. Hence Jane’s quiet first months, Henry’s admission in a few months [August] that he could not be a father, and hence the long interval from the date of marriage before Edward was [conceived]. Hence the urgent, the peremptory, reason, for Anne Boleyn’s elision.

  Anne’s speedy fall could also be explained by Cromwell needing to move quickly to preempt the King taking pity on her and showing leniency, but there was no need for Henry to be betrothed to Jane on the morning after the execution, or for him to marry her ten days later—unless Jane was pregnant. Already, when she had pleaded for Mary, he had reminded her of the children they would have together. All Mary’s letters written in June express the hope that the Queen will bear a son or be fruitful. Of course, both Henry and Mary could have been voicing general hopes for the future. And if Jane was expecting, she must have lost the child before it quickened (a not unusual occurrence), or the King would have announced her pregnancy. This is the reasoning behind what I realize may prove to be a controversial aspect of this novel. As a historian, I would not claim that Jane probably was pregnant when she married, only that the possibility should be borne in mind.

  There may have been another doomed pregnancy. Among the papers of the Duke of Rutland at Belvoir Castle, there is an account, published by the London printer Thomas Colwell, of the Lady Mary being received back at court in 1536. This is the report that mentions Mary fainting and Henry patting Jane, who was “great with child,” on the stomach, saying, “Edward, Edward!” The phrase “great with child” did not then necessarily mean that Jane had a swollen stomach, only that she was expecting a baby. We find the term used to describe women in early pregnancy.

  Colwell flourished as a printer from 1560 until his death in 1576. The account he published places this event at Windsor on December 17, 1536, but we know that Mary had returned to court in October while on December 17 the court was held at Whitehall. There are other flaws in the narrative—it states that “commandment was made that she should be called Lady Princess, and the other Lady Elizabeth,” which is incorrect—but the detailed description of the meeting itself is convincing, and may actually relate to Mary’s visit to the court at Windsor in October 1536, and be based on eyewitness testimony or a contemporary source lost to us. It is inconceivable that some form of ceremony would not have marked Mary’s return to court.

  Yet, while accepting subsequent evidence in this document, most historians ignore or discount this account, probably because of its flaws—not unusual in a narrative written between twenty-three and forty years after the event it describes—and because Jane could not then have been expecting the future Edward VI, even in December 1536. But what if she had been pregnant with another child in October 1536? It is highly unlikely that she would have been expecting a baby conceived in February, or there would be other references to her advancing condition—as in 1537, when she certainly was pregnant—such as an announcement to the Privy Council, public rejoicing and prayers offered up, especially as the child would have been due in November. And in August, Henry had said he did not think he would have children by Jane. Yet there remains the possibility that there was a second pregnancy, a child conceived in August and lost in October or November. It is perfectly possible for a woman to have two miscarriages and a successful conception in quick succession; in fact, the likelihood of a successful pregnancy is greater if conception takes place within six months of a miscarriage. I know this theory too will be controversial, and while as a historian I would be cautious about committing to it, this is fiction, and I could not resist posing the question, What if…?

  I have refrained from developing a storyline based on notorious claims that Jane suffered a Caesarean delivery. Rumors to that effect were current in London at the time, but in 1585, a Catholic writer, Nicholas Sander, hostile to Henry VIII, wrote that when Jane “was in severe labor in a difficult childbirth, all her limbs [were] stretched for the purpose of making a passage for the child, or (as others stated) having the womb cut before she was dead, so that the child ready to be born might be taken out. The travail of the Queen being very difficult, the King was asked which of the two lives was to be spared. He answered, the boy’s, because he could easily provide himself with other wives.” A Caesarean operation is then said to have been performed, but there is no evidence for one being carried out on a living mother before 1610, and if it had been, the result would have been a speedy and agonizing death.

  Not until the twentieth century could this procedure be safely carried out. Yet the story gained wide currency, and persisted. In his chronicle of 1643, Sir Richard Baker claimed that Jane “was fain to be ripped,” and in an old ballad, “The Death of Queen Jane,” which survives in various versions, perhaps the earliest dating from 1612 (although a ballad called “The Lamentation of Queen Jane” was licensed in 1560), Jane is in labor for six days and more, and begs that her side be cut open so that her baby can be saved, and Henry reluctantly concedes.

  There is another reason why I did not build on this myth. Traditionally, it has been assumed that Jane died from puerperal fever, yet there is no mention of fever in the sources. And when I studied them, and looked at the chronology, it looked as if she actually suffered two distinct illnesses.

  She was in labor from the afternoon of October 8, 1537, until her son was born at 2 a.m. on the twelfth. On the evening of the twelfth she was signing letters announcing the birth, and late at night on the fifteenth, she was sitting up in bed, hosting the guests who had attended the christening. Thus there were probably no complications to her labor, and the birth was normal. I myself was in labor for a similar time with my first child, and Jane’s experience in the novel mirrors mine (except I had pethidine, not a Tudor herbal infusion!).

