Jane Boleyn: The True Story of the Infamous Lady Rochford (46 page)

But it was at Lincoln, the scene of the wonderful Mass in the abbey at which the dutiful queen knelt beside her husband, that events moved into another gear. This time Jane did not just deliver an epistle, she also helped arrange a tryst. Everywhere they stopped, Culpepper said, Catherine searched for quiet nooks and crannies “that would have served” as meeting places. She “would in every house seek for the back doors and back stairs,” he continued, and at Lincoln she was particularly lucky. In a visit that lasted only three days, the pair were able to meet on two nights, although their assignations did not go unnoticed.

Katherine Tylney reported that Catherine was “out of her chamber when it was late.” The queen was with Jane in Jane’s room, which was “up a little pair of stairs” conveniently close to hers. When Tylney went up there with Margaret, presumably Margaret Morton, the queen sent both women off to bed. Tylney obeyed, but the curious Margaret crept up to see what was going on. She did not return until 2 a.m. “Jesus, is not the Queen abed yet?” asked Tylney. “Yes, even now,” was the enigmatic response.

In fact, as Jane knew only too well, Catherine had spent most of that night with Culpepper, who later said, much to the fastidious disgust of the councilors, that he thought the assignation was in Catherine’s stool chamber.
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He had arrived at 11 p.m. and stayed until 3 a.m., simply talking, he maintained, “of themselves and of their loves before time.” Jane listened but heard little of what they said as they talked softly and “secretly,” although she did pick up that they spoke of Bessie Harvey, another of Culpepper’s loves, a woman to whom Catherine had contemptuously donated a damask gown. He had actually been lucky to get into the room at all. Catherine and Jane had been watching out for him in the darkness at the back door, when a watchman with a light suddenly appeared. He clearly took his duties seriously, realized that the outer door was unlocked, and much to the ladies’ consternation, proceeded to lock it. When Culpepper turned up a short while afterward, they “marveled how he came in”: it seems that his resourceful servant had picked the lock.

The careless use of attendants was, as Jane came to appreciate, foolhardy, as many of them could, and did, give evidence against her. On the second night at Lincoln, Catherine went into Jane’s room again, having sent all her ladies to bed except Katherine Tylney, who sat up with Jane’s female servant some distance away from the queen “in a little place by.” They stayed there while the queen “tarried also in a manner as long as she did the other night,” Tylney informed Wriothesley helpfully, but she had neither seen nor heard what went on. Staying up half the night might suit Catherine and Culpepper, but Jane, their supposed chaperone, had fallen asleep. She had not woken up, she said, “until the Queen did call her to answer Lovekyn,” another of Catherine’s ladies, who had come to knock on the door. Catherine, clearly furious that Lovekyn had appeared at all, ordered that no one should come to her bedchamber unless specifically summoned. She later vowed to dismiss Lovekyn, together with Margaret Morton. This would have been “without reason,” said an aggrieved Morton, going on to suggest that Catherine’s intention was to bring some of Jane’s cronies into the privy chamber. It was Margaret Morton, now watching out for anything untoward, who reported that she “first suspected the Queen at Hatfield when the Queen looked out at her privy chamber window at Mr. Culpepper.” Catherine stared at him “after such sort that she thought there was love between them,” Morton testified with the benefit of hindsight.

Morton proved a valuable source for the queen’s activities at Pontefract too. There, she said, Catherine, alone with Jane every night, “locked and bolted her chamber door on the inside.” The queen was too occupied with Culpepper to countenance any interruptions, even from her own husband. Indeed, when Anthony Denny of the king’s privy chamber went to Catherine’s room one evening, presumably to escort her to an amorous Henry, he found the door locked. As Morton alone reported the occurrence, the queen’s explanation is tantalizingly lost to us. Catherine’s mind was focused on Culpepper, not on Henry. Jane, acting as intermediary, told Culpepper where to be and at what time. By now Catherine was becoming a little jumpy, unnerved by the watchman locking the door on the outside at Lincoln. Convinced that the king had “set a watch” near her apartment, she consulted Jane. Jane then persuaded her own maidservant to stay up as a lookout. Since the coast was clear, Culpepper came the next night, remaining with her until the king went to bed. According to Culpepper, they were just talking. They seemed to do a lot of that. Jane maintained that she never knew what they actually said because she was always stationed too far away to hear. She knew that Catherine’s fears of discovery had not entirely abated, however. Culpepper stood on the stairs, she said, “ready always to slip down if noise came,” with petite Catherine standing on the step above the much taller young man.

