It was 11 July 1540, a Sunday, and a group of the king’s privy councillors had just been admitted into Queen Anna’s inner chamber at Richmond Palace.1 No doubt the women there looked up mistrustfully. How often unpleasant things had begun in this way. For Jane, Viscountess Rochford this might have felt something like a flashback: another time, another queen, another knife edge. But would Queen Anna follow her namesake, Jane’s sister-in-law Queen Anne Boleyn, to the Tower? Was anyone seeking to put her there?
Only a few days ago a similar delegation had arrived to inform Queen Anna that the legality of her marriage to Henry VIII was to be examined by a convocation of bishops, and that she must consent to this. Reduced to tears and bereft of the advice of her ambassador Karl Harst, who had been summoned to court to be given the same news separately, Anna had replied that ‘for all she knew, he was given her as a husband, and this was what she saw in him, and nothing could separate them but death’.2 Though she had been brought to consent, Harst thought that she was not fully aware of what she was signing, since the copies of the documents had not been translated into German.3 Now they were back, six men led by Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk. Suffolk explained that the bishops’ convocation had found against Anna’s marriage ‘by reason of a precontract between lady Anna and the marquis of Lorraine, that it was unwillingly entered into and never consummated’.4 They now required her acknowledgement of this also, but whether she signed or not the annulment was a fact of law already.
The king’s councillors must have been heartily sick of the river journey between Westminster and Richmond. Did Queen Anna know that Richmond was used as a place to send unwanted royal women?5 It was smaller than the king’s favourite palaces and considered to be out of date. The royal lodgings were in the old stone donjon on its own moated island, so that to reach the hall, the chapel or even the gardens Queen Anna had to cross a bridge. The layout had been little altered since King Henry VII’s day and followed the old style, the queen’s lodgings stacked vertically on top of the king’s. The rooms were high-ceilinged but small, and Anna must have felt mewed up at the top of the tower.6 Queen Anna and her household had been there since 24 June in what amounted to banishment. Though the courtiers with her had done everything possible to help pass the time, it had been a very long seventeen days.7 The queen was not stupid. Both she and ambassador Harst were well aware of Henry’s marital past, and they frequently expressed fears that Anna would end up in a situation like Catherine of Aragon, dying in poverty far from the king.8
The annulment at least provided a way out of unbearable uncertainty, though not one that Queen Anna would have chosen. She would be the king’s ‘dear sister’, treated with the highest honour. She would have the manors of Richmond and Bletchingley in Surrey, and a household as befitted her status. She would be nominally free to marry again. Whether she was truly reassured by this or not, Queen Anna must have known that it would be useless to demur. Jane, Viscountess Rochford stepped up amid a small group of ladies-in-waiting: they were to act as witnesses. Jane watched with Eleanor, Countess of Rutland and Catherine, Lady Edgecombe as Queen Anna duly signed the papers. The six privy councillors signed too. Three of Queen Anna’s chamberers were also there as witnesses – Dorothy Wingfield, Anne Joscelyn and Elizabeth Rastall.9 Chamberers were usually of slightly lower status than other women in service with the queen, but that very fact meant that they were often present for more explicitly ‘private’ episodes than some of the highest-status ladies-in-waiting. They also tended to keep their jobs for long periods, and during Henry VIII’s reign that meant that they had borne witness to an increasing number of difficult moments. Anne Joscelyn, for instance, had been in service with Queen Anne Boleyn before she was queen. She had seen both Anne and Jane Seymour die before coming to Anna of Cleves.10 Their individual and collective memory was superlative, and their inclusion here may have been an attempt to weaponise this to the Crown’s advantage should anybody later question Queen Anna’s willingness to sign.
In fact, women’s evidence had been a central part of the case made against the marriage. Unravelling the decisions behind the annulment is a difficult task, not least because the evidence that is most easily accessible to us was deliberately created to be very one-sided.11 The diplomatic situation had much to answer for. European tensions had not eased, and an alliance with Cleves continued to be more of a liability than an asset to an England worried about its position between the large Roman Catholic kingdoms to the south and the Lutheran Schmalkaldic League to the north. This, though, was not what was given out publicly. The official line was twofold: firstly, that Anna’s pre-contract of marriage with the Duke of Lorraine had not been properly dissolved and that she had never been free to marry Henry; and secondly, that the marriage had remained unconsummated. One of the depositions given as part of the case was made by three of Queen Anna’s English ladies-in-waiting, the very same three who then witnessed her signature on the annulment documents: Jane, Viscountess Rochford, Eleanor, Countess of Rutland and Catherine, Lady Edgecombe.12
Their evidence was slightly different to that given by the men around Henry. Jane and the others stated that about a fortnight previously they’d had a conversation with Queen Anna in which it became apparent that she was ignorant of the basics of human copulation. The three of them had ‘wished her Grace with child’, to which she had replied that she knew she was not pregnant. Lady Edgecombe had asked how she could know this if she lay every night with the king; the others chimed in, perhaps teasingly, perhaps anxiously, perhaps even unkindly, that Queen Anna must still be ‘a maid’, a virgin. There must be more than mere sleeping, ‘or else I had as rather the King lay further’, Jane had remarked, implying that it would be better for him to be sleeping with another woman in order to conceive an heir. Famously, Queen Anna is said to have replied that each night the king kissed her to bid her goodnight, and again for good morning: ‘is not this enough?’ ‘There must be more than this,’ the Countess of Rutland responded, ‘ere it will be long until we have a Duke of York.’ Queen Anna said that she was contented with this because she ‘knew no more’. Had she spoken to Mother Lowe about this? ‘For shame, God forbid,’ the queen declared.
