Jane Boleyn: The True Story of the Infamous Lady Rochford (40 page)

And so she did not sign. Knowing that this was her one opportunity to secure her future, she would not waste it. Baldwin was ready to part with his twelve hundred pounds only if he felt the sale was secure, so Jane had only a further five days to consent or Thomas would come to a new agreement with Baldwin concerning Swavesey. Frantic discussions must have taken place behind the scenes before Jane considered a satisfactory compromise had been reached but eventually she did sign the original document.

The situation was complicated further because Jane schemed to obtain a private act of Parliament as a form of insurance policy. She was no fool; she knew just how sharp Thomas could be if money was at stake and she also knew that he was aging. Should he die before the entire deal came to fruition, there was no way of knowing whether it would be honored. An act of Parliament, however, would be sacrosanct; to procure one was merely another variety of the back-watching that was endemic in her family. Such acts were not easy to get yet she not only managed it, but hers was special: the king signed it personally, a tremendous coup for Jane. She was no longer a pariah, contaminated by association with George and Anne. She had worked her way back into a position of trust. She even managed to obtain a grant of two Warwickshire manors from the king in her own right, although she would never have dared approach Henry herself. Such a delicate matter required time and the intercession of an intermediary. In her case, that was likely to have been Cromwell. He had helped her once and might have done so again. Perhaps she had been of some use to him, or perhaps he was simply being generous to a woman who had lost so much. Sometimes the minister did put himself out to be of assistance to the wives and children of traitors, as he did for several dependents of those executed after the Pilgrimage of Grace.

And when news of Thomas’s increasing ill health filtered through to her, there was all the more reason for Jane to make sure that her hard-won concessions were not lost. Thomas survived his wife by less than a year. In March 1539, at sixty-two or sixty-three years of age—we cannot be entirely certain—Jane’s father-in-law died peacefully in his own chamber at Hever, “the end of a good Christian man,” his steward informed Cromwell. On hearing the news, the king paid just over sixteen pounds for masses for the “soul’s health” of the man whose children he had executed. Thomas was buried in the church at Hever. His last resting place can be seen to this day, a monumental life-size flat brass effigy over his tomb showing him resplendent in his robes as a Knight of the Garter.

There is no record of Jane’s inheriting anything from her father-in-law but she did not expect to do so. By opting for a jointure settlement confirmed by act of Parliament and introduced in the House of Lords two months after Thomas’s death, her fortunes were very much improved. All three readings were completed in one day, Friday May 23, 1539. With the king’s firm signature already on the document, the whole thing went through on the nod, and in the presence of men she had known at court for many years. Her father was there, keeping a watchful eye on his daughter’s finances, in the same company as Norfolk, Suffolk, Cranmer, the Earl of Hertford, and most important, Cromwell himself.

Jane was entitled to feel delighted with the final bill. She was to receive a life interest in “the manor of Swavesey within the county of Cambridge of the clear yearly value of a hundred marks.” And it did not stop there. She gained further land in Cambridge and in Norfolk too. Her chief prize was the Boleyn stronghold of Blickling. Naturally the house would revert to James upon her death but it was an excellent base in the meantime, and perhaps remembering how George had reacted when Henry had entrusted him with Beaulieu, she quickly moved in some of her goods. Crucially, because of the parliamentary act, her right and title to all of these lands was assured. Even had they wanted to, the remaining Boleyns could not touch any of them. Jane had them for her lifetime. The Staffords and James Boleyn had already recognized this. When applying to Henry for his consent to their inheriting various other properties from Thomas, they had complied with the law and listed all they had gained immediately upon his death, together with respective values—the king was always keen to know about values and would penalize heavily anyone who foolishly attempted to cheat him—and they had also declared what they would inherit in the future. That meant lands that Jane currently held but would revert to the Boleyn family upon her death.

