Jane Seymour – Pawn, Player, or Perfect Queen?

When we talk about Henry VIII’s wives, there’s often a stark contrast in how we judge them. Anne Boleyn is often blamed for “stealing” Henry from Catherine of Aragon and is held responsible for the way Henry treated his first wife and daughter. And yet, Jane Seymour, whose involvement with Henry led to Anne’s execution, is rarely judged in the same way. Why the double standard?

At the same time, I don’t agree with those who vilify Jane either, those who claim she “got what she deserved” when she died after childbirth. That’s just cruel. In my opinion, we need to remember that Henry VIII was the one in control of it all. His wives were pawns in a game they had very little power over…

Transcript:

When we talk about Henry VIII’s wives, there’s often a stark contrast in how we judge them. Anne Boleyn is often blamed for “stealing” Henry from Catherine of Aragon and is held responsible for the way Henry treated his first wife and daughter. And yet, Jane Seymour, whose involvement with Henry led to Anne’s execution, is rarely judged in the same way. Why the double standard?

At the same time, I don’t agree with those who vilify Jane either, those who claim she “got what she deserved” when she died after childbirth. That’s just cruel. In my opinion, we need to remember that Henry VIII was the one in control of it all. His wives were pawns in a game they had very little power over.

So today, I want to take a closer look at Henry VIII’s courtship of Jane Seymour. When did it really begin? Did Jane actively encourage it, or was she simply being used by those around her? Let’s travel back to 1536, a time when Anne Boleyn was at her most vulnerable, and Henry VIII’s eye was beginning to wander once again…

In January 1536, Anne Boleyn had been Queen of England for three years, and while there was good news – she was pregnant and the defiant Catherine of Aragon was dead – Anne was also struggling both personally and politically. Her husband was no longer infatuated with her and that made Anne vulnerable. Their relationship hadn’t been based in diplomacy, it had been based on passion, and if that passion waned, Anne had no foreign royal family connections to protect her. And the king’s eye wandered. Anne had plotted with her sister-in-law, Jane Boleyn, Lady Rochford, to have a rival removed from court in 1534, but it had led to Jane getting into trouble and being banished for a while. And in the same year, Anne appears to have suffered from a stillbirth, a devastating personal loss, but also something that she just couldn’t afford as the woman who was supposed to revitalise the barren Tudor line, the wife who was supposed to give Henry his longed-for Prince of Wales. Henry’s affection was cooling and that stillbirth must have reminded him of all the babies Catherine had lost. History was repeating itself.

He’d noticed Anne while she was a maid-of-honour serving his first wife, and now his eye wandered to one of Anne’s maids of honour, Jane Seymour. Jane was the polar opposite of Anne. Anne was sallow-skinned, dark-haired, confident, witty, charismatic, outspoken, highly educated and sophisticated, a true Renaissance woman, while Jane was fair-haired, fair-skinned, quiet, mild-manned, demure, and a typical English gentry woman with a normal education level. Hmmm… what had Jane got that Anne hadn’t? Perhaps it’s what she didn’t have that attracted Henry – no fiery temper for a start, and no enemies. And she had potential, the potential to give him sons. She may have been in her late twenties, but she came from a large family. She was one of ten children, and six of those had been boys. She definitely had potential.

But when did Henry notice Jane?

Well, unfortunately, it’s not clear exactly when Henry first noticed her or when he started courting her. He and Anne had visited the Seymour family home, Wulfhall in Wiltshire, on their royal progress of summer and autumn 1535, but there’s nothing to suggest that their relation started then. However, following that visit, Jane was appointed to Anne’s household and came to court. Henry must have started wooing Jane by 29th January 1536, when Anne Boleyn suffered a tragic miscarriage because Eustace Chapuys, the imperial ambassador, wrote of how some put the miscarriage down to, and I quote, “a fear that the King would treat her like the late Queen, especially considering the treatment shown to a lady of the Court, named Mistress Semel [Seymour], to whom, as many say, he has lately made great presents”.