  Not until the afternoon of October 16, four days after Edward was born, did Jane become unwell. Her condition was described by her chaplain, the Bishop of Carlisle and her physicians in a bulletin stating that she had suffered “an natural lax, by reason whereof she began to lighten [become more cheerful] and (as it appeared) to mend, and so continued till toward night. All this night she hath been very sick.” The word “sick” meant ill in a general sense, not necessarily that she was vomiting.<
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  Some historians have understood the word “lax” to mean post-partum bleeding (from which several theories have evolved), but from c. 1400, the word (which is sometimes given as “laske”) meant “loose bowels”; the word “laxative” derives from it.

  Jane recovered the next day, Wednesday, and there are no further reports of her being unwell again until the evening of Friday, October 19. Her condition worsened over the weekend, and on Monday night she was in “great danger.” On Tuesday evening, the King was summoned to her bedside, as it was clear that she was dying. She passed away at two o’clock the next morning, October 24. After her death, her illness was attributed to “the fault of them that were about her, and suffered her to take great cold, and to eat things which the fantasy in her sickness called for.” The bulletin and this report are the only evidence relating to her illnesses.

  The first suggests she had food poisoning, which was unpleasant, but cleared up quickly. The reference to her eating unsuitable foods might be corroborative. The mention of Jane being cold in the second report has been the basis of claims that she died from puerperal fever, but that condition was recognized then and would surely have been described as such; the coldness was more likely to have had an entirely different significance.

  I showed the historical evidence to Suzanne Schuld, a registered nurse of more than thirty years’ experience focusing on critical care and emergency medicine; she in turn showed it to her colleagues Melissa Rockefeller, MD; Karen Maury, MD; and Michele Sequerra, MD. I also showed the evidence to Sylvia Howard, a midwife with decades of experience. I am enormously grateful to these five medical experts for their groundbreaking theories and opinions, which shed new light on why, and how, Jane Seymour died, and which inform the final pages of this novel. Any mistakes in my interpretation of the information they gave me are mine alone. It is summarized as follows.

  As I suspected, there were almost certainly two distinct illnesses, and the first was probably food poisoning—my original theory. In regard to the second illness, as there was no report of fever, puerperal sepsis or endometritis (which have similar symptoms) seem unlikely. On the evidence we have, death was probably due to a combination of dehydration and embolism, leading ultimately to heart failure.

  Possibly Jane had a thrombosis in a leg or in her pelvic circulation, and pieces broke off and migrated to the right side of her heart and lungs. Rushing to the close stool while suffering from food poisoning, or getting up to enable her servants to clean or change her bed, might have dislodged a piece of clot.

  Embolisms do not always lead to instant death, and not all are fatal. Jane could easily have had one or more small ones that would have put a strain on her heart and respiratory muscles and worn out her ability to breathe, especially if she had less oxygen-carrying capacity due to anemia. Contemporaries remarked upon her “whitely pale” skin, which may indicate that she was anemic.

  If Jane was anemic, and dehydrated after suffering food poisoning, her heart would have been under tremendous strain. The addition of an embolism may have been more than it could endure. Her heart was relatively young so it would have taken longer to wear out, hence the duration of her last illness.

  Combined, anemia, possible postpartum blood loss after a long labor, dehydration from diarrhea and extended bed rest or inactivity could have caused an embolism, and probably more than one—not enough to trigger instant death, but enough to put Jane gradually into cardiorespiratory failure, shock and death. Her symptoms at the end, especially being cold, suggest she was cyanotic, or turning blue in her extremities.

  Suzanne Schuld, who has seen this condition many times, very kindly described to me the stages of Jane’s last illness, and explained the medical terminology of the doctors’ theories for me, for which I am hugely grateful.

  Aside from the theories I have outlined above, this book is substantially underpinned by historical sources. The earlier sections have been heavily fictionalized because we have only a skeletal framework of evidence for Jane’s early years. Parts of the text are based on passages from an earlier, unpublished novel I wrote about Jane Seymour, which I had entitled A Certain Young Lady.

  The family ancestry, as outlined by Sir John Seymour in the novel, is now known to have been somewhat less colorful. Although the Seymours claimed descent from one of William the Conqueror’s Norman knights, supposedly surnamed St. Maur after Saint-Maur-sur-Loire, his birthplace in Touraine, their first certain ancestor was William de St. Maur, who held manors in Monmouthshire in 1240. Jane’s branch of the family was established in Wiltshire by the end of the fourteenth century.