This was almost certainly untrue. Queen Anna’s upbringing might have been more sheltered than that of an English woman of comparable station, but she had a mother, married sisters and many other women around her in the Frauenzimmer. She would have seen pregnancy, perhaps even witnessed childbirth, and it is unthinkable that a woman of her status would have been sent to her marriage without having been told about sex. But Jane and the ladies’ reported conversation bolstered other evidence given by King Henry and the men around him, and they were probably used by the king for this purpose. He knew that if Queen Anna’s own women claimed that she was ignorant of the mechanics of intercourse they would be believed, and thus his own testimony would appear more plausible. For Henry claimed that he had never liked Anna, and that he had been unable to consummate the marriage with her despite trying many times. A number of his closest male servants corroborated this in their own depositions given to convocation, adding details of derogatory comments made by Henry upon meeting Anna, after the wedding night and on other occasions thereafter; but these statements were all extracted at the time of the annulment, months after Anna’s arrival.13
The letters of Cleves ambassador Harst, though, suggest otherwise, and present Anna as a far stronger character than do English sources. Harst’s letters survive in a German archive but are vastly underused by English-speaking scholars, largely because they were written in Low German.14 Harst thought that Queen Anna and Henry slept together regularly, because she told him so. She even told him on one occasion that she thought she might be pregnant, though within a few weeks she then doubted this.15 Harst was appalled that Henry had sworn an oath that he’d never touched Anna. When informed about the convocation assessing the validity of the marriage on these grounds, he even asked Henry angrily whether he thought the Duke of Cleves had sent his sister over here for prostitution or whether this was the custom of this country, to seek a foreign bride and cast her aside after six months.16 He told Queen Anna not to sign anything that agreed to this, and when he heard that she had done so they had a heated altercation in which he warned her that she was condemning not only her own immortal soul by lying about this but Henry’s also; she retorted with vicious pragmatism that she had no choice unless she wanted her head cut off.17
Somebody here was lying. We may never know who. Undoubtedly Queen Anna knew what sex involved, and if it wasn’t happening one can understand why she might have kept this a secret and lied even to Harst, even to her own women, perhaps deliberately creating an impression of naivety rather than go into the shameful details. It’s difficult to see how the conversational testimonies of all of King Henry’s men could be entirely fictitious, but equally those very testimonies make it clear that they were all afraid of Henry’s caprice, none more so than Thomas Cromwell, who provided the most detailed deposition from the Tower after his recent arrest.18 Cromwell’s fall was one of the most shocking parts of the whole affair, for he had seemed high in the king’s favour until suddenly, very suddenly, he was not. Nobody at the time was quite sure what had happened, and historians have struggled to unravel it ever since.19 What is certain is that Cromwell’s fall endangered many others too. All of those who gave testimony were people who had something to lose. Jane, Viscountess Rochford was the widow of an executed traitor. She was only able to survive because Thomas Cromwell had browbeaten her father-in-law into allowing her more money, and both of those male protectors were now dead or disgraced. Catherine, Lady Edgecombe was in a similar position. Her late husband had been a friend and client of Thomas Cromwell’s, and on his death a year previously Cromwell had sent for her and then given her a position in the royal household, a move that strongly suggests she too became his client, eyes and ears within the queen’s household.20 With Cromwell in the Tower, Lady Edgecombe was adrift; the king, ever aware of the shifting patterns of clientage, would have known this. Even the Countess of Rutland, with an influential husband and no blemish on her record, was not safe. The earl had been Queen Anna’s chamberlain, and he owed most of what he had to the king. That all three women signed to a single deposition rather than individual statements further suggests that it was created for, rather than by, them, and we don’t know when they signed it, since their names do not appear in convocation’s list of those from whom testimonies were collected.21
Jane and her colleagues had little choice. The process of annulment began officially on 6 July, but nobody on the queen’s side was informed until two days later, by which point the depositions – presumably including the women’s – had already been collected. At no point was Queen Anna given the opportunity to speak in her own defence, or commission anybody to do so for her. Ambassador Harst asked Cleves for experienced envoys, but it was already too late.22 It must have been more than evident to Jane and the others that the annulment would go ahead regardless of whether they participated or not, and refusal might only bring consequences down upon their own heads.
