Jane Boleyn: The True Story of the Infamous Lady Rochford (14 page)

His successor as chancellor, Thomas More, was not there either, for he had resigned his post five months earlier to retire into what the Boleyns trusted would be obscurity. He would never be an ally, but with his sparkling wit, persuasive pen, and the almost universal respect he aroused, they did not want him as an implacable foe. The queen was another absentee. On Jane’s first visit to Calais, Katherine had been prominent in all the celebrations. Recently, though, she had been banished from court and separated from Princess Mary, her humiliation callously increased when Henry ordered her to return her jewels so that Anne could have them. His beloved wanted to look her best before Francis. Jane certainly saw the glittering stones. She may even have helped Anne fasten them around her neck or on her freshly designed gowns, or admired the priceless rings as Anne held up her hands to watch the jewels catch the light. Well might the discarded queen write to her nephew that the treatment she received was “enough to shorten ten lives,” not just hers. Henry did not care; he wanted only Anne. He “cannot be one hour away from her,” said Chapuys scornfully. It was Anne who hunted with him, who sat next to him, who took precedence over even the proudest of court ladies, who listened while ministers reported to him, and who was still being showered with gift after gift. Just as Jane became used to her own elevation, she had witnessed Henry’s latest offering that saw her sister-in-law’s status transformed as well: Anne had been created Marquess of Pembroke (the male title) in her own right, a singular honor for a woman. The lavish ceremony at Windsor Castle, in front of the most important figures of the land including, significantly, the French ambassador, had been almost a dress rehearsal for the coronation that Henry could not yet give her. With her long dark hair flowing free, dressed in crimson velvet trimmed with ermine, her train carried by Norfolk’s daughter, Anne had knelt at the king’s feet for her investiture. She had arisen with a title that her sons, whether legitimate or not, could inherit and lands worth one thousand pounds per annum. She was not her father’s daughter for nothing.

But as the sails on Henry’s vessel billowed in the wind, Jane prepared to board the ship with the Marquess of Pembroke, not with Queen Anne. In fact, the two women had become fairly close over time, as Anne’s confidences later prove, so Jane had shared the frustration Anne had felt at the failure of the Blackfriars court. As the days following the trial had become weeks, then months and then years, Jane had seen the king, once so affable, became more and more obdurate. He would get his way, at whatever cost, and was totally unwilling to countenance even the mildest opposition. Katherine understood this as she evaluated her own position. She wrote to Charles V that because her counsel were “afraid to speak,” she relied on Chapuys to promote her cause with Henry as she trusted that her nephew would do with the pope. When writing to Charles himself, the ambassador repeated the rumor that as there had just been repairs made to the Tower of London, Henry intended to confine Katherine there while he was at Calais. Chapuys dismissed such talk as “highly improbable,” but the queen was right to sense a change in Henry, who was no longer the idealistic young monarch who had wrestled with Francis all those years ago.

Always sure of himself, Henry had, if anything, grown even more confident. He had only to begin a sentence with the word
well
for all to understand that his mind was made up and it was safer to obey. Wolsey had known exactly what sort of man he was dealing with when he had warned William Kingston, the constable of the Tower, that while Henry was “a prince of a royal courage” with “a princely heart,” he would risk half his kingdom “rather than he will either miss or want any part of his will or appetite.” Despite the cardinal begging him on his knees to change his mind, he said, Henry would never do so. If ever Kingston became a member of the Privy Council, Wolsey had entreated, he should beware “what matter ye put in his head, for ye shall never put it out again.” As even Jane, whose personal experience had been only with a gentle and bountiful Henry, could appreciate, the divorce had become his obsession.

Henry had been forced to move on from the trauma of the Blackfriars trial as he and the Boleyns explored alternative routes to satisfy that obsession. Jane had often been without her husband for weeks on end during those years as he, like Thomas, put their case abroad, largely fruitlessly. In one key area, though, there had been a major breakthrough: the English clergy had been forced to accept that Henry was the head of the church. The more he read, and the more others read for him, the more convinced the king had become that the pope had usurped authority that was rightfully his. If this was so, then the case could be decided not in Rome but at home, agreed by Convocation, the bishops’ ruling forum, and ratified in Parliament. George had played his part in trying to convince Convocation to accept the official line. Henry had ordered him to go in person to present the clergy with various tracts that purported to debate even-handedly precisely where authority in church and state lay. Old Testament kings such as Josiah, Convocation had been told, “were princes temporal named yet they executed spiritual administration in setting forth the word of God, in depressing idolatry, and advancing God’s only glory.” They had been informed that “no impediment is known by scripture why that a temporal prince may not be a minister, yea a head over the Church, the spiritual kingdom of Christ.”

