How a woman like Jane Seymour became Queen of England is a mystery. In Tudor terms she came from nowhere and was nothing.
Chapuys confronted the riddle in his despatch of 18 May 1536, which was addressed to Antoine Perrenot, the Emperor’s minister, rather than to the Emperor Charles V himself. Freed from the decorum of writing to his sovereign, the ambassador expressed himself bluntly. ‘She is the sister’, he began, ‘of a certain Edward Seymour, who has been in the service of his Majesty [Charles V]’; while ‘she [herself] was formerly in the service of the good Queen [Catherine]’.
As for her appearance, it was literally colourless. ‘She is of middle height, and nobody thinks she has much beauty. Her complexion is so whitish that she may be called rather pale.’
This is a neat pen-portrait of the woman whose mousy, peaked features and mean, pointed chin are rendered by Holbein with his characteristic, unsparing honesty.
So much Chapuys could see. But when he turned to her supposed moral character he gave his prejudices full rein. ‘You may imagine’, he wrote to Perrenot, man-to-man, ‘whether, being an Englishwoman, and having been so long at Court, she would not hold it a sin to be virgo intacta.’ ‘She is not a woman of great wit,’ he continued. ‘But she may have’–and here he became frankly coarse–‘a fine enigme.’ ‘Enigme’ means ‘riddle’ or ‘secret’, as in ‘secret place’ or the female genitalia. ‘It is said’, he concluded, ‘that she is rather proud and haughty.’ ‘She seems to bear great goodwill and respect to [Mary]. I am not sure whether later on the honours heaped on her will not make her change her mind.’1
What was there here–a woman of no family, no beauty, no talent and perhaps not much reputation (though there is no need to accept all of Chapuys’s slanders)–to attract a man who had already been married to two such extraordinary women as Catherine and Anne?
But maybe Jane’s very ordinariness was the point. Anne had been exciting as a mistress. But she was too demanding, too mercurial and tempestuous, to make a good wife. Like the Gospel which she patronised, she seemed to have come ‘not to send peace but the sword’ and to make ‘a man’s foes…them of his own household’ (Matthew 10.34–6). Henry was weary of scenes and squabbles, weary too of ruptures with his nearest and dearest and his oldest and closest friends. He wanted his family and friends back. He wanted domestic peace and the quiet life. He also, more disturbingly, wanted submission. For increasing age and the Supremacy’s relentless elevation of the monarchy had made him ever more impatient of contradiction and disagreement. Only obedience, prompt, absolute and unconditional, would do.
And he could have none of this with Anne.
Jane, on the other hand, was everything that Anne was not. She was calm, quiet, soft-spoken (when she spoke at all) and profoundly submissive, at least to Henry. In short, after Anne’s flagrant defiance of convention, Jane was the sixteenth-century’s ideal woman (or at least the sixteenth-century male’s ideal woman).
And it was not only Henry who noticed the difference. Sir John Russell had been one of the many who had felt the repeated rough edge of Anne’s tongue. Now he rejoiced at her successor: indeed, his gladness seems to have blinded him to the reality of her looks. ‘I do assure you, my Lord’, he wrote to his friend Lord Lisle, ‘she is as gentle a lady as I ever knew, and as fair a Queen as any in Christendom.’ ‘The King’, he continued, warming to his theme, ‘hath come out of hell into heaven, for the gentleness in this, and the cursedness and the unhappiness in the other.’
Lisle, he advised, should write to congratulate Henry, saying ‘you do rejoice that he is so well matched with so gracious a woman as she is’–‘wherein’, Russell stated with his insider’s knowledge, ‘you shall content his Grace’.2
Everybody–Henry, Jane and the Court–was happy.
In his first audience with Jane, Chapuys played on this idea of happiness with a debonair gracefulness which contrasts gratingly with his private judgement. He kissed her and congratulated her. ‘Her predecessor’, he said, ‘had borne the device “The Most Happy”.’ She, on the other hand, ‘would bear the reality’. Then he continued to pile flattery on flattery. He was sure, he said, that ‘[Charles V] would be immeasurably pleased that the King had found so good and virtuous a wife, especially as her brother had been in [Charles’s] service’.3
On the back of this reference to the Seymours’ Imperial connexions, Chapuys smoothly shifted to politics. ‘The satisfaction of the people…was incredible’, he said, ‘especially at the restoration of Mary to the King’s favour’. And it would be even greater, he hinted, if Mary were made heiress once more. Then indeed Jane would deserve the title that he hoped would be hers of ‘the pacific’ or peace-maker–abroad as well as at home.
This was getting into deep water. At this point Henry, who had been enjoying the company of the Queen’s ladies without the reproving stares which had spoiled such pleasures under Anne, pricked up his ears, came over and interrupted the conversation. Jane, he said, was overwhelmed. Chapuys was the first ambassador who had spoken to her and she was not used to such attentions. However, he was sure she was eager for the title of ‘pacific’. ‘For, besides that her nature was gentle and inclined to peace, she would not for the world that he was engaged in war, that she might not be separated from him.’4
Henry’s little woman was rescued. But from what? Chapuys had addressed her in French. Was she, unlike Anne, unable to reply easily in the same language? Was she simply bashful? Or was Henry afraid that she might disclose too much of her own opinions in her reply?
In other words, was Jane really quite such a doormat as at first appears? Or was there strategy in her submissiveness? Did she choose the extravagant humility of her motto ‘Bound to obey and serve’ because it represented her view of her position? Or because it would tickle Henry’s patriarchal visions?
