Jane Boleyn: The True Story of the Infamous Lady Rochford (23 page)

For appearances could sometimes deceive. Over the year or so since Anne’s miscarriage, subtle changes had been occurring. And they had been occurring very close to home: conflict within the Boleyn family coincided with disturbing hints of trouble between Anne and the king. To see his anger visited upon someone else was one thing; to be in the firing line personally was quite another. And, during that dramatic period when the Carthusian monks had rotted in prison, and Fisher and More had resorted to using charcoal as pens, Jane had become so involved in her sister-in-law’s affairs as to draw Henry’s wrath upon herself.

CHAPTER
18

Happy Families

T
HE HORSES STAMPED IMPATIENTLY
as the last of the baggage was loaded into carts. It was late autumn, the days were getting shorter, the nights darker and the weather colder, but only when Jane Rochford had left the confines of the palace did everyone set off. They had all been waiting for her. For Jane, this was reminiscent of a journey she had made so many years ago when, as a young girl, she had left the safety of her parents’ home for the excitement and allure of the royal court. That was a lifetime away. Now it was the court that she was leaving, and in ignominy. At least she was not facing detention behind the stone walls of the Tower, where the Carthusian monks Fisher and More still languished in an agony of suspense until the ax and the knife ended their lives. In view of the king’s temper, that in itself was a considerable relief.

Over the next few months, while Henry’s justice overwhelmed others, Jane had the leisure to reflect on her own situation. Ultimately, everything had stemmed from the vulnerability of the Boleyns’ position. Anne had to give Henry the heir he needed. It was as straightforward as that. A slight edginess within the family had been inevitable after Anne’s miscarriage but for a while life appeared to continue as normal. The king had accepted his loss and pushed on with crushing the merest hint of opposition and in her position Jane already knew, or would know, every last gruesome detail about how he managed that. However, the fact remained that everything depended on Anne’s reproductive abilities. Anne’s relationship with Henry had always been one of intense passion. So far, she had proved to be the love of his life, his “sweetheart,” his “darling,” his soul mate. Sheer physical and mental attraction, as the Boleyns appreciated, was the secret of Anne’s grip over Henry and the reason for their financial gains as part of the extended royal family. But such a hold could prove a chimera. The court was brimming with attractive women, many of them younger than Anne. The danger was crystal clear: a man who had strayed from one wife might get into the habit and make it a specialty. Until she gave birth to a prince, Anne’s position would never be totally secure. Jane, like the rest of the family, was only too aware of that basic fact. And, like them, she would help her sister-in-law if she could.

Suddenly that help became necessary. Henry flirted with another woman a few months after the miscarriage. We do not know her identity but she certainly gave Anne cause for concern. Chapuys, ever eager to pick up on any gossip that might mean Anne’s influence was waning, was soon onto the scent. He wrote to Charles about “a young lady whom this king has been accustomed to serve,” expressing hopes that this girl might succeed in destroying Anne for she was, he reported, sympathetic to Mary. He reported that the lady in question had sent a message to the princess, “telling her to take good heart,” since “her tribulations will come to an end much sooner than she expected,” and that “should the opportunity occur,” she would, she assured Mary, “show herself her true friend and devoted servant.” From Chapuys’ point of view, it could not have been more promising.

Anne’s response was to try the direct approach; it had always worked before. She went straight to Henry, demanding that her rival be sent away immediately for not treating her “with due respect in words or deeds.” This time, however, all she managed to do was to infuriate her husband. Not prepared to be taken to task by his wife, the king “went away in a great passion, complaining loudly of her importunity and vexatiousness.” It was at this point that Jane came into the picture. She and Anne were close enough for the queen immediately to turn to her, above all her ladies, for help. Caution required such sensitive discussion was kept within the family. Jane could be trusted. Together they plotted about how best to deal with the interloper and they hatched a plan: Jane would pick a quarrel “or otherwise” with her so that Henry, finding the fracas all too tiresome and preferring a quiet life, would dismiss the girl from court. As Chapuys mentions that Jane “joined a conspiracy” to that effect, the family machine was obviously involved too. Since this crisis had happened at the moment when Henry, with Cromwell in the vanguard, was dealing with such high-profile antagonists as More and Fisher, it was a courageous action on Jane’s part. But she knew that her own fortunes were so inextricably bound to those of the Boleyns that the risk had to be taken.

