Jane Boleyn: The True Story of the Infamous Lady Rochford

by Julia Fox

  What was needed was irrefutable material to reinforce Henry’s cause if scholars like John Fisher were to be rebutted. A cast-iron case must be presented to Clement. Fortunately, the Boleyns knew the very man who could help: Robert Wakefield, the foremost Hebrew expert of the day, who believed that only a thorough knowledge of the early tongues allowed accurate interpretation of scripture. The acquaintance came through James Boleyn, once his pupil. And in 1527, Wakefield came to Henry’s notice. The king’s former personal secretary, Richard Pace, then recuperating at Syon from a fresh bout of a recurring illness, wrote to his master mentioning Robert Wakefield, a man of “excellent learning and wonderful knowledge.” Pace went on to say that Wakefield offered to “show unto your Highness such things as no man within your realm can attain unto or show the like, and as well for you as against you.” Pace’s letter was followed by one to the king from Wakefield himself. He suggested defending Henry’s cause “in all the universities of Christendom,” promising that he could “in such manner” answer Fisher’s points in support of the original papal dispensation “that I trust he shall be ashamed to wade or meddle any further in the matter.” What Jane realized was that for Wakefield to be so confident of helping Henry, the scholar’s interest in the annulment, which Henry and the Boleyns labored so hard to keep secret, must have been kindled even before he wrote to Henry or spoke to Pace. Informing him about what was happening might well have been the job of George’s uncle James, whom Wakefield remembered as a “generous knight” and a “learned” man. For James to contact an old friend for advice when in trouble was entirely natural. And to get Jane’s sister-in-law on the throne of England was to be a whole family effort.

  That effort bore fruit. Wakefield’s work was sensational, demolishing, at least in Henry’s eyes, his opponents’ arguments. His meticulous Hebrew translation suggested that the term childless in the Leviticus text, a potent stumbling block, was wrongly gendered. It should refer only to a lack of sons, not children in general. Moreover, as Leviticus was part of Mosaic law, adherence to its restrictions was obligatory even for Christians. As for Deuteronomy, this applied to the Jews alone and was not binding upon Gentiles. Armed with such arguments, the chances of Henry and Anne achieving their desire were transformed. Fisher, who also derived his knowledge of Hebrew from Wakefield, disagreed but even he admitted that Henry would be “quite justified in submitting his difficulties to the pope,” for it was his prerogative “to clear ambiguous passages of Scripture, after hearing the opinions of the best divines,” although the skeptical bishop went on to say that kings “are apt to think that right which suits their pleasure.”

  The waiting game went on. Thomas Boleyn, ever ready to help his king, and especially his daughter, did his part. Already a member of the advisory circle nearest the king, he went on the first of many journeys to France to solicit support for their cause from Francis. George, an indefatigable ally of his sister, soon joined him. Henry’s fellow monarch, delighted by the wedge developing between Henry and Charles, made appropriately soothing noises while continuing his own schemes to advance French interests in Italy and beyond. Wolsey, desperate to retain his own position, negotiated with Rome. Letters went thick and fast to Charles, from Henry, from Katherine, from the troubled Spanish ambassador. Henry collected more and more reasons to justify his cause and spent long hours writing about them in the various “King’s Books” that accumulated. Still the pope dithered.

  Then, as a breakthrough suddenly looked more likely, Jane’s husband fell desperately ill with a terrifying disease that could kill in less than a day. Worse still, he was not its only Boleyn victim.

  CHAPTER 9

  The Sweat

  THE YEAR 1528 began so well. Summoning up his courage, for he always hated direct confrontation, Henry had at last informed a tearful Katherine of his doubts over their marriage, confirming what in fact she had already been told by her growing band of supporters. No doubt encouraged by Anne, he then went one stage further, requesting Pope Clement to pronounce him free to marry again “in case his marriage…be pronounced unlawful.” Jane had only to hear of Henry’s choice of words to be assured that his love for Anne was as strong as ever. He wanted every conceivable legal and religious pitfall sorted out in advance. Perhaps with Anne’s friendship with Northumberland in mind, he asked permission to remarry even if his future bride had “contracted marriage with another man, provided it be not consummated.” He went on to seek consent “even if she be of the second degree of consanguinity or of the first degree of affinity,” covering potential repercussions emanating from the king’s affair with Anne’s sister, a relationship that was the mirror opposite of Katherine’s with his brother. Because no one wanted such uncertainty again, this union had to be incontestable.