Queen Anna must have felt very alone in these days. To Harst she described the English as ‘a pack of wolves’.23 It’s not clear whether she had ever experienced real friendship with any of her English women. While there is evidence that by June she was able to understand and talk in English with them, translating for ambassador Harst, this did not necessarily dispense entirely with the language barrier.24 The situation was the more difficult because, according to Harst, even Queen Anna’s German women were used against her. He had heard that two German maids had allegedly ‘confessed a marriage’ between Anna and the Duke of Lorraine, and he thought that they had been ‘milking the cash cow’.25 Her German mother of the maids, Mother Lowe, had also left the country. First given the king’s permission to leave on 1 June, she had still been there in early July, when according to ambassador Harst she was then, extraordinarily, granted permission to depart by the king’s mistress, Katherine Howard.26 If Queen Anna had confided in anybody, Mother Lowe was likely the person, and one would think that her testimony for the annulment case would have been extremely useful. That she was expressly told to leave at just this time suggests that the English sought to have her out of the way so that she could not provide any detail counter to their assertions of non-consummation.
Service to the queen had never been risk-free. But, to a historian’s eye, by 1540 the surviving sources give a far stronger sense of its attendant dangers than was the case in 1509. At one stage Queen Anna told ambassador Harst that even the privy councillors were ‘weeping bitterly’ with her, but that ‘everybody is fearing for their heads, nobody is allowed to speak up’.27 If this was the case for men, how much more so for women? Queen Anna had no choice but to accept her fate, and Jane and the other women around her had no choice but to contribute to it. It would be a brave woman who took on this king.
On Friday, 16 July 1540 Jane, Viscountess Rochford and her colleagues wept as they took their leave of the former Queen Anna of Cleves.28 They could not remain with her, for Anna would have new ladies of lower rank to match her new status. Jane and the others were to attend the new queen, Jane’s first cousin by marriage, Katherine Howard. It’s possible that Jane had met her before this time at family gatherings, for Katherine had been living as a ward in the household of her grandmother Agnes Tylney, dowager Duchess of Norfolk, at Norfolk House. She had been a strong and vivacious personality in the household. While not everybody had liked her, nobody had been able to ignore her.29
So it proved at court. It was later said that the king had ‘cast a fantasy’ towards Katherine the first time he saw her and by late spring 1540 she was his mistress, plucked from among Queen Anna’s maids of honour in a wearying repeat of what was becoming King Henry’s usual pattern.30 In June she was discreetly returned to the duchess’s household at Lambeth so that the king could visit her there; her family, perhaps including Jane, coached her to amuse and entertain him. Queen Anna knew this, and was both upset and furious, holding forth on the subject to ambassador Harst for a whole hour.31 Harst called Katherine a whore in his letters back home.32 And yet she had no more choice in her situation than did Queen Anna. One did not say no to the king, who even had the law changed so that he could marry her after a lawyer pointed out that, technically, the fact that she was the late Queen Anne Boleyn’s first cousin meant that they were too closely related to permit marriage. A swift Act of Parliament later and Henry was legally allowed to marry any woman he chose, even one he had slept with before.33 The marriage took place on 28 July at Henry’s newly completed palace of Oatlands in Surrey, designed as a kind of bloated hunting lodge so that the increasingly lame king could continue to partake in the sport that he loved without having to endure long rides. In the kind of bizarre juxtaposition that the king seemed to enjoy, the wedding took place on the same day as his erstwhile chief minister Thomas Cromwell’s execution on Tower Hill.34
By now, Jane, Viscountess Rochford was an old hand, an experienced courtier who had served four queens and been directly involved in the removal of two of those. She knew how to pivot into a new royal household and how to help a new queen find her way through royal ceremonial. She was a crucial part of the human machinery that kept the wheels of queen consortship turning. Queen Katherine had so little court experience that women like Jane were especially valuable to her, and this is one reason why personnel did not initially change much between Queens Anna and Katherine. Besides, the household had been appointed so recently that it did not make sense to entirely rearrange it. Conveniently, a number of Katherine’s relations were already part of the establishment; not only Jane, but Mary Howard, dowager Duchess of Richmond, Margaret Gamage, Lady Howard and Katherine’s own half-sister Isabel Legh, Lady Baynton. To these were swiftly added another of Katherine’s sisters, Margaret Howard, Lady Arundell and her former room-mate and distant cousin Catherine Tylney.35
