Jane Boleyn: The True Story of the Infamous Lady Rochford (28 page)

And, in her incoherent babblings in the Tower, all carefully noted by Kingston and the unsympathetic ladies sent to serve her, Anne unwittingly presented the king’s chief minister with more and more circumstantial froth that he was only too happy to use against her and against any man whose name tripped from her tongue. Indeed, within hours of her idly mentioning chiding Weston for flirting with Madge Shelton despite being married, and his gallant response that the woman he loved more than both his own wife and the delectable Madge was the queen, he found himself behind bars, as did Brereton, Page, and Wyatt, to whom she also made reference in her almost hysterical outpourings. In those early days, the formerly shrewd queen was a prosecutor’s dream. She wondered about the Countess of Worcester, whose child, she said, “did not stir in her body…for sorrow she took of me.” Quite what her references to the Countess of Worcester meant perplexed Kingston as much as they still perplex us today, but he recorded her words nonetheless in case they might prove useful. She worried about her “sweet brother,” about her father and her mother who, she thought, would “die with sorrow.” To voice concern about her parents was natural; in the current circumstances, any mention of her brother was suspect. She managed to remember a potentially incriminating conversation with Mark Smeaton as well. Finding him standing forlornly by the window in her presence chamber, she reminded him that he could not expect her to speak to him in the same way as she would a nobleman, as he was “an inferior person.” His riposte that “a look sufficed” him coupled with a perfunctory “fare you well” demonstrated her occasional overfamiliarity wonderfully clearly. It was another gift to Cromwell, for no one would have addressed Katherine with such a lack of respect, and Mark had been his first prey.

For, although Jane was unaware of it, Cromwell had collected a plethora of evidence he could use when the trials came. The pivotal confession of Mark Smeaton, the “spinet player” of Chapuys’ missive, made a comfortable start. Mark’s downfall had begun even before the May Day jousts. On Sunday, April 30, Cromwell had ordered the young musician’s arrest. Smeaton was taken to Cromwell’s house in Stepney where he was questioned about just how familiar his relationship with his queen truly was. A statute of 1351 had pronounced it treason to “violate” the king’s companion even with her consent. The minister’s agents were skilled interrogators, highly accomplished in prizing secrets out of even the most reluctant or most courageous of prisoners. Few could resist for long. We will never know what pressure they applied to Mark, although there were suggestions that he was racked or that a rope was tightened around his head with a cudgel until the pain was so intense that he had no choice but to say anything that might stop the agony. Perhaps he was promised his life if he cooperated. But whether tortured or not, confess he did: he had, he said, slept with Anne. Once the king was told, there was no going back. Enquiries had to be undertaken, and Cromwell was the man to pursue them. No one doubted that he would approach his mission with diligence. After all, Henry’s honor was at stake, and if Anne’s foolish comments to Norris were taken seriously, so was his life.

Jane and the rest of the Boleyns were completely in the dark about all of this. Naturally, they had agonized over the various difficulties that had beset them over the past few months. It was plain that Anne and Henry could be closer, or he would not be looking at any other woman. The lack of a son was the main stumbling block, but there was still a chance that Anne might conceive, and the royal marriage had always been a roller coaster of emotions. They could come through this. Even the inevitable fallout from Katherine’s death was not insurmountable. Should Henry want to shift allegiances toward the emperor and away from Anne’s beloved France, very much a current possibility, they could accept that. If that happened, the rehabilitation of Lady Mary would be a major problem, of course, but there might be room for accommodation there too. As for Anne’s disappointment that the proceeds from the current round of monastic closures were going into Henry’s pocket rather than into her cherished schemes of poor relief, she would have to get over it for the time being and work on Henry once she regained her influence. She ought also to patch up her recent quarrel with Cromwell, no longer a staunch ally.

But for Henry there was a hidden agenda. What the minister understood was the depth of his master’s involvement with the gentle and demure Mistress Seymour, whom the king was no nearer to enticing into his bed. With Anne’s shining example before her, she was holding out for marriage. If anything so dented the king’s faith in Anne that he made up his mind to get rid of her, Jane Seymour would soon wear a crown. Then anyone who helped him achieve his goal, and the happiness he was sure he would find with a new bride, would gain his gratitude. Jane might have the fate of Alice More before her; Cromwell had that of Wolsey before him. Henry was used to getting his own way. It was his minister’s job to get it for him or suffer the consequences of failure. The evidence we have on when or why the king decided that he no longer wanted Anne as his queen is inconclusive, but it was probably a sudden decision, perhaps taken shortly after Chapuys was forced to acknowledge her in the chapel at Greenwich. Jane, naturally, had even less forewarning than her sister-in-law. The first she knew was the dramatic arrest of her husband and her own subsequent interrogation.

But it had started a little before that. By the time he got around to interviewing Jane, Cromwell’s dossier was getting thicker. John Husee, writing to Honor Lisle, told her that three women had accused the queen of infidelity, “the lady Worcester, Nan Cobham and one maid mo[re].” Of the three, Husee offered no clues about what Nan or the maid might have said but he identified Elizabeth, Countess of Worcester, who had stood at Anne’s side during the coronation banquet, and about whom Anne’s mutterings had been overheard by Kingston, as “the first ground,” or original witness. The story was that she had betrayed Anne’s secret affairs with Mark and with George Boleyn when reproved by her brother, Sir Anthony Browne, for her own immorality. Nothing she had done, she was supposed to have said wildly, was as bad as the behavior of the queen. As Jane was to find out for herself, anyone who concealed knowledge as spectacular as that was in peril. Browne, concerned for his own safety, therefore discussed the matter with Sir William Fitzwilliam, Elizabeth’s half brother, and the matter eventually reached the ears of Cromwell. Perhaps. In view of Anne’s friendship with the countess it all seems far-fetched but certainly something prompted the arrest of poor Smeaton.

