Jane Boleyn: The True Story of the Infamous Lady Rochford (47 page)

What Jane did not know was the depth of Henry’s despair or his anger. The situations concerning Anne and Catherine were entirely different. He had wanted to end his marriage to Anne in order to marry Jane Seymour so he had been eager to believe the worst of her. Not so with Catherine. She had been his “jewel.” He had adored her and believed his love was reciprocated. But, it transpired, she had not only misled him into assuming her “of pure and honest living before her marriage,” she had gone on to betray him with one of his own servants. He would never forgive her. He demanded a sword “to slay her he had loved so much.” The “wicked” Catherine, he vowed, “had never such delight in her incontinency as she should have torture in her death.” Any hope of clemency from the king was indeed forlorn. And with the whole torrid story out in the open, there really was no hope at all.

On December 1, Sir John Gage, in his capacity as constable of the Tower, brought Dereham and Culpepper to the Guildhall in London where they were tried for treason. With Norfolk, Suffolk, and most of the council at his side, Audley read out the various indictments, the two men pleading “not guilty.” Then, “after sufficient and probable evidence had been given on the King’s part,” but before the jury retired to consider their verdict, the prisoners changed their plea to guilty. There was only one sentence for treason: the full agony of hanging, drawing, and quartering. When the council members were certain that they had “gotten as much of Dereham as would be had,” the king ordered that the executions should take place, providing that the two men had been given “convenient respite and warning of the time, that they may prepare themselves to God for the salvation of their souls.” The king refused Dereham’s request that he be beheaded rather than disemboweled, considering that he “deserved no such mercy.” Because of his lineage, Culpepper suffered the swifter death of decapitation, although the council instructed that since his offense had been “very heinous,” his execution should be “notable.” That translated into his being tied to a hurdle and dragged across the sharp, cobbled streets to Tyburn where the headsman would be waiting.

Next it was the turn of those who had kept silent about Catherine’s “abominable” life. The elderly Dowager Duchess of Norfolk found herself in the Tower along with her daughter, her son, her son’s wife, Robert Davenport, and the queen’s various attendants. Only Mary Lascelles escaped detention, on the direct intervention of the king, as a reward for bringing the whole issue to light, even if somewhat tardily. The duchess was in especial trouble for breaking open coffers belonging to Dereham and Davenport once she had heard of their arrest. The council spent many hours trying to force the scared and confused woman to tell them precisely what she had read and what she had destroyed. There could have been love letters in the coffers or worse: maybe the jittery councilors were anxious about Dereham’s trip to the often rebellious Ireland. The grim fortress became so full that the harassed lieutenant, Sir Edmund Walsingham, ran out of rooms in which to house his prisoners and was forced to ask the king whether he could use the royal apartments. The king consented but there was a delay when Walsingham checked to see if Henry had the keys to the locks on the doors. When Henry could not remember, Walsingham had to change them all. Eventually the captives were freed but not before they were found guilty of misprision and frightened so much that they appeared physically changed by the rigors of their ordeal.

While all of this was going on around them, neither Jane nor Catherine was brought to trial. Catherine was left at Syon, officially a pariah. Norfolk, terrified that he might be blamed for this second Howard niece’s immorality, wrote an abject letter to his sovereign to distance himself from her and to beg the king’s favor, without which he did not “desire to live.” To Marillac’s wry amusement at what he saw as an odd English custom, Catherine’s brothers rode ostentatiously through London “to show that they did not share the crimes of their relatives.” We do not know whether Jane’s brother did the same but any despair that he may have felt on his sister’s behalf did not hinder a property transaction he undertook with Lord Morley at the end of January. And James Boleyn, aware that Jane’s interest in Blickling was only valid during her lifetime, could anticipate its reversion to himself with some satisfaction.

Meanwhile Jane was overwrought. It was just all too much. Conscious that the king’s officials were busily listing and valuing all her possessions and that her own life hung by a thread, “she went mad” on the third day of her incarceration, Chapuys tells us. In view of the trauma that she had suffered when the king had struck at Anne and George, finding herself in the firing line again, and this time at the epicenter, not the periphery, her breakdown is quite understandable. It did not suit Henry, however. While, grudgingly, he was to pardon the other women dragged into the affair, Jane was different. She alone had taken messages, she alone had stood guard, she alone had known the full extent of what had been going on. She might even have been laughing at him behind his back, just as her husband had done with Anne. None of that could be allowed to go unpunished, and that punishment should be public. His rightful justice must be properly witnessed. Therefore, she must be nursed back to health. He sent his own doctors to treat her, allowed her out of the Tower, and placed her in the care and custody of the admiral lord Russell’s wife, Anne. Jane knew the Russell family both from court and from the progress visit to their seat at Chenies in Buckinghamshire. Their London residence, Russell House, was on the Strand, so Jane could have been taken there by river at dead of night without anyone’s knowing. Then, once out of the bleak stone fortress with its haunting memories of Anne and George, and back into a familiar world of warm fires, wood paneling, tapestry hangings, rich food, and wine, Jane could recover her wits. Henry’s vengeance could wait until after Christmas, which he spent, as usual, at Greenwich.

There was no trial for his queen or her attendant. Henry decided to proceed via Act of Attainder, such a neat and clinical method. He opened Parliament himself in January 1542. Audley outlined the case against the queen and “that bawd, the lady Jane Rochford.” In a speech that Chapuys considered “aggravated the Queen’s misdeeds to the utmost,” Audley was punctilious in omitting none of the more salacious and sordid facts. Jane’s father, Lord Morley, sitting in the Lords, listened impassively as his daughter’s life hung in the balance. The guilty verdicts, though, were a foregone conclusion. The king did not have a last-minute change of heart: Jane and Catherine were to die.

