Jane Boleyn: The True Story of the Infamous Lady Rochford (44 page)

W
HEN
C
RANMER,
accompanied by a handful of other councilors, entered Catherine’s apartments, she and Jane were in mortal danger. All hinged on exactly what Henry had discovered. But, although the peril remained grave, both the queen and Jane could feel only overwhelming relief that the archbishop’s focus was solely on Catherine’s life before she had met the king rather than afterward. What Catherine realized, and what Jane did not, was how much dirt could surface concerning her teenage years.

Jane, like everyone else at court, knew about the queen’s upbringing. It was common knowledge, arousing minimal interest. Because her mother, Joyce, had died when she was little and her father, at one point comptroller of Calais, had found it impossible or inconvenient to look after her, Catherine had been dispatched to Agnes Tylney, the widow of the second Duke of Norfolk, and her stepgrandmother, to be brought up in the dowager duchess’s houses at Horsham in Sussex and at Lambeth in London. Since children were frequently sent away from home to the households of rich patrons or relatives, few at court had felt much sympathy for Catherine’s plight, although it was true that she had probably been younger than was usual when she first went to Horsham. The dowager duchess had kept a fairly open house. She had other youngsters in her care, including, at times, Catherine’s siblings and cousins, as well as the daughters of various neighbors, so Catherine’s childhood had not been lonely or unhappy. At night, there would have been chatter and laughter in the maidens’ chamber, where they all slept together, often sharing beds. By day, there were lessons. The busy duchess had arranged for the girls to be taught to read and write and, with a pragmatic eye on acceptable feminine accomplishments, had even paid for one Henry Manox, a musician, to give them music lessons. Manox, however, had been interested in giving the bubbly and precocious Catherine somewhat more than music lessons.

And it was the extraordinary details of Catherine’s romps with Manox, and with Francis Dereham, another of the bucks at Horsham, that had been relayed to the archbishop, and that he had in turn passed on to the king by letter a few days earlier. There is no reason to assume that Jane had known anything of the queen’s youthful adventures. She knew quite enough about what Catherine had been up to over the past few months to disturb her sleep but the queen had hoped to keep her earlier genie safely locked in its bottle as well. Unfortunately, too much was known by too many.

And one of them, Mary Hall, born Lascelles, had let the genie out. When Mary’s brother, John, had come to visit her in Sussex, he had suggested that she should ask Catherine for employment since Mary had known the queen at Horsham. His sister’s response had put John in a terrible position: Mary vowed not to approach Catherine because she was “light, both in living and conditions.” When pressed, Mary had gone further. Manox, she had maintained, knew a “privy mark” (a private mark) on Catherine’s body and Francis Dereham “had lain in bed” with Catherine “in his doublet and hose.”

John’s dilemma had been acute, and it was one that Jane could appreciate. If he buried the information, only for it to come out later, he would be in dire trouble for concealing it. Then, he could be deemed guilty of misprision of treason, an offense carrying a maximum penalty of life imprisonment and confiscation of all property. On the other hand, if he passed on Mary’s remarks, and they were shown to be false or unproven, he would have slandered the queen and incurred Henry’s displeasure. Either way, his position was grim. On balance, he had felt it better to tell someone, although quite who to tell had been another difficulty. In the end, he had confessed all to Cranmer, who, “being much perplexed,” and wary of bearing Hall’s burden alone, had consulted Audley and Hertford, Queen Jane’s brother. Thus it was that the archbishop had written to the king and the investigation had been initiated. Everyone remotely connected with what might have occurred in the maidens’ chamber had been rounded up and interrogated with the utmost rigor. So devastating were the results that the wounded king had left Hampton Court and sent Cranmer to question his jewel.

By the time Cranmer walked into Catherine’s apartments, the material already amassed by Henry’s councilors was staggering. What is also staggering is that 450 years after the incredulous councilors scribbled them down, we can still read their original handwritten accounts. They were the ones at the king’s fingertips while he waited to hear of Catherine’s responses to Cranmer’s gentle probing when she faced the archbishop on that winter’s day at Hampton Court.