For Jane, the whole messy jointure episode was now closed. She now had a decent income, over two hundred pounds a year, and her own manor house at Blickling. Should she choose to do so, and that she would have to decide, she could live very comfortably in the Norfolk countryside. She had achieved much more than the hundred marks of Thomas’s first offer. Clearly her hard bargaining had paid off. But she also knew that what she now had was a drop in the ocean compared with what she would have enjoyed had George outlived Thomas. On his father’s death, George would have netted both his title and his estates. James affirmed that the total value of the lands he inherited from Thomas, excluding what he would eventually get on the reversion of Jane’s manors, was just over £116; the Staffords got more, declaring a little over £488. All of that would have boosted George’s income rather than theirs had he not been caught up in the maelstrom that destroyed his sister. Then too his property would not have been forfeit to the king, and with Henry’s continued favor instead of his displeasure, George would probably have grown richer still. There would even have been the chance that just like Suffolk, he might have been presented with a dukedom by his royal brother-in-law. So Jane’s jointure settlement, while very welcome, and a great relief, served only to remind her of what she had lost. She was a widowed viscountess in comfortable circumstances but had events panned out differently she could have been Countess of Wiltshire at the very least, living on more than four times what she would now get. She might also have had a family of her own; she had still been young enough to conceive a child when George was taken from her.

But the past could not be recaptured. She had put it behind her once, she had to do so again. She had rebuilt her life after what was perhaps the worst type of disaster to befall a woman of her age and class. To regret what might have been was a waste of energy; far better to concentrate on what was to come. A second marriage was always a possibility. With an income of two hundred pounds, she was a reasonable catch. The money would die with her, though, and she had nothing else to bequeath to a new husband’s family. Perhaps that explains why, although so many widows remarried, sometimes with almost indecent haste, Jane never did. Or maybe her own firsthand experience had revealed the risks, pitfalls, and grief that a second sortie to the altar could bring and she could not face that emotional trauma again.

So, with her marital status unchanged, Jane had to think about her next step. She had a definite choice: calm tranquillity at Blickling or the excitement of the court. The house that Jane inherited at Blickling is no longer there. All that remains is one chimney, which has been incorporated into the grand Jacobean mansion that replaced it shortly after James died, but the site, nestling in the gentle Norfolk countryside, is of course the same. It is pretty, but remote, a far cry from the noise and bustle of Henry’s palaces. And it was to Henry’s world that Jane was addicted. However, unless the king married again, there was no real place for her there. Without a husband in whose wake she could follow like a dutiful wife, the only chance for a lucrative return to court was if the king gave way to his council and there was a new queen for her to serve. That is precisely what happened.

CHAPTER
28

A Question of Trust

W
ITH
B
LICKLING NOW HERS,
Jane could relax. Those anxious years following George’s death were surely over. By dint of hard-nosed bargaining, she had money and property in her own right for the first time in her life. She had come of age. But for Jane, a creature of the court, the rumor that Henry was seeking a new wife was welcome. Blickling was all very well but she needed more than the peaceful existence it offered. Henry wanted a change too. His mourning for Queen Jane was not prolonged; a dutiful son of the church, he accepted that to wallow in grief was tantamount to challenging the will of God. There was still a world to enjoy, and in that world was a potential fourth wife. The French ambassador Marillac noticed Henry’s demeanor. “The king, who in some former years has been solitary and pensive,” he wrote, “now gives himself up to amusement, going to play every night upon the Thames, with harps, chanters, and all kinds of music and pastime…all his people think this a sign of his desire to marry if he should find an agreeable match.”