What we do know is that Cromwell sent for the private correspondence of Bridget, Lady Wingfield, because one particular letter to her from Anne can be found in the British Library among documents extracted in the seventeenth century from the State Papers. Had Cromwell not kept the note, it would not have ended up here but in the private archive of the Wingfield family. As it is, it was seized at Cromwell’s fall and is therefore a matter of public record. Anne had written this puzzling letter some time before becoming Marquess of Pembroke. The note is conciliatory to the point of obsequiousness, for Anne apologizes profusely for appearing to neglect Bridget, acknowledging that she had not “at all times” showed “the love that I bear you as much as it was indeed,” but reassuring her that she did in fact love her “a great deal more than I fair for.” Anne’s love, was, she stated, “unfeigned” she loved Lady Wingfield “so entirely.” Indeed, she said, she hoped that Bridget would accept that she would “write nothing to comfort you in your trouble” but would “abide by it as long as I live.” The nature of that trouble probably mystified the minister as much as it does us. What he surely realized, though, was that Anne wanted to keep on the right side of Bridget; she did not want her as an enemy. And the only possible reason for that was that Lady Wingfield knew something that Anne preferred to keep hidden from her royal lover, presumably originating either from Anne’s early years in Kent or when she had first come to court. And when Bridget died some time in 1534, she is alleged to have made a deathbed confession, the golden nugget that Cromwell gathered up and that had raised his suspicions in the first place.

Thus, Jane Rochford found herself dragged into a maelstrom of intrigue, innuendo, and speculation. For when Cromwell sent for her, he already had much of what he needed not only to bring down Anne and her circle but also to make possible Henry’s marriage to Jane Seymour, the woman Henry was positive was his ideal bride. A few more details were all that was required. The questions to Jane would have come thick and fast. There is no word-for-word transcript of what they were but the record of the trials of both Anne and George Boleyn give us a plethora of clues. How often did George and Anne meet? Who was present on those occasions? Were they ever totally alone? Did he ever go into her bedroom? Was she in bed at the time? Was he ever there alone with her? How did they behave when they were together? What did they talk about? Did either of them ever speak about the king? What did they say? How did they say it, respectfully or mockingly? Did they say it to each other or to someone else? If so, to whom? How often? When? Did Anne ever confide any intimate details about her sexual relationship with Henry to Jane? Had the queen conducted any love affairs with anyone else? Did she ever mention Harry Percy, now Earl of Northumberland? How did she behave with Norris? With Weston? With Brereton? With Page? With Wyatt? What was her demeanor with the other gentlemen of the court? What did she say about the Princess Dowager? About Lady Mary? About the Duke of Richmond?

Faced with such relentless, incessant questions, which she had no choice but to answer, Jane would have searched her memory for every tiny incident she could think of. This was not the moment for bravado and anyway the arrests had been so sudden and unexpected that there was no time to separate out what testimony might be damaging, what could be twisted to become so, or what could only be innocuous no matter what the interpretation. By the end of the various sessions, Cromwell had what he wanted. All he had to do was to put together all the “facts” he had gleaned from all those whom he had interrogated and finalize the details on how the trials were to be conducted. Coincidentally, or some would say with considerable preliminary planning and foresight, commissions of Oyer and Terminer had been established on April 24 in Middlesex and Kent to look into serious criminal activity.
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That, of course, would cover any cases of treason that might surface. On April 27, Parliament had been summoned, less than two weeks after it had been dissolved. That would be useful too. By May Day, then, the necessary apparatus was already in place, most of the ground prepared.

There was still much work for the minister and the council to do before all was ready for the trials of such high-profile prisoners. Cromwell wanted a watertight case. In the meantime, Henry consoled himself with the solicitous Jane Seymour, sure that he was lucky to be alive, free from the clutches of the evil Anne. His children were lucky too. Chapuys informed Charles that when Richmond went to his father to wish him good night on the evening of Anne’s arrest, Henry “began to weep, saying that he and his sister, meaning the Princess Mary, were greatly bound to God for having escaped the hands of that accursed whore, who had determined to poison them.” As for the Boleyns, there was little they could do. Norfolk swiftly disassociated himself from his niece, as did the prudent Thomas from his son and daughter. Like Jane’s father, both Thomas and Norfolk could be expected to serve on the panel of peers that would be constituted to try them.

Jane’s main concern was for her husband. She had not deserted him through all their years of marriage; she did not do so now. Neither a visit nor a personal letter would have been permitted so she tried a more circuitous route: she sent a message to Kingston for George. In a letter to Cromwell, part of a cache of damaged documents saved from a fire in 1731, Kingston reported what she said. She asked how George was and promised that she would “humbly [make] suit unto the king’s highness” for him. The message was gratefully received by the otherwise abandoned George, who wanted to “give her thanks.” The prospect of a petition to Henry, or perhaps the council, from his wife, obviously gave him comfort. He asked Kingston at what time he would see the council and wept. In one of the tantalizing fragments that survived the fire, he went on to say, “for I think I [may not] come forth till I come to my judgment,” presumably meaning that without Jane’s aid he knew that no one would listen to his case before his trial.

Unfortunately, Jane’s chances of pleading with the king were slim. Access to the royal presence was virtually impossible. In any case, it was too late. The die was cast, and it was cast against the Boleyns. George was right. Only the formalities of the various trials stood between him and the block. Jane was about to become a widow.

CHAPTER
22

Death of the Falcon