Jane Boleyn: The True Story of the Infamous Lady Rochford

by Julia Fox

  The peers traveled to the Tower for the trial. On Monday, May 15, Kingston escorted the queen from the Tower’s royal apartments where she had been kept into the King’s Hall where her judges were waiting. She was given no legal counsel; no one ever was. She was on her own. As was traditional, she held up her hand as the charges were read out to her and then declared herself not guilty. In addition to adultery with the four courtiers, the incest allegation, and plotting to murder the king, she was also accused of poisoning Katherine, of pondering doing the same to Mary, and last but far from least, laughing at her husband and ridiculing him. The most preposterous of accusations were treated as gravely as the most serious. With the eyes of Suffolk, Norfolk, Lord Morley, and the rest upon her, she defended herself with considerable skill.

  While Lord Morley would most likely have told his daughter all that occurred within the crowded room in the Tower on that May day, we have no verbatim record. Much of what is extant comes from Chapuys, always so clever at finding those willing to brief him, but he was not present himself. Two men who were have both left us information. One was Anthony Anthony. A brewer, he owned an inn, the Ship, and was a churchwarden at St. Botolph’s Church in Aldgate. He also kept a journal covering the major events that he saw as “an eye-and ear-witness” while working at the Tower. The journal has long since disappeared but Thomas Turner, writing in the late seventeenth century, saw Anthony’s “old, original diary” and transcribed extracts from it. They make fascinating reading. It was Sir John Spelman, the second “eye-and ear-witness,” however, a man who had shared the same table with Lord Morley in Anne’s coronation banquet less than three years earlier, who recorded in his notebook that the “matter was disclosed” by Lady Wingfield, reporting that she had made accusations against the queen in a deathbed confession. Perhaps she did but quite what she said, and to whom, remains a mystery. Clearly whatever it was she was supposed to have divulged must have been damaging to Anne, but it could have referred to anything that had happened before she was queen. Equally, and perhaps most likely, it could have been a fairly minor indiscretion that was exaggerated out of all proportion.

  Neither Anthony nor Spelman mentioned Lady Worcester’s accusation. And they did not refer to Jane at all. She was not called on to give evidence in person against her sister-in-law, nor was anyone else. In fact, no witnesses at all were called, much to Chapuys’ surprise. As he wrote to Charles, it “is customary in such cases, when the accused denies the charge brought against him.”

  The lack of witnesses did not affect the outcome. At the close of the proceedings, the peers gave their decision. Beginning with the most junior, each of the twenty-six announced his verdict verbally. All said the same, single word: “Guilty.” It was up to the queen’s uncle to pronounce sentence on his niece. She would be put to death, he said, “and according to the old customs of the land she should be burned, but nevertheless it should stand in the king’s commandment.” She would be executed on Tower Green, within the walls of the fortress. Calm and composed, Anne said that she was prepared to die but was sorry that others, who were innocent, were also condemned. She asked for some time to “prepare her soul for death.” For her, it was almost over.

  Jane’s husband was next. Since his sister, whom he was not allowed to see, had already been found guilty, his position was perilous. But a Boleyn to the last, he held up his hand at the bar to plead not guilty to all of the charges against him and proceeded to conduct his own case with commendable aplomb. His momentary weakness in the Tower, when he had wept in front of Kingston, was a thing of the past. He stood before the same judges who had just sentenced his sister to a terrible end. They were all men he knew. Among them he could identify his uncle, Norfolk, in the seat of honor; Suffolk with his instinct for self-preservation; his father-in-law, Lord Morley, whose duty it might be to turn his own daughter into a widow. Although not trained as a lawyer, George defended himself so ably that many who were there “had no difficulty in waging two to one that he would be acquitted.”

  The evidence was weak, resting chiefly on his staying a while in Anne’s bedchamber, probably when he had rushed to her side to give her the latest news from France, and enjoying her company. Again no witnesses were called, which continued to puzzle Chapuys. But then came the crunch, as Jane must have feared that it would. He was given a slip of paper that he was told not to read out but was asked to give a yes or no response to what it said. Defiant as always, George scornfully read it aloud, sealing his own fate in the process. Had Anne told Jane, he read, that Henry found it difficult to sustain an erection? It was most likely this that Cromwell had painstakingly extracted from a frightened Jane. The atmosphere in the King’s Hall, already tense, was now electric. If the king truly was impotent, then Elizabeth was not his child and he could never have a son. But George refused to answer the question with the required yes or no, not wishing, he said, “to engender or create suspicion in a matter likely to prejudice the issue the King might have from another marriage.” Nor would he respond to any suggestion that he had spread a rumor that Elizabeth was not Henry’s. The idea that he believed Elizabeth was not the king’s child and that he had repeated such an untruth was, to George, so contemptible that he would not even dignify it with a reply.

