Bound to Obey and Serve

Calculating, ambitious and back-stabbing vixen or sweet, innocent and demure? We will never know the truth about Henry VIII’s third wife, the love of his life, Jane Seymour. Popular history has given us the latter version, but although there are good aspects to her character I tend to agree with Alison Weir who has a dim view of ‘Mistress Jane’.

‘She is my death and I am hers’, beautiful and unlucky Anne Boleyn reportedly remarked about Mary, the King’s first daughter. Instead she found that it applied to the former Queen Catherine. Now that Katherine was dead, the King, desperate for an heir, was free to argue that his marriage to Anne was not legitimate and a terrible mistake, so that he could look for a third wife. He was now a widower in the eyes of the Church. When Anne fell pregnant again, there was great hope in the country that she would finally have a son, but her miscarriage made the King very angry. There is a story that he told Anne that ‘he would have no more boys by her’. He was certainly quite cruel, and started to agree with popular opinion that Anne had ‘bewitched’ him into his second marriage.

Jane, who, according to the Spanish ambassador, was ‘of middle stature and no great beauty’, probably attracted the attention of the now fat and aging King because she was seemingly the opposite of Anne. Anne was bad-tempered, capricious and volatile, while Jane was seemingly sweet-natured and virtuous. Chapuys was one of Anne’s more important enemies, and she had many, because he wanted an alliance between England and Catholic Spain. The Spanish wanted to get rid of ‘the Concubine’. Unlike Anne who favoured the new, reformed religion, Jane preferred Catholicism, had been sympathetic towards Queen Katherine and wanted young Mary to be re-instated in the King’s favour. She also had royal blood – her mother was descended from Edward III – important in the wife Of a King, and she had four brothers. The predominance of males in the ambitious Seymour family was promising for Jane’s ability to bear sons.

One of Queen Anne’s Ladies- in- Waiting, Jane behaved very virtuously during her courtship with Henry. There is talk that her brothers, Edward and Thomas, who were in favour of the marriage because it would promote the family, warned her to be chaste. We don’t know if twenty-seven year old Jane thought that she should be virtuous or whether this was calculated to increase his desire for her. Henry was very impressed by her modest behaviour when she refused to accept a gift of golden sovereigns to make up for the scandal that their courtship had caused. However she had been showered with gifts and jewels before that she showed no compunction about accepting.

Go To Page: 1 2

Articles in this Topic    Discussions in this Topic