A few women did remain with Anna of Cleves rather than transferring to Katherine Howard, though it’s not clear whether this was their own choice and whether it was perceived as an honour, or a dead-end job with few prospects for the future. Elizabeth Rastall, one of the witnesses to the annulment, was still with Anna in 1547.36 Otherwise, the letters of Cleves ambassador Harst show that new ladies-in-waiting were sent to her, and indeed he liked them better than their predecessors; they were less ‘impudent and free’.37 The indomitable Lady Lisle’s daughter Katharine Basset was among them. Katharine had been in the Countess of Rutland’s household for some time while her family tried to secure her a position at court to join her sister, the ambitious Anne. The annulment of Queen Anna’s marriage made this possible. Katharine’s sister Anne Basset kept her place as a maid of honour and was transferred to Queen Katherine Howard’s household.38 This was just as well, for tragedy had come to the Lisle family. In the middle of May 1540 the Basset girls’ stepfather Arthur, Lord Lisle had been arrested while visiting London. A day later their mother Honor, Lady Lisle had been placed under house arrest back home in Calais. The couple’s religiously conservative beliefs and connections had placed them increasingly at odds with Thomas Cromwell and other evangelicals, and there had been serious disputes over Calais patronage as well. It was feared that Lisle might be in cahoots with that festering thorn in the king’s side, Cardinal Reginald Pole, particularly since one of the household’s priests had recently fled to Rome. In fact, the Lisles were innocent of any such involvement. The evidence suggests that Lord Lisle was simply caught up in a general move made by Cromwell against those he perceived to be his enemies in the spring of 1540, a move that was curtailed by Cromwell’s own arrest and execution shortly afterwards.39
Did the Basset girls know this? The family’s papers were seized – this is why their letter collection has survived – and naturally it falls silent at this point. This, coupled with the royal annulment and the doubt cast over her position, must have made it an exceptionally stressful summer for Anne Basset. The weather did not help. England was burning up. No rain fell between June and Michaelmas, and the Thames was so low that the saltwater tides reached beyond London Bridge. The drought gave way to plague in a new form, a ‘strange sickness’ with ‘hot agues and fluxes’, and Anne must have feared for her father, imprisoned in the Tower and unable to flee the sickness as the royal court did, safe away on progress.40
All eyes were on Queen Katherine as she settled into her new position. The French ambassador, Charles de Marillac, thought her ‘rather graceful than beautiful’, but conceded that ‘the King is so amorous of her that he cannot treat her well enough and caresses her more than he did the others’, something which Katherine had no choice but to endure. Anne Basset, Jane, Viscountess Rochford and the rest of the court ladies may have spent some of their summer engaged in the refashioning of their clothes, since Marillac also reported that ‘all the Court ladies dress in French style’.41 While the court was still away the unusually shallow and salty Thames attracted three dolphins, seen playing near Greenwich. Dolphins, like swans, were officially the property of the Crown, which was entitled to any that were captured or washed up within three miles of the shore. The three animals were dutifully caught in nets by local fishermen.42 They might have done better to heed mariners’ superstitions. Dolphins, sailors said, appeared in advance of bad storms. Jane, Viscountess Rochford and the others might hope for security under a new queen; but, by now, was it safe to trust that stability might return to the queen’s household?
Margaret Morton and Maud Lovekyn had a grievance. As two of Queen Katherine’s chamberers, much of her most intimate and personal care was their responsibility. They helped her to bed and helped her to dress, carried her messages and waited upon her. Though not the highest-status position within the queen’s household, it was nevertheless one to which much importance was attached.43 Chamberers knew many bodily secrets, and they jealously guarded their closeness to the queen. Margaret and Maud felt that closeness threatened, and they were not happy about it. Ever since Catherine Tylney’s arrival, Queen Katherine Howard ‘could not abide’ their presence. Margaret was particularly annoyed by this. She had known both of the Katherines in the dowager Duchess of Norfolk’s household at Lambeth before they had all come to court, and she clearly felt that Katherine Howard had no right to shut out one former colleague in favour of another, queen or not.44 Margaret’s words, written down later, suggest that she blamed Jane, Viscountess Rochford for the current politics in the queen’s chamber.45
Certainly the others had also noticed the queen’s extraordinary preference for Jane of late. Jane was always there. Indeed, by the time the court was on progress in the summer of 1541 Jane may have felt like she needed a holiday. The queen continually sent her messages by one or other of the chamberers, or the pages, or her gentlemen ushers. At Chenies, the lord admiral’s house, Alice Restwold, another of the queen’s Lambeth colleagues, arrived to join her household; the queen, having kissed her and told her to lodge with the other chamberers, then sent Jane with a gift of jewelled edgings for her French hoods and a gold tablet.46 Jane’s presence, evidently, had become a sign of the queen’s favour. It’s not clear quite when the queen’s preference for Jane began. Nor do we know precisely how and why the queen came to favour her, or whose doing this really was. For Queen Katherine had a secret, and by summertime Jane knew the secret too.