  He knew his sister. She was as clever and sharp as he was; she had lived in royal courts for most of her life. She understood how they were organized. No matter what anyone might have insinuated to Cromwell, she would not have prejudiced the position they had all worked so hard to help her attain by leaping into bed with an importunate courtier. Nor would she have tried to have a child by a man not her husband. It was too dangerous. The charge that George had fulfilled the role of surrogate himself was preposterous. The Boleyns were grasping and opportunistic but to flaunt morality and religious law so wantonly was beyond even them. Like Anne, George was sincere in his beliefs. Even if Henry was not virility epitomized, he was not impotent either. What Anne told Jane, as she must have done, and what Jane repeated to George, as indeed she must have done, was surely not meant to suggest anything other than that Henry had intermittent sexual dysfunction. Getting pregnant by him was not easy, but it could be done. Anne’s ill-considered remark proved to be George’s undoing, as ripe for misinterpretation as his impetuous rush to keep her up to date with the delicate negotiations that he had been conducting in France. And Jane would remember until her dying day that the words Cromwell had gleaned from her during her interrogation had been turned so effectively against her husband. Perhaps there was some consolation in knowing that she did not volunteer the information but it would be understandable if she wished that Anne had kept her own mouth firmly shut in the beginning. It was dangerous to be the queen’s confidante.

  The guilty verdict was inevitable, delivered by each of the peers in turn. Only Northumberland, “suddenly taken ill,” was not there to deliver the fatal word. Again, it was up to the stalwart Norfolk to pronounce the death sentence on a relative. Like Anne, George took it well. Acknowledging that he deserved to die, for everyone was a sinner, he asked the king to pay his debts. It always mattered to leave this earth owing nothing to anyone. And to die well was all that remained for him.

  Henry’s blatantly delighted reaction to the arrests and court cases astounded even the worldly Chapuys. On the day before the Boleyns were tried, he moved his beloved Jane Seymour to live within a mile of him and ordered that she should receive only the very best of everything. There was even a report that he sent her a message on the day of his wife’s trial to let her know that she would hear that Anne had been condemned by three o’clock that afternoon. His timing was impeccable, for so she was. He felt free of his “own sweetheart,” and he celebrated in style: he dined in company until the early hours of the morning, people living by the river heard music and song from musicians and minstrels as the royal barge glided by taking the king to his untroubled sleep. His callous behavior was compared to “the joy and pleasure a man feels in getting rid of a thin
, old, and vicious hack in the hope of getting soon a fine horse to ride,” wrote the ambassador.

  It was not like that for Jane. As the prisoners anticipated their end, their relatives’ anguish began. While they were still alive, there was always a slim chance that the king might show mercy, a forlorn hope in this case. The French ambassador no less tried to move Henry to spare Weston but failed. To attempt to intervene for Anne or George would have been foolhardy and there is no suggestion that anyone did. At one point, Anne wondered whether she might be allowed to retire to a nunnery but that was out of the question. Henry wanted her dead. And it would be neater if her brother lost his head as well. Just to tidy any loose ends, and to distance the king completely from the woman for whom he had once yearned, a sick Northumberland was interrogated to ascertain whether he and Anne had agreed to marry back in those days when both had been so young. However, that easy way of annulling her marriage to the king failed when the earl swore on the holy sacrament that there had been no precontract. It was left to the faithful Cranmer to help his master by granting a decree of nullity, supposedly on the grounds that his affair with Mary Stafford had put him in a prohibited degree of relationship with Anne. It was the Katherine situation all over again.

