Boleyn traitor, p.50
Boleyn Traitor, page 50
Dr Butts takes my hand and speaks very quietly and quickly, almost as if he were hiding what he is saying from my maid who stands at the door, and the guard who stands outside it and perhaps another watcher who is in my bedroom at the half-closed door, straining to hear. ‘Jane, I am trying to tell you something. Blink your eyes if you understand me.’
I am not such a fool. I stare at him with my eyes goggling wide.
‘There is a law come before the new session on parliament which will be passed and turned into law without even the king’s signature, just on his nod.’
I am as unblinking as an owl at dusk.
‘It says there is a new treason: no woman may marry the king if she has had a lover or a husband before.’
‘Katherine of Aragon, Anne Boleyn, Anne of Cleves, Katheryn Howard,’ I say – naming four of five queens, divorced by the king for that very reason. ‘He’ll find that inconvenient.’
‘It is to be applied retrospectively,’ he says urgently. ‘Do you understand? Backdated. Katheryn Howard will go on trial for marrying the king when she was betrothed to Francis Dereham. And she will be accused of foreseeing the king’s death with Thomas Culpeper.’
Finally, they understand the contradiction in accusing her of adultery. I smile in my pleasure at the logic. ‘It’s tyranny, of course. But at last, it makes sense.’
‘Listen,’ is all he says. ‘There is another clause to this new law. Anyone who is insane can now be interrogated – contrary to the previous law. Anyone insane can now be accused of a crime. Anyone insane can now be executed – contrary to the previous law. A madman can be executed even if he does not understand why.’ He looks into my face. ‘Or a madwoman.’
‘No, no, madness is a complete defence under the law,’ I tell him.
‘Not any more. The king has ordered the law to be changed. Madness is no defence. A madwoman can be executed.’
His words pierce my indifference. ‘He has changed the law on precontract, just to kill Kitty?’ I whisper. ‘He has changed the law on madness just to kill me?’
He nods.
‘He is determined that she shall die because she is young and pretty and preferred a young handsome man to him?’
He nods again.
‘And I am to die for knowing this?’
The spies strain their ears in the silence.
‘Will no one say “no” to him?’
The Tower of London, February
1542
I DO NOT NEED to pretend to madness in the world we live in. We are ruled by a madman, and we are all so bereft of our wits that, having started by obeying him, we have gone on to do what he wants before he even asks for it, and now we are all as mad as him. When he was young, he was fair and handsome, and we admired him, loved him, and thought he would go on to do great things. Now that he is tyrant, we go on saying he is fair and handsome and we admire, love, and expect much of him. He threatens war with his neighbours, he destroys the Church, he rewrites laws, murders his friends, and destroys his wives, and we are as mad as March hares – we never ever say ‘no’.
The dark barge comes for me in February, and I don’t bother to caper or sing. Whether I am mad or sane, the king is going to kill me, as he has killed hundreds of others: from the pilgrims, starved to death in their metal cages hanging at crossroads in Yorkshire, to those that waited obediently for their deaths in the Tower, as I do.
I am not alone in here. Sir John Gage could not give me my old room when I came again to the water gate. The place is as busy as an inn; he could not reserve my usual rooms for me. Kitty’s step-grandmother the dowager duchess is in my old room, her daughter the countess with her. Kitty herself is in the rooms where Anne waited for her death. Others of her family and her maids-of-honour are in cells in the White Tower and in the nearby buildings. Dozens of us are charged with treason, because the king cannot bear to think that a wife nearly young enough to be his granddaughter might have fallen in love with a young man who was deeply in love with her.
We are not waiting for trial. The lords will use the device of my spymaster, the writ of attainder, so we can be proclaimed guilty without being heard. It is – as he told me – so much more efficient than a public trial. Kitty chooses not to defend herself – how could she? She would have had no idea that there was anything to say in her own defence. She would not play Guinevere – but she will play the dying queen – Polyxena – and they tell me she has the block brought to her chamber so she can practise kneeling and laying down her head. It gives me a little shock to think that I will have to kneel where she knelt just minutes before, lay down my cheek on the block where she laid hers. They’ll never clean it properly; I will die with Kitty’s blood on my cheek.
