CHAPTER VII

1536-1540

PLOT AND COUNTERPLOT—JANE SEYMOUR AND ANNE OF CLEVES

From the moment that Henry abruptly left the lists at May-day on the receipt of Cromwell’s letter detailing the admissions of Smeaton, he saw Anne no more. No pang of remorse, no wave of compassion passed over him. He easily believed what he wished to believe, and Anne was left to the tender mercies of Cromwell, to be done to death. Again Henry was a prey to profound self-pity for ever having fallen under the enchantment of such a wicked woman. He, of course, was not to blame for anything. He never was. He was always the clement, just man whose unsuspecting goodness of heart had been abused by others, and who tried to find distraction and to forget the evil done him. On the very night of the day that Anne was arrested the Duke of Richmond, Henry’s son, now a grown youth, went, as was his custom, into his father’s room at Whitehall to bid him good night and ask his blessing. The King, we are told,[167] fell a-weeping as he blessed his son, “saying that he and his sister (Mary) might well be grateful to God for saving them from the hands of that accursed and venomous harlot who had intended to poison them.” That Anne may have planned the assassination of Mary is quite probable, even if she had no hand in the shortening of Katharine’s days, and this may have been the real hidden pretext of her death acting upon Henry’s fears for himself.[168] But if such were the case, Henry, at least, was deserving of no pity, for when it was only Katharine’s life that was in danger he was, as we have seen, brutally callous, and only awoke to the enormity of the “venomous harlot” when Cromwell made him believe that his own safety was jeopardised. Then no fate was too cruel for the woman he once had loved.

On the day preceding Anne’s trial, Jane Seymour was brought from Sir Nicholas Carew’s house to another residence on the river bank, only a mile from Whitehall Stairs, to be ready for her intended elevation as soon as the Queen was disposed of. Here Jane was served for the few days she stayed “very splendidly by the cooks and certain officers of the King, and very richly adorned.”[169] So certain was Henry that nothing would now stand in the way of his new marriage that Jane was informed beforehand that on the 15th, by three in the afternoon, she would hear of her predecessor’s condemnation; and Anne’s cousin and enemy, Sir Francis Brian, eagerly brought the news to the expectant lady at the hour anticipated. The next day, when the sword of the French headsman had made Henry indeed a widower, the King only awaited receipt of the intelligence to enter his barge and seek the consolation of Jane Seymour. At six o’clock in the morning of the 20th May, when the headless body of Anne, barely cold, still awaited sepulture huddled in an old arrow-box in the Church of St. Peter within the Tower, Jane was secretly carried by water from her residence to Hampton Court; and before nine o’clock she had been privately married to the King,[170] by virtue of a dispensation issued the day previously by the accommodating Cranmer.[171] It would seem probable that the day after the private espousals Jane travelled to her home in Wiltshire, where she stayed for several days whilst preparations were being made in the King’s abodes for her reception as Queen: for all the A’s had to be changed to J’s in the royal ciphers, and traces of Anne’s former presence abolished wherever possible. Whether Henry accompanied his new wife to Wiltshire on this occasion is not quite certain, though from Sir John Russell’s account it is probable that he did. In any case the King and his new wife visited Mercer’s Hall, in Cheapside, on the 29th May, St. Peter’s Eve, to witness from the windows the civic ceremony of the annual setting of the watch; and on the following day, 30th May, the pair were formally married in the Queen’s closet at Whitehall.

