Jane Boleyn: The True Story of the Infamous Lady Rochford

by Julia Fox

  In any event, there was certainly plenty to keep Jane’s mind racing in those months away from court. But if there were underlying anxieties, there was good news as well. It was true that Jane had paid a high personal price for her devotion to the Boleyn cause but at least the mysterious woman, who temporarily distracted the king and for whom Jane was banished, was gone. She disappears back into the archives as swiftly as she surfaced. Excellent. Then, even if Mary Carey had let them all down by marrying Stafford, and they were a little uneasy about Norfolk, the rest of the family were still united. George and Thomas never faltered in their allegiance to Anne. James was acting responsibly as Anne’s chancellor, William Boleyn continued to live his quiet, blameless, celibate life, without causing a moment’s worry, and Anne reigned supreme again. The family’s domination was far from over.

  CHAPTER 19

  The Final Flourish

  WITH ANNE SAFELY BACK in the king’s arms, the entire family breathed a collective sigh of relief. More and Fisher knelt before the block, the Carthusians took their last agonized breaths, their broken bodies testament to their courage, and Henry’s critics were learning the bloody results of opposition. It was business as usual. For Jane, an end to her banishment could have occurred at any time after Anne’s resurgence, perhaps in the early months of 1535. Even if she was forced to stay away from court for a while longer, she was likely to be very well informed on what was going on. Her loyalty meant that she could not be ignored.

  Nor, from Anne’s point of view, could Katherine and Mary. As far as the queen and the rest of the Boleyn family were concerned, the two women had to be brought into line. They were still refusing to accept their changed circumstances. Katherine would not relinquish her title of queen, and while Mary was prepared to acknowledge Elizabeth as her father’s daughter in the same way that Richmond was his son, she believed that the only true princess was herself. She was legitimate; they were not. For her, it was simple; for the Boleyns, exasperating. In fact, it was worse than that, for Elizabeth’s position had to be protected: she was, after all, a Boleyn as well as the current heir to the throne. Thus, the poor treatment of Katherine and Mary continued unabated. Kept apart from each other, mother and daughter could only correspond and even that was difficult. The solicitous Chapuys did his best for them both, constantly negotiating with Cromwell on their behalf and bravely taking on the king himself to try to improve their living conditions. Their only reliable link with the outside world, he was a true and constant friend in what for them was a living nightmare.

  The ambassador was convinced that somehow Anne would organize the deaths of Katherine and Mary. Alarmed, he disclosed to Charles that Anne had said that if the king were out of the country meeting Francis and she were left in charge, she would “certainly cause the death of the said princess [Mary] by the sword or otherwise.” When George sensibly counseled that this might “offend the king,” Anne’s response was of an uncompromising type that a rueful Mary Stafford would have recognized. She “cared not,” she said, “even if she were to be burnt or flayed alive in consequence.” Anne could be rash, as Jane had learned over the years, but she was not quite that rash; nor, most definitely, was the family.

  To act against Katherine and Mary legally, though, was an altogether different proposition, and there were plenty of rumors circulating about that. Whether at court or not, Jane would have heard them. Again, Chapuys feared for the two women’s lives. According to him, Anne asserted that they should be “punished as traitresses according to the statutes.” Others had paid the due price for their disobedience, she said, so should they. Anne was “incessantly crying after the king” to act decisively because they “deserved death more than those” already executed, for “they were the cause of it all.” She tried another tack as well, he reported: she bribed an unnamed man to pretend to have a revelation that she would not be able to conceive while Mary and Katherine were alive. Chapuys was so desperately troubled that via wonderfully far-fetched cloak-and-dagger schemes, he tried to plot an escape route for Mary after which she would then live happily ever afterward in her cousin the emperor’s dominions until it was time for her to become queen in her own right. That is, if Katherine did not become pregnant in the interim—despite the fact that she was postmenopausal, the ambassador had not quite given up the pipe dream that Henry might take her back, whereupon she would then produce the longed-for son, in spite of the fact that she was forty-eight at the time.

  As it was, now that Anne was back in favor, mother and daughter were kept in relatively close confinement. At least the Boleyns could rely on Lady Shelton to keep a sharp eye on the former princess. With Mary stubbornly intransigent and so frequently ill with menstrual problems and nervous complaints, all of which seemed to get worse if she was under particular stress, Lady Shelton’s task was far from easy. At the slightest whisper of indisposition, Katherine always begged to care for her daughter. There would be “no need of any other person but myself to nurse her,” she entreated the faithful Chapuys, her “especial friend,” to tell the king. “I will put her in my own bed where I sleep, and will watch her when needed.” That, of course, would never be allowed. Anne and Henry were convinced that Katherine would strengthen Mary’s current obstinacy. “Although sons and daughters were bound to some obedience towards their mothers,” an irate Henry told Chapuys, “their chief duty was to their fathers.”