Or perhaps we will just wait in the Tower, wait for years, like Margaret Pole, like Lord Lisle, as the king’s fickle attention scampers elsewhere – war with France, the marriage of Lady Mary, an alliance with Scotland, the return of the Church? He could be thinking of anything but us. I doubt he will kill Kitty until he wants a new wife, as he usually does. The longer that we wait – all the first week of February and into the second – the more sure I am that he has forgotten about us.
‘The king dined with some ladies,’ my maid tells me one cold grey morning. ‘He held a great dinner, and sixty-one ladies attended.’
Choose your partner – I would have foreseen this if I had been still mad. But it is the ladies who paraded themselves at dinner for the king to choose who are the mad ones.
‘Was the king happy?’ It’s all that ever matters. ‘Was he happy? Was he pleased? Did he favour anyone? Is he well?’
‘They say he was pleased with Lady Cobham, Elizabeth Basset, and she who was the wife of Sir Thomas Wyatt, Elizabeth Brooke, oh – and Kateryn Parr.’
‘Old friends,’ I say, smiling at the revival of the ambition of Elizabeth Basset and the return to court of the others. Three of them were fellow spies with me for my Lord Cromwell. ‘Dear old friends.’
It is now a race, and if I were a gambling woman, I should put money on the king becoming urgent in his desire for a new wife before the ulcer on his leg kills him. If he wants to clear the Tower of the friends and kinsmen and -women of his fifth wife before his wedding to the sixth, then the executioner will be busy. But if he tries to dance on his one leg, in his one-sided courtship, then he may kill himself before he can kill us. It is a race, and my life is the stake.
I think I am amused by this until I hear the noise of hammering wood, and I look from my window. Just out of the corner of the window, only visible if I press my face to the cold little panes of old glass, I can see Tower Green, and they are building a scaffold, and I know I have lost my bet, and little Kitty Howard has lost hers. The tyrant is clearing the way for another wife. Whoever she is, she will have to keep her wits about her.
We should have said ‘no’. We should have said ‘no’ at the first sign of madness – the dismissal of Queen Katherine of Aragon. We should have said ‘no’ to the deaths that followed. All that is needed to defeat a tyrant is the courage to say ‘no’.
I see little Kitty, head bowed, walk under my window to the green. It is a new walk for her; she will have rehearsed it. Her head droops like a tired lily on its stem; she sways a little, as if she is hearing the music of a dance in her head. Her new walk is a slow lilting pace, like the Volta, her scaffold walk.
Even pressed against the window, I can only see the ladder up to the platform and the waiting headsman. But I hear the silence fall on the small invited crowd as she climbs the steps, and the silence as she speaks – she will have rehearsed her speech but it will be quite nonsensical – then the silence as they wait for her eyes to be masked and for her to kneel before the block, and then the roll of the drums, and the thud of the axe and the ‘oh’ as the crowd witnesses a death prettily done, well done by Kitty who liked to do things well. But they should have said ‘no’.
There is a knock at my door, and Sir John Gage comes in, his face grave, his eyes on the ground. ‘Are you ready, Lady Rochford?’ he asks.
‘I’m ready,’ I say.
But I should have said ‘no’.
AFTERWORD
ANYONE MIGHT THINK that there has been enough written about the Tudors! I, too, have made a contribution to this huge library. But there are still characters never explained or understood, and one of the greatest is Jane Boleyn, Lady Rochford.
There are good reasons for this – she was a minor Tudor woman, and, like all Tudor women, not much was recorded about her in her own time. We don’t know the date of her birth, we don’t have any lengthy letters, we don’t even have a portrait of her, though Hans Holbein sketched many of her friends.
