Jane Boleyn: The True Story of the Infamous Lady Rochford (12 page)

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

T
HE 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 Wolsey’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.

The unseasonable weather hardly lifted the spirits. Campeggio complained that he was forced to wear his winter clothes and have fires lit. There was anxiety that the sweat was about to make an unwelcome return. Yet once the case began, Anne, Henry, and her entire family anticipated victory rather than defeat. The king and queen returned to the capital from Hampton Court a couple of days beforehand in readiness for the proceedings. Henry was rowed to Greenwich, close to where Anne already had her own apartments. She obviously liked the general area for Henry later bought her a farm there for just over eighty-six pounds.

George and Jane were probably in the same vicinity, for the king rented a house for them at Greenwich at about this time at a cost of ten pounds per annum. Unfortunately, the little noticed reference gives us no details of what the house was like but the rent was sufficiently high for it to have been far more than merely comfortable. Jane was becoming used to the benefits of close association with royalty. Indeed, these advantages were coming thick and fast to the couple. Appointed squire of the body, a lucrative if honorific post, a few months earlier, with a salary of sixty-five pounds, six shillings, and eight pence, George was also awarded an annuity of fifty marks (thirty-three pounds) a year to be paid “by the chief butler of England, out of the issues of the prizes of wines” and in addition was given the office of master of the buckhounds. These hunting dogs were so dear to the king’s heart that George was frequently allowed sums as huge as three or four pounds to find them meat. Then he received the jackpot: in the list of grants authorized by the king for November 1528 is one that gave him the keepership of the old Ormond estate at Newhall, which Henry had transformed into his sumptuous palace of Beaulieu, together with a variety of other offices, once the perquisites of William Carey. This really was something worth having, if only for the privilege of residing on the premises whenever he wanted. Although she and George did not move in immediately, Jane would soon have the chance to live like a queen herself. In fact, she was very much the established court lady by now. She received a gift from the king in her own right in the New Year’s gift lists of 1528 and 1529, the same years in which her servants were also given rewards by the king. She had come a long way since those days at Great Hallingbury.

For the moment, however, much depended on the outcome of the court case. It took place in the Parliament Chamber at Blackfriars, close to the river and to Henry’s palace at Bridewell, where he spent several nights during the trial, more or less alternating with Greenwich. Since it was not held in camera, there were plenty of spectators inside the hall and gawping crowds outside, straining to catch a glimpse of the main protagonists. For the pretense of her total noninvolvement to be remotely credible, Anne, of course, had to bow to decorum and stay away, but Thomas and George were almost certainly present and there is no reason to suppose that Jane was not there as well. It was too important to miss. The room was carefully arranged. Campeggio and Wolsey sat on a dais at the far end with the officers of the court immediately in front of them. The king’s chair was on the right underneath a gold brocade cloth of estate; a similar chair was placed for Katherine on the left, again under a canopy, but at a slightly lower level than that of Henry. Then there were judges, bishops, the archbishop of Canterbury, and the counsels for the two parties. Henry and Katherine had their own individual legal advisers, with the ascetic but formidable and highly regarded Bishop Fisher foremost in the queen’s camp. Both Henry and Katherine were there in person not just in proxy. Once the pope’s commission giving authority for the court to sit was read aloud, the trial could begin.

Almost straight away, Katherine reduced the hall to a stunned silence. She heard Campeggio and Wolsey reject her request that her cause be heard outside of the kingdom, she listened impassively while the king earnestly explained that all he wanted was to have his scruples answered and his troubled conscience put at rest, and then she struck. Ignoring the judges, ignoring everyone else in the room, she concentrated on the man who, she maintained, was her lawful husband. She rose from her chair, crossed to where Henry sat and knelt at his feet. She was truly center stage. She may have been sidelined while Henry dallied with Anne but on this day Katherine was regal dignity epitomized. Even the Boleyns could hardly deny that she was magnificent as she fought for her marriage and for the legitimacy of her daughter. Throwing herself on the king’s mercy as a woman and a foreigner, she appealed to him directly. As she did so, the situation slid from bad to worse for the amazed and disconcerted Henry. She vowed that she had been “a true humble and obedient wife,” always “conformable” to his “will and pleasure.” Referring to her many fruitless pregnancies, she touched profoundly many of those who listened spellbound when she said that “by me ye have had divers children, although it hath pleased God to call them out of this world, which hath been no default in me.” Although her own colors were firmly nailed to the Boleyn mast, the queen’s childlessness would resonate with Jane, herself still without issue after some years as George’s wife. And Katherine was not finished yet. With a tilt at Henry’s assertion that her marriage to Arthur was consummated, she vowed that she remained “a true maid without touch of man” at Arthur’s death, as Henry’s conscience should tell him. With a final request that she be spared this trial until she had more neutral counselors, men who would risk the king’s displeasure as her current ones would not dare to do, she begged for time to seek further advice from her “friends in Spain.” “If ye will not extend to me so much indifferent favor,” she said to Henry, “your pleasure then be fulfilled, and to God I commit my cause.” With that, she made a deep curtsy to the king and swept from the room, followed by many of the women. It was spine tingling.

And it presaged disaster for the Boleyns. The trial continued in the queen’s absence, of course, but hopes of a quick result were at an end. Bishop Fisher, exhibiting scant consideration for self-preservation despite Katherine’s claims, fearlessly fought her corner against everything that came up. Nonetheless, Henry’s argument was not finished yet. Evidence was given that Arthur and his bride had been of an age to consummate their union, that Arthur was often conducted to his wife’s bedchamber “in his nightgown,” that they spent their nights together, that Arthur, who was of a “good and sanguine complexion,” was physically fit enough to do his duty. It all added up. The most vivid description of the morning after the wedding came from Sir Anthony Willoughby who said that the prince demanded “a cup of ale” for he had been “this night in the midst of Spain.” A Mr. St. John, who also affirmed that Arthur had boasted about being “in the midst of Spain,” felt that such strenuous activity actually caused the prince’s “decay” as he “was never so lusty in body and courage until his death.” The testimony was all to no avail. As Clement said to Wolsey, he could not give the king all he wanted “without incurring manifest danger, and causing a scandal to Christendom.” So, on the pretense that the trial was dragging on into the summer months when all such cases were suspended in Rome, Campeggio adjourned it. And that was it. Well might he say that it would be resumed in the autumn, Anne and the king were only too aware that this was a way of transferring the trial to Rome, especially when the devastating news of Clement’s accommodation with Charles reached them. Katherine had won this round.

But the battle was not conceded. As Jane and George repaired to the house at Greenwich, she watched the Boleyns regroup and replan. They knew precisely where to lay the blame. The court was buzzing with excitement and anticipation: even the queen, no friend of the cardinal, wrote to Mendoza that “she perceives that all the king’s anger at his ill success will be visited on Wolsey.” Jane, who had grown up during the years of his ascendancy, was about to see a furious Anne, together with George and Thomas, bring him down. Suffolk was quick to join them. “It was never merry in England whilst we had cardinals among us,” he berated a shocked Wolsey, contemptuously brushing aside memories of the aid that he had once been so relieved to receive following his own clandestine marriage to the king’s sister. There was no point in Wolsey’s counting on calling in past debts. Well might he refer to Cromwell as his “only refuge and aid” in the numerous notes with which he bombarded him.