Memories of the struggle to get the church to accept Henry’s point of view were fresh and raw as Jane sailed to Calais with the rest of the Boleyn clan. George had done his best but the bishops had already bowed to the king’s arguments only because they were afraid that Henry would use the same law against them which he had used so successfully against Wolsey. This law, that of praemunire, made it treason to accept foreign jurisdiction in England so technically the clergy had broken it by accepting papal decrees. Normally, of course, this did not matter, as the king too had acknowledged such decrees, but the law of praemunire was so wonderfully vague and all-encompassing that Henry could invoke it with impunity whenever he chose to do so. Terrified of being considered traitors, the clergy hurriedly voted to give the king one hundred thousand pounds in exchange for his pardon for any wrongdoing that otherwise he might decide they had committed. The bishops also agreed that he was indeed supreme head of the church, but, for their consciences would not yet allow them to deny completely the pope’s authority, which they believed derived from that of St. Peter, they added the proviso that the king’s title applied only “as far as the law of Christ” allowed. Henry had not quite got what he wanted, but it was good enough as a start, and pleasing to the Boleyns. Then, when the church had reluctantly gone on to submit to Henry’s demands to control church law, the Boleyns had been even happier. More’s immediate resignation as chancellor had been additional grist to their relentless mill.

With all these deaths and resignations, there had been changes among the personnel of the court. Jane had become familiar with the new faces upon whom the Boleyns were relying. Thomas Cromwell, well on his way toward becoming Henry’s chief minister, was a particularly welcome ally. An astute operator, willing to work assiduously for whatever his king wanted, he was very much a man after Thomas’s own heart. The Boleyns could do business with him. To have his loyal associate, Sir Thomas Audley, in line for the chancellorship was also encouraging. But most of all, the Boleyns had high hopes of the clever young Cambridge theologian, Thomas Cranmer, a man who shared their excitement at the new religious ideas springing up and who genuinely believed that the king’s marriage was unlawful. On the death of the elderly archbishop of Canterbury, William Warham, an implacable enemy of the Boleyns, his post, the most senior in the English church, was vacant. Already the Boleyn supporter, Edward Lee, had been appointed to the second most important position, that of archbishop of York, when Wolsey had died. It was crucial to Anne’s cause that the right man should now be given the job at Canterbury. And, as Jane set foot on dry land at Calais, the Boleyns knew who they wanted in Warham’s place: Cranmer.

So as the royal party disembarked from Henry’s ship, the
Swallow,
before the walls of his port of Calais, at about ten in the morning on Friday, October 11, after a mercifully tranquil voyage, and were met by Lord Berners, the lord deputy, and Thomas Tate, the mayor, the future looked much more encouraging. True, many of the English nobles thought the meeting a waste of time and money. It was also true that Francis’s new queen, Eleanor, and the chief ladies of the French court would not be present, a rather pointed nod in the direction of decorum, so Anne could not be officially greeted by the French. Wisely, the Boleyns pretended to ignore the snub, for Anne was still highly prominent. Indeed, a Venetian observer tells us that at Calais she lived “like a queen,” with the king accompanying her “to mass and everywhere as if she was such.” And where Anne went, so did Jane. Their turn in the international spotlight, though, really came when Francis arrived to stay as a guest of his fellow monarch.

While both rulers had agreed that this encounter was to be far more modest than that of 1520, simple courtesy required the maintenance of royal etiquette. As the two kings rode into the town, Henry in his customary cloth of gold with diamonds and rubies flashing on his sleeves, they were greeted with a deafening gun salute. Henry conducted Francis to his sumptuously prepared quarters, before riding on to his own apartments in the building that housed Anne and a dozen or so of her ladies. Jane was probably lodged with her sister-in-law; it is most likely that George stayed with Henry rather than being billeted in nearby houses with the less important privy chamber attendants.