  Those incarcerated in the Tower could only await the inevitable. George was preoccupied by what he owed, in particular his responsibility to a monk whom he had helped to become an abbot, charging a total fee of two hundred pounds for his services, but whose new abbey was presumably closed by the king. Had George lived, he would have wanted to refund the monk’s money since he could not become abbot of an abbey that no longer existed. George asked for Cromwell’s help in sorting this out. Kingston does not tell us whether George was allowed to see Jane or whether she communicated with him at all. Weston wrote a poignant letter listing his debts, asking his father and mother to pay them for him “for the salvation” of his soul and begging both his parents and his wife to pray for him. “I believe,” he said, that “prayer will do me good.” Anne asked that Cranmer hear her confession. She affirmed “on the damnation of her soul” that she had always been faithful to Henry. One small consolation was that her sentence was commuted to beheading rather than burning, Henry going to the trouble of sending for an expert swordsman from Calais to do the job. “I heard say the executioner was very good, and I have a little neck,” she joked with Kingston as she laughingly put her hands around it.

  And the minutes ticked away. On Wednesday, May 17, Kingston led the five condemned men to a scaffold set up on Tower Hill just outside the fortress. For George, Norris, Brereton, Weston, and Smeaton, the time had come. The executions were, of course, in public. George was the first to die, and to die by the ax. He did not face the terrible death that he had watched the Carthusian monks suffer a few months earlier. There would be no hanging, no disemboweling, no quartering. For Norris, once so much liked by the king, and for young Weston, for Brereton, and for George, a magnanimous Henry allowed a swifter demise. Jane would have had little, probably no, advance warning of the time scheduled for her husband’s execution. Kingston had told him the night before and confirmed it with him and the others only in the early morning of the day itself. Contacting the wife of a convicted traitor was not a requirement of his post.

  George stepped forward for the last time and gave his final speech. “Christian men,” he said, “I am born under the law, and judged under the law, and die under the law, and the law has condemned me.” He acknowledged that his many sins, which he would not enumerate but which were all known by God, meant that he deserved death. “I am a wretched sinner,” he admitted, “and I have sinned shamefully.” Everyone, particularly those at court, should learn from his great fall and “trust not in the vanity of the world, and especially in the flattering of the court.” After asking forgiveness of anyone whom he had offended “in thought, word or deed,” he revealed his passionate involvement in religion. He did not, as Chapuys maintained, confess that he had been “contaminated” with the “new heresies.” On the contrary, he proclaimed himself “a setter forth of the word of God,” a man who “favored the Gospel of Christ.” If only he had practiced in deed what he had read, he said, he would not have come to this. It was better to be a “good doer” than a “good reader.” Of the specific crimes of which he was accused, he said nothing.

  And now it really was the end. As the other condemned men watched, George knelt down, laid his head on the wooden block, the headsman’s ax fell. As George’s mangled remains were removed, it was Norris’s turn, then Weston’s, then Brereton’s, and right at the end, having to endure the mental torment of yet more waiting, Mark Smeaton’s. He, though, was not beheaded, for as Anne had explained as they stood by the window in her presence chamber, he was not a gentleman. Instead, he was hanged and his body cut into quarters. The corpses were carried back into the Tower to the churchyard of St. Peter ad Vincula, where Norris and Weston were bundled into one grave, Brereton and Smeaton in another. George’s head and body were not kept with the others. He was taken inside the chapel and laid to rest. Too soon, Jane would join him there.

  Anne did not die until Friday. She dressed with great care for this, her ultimate performance. Ever since her return from France as a girl, she had dressed well and today of all days was to be no exception. She chose a gable headdress, unusual for her, and a cloak trimmed with ermine. Attended by the four ladies set to guard and wait on her, who included Lady Kingston, the constable’s wife, and her own aunt, Sir Edward Boleyn’s wife, a woman who had once served Katherine of Aragon and whom she had never liked, the queen walked out into the open air from the royal apartments and to the waiting scaffold, sited close to the chapel where her brother lay. There were plenty of people there to witness her death. Cromwell, a friend no longer, sat in the stands to watch. So did Suffolk and Audley and Henry’s natural son, Richmond. Although the gates of the Tower were open, foreigners were excluded so Chapuys was unable to see the Concubine, the woman he despised for what she had done to Katherine and Mary, receive her punishment. Nor did he hear her short speech, so faithfully recorded by Anthony Anthony:

  You shall understand that I have submitted me unto the law, and so I am come hither to obey and fulfill the law. And so I can say no more, but I desire you all to be just and true unto the king, your sovereign, for he is a good virtuous king and a goodly king, a victorious king, a bountiful king, for I have found his grace always very good and loving unto me, and [he] has done much for me. Wherefore I pray God reward his grace, praying you all to pray to God for his life, that his grace may reign long with you, and I pray you all for God’s sake to pray for me.

