Jane Boleyn: The True Story of the Infamous Lady Rochford (50 page)

It took no major stretch of the imagination for Foxe (or Day) to blame “that bawd,” who even had a recusant nephew, for forging a key letter to destroy Anne and George. The myth was taking shape. Foxe’s book was made required reading by a proclamation issued by Cecil. It was a best seller, readily available to those who wished to use it or to cite it. Perhaps one author did. Edward, Lord Herbert of Cherbury, published
The Life and Raigne of King Henry the Eighth
in 1649. Echoing the marginal addition to Foxe, he denounces Jane as “wife to the late Lord Rochford, and noted to be a particular instrument in the death of Queen Anne.” Like Foxe, however, he does not bring Jane into his description of the events during Anne’s own arrest or trial but makes his damning condemnation only much later, and in parentheses, when talking of the attainder and execution of Catherine Howard.

After Charles II’s Restoration, Peter Heylin takes the myth a stage further. In
Affairs of Church and State in England During the Life and Reign of Queen Mary,
published in 1660, Heylin states that the evidence against Anne comprised only Mark Smeaton’s confession and “the calumnies of Lady Rochford.” Jane, he contends, had “aggravated” the story that George had been “found whispering” to Anne when she was in bed. Without concrete motives for Jane behaving so falsely, Heylin suggests that the cause could be “jealousy” toward her husband or “inveterate hatred” of Anne “according to the peccant humor of most sisters-in-law.” Like Foxe before him, Heylin smugly points to the events of 1542: Jane “most deservedly lost her head within few years after, for being accessory to the adulteries of Queen Catherine Howard.” This was the best Heylin could manage to justify his exposition of Jane’s life.

Bishop Gilbert Burnet delivers the coup de grâce in his
History of the Reformation of the Church of England,
beginning with the first and second volumes in 1679. Jane, he writes, was “spiteful” and, blatantly picking up Heylin’s jibe, “jealous” of George. She “carried many stories to the King, or some about him, to persuade, that there was a familiarity between the Queen and her brother.” As her conduct in the Catherine Howard affair proves, or so Burnet maintains, Jane was “a woman of no sort of virtue.” Her execution, therefore, is “God’s justice” because she “had the chief hand” in the deaths of Anne and George, her “spite and other artifices” having “so great a hand” in their fall.

Jane is damned indeed. And because Burnet’s books have been used so frequently from his own time until the present day, his judgments have largely been followed. However, in the third and final volume of his work, published in 1714, there is a brief sentence that usually slips by unnoticed but that actually contradicts what he had previously said about Jane: the “confession of Smeaton,” Burnet at last concedes, “was all that could be brought against her [Anne].” He cannot have it both ways.

Burnet’s sources were vast. He could certainly refer to Foxe. He had access to the original documents stored in the Tower of London, the State Paper Office, and the Cottonian Library before the fire at Ashburnham House in 1731 that destroyed or damaged a quarter of those manuscripts. He could use the various chronicles, he could use Heylin and Herbert—the words with which he chooses to malign Jane are strikingly similar to Herbert’s—but he also acknowledges an “eye-and ear-witness” to the trial proceedings: Anthony Anthony, who wrote a journal of what he saw and heard while working at the Tower. Sadly, the journal is now lost to us, but it was still in existence until the late seventeenth century. Burnet cites it as one of his sources for Anne’s trial and execution but does not say which parts of his narrative are based on it. Anthony’s work is also listed among the authorities used by Stow in his historical work,
Annales of England.
This is fortuitous, since Stow, who was writing in Elizabeth’s reign and would surely have taken the opportunity to provide corroboration of her mother’s innocence had it been readily available and to condemn Jane as her traducer, does not blame Jane at all. Nor do the chroniclers Edward Hall (first published in 1548) or Raphael Holinshed (in 1577). Even William Camden, a more independent-minded historian and antiquary writing partly in Elizabeth’s reign and partly under James I, says nothing detrimental to Jane when describing Anne’s fall. Whether these authors apart from Stow were able to use Anthony Anthony’s journal is unknown, but specific references made to it in another source have caused major confusion as late as 2004.