Even more interesting is the question of her badge or personal emblem. Her father, Sir John Seymour, had sported ‘a peacock’s head and neck couped Azure, between two wings erect Or’. But of course the peacock, then as now, symbolised pride. That was hardly suitable for the message Jane was supposed to convey. So she, or someone on her behalf, effected an ingenious substitution. Out of filial loyalty, she kept a bird as her badge. But a few deft strokes changed it from the peacock to the phoenix. This was the peacock’s opposite. Instead of empty pride, it represented renewal through self-sacrifice. According to the legend, it lived for a thousand years. Then, feeling its end near, it built a nest-cum-pyre. This it ignited, and then burned itself to ashes from which there arose a new phoenix.5
And so, Jane’s badge said, she would renew the Tudor dynasty. As indeed she did, and, as it happened, at the cost of her own life.
The extent of Jane’s ‘ordinariness’ is therefore debatable. Moreover, why had this ordinary woman won the King’s hand? Had Henry spotted her for himself? Or had she been chosen for him? And why?
These questions cannot be answered definitively because the obscurity, which veils the whole of Jane’s early life, also masks the origins of her love affair with the King. We do not know when it began. Or where. Instead, she appears fully-fledged in February 1536 as ‘the young lady…whom [Henry] serves’. This is how Henry’s relationship with Anne had begun also. It too had been an episode in the game of Courtly Love that had quickly turned serious.6
But, then, it was Anne herself who had brought about the transformation. In 1536, on the other hand, it is clear that Jane had many helping hands.
Her two principal patrons were Gertrude, Marchioness of Exeter, and Sir Nicholas Carew, the highly influential Master of the Horse who had won out in the struggle for the Garter with Rochford. Gertrude’s activities were supported by her friends and relations in the conservative high nobility, such as Montague; while Carew had the enthusiastic backing of his colleagues of the Privy Chamber, such as Sir Anthony Browne and Sir John Russell. Even Carew’s brother-in-law, Sir Francis Bryan, once so closely identified with Anne, had gone over to the enemy after his furious quarrel with Rochford in December 1534.7
But it is important to be clear about Jane’s place in the scheme of things. For the Marchioness, Carew and the rest, she was a means, not an end. Their immediate goal was to restore Mary as heir to the throne, and, with Mary as a stalking-horse, to bring about a Catholic restoration also. Or, at the very least, to stop Reform in its tracks.
All of this, they knew, would happen only over Anne’s dead body. And Anne’s dead body was something they could contemplate with equanimity, if not enthusiasm.
For they had only ever paid the minimum lip-service to the Boleyn marriage. They detested Anne, and they detested the consequences of her marriage. And, from the beginning, they had sought for means to overthrow her. The obvious tactic was to turn her own weapons of bedchamber politics against her. She had shown that a mistress could become Queen. Why should not another woman repeat the trick? And why should this other woman not overthrow Anne and all she stood for, as completely as Anne had toppled Catherine?
The problem, of course, was to find the right mistress. Each young woman who caught Henry’s eye was nobbled by Anne’s opponents and enthusiastically talked up as her nemesis. Things had reached a fever-pitch of excitement in late 1534. Henry had acquired a new ‘young lady’ who refused to pay court to Anne. And Henry refused to back Anne when she appealed to him to slap down the insolent new-comer. Instead, he brushed off his wife angrily, and complained loudly about her importunity. The Court seethed with rumour. Was this the beginning of the end of Queen Anne?
Chapuys at least kept a sense of proportion. ‘Not much weight’, he wrote, was to be attached to the report, ‘unless the love of the King for the young lady…should grow warm and continue for some time’. But, he warned, ‘it is impossible to form a judgement [of this], considering the changeableness of [Henry]’. The ambassador was right to be sceptical. The ‘young lady’ disappeared and we do not even know her name.8
But of course the situation in early 1536 was very different. Catherine died, which meant that Henry could repudiate his second marriage without reaffirming his first. Anne miscarried. Cromwell turned against Anne. And, above all, Henry’s love for Jane Seymour indeed ‘grew warm and continued for some time’.
It is possible to pin-point the moment that the nature of Henry’s feelings for Jane changed more or less exactly to mid-March. The last Session of the Reformation Parliament opened on 4 February. At first, Henry alternated between Greenwich and York Place, spending a few days at a time in each. But, when the Bill for the Dissolution of the Monasteries showed signs of sticking, he moved to York Place for the whole of March. Meanwhile Jane remained at Greenwich. And Henry, obviously fearing lest his dalliance prove out of sight, out of mind, sent her a valuable present. It consisted of ‘a purse full of sovereigns’ and a covering letter.9
Jane’s response, however, was quite unexpected. She kissed the letter and returned it unopened to the messenger. Then, ‘throwing herself on her knees’ before the messenger, she addressed the King through him:
[She] begged…[Henry] to consider that she was a gentlewoman of good and honourable parents, without reproach, and that she had no greater riches in the world than her honour, which she would not injure for a thousand deaths, and that if he wished to make her some present in money she begged it might be when God enabled her to make some honourable match.
Jane, in other words, was playing the Boleyn card, and playing it rather well. She would not be Henry’s mistress, but only his wife.
Was it her idea? Or had she been coached? We know certainly that she had had lessons. According to Chapuys, Carew ‘continually counsels [Jane]’. More generally, she ‘had been well taught by members of the King’s Privy Chamber that she must by no means comply with the King’s wishes except by way of marriage’. And she had learned her lessons well: ‘she is quite firm [in the matter]’, Chapuys reported.10 Whether Jane had written her own script for the scene at Greenwich, or not, there can be no doubt about the effect. ‘Henry’s love and desire…was wonderfully increased,’ the delighted Marchioness informed Chapuys. ‘[Jane] had behaved most honourably,’ Henry said. ‘To show that he only loved her honourably,’ he continued, ‘he did not intend henceforth to speak with her except on the presence of some of her kin.’ Cromwell was moved out of his lodging at Court, which was connected to the King’s apartments by secret galleries. And Jane’s eldest brother Edward and his wife Anne, née Stanhope, were moved in. With such sympathetic chaperones, Henry could still see Jane to his heart’s content.11
From this moment, Jane was Henry’s wife-in-waiting.
