Jane Boleyn: The True Story of the Infamous Lady Rochford

by Julia Fox

  With Queen Jane buried with the full panoply the state could provide, life for those left behind had to continue. Jane’s situation had changed yet again. While undoubtedly back in royal favor, she was also out of a job. Much would depend on whether the king decided to add a fourth wife to his growing tally and perhaps make another attempt at populating the nursery. Edward was a healthy baby, but though there were high hopes of his survival through the pitfalls of infancy, that could never be taken for granted. In those early years of Henry’s reign, when he had still been married to Queen Katherine, Prince Henry had sickened and died without much warning. Now he had Edward but only a second son would make the succession truly secure. And, for Jane, a new wife for the king might bring fresh opportunities.

  Even before Queen Jane’s funeral, Norfolk had written to Cromwell describing a conversation he had just had with the grieving king. Norfolk had, he said, spoken “peradventure not wisely, but plainly.” Counseling Henry “to accept God’s pleasure in taking the Queen,” he had exhorted him to take comfort in his newborn heir, the “treasure sent to him and this realm.” But the duke had gone one stage further: he had “advised him to provide for a new wife.” Cromwell was also working on the king to the same purpose. He found that while Henry had taken the queen’s death “reasonably,” he was “little disposed to marry again.” Nonetheless, the minister said, some councilors “thought it meet…to urge him to it for the sake of his realm.” It might take a little while, but the chances were that the king would weaken. If he did, then Jane might well have a role in the bedchamber of the new queen. In the meantime, and totally unexpectedly, her fortunes took a slightly different turn.

  CHAPTER 27

  A Woman of Property

  DESPITE THE EFFORTS of his council to cajole him into another marriage following Queen Jane’s death, Henry was in no hurry to tread the matrimonial path once more. If he ventured on to it again, it would be at a time of his own choosing and only after exhaustive enquiries regarding the lucky bride had been undertaken by men he trusted. He had learned his lesson: such things should not be rushed. In the interim, he delighted in his son. The child was strong and happy, cared for by a carefully selected team led by Lady Margaret Bryan, Edward’s “lady mistress.” The prince was “in good health and merry,” Lady Bryan wrote to the king in one of her many letters. It was a pity, she continued, that Henry could not have seen his son the previous evening when “the minstrels played, and his Grace danced and played so wantonly that he could not stand still.” To have a healthy child, who had even inherited his own artistic interests, was music to the proud father’s ears, but it did not bring Jane any nearer to another post within the royal household. Perhaps, however, she would not need one.

  Suddenly, and out of the blue, Thomas Boleyn had made overtures concerning her jointure. After her own initiative in eliciting Cromwell’s help, Jane had lived on the hundred pounds per annum her father-in-law had grudgingly allowed her. Combined with the perquisites of court service, this enabled her to live reasonably well, although not lavishly. She kept servants, she received and sent New Year’s gifts, she dressed according to prevailing diktats. Had George survived, of course, Jane’s lifestyle would have been far grander but at the very least she was managing to uphold the standards her birth and rank demanded.

  It was probably confronting his own inescapable mortality that had made Thomas contemplate the future. In April 1538, Jane received the news that her mother-in-law, Elizabeth Boleyn, had died in London, very close to Anne’s former property of Baynard’s Castle. As a duke’s daughter and an earl’s wife, Elizabeth Boleyn was given a respectful and reverent funeral. Accompanied by the light from ceremonial torches, and with banners fixed to the black draped barge on which her body lay, Thomas’s dead wife was rowed along the Thames to Lambeth for interment. The couple had been married for almost forty years. Although he was well enough to come to court the next January, Thomas was now in his sixties and the infirmities of old age cannot have passed him by. He could rest more contentedly if he thought he had set his affairs in order.

  That meant devising a property settlement, but Thomas’s dilemma was to determine what it should be. Because he had no son, his brother, James, was next in line to inherit most of the Boleyn lands. But Thomas had a daughter, Mary Carey, now Mary Stafford. She lived in her parents’ manor house at Rochford in Essex with her father’s blessing, his bitter response to her clandestine marriage to William Stafford quietly forgotten. After the executions of both George and Anne, she was his only remaining child, her son and daughter his only grandchildren. Other than via his siblings, not the same thing at all, his bloodline ran solely through Mary, and so it was to Mary and her descendants that Thomas wanted to bequeath whatever he could. What that really amounted to was the Ormond lands. They were his to bestow, providing Margaret Boleyn and his brother, William, agreed with his decisions. Neither should prove troublesome. Thomas had already gained control of his mother’s inheritance years earlier and even then she had been declared a “lunatic,” interspersing periods of lucidity with periods of insanity. There would be no problem in gaining her consent to anything. As for William, he was still content within the church, having spent his whole life safely shielded from the excitement, and the corresponding dangers, of the court. Although no gullible innocent, for he was not a Boleyn for nothing, he was likely to be amenable to some form of deal. Edward Boleyn, Thomas’s younger sibling, was uninvolved. However, as Thomas pondered his plans for posterity, he knew that there was one outstanding obstacle: his daughter-in-law, Jane.