She was not named as a witness in the trials of her husband and sister-in-law, and George Boleyn’s complaint that he was being convicted on the evidence of a woman did not identify that woman as Jane. Research now suggests that she was not one of those who gave evidence against him and his sister, and we have a letter from her to George, promising to speak to the king for him.
And yet she is blamed. Years after the trial, after her own disgrace and death, her reputation was destroyed by the accounts that she had betrayed her husband and her sister-in-law. These were not unbiased new findings, but part of the rehabilitation of Anne Boleyn’s reputation when her daughter, Elizabeth, took the throne. The new queen’s mother had to be exonerated, without blaming the queen’s father, Henry VIII. The building of the Tudor story, supporting their right to rule, was the start of the whitewashing of Henry VIII’s reputation. The price was the vilification of Jane.
This is my first novel since writing Normal Women: 900 Years of Making History, an exploration of how women’s history is missing from what we read as complete history books. It became clear that the unstated, often unconscious, biases of historians have skewed the history of what women actually did. Even when there was evidence before them of independence, agency, and logical action, historians have still reported dependence, weakness, and even madness. Jane Boleyn’s history is a striking example of this.
Even though she was hardly mentioned in the first accounts of the trial, Jane was later blamed for a murderous plot against her husband, and then for going on to pimp her kinswoman, Katheryn Howard, into an affair with a courtier which led to their deaths. Why – the all-male historians of the Victorian period asked themselves – why would a woman do that? Their only answer was that she must have been profoundly wicked – and terribly unladylike. ‘Jane Boleyn the monster’ was born out of widely held Victorian beliefs that women are naturally sexually frigid, naturally domesticated, and naturally lacking in ambition. Thus, any successful woman courtier tainted by sexual scandal cannot be a lady, cannot be a heroine. Indeed, she is so unwomanly, she is barely human. She is a monster.
This image of the monster-Jane was revised by new attitudes to women from the 1960s onwards, though a more liberal view of female sexuality has done her no favours, but instead has created a new lens of shame. The new, sexually liberated imagined Jane is driven by perverse desires as a voyeur. This Jane takes sexual pleasure from watching: first her husband with his sister, and then her young cousin with her lover.
And there her reputation was fixed, until more recent publications began to assert the common-sense view that Jane Boleyn could not have been a successful courtier, holding down a highly desirable post through five reigns, in the grip of an uncontrollable sex addiction or murderous spite.
Of course, Jane is not the only historical character to be written and rewritten according to the changing views of historians. In time, everyone is revised. I, too, have been part of that reimagining. I wrote of Katherine of Aragon as she was when she first came to England – not the tragic, old, defeated woman of most of the histories we read. Anne Boleyn’s public reputation has gone from an imaginary, murderous, incestuous, adulterous villain, to Protestant heroine, and even martyr, as each different generation of historians has sought and found a different Anne Boleyn. My first Tudor novel, The Other Boleyn Girl, was written from the point of view of Anne’s sister, Mary Boleyn, who (I think) could have been deeply afraid that what was being said of her sister was true; my novel describes her worst fears. Jane Seymour was the great favourite of Victorian historians, a quiet wife who had the grace to die in childbirth, and there are not many records of her short, married life for recent historians to revise. Nobody looking seriously at Anne of Cleves’ enchanting portrait could believe Henry VIII’s report that she made him impotent – but Team-Henry historians supported that story for five hundred years, until more forensic analyses of Henry focused on his accidents and illness. And Katheryn Howard’s reputation has risen since her disgrace, with the increased understanding and sympathy towards young, sexually active women.
Katheryn claimed in her confession that she was sexually abused, and this has led to a rewriting of her history as a victim, rather than a thoughtless nymphomaniac. Alas, there are still some determined dinosaurs, but most people see that Katheryn did not give full consent to the two so-called lovers of her childhood and cannot be seen of as knowingly, consciously, consenting to her marriage with the king. The disparity of power was so great that the seventeen-year-old niece of a highly ambitious uncle could not have refused the King of England. Gareth Russell’s recent biography of Katheryn Howard emphasises her youth and inexperience as well as her flirtatious nature.
