Jane Boleyn: The True Story of the Infamous Lady Rochford (49 page)

Morley worked hard in the months following Jane’s death and presented his completed and exquisitely decorated manuscript as his New Year’s gift to Henry in 1543. Ostensibly, it was his way of distancing himself from his daughter’s crimes and recognizing the justice of her execution, his unique equivalent of riding through the streets in the wake of Catherine’s brothers. If her own father was so horrified by Jane’s flagrant depravity as to write on the immorality of women and the need to keep them firmly under control, then he must obviously have agreed that she was indeed “that bawd” and her death well deserved.

But a close comparison of Boccaccio’s Latin with Morley’s English rendition suggests that he did not completely disown her after all: it is possible to discover a veiled valediction skillfully camouflaged within his work. Although his translation is usually precise, there are instances where he changes a word or phrase or adds an interpolation of his own. And it is in his passage on Polyxena that we can glean a hint of his true feelings. When Troy fell, Polyxena, the daughter of Hecuba and Priam, was sacrificed by Achilles’ son, Pyrrhus, so that the gods would send the victorious Greeks the winds they needed to return home. She was the counterpart to Iphigenia, who had been killed for a similar purpose when the wars first began.

Morley inserts a complete phrase of his own when describing Polyxena’s death: “O, that it was against all good order…that so sweet a maiden should be devoured by the hands of Pyrrhus for to satisfy for another woman’s offence.” Clearly, the “sweet maiden” was Jane. The other woman could be Hecuba because of her involvement in the death of Achilles; it could be Helen, the cause of the Trojan Wars; or Morley could mean Catherine Howard, in whose service Jane had died. Morley went further yet. Boccaccio talks of Polyxena as a willing victim, an important concept in both Greek and Roman literature, as a sacrifice was deemed useless if the sufferer struggled and fought. He speaks of the girl offering her “throat” to Pyrrhus “with a deeply constant heart,” to the admiration of everyone around. Morley, however, translates the word
iugulum
as “neck,” not as “throat.” The two words have the same root, but the subtle difference between them surely relates to how the two women died: Polyxena’s throat was cut, Jane’s head was severed. And Ottwell Johnson remarked on Jane’s considerable “constancy” when facing the ax.

Morley did not callously dismiss his daughter from his mind. The Catherine Howard inference is impossible to miss in his insertion; so is his respect for Jane’s bravery in adversity. Perhaps too he hoped that just as Polyxena’s death marked the end of the turmoil of war, Jane’s would presage peace, a return to normality after the storms of religious change and factional jockeying for power. In that, he was to be disappointed.

In his own way, though, he had paid what tribute he could to his daughter. He was not the only person to remember her. In the very year in which her daughter mounted the scaffold steps, Lady Morley made an unprecedented gift toward cost of the bells at St. Giles, Great Hallingbury. John Tonne, who originally came from Sussex but worked extensively in Essex, cast a new bell for the little church. To imagine that Alice Morley thought of Jane every time the bell was rung may be fanciful. Equally, it may be true. And John Tonne’s bell, the sole survivor of those early ones, is still there. It rings to this day.

EPILOGUE

History Finds a Scapegoat

W
HEN
J
ANE PLACED HER HEAD
on the block, she did so as “that bawd, the lady Jane Rochford,” a convicted traitor. She died because she had helped Catherine Howard pursue her wicked, lascivious life, or so it was said. What she did not die for was her Boleyn links, or for anything that she might have said or done in connection with the fall of Anne or George, and there is no suggestion of that in the Act of Attainder against her. As the years passed, her posthumous reputation, already tarnished by her relationship with Catherine, deteriorated further: a myth evolved, seeing her execution as a much deserved, if belated, retribution for giving false testimony against her own husband and sister-in-law. Eighteenth-century histories and biographies are littered with slurs. She was a “wicked woman,” a “scandalous woman,” a woman of “infamous character.” She became “the infamous lady Rochford, who justly deserved her fate for the concern which she had in bringing Anne Boleyn as well as her own husband to the block.” Her death was “the judgment of Heaven.”

