Jane Seymour
Queen of England
The story so far…
Week 6: Entirely Beloved Cromwell (Part 1)
“Plain and pale”, she is half-hidden at York Place, in the court of Anne Boleyn. When she comes out to get Mary Boleyn, “she speaks their names as if she is making introductions between two cockroaches.” She catches Cromwell’s glace as he leaves, raising her own eyes to Heaven.
Week 7: Entirely Beloved Cromwell (Part 2)
She was on duty the night they found a drawing of Anne sans tête in Anne’s bed. Did the “sickly milk-faced creeper” put it there? “That is not possible”, thinks Cromwell. She asks him for more orange tarts and asks for him to speak in English so she may spy all the better.
‘Who are you spying for?’
‘My brothers.’
Edward and Tom Seymour of Wolf Hall.
Every rising family needs information. With the king considering himself a bachelor, any little girl can hold the key to the future, and not all his money is on Anne.
Week 8: The Dead Complain of Their Burial / Arrange Your Face (Part 1)
“Pastyface”, “Milksop”, no one will ever want her, says Anne. Cromwell has given her a present of needlework patterns. “I feel sorry for her.”
Week 11: 'Alas, What Shall I Do For Love?' (Part 2) / Early Mass
She is flashing her kingfisher sleaves, made from silk gifted by Thomas Cromwell. “Cromwell’s sleaves,” she tells people and no one knows what she means. She suggests Cromwell pay a visit to Wolf Hall, where Edward is angry, Tom is restless, and Sir John is “always very well.”
She would like to go to the queen, up-country. But Cromwell says she should serve Lady Anne. “Of course, it is good to be humble. She makes sure we are.”
Week 12: Anna Regina (Part 1)
‘Do you think it’s already decided, what it will be, or does God decide later? Do you think it knows itself, what it is? Do you think if we could see inside you, we would be able to tell?’
“Jane, I wish you were still down in Wiltshire,” Mary Shelton says.
Jane would like a baby.
Week 13: Anna Regina (Part 2)
Jane is waiting on Queen Anne. “He turns to her and sees something surprising: she has grown up.”
Week 14: Devil's Spit / A Painter’s Eye
Jane’s sister Lizzie is at court with her husband, the Governor of Jersey, who is some connection of the new queen’s. Lizzie comes packaged into her velvet and lace, her outlines as firm as her sister’s are indefinite and blurred, her eyes bold and hazel and eloquent. Jane whispers in her wake; her eyes are the colour of water, where her thoughts slip past, like gilded fishes too small for hook or net.
Lady Rochford believes Cromwell is in love with her. “You are mistaken in the nature of my interest. I have young gentlemen in my house, I have wards, their marriages are my business.”
Lady Rochford thinks Jane Seymour has the wit of a sheep. “Sheep are maligned in that way. Shepherds say they can recognise each other. They answer to their names. They make friends for life.”
Week 16: The Map of Christendom (Part 1)
Jane tells him that no one has ever written her a sonnet. “Liz, he thinks, take your dead hand off me. Do you grudge me this one little girl, so small, so thin, so plain?”
Cromwell lets slip that he calls Thomas Howard, Uncle Norfolk. “I shall think of that when I am in the country and have nothing to amuse me. And then does he say, dear nephew Cromwell?”
He assumes she has a husband in prospect, down in the country.
Week 18: Falcons
She is a plain young woman with a silvery pallor, a habit of silence, and a trick of looking at men as if they represent an unpleasant surprise.
Her father calls her a great hunter, a goddess Diana. She says she is learning French from Mary Shelton. “We have gossip enough to occupy a whole town of women,” she says. The only man who penetrates this secret town is Mark Smeaton. “We barely count him a man. If you want to know our secrets, ask Mark.”
Jane apparently does not believe in ghosts. Neither does Thomas Cromwell.
When the king falls asleep, it is Jane who leans “over the king’s chair and taps the back of his hand: briskly, as if she were testing a cheese.”
The next day, the king asks whether she will walk in the garden with him.
Henry and Jane are walking below. Henry is a massive figure and Jane is like a little jointed puppet, her hand not up to the king’s shoulders.
The king is saying something to Jane. And when she comes in, her womenfolk carry her away to get it out of her.