It had begun innocently enough during Queen Anna’s tenure, when Jane had been one of the queen’s gentlewomen and her young cousin Katherine one of the maids of honour. As was usual, the queen’s women frequently encountered the gentlemen of the king’s privy chamber in the course of their duties. Equally naturally, flirtations sprang up, ran their short course and died as regularly as the waxing and waning of the moon. Among the king’s gentlemen in the winter of 1539 was Thomas Culpeper, much in favour with the king. Culpeper was the kind of man who enjoyed useful connections and pretty women, and among the queen’s maids of honour he had both. Katherine and Culpeper had got along well. But Katherine was not a stranger to flirtation, and apparently held firm against him: there would be nothing else unless he promised her something more concrete. This was not part of Culpeper’s plan, and he turned instead to other women. Katherine, unused to rejection, was shocked, sad and no doubt had to watch these other relationships blossom in front of her. ‘Her grief was such’, she later told him, ‘that she could not but weep in the presence of her fellows’, the other girls. But soon the king himself made his interest clear and it was not long before she was elevated above her wildest dreams, and far above Thomas Culpeper.47
Queen Katherine chose to make him smart for his earlier rejection. One of his new conquests was Bess Harvey. Bess had previously served Queen Anne Boleyn, and had been among the group of women who had been to view the king’s ships at Portsmouth in August 1539. At some stage in the spring or summer of 1541, Queen Katherine gave Bess a gown of damask and sent Jane, Viscountess Rochford to Culpeper with a pointed message: ‘he did ill to suffer his tenement’ – Bess – ‘to be so ill-repaired’ and so Katherine ‘for to save his honesty’ had covered the cost on it.48 It was a bold and relatable, if petty, triumph and says much about Queen Katherine’s personality. We don’t know precisely when Katherine played this card, but at some stage after she became queen Katherine and Culpeper reconnected. Of itself this wasn’t necessarily a problem. Queens naturally encountered men who were not the king. They had to work with them: the queen’s council, over half of her household and the entirety of the king’s were men. To interact with men for the sake of politics, patronage and even friendship was normal, but Queen Anne Boleyn’s execution five years previously had shown that such relationships might be all too easily, even wilfully, misinterpreted.
Nobody knew this better than Jane. Queen Anne had been her sister-in-law, George Boleyn her husband, and their executions had left her bereft and poor, reliant on Crown patronage. We don’t know whether Jane knew about her young cousin Katherine’s flirtation with Thomas Culpeper back in 1539, but somehow she became, or was made, aware of its reprisal in the spring of 1541. She then became its facilitator. She was ‘the carrier of all messages and tokens’ between them. Queen Katherine claimed that Jane persuaded her into the relationship, that she had sworn upon a book that Culpeper’s intentions were ‘nothing but honesty’, and Culpeper also deposed that Jane ‘provoked him much to love the Queen’. Chamberer Margaret Morton self-righteously called Jane ‘the principle occasion of her [Katherine’s] folly’.49 Yet Jane declared the queen the driving force behind their liaisons, that ‘three or four times a day since she was in this trouble would ask what she heard of Culpeper’.50 In facilitating the queen’s adultery Jane became proof of the value of loyal ladies-in-waiting. It must often have been frightening, sometimes exhilarating, always exhausting, and we may never know why she did it.
The court was on its summer progress, heading for York. It was late August, and they were at Pontefract Castle just south of Leeds, considered the principal royal castle in the north of England, though it had gone unoccupied for so long that it had required repairs ahead of the king’s arrival.51 The court on progress was a very different place to the court in London. The king’s London palaces were specifically designed to accommodate both his own and the queen’s households, but this wasn’t the case in all the places where they stayed on the route north. Some places – old monasteries, for instance, or bishops’ palaces – had only one grand set of rooms worthy of the king, so the queen and her ladies sometimes found themselves accommodated in makeshift royal apartments, curtains taking the place of walls and servants tucked into odd corners. The normal rules of access were difficult to maintain, and thus easy to break. Anybody who was found somewhere they shouldn’t have been could simply claim that they didn’t know, that they hadn’t realised this space was being used as a private chamber, or that they had got lost in an unfamiliar house.52
This made it easier than usual to arrange illicit liaisons. At each stopping point the queen, or Jane, or both searched for ‘back doors and back steps’ through which Culpeper could enter without being seen.53 When the queen was worried that the king had set the night’s watch in an inconvenient place, Jane sent her own servant to the courtyard each night to check. They found rooms that were empty, or out of the way, with easy access in and out; in the bishop’s palace at Lincoln a chamber underneath Jane’s, at York Lady Rochford’s chamber itself, and at Pontefract a chamber at the bottom of the donjon in which the queen was lodged, mercifully a separate building from the king’s own rooms.54 The risk of discovery was enormous. One night at Lincoln Jane and the queen stood at a back entrance watching for Culpeper when the watch came along with a light. Hearts in their mouths, the women hid inside as he closed and locked the door, and were startled when suddenly Culpeper himself appeared, jubilant: he and his manservant had picked the lock.55
If there was a point at which Jane considered that things had got out of hand, it might well have been one night in Pontefract Castle. Queen Katherine had brought Jane downstairs to chaperone and to guard the inner door, while the queen and Culpeper ‘did together’ out of sight at the other end of the room behind a window, the queen at the top of the steps leading outside and Culpeper on the steps themselves, a convenient position for kissing as well as for swift escape.56 Their relationship was sometimes one of teasing and banter. At York Queen Katherine had laughingly told him that she had ‘scores of other lovers at other doors as well’; ‘it is like enough’, he replied.57 At Lincoln Jane had watched and listened until three in the morning as they had a long and intimate conversation in which, vulnerable, Queen Katherine had told him of her heartbreak a year and a half ago when he had told her he loved her, only to pursue another woman, and he assured her that he had only gone elsewhere after her marriage had made her unattainable, that he loved only her and always would. Then, he had kissed only her hand, saying that he would ‘presume no further’.58 What did they do in the dark at Pontefract? What else did Jane hear?