The people at large looked somewhat askance at this furious haste to marry the new wife before the shed blood of the previous one was dry;[172] but the Court, and those who still recollected the wronged Princess Mary and her dead mother, were enthusiastic in their welcome to Jane.[173] The Emperor’s friends, too, were in joyous mood; and Princess Mary at Hunsdon was full of hope, and eager to be allowed to greet her father and his wife now that “that woman” was dead. Chapuys, we may be sure, did not stand behind the door now when he went to Court. On the contrary, when he first visited Whitehall a few days after the wedding, Henry led him by the hand to Jane’s apartments, and allowed the diplomatist to kiss the Queen—“congratulating her upon her marriage and wishing her prosperity. I told her that, although the device of the lady who had preceded her on the throne was ‘The happiest of women,’ I had no doubt that she herself would realise that motto. I was sure that the Emperor would be equally rejoiced as the King himself had been at meeting such a virtuous and amiable Queen, the more so that her brother (i.e. Sir E. Seymour, afterwards the Duke of Somerset) had been in the Emperor’s service. I added that it was almost impossible to believe the joy and pleasure which Englishmen generally had felt at the marriage; especially as it was said that she was continually trying to persuade the King to restore the Princess to his favour, as formerly.” Most of Chapuys’ courtly talk with Jane, indeed, was directed to this point of the restoration of Mary; but the new Queen, though inexperienced, had been well coached, and did not unduly commit herself; only promising to favour the Princess, and to endeavour to deserve the title that Chapuys had given her of “peacemaker.” Henry strolled up to the pair at this point, and excused his new wife for any want of expertness: “as I was the first ambassador she had received, and she was not used yet to such receptions. He (Henry) felt sure, however, that she would do her utmost to obtain the title of ‘peacemaker,’ with which I (Chapuys) had greeted her, as, besides being naturally of a kind and amiable disposition and much inclined to peace, she would strive to prevent his (Henry’s) taking part in a foreign war, if only out of the fear of being separated from him.”[174]

But all these fine hopes were rapidly banished. Jane never possessed or attempted to exercise any political influence on her husband. She smiled sweetly and in a non-committal way upon the Princess Mary, and upon the imperialist and moderate Catholic party that had hoped to make the new Queen their instrument; but Cromwell’s was still the strong mind that swayed the King. He had obtained renewed control over his master by ridding him of Anne; and had, at all events, prevented England from being drawn into a coalition with France against the Emperor; but he had no intention, even if it had been possible, of going to the other extreme and binding his country to go to war against France to please the Emperor. Henry’s self-will and vanity, as well as his greed, also stood in the way of a complete submission to the Papacy, and those who had brought Jane Seymour in, hoping that her advent would mean a return to the same position as that previous to Anne’s rise, now found that they had been over sanguine. Charles and Francis were left to fight out their great duel alone in Italy and Provence, to the general discomfiture of the imperial cause; and, instead of hastening to humble himself at the feet of Paul III., as the pontiff had fondly expected, Henry summoned Parliament, and gave stronger statutory sanction than ever to his ecclesiastical independence of Rome.[175] Anne’s condemnation and Elizabeth’s bastardy were obediently confirmed by the Legislature, and the entire freedom of the English Church from Rome reasserted.

But the question of the succession was that which aroused the strongest feeling, and its settlement the keenest disappointment. Now that Anne’s offspring was disinherited, Princess Mary and her friends naturally expected that she, with the help of the new Queen, would once more enter into the enjoyment of her birthright. Eagerly Mary wrote to Cromwell bespeaking his aid, which she had been led to expect that he would give; and by his intercession she was allowed to send her humble petition to her father, praying for leave to see him. Her letters are all couched in terms of cringing humility, praying forgiveness for past offences, and promising to be a truly dutiful daughter in future. But this did not satisfy Henry. Cromwell, desirous, in pursuance of his policy of keeping friendly with the Emperor without going to war with France, or kneeling to Rome, hoped to bring about peace between Mary and her father. But the strongest passions of Henry’s nature were now at stake, and he would only accept his daughter’s submission on terms that made her a self-confessed bastard, and against this the girl, as obstinate as her father and as righteously proud as her mother, still rebelled. Henry’s son, the Duke of Richmond, was now a straight stripling of eighteen, already married to Norfolk’s daughter, and, failing issue by Jane, here was an heir to the Crown that might carry the Tudor line onward in the male blood, if Parliament could be chicaned or threatened into acknowledging him. So Mary was plied with letters from Cromwell, each more pressing and cruel than the previous one, driving the girl to distraction by the King’s insistence upon his terms.[176] Threats, cajolery, and artful casuistry were all tried. Again Mary turned to her foreign advisers and the King’s rebellious subjects for support, and again her father’s heart hardened when he knew it. Norfolk, who with others was sent to persuade her, was so incensed with her firmness that he said if she had been his daughter he would have knocked her head against the wall until it was as soft as a codlin. But Norfolk’s daughter was the Duchess of Richmond, and might be Queen Consort after Henry’s death if Mary were disinherited, so that there was some excuse for his violence. Those who were in favour of Mary were dismissed from the Council—even Cromwell was in fear—and Jane Seymour was rudely snubbed by the King for daring to intercede for the Princess. At length, with death threatening her, Mary could stand out no longer. Without even reading it, she signed with a mental reservation, and confident of obtaining the Papal absolution for which she secretly asked, the shameful declaration forced upon her, repudiating the Papal authority, and specifically acknowledging herself a bastard.