Thomas Turner, or Tourneur as he liked to call himself, was elected president of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, in 1688. A keen scholar, he had easy access to a wealth of material including a version of Anthony Anthony’s journal and the first edition of Herbert’s
Life and Raigne of King Henry the Eighth.
Still sitting in Oxford’s Bodleian Library is the very same copy of Herbert that Turner read and annotated, together with some crabbily written notes, usually on separate sheets and bound awkwardly into the volume, transcribed “out of an old original diary or journal wrot with ye proper hand of one Mr. Anthony Anthony, surveyor of the ordnance in the Tower in the said K.H the 8th’s reign, the said Anthony being a contemporary to ye Action, and (as he sayeth himself) an eye-and ear-witness.” Other sources consulted by Turner for his remarks include Hall, Holinshed, Heylin, Richard Baker’s
Chronicle of the Kings of England
(1670), and John Strype’s
Ecclesiastical Memorials
(1721).

Turner, fortunately, was a meticulous note-taker with his own, unique system. When recording his comments, he begins with “Memorandum that…” or ends with “A.A.” if drawing from Anthony Anthony, as he does, for instance, when commenting on the executions of Fisher and More. When citing his other sources, Turner is equally explicit: “For better light in this dark business of the Queen’s crimes, see Dr. Heylin’s Church History,” he writes on one occasion, carefully citing the specific folio he had been reading. Should he choose to express opinions of his own, however, Turner prefaces his remarks with “Note that…”

His volume makes fascinating and, if we are to discern the role Jane played, essential reading, but the interpolated sheets containing Turner’s notes have been bound in the wrong order and therefore require sorting out and renumbering if they are to follow on and make complete sense. The critical passage is where Turner comments: “Note that the wife of Lord Rochford was a particular instrument in the death of Q. Anne (probably out of malice, because her husband had laid with the Q.) and yet this very woman was a conspirator in the adultery of Q. Katherine Howard afterward, and executed with her, see
postea
474.” This is not, as has recently been claimed, an extract from the lost journal of Anthony Anthony. It does not begin with “Memorandum that…” or end with “A.A.” but begins with “Note that…” So the passage is Turner’s own inference, most probably based on his reading of Herbert’s remark that Jane was “wife to the late Lord Rochford, and noted to be a particular instrument in the death of Queen Anne.” And this probability can be clinched as fact because Turner refers his readers to “
postea
474,” the exact page of Herbert on which (in Turner’s own mispaginated copy) the reference to Jane as a “particular instrument” is printed. At this same page 474 of his copy of Herbert, Turner interpolates an extract that genuinely was from Anthony Anthony’s journal, but all it says is “and both of them [Catherine Howard and Lady Rochford] beheaded on the green within the Tower on Monday 13 Feb. 33 H. 8 with the Axe. Jesu pardon their souls for their misdeeds. A.A.” In all of this, the damaging words about Jane come from Herbert, not Anthony Anthony. What Turner adds to the debate is no more than a cross-reference coupled with his own parenthetical, tentative suggestion as to why Jane might have acted as Herbert had described.

The remaining extracts we have from Anthony Anthony, some quite lengthy, which Turner faithfully transcribes into the Bodleian volume, are very useful—including, for example, Anne’s scaffold speech and Cromwell’s too—but nowhere do they say that Jane Rochford caused the deaths of Anne and George. When Anthony describes Anne’s trial, Jane’s name is entirely absent. And, like Spelman, Anthony Anthony was an “eye-and ear-witness” to what happened within the Tower walls in 1536 and, probably, in 1542. If he did not accuse Jane, then she had done nothing to warrant it. He could not have been the vital, mysteriously elusive source for Foxe’s devastating comment either.

When the young Jane set out from her parents’ home at Great Hallingbury for Henry’s court, she believed that she had the world before her. And for a while, she had. She married a man of her own age, from an up-and-coming family, and whom her father considered a good match. She should have become the traditional Tudor matron, running her household and coming to court when required, rather like a carbon copy of her own mother. She was destined to be the mistress of Hever and Blickling, dividing her time between those two great houses and the court presided over by Henry and Katherine of Aragon. Her sister-in-law, Anne, could be expected to have married well but should have been no more than a footnote in history, if that. Her husband, George, might well have become a royal councilor, following in the footsteps of his father, Sir Thomas, but under normal circumstances the Boleyns would not have been catapulted into positions of such supreme prominence.

