Jane Boleyn: The True Story of the Infamous Lady Rochford (26 page)

By the end of the year, Anne’s practiced smile was genuine. She was proudly and very clearly pregnant. The family had endured a very traumatic time. Jane had been unexpectedly exiled from the court she had grown to regard as her home; Mary Stafford remained disgraced; Anne herself had come to realize that she could never take Henry’s devotion for granted. Even after Chapuys’ mysterious lady vanished back into obscurity, Henry cast lovesick eyes on one of Lady Shelton’s daughters, a pretty girl whom the court knew as Madge and who had sat proudly in the fourth carriage at Anne’s coronation procession. And then there had been the odd scene, played out in public, when Anne burst out in hysterical laughter because she saw her husband become so wrapped up in talking to a young woman who had caught his attention that he quite forgot that he had set off to talk to someone else altogether. But as the child grew in Anne’s womb, so much that had happened paled into insignificance. It was of no consequence. The Boleyns were flourishing once more. Or were they?

CHAPTER
20

The Wheel Turns

J
ANE COULD PINPOINT
the very day on which her world collapsed. It was Tuesday, May 2, 1536, the day after the May Day jousts. When the end of Boleyn ascendancy came, it came with terrifying speed and a bewildering inevitability. Yet the year had begun well enough. Anne’s pregnancy advanced and the future was promising. The birth of a son would ensure that the family lifestyle continue unabated. Jane would use her masking stockings; she would eat from the engraved silver bowls and eventually breathe her last in that wonderful Rochford bed with its embroidered knots and yellow counterpane. But it was not to be.

Had she thought back, Jane might have seen the demise of Katherine as the time when it all started to fall apart. Katherine’s illness and death, an event that Anne and George had always yearned for, actually gave the former queen her final victory over the woman who had supplanted her in her husband’s affections and on her throne. Katherine had been ill, on and off, for some time. Chapuys constantly begged Cromwell to persuade Henry to treat her more kindly and respectfully and to move her to what he thought would be a healthier environment. He was never happy with her living at Kimbolton in Cambridgeshire, a sprawling medieval castle that was bound to be damp and cold in winter. But Henry, encouraged by Anne, would only agree to improve Katherine’s situation if she would acknowledge the invalidity of her marriage and the legality of his second one. Impasse.

Whether Jane was aware of the full details of the former queen’s last days is unknown, although her years at the center of power meant that she heard of Katherine’s frequent bouts of sickness. It is Chapuys who leaves us the best account of precisely what happened. On learning from her doctor on December 29 that Katherine was seriously unwell, Chapuys asked permission to visit her. Apparently, she had been unable to keep down either food or drink for two days and could not sleep for more than an hour and a half as her stomach pains were so bad. She was incredibly weak. Chapuys was at Greenwich, about sixty miles from Kimbolton, when he first heard about Katherine’s illness but he mounted his horse the moment he received royal consent to see her, arriving at the castle on Sunday, January 2, 1536. Much to the consternation of her custodian, Sir Edmund Bedingfield, the ambassador spoke to her comfortingly in her native language, although as Bedingfield was quick to point out in his report to Cromwell, “Mr. Vaughan, who was present, can declare to your Mastership the effect of their communication.” Katherine was delighted to see Chapuys, saying that should she die while he was there, it would be a “consolation” to her to take her last breath in his arms “and not all alone like a beast.”

The ambassador sat with Katherine during each day that he spent at the castle, chatting with her about the emperor, about her own woes and those of her daughter, her fears for the country, and about her will. Gradually, she seemed to improve. She kept a little food down and felt so much better that she advised Chapuys to leave. If he stayed too long, he might not be allowed to come again. Only after consulting her doctor who “gave full hope of her recovery” and promised to recall him should she suffer a relapse did the devoted man set off for London.

