solemn es, it was easy for her father, for Wyatt, or even his sister, to bribe the porter and sextons of the church to connive at the removal of the royal victim's remains. That old elm-chest could excite no suspicion when carried through the dark narrow streets and the Aldgate portal of the city to the eastern roaa: it probably passed as a coffer of stores for the country, no one imagining that such a receptacle enclosed the earthly relics of their crowned and anointed queen. It is remarkable, that in the ancient church of Horndon-on-the-Hill, in Essex, a nameless black marble monument is also pointed out by village antiquaries as the veritable monument of this queen. The existence of a similar tradition of the kind in two different counties, but in both instances in the neighbourhood of Sir Thomas Boleyn's estates, can only be accounted for on the supposition that rumours of the murdered queen's removal from the Tower chapel were at one time in circulation among the tenants and dependants of her paternal house, and were by them orally transmitted to their descendants as matter of fact. Historical traditions are, however, seldom devoid of some kind of foundation; and whatever be their discrepancies, they frequently afford a shadowy evidence of real but unrecorded events, which, if steadily investigated, would lend a clue whereby things of great interest might be traced out. A great epic poet1 of our own times has finely said— "Tradition! oh, tradition! thou of the seraph tongue, The ark that links two ages, the ancient and the young." The execution of the viscount Rochford rendered his two sisters the co-heiresses of their father, the earl of Wiltshire. The attainder of Anne Boleyn, together with Cranmer's sentence on the nullity of her marriage with the king, had, by the law of the land, deprived her and her issue of any claim on the inheritance of her father. Yet, on the death of the earl of Wiltshire, king Henry, in defiance of his own acts, did with equal rapacity and injustice, seize Hever-castle and other portions of the Boleyn patrimony in right of his divorced and murdered wife Anne, the elder daughter, reserving for their daughter Elizabeth all that Mary Boleyn and her heirs could otherwise have claimed. Greenwich-palace was Anne Boleyn's favourite abode of all the royal residences. The park is planted and laid out in the same style as her native Blickling, and with the same kind of trees. It is natural to suppose that the noble intersected arcades of chestnuts, which form the principal charm of the royal park, were planted under the direction of this queen, in memory of those richer and more luxuriant groves beneath whose blossomed branches she sported in careless childhood with her sister Mary, her brother Rochford, and their playmate Wyatt. Happy would it have been for Anne Boleyn, if parental ambition had never aimed at her fulfilling a higher destiny than becoming the wife of the Adam Mickicwitz, 1536.] The" Baga de Secretis." 271 accomplished and true-hearted Wyatt-that devoted friend, whose love, surviving the grave, lives still in the valuable biographical memorials which he preserved of her life.1 Sir Thomas Wyatt died four years after the execution of Anne Boleyn; Percy only survived her a few months. The motives for Anne's destruction were so glaringly unveiled by the indecorous and inhuman haste with which the king's marriage with Jane Seymour was celebrated, that a strong presumption of her innocence has naturally been the result to unprejudiced readers. André Thévet, a Franciscan, affirms " that he was assured by several English gentlemen, that Henry VIII., on his death-bed, expressed peculiar remorse for the wrong he had done Anne Boleyn by putting her to death on a false accusation."2 The Franciscans, as a body, had suffered so much for their steadfast support of the cause of queen Katharine, in opposition to the rival interests of queen Anne, that a testimony in favour of the latter from one of that order ought to be regarded as impartial history. Superficial readers have imagined, that the guilt of Anne Boleyn has been established by the discovery of documents mentioned in the report of the Record Commission as the contents of the "Baga de Secretis." This bag, which was always known to be in existence, contains merely the indictment, precepts, and condemnation of that unfortunate queen, and not a tittle of the evidence produced in substantiation of the revolting crimes with which she was charged. It has been suspected by many persons, that the depositions of the