Jane Fludd

Jane Sondes was the daughter of Sir Michael Sondes or Sandes of Throwley Park, Kent (d.1617) and Mary Fynch (d.1603). Even before her marriage and the escapades reported in A. L. Rowse's Sex and Society in Shakespeare's Age, Jane had quite the active sex life. David McKeen in his biography of William Brooke, Lord Cobham, places her in the household of her uncle, Thomas Sondes as companion to Margaret Brooke Sondes, his second wife, and implies that Jane had numerous affairs while living there before her marriage. On January 5, 1593/4, she married Edward Fludd of Bearsted, Kent (c.1563-1600), son of the treasurer of war in the Netherlands. In 1600, probably accompanied by her maid, Susan Rigden, she visited the astrologer Simon Forman to ask if Sir Calisthenes Brooke and Sir Thomas Gates and others still loved her. In the course of the consultation she gave Forman names and details, which he recorded. Sir Calisthenes Brooke, nephew of Lord Cobham, was a soldier for whom she wore a bramble. Their affair had begun around 1596 and she kept his letters under her pillow. After him came both Henry Wotton and Sir Thomas Gates, another soldier, for whom she wore thyme. Her current lover was Sir Thomas Walsingham of Chislehurst. Forman recorded that she'd also loved Copell (the rector of her parish church at Throwley from 1597-1605), Sir Robert Rivington, Robin Jones (her father's man, a clerk), Wilmar (Sir Thomas Fludd's man, deceased by 1600, for whom she wore a willow), "Lady Vane's son of Kent," who "took her garter from her leg to wear for her sake"—this could be either Sir Thomas Vane or Henry Vane of Hadlow. In May 1600, she returned, now a widow, to ask if Vincent Randall, son and heir of Edward Randall of Gayseham Hall, Essex, with whom she had fallen in love, would marry her. He did not, and Forman's horoscope predicted that she would not wed for some time and that when she did, it would be to "a miserable, ungodly, untoward old fellow." Of Jane, he wrote: "She is not to be trusted, though she has a fair tongue, but will backbite and speak evil of her best friends. She professes virtue, loyalty, chastity—yet is full of vice, apt to be in love with many; hath loved men of worth and base fearing creatures, and some of the clergy. She spends much in pride and is in debt, poor in respect. She is wavering-minded, light of conditions and will overthrow her own estate." Jane's family, however, does not appear to have had any idea of her extracurricular activities, for when her father-in-law, who died on May 30, 1607, wrote his will, he left her a house in Bearsted called Otterash, with barns, an orchard, yards, and arable land attached. By that time, she had remarried, taking as her second husband the well-to-do Sir Thomas May of Mayfield, Sussex (d. July 1616). His first wife, Barbara Rich, had died in early 1602, leaving him with a son, also named Thomas (1595-1650). Jane had one daughter, Mary, by Fludd and four daughters with her second husband. Toward the end of 1609, Jane paid another visit to Simon Forman, this time to learn the fate of her one-time lover, Sir Thomas Gates, who was on the missing ship Sea Venture, which had become separated from the fleet on a voyage to Jamestown, Virginia, where he was to be governor. It was the following year before those in England learned that although a hurricane had wrecked the ship in Bermuda, all aboard had survived. This is the event that probably inspired Shakespeare's The Tempest. Although Forman's predictions about the sort of man Jane would marry do not seem to have been accurate, he did appear to be correct that she would "overthrow her own estate." By the time Thomas May died, there was very little money left, forcing Jane's stepson to turn to writing to earn his living. What happened to Jane's daughters after 1616 remains a mystery and Jane's date of death is unknown.