We will never know for sure. Under the pressure of questioning and in fear for her life, Jane stated that ‘she thinketh that Culpeper hath known the Queen carnally considering all things that this deponent hath heard and seen between them’, but she also said that she could neither see nor hear them that night at Pontefract. Culpeper said only that he had ‘intended’ to ‘do ill’ with the queen, not that he had done so.59 Their lack of clarity was partly a result of the law itself. Since the Treason Act of 1534, intention alone was sufficient to bring a charge of high treason. Legally it did not matter whether the act had occurred or not, and so the later investigation did not waste its time trying to prove that it had.60 Naturally, Culpeper was not going to admit to having had intercourse with the queen of England if he thought there was a chance of survival, but it’s just as possible that they had never actually consummated their relationship, or that even Jane simply did not know whether or not they had.
It is surprising that they weren’t discovered sooner. But the summer progress wound its way back to Hampton Court, and Jane was still arranging liaisons between the queen and her paramour. The first blow fell in early November, and ironically was not to do with Culpeper at all, but with Queen Katherine’s past. A woman who had been in the dowager duchess’s household at Lambeth with Katherine told her brother about certain antics in the maidens’ chamber there. This brother – an evangelical, and not a fan of Katherine’s family’s conservatism – suddenly developed a suspiciously outsized conscience and passed these tales to the king’s council. From there the story unravelled alarmingly quickly, fuelled by fear of a king whose capacity for judicial murder seemed increasingly limitless.
Katherine, it transpired, had had two sexual affairs while still in her grandmother’s household, one with her music teacher Henry Mannox and one with Francis Dereham, a gentleman in her grandmother’s service. This was where Katherine had learned how to keep such things a secret. She and Mannox, who was already married, met at night and out of doors, wherever they could find some measure of privacy, in the same way as she would later do with Culpeper. The Dereham affair had gone even further, to full intercourse, and they had called each other husband and wife. Katherine had not been the only girl engaged in sexual contact in that household, but she had been something of a ringleader, stealing the keys to let the boys in and telling them to hide in the little gallery when the duchess, tipped off, stormed into the room one night. When Katherine broke off the affair because she was entering court service, Dereham had betaken himself to Ireland in a fit of pique.61
Many of her family members had known about this, particularly the women. It’s often said that Katherine was placed at court precisely so that she could catch the king’s eye and become the next queen, but this is sheer impossibility. Nobody could have known in the autumn of 1539 that the marriage with Anna would not prove a success, nor that Henry would fasten, limpet-like, onto Katherine. Her relatives must have had many sleepless nights since then, for if Henry found out that his ‘jewel’ was tarnished they would all suffer. The best that they could do was to try to limit the damage. This is why so many former members of the duchess’s household found their way into Queen Katherine’s establishment, including, astonishingly, Francis Dereham himself. Given a vested interest in her success as queen, perhaps they would keep their mouths shut.62
We don’t know whether Jane, Viscountess Rochford knew about Katherine’s former life, but she must in any case have lived in a state of unbearable dread while it was investigated, knowing that there was worse to find. In the end it was Queen Katherine herself who gave away the Culpeper affair. She was questioned by Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury. The archbishop was kind and patient with her, giving her space to cry, offering comfort, but returning inexorably to the details over and over. In a moment of panic and confusion Katherine spoke of a visit that Francis Dereham had made her at court before she became queen, and how he had asked her whether she was married to ‘Mr Culpeper’ as he had heard reported.63 Cranmer, never slow-witted, knew that he had something. Queen Katherine, swiftly confined to her chambers at Hampton Court, knew it too.
Within days she was removed to the former convent at Syon Abbey, her household dismissed. Katherine knew that Queen Anna had been sent to Richmond Palace to be out of the way while the king and council had ended her marriage. Syon was only a mile away from there and had recently held another disgraced royal woman, the king’s niece Margaret Douglas, in trouble yet again for carrying on a dalliance with another Howard boy.64 More secure than the nearby palace, Syon nevertheless offered appropriate accommodation for a queen, for it had been the wealthiest abbey in England at the time of its suppression in 1539. Queen Katherine was permitted three chambers, ‘hanged with mean stuff, without any cloth of estate’.65 The first was for her staff to dine in, and the other two for her own use.66 Like her cousin Queen Anne Boleyn, she was permitted only a few female attendants but, unlike Anne, she was allowed to choose them: four gentlewomen and two chamberers ‘at her choice, save that my Lady Baynton shall be one’.67 Lady Baynton was Isabel Legh, Queen Katherine’s half-sister. Her husband was the queen’s vice-chamberlain, as he had been to all of the king’s wives so far. That the king specified Lady Baynton’s inclusion is unlikely to have been an act of kindness, and suggests that despite the family relationship Isabel was probably more of a Crown agent, a spy, than a friend or ally, much like Lady Kingston had been for Queen Anne Boleyn.