  It was excellent news for the family. Jane’s sister-in-law would be queen yet. She had a stunning emerald ring to prove it, not, of course, that it could be flaunted to those outside her immediate circle. And with talk of the pope sending Cardinal Campeggio as his legate to try the case in England, there were fewer clouds on the horizon. But one remained, and against it, no papal dispensation could prevail.

  At the beginning of June, Brian Tuke, a senior official in Henry’s household, wrote to the bishop of London informing him that he had just fled from his house in the city because one of his servants had become ill. This was no ordinary illness: a terrifying disease, the sweating sickness, was back. Henry and Anne, who was now frequently at his side, although never in his bed, were both at Greenwich when the epidemic struck. George and Jane were probably there too. At first all seemed well; the royal party was untouched. The king had already decided to move on to Waltham Abbey, a monastery in Essex where rooms were always reserved for him in case he was hunting in the vicinity, when there was a scare: one of Anne’s maidservants became ill. Henry, desperate to avoid coming into contact with the virus, hurriedly left for Waltham accompanied by George and some of his privy chamber, while Anne fled to the safety of Hever with her father. Whether Jane went with her husband or to Kent is not known. What we do know, though, is that on the very same day, George felt the first symptoms.

  The disease could strike at any moment, and with incredible ferocity. Some victims even collapsed while riding. The sweat began with a headache, developing at frightening speed. The pain swiftly moved to the abdomen. Then there was vomiting and palpitations, sometimes paralysis, breathlessness, all accompanied by almost intolerable sweating. The first few hours were critical. Some died within four hours of the slightest trace of a headache, others within twelve. Those surviving for twenty-four hours normally lived. For Jane, the specter of widowhood was beckoning.

  Everyone was afraid. According to Tuke and the Venetian ambassador, the mere rumor that the sweat had returned caused some to collapse from fear. Lawyers alone were said to have gained. They “had a fine time,” said the French ambassador mockingly, since “100,000 wills have been made,” among them one from an ever-vigilant Henry.

  The onset of symptoms was so sudden that George’s family did not hear that he was fighting for his life until later. Only if Jane had been with him would the devastating news have reached them, and then only as quickly as the fastest horse could gallop the fifty miles or so from Waltham to Hever. In any event, there was little that they could do. He received the best of available treatment. Remedies abounded. The Dowager Duchess of Norfolk, the woman in whose household little Catherine Howard was to grow up, recommended “treacle and water imperial.” John Caius, a “doctour in phisicke,” suggested other precautions, which were, of course, too late for George. What Caius and other authorities could state for certain was that the sweat must be allowed to flow freely to let the evil out of the body. So George lay in bed, wrapped in quilts and fighting for his life, with meticulous care being taken to make sure he did not throw off the bedclothes in his delirium. Any exposure to the air was considered incredibly perilous, potentially fatal, particularly if air touched the armpits. His chamber
was kept warm, by lighting a fire if necessary, and his sweating was rigorously monitored. For those who did not sweat enough, Caius counseled gentle rubbing with a “new and somewhat hard handkerchief, well-warmed but not hot” or drinking cocktails of milk, vinegar, and herbs.

  Fortunately, George recovered and for a while it seemed as though the Boleyns might escape lightly. Henry, “much troubled” by the pestilence but anxious about Anne, was relieved to hear from Hever that she was well. “The doubt I had of your health troubled me exceedingly,” he wrote, “but since you have felt nothing, I hope it is with you as with us.” He was able to reassure her that George was “now quite well” and tried to keep up her spirits by reminding her that “few women have this illness.” Soon, however, one of those women was Anne. All the family’s dreams hung in the balance as she hovered between life and death.