And, thanks to Cromwell’s brutal efficiency and Anne’s ill luck, she did not have to wait long.
Anne’s arrest, however, brought about a temporary separation. Henry could hardly protest about Anne’s supposed misconduct if he were seen to be paying open court to another woman. So, for decency’s sake, Jane was removed from Court. The choice of her refuge has its own significance. She was sent to Beddington, Carew’s luxurious house and garden near Croydon. And it was also Carew who was sent to bring her back to the neighbourhood of the capital on 14 May, the day before Anne’s trial. She was lodged at Chelsea, Sir Thomas More’s former house, which was on the river, only a short boat-ride from York Place.12
All this looks like a formal recognition of Carew’s role as Jane’s sponsor. He was Pygmalion. She was the statue to whom he had given life and speech. His reward would come when, as he hoped, she continued to deliver his lines after she was Queen.
Jane now had the throne in all but name. ‘She is splendidly served by the King’s cook and other officers,’ Chapuys reported. ‘She is [also] most splendidly dressed.’ But the last hours of Anne’s life still stood between Jane and her King. They could not wait to get Anne out of the way. On the morning of the 14th, Henry informed Jane that at 3 o’clock he would send her news of Anne’s condemnation. At the appointed hour, Bryan turned up with the glad tidings. Other good news followed in quick succession. On the 17th, Cranmer, as we have seen, pronounced Henry and Anne’s marriage null and void. On the 19th, he issued a dispensation for Henry and Jane to marry, despite the fact that they were related in ‘the third degree of affinity’–perhaps, as it has been guessed, through one of Henry’s former mistresses. That same day came the best news of all: Anne was beheaded.13
According to Chapuys, ‘the King, immediately on receiving news of the decapitation of [Anne], entered his barge and went to [Jane]’ at Chelsea. We do not know how she reacted. But, at the least, she showed no compunction in stepping to the throne over the headless corpse of her rival. Anne might talk of killing Catherine; the gentle Jane went further and was an accessory-after-the-fact to the judicial murder of her predecessor.14
The following day, Saturday, 20 May, Henry and Jane were betrothed: at 9 a.m. at York Place, according to Chapuys, and ‘secretly at Chelsea’, according to the chronicler Wriothesley who, as both a herald and the cousin of Cromwell’s right-hand man, Thomas Wriothesley, was very well informed.15
At this point, the breakneck speed of events was slowed–not because Henry had cooled but because the precipitance of his new union with Jane ‘sounded ill in the ears of the people’. Jane probably remained in seclusion at Chelsea for another ten days. On Tuesday the 30th she was brought to York Place, where she was married ‘in the Queen’s Closet’. On Friday, 2 June, so Russell informed Lisle, ‘the Queen sat abroad as Queen [at dinner], and was served with her own servants. And they were sworn that day.’16
In the afternoon, the King and his third wife took boat for Greenwich. There, on Whitsunday, 4 June, Jane was formally proclaimed Queen, and processed with Henry to mass. ‘[She] went in procession’, Wriothesley reports, ‘after the King, with a great train of ladies following after her, and also offered at Mass as Queen.’ Then she dined in state ‘in her Chamber of Presence’. She sat ‘under the Cloth of Estate’ and in the chair which, only five weeks earlier, had been occupied by Anne.17
Two days later, as the Seymour cup of honour ran over, Jane’s brother Edward was created a peer, taking, after personal consultation between Henry and Garter King of Arms, the title of Viscount Beauchamp.18
Henry’s first divorce took seven years; his second, less than as many weeks. This was Cromwell’s work and, on 18 June, he had his reward. Wiltshire, Anne’s father, was stripped of the office of Lord Privy Seal, which was given to Cromwell. Three weeks later, on 9 July, the shearman’s son was created Lord Cromwell of Wimbledon.19
It remained only to determine the nature of the new regime. The Reformers feared the worst and, on 23 May, Shaxton added his urgent voice to Cranmer’s more measured pleading. ‘I beseech you, Sir,’ he wrote to Cromwell, ‘that ye will now be no less diligent in setting forth the honour of God and his Holy Word, than when the late Queen was alive, and often incited you thereto.’ ‘Leave not off, for God’s sake,’ he continued, ‘though she by her misconduct have sore slandered the same.’20
The emphasis on Anne’s role is striking–both for what it says about her and also, indirectly, what it presumes about Jane. For Shaxton was only too aware that Jane would not be ‘inciting’ Cromwell to Reform. Indeed, he had every reason to fear that she would do the opposite.
And Shaxton’s fears were complemented by the hopes of Carew, the Exeters and the rest of the conservative high nobility. Anne, the Reformer, was dead; Jane, the pious, as well as the pacific, was Queen–their Queen.
As so often in the sixteenth century, ceremony told its own story. It had already been decided that the ultimate ceremony–Jane’s coronation–would be postponed until the autumn when, it was hoped, she would be pregnant. Nevertheless, a series of events combined to launch the new reign in a blaze of pageantry. The first was the opening of the new Parliament, which had been summoned to undo the Boleyn marriage.21
The ceremonial began with a river procession from Greenwich to York Place on Wednesday, 7 June. It was modelled, of course, on Anne’s pre-coronation river pageant. But its message was the opposite. Then, a Frenchman had acted as image-consultant. Now, Chapuys dominated the scene and gave the Emperor’s benediction to the new marriage.