Now, for the king, this may have been no more than a courtly love flirtation while his wife was pregnant, but then Anne lost the baby just days after Henry suffered a jousting accident, a reminder of his mortality and the need to secure the succession. I do believe at that point that Jane was catapulted from courtly love flirtation to potential wife and mother of his child. As I explained in my recent video on Anne’s miscarriage, Catherine of Aragon’s death meant that the king could now set Anne aside without being forced to admit that he’d made a mistake and that Catherine was his lawful wife. He could move on to wife number three.

And I do believe that Henry had come to believe that his second marriage was just as cursed as his first. Both marriages had required dispensations due to the impediment of affinity. Catherine had previously been married to Henry’s brother, Arthur, and Henry had had a previous sexual relationship with Anne’s sister, Mary, so if Henry had argued that his first marriage was invalid as it went against Biblical law, didn’t that apply to his second marriage? Is that what he started to think about, I wonder? Was God not blessing this second marriage for exactly the same reason? Who knows? But he’d become convinced that Anne couldn’t give him what he and England needed, a Prince of Wales.

And Jane was just so perfect. While his wife argued with him, Jane brought him peace, while Anne had made enemies, Jane wouldn’t say boo to a goose – oh, the relief.

In March 1536, Jane’s brother, Edward Seymour, was appointed to the king’s privy chamber, to Anne’s “intense rage” as Chapuys noted, and he and his wife were given apartments in Greenwich Palace which the king could access through a private passage. This meant that the king could court Jane in privacy, and with her brother acting as chaperone.

Then, on 1st April, Chapuys recorded that the king had sent Jane “a purse full of sovereigns” and that, on receiving the purse, Jane had kissed the letter and begged the messenger to tell the king that she could not take the purse because “she was a gentlewoman of good and honorable parents, without reproach, and that she had no greater riches in the world than her honor, 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 honorable match”, meaning that she couldn’t accept this gift as an unmarried woman, as it would damage her honour, but that the king could give her a present when she was married. She was making herself seem pure and unattainable. Well played, Jane!

Although I’m sure that Jane didn’t feel right accepting this gift from the married king, I think she was told just how to act with the king and what to say. We know from Chapuys that Jane was being coached by Sir Nicholas Carew and the Catholic faction in how to appeal to the king, and I think they were following Anne Boleyn’s example. While Anne had said no, meaning no, and had retreated from court to get away from the king, her “no” had led to the besotted king proposing to her, could Jane’s no also lead to that? Her mentors thought so, and what better way to lead the king down that path than actually mentioning marriage? But that might not be enough, so, according to Chapuys, they also told Jane to tell Henry just how much the people of England “detested” his marriage to Anne Boleyn. Clever, and all while acting the obedient, virtuous lady.

I think that Jane’s brothers, Sir Nicholas Carew and supporters of the king’s eldest daughter, the Lady Mary, saw an opportunity. The Seymours were ambitious and Mary’s supporters believed that Jane would be sympathetic to Mary – only one woman stood in their way, and she was out of favour with the king anyway.
And in the meantime Anne was making herself even more vulnerable by falling out with the king’s advisors. Her almoner John Skip preached a sermon on 2nd April attacking the advice the king was receiving from his advisors, accusing them of advising the king for their own personal gain and drawing comparisons between Anne and the Biblical Queen Esther who wanted to save her people from the evil royal advisor Haman, who just had to be Thomas Cromwell. Now I don’t believe that Thomas Cromwell moved against Anne by his own initiative, but I do think it suited him to do the king’s bidding and get rid of her once and for all, along with some annoying courtiers.

Thomas Cromwell set about planning to bring down the Queen of England so that the king could marry Jane. On 24th April, Lord Chancellor Thomas Audley set up two legal commissions, the legal machinery that would be used to try Sir Henry Norris, Sir Francis Weston, William Brereton and Mark Smeaton for their alleged affairs with the queen. The coup against Anne was well underway. But it wasn’t long before gossip erupted over the king and Jane, so Henry VIII sent Jane away from court to Sir Nicholas Carew’s country estate, Beddington.