The doctor’s assessment of Katherine’s condition was wrong. Within three days of Chapuys’ departure, she was dead. It was true that at first she appeared stronger, once managing to comb and dress her hair herself. As night approached on Thursday, however, she rapidly grew weaker. Realizing that the end could be near, she kept asking what time it was as she wanted to hear Mass and receive the sacrament for the final time. Even in extremis and exhorted by her confessor, the bishop of Llandaff, who was willing to conduct the Mass straightaway, she would not allow the rules to be broken and waited until dawn, the earliest time she believed scripture permitted, for her request to be granted. She “took the Holy Sacrament with the greatest fervor and devotion that could be imagined” and prayed that the king would soon “follow the right path” and gain “good counsel.” Once she had been given extreme unction, Katherine asked her doctor to take down her last requests. She wanted to be buried in a convent of the Observant Friars, she wanted to leave little legacies for the staff who had so loyally tended her, and she wanted Mary to have her furs and a necklace with a cross on it, which she had brought with her from Spain when she had arrived on foreign shores as a young bride all those years ago. She died at about 2 p.m. on Friday, January 7. It was Cromwell who sent the news to a distressed Chapuys.

Jane may not have known exactly what had happened at Kimbolton as Katherine slipped away, but she did know how the news of Katherine’s death was greeted at court. Everyone knew that. “Thank God, we are now free from any fear of war,” was a relieved Henry’s immediate reaction. While Katherine’s relatives abroad donned somber black as funeral obsequies were performed in the imperial dominions, he decked himself out in yellow, a jaunty white feather in his cap. Little Elizabeth joined her parents at church that Sunday, her way heralded by trumpets and “great display.” Henry carried his daughter proudly in his arms, showing her off to all and sundry. There was dancing and tilting in the Greenwich tiltyards. Any outward semblance of grief was markedly absent. Those who lamented Katherine’s demise did so in private. Jane had known her for much of her own life but she too remained silent.

With Katherine gone, Mary was very much alone. Chapuys, stalwart as her protector, was convinced that Thomas and George, pleased to see the demise of one antagonist, were now calculating the further benefits that would accrue if Mary died too. Maybe they were. Anne tried a different tack. She proposed an olive branch to her stepdaughter, offering to become a replacement mother if Mary would only accede to Henry’s demands. She even added the inducement that Mary would be excused the more subservient duties of court service, such as carrying her train, should she be sensible and give way. Unsurprisingly, the bereaved girl failed to respond to her overtures.

So, superficially, nothing had changed in that quarter, and court life in general continued much as usual. Anne should have felt more secure than ever. With Katherine dead, there was no one else who could claim to be queen, a comforting thought for the entire family. Yet Chapuys informed the emperor that while Anne was jubilant, she was also anxious “lest she herself might be brought to the same end.” She understood only too well that the specter of a forcible return to Katherine had been lifted from her husband. Should anything befall her, he would be free to dip his toe into the waters of matrimony for a third time and enjoy a union un-blighted by controversy or scandal. And Henry, who at one time would never have so much as glanced at another woman, had strayed twice in recent months, once with her own cousin. Still, providing she gave birth to the longed-for son, her position would be impregnable. No breath of criticism, or any hint of disrespect, would be allowed to touch the mother of the next Prince of Wales, the prospective king. With a little prince slumbering in his cradle, any future affairs Henry might choose to wallow in would be conducted with the utmost discretion, not a situation Anne would relish but possibly one she could tolerate.

So she listened to music in her chambers, conversed with her ladies, exchanged pleasantries and, occasionally, her characteristically risqué brand of repartee with the gentlemen who drifted in and out of her apartments. In quieter periods, Anne sewed shirts for the poor, read, and planned what could be done with the proceeds of the monasteries Cromwell was so diligently closing. And she waited, as did every Boleyn, for her baby to be born.