  All health matters were, therefore, left to Lady Shelton, although the king’s most trusted physician, Dr. William Butts, was sent to check on the princess when her condition deteriorated. Illegitimate she might be in Henry’s eyes, she was his daughter nonetheless. Deep down, every Boleyn was aware of that, inconvenient though it was. The king informed Chapuys that Mary could not be in better hands than those of Anne’s aunt, as he said Lady Shelton was “an expert lady even in such female complaints.” Mary was lucky to have her, he implied. So were the Boleyns. Anne Shelton could not bring herself to be as disrespectful or unkind to Mary as they had sometimes demanded but she could be trusted to do her job efficiently. And it involved more than pandering to Mary’s complaints. When a letter from Mary to Sir Nicholas Carew, a courtier who was very much her adherent, reached him unchecked despite her vigilance, Lady Shelton questioned her charge thoroughly on how it had been achieved and who had acted as courier. She revealed all she had discovered, including the contents of the reply from Carew’s wife, directly to Henry. The Boleyns were indeed fortunate to have the capable Lady Shelton on hand. The family was pulling together again.

  For Anne, George, and Thomas, that was so in religion as well. It seemed to Chapuys that they were set on destroying his church and infecting the king with their wicked radicalism. They, of course, saw it differently: they were helping to bring the true message of the gospel and ending centuries of superstition. Anne’s status and place in Henry’s heart made this more possible. She continued to enjoy reformist literature that George and others imported from France, and her influence spread out from the court as her bishops and clergymen were appointed to sees and parishes across the land. She took a keen personal interest in their preferments and in the welfare of her scholars. When a Dr. Edward Crome proved tardy in taking up a benefice she had obtained for him, she wrote to chide him for his delay. She considered, she said, that “the furtherance of virtue, truth and godly doctrine will be not a little increased, and right much the better advanced, by his better relief and residence there.” He was to go immediately. Education too was central to promoting the true gospel. She wrote imperiously to the abbot of Whitby, who had recalled one of her students, John Eldmer, from university in Cambridge and had “charged him with certain offices, to the great disturbance of his studies.” That she would not permit. Eldmer was to learn, not perform routine jobs in the monastery. “We, therefore, desire you will allow him to return to the University, with sufficient maintenance to pursue his studies,” she instructed the chastened abbot. And Eldmer was only one of the queen’s scholars. Whatever she
really believed about her husband and sister-in-law’s avant-garde religious views, Jane could empathize completely with the furtherance of education. Despite not obtaining the living at Swaffham, her own scholar, William Foster, had reason to be grateful to her, although she would never have been able to give him help on Anne’s lavish scale.

  Brought up to value good works as a holy duty, Jane also agreed with Anne’s desire to help the poor. Many hours had already been spent sewing shirts for the destitute while Jane was in Anne’s privy chamber. There were stories of huge sums being distributed to the needy on the queen’s orders, individual cases of special hardship investigated and assistance given, and of Anne’s personal intervention when she thought it necessary. Her summer progress in 1535 with Henry, when the king, as was his practice, ceremonially visited towns and the estates of his courtiers to show himself to his people en route, gave her several opportunities for largesse. Of course, she could well afford it; in one year alone, George Taylor, her receiver-general, accounted for an income of over six thousand pounds. As late as February 1535, she was busily helping herself to some of Katherine’s possessions, which she felt were now hers, left at Baynard’s Castle in London. Among the items she appropriated then was “a horn cup with a cover, garnished with antique works, with foot and knot of ivory,” a coffer covered in crimson velvet, and a useful set of wood trenchers. She saw no incongruity between maintaining the style expected of a queen and charitable works. Yet Anne wanted more than random charity; she also wanted proper schemes for poor relief. This explains her delight when it was decided to look into the ways in which monasteries were run: when some were closed, the money gained by the Crown could be used for education and organized forms of assistance. All would be in line with her own convictions. Henry and Cromwell were bound to agree wholeheartedly.

  What Jane knew from family tales or reminiscences was the extent to which this was part of the Boleyn inheritance. Although Anne’s grandfather, Sir William, had left most of his wealth to his relatives, he was mindful of his obligations both to the church and to the poor. Norwich Cathedral, where he wanted to be buried next to his mother, received twenty pounds and each monk twenty marks, while the parish church at Blickling was the richer for four candlesticks and twenty pounds. Whenever Jane prayed in that church, she saw those candlesticks. Every householder in Blickling was given the princely sum of five pounds and his own household was to be kept in place, and therefore paid, for six months after his death. No one would be abandoned. It was a generous and unselfish gesture.