  Like George, she said nothing of the crimes she was alleged to have committed. Taking off her cloak and her hood, she covered her still beautiful dark hair with a thin linen hood and knelt down, modestly arranging her skirts. One of the ladies bandaged her eyes. There was no block; a sword does not descend vertically like an ax but slices off a head in one huge blow. This executioner was indeed an expert. Kingston had promised Anne that there would be no pain. It was certainly fast. When she fell, her ladies moved toward her. One covered her bloodied head with a white cloth and gently took it into St. Peter ad Vincula, the other three women bearing her lifeless body.

  Brother and sister were thus reunited in death, their ordeal finished. Jane’s was not. In under three weeks, the so-powerful Boleyn clan had been discredited and disgraced, their lives, and Jane’s, shattered. She had been with Anne during the long years of Henry’s courtship, she had ridden behind her through the bedecked streets of London on that wonderful day of triumph, and she had watched as Cranmer had set St. Edward’s Crown on the new queen’s head. She had shared in the disappointments of Anne’s failed pregnancies; she had even tried to help her sister-in-law fight off a potential rival for the king’s waning affections. She had been closer to the queen than she was to her own sister. She knew Anne through and through, knowledge that would have led her to believe in her sister-in-law’
s innocence. Now she had lost her. Even more devastatingly, she had also lost her husband. George, the young gallant who had strode so proudly into the colorful little church at Great Hallingbury in the middle of the Essex countryside and whisked her off to a life of excitement and wealth, was buried under the cold floor of a very different church in a very different place. There would be no more cozy nights in that wonderful Rochford bed, trying for the child they had never had. Instead, Jane was a widow. But hers would be no ordinary widowhood. There could be no ornate funeral, no public grieving. No sympathy would be offered and any tears would be shed in private. It must be as though George had never been born. Jane was on her own.

  CARVING A CAREER

  CHAPTER 23

  Taking Stock

  HENRY’S OFFICERS set about their task methodically. Every last item George owned was recorded. It was the king’s now, and he could not be cheated. The silver dishes, the candlesticks, the gilt trenchers and pots, and the elaborately embroidered furnishings were all carefully packed to await the king’s pleasure. Once they were securely stored with his other goods, Henry might not even bother to glance at them. But when the executioner held George’s bleeding head aloft to display to the watching crowds, Jane was not just a widow, crying furtive tears for her dead husband, knowing that he had gone to his execution a totally innocent man. She was infinitely poorer.

  Even her own personal possessions were rifled through by Henry’s diligent scribes as they listed all that she had. She kept many of her things in a chest “in the chamber over the kitchen,” probably the kitchen at Beaulieu, the palace that had so charmed George that he had moved his household in with remarkable speed. But that had been in happier days, when Jane could have watched as he played tennis or went hawking and when they could have sat together talking in the candlelight before sleeping together as man and wife. Those times could not come again. Instead, Henry’s men turned their attention to the chest in the kitchen. A note was made of her prayer book edged with silver and gilt, of a book covered in black velvet and with its silver clasp, and a book covered in crimson velvet. Her clothes were enumerated too. She had ten pairs of sleeves for her gowns, all of rich materials. Among them she had a pair of crimson velvet worked in gold, two pairs made of cloth of silver, a couple in tinsel or thin cloth of silver or gold, some in yellow or white satin, a pair in white damask, and a pair in black velvet complete with eight sets of laces tipped with black enamel for fastening. She had intricate placards, the stiff panels that she loved to display beneath open skirts or gowns. These too were in satin, damask, and velvet. She had two pairs of knives sheathed in black velvet. Henry’s servants scrupulously wrote down that she had some broken beads, probably rosaries, of gold and white bone and gold and pearls. They did not forget the fabulous white silk stockings embossed in gold that she used for the masques she so loved. They were nothing if not thorough. It was humiliating in the extreme, emphasizing that she was no longer the queen’s sister-in-law, but the unimportant widow of a convicted traitor. Perhaps she was allowed to keep much of this; we do not know.