Queen Katherine also had Anne Parr, Lady Herbert and Elizabeth Oxenbridge, Lady Tyrwhit.68 If Jane was also among them, it surely cannot have been for long. Once Culpeper’s name became a part of the investigation the queen’s women were questioned and gave further details in turn, and Jane’s role in the whole affair was soon uncovered. Witness depositions are tricky sources to work with. Preserved as paragraphs written in the third person, they were actually given as first-person answers to leading questions, making it difficult to know what the scribe had chosen to prioritise or truncate. The women’s depositions give the impression that there was little love lost between Jane and the rest of Queen Katherine’s household, but Jane was also a convenient scapegoat for frightened people, since her involvement was already certified. The abundance of surviving evidence here is in contrast to the lack of evidence we have for Queen Anne Boleyn’s fall, which must once have existed. The statements given by the queen’s women were crucial, particularly those of the chamberers. Margaret Morton – she who had not liked being pushed aside after Catherine Tylney’s arrival – had seen the queen look out of her privy chamber window onto Culpeper in the garden below at Hatfield Chase and had ‘thought in her conscience that there was love between them’.69 Catherine Tylney herself had been sent with ‘such strange messages’ to Viscountess Rochford that ‘she could not tell how to utter them’.70 But they had not known for sure that anything was going on. Queen Katherine had not confided in any of her women except Jane, and Jane had perhaps told her to keep it this way, knowing from prior experience that it wasn’t safe for a queen to confide too much in her ladies-in-waiting.
The ways in which the secret was kept, however, raised suspicion, and this tells us a lot about the norms of access for ladies-in-waiting. They noticed when the queen remained closeted for long periods with only Jane, and they thought it odd. They noticed when she stayed up unusually late, and made comments to one another about it. They were surprised when they were ordered not to come into her bedchamber unless called for, and even more when they found her chamber door bolted from the inside. Whereas the king’s bedchamber was indeed sacrosanct to all except his groom of the stool, the queen’s women were apparently used to going in and out of hers: chaperones indeed.71
The investigation continued its wearying course. The maids of honour were to return home, ‘save Mistress Basset, whom the King, in consideration of the calamity of her friends, will, at his charges, specially provide for’; Anne Basset’s parents were still under arrest.72 Hampton Court, ‘where the ladies are’, remained closely guarded, and questioning continued.73 The women were asked what they had seen and heard, where, when had the queen left her chamber late at night, with whom, when had she returned? In the minds of the king’s councillors the queen’s chamber took on monstrous proportions, its very femininity and the fact that they couldn’t enter it meaning that anything could happen there; as the French ambassador reported ominously, the queen had met with men in ‘secret and suspect places’.74
By 19 November Dereham and Culpeper were in the Tower, and so was Jane. Queen Katherine’s Howard relations were trying every trick they knew. Her grandmother, Duchess Agnes, sharp and quick-witted, pulled many strings to find out what was happening, burned evidence and checked for legal loopholes, but eventually even she was forced to submit to arrest and imprisonment in the Tower.75 Their goods were inventoried. Jane’s silver plate, her jewels – ‘a fair brooch, black enamelled with six small diamonds’, ‘a flower of rubies’, a gold brooch with a fashionable ‘antique’ head – and other treasures were taken, and even her clothes, all black, of velvet, satin, damask and taffeta, were seized.76 Rumours spilled out of ambassadors’ ready pens and across the continent. Jane, the French ambassador Marillac pronounced, ‘all her life had the name to esteem her honour little, and has thus in her old age shown little amendment’.77
Culpeper and Dereham were tried and found guilty on 1 December and executed on the 10th. Culpeper, as a noble, was beheaded, but Dereham suffered the traditional traitor’s death and was ‘hanged, [dis]membered, [disem]bowelled, [be]headed, and quartered’.78 On the 22nd the rest were arraigned and indicted for misprision of treason, knowing of treason but doing nothing about it: eleven members of Queen Katherine’s family and their Lambeth associates, seven of them women. Of these, Margaret, Lady Howard, the wife of Lord William, and Catherine Tylney had been in Queen Katherine’s service at court. Neither had known about the Culpeper affair and both had given up all they knew of Katherine’s pre-marital relationships. That knowledge, not their court service, was why they were attainted. All eleven could now look forward to the confiscation of their goods, lands and titles, and a lifetime of imprisonment. So full was the Tower that even the royal apartments were used, with new locks installed because the king could not find his key.79 The king spent Christmas at Greenwich, dining on rage and self-pity.80 Queen Katherine remained at Syon, her mood swinging between terror, depression and forced hilarity. In a final measure of the cruellest of uncertainties, she was forced to wait until Parliament opened on 16 January for a decision to be made as to her future. Her grandmother the Duchess of Norfolk was in the same position.81
So too was Jane. According to Imperial ambassador Chapuys, a few weeks into her imprisonment in the Tower she ‘went mad’.82 Her arrest, imprisonment and intense questioning on top of the strain of the summer, carrying such deadly secrets, became intolerable. Jane had seen this play before, and she knew how the last act was supposed to end. Five years ago she had not only witnessed the arrest, trial and execution of another queen, her sister-in-law and mistress, but played a part in it, been interrogated by councillors, seen her words used against those she loved and watched her husband, her sister-in-law and her friends die on the block as a result. To see it repeated with herself at the centre was indescribably traumatic. Unable to process what was happening and what was likely to happen, it is by no means surprising that Jane’s mind simply ceased its normal function.
