Jane Boleyn: The True Story of the Infamous Lady Rochford (24 page)

As the months went by without Anne becoming pregnant, one previous action returned to haunt her. Anne had persuaded Henry to allow Norfolk’s daughter, Mary, to wed the king’s illegitimate son, the Duke of Richmond, without paying for the privilege. Normally, Henry would have expected Mary to come provided with a large dowry in order to marry within the royal family but he had been willing to forgo such payments in this case. “The king’s grace had never a penny for my lord of Richmond,” wrote Norfolk’s estranged duchess to Cromwell, “for Queen Anne got the marriage clear for my lord my husband, when she did favor my lord my husband.” Since the betrothal was arranged long before she became queen, Anne had probably consulted her own family before suggesting a policy that had seemed so beneficial. It was a clever move to reward Norfolk, despite his initial uncertainty of the value of the union to his house, binding Richmond to the Howards and preventing a foreign match that could turn the boy into a rival. The marriage took place in the same month as Anne’s coronation, so Jane may well have been one of the guests. But with no son from Anne, the one Henry did have, whether born out of wedlock or not, was the apple of his father’s eye. As he was fourteen when they married, Richmond and Mary Howard were considered too young to consummate their union but they would soon grow up. The day might come when Norfolk’s grandson would sit on St. Edward’s Chair; perhaps the clever move was not quite so clever after all.

To turn Norfolk into an outright enemy could be short sighted but so far it had not come to that. Not quite. Anne and George recognized that their religious ideas were far more radical than Norfolk’s and that he was bound to be jealous, and probably wary, of Cromwell. The offices Cromwell held, such as master of the king’s jewels and chancellor of the exchequer, were no indicators of the minister’s true power. That lay in his relationship with the king, who relied on him and trusted him to get on with the daily grind of state business just as once Henry had placed his faith in Wolsey. To be wary of Cromwell was indeed a sensible precaution. Then, as the entire court could not fail to be aware, the great duke had his own personal problems in the shape of his formidable wife, who refused to countenance his ongoing adulterous affair. Although forcibly kept from court, the duchess was adept at causing scenes and creating friction, writing vituperative accounts of her tribulations to Cromwell. It was hardly surprising that Norfolk was not enamored of women as forthright as his niece. Still, as even Jane knew, the ambitious duke would never put himself at risk by opposing Anne, unless the king tired of his wife and she became vulnerable. For as long as she was adored by her husband there was no imminent peril, but Norfolk and his arrogant son, the Earl of Surrey, a close friend of Richmond’s, could prove dangerous foes if Henry’s eyes ever alighted on another pretty woman and the queen produced no son.

Jane’s enforced exile from court, if anything, gave her even greater leisure to think about these tensions. She was sure that she would regain the king’s favor in the end, that it was simply a matter of patience, but rifts within the family would not be healed easily and enemies made could not be unmade. Whether she heard from or even visited her father and mother over these months is unknown. If she did go to Beaulieu, it is entirely possible that she took the opportunity to make the journey to Great Hallingbury, which was not that far away, and walked through the gardens and the orchard or sat by Lady Morley’s pond. Her infant nephew, her brother’s son, another Henry, was likely to have been brought up in Jane’s childhood home, so on any visit she could have seen him too as she chatted to her sister-in-law, Grace, in those familiar rooms, surrounded by the tangible mementoes of her grandmother. Since her marriage to Lady Shelton’s son, Jane’s sister, Margaret Parker, had left the Morley household but she too probably came home for the occasional visit or wrote about her new life and her own children. Jane remained childless, something else that no doubt preyed on her mind. Time was running out. To be a barren wife, while not uncommon, was a great misfortune as it jeopardized the continuation of the family line, and although physicians were aware that either partner could be the root cause of childlessness, most men tended to blame the woman, who was supposed to be too moist to retain her husband’s seed. George, and certainly his father, would have hoped that Jane could fulfill her function and produce the Boleyn heir. Anne was not unique in watching for her monthly “courses.”

Then, out of the blue, William Foster, Jane’s scholar at King’s College, Cambridge, asked for her aid. With all that was going on within the family, this would be an added burden. Foster had become involved in a scramble for jobs, in particular one concerning the priory of Swaffham Bulbeck in Cambridgeshire. The story was complicated and, had Jane not had more pressing matters to contemplate, amusing. The small priory owned the nearby parish church with the right to appoint the parish priest, and when the post fell vacant, the prioress, Joan Spylman, who was conducting an illicit and long-standing affair with a friar, Father Bassam, nominated her lover who would then be conveniently close. The scandal was notorious for miles around; the nuns all knew that Bassam had been “naughty” with their prioress. Despite her strenuous efforts on his behalf, however, her friar fancied moving on to higher places, in fact to a King’s College parish in the gift of the provost, Edward Foxe. Bassam persuaded Foxe to give him the King’s College parish in exchange for Swaffham but this in turn meant an exchange with a Fellow of King’s who had already been promised it. All seemed well; the Fellow accepted the swap, which should then have gone ahead, but disaster struck in the person of Dr. Thomas Leigh, Cromwell’s commissioner, who visited Swaffham Bulbeck as part of the general visitation of all the monasteries ordered by the king. Dr. Leigh said that no exchange could occur while the status of monastic property was under review. When a few months later, Parliament enacted that all foundations with an annual income of less than two hundred pounds should be closed, Swaffham Priory fell into that category and so lost its right to appoint the new clergyman for the local church. The Fellow who had agreed to the swap, therefore, realized that his chance of obtaining the Swaffham living was so slim that he surrendered it to young Foster. All Foster had to do was to figure out a way to get it.

With his connection to Lady Rochford, the “special patroness” of his studies, Foster thought he would be home and dry. His sponsor was not simply a noblewoman but a member of the foremost family in the land, linked by marriage to the king. He was confident that with her aid his benefice was in the bag. Surely she would approach the king and queen for him, and as a quick glance around his surroundings at Cambridge proved, the royal couple could do whatever they wished, even bypass the implications and small print of the recent act. There was no reason for him to think otherwise. Evidence of the monarch’s wealth and might was all-encompassing. Whenever he entered King’s College Chapel to pray, he knelt beneath the great vaulted ceiling amid glowing shafts of light, gently diffused through breathtaking stained-glass windows. These had been superbly fashioned by the artistry of Henry’s glaziers into ethereal depictions of the saints and the Virgin and the holy figures of the Bible. He knew that Italian craftsmen had nearly finished carving an intricate organ screen on which the initials of Anne and Henry were prominently displayed, sometimes intertwined as signs of their love, and with Anne’s falcon badge, together with the bulls of the Boleyns, clearly visible. In the event, it was not his reasoning but his timing that was at fault. Naturally, when he contacted her, Jane did her best. Patronage implied obligations. She passed the letter on to Cromwell, who gave some help, which Foster appreciated, but unfortunately even the great minister’s hands were tied because the king was busily closing the smaller monasteries and confiscating their lands and goods. Jane could not give more help either. She was too busy struggling to preserve her own position to be of any use to Foster, who left Cambridge shortly afterward, certainly by October 1536. He never did get the benefice of Swaffham, although there is every chance that he was the William Foster who became Vicar of Billings-hurst in Suffolk. If so, he did owe something to his “special patroness” who had, at least, started him on the road to a career. She could take pride in that.

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

W
ITH
A
NNE 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.