Viscountess Jane Parker

   Cause of her death was Executed.

  General Notes:

Jane Boleyn, Viscountess Rochford (by courtesy) (c. 1505 – 13 February 1542) was an English noblewoman who lived in the reign of Henry VIII. She was a sister-in-law of Henry's second wife Anne Boleyn and lady-in-waiting to his fifth wife Catherine Howard, with whom she was executed.

After eleven years of marriage, Jane's husband George Boleyn was arrested in May 1536 and imprisoned in the Tower of London, accused of having had sexual intercourse with his sister, the Queen. It was Jane's supposed testimony which helped convict him of incest and treason, stating that she believed that he and his sister Anne had been involved in a sexual relationship since the winter of 1535, thus strongly implying that George had been the biological father of a foetus Anne had miscarried early in 1536. There was no truth in these rumours, according to the vast majority of contemporary witnesses, but they provided the legal pretext which the Boleyns' enemies needed to send Lord Rochford to the block.

Lady Rochford kept her post as lady-in-waiting to the new Queen Catherine and exerted considerable influence over her, eventually becoming one of her favourites. When the teenage Queen grew bored with her aged and obese husband, it was Lady Rochford who helped organise secret meetings between Queen Catherine and the handsome courtier Thomas Culpeper. The affair progressed with Lady Rochford's help throughout the royal tour of the North in 1541, but Queen Catherine's past was uncovered in the autumn and an investigation was launched into her private life.

At first, the Queen was detained in her apartments and then eventually placed under house arrest at Syon Abbey, a disused convent far from Court. Her confidantes and favourites were questioned and their rooms searched; many of the servants and ladies-in-waiting recalled Lady Rochford's suspicious behaviour with Catherine and Culpeper, with the result that Jane was herself detained for questioning.

Subsequently, a love letter from Catherine to Culpeper was discovered and it explicitly mentioned Jane's role in arranging their meetings. This was a crime of misprision of treason, which carried the death penalty in Tudor England. Jane was taken to the Tower of London and imprisoned there for several months, whilst the government decided how and when to proceed against the accused.

During her imprisonment in the Tower, she was interrogated for many months, but as she was an aristocrat she was not tortured. Under psychological pressure, however, she seems to have suffered a full nervous breakdown and by the beginning of 1542 was pronounced insane. Her 'fits of frenzy' meant that legally she could not stand trial for her role in facilitating the queen's adultery, but since he was determined to have her punished, the King implemented a law which allowed the execution of the insane. Jane was thus condemned to death by an Act of Attainder (that is, without trial) and the execution date was set for 13 February 1542, the same day as Catherine Howard's.

The Queen died first, apparently in a weak physical state, although she was not hysterical. Jane, who had been on the scaffold to watch the girl's death, then spoke before kneeling on the just-used scaffold. Despite her nervous collapse over the last five months, she was calm and dignified and both women won mild posthumous approval for their behaviour. One eyewitness, a merchant named Ottwell Johnson, wrote that their 'souls [must] be with God, for they made the most godly and Christian end.' The French ambassador Marillac merely stated that Jane gave a 'long discourse'; Johnson says that she apologised for her 'many sins', but neither man's accounts supports the later legend that she spoke at length about her late husband or sister-in-law. According to Alison Weir, the dead queen was not much more than seventeen at the time of her death and Jane was about thirty-six.

The execution was carried out with a single blow of the axe and she was buried in the Tower of London alongside Catherine Howard, and very close to the bodies of Anne Boleyn and George Boleyn.

  Noted events in her life were:

• Marriage: to Viscount George Boleyn, 1526.