But for normality to have existed, Prince Henry needed to have survived. He had not. And the king’s doubts about the legality of his marriage had festered. That her sister-in-law, Anne, should not only catch the eye of the king but become his wife, with George constantly at her side, had not been foreseeable when Jane had taken her marriage vows. We cannot know what Jane had really thought about the Boleyns’ changed fortunes but she had played her part in the ceremonies connected with Anne’s new rank, settled down within the bedchamber, and accepted the rewards of royal favor with no sign of unease. The lure of the court had swiftly cast its spell.

Then it had all gone wrong. Just as her husband’s world had crumbled, so had Jane’s. Jane took to her grave the intimate secrets of her relationship with George but to lie just to “be rid of him,” as Wyatt suggests, is absurd. A Tudor marriage was not predicated on romantic love. Had she and George seriously quarreled, and there is not a scrap of sound evidence to show that they had, they needed only to behave with dignity and decorum in public while leading virtually separate lives. George’s duties often took him away from home, and in any case, he and Jane would not be closeted away together day after day. She had no need to slander her husband, especially when the financial implications of such a move would be ruinous. To slide from a luxurious court lifestyle to managing on one hundred marks a year was not a prospect to be relished, and had she caused the death of his only son, she could hardly have envisaged Sir Thomas rushing to increase her allowance.

Jane had not rushed to tell tales but she had buckled under the pressure of relentless questioning, once the investigation was in progress. Confronting the first major test of her courage, she had given way. She had repeated to Cromwell Anne’s indiscretion about Henry’s sexual inadequacies, the specific remark that was passed to George on a slip of paper at his trial and which he had been ordered not to read out but only to give a yes or no answer. And it was her weakness under interrogation that gave her future detractors, happy to find a scapegoat to exonerate the king from the heinous charge of callously killing his innocent wife, the ammunition to maintain that it was her evidence that had fooled Henry and destroyed Anne and George. She had repeated Anne’s secret to her own husband, which in itself implies a relaxed rather than a failed union between herself and George, and she had confessed the same to Cromwell, but she had done no more than that.

It was, of course, enough. The piece of paper read out by George in blatant defiance of the court’s instruction could so easily be twisted, or misunderstood, and become not a slip of paper but a letter, perhaps the very letter that Constantine mentions. That in turn could have become confused with the letters that may (or may not) have been in circulation in France, about which Ales wrote to Elizabeth. And the letter stories grew and grew. “She hinted to the king that his wife carried on a criminal correspondence with her own brother,” wrote Smollett in 1759. The fictional letters ballooned into accounts of everything from rumors of adultery and whispers of incest, to the supreme crime of treason.

What matters is that Jane’s own actions made the accusations later leveled against her credible. She opened the floodgates herself. With considerable effort, she had carved a career for herself after George’s death. She had shown just how far a woman alone could progress, despite the handicaps she had faced, but then she had thrown it all away. When faced with Catherine’s demands, she succumbed once more. She could not break her addiction to the court and retire quietly to Blickling. It was a fatal mistake. Supporting Catherine’s silliness, for whatever reason, cost Jane not only her head but her reputation. Anything, even deliberately betraying her own family, could then be believed of such a woman. Jane had turned herself into the perfect target. She has been ever since. She is “that bawd,” “the infamous Lady Rochford,” a “woman of vice insaciatt” (insatiate). She is so “vile and vicious” that Anne, “a virtuous and truly spiritual Christian,” could “not but hate” her “unworthy behavior.” Small wonder then that she died “unlamented” and “unpitied.” Not only was she Catherine’s “associate,” but her lies “had plunged her husband and sister-in-law into an untimely grave.” Or so generation after generation has been educated to believe.

In fact, it is Jane who has been betrayed. She had told George what Anne had confided to her about Henry’s sexual inadequacies but a private conversation between husband and wife, even if she had confessed to it when interrogated, is not the same as inventing malicious tales to bring down the Boleyns. She was not a tale-teller: she certainly did not inform against Catherine when she had good reason to do so. It might have been better for her if she had. But, although she is innocent of the charge of bringing down the Boleyns, she is guilty of helping Catherine to conduct an illicit affair. She did not deny it. It was for this that Jane died, for this and for nothing else. And she died courageously. The woman who walked out onto Tower Green that morning walked calmly toward the scaffold, any former weakness overcome. She confessed that she had sinned, she asked those about her to learn from her faults, she prayed for her prince, she made a “godly end.” Whatever she had done wrong, and it was in fact very little, she paid the price. Her life was stolen from her. So was her story.