Kinlight · The British Royal Line

Jane Seymour

1508 – 1537 · Generation XXII

Portrait of Jane Seymour

Jane Seymour was the third wife of Henry VIII and the mother of his only legitimate son to survive infancy, the future Edward VI. She was queen for less than seventeen months. Her date of birth was never recorded. It is usually placed around 1508 or 1509, though the historian Elizabeth Norton has argued for a date as late as 1512 or 1513. She was a daughter of Sir John Seymour and Margery Wentworth and was most likely born at Wulfhall, the family seat in Wiltshire, where she grew up in a large household. Through her mother she descended from Edward III, and she shared a great-grandmother with both Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard.

Her schooling was modest beside that of Henry’s first two queens. She had only a little reading and writing, and her real accomplishments were needlework and household management, the skills then expected of a gentlewoman. Some of her embroidery was still being kept in 1652. Most historians think she came to court in the late 1520s as a lady-in-waiting to Catherine of Aragon and later served Anne Boleyn. People who met her disagreed about her looks. The imperial ambassador Eustace Chapuys thought her pale and no great beauty, while the courtier John Russell called her the fairest of all the king’s wives. Both men remarked on her gentle, peaceable manner.

Henry and Anne stayed at Wulfhall for a week in September 1535, and the king’s interest in Jane may date from that visit. By February 1536 he was sending her presents. When a letter arrived with a purse of sovereigns, she returned both unopened, with the message that she valued nothing in the world as much as her honour and that the king might keep such gifts until she made a good marriage. Contemporaries and historians alike have suspected that her family, and the conservatives at court who wanted Anne gone, coached her in these replies. How far Jane steered events herself is an open question. Anne was executed on 19 May 1536. Henry was betrothed to Jane the next day and married her privately at Whitehall on 30 May, and she was proclaimed queen on 4 June.

As queen she kept a formal, tightly ordered household where Anne’s had been lively and lavish, put a stop to the French fashions Anne had brought in and took as her motto “Bound to obey and serve.” Her sympathies were conservative. When she asked Henry in 1536 to pardon those who had joined the Pilgrimage of Grace, he is said to have warned her to remember her predecessor’s fate and keep out of his affairs. Her one clear success was with Henry’s elder daughter. She pressed for Mary’s return to court and brought father and daughter back together, although Mary was not restored to the succession in Jane’s lifetime. Jane was never crowned, because plague was in London and perhaps because Henry wished to see an heir first.

She went into confinement at Hampton Court in September 1537, and after a labour of two days and three nights gave birth to Edward in the early hours of 12 October. The prince was christened three days later. Jane soon fell gravely ill and died at Hampton Court on 24 October, of complications following the birth, the exact cause being uncertain. Mary was chief mourner at the funeral, and on 12 November Jane was laid to rest in St George’s Chapel at Windsor. No other wife of Henry’s was given a queen’s funeral. Henry wore black for three months, and at his own request he was buried beside her when he died in 1547. Her brothers rose with her son. Edward Seymour governed England as Lord Protector in the young king’s name, and both he and Thomas Seymour ended on the scaffold.

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Life

  • 1508 — Born
  • 1536 — Married Henry VIII Tudor
  • 1537 — Died

Sources

  1. Jane Seymour · Wikipedia
  2. Jane Seymour (queen of England) · Encyclopaedia Britannica
  3. Henry VIII’s wives: six queens, six women · Historic Royal Palaces (Hampton Court Palace)

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