The Boleyns: The Rise & Fall of a Tudor Family

by David Loades

  CONCLUSION: A POLITICAL FAMILY?

  The Boleyns were one of a number of families which served the Tudors through several generations. The Howards were such another, and the Talbots and the Stanleys. However, the Boleyns were unique in that they owed their influence to the sexual prowess of their women rather than to the military or political talents of their men. Sir Thomas was courtier and diplomat of note before his daughters attracted the attention of Henry VIII, but Henry Carey owed his career almost entirely to being Elizabeth’s kindred on the distaff side. He was competent, but not of the same level of ability as William Cecil, and lacked the charismatic personality of the Earls of Leicester or Essex. He was a courtier rather than a statesman or a soldier, and the same description might be applied to his grandfather. Without the court connections supplied by his wife, Elizabeth Howard, Sir Thomas Boleyn might well have lived out his life as a country gentleman, and married his daughters into similar families. The marriages of his own father and grandfather had given him court connections, but these might well have lapsed without the marriage which his father negotiated for him with the daughter of the Earl of Surrey. As it was, he became a member of the Howard affinity, and that gave him access to the Prince of Wales, who promoted him after his accession. He became thereafter the King’s own man, and owed his first diplomatic assignment to the fact that the King liked him, and that his wife was a favoured member of the Queen’s Privy Chamber. Sir Thomas was a successful diplomat, but he is not known to have had any political agenda. He got on comfortably with Cardinal Wolsey, without being in any sense dependent upon him, and it was only the chance that his daughter Mary caught the King’s eye that singled him out from other royal servants of the second rank, like Sir Henry Wyatt and Robert Wingfield.

  Mary’s talents appear to have been strictly domestic. She was pretty and biddable, and raised no objection to being used for the King’s pleasure. She was all that a mistress ought to be, so self effacing that we have difficulty in tracking her relationship with Henry, and entirely innocent of any political agenda. If she raised any difficulty about being placed in a morganatic marriage with William Carey, we have no record of the fact, and at the end we are left speculating about when she commenced conjugal relations with her husband. Both her husband and her father derived benefits from her complacency, receiving grants of land and office, but there is no suggestion that she was rewarded herself. After William’s death she can be glimpsed about the court, but the circumstances of her second marriage to William Stafford remain mysterious, or why should it have provoked the wrath of her family. Mary’s story is that of a court lady of a certain type at the disposal of a monarch of an arbitrary disposition. It is not remotely political, and she played no part in the infighting of the court. Her father is alleged to have fallen out with Cardinal Wolsey over the controllership of the Household, but there is no sense in which he was important enough for that to have mattered. Wolsey was not going to lose any sleep about having quarrelled with Sir Thomas Boleyn. The kind of personal link which the latter enjoyed with the King was hardly of the kind that could be acknowledged in public. Mary’s importance in this story is mainly as the mother of Henry and Catherine, particularly Henry through whom the Boleyn genes were to be transmitted to subsequent generations.

  Anne was completely different, and it is with her advent that the politics of sexuality become important. However, it needs to be remembered that it was power at second hand. Even Anne, who had her own independent ideas, and patronage of her own, exercised her authority in and through her husband. Henry was always in charge, even in the days when some diplomats thought that he was overshadowed by Cardinal Wolsey. Wolsey himself never made the same mistake, which is why he viewed the advent of Anne with increasing alarm. Here was a rival with access to the King that no mere minister could rival, and he knew Henry well enough to realise his susceptibility to pillow talk. Anne had been trained in France to regard sex and politics as two sides of the same coin, and saw courtly love for what it was – a part of the competitive role play of male courtiers. However, the lady did not have to be a passive recipient of these attentions. By playing a positive part herself she could raise the stakes for the male competitors, which could result in brinkmanship of a most exhilarating kind.[518] Anne’s matrimonial adventures before the King took her up were conventional enough. Being used like a chess piece in her father’s and grandmother’s play for the Ormond inheritance was what any girl of her status could expect, and although she does not seem to have approved of these manoeuvres, she would have been powerless to resist had the negotiation succeeded. Her affair with Henry Percy was no more than a gesture of independence, and although she was seriously put out by its quashing, she was equally powerless to do anything about it. Indeed her silence on that subject afterwards, and the emphasis upon her virginity indicates that it was a purely platonic relationship, no matter what Percy may have been motivated to claim. It was the King who gave Anne and her family a political role. Before 1526 she was simply a lady of the court with whom Henry had chosen to play the game of courtly love. She was unusually sophisticated, thanks to her training in France, but not distinguished in any other way. Her father owed his treasurership of the Household and his promotion to a viscountcy to his own status as a courtier, and neither was an appointment of much political significance. It was Henry’s desire to end his marriage and make Anne his second queen which elevated her whole kindred into the status of a political party.