  Jane’s jointure provisions had included specified manors, Ormond manors. None had been handed over, as she knew only too well, and she had been given her hundred pounds every year in recompense. Her manors of Aylesbury and Bierton in Buckinghamshire suddenly became crucial. Thomas wanted to sell them. There is no record of precisely why he wanted ready money at that moment; perhaps he did not want to saddle his daughter Mary with his debts. But what Jane was soon to discover was that her particular manors were valuable and that Thomas had a willing cash buyer waiting in the wings: Sir John Baldwin, chief justice of the Court of Common Pleas at Westminster. Baldwin, an acquaintance of Thomas’s from the trials of Fisher, More, and, more painfully, from that of the courtiers accused of sleeping with Anne, was a Buckinghamshire man, born and bred. He had inherited lands around Aylesbury and had bought up others whenever they came on the market. The Ormond estates would considerably expand his existing property portfolio in the area, all of which he would be able to leave his son, William, in the fullness of time. And he was prepared to pay handsomely for the privilege.

  With his customary business acumen, therefore, Thomas opened negotiations with Jane. While she did not have outright ownership of the coveted manors, she did have a life interest. Thomas could not sell the lands without her consent. Jane’s father, a signatory of the original jointure, was also involved. Just as he had protected his daughter’s interests all those years ago, it was up to him to perform the same task for her now. However, Lord Morley had a few distractions. His mind was very much on his purchase of Markhall, an estate he had leased since 1521, and he had recently been engaged in sorting out problems connected with the jointure of Lady Katherine Edgecombe, his wife’s sister. Perhaps his attention was divided. And there was a major difference concerning the negotiations with the Boleyns this time: the very young, immature, and inexperienced girl who had stood at the altar in St. Giles with her bridegroom, her dreams intact, had grown up. And she had grown up in a merciless school. She had been widowed in the worst possible way, she had managed to recoup a proportion of her income through her own efforts, and by sheer determination, she had worked her way back into royal favor, gaining powerful support in the process. Jane, therefore, would not be an easy target. The deal would have to be worth taking.

  The haggling took place over the spring and summer of 1538, the major indenture drawn up in October. The final price for the Buckinghamshire
manors was fixed at the astronomical sum of twelve hundred pounds, which was to be handed over in four months’ time. However, while no doubt the dream purchaser as far as Thomas was concerned, Baldwin had a lawyer’s eye for detail. He was insistent that when he paid the money there should be no potential entanglements or disputes outstanding on his new acquisitions. He had no intention of facing debts or lawsuits in the future. One impediment could only be removed by the king. While the manors were held freehold, Henry retained certain feudal rights over them so his permission was vital for Thomas to sell them. Thomas did not envisage the king’s refusal and he was right: Henry acquiesced. It was with Jane, the key player, that there was a hitch.

  For the deal to go ahead, both she and her father, who was coping with the transaction on her behalf, had to sign the deed. If she was to give up Aylesbury and Bierton, she wanted something in exchange. Thomas offered her the manor of Swavesey in Cambridgeshire, in theory not a bad swap.

  Unfortunately, as far as Jane was concerned, there were catches in what at first sight seemed a very neat arrangement. Should Baldwin find that Aylesbury and Bierton did not in fact come to him unencumbered on the set date, or should Thomas, his mother, or Jane die before then, he would be able to stake a claim on Swavesey until everything was sorted out. As long as the preliminary paperwork had been meticulously completed that should not happen, but it was a potential cloud on Jane’s horizon since she was the youngest and least likely to die. As the survivor, she would then be left to pick up the pieces. And there was actually more than one cloud. Thomas did not really want Jane to have full possession of Swavesey. Maybe he hoped to pass it on to Mary and William Stafford sooner rather than later. It would come to them in the end, but only on Jane’s death and she could live for years. So Thomas suggested that Jane allow him to keep Swavesey for himself, to do with as he pleased, in exchange for a hundred marks (sixty-six pounds) a year, payable in two equal installments at the font of St. Paul’s in London. Since she was already receiving almost twice that sum from Thomas, the compensation he was offering her for not giving her the lands was simply not enough. And now she no longer wanted a money settlement: she wanted land instead if she was to give up Aylesbury.

  And so she did not sign. Knowing that this was her one opportunity to secure her future, she would not waste it. Baldwin was ready to part with his twelve hundred pounds only if he felt the sale was secure, so Jane had only a further five days to consent or Thomas would come to a new agreement with Baldwin concerning Swavesey. Frantic discussions must have taken place behind the scenes before Jane considered a satisfactory compromise had been reached but eventually she did sign the original document.