Catherine’s trepidation did not make her call a halt to the affair. They met again at York, where Catherine teased Culpepper about the other lovers she could take if she chose. She accepted a ring from him, sending him two bracelets in return “to keep his arms warm.” And they were still enamored at the end of the progress, for Katherine Tylney, worth her weight in gold to the busy councilors, declared that yet again the queen had sent her to Jane with one of those cryptic requests about when she should “have the thing she promised her.”

If Catherine, Culpepper, and Jane ever imagined that all of this could stay hidden forever, they were roughly disabused of their fancies once the arrests began, and Dereham, thinking about his own neck, passed on what he suspected of Culpepper. Tylney, present both at Horsham and on the progress, was a star witness against Catherine with regard both to her conduct before and after marriage. Margaret Morton, so frequently in the right place at the right time, was another quick to tell her story, which was sometimes so close to that of Tylney as to indicate that they had spent many a cozy hour discussing what they had observed. There is no record of Culpepper’s servant, that expert lock picker, being questioned but he may well have been, and the same is true of Jane’s servant, Richard, who was probably the woman with whom Tylney had sat at Lincoln.

By the time Catherine had been sent to Syon and Jane and Culpepper arrested, the councilors had pieced together virtually the whole story. Culpepper was taken straight to the Tower, to be questioned in that bleak atmosphere, so conducive to confession. Although not tortured, he seemed to be cooperative, purporting to give a full account of all he could remember about the progress, Catherine’s gifts, and what they had talked about. He admitted that she had told him that if she “had tarried still in the maidens’ chamber, I would have tried [made love to] you.” At Lincoln, when she pleaded that “she must never love him,” he responded that he was so “bound” to her that he loved her “above all creatures.” At York, he said, the queen “desired communication with him how well she loved him.” Always, though, he said they just talked. Their romance was rooted in the language of love, not its practical application. He did not seem to think that the concept of this very experienced couple’s spending hour after hour in the middle of the night engrossed merely in conversation stretched credulity as, frankly, it does. When pressed, however, he uttered the one sentence that could condemn him whether or not the rest of his evidence was truthful. “He intended and meant to do ill [go to bed] with the Queen,” he said, “and that in like wise the Queen so minded to do with him.” Anyway, he accused, the real culprit was Jane. Not only was she “the carrier of all messages and tokens” between himself and Catherine, but she “provoked him much to love the Queen.” The offense was not his and certainly not Catherine’s. It was all Jane’s fault.

In that, at least, he was joined by the garrulous Margaret Morton. Growing envious of Jane’s preeminence within the privy chamber, Morton pointed the finger at her as “the principal occasion of the folly.” Catherine too also shifted the blame squarely onto her lady of the bedchamber. In a confession extracted just before she was sent to Syon, Catherine denied any sexual intimacy with Culpepper, stating that the only “bare of her” that he had ever touched was her arm. Everything between them was perfectly innocent, she maintained. They had just talked. In that, her story meshed with Culpepper’s, although, unlike him, she was careful not to divulge that they had talked of love or that she was prepared to “do ill” with him, if she had not already done so. And the only reason they had talked in the first place, she said desperately, was because Jane had pushed her into it. It had never been her own idea. It had been Jane, she claimed, who had begged her to speak to Culpepper, telling her that he “desired nothing else” and meant the queen “nothing but honesty.” It had been Jane who had calmed her fears that “this will be spied one day” and that then they would “be all undone.” It had been Jane who had chosen and bought the bracelets for Culpepper, after entreating the queen to let her do so. It had been Jane who had warned her to tell no one what was happening, promising, that she (Jane) would be “torn with wild horses” before she would confess it herself.