This myth, which makes Jane’s name synonymous with deceit and betrayal, did not develop overnight. It can be traced back to its source: John Foxe, the doyen of the Protestant historians of Elizabeth I’s reign. Within forty years of Jane’s death, he named and shamed her in his
Actes and Monuments,
the work that charts the origins and progress of the Reformation and immortalizes those martyred for their Protestant beliefs. Jane does not figure in the 1563 edition of Foxe’s work but she does become a marginal note in that of 1576. Foxe does not bring her into his discussion of the fall of Anne, and when he talks of the execution of Catherine Howard in the main body of the text, he merely mentions Jane as dying with her. It is the marginal comment that castigates Jane: “It is reported of some that this Lady Rochford forged a false letter against her husband and Queen Anne her sister, by the which they were both cast away. Which if it be so, the judgment of God is here to be marked.” The same note appears in the 1583 edition, again in the margin and not in the text itself.

Foxe, if indeed the note was his rather than the printer’s (as is often the case with marginal additions), must have latched on to the false letter idea from somewhere. Had Jane given direct evidence at the trials of Anne and George, his source would be clear. However, Jane did not appear in person at either trial. Chapuys actually said that the absence of witnesses was unusual. All he did say, and it is significant, is that the smart money was on George’s acquittal until he read aloud from the paper that he was handed, referring to Henry’s lack of potency. This was the only time, that we know about, when Jane’s name cropped up at the Boleyn trials. When we look into who else was in a position to know what testimony was given or produced in the Tower hearings, information that Foxe could have used, we continue to draw a blank. Sir John Spelman, who sat on the bench throughout, did not touch on Jane at all. Instead, he wrote in his notebook that the incriminating evidence against Anne came from Lady Wingfield. He could hardly have confused “Rochford” with “Wingfield.” According to John Husee, the chief informant was the Countess of Worcester; he did not say it was Jane. And Cromwell, who we can be sure prepared the case, simply made general remarks on the disgust at Anne’s conduct felt by the ladies of the bedchamber. Had Jane been his star witness for the prosecution, there was no reason for him to withhold her name. In fact, he had everything to gain by proclaiming it to the rafters.

So if Foxe did not alight on Jane from what he could discover about the trials, he did so in another way. Several possibilities spring to mind. We know that he used documents and oral recollections, so one informant might have been the young George Wyatt, grandson of Anne’s love, the poet Sir Thomas Wyatt. Writing toward the end of Elizabeth’s reign, George Wyatt penned an account of the life of Anne Boleyn, which was eventually published in 1817. In this highly partisan story, Wyatt clearly wished to vindicate the queen who, he gushes, was not only of “rare and admirable beauty” but had a “heavenly flame burning in her.” Although he does not allude to any letters, he includes a damning reference to Jane, saying that she was the witness to the alleged incest between George Boleyn and Anne. Wyatt calls her George’s “wicked wife, accuser of her own husband, even to the seeking of his own blood.” Conveniently ignoring the comparative penury to which Jane would instantly be reduced by “seeking his own blood” in such a dramatic way, Wyatt goes on to suggest that she was a hostile witness “more to be rid of him than of true ground against him.” Jane’s later execution after the Catherine Howard debacle, “the judgment that fell out upon her,” was a “just punishment by law after her naughtiness.” By dying as she had, Jane had provided every man and his dog with the chance to impugn her. Yet after resoundingly maligning Jane, Wyatt proceeds to contradict himself by reporting that he had heard that George was “condemned only upon some point of a statute of words then in force,” which somehow contrived to “entangle” or “bridle” the truthful. His idea of exactly what had actually happened in the trials is patently hazy.