The next day, she is up early in her “stiff finery” gazing out into England.
Jane hardly seems to breathe. No rise and fall discernible, of that flat bosom. He feels he should walk backwards, withdraw, fade back into the night, and leave her here in the moment she occupies: looking out into England.
Week 19: Crows (Part 1)
Cromwell tells Jane Seymour to come to Elvetham. He now knows that “silent Jane in his bed, pale and speechless Jane, that is what Henry dreams of now… No harm if he, Cromwell, helps ease the king’s way towards her.”
At Elvetham jane was like a flower, head drooping, modest as a drift of green-white hellebore. In her brother’s house, the king had praised her to her family’s face: ‘A tender, modest, shame-faced maid, such as few be in our day.’
Tom Seymour says sleeping with Jane would be like “kissing a stone. Rolling her about from one side of the mattress to the other, and your parts growing numb from cold.”
Jane seems oblivious to why she is here. Or perhaps, only appears to be oblivious.
A fleeting smile and she vanishes, leaving him looking after her. We could be married at that, he thinks; it would keep my mind agile, wondering how she might misconstrue me. Does she do it on purpose?
He will advise the Seymours on how to present her to the king to their advantage.
But what will Anne the queen do, if Henry takes as mistress a young woman she has laughed at since ever Jane waited upon her: whom she calls pasty-face and milksop? How will Anne counter meekness, and silence?
Week 20: Crows (Part 2)
‘I shall play cards,’ Jane Seymour says. ‘With myself, so there will be no undue losses.’
Cromwell wonders whether Jane has been informing for Katherine. Her family consult Cromwell as they position her as the king’s mistress. And then she is seen walking with Henry in ‘desolate winter gardens.’
He has asked her to be his ‘good mistress.’ Cromwell advises her what to do if he attempts anything on her person. ‘Pray. Pray aloud… appeal to His Majesty’s piety and sense of honour.’
Anne watches the king watching Jane. She does not explode. There is no broken glass. Instead, she huddles into herself, ‘narrow shoulders shrinking.’
Week 21: Angels
Jane continues to serve the queen, ‘unreadable expressions drifting across her face.’
One day Henry seizes Jane as she is passing and sits her on his knee. It is a sportive gesture, boyish, impetuous, no harm in it; so he says later, excusing himself sheepishly. Jane does not smile or speak. She sits calmly till she is released, as if the king were any joint-stool.
Week 23: The Black Book (Part 2)
Her sister Bess: ‘She is not proud, as some people think. They wonder why she doesn’t speak to them, but it’s only because she can’t think what to say.’
Jane has been praying for the late Katherine. Her brothers advise against mentioning this to the king. They ask her whether she is a virgin and tell her, ‘You must not give in to the king.’
The king on Jane: ‘Her little hands, Crumb. Her little paws, like a child’s. She has no guile in her. And she never speaks… Her little bits of embroidery, her scraps of silk, her halcyon sleeves she cut out of the cloth some admirer gave her once, some poor boy struck with love for her.’
Cromwell’s sleeves. She is the ‘black reverse portrait of the present queen.’ He, Henry, writes her a love letter. Cromwell advises. ‘It is very delicately expressed, sir. And she is very innocent.’
Jane asks Cromwell for advice. What is she to say to the king? Horses. Dogs. Cannon. Cromwell is not much help.
She returns the king’s gift of money and leaves his letter unopened. She kisses the seal.
Week 27: The Book of Phantoms (Part 3/5)
At Carew’s house in Surrey, her family teach her how to enter a room like a queen. Cromwell comes to deliver a note and a gift from the king. The gift is a girdle book that he gave to Katherine and Anne in their time.
Her sister Bess takes off Jane’s French hood and replaces it with an elaborate gable hood that Jane will hereafter make her own. Behind her meekness, there is something sharp and barbed. On Anne:
‘No one need contrive at her ruin. No one is guilty of it. She ruined herself. You cannot do what Anne Boleyn did, and live to be old.’
Cromwell studies her downturn face and recognises the ‘painted silver-faced virgins’ he has seen in Florence. ‘If Jane could veil her face completely, she would do it, and hide her calculations from the world.’
She tells Cromwell he was kind to her when no one else was, and she will return the kindness when she is queen.