On the third night of his visit, Henry provided a banquet for Francis in a chamber lined with silver cloth of gold, brilliantly lit by candles supported in silver and silver-gilt candelabra. Since Francis and his lords had dressed more extravagantly than their English counterparts, Henry’s unstinting hospitality was a reassuring sop to national pride. Anne had not yet met Francis formally and was not at Henry’s side during the banquet. Instead, with Jane, Mary Carey, and four others, she was dressing and preparing for the entertainment that was to follow. As the guests finished their last dish, served on plates of solid gold, seven masked ladies suddenly entered to the gentle strains of Henry’s musicians. Clad in cloth of gold, cloth of silver, and crimson satin fringed with gold thread, and with all eyes upon them, the maskers turned toward the spectators, then selected dancing partners. This was Anne’s chance to take center stage, as Henry had always planned, for her choice was Francis himself. After a couple of dances, a proud Henry removed the masks from the ladies’ faces “so that there their beauties were showed” and Francis could feign surprise at the identity of his companion. Anne’s fluent French made conversation easy between them and they were, of course, old acquaintances from her years at the French court. As Henry watched proudly, the couple talked and danced for about an hour before Francis, with his perfect manners, politely said his good-byes and left for his own quarters escorted by an equally solicitous Henry.

Jane’s partner is not recorded but he was definitely a man of some consequence since all those present were important lords. As Jane took to the floor, perhaps wearing her favorite stockings of silk trimmed with gold and with her face now visible to everyone, her position as a woman of growing significance was apparent. George was certainly close to his sister but Jane had become so as well. There may have been no official French reception for Anne, but the shrewd and the wily were quick to ingratiate themselves with the woman who was likely to be queen. Indeed, Francis prudently sent her a gift of a fabulous diamond.

When Francis had left Calais, after the usual round of present giving, Henry and his party prepared to return home. This time, however, the weather was unkind. Some of the first ships to leave were driven back by the wind, which became so fierce at one point that it was not possible to even stand up straight in the streets, and the vessels in the harbor were tossed about so much that they were in danger of capsizing. Jane, with the rest of the royal party, was stranded. Maybe it was as he waited for the weather to lift that Henry lost fifteen shillings playing cards with Anne. She, like George, was a sharp card player to whom Henry frequently lost relatively large sums.

It took about a week before the king was willing to risk ordering his bed shipped back to England and a couple of days more before he ventured on the seas himself. The expressions of relief for his safe return were fulsome. The council attended the Te Deum sung in St. Paul’s in thanksgiving. If Calais was a success for Jane, it was a satisfying victory for Anne. Her place as Henry’s consort was taken for granted. Those who muttered against it, like the Duke of Suffolk, who had proved a somewhat erratic ally once Wolsey was out of the way and whose wife’s absence from the festivities had been noticed, were uncomfortably aware that Henry would not be moved. Indeed, there had been talk that Anne and Henry had intended to marry while on this trip but that had not happened. Something else had: after years of calculated refusal, Anne at last allowed Henry to become her lover in deed as well as word, though we will never know whether their first night together was spent in Calais or whether they waited until they were once more on English soil.

Nor is there conclusive evidence of when she and Henry actually married, although we are sure that it was done secretly in front of very few witnesses. That Jane was one is remotely possible but speculative. That she knew about it is far more definite. Anne had come so far with the help of her entire family, it is inconceivable that she kept such a tumultuous event from them. Indeed, if Chapuys is to be believed, she was married “in the presence of the father, mother, brother, and two of her favorites.” All were people she could trust. Henry, however, could not resist joking at the expense of those who were not privy to such insider knowledge. When dining with Anne in her apartments, he pointed to the costly tapestries and gold plate on display. He then asked the Dowager Duchess of Norfolk, who was sitting at a table with other members of the court, whether she thought Anne “had a fine dowry and a rich marriage portion.” The duchess could not fail to understand that the only husband Anne contemplated was the king himself. What she did not know was that not only was Anne Henry’s wife already, she was also about three months pregnant.