The ambassador had set up a ceremonial pavilion at Rotherhithe, where he had a house, conveniently mid-way between the City and Greenwich. The Emperor’s arms were on top of the tent and banners hung on poles around it. Chapuys himself was dressed in a rich gown of purple satin, with a suite of gentlemen dressed in velvet. As the royal procession passed Limehouse and came into sight, he sent two boats of musicians to salute the King and Queen. There were trumpets in one boat and wind-instruments in the other. Then, on land, a forty-gun salute was fired.22
A few moments later, there came an even mightier sound when the Tower shot four hundred guns. Only a few weeks earlier, it had been a place of desolation, its scaffolds running with the blood of Anne and her alleged accomplices. Wyatt had watched the scene from his cell and it left an indelible impression.
These bloody days have broken my heart.
My lust, my youth did then depart,
And blind desire of estate.
Who hastes to climb seeks to revert.
Of truth, circa regna tonat [around the throne the lightning strikes].
The Bell Tower showed me such a sight
That in my head sticks day and night.
There did I learn out of a grate,
For all favour, glory or might,
That yet, circa regna tonat.
But now the mighty fortress presented its other face and ‘all the Tower walls towards the water side were set with great streamers and banners’. The storm had passed; the sun shone and all was fair in the world:
So the King passed through London Bridge, with his trumpets blowing before him, and shawms and sackbuts and drumslades playing also in barges going before him. Which was a goodly sight.23
Did Jane, as she passed the Tower where her predecessor was barely cold in her grave, think that the weather could change again? That the spring of royal favour could turn into the bitter winter of indifference and contempt? Or did she somehow feel exempt?
The following day, Jane stood in the new Gate-house at York Place to watch her husband ride out in procession to open the Parliament that would give the succession to her children. But first, as was customary, the King and the Lords heard the Mass of the Holy Ghost. The mass was celebrated in the newly completed Henry VII Chapel. Henry was met by the Abbot and the monks in copes of cloth of gold. The Abbot presented him with St Edward’s sceptre and four monks held a canopy of cloth of gold over him.24
It was almost like a second coronation.
Then the King processed to the Parliament Chamber for the opening proper. Audley made the speech, ‘which’, Wriothesley noted with some surprise, ‘continued half an hour large’. For there was, after all, a lot to explain. Since the last Parliament, Audley said, Anne’s abominable treasons had come to light. Reluctantly, and only at the petition of the nobility, Henry had remarried a wife who was ‘chaste, pure and fertile’. Now, concerned as ever for the welfare of his subjects, he wished to provide for their security by re-establishing the succession. Finally, Audley offered up a prayer for the King.
Let us pray God to send offspring to our most excellent Prince; let us give thanks that He has preserved him for us safe from so many and so great dangers…and leave us thus to his posterity.25
Whether this prayer would be fulfilled depended largely, of course, on Jane.
A week later, on Corpus Christi Day, 15 June, Henry rode in procession once more from York Place to the Abbey. But this time he was accompanied by Jane and her ladies. In the Abbey, the King and Queen, with the Parliament and the Court, joined in procession to honour the Real Presence in the Sacrament.
For once, Henry was not the focus. Instead, four Grooms of the Privy Chamber bore the cloth of gold canopy over the monstrance with the consecrated wafer. The monstrance was carried by Richard Sampson, Bishop of Chichester and Dean of the Chapel Royal, who wore a rich cope and mitre and was supported by the sub-Dean. And another four Grooms walked round him, carrying flaring torches.26
It would be hard to think of a clearer signal of the limits of Reform. Other things might change. But Henry’s belief in the miracle of the mass remained unshaken. And let any who denied it tremble.
Jane, by her presence and her known orthodox piety, lent her enthusiastic support.
Jane’s smooth ascent produced near euphoria among Mary’s supporters. ‘The joy shown…at the hope of [Mary’s] restoration is inconceivable,’ Chapuys reported. Mary’s leading partisans were the new Queen’s patrons and promoters. And Jane herself, quite unfeignedly, was a Mary loyalist. ‘She bears great love and reverence to [Mary]’, Chapuys had informed Perennot. Even before Anne’s arrest, Chapuys heard, Jane had begged Henry for Mary’s restoration. She got little thanks. ‘She was a fool,’ Henry snapped. ‘[She] ought to solicit the advancement of the children they would have between them, and not any others.’ But Jane stood her ground. She was doing what Henry asked, she replied. ‘[For], in asking for the restoration of [Mary as] Princess, she conceived she was seeking the rest and tranquillity of the King, herself, her future children, and the whole realm’. ‘For,’ she dared to continue, without Mary’s restoration ‘neither [Charles V] nor this people would ever be content’.27
Chapuys naturally returned to the subject when he had his first audience with Jane on 6 June at Greenwich. ‘It was not her least happiness’, he informed her in his most courtly style, ‘that, without having had the labour of giving birth to her, she had such a daughter as [Mary].’ He begged her to favour Mary’s interest. And she said she would.
It was at this sensitive point that Henry had intervened to cut the conversation short. But, as soon as Chapuys had gone, Cromwell informed the ambassador, Jane had returned to the attack. ‘She had spoken to the King as warmly as possible in favour of [Mary].’ She had also extolled the power and greatness of Mary’s family connexions.
Chapuys had another important interview at Court that day with Jane’s brother, Edward Seymour. A satisfactory solution to the question of Mary’s status would do good both to the Seymours and Christendom, he explained. Seymour seemed convinced, and Chapuys left him ‘sure he will use his good offices therein’.28
So far, despite Henry’s initial slapping down of Jane, all seemed to be going to plan. And Mary, above all, dared to hope. Mary and Elizabeth were now staying at Hunsdon, an agreeable royal house a few miles to the south-west of Bishop’s Stortford in Hertfordshire. And there, in the third week of May, Lady Kingston, fresh from accompanying Anne to the scaffold, had gone with the good news. Mary had immediately written to Cromwell. She would have asked him to intercede for her with Henry before, she wrote. ‘But I perceived that nobody durst speak for me as long as that woman lived.’