Catherine in her distress and confusion had forgotten her own highly incriminating invitation to Culpepper: “It makes my heart die to think I cannot be always in your company. Come when my Lady Rochford is here, for then I shall be best at leisure to be at your commandment.” This devastating note hardly supported her attempt to assert that all along it had been Jane who had talked her into the affair. Two days later, the councilors would raid Culpepper’s lodgings at court and seize his possessions, including this explosive document.

Nor could Catherine consult Culpepper to make sure that their stories tallied. While Culpepper said that it was he who had pulled the cramp ring from Jane’s finger, and that when she had heard of it, Catherine had taken another from her own finger and had sent Jane to give it to him with a message, Catherine gave a conflicting version of this incident. She insisted that Jane had deliberately taken one from her to give him and had then taken another to “match it.” And while Culpepper alleged that it was the queen herself who “would in every house seek for the back doors and back stairs,” Catherine claimed that it had been Jane. “At every lodging,” the cornered queen said, Jane would “search the back doors and tell her of them if there were any, unasked.” Jane, she continued, had even found “an old kitchen” at Greenwich where Catherine and Culpepper could “speak.” And during these nocturnal liaisons, said the queen, it was she herself who had to make Jane sit “near” rather than wander off or turn a blind eye, which, she reported, Jane had tended to do.

The more she talked, the more Catherine tied her herself up in knots in her frantic attempt to extricate herself. At one point, she tried to throw the blame on Culpepper, protesting that when she had wanted to end the friendship, he would not listen. “Sweet little fool,” she said she had called him. But mostly she blamed Jane. She had started the whole thing, insisting it would be safe, reassuring her that men would be bound to look at her. Jane, she added, had even said that another man, Thomas Paston, Culpepper’s colleague in Henry’s privy chamber, “bore her favor.”

Perhaps Catherine really thought that she might escape Henry’s vengeance and leave Jane to pay the price. After all, Jane was a Boleyn, a woman whose own husband, according to Henry and the judgment of the courts, had thought nothing of having an incestuous relationship with his whore of a sister: anything, therefore, could be believed of her. It was worth a try. Yet for Catherine to believe that Henry’s hardened councilors would be taken in by her story that she was little more than putty in the hands of her lady-in-waiting was a forlorn hope. For was it not Catherine who had already confronted, and defeated, Princess Mary by taking away two of her maids? A woman who could stand up to Henry’s daughter could certainly stand up to Jane.

Jane saw herself as the victim, not the instigator, of the whole sorry mess but Catherine’s evidence, so useful as the basis for an indictment against everyone involved, ensured that her sojourn in the Tower would be terrifying. Because Jane was a viscountess, she had the consolation of knowing that Henry’s skillful torturers would not touch her body but the incessant questioning, so horribly reminiscent of her interviews following the arrests of Anne and George, was enough to petrify her. Her sworn deposition, taken at her interrogation, is quite short and to the point. She cataloged meetings between her mistress and Culpepper. She mentioned Bessie Harvey, she remembered Culpepper’s servant picking the lock, she talked of Catherine’s standing above Culpepper on the stairs, and she accepted that she had helped the queen look out for him. She denied nothing. But she did go one step further than Culpepper: she did not think his affair with Catherine was platonic. “What they might speak and do together,” she said, she was “never the privier.” As she was also asleep on at least one occasion, they had every opportunity to express their love. She thought, she finally said outright in her sworn statement, “that Culpepper hath known the Queen carnally considering all things that this deponent hath heard and seen.”

She stuck to the truth as she saw it. That was what she had done in 1536 and she had survived. No lady-in-waiting had followed Anne to the block; no doubt she hoped that none would this time either. Even if she was brought to trial, found guilty, and condemned, the king had the power to pardon her. He could grant a reprieve up until the very last minute. Only recently he had done just that to Sir Edmond Knyvett, who had been sentenced to lose his hand for a violent blow he had struck Thomas Clere, ironically a Boleyn relation, “in the tennis play within the court.” All had been made ready for the amputation: the king’s cook had his knife, the sergeant of the scullery had his mallet, irons to cauterize the stump were heating in the fire. Then, just as the cook was about to perform his gruesome task, Henry had called a halt to the proceedings and the errant Knyvett had been freed. So, from Jane’s point of view, telling the truth might be worthwhile.