Week 28: Master of Phantoms (Part 4/5)
Jane Seymour is brought back up to London so that Henry can see her at night. Her sister says she is ‘squirrelling away money in a locked chest, in case the king changes his mind.’ Anne had said to him: ‘Tell her from me, God sees her tricks.’
Week 29: The Book of Phantoms (Part 5/5) / Spoils
Jane Seymour remains with Nicholas Carew until after Anne is dead. She marries Henry in a private ceremony and takes as her motto: ‘Bound to Obey and Serve.’ This autumn, everywhere the falcon will be replaced by the phoenix. Anne’s lions will be changed for Jane’s panthers. ‘It is done economically, as the beasts only need new heads and tails.’
Week 31: Salvage (Part 1/3)
Jane appears at court in ‘the dead woman’s jewels’. She can scarcely believe that the king’s niece Margaret Douglas is waiting on her. Her family gathers around and she is coy about what happened last night. The king has asked her to do some very strange things. Cromwell teases it out of her: ‘He wants me to ride down to Dover with him, and see the fortifications.’
Week 33: Salvage (Part 3/3)
At the reconciliation between Henry and Mary, Jane gives Mary a diamond ring and tells her to treat her like her mother. At dinner, her husband is dazzled by Rafe Sadler’s wife and Jane chooses not to notice, ‘steadily eating her way through her trout pasty.’
Week 34: Wreckage (II) (Part 1/2)
The queen is with her kinswomen, trying not to speak ill of the dead. ‘The king never does an unpleasant thing. Lord Cromwell does it for him.’
An image swims into his mind, clouded, as if from distance: Jane Seymour, padding softly through the apartments of the late Anne, her arms laden with folded sheets. Anne was not queen then; but she lived in expectation, and she was served like a queen. He remembers the soft perfume of lavender. he remembers Jane, whose name he hardly knew, her dipped glance casting a lavender shade against the white.
Week 35: Wreckage (II) (Part 2/2)
He finds Jane looking over a Book of Hours that once belonged to Anne. She shows him the love notes between the dead queen and her husband. She tells him about the king’s visits and her concerns about not finding pleasure in them. Her sister Bess apparently has reassured her that the woman does not need to enjoy it in order to conceive a child.
Week 36: Augmentation
Henry has made exhaustive enquiries into the state of her body and soul. He is satisfied that no man except a brother or close cousin has so much as kissed her cheek. When she confesses to her chaplain, it takes five minutes. She may as well be transparent, for all she has to hide.
Week 38: Vile Blood (1/2)
Cromwell helps Jane craft her petition to the king to bring Lady Mary back to court. In private, she asks him about the king’s dreams. At court, she makes her request to the king, including a plea to allow people to pray for the pope and for their burdens of tax to be eased. These ‘complaints’ anger the king, who tells her she should remain silent until she has given him a son. Her family bundle her out of court.
Week 41: The Image of the King (Part 1/2)
Jane stands godmother to her brother’s daughter. She lets slip she is expecting: ‘I shall hardly be a happy mother, if I have a girl. I should think I will be sent back to Wolf Hall in a basket, like a fowl unsold on market day.’
In May, the child quickens. She has reservations about being painted by Hans but agrees. ‘It is very correct to breathe,’ Hans reminds her. Her sister says, ‘I warrant when he married her … she did not look so much like a mushroom.’
Jane lets out her bodice. The Lisles sent quails from Calais and she agrees to take one of the Bassett girls as a lady-in-waiting. When Anne Basset appears, she demands that she be presented in more modest attire.
Week 42: The Image of the King (Part 2/2) / Broken on the Body
Henry and Jane view the painting by Hans Holbein: ‘The queen stands by him, and his hand steals out, and rests on her belly as if testing what he finds there: as he has many times in the last few days, while she holds her breath and wonders why.’
On 16 September, Jane begins her seclusion. Her labour lasts two days and three nights, and she gives birth to her son, Edward, on 12 October.
Two days after the christening, Jane is feverish. On the 24 October, Henry visits her for the last time. At St James’s, Cromwell learns of her death in a letter from Norfolk: ‘I pray you to be here early to comfort our good master, for as for our mistress there is no likelihood of her life, the more pity …’