The queen began by denying everything but was confronted by a mountain of evidence. For a start there was Mary Hall’s testimony, collected by the Earl of Southampton, Cromwell’s successor as Lord Privy Seal, who had rushed down to Sussex to see her. Mary had been very forthcoming. After working as a nurse to the children of Lord William Howard, the Duchess of Norfolk’s son, she had become a chamberer to the duchess herself, which is when she had met the nubile Catherine. Henry Manox, maintained Mary Hall, fell “so far in love” with Catherine that Mary “did abhor it.” Tokens were carried back and forth between them by the female servants and Mary had become worried enough to take Manox to task. If the duchess ever found out what was going on, she warned him, she would “undo” him, for Catherine came “of a noble house.” She was so far out of Manox’s league that should he marry Catherine, Mary prophesied, “some of her blood will kill thee.” Manox had shrugged off her remarks. “Hold thy peace, woman,” he had retorted. “I know her well enough for I have had her by the cunt and know it amongst a hundred.” Catherine had even promised him “her maidenhead.” According to Mary, when Catherine berated Manox, he had responded that “he was so far in love with her that he wist not what he said.” For a fleeting moment, Mary had thought that Catherine had dealt firmly with the bragging Manox but then she saw her walking with him behind the orchard “and no creature with them but they two alone.”

To compound her foolishness, when bored by Manox, Catherine had quickly moved on to the charms of Francis Dereham. Mary confessed to seeing “them kiss after a wonderful manner, for they would kiss” and hang together as though they were “two sparrows.” It was not long before Catherine ordered Mary to steal the key to the maidens’ chamber so that she could let Dereham in. Catherine “would go to naked bed,” said Mary, and Dereham “would lay down upon the bed in his doublet and his hose.” Mary discussed the situation with another colleague, Alice Wilkes, who told her that Dereham would lie on Catherine’s bed “till it was almost day,” and that many times there was “a puffing and blowing betwixt them.” When she could think of no more to report to Southampton, the obliging Mary provided the minister with a list of several other people whom she thought might know something. The diligent councilors set to work to trace them all. Trace them they did.

Manox was easy to find. He had in fact done rather well for himself after leaving the duchess’s employment. He had married Margaret, the widow of Nicholas Jennings, a wealthy London alderman, and now lived very comfortably with her in the late alderman’s residence in Streatham. He too proved most forthcoming. He agreed that he had asked to touch “her secrets,” a favor he demanded as a special sign of her love. Clearly dismissing his request as unimportant, Catherine had consented on the condition “that he would desire no more” for, she had asserted, “I will never be naught [wicked or sinful] with you and able to marry me you be not.” Although he had touched her private parts quite often, he maintained that that was all he ever had done but he too confirmed that Dereham had replaced him in the fickle Mistress Howard’s affections. Dereham, Manox said, and his friend, Edward Waldegrave, who was infatuated by another maiden, “haunted nightly” Catherine’s chamber “and would commonly banket [banquet] and be merry there till two or three of the clock in the morning.” Indeed, Manox had felt so jealous of his successor that he had written an anonymous letter to the duchess to advise a random check on her maidens’ bedchamber to see whether it contained more than maidens.

Catherine would surely be able to remember the incident. And she could hardly have forgotten her intimacies with Dereham, now so meticulously documented from the statements of Mary Hall and so many other deponents. Dereham, who was “seriously examined,” a code for torture, confessed “that he hath had carnal knowledge with the Queen afore marriage, being in bed with her in his doublet and hose divers times and six or seven times in naked bed.” When Dereham’s close friend, Robert Davenport, was also interrogated “seriously,” and imprisoned alongside him in the Tower, he corroborated Dereham’s statement. He had, he affirmed, “seen the said Dereham and Catherine Howard kiss oft and lie together upon the bed.” He had even heard Katherine Tylney, who at that time had to share Catherine’s bed, plead, “I pray you Mr Dereham, lie still.” Since Davenport went on to say that he could “hear Dereham blow and strive to have had his will,” poor Katherine Tylney’s entreaties for a peaceful night were evidently ignored. Davenport also mentioned other times when Dereham had visited Catherine’s chamber and “no woman was with her.”

The councilors were thoroughness epitomized. All evidence was carefully substantiated, cross-checked and cross-referenced, no possible witness ignored. They took particular care to track down any servants who had left the duchess’s employ but might possess valuable information. One such was Andrew Maunsay. He swore that “he thrice saw the Queen, then Mrs. Catherine Howard, lie in her bed and one Durnand [Dereham], a gentleman then in the house, lie suspiciously on the bed in his doublet and hose.” Unaware that she had already been interrogated, he suggested that the councilors should contact Katherine Tylney who “lay in the bed at the time and can tell more.”