Henry, while carrying on with the normal round of state business, was also waiting for the child’s birth. His wife was quite right, though, to be anxious: he had indeed spotted someone else, but she was proving as elusive as Anne had been. He was hopeful, though. After all, persistence had worked with the reluctant Anne so it might do so again. He would see. In the meantime, there was dancing, a spot of hunting, and while in the masculine world of his own privy chamber, playing chess with the ivory set he had purloined from Baynard’s Castle a short while before. He also had to rest a little, for he had suffered a terrible accident: he had fallen from his horse—a huge one able to support his increasing weight—and had gone for two hours “without speaking.” It was a miracle he was not killed, wrote Chapuys, half wistfully. And there was a funeral to arrange.

Bedingfield dared do nothing without the king’s express command and there was one point on which Henry was adamant: Katherine would not be interred as a queen. Even Anne, with her general misgivings about the current situation, but happy to see Henry cuddling Elizabeth, could not quarrel with that. Nevertheless, Henry was determined that Katherine would be given the reverence due to a princess of Spain and the widow of the Prince of Wales. Established protocol was to be followed to the letter. Katherine’s embalmed body lay in state in her private apartments and in the chapel until her coffin was taken on the slow two day journey to Peterborough Cathedral, thirty miles away, where her tomb was waiting. Since the king had closed down the houses of the Observant Friars, Katherine’s request for burial among them could not be granted. The solemn cavalcade to the abbey was impressive, however. The wagon on which her corpse lay was draped in black velvet with a frieze of cloth of gold, and was pulled by six horses covered in black. Priests, servants, gentlemen, and mourners accompanied the late queen. Four heralds walked in the procession, each carrying a crimson banner, two with Katherine’s arms emblazoned on them, one with the arms of England, and one that combined the arms of England and Spain. Four golden standards were held aloft, one depicting the Trinity, one Our Lady, one St. Katherine, and one St. George.

Chapuys, invited to attend and even offered black cloth for a mourning costume, politely refused. He did not wish to be present at what he saw as a shabby occasion that belittled the woman he had always regarded as the true queen. And he remained convinced that she had been poisoned, presumably by Anne. When her body was opened for the embalming process, he said, the chandler who performed the operation found that Katherine’s organs were all sound but with one exception: her heart was totally black and had “something black and round” clinging inside it. Despite the ambassador’s suspicions and his contemptuous dismissal of the whole affair, the funeral ceremonies were conducted as tradition demanded. Katherine’s friend, the Dowager Lady Willoughby, who had managed to sneak in to see her just before she died, was one of the chief mourners, who also included the Countess of Worcester and the Countess of Surrey. Frances Brandon, the daughter of the Duke of Suffolk and the French queen, was there too, so there was a royal link. Inside the abbey were yet more banners and Katherine’s motto, “Humble and Loyal,” was picked out in gold letters near where her body lay. Finally, she was laid to rest close to the cathedral’s high altar, where she remains to this day. Four bishops officiated at the requiem masses. Chapuys was correct that she was not buried as a queen, but she was treated with dignity and some pomp. In this area anyway, Henry did not shirk his responsibilities to the woman he persistently regarded as Arthur’s wife, but not his own.

It was Henry’s current wife who was then to become the center of a catastrophe. On the same day that her predecessor was buried in Peterborough, Anne miscarried. Worse, the child had the appearance of being a boy. Anne’s desperate excuses, blaming Norfolk for telling her too abruptly of the king’s fall, and her anguish at his infatuation with one of her own maids, made no impression on her angry husband. “I see that God will not give me male children,” he spat. And it got worse. Instead of consoling her, he left a distressed Anne, exhausted from the physical as well as psychological effects of her ordeal, with devastating parting words. “When you are up I will come and speak with you,” he said dismissively. They were parting words indeed, for she remained at Greenwich recovering, while he returned to London to spend days in “festival and rejoicing.” This was a man who, in happier times, could hardly bear to be in a different room from his beloved, let alone in a different palace. He had been more sympathetic to her when her favorite dog had died. Henry, hauntingly accustomed to stillbirths and miscarriages, was treading familiar ground and doing so in a familiar way. No wonder the Boleyns were worried.