Another potential source for Foxe was George Constantine, a former servant of Henry Norris, who fell afoul of Cromwell for remarks he was purported to have made to the Dean of Westbury. In 1830, Thomas Amyot, treasurer of the Society of Antiquaries, was handed an alleged transcript of Constantine’s “Memorial” (answer) to Cromwell with details on Anne’s fall and, crucially, George’s trial. “I heard say,” writes Constantine, “he had escaped had it not been for a letter.” If authentic, this suggests that talk of a letter had surfaced, although Constantine gives no information on its contents, sender, or recipient and emphatically does not say that Jane was involved.

Furthermore, Constantine’s “Memorial” may be a forgery. The original document has never been seen; all that was ever produced was the transcript, which Amyot received from the infamous John Payne Collier. A journalist, theater critic, literary reviewer, essayist, and subeditor at the
Morning Chronicle,
Payne Collier wrote a
History of English Dramatic Poetry and Annals of the Stage
in three volumes. Unfortunately, he regularly tacked on inventions of his own to the sources he claimed to have rediscovered. So, although his transcript may be genuine, it is better to reserve judgment. Even if true, however, the document does not implicate Jane; it merely gives a hint of the origin of a possible letter known to Foxe.

Where letters do figure significantly is in a document sent by Alexander Ales, a Scottish Protestant, to Elizabeth at the beginning of her reign. In what was in reality a plea for money, he tells Anne’s daughter that he wants to write “the history or tragedy of the death” of her “most holy mother.” Blaming Anne’s death primarily on the failed embassy to the German princes, when George had been unable to negotiate a possible alliance, Ales also refers to Stephen Gardiner, “a most violent persecutor of all the godly” and then ambassador to Francis, passing on to Cromwell the news that “certain reports were being circulated in the Court of the King of France, and certain letters had been discovered, according to which the Queen was accused of adultery.” An additional letter, it transpires, was supposed to be from Anne to her brother, telling him that she was pregnant. In spite of this, Jane’s name never surfaces and Ales, keen to impress Elizabeth, explains away all of this circumstantial froth, but the idea that there were letters, some of which were possibly forged, has materialized.

We do not know whether Ales’s own epistle ever reached the hands of Elizabeth, but it would certainly have been read by Sir William Cecil, her secretary of state and chief councilor, among whose official papers it is now preserved. A zealous Protestant, Cecil was Foxe’s patron in publishing the
Actes and Monuments.
And Foxe’s printer, John Day, who may himself be the author of the marginal note about Jane that first appeared in 1576, had run a secret underground press for the Protestants not far from Cecil’s country house at Stamford in Lincolnshire during the Catholic Mary Tudor’s reign. Once Elizabeth was queen, Day continued to work closely with Cecil, to the point where one historian has called him Cecil’s “tame printer.”

It is now that Jane’s story becomes intertwined with politics. After the brief reigns of Protestant Edward VI and the unhappy Mary, Elizabeth ushered in a religious settlement that made Protestantism England’s official religion. A Boleyn sat on the throne. Although Elizabeth wisely preferred not to rake up the past, Ales scored a palpable hit when he said that it could hardly be imagined that her “most saintly mother,” a Protestant heroine in her own right, was an adulteress. Since it was unthinkable that her “serene father,” the great king who had freed his country from the papal yoke, could act unjustly, he must have been misled into believing his wife false. Someone must have lied to him: Jane fitted the bill. Named a “bawd” by Parliament, she had already lost her good name, so she was the ideal scapegoat. To make her situation worse, she had been born a Parker. In 1570, her nephew, her brother’s son, Henry Parker, fled abroad as a recusant and became a leading Catholic exile. These were dangerous times. By then, the Catholic Mary, Queen of Scots, was a prisoner on English soil, memories of the Catholic revolt in the north of 1569 were still fresh, and the government were uncertain whether there would be any repercussions following Elizabeth’s excommunication by the pope in 1570. In such circumstances, no stigma on the queen’s parents could possibly be countenanced and anything or anyone remotely connected with Catholicism was bound to be suspect. Jane was doomed all over again.