I, Jane: In The Court of Henry VIII (28 page)

December 1531

the More, Hertfordshire

T
hree months’ time passed at the More, a dank and shadowy prison set in the most desolate, windswept area imaginable. Against the fervent advice of both of her brothers, Jane and a few women elected to go with the banished queen. Once there, however, she quickly began to feel as if she were as much a prisoner of Anne Boleyn as the queen herself was.

The ladies collected at the More passed the time quietly sewing or praying and waiting, full of fear for news of the negotiations with Rome about the annulment. They knew what it would mean for their beloved queen. While Katherine’s nephew, Emperor Charles V, assured her that he would make certain the pope did not surrender, part of Jane began secretly to hope that he would. An annulment would certainly put an end to what everyone privately believed was going to happen anyway. That way, perhaps the poor besieged queen and her daughter, Princess Mary, could retire to a more fitting palace and find some bit of peace.

But that did not happen.

In the end, Henry, her husband of twenty-two years, circumvented
the pope. He gave up on annulment or divorce and simply broke with Rome altogether. He created his own church and his own rules.

Suddenly, Anne Boleyn was his wife—his pregnant wife.

And she was called Queen of England.

As Katherine’s loyal staff stood somberly behind her, with tears in their eyes, Jane helplessly watched the proud, defiant Katherine brought to her knees. Anne’s uncle, the powerful Duke of Norfolk, haughtily declared, “Since you are no longer queen, my lady, you shall no longer keep a queen’s household at the king’s expense or his pleasure.”

“Et tu, Brute?” she said softly, not prepared for his betrayal.

“’Tis a matter of survival, my lady, only that,” Norfolk replied icily.

The man beside Norfolk, Charles Brandon, had been her dear friend for decades. But like Norfolk, he, too, looked at her as if she were no longer of any consequence.

Brandon had always seemed arrogant to Jane, but never so bad as he had become after the death of his wife, Mary, the king’s own sister. Some part of him seemed to have died with her, and now it was as if he was simply out to gain for himself what he could.

“Nothing the concubine does can ever make her queen in my place,” Katherine declared, racked with trembling. Her body was fleshy now and worn with the trials of recent years. Her face had swiftly drained of its color from the shock of this cruel encounter.

“Forgive me, madam,” Brandon interceded gloweringly. “But she already has.”

The two men pummeled her with information then, back and forth, rapid, lethal, as if they were delivering blows. “You have until April to benefit from His Majesty’s largesse. Then it is expected that
you shall retire to some private house of your own,” Norfolk explained in a dry monotone.

“I have no such dwelling,” Katherine countered.

“You have until spring to find one.”

“On what am I to live if I do?”

“As you are not queen, you no longer need a queen’s household,” Brandon said.

“No matter what he calls her, I
am
queen. My husband can place me where he likes, so long as I have a confessor, a physician, and Maria for comfort.”

“You shall no longer be called queen, madam.”

“While I live, I shall call myself so, as will those faithful few, no matter their number, who remain around me.” Her tone, full of aching pride, bore only a slight tremor.

Jane longed to cry out that she would be honored to be among them, but this was not the time. Yet again her bitterness toward Anne Boleyn grew.

“Am I to know where I am to be moved, since my circumstances are to be so swiftly reduced?”

“If you refuse to make your own arrangements, my lady, there is a place called Buckden,” Brandon coolly revealed, picking a piece of lint from his massive puffed velvet sleeve.

“Any further east and I would be in the sea,” Katherine exaggerated drily of the twelfth-century Buckden Palace in Cambridgeshire.

Jane could hear Maria de Salinas begin to weep at the rapidly declining situation.

A fortnight later, the conversation continued to chill Jane as she and nearly all of the others were released from service to the queen and sent home.

The drawn litter in which she rode four months later, accompanied by Sir Francis Bryan, rattled and swayed along the twisted, rutted road back to Wolf Hall. A very different Jane Seymour from the one who had left clutched the Spanish coin once given to her by the queen as she watched her childhood home come slowly into view.

“It was good of you to accompany me, Sir Francis,” Jane said shakily, feeling her heart beat more swiftly for the disappointed looks she knew lay ahead.

“’Twas on my way to my estates. I really should see my wife now that I have one before I depart for France,” he said cavalierly.

The king was sending Francis again as an envoy to France in order to shore up relations with King Francis I, who had been caught unaware when Henry left the Church. Francis Bryan, considered an expert in diplomacy now, was to do damage control for Henry.

Jane had never met Francis’s wife, Philippa, since she remained at their country home in Surrey and did not come to court, but she knew Francis had found happiness. Marriages, children, even dalliances were passing Jane by as she neared her twenty-sixth birthday.

“Yet you do, at least, have a partner, which is more than I can say for myself,” Jane said.

He rubbed his bearded jaw thoughtfully as the stuffy litter continued to rattle and sway, the heavily laden trunks bouncing behind them.

“I am sorry there were no stellar options presented for you at court, Jane. I had hopes.”

“Faith can be blind, but most men are not,” she replied with a sigh. “There has only ever been one person in my life who has seen me differently, and that was a long time ago.”

“Ah, yes, young Master Dormer.”

“He must be well married now by his own ambitious mother.”

“As it happens,” Francis said nonchalantly when the litter was brought to a rest in the cobblestone courtyard of Wolf Hall, “Master Dormer is yet unmarried.”

She glanced at him as a servant approached with a stepping stool. She tried to keep the tremor of surprise from her voice. “How do you know that?”

“We favored few have our ways,” he said with a diplomatic smile. “People gossip about those who seek the sovereign’s favor, and Lady Dormer has been prominent among that group through the years.”