witnesses were destroyed by the order of Elizabeth; but surely, if she had destroyed the evidence, she would never have allowed the indictment, which branded her unhappy mother as a monster of impurity, to be preserved. It is more according to probability that Henry and his accomplices in this judicial murder, being well aware that no evidence of Anne's guilt was produced that would bear an impartial legal investigation, took effectual measures to prevent its ever appearing in her justification. Anne Boleyn had been maid of honour to four queens; namely, Mary and Claude, queens of France, Margaret queen of Navarre, and Katharine of Arragon, the first consort of Henry VIII., whom, in an evil hour for both, she supplanted in the affections of the king, and succeeded in her royal dignity as queen of England. She only survived the brokenhearted Katharine four months and a few days, and was in her thirtysixth year at the time of her execution. 1 There is a beautiful Italian MS. on the subject of this unfortunate queen in the collection of Sir Thomas Phillipps, bart., of Middle Hill, written just after the death of queen Elizabeth. It professes to be the history of Anne Boleyn, but can only be regarded as the earliest historical romance on her eventful career. It seems to have been the foundation of the popular Italian opera of Anna Bolena. 2 Universal Cosmography; book xvi. c. 5. JANE SEYMOUR, THIRD QUEEN OF HENRY VIII. "JANE SEYMOUR was the fairest, the discreetest, and the most meritorious of all Henry VIII.'s wives." This assertion has been generally repeated by all historians to the present hour, yet, doubtless, the question has frequently occurred to their readers, in what did her merit consist? Customs may alter at various eras, but the laws of moral justice are unalterable: difficult would it be to reconcile them with the first actions known of this discreet lady, for discretion is the attribute peculiarly challenged as her own. Yet Jane Seymour's shameless conduct in receiving the courtship of Henry VIII. was the commencement of the severe calamities that befell her mistress, Anne Boleyn. Scripture points out as an especial odium the circumstance of a handmaid taking the place of her mistress. Odious enough was the case when Anne Boleyn supplanted the right royal Katharine of Arragon, but the discreet Jane Seymour received the addresses of her mistress's husband, and passively beheld the mortal anguish of Anne Boleyn when that unhappy queen was in a state which peculiarly demanded feminine sympathy; she knew that the discovery of Henry's inconstancy had nearly destroyed her, whilst the shock actually destroyed her infant. Jane saw murderous accusations got up against the queen, which finally brought her to the scaffold, yet she gave her hand to the regal ruffian before his wife's corpse was cold. Yes; four-and-twenty hours had not elapsed since the sword was reddened with the blood of her mistress, when Jane Seymour became the bride of Henry VIII. And let it be remembered that a royal marriage could not have been celebrated without previous preparation, which must have proceeded simultaneously with the heart-rending events of Anne Boleyn's last agonized hours. The wedding-cakes must have been baking, the wedding-dinner providing, the wedding-clothes preparing, while the life-blood was yet running warm in the veins of the victim, whose place was to be rendered vacant by violent death. The picture *502.] The Seymour family. 273 is repulsive enough, but it becomes tenfold more abhorrent when the woman who caused the whole tragedy is loaded with panegyric. Jane Seymour had arrived at an age when the timidity of girlhood could no longer be pleaded as excuse for passive acquiescence in such outrages on common decency. All genealogies1 concur in naming her as the eldest of Sir John Seymour's numerous family. As such, she could not have been younger than Anne Boleyn, who was much older than is generally asserted. Jane was the eldest of the eight children of Sir John Seymour, of Wolf-hall, Wiltshire, and Margaret Wentworth, daughter of Sir John Wentworth, of Nettlestead, in Suffolk. The Seymours were a family of country gentry who, like most holders of manorial rights, traced their ancestry to a Norman origin. One or two had been knighted in the wars of France, but their names had never emerged from the herald's visitation-rolls into historical celebrity. They increased their boundaries by fortunate alliances with heiresses, and the head of the family married into a collateral branch of the lordly line