  He was but following in the footsteps of his own father, Sir Geoffrey Boleyn, and it was his genes too that Anne and George had inherited. Everything that Anne intended to do conformed to the blueprint her great-grandfather had provided in his will. In many ways a conventional Catholic, Geoffrey wanted masses said for his own soul, for that of his wife, and for those who were buried alongside him. He left money for that church and for the one at Blickling. But he went radically further. Like Anne, he believed in the value of preaching. He wanted a “convenable, honest, virtuous priest of good governance and conversation” to be employed for twenty years after his death to say the necessary masses four times a year. That duty performed, the priest could engage in learning or teaching or—and Anne would have thoroughly approved of this—he could “labor in preaching the word of God” on the highways and byways of the land. Even at the services he gave for Geoffrey’s soul, he was to preach a sermon. Like Anne, Geoffrey was way ahead of his time for the Catholic Church did not encourage sermons and preaching on such an informal and ad hoc basis; such activities were far more in line with the Protestant ideas that interested Anne.

  Then, again just like her, he had cared about the disadvantaged and those who really were at the bottom of the heap: he had left sufficient money for food to be given to the prisoners in London four times a year. On the anniversary of his death, every four prisoners were to share dishes of beef and mutton, or two types of fish, should it be a fish day, with a pennyworth of bread, the whole meal to be washed down with a pottle of ale. In addition, he bequeathed money for five years to be spent on the general welfare of prisoners both in London and throughout the country. Leper houses received financial help too, and so did the mendicant friars in London, the “poor, sick and feeble” in hospitals in the city, and the women in the almshouses within the hospital of St. Katherine beside the Tower. Jane was involved with the hospitals Geoffrey aided, as one of them, the house of Our Lady of Bethlehem [Bedlam], was in George’s keeping. Geoffrey did not stop there. He went on to leave funds for poor householders in various named parishes, including Blickling, and for those brought into poverty through misfortunes of “fire” or “water.”

  Education too mattered as passionately to Geoffrey as it did to Anne. He had his own scholar to whom he left ten marks a year for ten years providing he prayed for his soul, worked at his studies in divinity in Oxford or Cambridge, or preached. For Anne and Jane, supporting scholars really was in the family. Jane could feel a Boleyn in that also. Finally, if there was anything left of his vast fortune after his debts had been settled and the personal bequests to members of his family had been given, Geoffrey Boleyn ordered that the residue of his estate should be used for the relief of the poor, setting up schools for children, arranging the marriages of poor maidens, and in “other works and deeds of mercy and piety” according to the discretion of his executors.

  As Jane watched Anne poring over plans to alleviate poverty and put her religious ideals into practice, she knew that the same ideals were in the queen’s blood too. Anne could carry on where Geoffrey had stopped. In her private apartments there was always music, song, dance, and fun, all taking place in the most splendid surroundings that her royal husband could provide, but Jane appreciated that there was more to Anne than mere hedonism. And now that the storm caused by Henry’s dalliance had passed, life continued much as before.

  Chapuys dutifully conveyed to Charles the bad news that Anne was back in favor. If anything, she seemed more powerful than ever. Even before the executions of More and Fisher, she laid on amusements and banquets to divert Henry, a task that “she so well managed” that “the King loves his concubine [Anne] now more than he ever did.” Mary’s fears for her life may have become “considerably increased” but there were fewer sleepless nights for the Boleyns. Anne felt sure enough of Henry’s feelings to tell him how grateful he should be to her for rescuing him “from a state of sin.” It was through her, she told him, that he had become “the richest Prince that ever was in England” and that “he would not have reformed the Church, to his own great profit and that of all the people” without her encouragement.

  Whenever she could, Anne went to see her daughter, Elizabeth, a toddler by now. There was talk of a marriage for the little girl with the Duke of Angoulême, one of Francis’s sons, a matter for George to bring up when at the French court. For the Francophile Anne, this was a delightful prospect. Keen for visiting French ambassadors to report back on just how perfect little Elizabeth was, she insisted they went to see her. The diplomats were kept well away from Mary, of course, even though she was still housed in her half sister’s establishment.

  Jane had lived among the Boleyns long enough to anticipate that while the ultimate decisions were Henry’s, whatever was being planned for Elizabeth would be of considerable interest to Anne. Her hands-on approach to policy was not new to her family. It was her way; it always had been. Years earlier, Wolsey had been surprised that Anne sat in and became involved when he discussed matters of state with the king. Henry had accepted that she always wanted to be kept up to date on every development. In one of his own letters to her in those early, heady days of their romance, the king told her that George would give her all the latest information when he saw her. Thus, when George returned from a mission to France, it was natural for him to rush straight to his sister to let her know in minute detail exactly what had been said. He did so even before reporting to Henry. While in the
queen’s privy chamber, Jane was used to seeing her husband and her sister-in-law totally engrossed in private conversation. This was quite usual; Anne had no reason to think it could ever be remembered and used against her.