Jane Seymour

Jane Seymour (b. 1506? 1509?; d. 1537) was formally betrothed to King Henry VIII of England on May 20, 1536, the day following the execution (on trumped up charges of adultery and incest) of her predecessor, the widely reviled Anne Boleyn. In fact, as soon as he heard the guns signaling that Anne had been beheaded, Henry hurried to join Jane at the Strand, where she was getting her wedding clothes in order. The next day they held their betrothal ceremony at Wulfhall, Jane's family home in Wiltshire. Ten days later she became Henry's third wife.

Jane was the eldest daughter of Sir John Seymour, a country squire. She had served as one of Catherine of Aragon's ladies-in-waiting, and then had served Anne Boleyn in the same capacity. As Henry lost interest in Anne, he had begun to notice Jane, who was in virtually every way Anne's polar opposite. It was generally understood that once he was rid of Anne, the king planned to marry Jane. Like Anne Boleyn, Jane had refused to become Henry's's mistress, and held out for marriage. And as with Anne, Jane's reticence only increased Henry's determination to have her, even if that meant he had to marry her. Besides, Henry wanted a new wife, one that might give him the male heirs his first two wives had failed to give him.

When the dissolution of the monasteries provoked the uprising of northern Catholics known as the "Pilgrimage of Grace" (1536), Jane, who sympathized with the rebels' concerns, begged the king to consider their demands and to treat them with mercy. She unwisely raised the issue publicly, falling on her knees before the king in view of his entire court. She asked him to consider restoring some of the smaller monasteries. She even dared to suggest that God had sent the rebellion as a warning that the dissolution of the monasteries and the confiscation of their land and wealth was displeasing to Him. Enraged at her presumption, Henry angrily told her to attend to matters that properly concerned her. He also reminded her that his previous queen's meddling had gotten her executed. Jane never again attempted to influence Henry on matters of state, but focused instead on arranging matters in the domestic sphere.

As was the case with Anne Boleyn's family, Jane's family benefited greatly from her marriage to the king. Her elder brother Edward became Duke of Somerset, and her younger brother Thomas was appointed Lord High Admiral. In fact, when King Henry lay dying, he named Somerset to head the nine-year-old Edward's council of regents, until the boy king should reach his majority

Jane was a good stepmother to Henry's two daughters, the Princesses Mary and Elizabeth, and she made every effort to effect a reconciliation between her royal husband and his elder daughter, who was still in danger of arrest for refusing to swear the oath attached to the Act of Succession, which had confirmed the succession through the children of Anne Boleyn. Mary and her mother, Catherine of Aragon, had both refused to swear that oath, for in doing so they would have acknowledged that Catherine's marriage had been no true marriage, but merely twenty-four years of concubinage, that his marriage to Anne Boleyn was lawful, that Mary herself was illegitimate, and that the pope had no authority over the English church. Only after Mary finally took the oath on the advice of her cousin, the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V (who assured her that under the circumstances she could do so without compromising her conscience), was Henry finally willing to be reconciled with his daughter.

After their reconciliation, Mary was invited often to court, where she and Jane became quite close. Mary also persuaded Henry to invite his younger daughter, the Princess Elizabeth, to court for the Christmas season. For several months under the influence of Jane Seymour, the royal family seemed a model of domestic unity.

In early spring of 1537 Henry learned to his great delight that Jane was pregnant. She gave birth in October, after three excruciating days and nights of labor. Finally, on 12 October 1537, Jane delivered the son that King Henry had so desperately wanted. The infant, named Edward, was christened on Monday, 15 October, in a long, elaborate ceremony, followed by a reception for the nearly four hundred guests. As was expected of her, Jane participated fully in the ceremony and reception, though in her postpartum state she had to do so from a portable bed that was carried to the chapel and back.

The next day Jane was quite ill, manifesting all the signs of puerperal fever, the deadly postpartum infection that carried off so many women in the days before medical personal learned to wash their hands to avoid spreading infection to their patients. On Wednesday, 24 October, just ten days after presenting Henry VIII with his only surviving son, Jane Seymour died of complications from that delivery.

Jane was given a magnificent funeral. The king was disconsolate over the passing of the wife who had finally provided him with a male heir. Because she died after this greatest of triumphs, and before Henry had a chance to tire of her and look around for other women, the king forever cherished the memory of his third wife. When he died, he left instructions that he should be buried with Jane, and on his deathbed it was her name he called, not that of his last wife, Katherine Parr.

In 1543, during his marriage to Katherine Parr, Henry commissioned a painting of himself, his queen, and his three children. The wife sitting next to the king in that painting is not Katherine Parr but Jane Seymour, the woman he began to court in 1535, married in 1536, and lost in 1537. So brief was her tenure as queen that Jane never even had a public coronation.

It is perhaps telling that it was more than two years after Jane's death before Henry took his fourth wife. He certainly did not wait so long to remarry after losing any of his other wives.