  Henry was distraught. In a despairing letter to her he described hearing of her plight as “the most afflicting news possible,” even protesting that he “would willingly bear the half” of her sickness if it would cure her. This was from a man who was so fearful on his own behalf that he confessed his sins every day to a priest, compulsively moved from place to place, and was once found by Tuke “in secret communication with his physician, Mr. Chamber, in a tower, where he sometimes sups apart.” With Anne ill, though, Henry was practical. Desolate that the doctor he most trusted “is at present absent,” he sent her his “second” best physician, Dr. Butts, who duly hurried down to Hever. There he found Anne in great “jeopardy…by the turning of the sweat before the time,” always considered hazardous as the sweating had not done its work in ridding the body of all the “venom.” Since by now Thomas was as critically sick as his daughter, all of Dr. Butts’s best “endeavor” and skill was needed to save them. But save them he did. No one could do the same for Mary Boleyn’s husband, William Carey, who also caught the disease. He died, Henry hearing of his death as he went to bed. The first Boleyn widow was Mary, not Jane.

  Thomas, never a man to be relied on when there was trouble, gave little support to his grieving daughter. Insofar as Boleyn ambition was concerned, Mary was the past. The future had survived. It was in fact Anne who appears to have done the most for her sister. Her intervention with Henry prompted the king to contact Thomas, pointing out that “it cannot so stand with his honor but that he must needs take her his natural daughter now in her extreme necessity.” Anne’s help did not stop there. While the customary scramble for Carey’s offices was going on all around her, with its usual indecent haste, Anne prevailed on Henry to grant her the wardship of their young son, Henry Carey, which was surely a great weight off Mary’s mind. As the courtier Sir John Russell found to his cost when his pleas for the wardship of his wife’s daughter fell on deaf ears, Henry could not be relied on to allow such a lucrative perquisite to pass to relatives. Had anyone other than Anne become the child’s guardian, his lands might well have been despoiled and a marriage arranged in the interests of the guardian rather than the boy. If further proof of Henry’s adoration was required, this gift certainly provided it. Unfortunately, Carey’s death also exposed the underlying tension between the Boleyns and the cardinal.

  Just before he died, Carey had been pressing for the appointment of his sister, Elinor, as abbess of a nunnery at Wilton in Wiltshire. Anne too supported Elinor against the other candidate, Isabel Jordan. When Henry heard that Elinor had led a scandalous life, even having two children by two priests, he maintained that he could not allow Anne to “cloak” her conscience by promoting such an unworthy cause. A compromise abbess should be chosen instead. However, Wolsey went ahead without the king’s permission and appointed Isabel Jordan. Henry’s fury was no doubt matched by Anne’s. He left the cardinal reeling from his anger, particularly because he thought Wolsey was trying to wriggle out of blame by saying that he did not know what Henry wanted. This, said the king, just made matters worse. As he wrote accusingly to Wolsey, “You cloak your offence by ignorance, saying that you did not know my determination in this matter…it is a double offence to do ill and color it also.” Rarely had the great cardinal been faced with such naked antagonism from his “loving sovereign lord and friend.” Only after humiliating and abject apologies from Wolsey was Henry pacified. For the Boleyns, Anne’s hold over the king was emphasized yet again.

  However, Wolsey had his uses. The cardinal’s house at Tittenhanger, about twenty miles north of London, provided Henry with what he hoped was a safe bolt-hole away from the ravages of the sweat, and the king was happy enough to stay there for almost two weeks. Indeed, he felt sufficiently at home to make a few alterations to add to his comfort: a surprised Wolsey was informed that Henry ordered his builder “to make a new window in your closet, because it is so little.” More important, current Boleyn thinking was that working with Wolsey, rather than against him, remained the most sensible way to attain their objective, for the moment at least. Hiding her true feelings, Anne played her part. In a personal note, she thanked him for his letter, pledging “to love and serve” him “while breath” was in her body, and conveyed her relief that he had been spared the sweat. “I thank God,” she wrote, “that those I desired and prayed for have escaped—namely the king and you.” But she was shrewd enough to remind the cardinal just how close her relationship with his master actually was. In a letter in which ostensibly she thanked him abjectly for “the great pains you take for me, both day and night” that “are never likely to be recompensed,” there is a telling postscript added jocularly by Henry. He guilelessly confessed to writing it because “the writer of this would not cease till she had called me likewise to set my hand.” The cardinal was left uncomfortably aware that his own position was secure only if Anne and her family allowed it.