But Anne was gone, ‘whom I pray our Lord of his great mercy to forgive’. And the world looked brighter. Almost flippantly, Mary apologised for her ‘evil writing’. ‘For I have not done so much this two year and more, nor could have found the means to do it at this time but by my Lady Kingston’s being here.’29
Cromwell, as usual, moved fast. Four days later, on the 30th, Mary thanked him for getting her Henry’s blessing and permission to write to him. They were the highest comforts that had ever come to her. In return, she would be as obedient to him ‘as can reasonably be expected’.30
The letter, despite its formal humility, breathes an easy confidence. ‘That woman’, who had destroyed Mary’s mother’s marriage and poisoned Mary’s own life, was out of the way. Instead, Henry had a good Queen who longed, she knew, to welcome her as a daughter. And he was surrounded by courtiers and councillors who were her devoted servants and now dared to show it. Soon, and with the minimum of fuss, everything would be back to normal.
She had reckoned without Henry–and without Cromwell.
By 8 June, apparently, her reconciliation with her father was complete. Mary understood, she wrote, ‘that he has forgiven all her offences and withdrawn his displeasure’. But her happiness would not be complete until she was allowed to see him. ‘[She] hopes God will preserve him and the Queen and send them a Prince’.31
Then, over the next two days something went wrong. More would be required of her, perhaps as much as Anne herself would have exacted. On the 10th she wrote to Cromwell in a state of desperate anxiety. ‘I desire you, for Christ’s passion,’ she wrote, ‘to find means that I be not moved to any further entry in this matter than I have done.’ ‘For I assure you,’ she continued, ‘I have done the utmost my conscience will suffer me.’32
But it was not enough and, within a few days, a delegation of the Council, headed once more by Norfolk, appeared at Hunsdon with a list of formal demands. Would she acknowledge Henry as her Sovereign Lord and accept all the Laws and Statutes of the Realm? Would she accept him as Supreme Head of the Church and repudiate the jurisdiction of the Bishop of Rome? And would she acknowledge that her mother’s marriage was invalid by the laws of God and Man?
Anne could have done no more, and Mary responded as she had done previously. In return, the Councillors threatened her crudely. If she were their daughter, they said, ‘they would knock her head so violently against the wall that they would make it as soft as baked apples’. She was a traitoress, and deserved to be punished as such. Finally, before leaving, they ordered Lady Shelton to hold her incommunicado.
Nevertheless, Mary managed to get in touch with Chapuys to ask for advice. Yield in the face of the threat of death, he advised. But yield as little as possible.33
Cromwell now wrote to her, disowning her and commanding her, in the King’s name, to sign the articles required. Or else she would face the consequences. And he reminded her of her likely fate by launching a pre-emptive strike against her supporters. Lady Hussey, the wife of her former Chamberlain, was sent to the Tower. The Marquess of Exeter and Treasurer Fitzwilliam were suspended from the Council. Sir Anthony Browne and Sir Francis Bryan were interrogated on the 14th, and Browne for a second time on the 17th. Their answers pointed inescapably to Carew as the prime mover in the campaign for Mary’s restoration. And Carew clearly knew that the game was up. He wrote to Mary advising her to submit and to follow Cromwell’s advice. His wife Elizabeth, who was Sir Francis Bryan’s sister, used her mother, Lady Bryan, to get a still more urgent message to Mary. ‘[She] desired her, for the Passion of Christ, in all things to follow the King’s pleasure, otherwise she was utterly undone.’34
And Mary would not be the only one to be undone. For the new Bill of Succession, which Audley had promised, had not yet been submitted to Parliament. Until it was passed, the First Act of Succession remained in force. This, as we have seen, made it treason to impugn Elizabeth’s status as heiress to the throne. The activities of Carew and the rest undoubtedly fell within its scope: they were traitors, as much as Mary was a traitoress. And, if she did not yield, they were likely to suffer together.
At this point, Jane tried to intervene in the crisis, praying Henry on her knees to forgive his daughter. But her influence counted for nothing and ‘she was rudely repulsed’.
Only a day or two before she had taken part with Henry in the Corpus Christi Day celebrations in the Abbey. They made a magnificent couple. ‘For as his Grace’, Bryan recalled in his examination, ‘stood above all those present in person, so [he] surpassed all in princely gesture and countenance’. Sir John Russell had been equally enthusiastic about Jane’s appearance: ‘The Queen was in likewise…in apparel the fairest…lady [there]’. They seemed made for each other, destined for ‘long life together’ and many children.35
But suddenly, out of this clear blue sky, storm clouds had gathered. When would lightning strike? And where?
Inevitably, faced with this threat to her supporters as well as to herself, Mary yielded and, late at night on the 22nd, she signed the formal ‘confession’ required of her. Even so, it seems to have taken more than one attempt to get her to concede everything. Easiest to allow, apparently, were the general issues raised by the Reformation. She acknowledged Henry’s Sovereignty and Supremacy and repudiated the Bishop of Rome. Then she signed the paper, as though she had finished.
But she had not. For she had not yet brought herself to address the more personal question of the invalidity of her mother’s marriage and her own bastardy. Finally this too was wrung from her. ‘I do freely [and] frankly…[ac]knowledge that the marriage, heretofore had between his Majesty, and my mother, the late Princess Dowager, was, by God’s law and Man’s law, incestuous and unlawful.’36
Each word was a poisoned arrow which pierced her heart, and she died a little with each. Then she signed a second time. She had signed away, she knew, everything that she had stood for.