Unfortunately, the plan backfired. It was Jane who was exiled, not Anne’s rival. Henry’s rage must have terrified her. He had changed. The truly beautiful young king, with his slender body and chivalric values, who had so entranced all who saw him, had long since vanished. His waist had thickened, his muscles were less toned, his hair was thinner, his good humor less reliable. It was no longer advisable to count on his laughing, as he once had when his standard-bearer, Sir Andrew Flamock, “having his belly full,” broke wind, excusing the loud noise as merely complementing the sound of the king’s hunting horn. The old prophecy that he would be “mild as a lamb” at the beginning of his reign but “more fierce than a lion” toward the end of it seemed to be coming true. Unexpectedly, it was Jane who felt the full force of that ferocity. The result was that on that October day in 1534, Jane left court under a cloud. We do not know where she was sent, although Beaulieu is a possible destination. At that time, Henry was not using the palace for himself or his family, as the former princess was living with Elizabeth, and the king had never considered it a suitable venue for Katherine’s enforced rustication. To be removed to Beaulieu was not too terrible a fate for Jane. The Boleyns had other residences, though, and it is very likely that she divided her time among them. To be banned from the court did not mean that she could not reside anywhere else in the capital. Anyway, Jane hoped that with luck it would not be too long before Henry relented and she was allowed to return to the court itself. There is no record of when she did, and Chapuys tells us that she was certainly not reinstated three months later.

However, no doubt to the ambassador’s disappointment, although not to his surprise, Anne’s rival sank into oblivion, for the queen quickly regained her husband’s affections. “The young lady who was lately in the king’s favor is so no longer,” Chapuys reported to the emperor regretfully. As the Boleyns perceived, the relationship between Henry and Anne was volatile, which was probably what gave it its spice, so blazing rows simply burned themselves out. They were but the “lovers’ quarrels” about which the shrewd ambassador had already informed his master. With her sister-in-law as beloved as always, it is likely that Jane was back in the queen’s apartments again before too long.

In the interim, enforced absence did at least allow a chance for contemplation, since hers was not the only problem to beset the Boleyns over those months. So far, they had all pulled together but cracks had started to appear in the Boleyn facade. Jane understood that the family was a team but Mary forgot it. In the dispatch in which he announced Jane’s exile, Chapuys gleefully told Charles that Mary Carey had also been sent from court as well. She was, he said, “guilty of misconduct” and was pregnant. Widowed when William Carey died of the sweat, Mary, like Jane, had been with Anne through those endless years of waiting as Henry wriggled out of his union with Katherine. She had been there to share in Anne’s glorious coronation, albeit in a place lower than Jane’s. Now she shared Jane’s disgrace. But there was a fundamental difference. While Jane’s removal was due to loyalty to the family cause, Mary’s was for baser reasons: she had fallen in love and secretly married William Stafford, a scion of the minor gentry. This would not do. She had failed in her duty. Semiroyal now, she could have been married off advantageously for the Boleyns. Thomas was furious, George was furious, Anne was incensed. Sister or not, Mary was cut off at once. Although joined only through marriage, Jane had proved herself a more dependable Boleyn than Anne’s own flesh and blood, especially when trouble had loomed. In the face of Boleyn anger, there was no way in which Jane could have helped her former masking partner, even supposing she had wanted to. This was not her dispute. Mary needed to make her peace herself. That, of course, was easier said than done. In comparative poverty and at her wits’ end, Mary did the only thing possible: she wrote to Cromwell, as one day so would Jane. The tone of entreaty so apparent in their letters is remarkably similar.