What did Jane think of all this and how aware was she of what was going on? It’s impossible to say. She may have been a pawn, just doing what she was told, or perhaps she disliked Anne. She had served Catherine of Aragon as a maid of honour before Catherine’s banishment, so perhaps she felt that Anne deserved all she got, although I’m sure that she had absolutely no idea that replacing Anne would lead to Anne’s execution. Banishment, yes, death, no. Perhaps that was another reason Jane was kept away from the goings-on at court, Henry didn’t want her to see how ugly things were just about to get.

The first arrest happened on 30th April, and by 5th May, the queen and seven men were imprisoned in the Tower of London all implicated in Anne’s fall. On 12th May, four of the men were tried for treason and found guilty, having been accused of sleeping with the queen and plotting with her to kill the king. They were sentenced to death, Two days later, on 14th May, the day before Anne’s trial, the queen’s household was broken up and her servants dismissed. On that very same day, Jane was moved from Beddington to a property in Chelsea, which, conveniently, was less than a mile away from where the king was lodging. The king wasn’t worried about gossip any more, Anne was on her way out. The following day, Anne and her brother, George Boleyn, Lord Rochford, were tried, found guilty and sentenced to death. It was a done deal. The king had assured Jane that very morning that he’d send her a message later regarding Anne’s condemnation. Yep, Anne was not going to be found innocent.

George met his end on the scaffold with Norris, Weston, Brereton and Smeaton on 17th May and Anne followed suit on 19th May. The two remaining men, Thomas Wyatt and Richard Page, were later released without charge.

On 19th May, the very same day that Anne was executed, Archbishop Thomas Cranmer issued a dispensation for Henry VIII to marry Jane. The king and Jane were related, being fifth cousins, but the dispensation was for a marriage “in the third and third degrees of affinity”. Henry VIII’s previous sexual relationships with Mary and Anne Boleyn put him within the prohibited degrees of affinity with Jane because the Boleyn girls were Jane’s second cousins. Officially, they were second half-cousins, sharing a great-grandmother, Elizabeth Cheney. Anne and Mary Boleyn’s mother, Elizabeth Howard, was the daughter of Thomas Howard, Earl of Surrey, and Elizabeth Tilney, who was the daughter of Elizabeth Cheney and her first husband, Frederick Tilney. Jane Seymour’s mother, Margery Wentworth was the daughter of Sir Henry Wentworth and Anne Say, who was the daughter of Elizabeth Cheney and her second husband, Sir John Say. So Jane, Mary and Anne shared a maternal great-grandmother but had different maternal great-grandfathers. It was enough to cause an impediment to Henry VIII’s marriage to Jane though.

On 20th May, the day after the dispensation had been issued and his first wife had been beheaded, Henry VIII became betrothed to Jane, how very romantic! And, just ten days later, on 30th May, the couple married at Whitehall Palace, a property that Henry and Anne had renovated. Then, on 4th June, Jane was officially proclaimed queen at Greenwich Palace. England had a new queen. The King’s Beasts that decorated the moat bridge at Hampton Court Palace soon underwent a bit of renovation, with Anne Boleyn’s leopard being replaced with the Seymour panther – an easy alteration. And it was at Hampton Court Palace that after a long and difficult labour, Jane gave birth to a healthy baby boy on 12th October 1537, the eve of Feast of St Edward the Confessor. Henry VIII had finally been blessed by God with a Prince of Wales.

But Jane Seymour’s marriage to Henry VIII ended just twelve days after she gave him what he had always wanted—a son. She died on 24th October 1537, probably from a postpartum infection caused by retention of placental tissue. But she had done her duty, and in Henry’s eyes, she would always be remembered as his perfect wife—the one who had given him an heir, without causing him any trouble.

But who was Jane, really? Was she truly meek and mild, or was she clever enough to play the game and win? Was she loved by Henry, or simply used by him? And how did she feel about Henry? Could she ever truly love a man who had sent his previous wife to the scaffold?

We may never know the answers, but oh, wouldn’t it be fascinating to sit down with Jane and ask her? Jane Seymour – pawn, player or perfect queen? Probably all three. A pawn of those more powerful around her, a player like anyone trying to survive at the Tudor court, and the perfect queen consort who did her duty and appears to have been well-loved and respected.