All that remained was to have them taken back to the Tower. Gage went to Syon to break up Catherine’s household. She had lived through the past couple of months as though in a dream. Chapuys informed the emperor that she took care of her appearance and was both cheerful and demanding. She was, he wrote, “more imperious and commanding, and more difficult to please” than she had ever been. On Friday, February 10, 1542, however, when she was brought down to the waiting barge for her journey to the Tower, reality hit her. It was only after overcoming “some difficulty and resistance” that the councilors persuaded her to board the small covered vessel. There were three barges in total at the river’s edge. Southampton climbed aboard the first one, with other councilors and servants. Catherine, dressed in black velvet, sat in the second, together with four ladies and the four sailors whose job it was to row their queen to her prison. Suffolk brought up the rear, “in a big and well-manned barge, with plenty of armed men inside.” When the somber group arrived, Catherine was received “with the same honors and ceremonies as if she were still reigning.” And, although forced onto the boat, she soon regained her composure. When told on Sunday evening that she was to die early on the following morning, she asked that the block should be brought to her chamber so that she could practice what she would have to do on Monday. She would die as befitted her birth and her rank.

Jane was rowed back to the Tower on Thursday, the day before her mistress, each stroke of the oars bringing her closer to her destiny. For her, there was no formal reception committee but she too would have been treated with courtesy and consideration. She had almost three days in which to consider the enormity of what was about to happen before Gage, or possibly Walsingham, brought her the news that her execution had been fixed for early the next morning. Now only hours remained.

CHAPTER
32

Royal Justice

A
S THE LONG NIGHT
slowly turned to day, the anguished waiting was almost over for Jane and for Catherine, the last of the queens she had served. It was time for them to make their final preparations. As the two women began to don the clothes they had carefully chosen, the executions of Anne and George less than six years before must have crossed their minds. Jane and Catherine knew exactly what to expect; they came from families only too familiar with the horror of decapitation. They also knew that they would die well. They would hide their terror and accept their fate. Their birth and their honor demanded it. They would play their part in the ritual to come, a ritual that required compliance, not resistance, from the victims.

So mistress and servant, each in her separate chambers in the royal lodgings, rooms that were comfortable without being comforting, gradually made ready to face the world for the last time. Catherine had her four ladies to assist her into a plain velvet dress, one of those allowed her by the king. Her nightdress was removed and she put on her silk chemise. Then there were the underskirts to give her gown the fashionable shape she liked, a velvet kirtle, separate embroidered sleeves, a hood with gold edging, silk stockings, soft leather shoes and leather gloves. Finally, for Tower Green was in the open air, a mantle was slipped around her shoulders to protect her against the cold and frost of that early February morning. She would be the queen just once more.

Jane too was helped to dress. As Lord Morley’s daughter, she expected this. Servants had been around her since her childhood, women who would see to her every need. Now, although a convicted traitor, she remained a viscountess. She could not be treated as an ordinary prisoner. The formalities had to be preserved. So she took off her black damask nightdress and, over her chemise and kirtle, put on a velvet gown, again in the black she usually wore as a lady of the bedchamber. Her black shoes and gloves were leather, but her stockings were probably plain. She was not going to a masque.

Sir John Gage had much to do.
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The execution of a queen was hardly an everyday occurrence. There could be no mistakes. This was too important a task to be left solely to Sir Edmund Walsingham. Gage was very conscious that the king was waiting to hear that Catherine and Jane had paid the ultimate price for their wicked betrayal. At least Gage and Walsingham had the precedent of Anne’s death to follow, and Anthony Anthony was still in his post as surveyor of the ordnance at the Tower. That made it easier; there was no need for constant consultation with the council. And Walsingham had been lieutenant then too, so he knew exactly what to do. They checked that the scaffold was ready. Draped in black, some three or four feet high and covered with straw to soak up the blood, it stood starkly on the grass. Upon it rested the block on which Catherine had practiced the night before in her bizarre dress rehearsal. When she laid her neck on it this time, it would be for real. The headsman had arrived; no swordsman was coming from Calais for this queen. The guards were prepared. All that was lacking were the king’s councilors and the small group of Londoners who were also to watch royal justice administered. Gage waited for them to arrive, for this was, after all, a ceremony, a performance. It would not be complete without an audience.

The councilors had spent the night at Westminster, close to Westminster Hall where Jane had banqueted with Anne on the day of her sister-in-law’s coronation, and near to St. Peter’s Church, where the king’s son, Prince Henry, slept peacefully. Had he lived, the tragedy that was about to unfold would most likely never have happened. When it began to get light, the councilors boarded the barges that were bobbing up and down on the dark waters of the Thames, waiting to take them to the Tower, about two and a half miles downriver. Norfolk was not with them. We do not know why. Perhaps watching Catherine die was too much even for him; maybe he had been excused or chose to be unwell. The Duke of Suffolk was not there either. He was ill, Chapuys tells us. Whatever had laid him low, it was not serious enough to prevent his attending the council meeting the next day, along with Norfolk. The other councilors all knew that they had no choice but to attend. For some, like Sir Richard Rich, that key witness against More and Fisher who had risen to be chancellor of the Court of Augmentations overseeing the administration of ex-monastic lands, it was simply a job to be done. For Sir John Russell, perhaps, whose houseguest Jane had so recently been, the coming hours would be more taxing.