Calling herself “a poor banished creature,” Mary begged for the chief minister’s aid “for the love that well I know you do bear to all my blood.” Acknowledging that she and Stafford had been “hasty” and “bold” in marrying without the royal consent, she accepted that they deserved “high displeasure…both of the king’s highness and the queen’s grace.” She had, she said, been unable to stop herself. “Love overcame reason,” she confessed, “for my part I saw so much honesty in him, that I loved him as well as he did me.” In a sentence that proved she appreciated only too well that family ambition might have produced a more suitable husband, she wrote that she “could never have had one that should have loved” her more deeply, even though she “might have had a greater man of birth and a higher.” Their devotion was such, she wrote, that “I had rather beg my bread with him than be the greatest queen in Christendom.” And his feelings were “in the same case with me; for I believe verily he would not forsake me to be a king.” She begged Cromwell to intercede with her mother and her father for their blessing and to ask Norfolk and George “to be good to us.” She dared not write to either directly, as “they are so cruel against us.”

Above all, Mary knew that her sister, the woman who had replaced her in the king’s bed, was totally implacable. The only way to move her was for Cromwell to approach the king and persuade him to intervene, presumably for old times’ sake.

And, good master secretary, sue for us to the king’s highness, which ever was wont to take pity, to have pity on us; and that it will please his grace of his goodness to speak to the queen’s grace for us; for, so far as I can perceive, her grace is so highly displeased with us both that, without the king be so good lord to us as to withdraw his rigor and sue [plead] for us, we are never like to recover her grace’s favor: which is too heavy to bear.

Yes, Mary knew her sister through and through. We will never be privy to Cromwell’s reply, or to what the Boleyns said to one another behind closed doors as they fumed over Mary’s conduct, but she was not forgiven and brought back into the fold until after Anne’s death. Then, all was different, as her children represented the future. For the moment, however, as Jane walked in the gardens or sat calmly sewing in her comfortable but tense exile while she waited for news from George or from friends at court, she can only have looked on Mary’s fate and learned from it. To cross the family was unwise even for those who believed themselves at its heart, like Mary, or for those who thought themselves influential within it.

That was Norfolk, Anne’s uncle, and he was another niggling worry for the Boleyns, something else for Jane to ponder as winter set in. Premier duke he might be, head of the powerful Howard clan he certainly was, but his wings had been clipped by the rise of his niece who, if anything, took after her wily great-grandfather, Geoffrey, in values and courage. In the early days, Norfolk had been a vital ally, especially as they all worked together to destroy Wolsey. The cardinal was gone now, his corpse rotting in his grave at Leicester Abbey. Norfolk could never again be quite as useful, and as the years had passed, that fact had become plain both to the Boleyns and to the duke himself.

Chapuys, who usually rubbed along reasonably well with Norfolk, was quick to report a growing rift between uncle and niece. “I am informed on good authority,” he told Charles, “that the said lady [Anne] does not cease night or day to procure the disgrace of the duke of Norfolk, whether it be because he has spoken too freely of her or because Cromwell, desiring to lower the great ones, wishes to commence with him.” Never one to mince words, the queen could be acidly sharp when talking to her uncle, and perhaps because she felt Norfolk was insufficiently deferential toward her, she indulged in altercations that Jane, while in the queen’s apartments, was likely to have witnessed. When Anne used “shameful words” to him, in a way in which “one would not address a dog,” a humiliated Norfolk “was compelled to quit the chamber.” Once outside, he was sufficiently incandescent to complain “to one to whom he did not generally show good-will.” Momentarily careless, he let his polite facade drop far enough to utter “reproaches” against Anne, and call her a “grande putain.”
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Rumors of the confrontation spread throughout the court remarkably quickly, as any gossip concerning the queen always did. And Anne’s high handedness endeared her to no one.