  For nearly seven years this desire dominated the politics of the court, and spilled over into foreign policy, as the King struggled against both Pope and Emperor to bring it about. There is abundant evidence that it was Anne who kept him to his task, using her father, her brother and their friends as seemed most appropriate at the time. This gave the whole party a political agenda, centred on the securing of the annulment, which led first to a pro-French stance in the ongoing battle between Francis and Charles, and secondly to the overthrow of Cardinal Wolsey. They became powerful, but only because of their capacity to influence the King. Others, like the Duke of Suffolk joined them for some activities, without being sympathetic to their main agenda. Officially, the Duke of Norfolk was their leader by virtue of his rank, but his ambition did not extend much beyond securing Anne’s position as queen. He was quite happy to see Viscount Rochford promoted to the earldom of Wiltshire in 1529, and George Boleyn used on diplomatic missions, but drew back when the younger Boleyns began to support an evangelical agenda which followed up the logic of their political position. Norfolk remained pro-French, but was rapidly eclipsed after 1532 by the rising star Thomas Cromwell, who allied himself with the Boleyns mainly as a matter of convenience.[519] It was Anne who held Henry’s attention, but Anne was not a member of the council, and the King was conscientious in consulting his council over every important decision. Consequently it was necessary to manage the council, and although Anne could have some input into that through her father, it fell mainly to Cromwell. By 1535 the so-called ‘Boleyn party’ in the council was held together mainly by support for the King’s second marriage, and the Royal Supremacy which essentially maintained it. They remained dominant largely because Catherine remained alive, and the King became increasingly committed to the supremacy. The Duke of Norfolk and the Earl of Wiltshire remained in this affinity, but it was effectively driven by Anne and by Thomas Cromwell.

  The events of April and May 1536 are mainly significant in demonstrating how little real power the Boleyns actually had. As long as they were acting as agents for the King, they were effective, but when Henry changed his mind, they were absolutely helpless. The King changed his mind for a variety of reasons, as we have seen, but the critical factor was that he chose to trust Cromwell rather than Norfolk or Wiltshire – or Anne. There was no struggle in the council at that point; the only struggle was in the mind of the King, and once that mind was made up, Anne was destroyed. The whole imposing edifice of the ‘Boleyn ascendancy’ disappeared within a matter of d
ays. Norfolk survived, but was politically unimportant. What followed was a sharp struggle between Cromwell and those conservatives who had allied with him to get rid of Anne – a struggle which Cromwell won by securing the submission of the Princess Mary in July 1536. It was not necessary to destroy the Earl of Wiltshire, because he was not politically effective. He lost his office as Lord Privy Seal and retired from the fray. It was necessary to destroy George, partly because the charges of incest against him were an essential aspect of the charges against his sister, and partly because he had the political will and intelligence to remain dangerous. Sir Henry Norris had to be executed for the same combination of reasons, and because he was a member of Privy Chamber who had been (and might be again) close to the King. For the next four years it was Cromwell and his allies, like Sir Thomas Audley, who dominated the King’s council and influenced his mind. He attempted, unsuccessfully, to reach agreement with the Emperor, and then even less successfully, to negotiate with the Schmalkaldic League.[520] Politically the Boleyns were in eclipse, represented in the corridors of power only by the infant princess Elizabeth, who remained mainly as a symbol of a dead passion, and as a burden upon the chamber finances. In 1540 Cromwell was destroyed in his turn by those conservative forces which he had outwitted in 1536, who succeeded in convincing the King that he was a sacramentarian, and ‘bounced’ Henry into executing him in much the same way that he had been ‘bounced’ into disposing of Anne. Norfolk’s triumph, however, was short lived, as the indiscretions of his other niece, Catherine Howard, led to the indictment of his whole family (the Duke excepted) for misprision of treason in December 1541 and destroyed the Howard ascendancy as well. During the last three or four years of her life, Mary Carey received a few favours from the Crown, but neither she nor her husband were politically significant. The most important thing that happened to the Boleyns during the last few years of Henry’s life was the inclusion of Elizabeth in the order of succession laid down in 1544. This did not mean that the King was regretting what he had done to her mother, but simply that he was facing the reality that he had one legitimate son (who was a child) and two illegitimate daughters, a fact of which his last queen, Catherine Parr, had made him acutely aware. Neither he nor anybody else anticipated that both his son and his elder daughter would die childless, or that the great queen who was to reign for forty-five years would be Anne Boleyn’s daughter.