Recent historians have pulled back from the view of a hyper-sexual Jane Boleyn as well. Julia Fox’s thoughtful biography offers us a portrait of a loving wife and loyal sister, neither accusing her husband nor relishing his adultery. But Jane cannot simply have been in the wrong time and place – a key witness at two trials for royal adultery, and two royal divorces.
I think the answer to the mystery of her career is to be found in the turning point for the Boleyn family. When they were disgraced in a show trial against a flirtatious queen who had lost her husband’s love, failed to give him a son, and had no powerful supporters, Jane did not share their disgrace. The Boleyn sister and brother and their supporters died on the scaffold, and the Boleyn parents retired to the country, but Jane sailed on into the next reign – well paid, promoted, and respected. She was appointed almost at once to serve the new queen, Jane Seymour.
She even benefited from a law, passed in Parliament, that gave her an improved widow’s dower. How did she get this? Neither the Boleyns nor their great family, the Howards, could, or would, have done this for the widow of a traitor. I think it can only have been Thomas Cromwell, at the peak of his success, building a spy and management network throughout the court and country. I think Cromwell brought her back from temporary disgrace and then used her as one of his many lady-spies in the queen’s rooms, through three reigns.
When Jane Seymour died and Anne of Cleves arrived, it was Jane Boleyn who was her chief lady-in-waiting, but not even her warnings of the failure of the marriage could save Cromwell from the plotting of his great rivals and enemies, the Spanish party, who continued to support their heir, the Roman Catholic princess Lady Mary.
Cromwell did not survive the divorce of his candidate, Anne of Cleves, though I think he and Jane created the evidence for the divorce; and his death left Jane without a spymaster and patron. But she still had the fortune that he had won for her – the magnificent Blickling Hall in Norfolk was hers for life, with other lands that paid rent. She could have retired from court and lived on her lands as a wealthy widow. She was rich enough to be an attractive wife and could have married again. But she did not.
You don’t have to be a Victorian historian to imagine that Jane was ambitious. The court life was all she had known from girlhood, and the arrival of young Katheryn Howard at court was a wonderful opportunity for Jane to advise and guide another queen, especially as this one might outlive her husband. There is no historical evidence that Jane was hoping to be lady-in-waiting to a queen regent – that part is my fiction. But ‘my’ Jane – the Jane of this novel – has studied Henry VIII all her life, and sees, as everyone saw in real life, his deterioration in these years.
We know that she helped Katheryn and Thomas Culpeper to meet, fully aware of the danger. The great question about Jane is why would she do this? The outdated answers – firstly that she was murderously wicked, then that she was sexually perverse – are, I think, very unlikely. If Jane’s was jealous of her queens, why did she help Anne of Cleves to safety and prosperity? If she was compelled by voyeurism, she could have satisfied it without fatal danger to herself, her young kinswoman, and her family. The fact that she was in the room when the lovers met – even when they were sexually active – is not proof of her perversity, nor of theirs, but of an attempt by all three to cling to a sort of respectability. And though shocking to the Victorians, and perhaps to us, we must remember that in medieval England people often had sex in crowded rooms with others watching or hearing; privacy is a modern invention.
Jane cannot be accused of being a pimp in the Howard–Culpeper affair, even though they both blamed her once they were caught. Nobody reading Katheryn’s letter to Thomas could think that this was a girl tricked into meeting an unwanted suitor. Her letter – which I quote in the novel – are the words of a young woman deeply in love. She wrote,
‘I never longed so muche for [a] thynge as I do to se you and to speke wyth you, the wyche I trust shal be shortely now, the wyche dothe comforthe me verie much whan I thynk of ett and wan I thynke agan that you shall departe from me agayne ytt makes my harte to dye to thynke what fortune I have that I cannot be always yn your company.’