  The situation was complicated further because Jane schemed to obtain a private act of Parliament as a form of insurance policy. She was no fool; she knew just how sharp Thomas could be if money was at stake and she also knew that he was aging. Should he die before the entire deal came to fruition, there was no way of knowing whether it would be honored. An act of Parliament, however, would be sacrosanct; to procure one was merely another variety of the back-watching that was endemic in her family. Such acts were not easy to get yet she not only managed it, but hers was special: the king signed it personally, a tremendous coup for Jane. She was no longer a pariah, contaminated by association with George and Anne. She had worked her way back into a position of trust. She even managed to obtain a grant of two Warwickshire manors from the king in her own right, although she would never have dared approach Henry herself. Such a delicate matter required time and the intercession of an intermediary. In her case, that was likely to have been Cromwell. He had helped her once and might have done so again. Perhaps she had been of some use to him, or perhaps he was simply being generous to a woman who had lost so much. Sometimes the minister did put himself out to be of assistance to the wives and children of traitors, as he did for several dependents of those executed after the Pilgrimage of Grace.

  And when news of Thomas’s increasing ill health filtered through to her, there was all the more reason for Jane to make sure that her hard-won concessions were not lost. Thomas survived his wife by less than a year. In March 1539, at sixty-two or sixty-three years of age—we cannot be entirely certain—Jane’s father-in-law died peacefully in his own chamber at Hever, “the end of a good Christian man,” his steward informed Cromwell. On hearing the news, the king paid just over sixteen pounds for masses for the “soul’s health” of the man whose children he had executed. Thomas was buried in the church at Hever. His last resting place can be seen to this day, a monumental life-size flat brass effigy over his tomb showing him resplendent in his robes as a Knight of the Garter.

  There is no record of Jane’s inheriting anything from her father-in-law but she did not expect to do so. By opting for a jointure settlement confirmed by act of Parliament and introduced in the House of Lords two months after Thomas’s death, her fortunes were very much improved. All three readings were completed in one day, Friday May 23, 1539. With the king’s firm signature already on the document, the whole thing went through on the nod, and in the presence of men she had known at court for many years. Her father was there, keeping a watchful eye on his daughter’s finances, in the same company as Norfolk, Suffolk, Cranmer, the Earl of Hertford, and most important, Cromwell himself.

  Jane was entitled to feel delighted with the final bill. She was to receive a life interest in “the manor of Swavesey within the county of Cambridge of the clear yearly value of a hundred marks.” And it did not stop there. She gained further land in Cambridge and in Norfolk too. Her chief prize was the Boleyn stronghold of Blickling. Naturally the house would revert to James upon her death but it was an excellent base in the meantime, and perhaps remembering how George had reacted when Henry had entrusted him with Beaulieu, she quickly moved in some of her goods. Crucially, because of the parliamentary act, her right and title to all of these lands was assured. Even had they wanted to, the remaining Boleyns could not touch any of them. Jane had them for her lifetime. The Staffords and James Boleyn had already recognized this. When applying to Henry for his consent to their inheriting various other properties from Thomas, they had complied with the law and listed all they had gained immediately upon his death, together with respective values—the king was always keen to know about values and would penalize heavily anyone who foolishly attempted to cheat him—and they had also declared what they would inherit in the future. That meant lands that Jane currently held but would revert to the Boleyn family upon her death.

  For Jane, the whole messy jointure episode was now closed. She now had a decent income, over two hundred pounds a year, and her own manor house at Blickling. Should she choose to do so, and that she would have to decide, she could live very comfortably in the Norfolk countryside. She had achieved much more than the hundred marks of Thomas’s first offer. Clearly her hard bargaining had paid off. But she also knew that what she now had was a drop in the ocean compared with what she would have enjoyed had George outlived Thomas. On his father’s death, George would have netted both his title and his estates. James affirmed that the total value of the lands he inherited from Thomas, excluding what he would eventually get on the reversion of Jane’s manors, was just over £116; the Staffords got more, declaring a little over £488. All of that would have boosted George’s income rather than theirs had he not been caught up in the maelstrom that destroyed his sister. Then too his property would not have been forfeit to the king, and with Henry’s continued favor instead of his displeasure, George would probably have grown richer still. There would even have been the chance that just like Suffolk, he might have been presented with a dukedom by his royal brother-in-law. So Jane’s jointure settlement, while very welcome, and a great relief, served only to remind her of what she had lost. She was a widowed viscountess in comfortable circumstances but had events panned out differently she could have been Countess of Wiltshire at the very least, living on more than four times what she would now get. She might also have
had a family of her own; she had still been young enough to conceive a child when George was taken from her.

  But the past could not be recaptured. She had put it behind her once, she had to do so again. She had rebuilt her life after what was perhaps the worst type of disaster to befall a woman of her age and class. To regret what might have been was a waste of energy; far better to concentrate on what was to come. A second marriage was always a possibility. With an income of two hundred pounds, she was a reasonable catch. The money would die with her, though, and she had nothing else to bequeath to a new husband’s family. Perhaps that explains why, although so many widows remarried, sometimes with almost indecent haste, Jane never did. Or maybe her own firsthand experience had revealed the risks, pitfalls, and grief that a second sortie to the altar could bring and she could not face that emotional trauma again.