“I see.”

“He is her only son, if memory serves.”

“Yes,” Jane confirmed. “One accustomed to being indulged as well as indulging himself, from a very early age. I was done with that, and with him, long ago.”

“I remember that he might have taken some liberty with you, but at least he was interested enough to tell you he meant to marry you.”

“How could you know that?” Jane shot back, feeling defensive suddenly. She did not want to open old wounds.

Francis scratched his beard awkwardly as he gazed out the window. “I would have you ask yourself, have you the luxury to be aloof with a man who once cared for you so deeply that he proposed marriage? Especially if you might, after all this time, still care for him a little?”

The question hit her as a servant opened the little door and a rush of fresh air swirled around them. How, she wondered, did he know any of that? But when she stepped onto the gravel drive, it was into her sister’s waiting arms. Their conversation quickly ended in the surprise of seeing Elizabeth after so long.

“What are you doing here?” Jane wept, feeling the full press of her sister’s sixth child between them.

“I came for a visit as soon as I heard you were returning from your exile. Was it awful there at the More?” she asked as Jane held her out at arm’s length.

Her once stunningly pretty sister had aged with the years and the strain that repeated childbirth had placed upon her once small and delicate frame. Elizabeth’s face was slim and drawn, and her beautiful blue eyes had dimmed. Jane had always envied Elizabeth. Until today. She now wore a dress of amber cloth ornamented with ivory lace, which paled in comparison to Jane’s rich court-designed gown with its intricate plum-colored embroidery and fashionable slashed sleeves.

“Sir Francis,” Elizabeth said, curtsying respectfully to their cousin. It occurred to Jane then that Elizabeth would never have the same kinship with Francis that she shared with him after years together at court. There was a strange, almost imperceptible little turn of the tide then, and she sensed that the balance of power had shifted between the two sisters. “Will you be staying with us?” Elizabeth asked him hopefully.

“I was planning on your mother’s grace for only a night or two before I set off to Surrey.”

“I know she will be honored. Especially if you bring us news from court,” she said excitedly. “Everyone is wondering all about the new queen.”

“Katherine shall ever be King Henry’s only queen,” Jane said defensively as her parents appeared at the half-timbered, gabled entrance to Wolf Hall.

The world tipped on its axis then.

She remembered their disappointment in her before she had left home and felt the sting still. That sensation would live within her always, no matter what glamour she had experienced at court.
Knowing not what else to do, Jane curtsied before them, but her knees were weak. It was her mother who brought her up with a surprisingly gentle hand.

“Welcome home, my dear.”

Those unexpected words, filled with sincerity, hit her like a knife wound. For a moment, she could not think. She could never have expected what happened next.

“Dear girl,” her mother said as she reached out to Jane, who had telltale tears in her eyes. “You are looking fit after your ordeal in the More. Was it too dreadful?” she asked.

“’Twas not dreadful at all. At least not until the last days,” she amended, not wanting to think of the kindhearted queen, noble to the end, though she was intentionally separated by the vindictive king from her only child. Jane might have seen fleeting sparks of humanity in King Henry over the years—and softened toward him in those moments—but she still could not relate to him. Perhaps he deserved Anne Boleyn and the tumultuous existence he had created for himself. “By God’s grace, I learned a great deal in my time with the queen.”

“You can see our Jane has matured,” said her father appraisingly as he reached out and drew her into an embrace that was as unexpected as her mother’s kind and thoughtful words.

Jane tried very hard not to go rigid in his arms, but it was difficult. “Thomas wrote to us that the new Queen Anne causes quite a stir when she rides out in public. The loyalty of the people seems to have remained with Queen Katherine, whether she gave him a son or not,” said her mother.

“Which, no doubt, is why she has been exiled even farther, to Buckden,” Jane added. “If the king could see her sent back to Spain, I am quite certain he would.”

“Well, Anne Boleyn is queen now,” Francis said philosophically, almost as if someone influential might be listening. “And we all must needs honor her if we intend to remain in the king’s good favor.”

Francis Bryan had known a remarkable rise under Henry VIII, and, by extension, so had the entire Seymour family. They let the matter of loyalty drop.

They dined early that night in honor of Sir Francis, Jane’s mother laying a splendid table complete with delectable roast lark and herbed pheasant. But the house seemed empty without Edward and Thomas, as she so fondly remembered them at Wolf Hall. They sat by glowing lamplight, often in silence now, interrupted only by the sound of silver hitting china, or her father’s loud chewing and occasional extended belches. There was no music, which Jane had grown accustomed to at the king’s palaces, and there were far fewer servants to attend them. Tonight, away from the elegance of the royal court, the soup was cold, and the lark sauce bitter. Her former fear and awe of Margery and John Seymour faded with each swallow.

After the meal was over, Jane and Francis took a stroll beneath the rich, golden orb of moonlight glowing on the meadow, bordered by cultivated yews and sweet-scented, newly blooming viburnums.

“I have a confession to make,” he suddenly said. “’Tis quite a dreadful thing, too.”

Jane could see by his strained expression that this was not a jest and that he was troubled by whatever he had withheld. “I could say it was not truly my fault, as it was forgotten in the melee of the accident.” He pointed to his eye patch, as if that were necessary. “I have not worn the armor since then. But the bitter and slightly ironic truth of the matter is that when my man took the cuirass out last month for polishing, something I had stashed inside dropped from it. ’Twas a
letter, Jane.” He held it out to her now. “William Dormer had bid me to give it to you.”

“He gave you a letter for me all those years ago?” She nearly choked on the question. This seemed so incredibly impossible and cruel.