of Beauchamp. After that event, two instances are quoted of Seymours serving as high sheriff of Wilts. Through Margaret Wentworth, the mother of Jane Seymour, a descent from the blood-royal of England was claimed from an intermarriage with a Wentworth and a supposed daughter of Hotspur and lady Elizabeth Mortimer, grand-daughter to Lionel duke of Clarence. Few persons dared dispute a pedigree with Henry VIII., and Cranmer granted a dispensation for nearness of kin between Henry VIII. and Jane Seymour-rather a work of supererogation, since the parties could not be related within the forbidden degree. Although the royal kindred appears somewhat doubtful, yet it is undeniable that the sovereign of England gained by this alliance one brotherin-law who bore the name of Smith, and another whose grandfather was a blacksmith at Putney.2 Jane's childhood and early youth are involved in great obscurity, but there is reason to suppose that, like Anne Boleyn, her education was finished and her manners formed at the court of France. Her portrait in the Louvre, as a French maid of honour, has given rise to this idea. It is probable that she entered the service of Mary Tudor in 1514, which her brother certainly did; for in a list of the persons forming the bridal retinue of that queen, signed by the hand of Louis XII.,3 may be observed, among the children or pages of honour, the son of M. Seymour. This must have been Jane's brother Edward, afterwards known as the Protector Somerset. He was younger, however, than Jane, and it is very possible that she had an appointment also, though not of such importance as Anne Boleyn, who was grand-daughter to the duke of Norfolk, and was associated with two of the sovereign's kinswomen, the ladies Gray, as maid of honour to Mary queen of France. Jane could boast of no such 1 Collins' Peerage. VOL. II 2 Ibid. 3 Cotton. MS. יו' high connections as these, and, perhaps from her comparatively inferior birth, did not excite the jealousy of the French monarch like the ladies of maturer years. It is possible that Jane Seymour was promoted to the post of maid of honour in France after the dismissal of the other ladies. Her portrait in the Louvre, a whole-length, and one of Holbein's masterpicces, represents her as a beautifully full-formed woman, of nineteen or twenty, and seems an evidence that, like Anne, she had obtained a place subsequently in the household of queen Claude, where she perfected herself in the art of coquetry, though in a more demure style than her unfortunate compeer, Anne Boleyn. It was Sir John Seymour1 who first made interest for his daughter to be placed as maid of honour to Anne Boleyn. Anne Stanhope, afterwards the wife of his eldest son, Edward Seymour, was Jane's associate. Henry's growing passion for Jane soon awakened suspicion in the mind of queen Anne; it is said that her attention was one day attracted by a jewel which Jane Seymour wore about her neck, and she expressed a wish to look at it. Jane faltered and drew back, and the queen, noticing her hesitation, snatched it violently from her, so violently that she hurt her own hand, and found that it contained the portrait of the king, which, as she most truly guessed, had been presented by himself to her fair rival. Jane Seymour had far advanced in the same serpentine path which conducted Anne herself to a throne, ere she ventured to accept the portrait of her enamoured sovereign, and well assured must she have been of success in her ambitious views before she presumed to wear such a lovetoken in the presence of the queen. Anne Boleyn was not of a temper to bear her wrongs patiently, but Jane Seymour's influence was in the ascendant, hers in the decline: her anger was unavailing. Jane maintained her ground triumphantly; one of the king's love-letters to his new favourite seems to have been written while the fallen queen was waiting her doom in prison. " HENRY VIII. TO JANE SEYMOUR, "MY DEAR FRIEND AND MISTRESS, "The bearer of these few lines from thy entirely devoted servant will deliver into thy fair hands a token of my true affection for thee, hoping you will keep it for ever in your sincere love for me. Advertising you that there is a ballad made lately of great derision against us, which if go abroad and is seen by you, I pray you to pay no manner of regard to it. I am not at present informed who is the setter forth of this malignant writing; but if he is found out, he shall be straitly punished for it. it "For the things ye lacked, I have minded my lord to supply them to Fuller's Worthies, 848. |