  The removal of Henry’s overwhelming presence in January 1547 changed the politics of the court fundamentally, because first Protector Somerset and then the Earl of Warwick were in possession of real power, and not of influence.[521] The Boleyns however, scarcely feature in the battles of Edward’s reign. Mary was the acknowledged leader of the conservative opposition, and Elizabeth scarcely features except when her brush with Thomas Seymour contributed to the latter’s execution on charges of treason. Henry Carey lurked on the fringes, with a minor post at court and a seat in the House of Commons, while the Earl of Wiltshire’s younger brother, James, (who is very easily forgotten), continued to live at Blickling. He did his duty on various kinds of commission, but in other respects led the life of a country gentleman. If he had any residual contacts with the court, they are not apparent.[522] Mary’s accession changed the profile, because Elizabeth was now the heir, unacknowledged by the Queen, but recognised by the political nation. She became the symbol of opposition, rather than its leader, because the latter would have been far too exposed a position. She spent time in prison for suspected involvement with Sir Thomas Wyatt, and Mary made it clear that she did not wish Elizabeth to succeed her because of ‘certain respects in which she resembled her mother’.[523] It was probably association with religious reform that the Queen had in mind, rather than her sexuality, but the painful memories of Mary’s adolescence might have been equally responsible. At the time when this remark was made, in the winter of 1553–4, the Queen had every intention of marrying and providing the realm with an heir of her body, so Elizabeth’s claim was a hypothetical one. Mary’s marriage, however, failed, and her husband Philip of Spain disclaimed any interest in claiming the realm in the event of her death. He knew the disposition of the English, and knew that it would mean fighting a civil war to force himself onto the throne. So he accepted Elizabeth’s right, and brought her to the forefront of politics by seeking to marry her to the Duke of Savoy. By the time that the Queen’s health went into terminal decline in the autumn of 1558, it was clear that Elizabeth would be the next queen, and that Anne Boleyn’s unmarried daughter would be faced with all the challenges of ruling England. Fortunately for her, Mary’s second parliament had cleared up the constitutional propriety of having a woman on the throne, and had declared that her powers would be the same as any ‘of her predecessors, kings of this realm’.[524] It remained to be seen how she would cope.

  In a sense the whole story of Elizabeth’s reign could be entitled ‘the Boleyns in power’, but that would be unrealistic because she derived her claim and a fair bit of her personality from her father. What is realistic, however, is to look at how she addressed the issues arising from her gender and sexuality, because that was her inheritance from her mother. Direct comparisons are not possible, because Anne was never a sovereign, and her power always lay in her ability to manipulate her husband. Elizabeth had no husband, but she did have a council and lovers of various degrees of intimacy whom she also had to control. As we have seen, she spent almost half her reign coping with pressures from within the realm that she should marry, and nobody knows whether, or when, she decided that that would not work. One international negotiation succeeded another, and all ended in failure because there was no way in which the obligations of a ruler could be squared with the duties of a wife. What these did do, however, was to provide a theme by which foreign policy could be conducted. This was a theme which no king could have used because of the differences between a male and a female consort, the latter being a mere adjunct and the former a king matrimonial. Elizabeth’s objective was to maintain the security and integrity of her realm, without having to fight major wars in order to do so. So she played the feminine card for all that it was worth, and for more than twenty years it worked. A king could not have expected to retain his authority, either at home or abroad, without fighting, but she could, and did. She also had to deal with her council and courtiers, all of whom were men. She had, admittedly, a female Privy Chamber to retreat to when the pressures of the masculine world became intolerable, and that had a politics of its own, but it was not a centre of power in the same sense that Henry VIII’s Privy Chamber had been.[525] Courtiers, ultimately, would do as they were told, but councillors were a different proposition. Elizabeth took seriously her obligation to rule with counsel, but was denied the kind of male bonding which had traditionally determined relations between kings and their advisers. It was one thing for councillors to pretend to be in love with their mistress, but quite another to admit any degree of intimacy. The relationship which fitted her predicament best was that which she enjoyed with William Cecil, which was that of a niece with a surrogate uncle. This enabled her to quarrel with him, and reject or ignore his advice, without ever forfeiting that special relationship which underpinned her regime for almost forty years. Elizabeth modelled all the associations which mattered to her on aspects of the family. The Earl of Leicester was her ‘husband’ (without any of the rights which real marriage would have conveyed), Lord Burghley was her ‘uncle’, the Earl of Essex her ‘son’ and so on. Henry Carey, who was her real cousin, was much favoured and employed, but does not really feature in this make believe family. Elizabeth also played the female card in other ways. She threw tantrums in which neither the recipients nor the observer knows where the play-acting ended and the real rage began. She even became violent on occasions – with her female attendants. She procrastinated endlessly when she was expected to be decisive, but whether out of a genuine inability to make up her mind, or out of a mischievous desire to keep her servants on their toes, no one is very certa
in. Sometimes events made up her mind for her, and sometimes she eventually came to a resolution – as with the fate of Mary of Scotland – but never did her indecisiveness matter in the long run. Similarly she changed her mind. Having resolved to send Sir Francis Drake to sea in 1585, she countermanded his instructions, but only when he was safely out of sight of land! These devices had her councillors hopping up and down with frustration, and even Cecil found her practices hard to take at times, but it all seems to have been in the service of never being taken for granted. At the beginning of her reign her councillors believed that, being a mere woman, she would follow their directions in everything, and that she was determined not to do. God had given England to her to rule, and she would be answerable to him, and not to a bunch of her own servants. In short, Elizabeth became a man manager of the sort that only a certain kind of woman can be, and that skill she undoubtedly inherited from her mother. Had she been a subject, and had she married, she would very probably have taken a risk too far, as Anne did, although probably not at such a cruel cost.