Still Catherine continued to lie. When, finally, she decided to cooperate and start to tell the truth, up to a point at least, Cranmer felt sorry for her. He “found her in such lamentation and heaviness, as I never saw no creature,” he wrote to Henry. “It would have pitied any man’s heart in the world to have looked upon her,” he continued. She wept, she raged, she worked herself up into a “frenzy” of fear. She did admit her relationship with Dereham but swore that all that he “did unto her was of his importune forcement, and, in a manner, violence, rather than of her free consent and will.” Yet she hoped for a miracle: that Henry might pardon her. Calling herself his “most sorrowful subject and most vile wretch in the world,” she begged him to take into account her “youth,” her “ignorance,” her “frailness.” Although she acknowledged herself “worthy of most extreme punishment,” she trusted to his “infinite goodness, pity, compassion and mercy.” Her written confession was so perfectly pitched to tug at Henry’s heartstrings as to suggest that she was given help to compose it.

The atmosphere in the queen’s apartments during the next few days was tense. Their routine interrupted, her ladies tried to calm and comfort Catherine as more and more revelations came to light. The agony of suspense was so much worse for Jane. While every new disclosure was horrifying enough, she knew it was but the tip of the iceberg. Even the once fun-loving Catherine was far too apprehensive for amusement. “Whereas, before, she did nothing but dance and rejoice,” Marillac informed Francis, “now, when the musicians come they are told that it is no more the time to dance.” Soon, Hampton Court was strictly guarded. For as long as the interrogations focused only on Catherine’s life before her wedding, both she and Jane felt that they might survive. It could be a matter of holding their nerve. The king would be furious, he would be disillusioned, he would be hurt, but he would not be branded a cuckold for the second time. He might, therefore, be compassionate. The Duchess of Norfolk, oblivious to her own impending imprisonment, was optimistic. Davenport told his interrogators, Sir John Gage, Sir Richard Rich, and Henry Bradshaw, that he had heard the duchess say that she believed Dereham and Catherine were in trouble “for some matter done when they were here,” in which case they “should not die for it.” She may have been right, for Cranmer himself had at one point reassured Catherine that the king was inclined to mercy.

And there could have been a way out. If Catherine and Dereham had agreed to marry and had then copulated, that could amount to a precontract. Since Anne of Cleves’s presumed precontract with the son of the Duke of Lorraine had provided the principal cause for the annulment of her union with Henry, a comparable situation could now arise. But Catherine refused to grasp the lifeline. While she admitted that Dereham had left the huge sum of one hundred pounds with her for safekeeping when he had gone away, and that marriage talk had been bandied about between them, she would not concede that it amounted to a precontract. The archbishop reported back to the king that what she had said was “not so much as I thought,” but he still believed it “sufficient to prove a contract.” Unfortunately, further revelations would make the precontract escape route irrelevant.

Until that happened, it was a waiting game. The queen hoped that her confession would stop the questions. It did not; the questions went on, moving in ever widening directions. Sooner or later, the councilors would latch on to Catherine’s more recent conduct and that would entrap Jane as well. A distraught Catherine almost lost her mind with worry. She “refuses to drink or eat and weeps and cries like a madwoman, so that they must take away things by which she might hasten her death,” wrote a well-informed Marillac to the French king. Although less serious than the damning facts that so far lay undiscovered, an additional complication was that Catherine had had fresh contact with Dereham. Her relationship with Manox had indeed petered out once he had carved himself a new life with his rich widow, and for a while she had lost touch with Dereham too. Much to the suspicion of the investigating councilors, he had gone to Ireland when his frolics with Catherine had come to an end. It would have been better for both had he stayed there. But the break was only temporary. In a gesture that could be misinterpreted as acquiescence to blackmail, which maybe it was, the queen had employed Joan Bulmer, an acquaintance from her Horsham days, after Joan had written to her seeking a position for old times’ sake. Stupidly, the queen had also welcomed Dereham into her household upon his return from Ireland. Now there were questions about whether they had resumed their affair. Since she had met her former lover within the confines of her privy chamber “divers times” and had once publicly advised him to “take heed what words you speak,” a belated nod toward discretion, there was yet more scope for Henry’s unremitting investigators.