‘Incredible rejoicings’ at Court greeted the news of her submission. Many, of course, were thanking God for their own escape. But Mary was racked with doubt. Chapuys was at hand with plausible justifications. But she sought relief from a higher authority and asked Chapuys to obtain a secret Papal absolution–‘otherwise her conscience could not be at perfect ease’.37
Nothing was now too good for Mary. Councillors knelt to her and sought her pardon. She was offered her choice of servants, and new and sumptuous clothes. The King sent her a horse. And, as the final mark of favour, he agreed to meet her for the first time in five years.38
Bearing in mind all that had happened, it was felt that this first encounter should be kept both secret and private. In the small hours of Thursday, 6 July, Mary was brought from Hunsdon to Hackney. Then, in the afternoon, the King and Queen, ‘with a small and secret company’, also left for the rendezvous. Henry, now that Mary had cast herself at his feet, was at his most expansive. He talked to her constantly and showered her with affection and promises. Jane gave her a beautiful diamond and Henry a present of 1,000 crowns ‘for her little pleasures’. They parted on the Friday evening, with many expressions of mutual love.39
Henry last words were to promise that she would be brought to Court. She was, and took her place immediately after the Queen. But she did so solely on Henry’s terms.
Mary was a trophy. And it is hard to think, after all this, that Jane was much more.
This was made even clearer by the Act of Succession as it was eventually passed. Chapuys had justified Mary’s surrender on the grounds that it would open the way for Henry to recognise her as heir. But neither she nor her supporters were given any such consolation. The Act was introduced into the Lords on 30 June, eight days after Mary’s capitulation. And it took full advantage of it. For the Act, like Henry, contrived to take with both hands. On the one hand, it stripped Elizabeth of her title of Princess and her status as heir. On the other, it failed to restore them to Mary. Instead the succession was given only to Henry’s children by Jane or (lest she become too proud) by any subsequent wife.40
This decision, since no such child existed, created a dangerous vacuum. To fill it, Henry was given unprecedented powers to nominate such successor as he wished, from time to time, by his Will.
Henry had always guarded his power jealously. Now, like misers throughout the ages, he could use the Great Expectations of his Will to control the behaviour of his possible heirs while he was alive.
The handling of Carew and the rest of Mary’s supporters was also an object lesson in political management. Cromwell had used them to help bring down Anne. But, when they demanded their share of the spoils, they were threatened with the same fate as the Boleyns. It was an extraordinary achievement and confirmed his absolute mastery of the political scene. Not even Wolsey had enjoyed such power.
Nor had he been so hated for it.
The weary catalogue of unfulfilled dreams and broken promises continued throughout the summer. The idea of a great Progress to the north, to match the one to the west country of 1535, had been abandoned even before Anne’s fall and it was not reinstated. The Dissolution of the Monasteries gathered pace, despite Jane’s rather pathetic attempt to save the admirably managed nunnery of Catesby in Northamptonshire. Finally, at the end of September, Henry decided to reconsider the plans for Jane’s coronation. The date fixed on was Sunday, 29 October. But as Ralph Sadler, Cromwell’s new fixer at Court, reported to his master on 27 September, the King was having second thoughts. Perhaps significantly, he gave voice to them after having supped with Jane in her Chamber.41
‘The plague had reigned in Westminster and in the Abbey itself ’, Henry told Sadler. This meant, he continued, ‘that he stood in a suspense, whether it were best to put off the time of the Coronation for a season’. Cromwell was to summon a full meeting of the Council to Windsor to debate the matter with the King.
The decision, inevitably, was ‘to put off ’. No doubt the excuse of plague was genuine. But there must also be the suspicion that Jane was being punished for her failure to conceive. Moreover, Henry’s notorious eye had started to rove again. ‘The King will not have the prize of those who do not repent in marriage,’ Chapuys reported. A week after the publication of his marriage to Jane, Henry had met two beautiful young ladies. He had sighed and said ‘[he was] sorry that he had not seen them before he was married’.42
Jane’s honeymoon was proving shorter than she expected.
And there was a price to pay for Cromwell’s magnificent dishing of conservative hopes. For the three years of Anne’s reign, Chapuys’s correspondence had been filled with predictions of rebellion. Now, five months after her death, the predictions were fulfilled. First Lincolnshire and then the north rose in revolt. In Lincolnshire, Hussey offered feeble and temporising resistance to the rebels, while his formidable wife was openly sympathetic, giving them food and drink and offering money. The rebels found a charismatic leader in Robert Aske and they framed a coherent programme of thorough-going reaction. The monasteries were to be restored. Mary was to be declared heir. Cromwell, Rich and Audley were to be executed or at least exiled. And Anne’s heretic bishops, Cranmer, Latimer, Shaxton and Hilsey, were to be burned.43
Faced with rebellion, the royal family closed ranks and both Mary and Elizabeth were brought to Court and treated with near-royal honours. ‘The Lady Mary’, a French agent reported, ‘is now first after the Queen, and sits at table opposite her, a little lower down, after having first given the napkin for washing to the King and Queen.’ ‘The Lady Elizabeth’, he noted, ‘is not at that table, though the King is very affectionate to her. It is said he loves her much.’
But, behind the façade of unity, there were deep divisions over policy. Jane, undoubtedly, was sympathetic to the main thrust of the rebel demands. ‘At the beginning of the insurrection’, the French report continued, ‘the Queen threw herself on her knees before the King and begged him to restore the Abbeys.’ Henry repulsed her once more. ‘Get up!’ he said. ‘He had often told her not to meddle with his affairs.’ Then he added the terrible warning: remember Anne. ‘[It] was enough’, the Frenchman concluded, ‘to frighten a woman who is not very secure.’44
But, though Henry could rule his wife and his Court with a rod of iron, the provinces proved more recalcitrant. Norfolk, who, in his younger days, had played a crucial role in Catherine’s great victory at Flodden, was brought out of retirement to lead the King’s armies. But the north was too strong, Norfolk advised, for the King to defeat the rebels in the field. Instead, he must negotiate. With profound reluctance, and always in bad faith, Henry agreed. Finally, in tense negotiations at Doncaster in early December, a settlement was reached. It was understood differently by the two sides. But they at least agreed that outstanding differences were to be referred to a Parliament.