This, though, was no good to the king. He needed reprisals handed down and examples made, for his own satisfaction and for the audience watching his humiliation. Perhaps he also sought to enact specific vengeance upon Jane herself. Her words, her conversations with Queen Anne Boleyn about his inability to perform in the bedroom, the sense that she and the others were laughing at him had been among the worst elements of that entire affair. The very same woman had helped another of his wives to sleep with another man. In Henry’s mind she had connived, been privy to his most intimate sexual secrets, laughed at him and made him a laughing stock in front of the whole world, and it was utterly unbearable. But as things stood, the law did not allow for the execution of the mad. Jane must recover her reason.
She was removed from the Tower and sent instead to be with Lady Russell, the lord admiral’s wife, at their home on the Strand far west of the Tower.83 Even in her distressed state, it must have been something of a reprieve. There were fewer locked doors and a return to the kind of luxury she was used to. She could hear the bells of St Mary Le Strand and the Savoy Hospital chapel nearby, and the restful sounds of the city going about its usual business. Lady Russell herself was a familiar face, perhaps even a friend. Older than Jane, she had survived two husbands and nursed her third through at least one bout of serious illness, and she had borne and buried children. She had been in and around the queen’s household since Queen Anne Boleyn’s day.84 She knew grief and she knew trauma, and one hopes that she was kind to Jane even as she and her husband were loyal to the king.
Parliament opened on 16 January. Adultery on the part of a queen was not technically within the remit of the treason law, and though in 1536 it had been allowed to be judged thus under the clause of ‘imagining the death of the king’, in 1542 the king’s lawyers would not allow it a second time.85 Queen Katherine, the Duchess of Norfolk and ‘that bawd’, Viscountess Rochford, were condemned by parliamentary Act of Attainder instead, an Act that contained a change to the treason law to make a queen’s adultery an act of high treason for the future.86 On 29 January the Commons agreed that the Duchess of Norfolk was guilty of misprision, and the queen and Jane of high treason. Jane had not recovered from her breakdown. Though her reason returned every now and then, she was not of sufficient mental capacity to permit her execution. In a characteristic act of single-minded selfishness, the king forced through a change in the law. If any had thought that Jane might escape, this must have disabused them of that thought. Now the mad could die regardless.87
On Thursday, 9 February Jane was taken from the Russells’ house and returned downriver to the Tower.88 The next day she was joined by the queen, whose control had finally broken when she was faced with the journey. Queen Katherine had frozen, unable to move, and the councillors had had to manhandle her into the boat with her ladies.89 On Saturday the 11th they were officially condemned to death, but not informed until the evening of the 12th, at which point – according to ambassador Chapuys – Jane suddenly ceased to show ‘symptoms of madness’.90 Perhaps the shock had penetrated her dissociation, or perhaps the knowledge that there was an end in sight even came as a comfort.
At seven the next morning they were led separately to the scaffold, set up on the same spot as Queen Anne Boleyn’s six years previously, to the north-east of the White Tower in the centre of the palace complex. Queen Katherine died first, and Jane had to watch. The queen ‘was so weak that she could hardly speak’ and did not say much, merely confessing her guilt and praying for the king before the blindfold was fastened and she laid her head on the block. The axe fell. Her body was covered with a black cloak and her four women, including her sister Lady Baynton, stepped forward to carry it to the chapel, just as Queen Anne’s women had done for her all those years ago.91
It was Jane’s turn. One account said that she spoke little, but another that she gave ‘a long discourse of several faults that she had committed in her life’.92 Commending her soul to God and exhorting prayers for the king, she too was killed.
We will never know why Jane did the things that she did in the service of Queen Katherine Howard. The possible explanations are almost limitless and the drive to speculate has proved irresistible to most historians. She could have come across Katherine and Culpeper in an unchaperoned situation and been bribed or threatened into keeping silence. Maybe she had arranged one meeting for what seemed an innocent purpose and then become implicated before she was able to extricate herself. Perhaps she really was as guilty as her colleagues made her out to be, encouraging the affair for nefarious reasons of her own: revenge on her family or on the king who had taken and twisted her words to kill her husband and to annul his own previous marriage, ruining her life and condemning her immortal soul. Perhaps she simply misjudged the situation and made some bad decisions. Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps.
Regardless of the reasons, Jane no doubt thought that the worst would never happen to her, and in this she was not unjustified. Though the king had killed noblewomen before – most recently the elderly Margaret Pole, Countess of Salisbury, in the spring of 1541 – their crimes had been ones of conspiracy, of religion, or related to international politics. Queen Catherine of Aragon’s women had been harried and imprisoned and lost their jobs for their loyalty to her, but they had not lost their lives. Queen Anne Boleyn’s women, Jane included, had not even been accused of any crimes. No lady-in-waiting had ever been killed as a direct result of her service to the queen.
Jane’s death changed this. Giving evidence had not saved her as it had saved the others. There was no sating this king, and no lady-in-waiting would ever be safe in service again.