  Wolsey was quite safe for the time being, for the breakthrough, cruelly interrupted by the sweat, materialized at last. An ecstatic Henry rushed to tell Anne, currently away from court, the good news. “The Legate, which we most desire arrived at Paris on Sunday or Monday last post,” he wrote, “so that I trust by the next Monday to hear of his arrival at Calais.” Not long after he set foot on English soil, Campeggio would, Henry and Anne believed, deliver the verdict for which they yearned. “I trust within a while after to enjoy that which I have so longed for to God’s pleasure and our both comfort,” she read. Almost certainly her family read it too. It looked as if their combined planning would bring them their reward: Jane’s sister-in-law was about to become queen.

  CHAPTER 10

  Fortune’s Wheel

  THE COURT CASE that the Boleyns believed would change their fortunes forever began in early summer. Cardinal Lorenzo Campeggio had arrived some time previously, having made his will before setting off as any journey was perilous, and had then suffered such an acute attack of gout that he was unable to walk and had to be carried in a velvet chair for his first meeting with the king. After a fruitless attempt to persuade Katherine to make things easy for Henry and the church by entering the seclusion of a convent, Campeggio fulfilled the pope’s reluctantly bestowed commission to bring the case to trial. When Jane Parker married George Boleyn and pledged to take him as her husband “for better, for worse,” the prospect of a member of her new family replacing the respected and established queen would never have crossed her mind or, probably, theirs either. Since then, she had witnessed every stage of the burgeoning affair, as George and his father supported Anne while she took those first tentative steps toward the throne. Now their hopes were about to be realized. Or so they thought.

  There were still some lingering doubts, though, particularly about the genuineness of Wolsey’s professed commitment. Outwardly, the cardinal was tirelessly unremitting in his labors, so much so that he delegated many routine tasks to his solicitor and man of business, the shrewd and capable Thomas Cromwell, who suddenly surfaces in the records. Cromwell received legions of requests to convey information to his master or, increasingly, to help secure favors for petitioners on his own account. Even W
olsey’s illegitimate son, Thomas Winter, manifestly thought he was more likely to get help from Cromwell at this time than from his own busy father. Distrust of Wolsey’s actions was spreading, however. Iñigo de Mendoza, the Spanish ambassador, wrote as much to Charles V when he commented that Anne, “the cause of all the disorder,” suspected that the cardinal had deliberately placed “impediments in her way, from a belief that if she were queen, his power would decline.” The Venetian ambassador too latched on to Wolsey’s fears that Thomas Boleyn would “deprive” him “of his repute.” As indeed he would have. Even Francis I was supposed to have told the Duke of Suffolk that Henry should not “put too much trust in any man, whereby he may be deceived.” The Boleyns had already assessed their own support in preparation for a potential confrontation with Wolsey. The Duke of Norfolk, both ambitious and a relation, for he was Anne’s uncle, was on their side; and, with an acquisitive eye on Wolsey’s property, which would be confiscated by the king and sold or given to royal favorites, the notoriously rapacious Suffolk, despite his wife’s antipathy to Anne, was another ally. Both must be kept on board, which might not be easy. On the other hand, of course, should Wolsey prove true and remain useful, he was not the only problem. Charles V’s response to the imminent proceedings was a deep concern, and despite Clement’s “desire to oblige the king,” it was anyone’s guess whether, hedged in by imperial forces, he really would dare to antagonize the emperor by annulling the marriage. The pope’s constant ill health was a further worry. No, it was not going to be straightforward.