Then Henry was all amiability with his wronged daughter. He and Jane went to visit her at Richmond, whither she had been brought, giving her handsome presents of money and jewels; liberty was given to her to come to Court, and stately service surrounded her. But it was all embittered by the knowledge that Parliament had been induced to acknowledge that all the King’s children were illegitimate, and to grant to Henry himself the right of appointing his own successor by letters patent or by will. Alas! the youth in whose immediate interest the injustice was done was fast sinking to his grave; and on the 22nd July 1536 the Duke of Richmond breathed his last, to Henry’s bitter grief, Mary’s prospects again became brighter, and all those who resented the religious policy and Henry’s recalcitrancy now looked to the girl as their only hope of a return to the old order of things. Chapuys, too, was ceaseless in his intrigues to bring England once more into a condition of obedience to the Pope, that should make her a fit instrument for the imperial policy, and soon the disappointment that followed on the elevation of Jane Seymour found vent in the outbreak of rebellion in Lincolnshire and Yorkshire.

The priests and the great mass of the people had bent the neck patiently to the King’s violent innovations in the observances that they had been taught to hold sacred. They had seen the religious houses, to which they looked for help and succour in distress, destroyed and alienated. The abuses of the clergy had doubtless been great, and the first measures against them had been welcomed; but the complete confiscation of vast properties, in the main administered for the benefit of the lowly, the continued enclosure of common lands by the gentry newly enriched by ecclesiastical plunder, and the rankling sense of the scandalous injustice that had been suffered by Katharine and Mary, for the sake, as the people said, of the King’s lustful caprice, at last provided the extreme militant Catholic party with the impetus needed for revolt against the Crown. Imperious Henry was beside himself with rage; and for a time it looked as if he and his system might be swept away in favour of his daughter, or one of the Poles, who were being put forward by the Pope. The Bull of excommunication against Henry and England, so long held back, was now launched, making rebellion righteous; and the imperial interest in England, which was still strong, did its best to aid the rising of Henry’s lieges against him. But the rebels were weakly led: the greater nobles had for the most part been bought by grants of ecclesiastical lands; and Norfolk, for all his moral baseness, was an experienced and able soldier. So the Pilgrimage of Grace, threatening as it looked for a time, flickered out; and the yoke was riveted tighter than ever upon the neck of rural England. To the party that had hoped to make use of her, Jane Seymour was thus, to some extent, a disappointment;[177] but her placid submissiveness, which made her a bad political instrument, exactly suited a husband so imperious as Henry; and from a domestic point of view the union was successful. During the summer Jane shared in her husband’s progresses and recreations, but as the months rolled on and no hope came of offspring, ominous rumours ran that Jane’s coronation would be deferred until it was proved that she might bear children to the King; and some said that if she proved barren a pretext would be found for displacing her in favour of another. Indeed, only a few days after the public marriage, Henry noticed two very beautiful girls at Court, and showed his annoyance that he had not seen them before taking Jane.