The rebel armies were now disbanded, and on 15 December, Henry sent a personal message to Aske, carried by Peter Mewtis of the Privy Chamber, to summon him to Court for the Christmas festivities at Greenwich.45
These got off to a magnificent start. The Thames was frozen solid, which made the usual journey downriver impossible. Instead, the Court travelled by land. And, as with Jane’s river pageant from Greenwich, the journey was turned into a resounding reaffirmation of royal orthodoxy.
First, the new Lord Mayor of London was presented to the King and knighted in the Presence Chamber at York Place. The palace itself was now officially known as the Palace of Westminster. But popular usage had already started to refer to it as Whitehall, to distinguish it from what was left of the old medieval Palace of Westminster. And, as usual, popular usage won.
Preceded by the newly knighted Lord Mayor carrying the mace, the King, the Queen and the Lady Mary then rode from Whitehall through the City of London. The streets were freshly gravelled, from Temple Bar to the Southwark end of London Bridge, and were hung with cloth of gold and arras. The four orders of Friars stood in Fleet Street in cloth of gold copes, ‘with crosses and candlesticks and censers to cense the King and Queen as they rode by’. At the West Door of St Paul’s, where the young Henry had led Catherine to her marriage with Arthur, there was yet more incense, as the Bishop of London, two Abbots and the whole choir greeted Henry and Jane. Thence, the sweet smoke, the rustle of copes, and the glint of crosses and candlesticks continued the whole way to London Bridge.46
The chronicler Wriothesley, who was both religiously conservative and a lover of ceremony, was delighted. ‘[It] was a goodly sight to behold’, he concludes. Richard Lee, writing to the equally conservative Lady Lisle, was even more impressed. ‘The like sight’, he wrote, ‘hath not been seen here since the Emperor’s being here [in 1522].’ He particularly noted the presence of Chapuys, ‘the ambassador to the Emperor’, with the royal party, and concluded, like Wriothesley, that ‘it rejoiced every man wondrously’.47
Chapuys, at least, knew better. As early as 5 November he had reported his suspicions that Henry intended to double-cross the rebels. And he could only watch as, over the next few months, his gloomy prophecy was fulfilled.
Did Jane in her golden cage feel the same?
If she did, she was wise enough not to show it. According to Husey, she, like Henry, was ‘never merrier’ as they settled down to celebrate Christmas with ‘as great mirth and triumph as ever was’. Aske arrived between the 25th and the 31st and was lionised. Henry gave him ‘a jacket of crimson satin’. And he was even more prodigal with promises. He was Aske’s gracious sovereign lord. He reaffirmed his liberal pardon to all the north. He intended to hold his next Parliament in the north at York and to have Jane crowned there. He ‘tendereth the Commonwealth of his subjects and extends his mercy from his heart’.48
It was a consummate performance. And Aske swallowed it. On the 5th, he left the Court in haste and the utmost secrecy for the north. His mission was to broadcast Henry’s message of forgiveness. Naturally, he placed heavy emphasis on its two most dramatic elements: the promised Parliament and coronation at York. Parliament had last met there over two centuries previously, in 1322. And no King or Queen had been crowned there since the Conquest.
Aske was not heard uncritically. But his mission had the desired effect of dividing and disarming opposition. In February, a few disgruntled elements launched a new revolt. Henry now had his opportunity. The revolt was crushed easily and the King regarded himself as being exonerated from his promises. The rebel leaders, headed by Aske, Hussey and Darcy, who had played the same ambiguous role in Yorkshire as Hussey in Lincolnshire, were arrested, tried and condemned, along with dozens of others. They included Sir Robert Constable, who trusted to his family relationship with Jane to obtain his pardon. He trusted in vain.49
Aske’s last request was to be spared the full horror of execution for treason. ‘Let me [be] full dead ere I be dismembered,’ he begged. Henry, who, like the Mikado, had a bizarre taste in executions, granted his wish. Instead, Aske ‘was hanged in the City of York in chains till he died’.50
Probably, as he twisted there in agony for hour after hour, he wished for the swifter death of the knife.
Jane had a final part to play in this ‘pacification’ of the north by fair words and deceit. On 23 May her pregnancy was known at Court, and on the 27th, as a welcome change from the executions which had disfigured the City for months, a Te Deum was celebrated in St Paul’s. Audley and Cromwell attended and Latimer of all people preached the sermon.51
What, a quizzical observer must have wondered, had changed since the days of Queen Anne?
Henry took swift advantage of the Queen’s pregnancy to put off, yet again, his planned Progress to the north. It was the only one of his plethora of promises to Aske to have survived. Now it, too, was broken.
Ungallantly, in his letter of justification to Norfolk, who was mopping up in the north, he blamed the cancellation on Jane’s womanish fears. Normally, the King conceded, Jane was a good and obedient wife: ‘of that loving inclination and reverend conformity, that she can in all things well content…herself with [what] we shall think expedient and determine’. Nevertheless, if he were so far from her, and in such an unsettled country, even she, in the condition that she was, might take fright, with disastrous consequences: ‘[to the] no little danger…to that wherewith she is now pregnant’.52
But at least in the narrow sphere of her own household, Jane was sovereign. Henry refused to interfere in the appointment of her women. And Jane was strict in what she required of them.