  There is no evidence that the real Jane wanted to be a nun, but given her courageous pleas for the restoration of the monasteries, she must have had a strong devotion to them, or to particular religious houses, and it is credible that she might at some time have contemplated taking the veil. We do not know why it took so long to find her a potential husband, or why her younger sisters were married first, but that could be explained by her wish to become a religious. There is no evidence that Sir Francis Bryan was ever a suitor to Jane, although he was certainly a very good friend to her, and not always out of self-interest, so far as can be determined.

  That there was some kind of scandal in the Seymour family several years before Jane attracted Henry VIII’s attention seems likely. By 1519, Edward Seymour had married Catherine, daughter and coheiress of Sir Edward Fillol. She bore two sons, John in 1519(?) and Edward in 1527(?), then seems to have retired to a convent. Her father, in his will of 1527 (which Edward later contested), stated that “for many diverse causes and considerations,” neither Catherine “nor her heirs of her body, nor Sir Edward Seymour her husband in any wise” were to inherit “any part or parcel” of his lands, and he left her £40 “as long as she shall live virtuously and abide in some house of religion of women.” He died in July that year.

  Possibly a scandal then came to light, which resulted in Catherine being cast out of the Seymour family. Left destitute, she was probably driven to enter a nunnery (although there is no evidence that it was Amesbury, which I chose because of its proximity to Wulfhall), so that she could thereby claim her inheritance. She had died by early 1535, whereupon Edward immediately married the formidable Anne Stanhope, a lady whose pride would become notorious.

  But did Catherine have an affair with her father-in-law, Sir John Seymour? A marginal note in a seventeenth-century edition of Vincent’s Baronage in the College of Arms states that Edward had repudiated Catherine “quia pater ejus post nuptias eam congovit”—“because she was known by his father after the nuptials.” The only other evidence, written by Peter Heylin in 1674, claimed that a magician had conjured a “magical perspective” for Edward, enabling him “to behold a gentleman of his acquaintance in a more familiar posture with his wife than was agreeable to the honor of either party. To which diabolical illusion he is said to have given so much credit, that he did not only estrange himself from her society at his coming home, but furnished his next wife with an excellent opportunity for pressing him to the disinheriting of his former children.” It seems that Edward did have suspicions about the paternity of his sons by Catherine, for he disinherited them both, at his wife Anne Stanhope’s instigation, in 1540.

  If an incestuous liaison was involved, there was all the more reason for secrecy and the affair being hushed up, but we should remember that Sir William Fillol disinherited Edward as well as Catherine, for reasons that are not clear. Possibly—as I have chosen to show in the novel—he disapproved of Edward’s treatment of his wife, which had perhaps driven the unhappy girl, unforgivably, into his father’s arms.

  I have given the name Wulfhall in its older form, which derives from the Saxon Ulfela (Ulf’s Hall, after the thane who owned it) that appears in the Domesday Book in 1086.

  That Chapuys had feelings for Mary was suggested to me by his biographer Lauren Mackay.

 
There are supernatural threads in the novel. Jane’s aversion to Beddington Park is based on my own reaction to the house (now a special school called Carew Manor) when I drove there one evening to point it out to a historian friend, and we both felt so spooked that I hurriedly reversed, wanting to get away (although I fully accept that my overactive imagination was probably responsible). At Beddington, Jane dreams of a face in the church tower—possibly Sir Walter Raleigh, whose head is buried there. She is also haunted by the shadow of Anne Boleyn. But is it real, or a projection of her own guilty conscience? In the park at Hatfield, she is afforded a glimpse of the future, for in 1558, Queen Elizabeth I received the news of her accession while seated under the same tree. Jane’s dream of a ruined abbey is prescient, for Bisham Abbey was dissolved in 1538, less than a year after her death.

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  A note on titles: Jane always thinks of Katherine of Aragon, and for preference refers to her, as the true Queen. She calls Anne Boleyn queen only when she is constrained to. Those who support Katherine also covertly refer to her as Queen, and to Mary as the Princess, even after both have been deprived of their titles. The Imperial ambassador, Chapuys, would never refer to Anne Boleyn as queen; he wrote of her as “the Lady” or “the Concubine.” In the novel, those who are plotting against Anne follow his lead and refer to her as “the Lady.”

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  I owe a great debt of gratitude to the wonderful team at Ballantine whose creative dynamism and support has immeasurably enhanced this book: Executive Editor Susanna Porter, Associate Editor Emily Hartley, Associate Publisher Kim Hovey, cover designer Victoria Allen and publicist Melanie DeNardo.

  Huge thanks to all my readers for buying my books; to the history lovers who engage with me on Facebook; to the bloggers who have so generously reviewed and promoted my books; to those who feature my work and articles in historical publications; and to all the event organizers who have invited me to give talks and presentations. I am deeply touched by your interest and support.