And an agreeable match was found. With her mind set on a return to the privy chamber, Jane was agog for news of the identity of her new mistress. It took a while to narrow down the field. Henry had no pretty English girl waiting patiently this time, Queen Jane’s death having caught him unawares. Gossip about potential candidates intensified. Many bets were on the fetching young widow Christina of Milan, especially once Holbein’s portrait of her was seen. Even in her black mourning clothes, with a tight-fitting cap covering her hair and her hands demurely linked across her stomach, there was a hint of promise in her eyes, a suspicion of a smile about her lips. She would make a worthy wife for any man. Henry certainly thought so, but disappointingly, nothing resulted from diplomatic overtures. Nothing came of any other candidate either. Then, with the pope’s punishment of excommunication, threatened for ages, finally coming into effect, and with Charles and Francis becoming friendlier and friendlier, meeting for discussions and parting “with much love and affection,” the more complex international situation made everyone at court increasingly jittery. No one liked the idea of standing alone against the combined might of Spain, the Habsburg Empire, and France, especially with Henry’s nephew, James V of Scotland, never trustworthy, prowling on the northern border. In this tense period, Henry’s choice of the Duke of Cleves’s sister, Anne, came as a relief. Alliance with the German duchy made perfect sense. Jane had been here before: some years earlier, George had been involved in negotiations with the Schmalkaldic League, the union of German Protestant princes. Any plans Henry may have had then had failed to materialize, but the current political landscape necessitated drastic measures.

Henry wanted this marriage and he wanted it fast, as soon as all the preliminaries could be sorted out. Allies were always valuable, particularly since he felt vulnerable at home too. There seemed to be almost constant plotting. No one knew whether the person with whom they were chatting and laughing in the tapestried corridors and paneled rooms of the royal palaces was really a traitor, planning for foreign invasion or the murder of the king.

One particularly involved plot had recently been uncovered. The king’s once-favored choice for the archbishopric of York, Reginald Pole, who now lived in exile, had betrayed him, happy to encourage a foreign-led invasion to restore traditional Catholicism. It had been Pole’s relatives and their friends who paid the price. Lord Montague, one of the cardinal’s brothers, together with the Marquess of Exeter and Sir Edward Neville, had been arrested, put in the Tower, and brought to trial for treason. Their servants and acquaintances had been thoroughly interrogated but the most damning evidence had come from Pole’s second brother, Sir Geoffrey Pole, who was also arrested. He had almost fallen over himself in his eagerness to dredge up every communication his fellow prisoners had ever had with Reginald, together with any apparently incriminating remarks or ambiguous conversational nuances that he could remember. What was particularly staggering was the alleged involvement of Mary’s much-respected former governess, the elderly Countess of Salisbury, Richard III’s niece and mother of the Poles. Jane knew everyone implicated, from those on the fringes like the Marchioness of Exeter, never a Boleyn friend, who was questioned yet again, to the countess herself. Jane was also in a position to have insider knowledge of the various trials because her father, gaining further unwelcome experience in such matters, had been on the panel of peers who heard the cases against Montague and Exeter and, unsurprisingly, had found them guilty. Both, together with Neville, had been executed. The bewildered and bereaved elderly countess was still in her prison cell, a death sentence hovering over her, while the king magnanimously pardoned her son Geoffrey for providing such useful information. For those with a sound instinct for self-preservation, coming clean sometimes worked. The whole episode was terrifying but at least the king had escaped harm, so his loyal subjects could sleep more easily in their beds. Yet with traitors lurking behind every door, it was so difficult to be confident in the loyalty of anyone.

The death or capture of the conspirators, though, meant that such unpleasantness could be put aside and the focus of attention could pass to the new queen and what she might be like. The bare facts were that she was twenty-four years old and was certainly a Catholic, for Cleves was not a Protestant state despite its links with states that were. The bonus was that she was supposed to be beautiful. Henry had ordered stringent checks on her appearance, such things mattering to him very much. After all, he was the one most affected; he was the one who would have to put his neck into a “great yoke.” And all reports were favorable. Those who saw her, including Henry’s envoys and some of his own councilors, praised her good looks. One went so far as to assert that she excelled the beauteous Christina “as the golden sun did the silver moon.” Keen to see for himself, Henry sent Holbein to the court of Cleves just to check. The artist’s finished portrait pleased him. Looking intently at the canvas, the king saw a young woman rather than a young girl, with soft eyes, a slightly wide nose, and a delicate mouth. Carefully nurtured by her mother, she was said to be virtuous, a good needlewoman, moderate in diet, and gentle of temper. So far, so good. It was true that she spoke only German and was no musician but no doubt both drawbacks could be remedied. He could not wait to see her. Neither could the ladies designated to attend her.