In mid-July, Jane, then six months pregnant, was eating quails for dinner. The quails had been sent by Lady Lisle, and the Countesses of Rutland and Sussex, who were serving the Queen, took advantage of the fact. They reminded her of Lady Lisle’s suit for her daughters by her previous marriage, Anne and Catherine Basset, to be taken into the Queen’s service. The birds were delicious and the Queen was disposed to be gracious. But not too much. Let both girls be sent for, she decreed, and she would take her pick of one of them.53
The girls arrived and Jane chose Anne. There was an immediate problem about what she should wear. Lady Lisle had equipped her in the latest French fashion. But that, with its associations with her predecessor, was anathema to Jane. However, as a special concession, she agreed that ‘Mrs Anne shall wear out her French apparel’. But two things were non-negotiable. Anne had to have an English-style bonnet or headdress and a frontlet or bodice. Husey provided them for her, but was not happy with the results. ‘Methought [the bonnet] became her nothing so well as the French hood,’ he wrote to her mother. ‘But the Queen’s pleasure must needs be fulfilled.’ A few weeks later, even the remnants of Anne’s French attire were banished, at the Queen’s express insistence.54
In one respect at least, she would be different from ‘that woman’.
The day after Anne Basset had been sworn as one of Jane’s servants, she accompanied her new mistress when she took to her Chamber at Hampton Court on Sunday, 16 September. But, despite the short time she had been at Court, Henry, with his keen eye for the ladies, had already spotted that she was ‘far fairer’ than her rejected sister.
Jane’s confinement lasted over three weeks. Meanwhile, the plague struck in the vicinity and some courtiers were infected. Henry himself withdrew to Wolsey’s old house at Esher for four days, ‘so that [there should be] less resort’ to Hampton Court. As the time went by the tension mounted. ‘We look daily for a Prince,’ Thomas Wriothesley wrote to his friend, Sir Thomas Wyatt, who was now ambassador in Spain. ‘God send what shall please him.’ Jane went into what turned out to be a prolonged labour. On Thursday, 11 October, a solemn general procession was made at St Paul’s, ‘to pray for the Queen that was then in labour of child’. At 2 a.m. on Friday morning she was safely delivered. It was the eve of the Feast of St Edward, England’s royal saint. And the baby was a boy.55
Straight away, the pre-signed letters were sent out, in which ‘Jane the Queen’ proudly announced the birth of ‘a Prince, conceived in most lawful matrimony between my lord the King’s Majesty and us’.56
Cromwell received his copy early and wrote immediately to Wyatt. ‘Here be no news’, he began teasingly, ‘but very good news, which for surety I have received this morning.’ ‘That it hath pleased Almighty God,’ he continued, ‘of his goodness, to send unto the Queen’s Grace deliverance of a goodly Prince, to the great comfort, rejoice, and consolation of the King’s Majesty, and of all us his most humble, loving and obedient subjects.’57
It would be interesting to know Wyatt’s reactions.
Immediately, the celebrations began. By 8 o’clock, the Te Deum was being sung in every parish church in London. The bells were rung and there were bonfires in the street. At 9 a.m. a solemn Te Deum began in St Paul’s, in the presence of the Council, the judges and the mayor and citizens. Then the King’s waits and the City waits joined forces with a shrill display on the shawms, and the guns of the Tower fired a salute.
The celebration resumed in the evening, with more bonfires and music and free food and wine. Two thousand guns were shot off in the Tower and the ringing of church bells continued until 10 o’clock.58
On Monday, 15 October, the baby was christened in the Chapel Royal at Hampton Court. Cranmer officiated, Mary was his godmother and Elizabeth carried the chrisom-cloth. He was christened ‘Edward’, and Garter King of Arms proclaimed his titles: ‘EDWARD, son and heir to the King of England, Duke of Cornwall and Earl of Chester’. Then, with Mary and Elizabeth supporting his train, he was carried back to the Queen’s apartments, where his proud parents were waiting to greet him.59
Despite her lengthy labour, Jane seemed to make a good recovery and plans were put in hand for her churching, which would mark her return to ordinary life after the purdah of her confinement. Anne Basset, her mother was informed, would have to have a ‘new satin gown’ for the occasion. Meanwhile, in another splendid ceremony, Jane’s brother Edward and Treasurer Fitzwilliam were both made earls. There was a rumour that Cromwell would be created an earl too. But he had to wait.60
A few days later, however, Jane’s condition suddenly worsened. On Friday the 19th, there was another general procession at St Paul’s for ‘the health of the Queen’. By Tuesday the 23rd, ‘the bruit [rumour] was her Grace was departed’. But Jane pulled round. ‘If good prayers can save her life’, Lady Lisle was informed, ‘she is not like to die, for never lady was so much plained [lamented] with everyman, rich and poor.’61
At first, the prayers seemed to work. On the Tuesday afternoon, she had a natural ‘lax’ or discharge and she seemed to improve. But she was very ill all night, and, so her doctors reported, ‘doth rather appair [worsen] than amend’. Her confessor was with her from dawn and, at 8a.m., was preparing to administer Extreme Unction.62
Henry’s reaction was curious. ‘The King was determined’, Russell informed Cromwell a little later on the 24th, ‘as this day to have removed to Esher.’ But because the Queen was very sick, he had stayed. However, he was determined to be in Esher on the 25th. ‘If she amend, he will go,’ Russell wrote, ‘and if she amend not, he told me this day, he could not find it in his heart to tarry.’63
What was Henry doing? Was he grief-stricken and seeking solitude? Or did he find Jane’s death, like other unpleasant things, distasteful and something to be avoided?
In any event, he did not have long to wait. By 8 p.m. on the 24th she was dying and Norfolk summoned Cromwell from London. ‘I pray you’, he wrote, ‘to be here tomorrow early to comfort our good master, for as for our mistress there is no likelihood of her life, the more pity, and I fear she shall not be in life at the time ye shall read this.’
Jane died about midnight. We do not know whether Henry was present.64