• He's close to his children. He is fraught when Anne has sweating sickness. He has tender moments with her, and shares jokes with George.
The bad
• He is always plotting. Thomas seems to always be in a dark corner somewhere plotting with his son, George, or with the Duke of Norfolk.
• He acts as his daughters' pimp. At the Field of Cloth of Gold, he tells Mary, knowing full well what it entails, that the King has noticed her and wants to see her. Later, he recalls Anne from France and tells her that the King is tiring of her sister – he wonders if she can think of a way to keep the King's interests more "prolonged"? At the Château Vert pageant, Thomas pays Master Cornish to position Anne where the King will notice her and when the King does fall for Anne, he uses her influence over the King to bring down Cardinal Wolsey.
• Thomas is a murderer. He and George pay Bishop Fisher's cook, Richard Roose, to poison the soup to get rid of the man they see as standing in Anne's way. Fisher survives but four of his guests die. Later, in the episode, Thomas attends Roose's interrogation to make sure that he doesn't break, and then he and George watch him get boiled to death for a crime which, in reality, they were responsible for.
• He's ruthless. When his daughter Mary turns up at court pregnant and tells Thomas and Anne that she has got married, he cuts off her allowance and says that she and her husband can rot in hell as far as he's concerned. After the King's jousting accident, instead of gathering with others to pray, he meets with Cromwell to make sure that everything is in place for Princess Elizabeth to become Queen and for him to be made Lord Protector.
• He is responsible for Cardinal Wolsey's fall.
• He is cruel. When Anne miscarries, rather than comforting her, he says "What did you do to kill the baby?" He also seems to enjoy telling Henry VIII's daughter, Mary, that her parents' marriage has been annulled and that she is now to be known as "Lady Mary" rather than as "Princess".
• He's a heretic. There is a rather strange scene where Chapuys, the imperial ambassador, asks Thomas to use his influence to bring England back "from the brink of catastrophe" for "the love of Christ and the Apostles." Thomas states that he doesn't believe that Christ had apostles and that, furthermore, the men were all liars and charlatans who pretended to speak in Christ's name and who built a church on their lies. Very strong words.
• He's desperate. After Anne's second miscarriage, he tells her that they must give up the idea of a French alliance and that she must make a great fuss of the imperial ambassador. Anne isn't really listening to him so he grabs her forcefully and says, "We've come this far, nobody's going to be allowed to destroy us!" Later, when he's interrogated after Anne's arrest, we see him trying to save himself, condemning the men who are alleged to have slept with his daughter and saying that there should only be one punishment for them. One of those men is his son!
• He is self-serving. Everything he does and that he compels Anne to do is for the good of the Boleyns, even if it costs others their lives. At their fall, he won't risk defending his children for fear of losing his own life. As George is executed and Anne sobs her heart out, Thomas sits stony-faced in his cell, reading.
The Real Thomas Boleyn
Contemporary sources, however, give us a very different picture of Thomas Boleyn, Earl of Wiltshire.
Family Background
Thomas was born around 1476 or 1477, probably at Blickling in Norfolk. He was the son of Sir William Boleyn of Blickling, a landowner, and of William's wife, Margaret Butler. Thomas's paternal grandfather was Sir Geoffrey Boleyn, a wealthy mercer who had worked his way up from Sheriff of London and Alderman of the City of London to Lord Mayor of London. It was Geoffrey Boleyn who bought Hever Castle, in Kent, in 1462. Thomas's mother, Margaret Butler, was the second daughter and co-heiress of Thomas Butler, 7th Earl of Ormond. The Butlers were a wealthy family in Ireland and Margaret was descended from men who had been magnates, landowners and justiciars of Ireland. Thomas could trace his roots back to Edward I and ultimately to Eleanor of Aquitaine and Henry II.
Early Career Highlights
• 1497 - At around the age of twenty, Thomas had fought on the King's side against the rebels of the Cornish Rebellion. His father had also fought in these battles.
• 1501 - Thomas was present at the wedding of Prince Arthur and Catherine of Aragon
• 1503 - Thomas was chosen by Henry VII to accompany his eldest daughter, Margaret Tudor, to Scotland to marry James IV.
• 1509 - He had been appointed an esquire of the body before Henry VII's death and Henry VIII chose to keep him on. During Henry VIII's coronation celebrations in 1509, Thomas was created a Knight of the Bath. His wife, Elizabeth, served as one of the "baronesses" of the Queen's Chamber during the coronation of Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon.
• July 1509 - Thomas was appointed Keeper of the Foreign Exchange in Calais.
• 1509 and 1510 - Thomas served as sheriff of Norfolk and Suffolk.
• January 1510 - Thomas participated in a revel in honour of the Queen and dressed up as one of Robin Hood's (the King's) men. On 23rd May he was involved in the knightly combat and jousts, and accepted a challenge from King's team.
• 1511 - Thomas was involved in the jousts to celebrate the birth of Prince Henry, Duke of Cornwall. He was also a chief mourner and one of the knight bearers at Prince Henry's funeral on the 27th February 1511.
• 1511 - Rewards and grants made to Thomas in 1511 included the keepership of the park of "Beskwode", Nottinghamshire; the manors of Borham and Powers in Essex; "Busshy" in Hertfordshire; Purbright in Surrey and Henden in Kent; and Culverts and Little Waltham in Essex. He was also appointed Sheriff of Kent.
• 1512 - Grants and appointments received by Thomas included:
• Being granted, jointly with Henry Wyatt, the office of Constable and Keeper of the castle and gaol of Norwich, which was also reconfirmed to them in 1515
• Being granted one half of the custody of the lands, wardship and marriage of John, son and heir of Sir George Hastings;
• Being reconfirmed and granted in survivorship the manor of Wykmer in Norfolk with his wife Elizabeth.
• 1512-1513 - Thomas Boleyn was sent to the court of Margaret of Austria, along with John Young and Sir Robert Wingfield, to act as an envoy to her father, Maximilian I, Holy Roman Emperor. Their task was to secure an alliance between England and the Empire against France. Thomas Boleyn became so friendly with Margaret that they had a wager on how long the negotiations would take – Margaret bet Thomas that her father, the Emperor, would allow them to conclude their negotiations within ten days. If Thomas won the bet then Margaret would give him a "courser of Spain" and if Margaret won then Thomas would give her "a hobby".1 Their close relationship led to Thomas securing a place for his daughter, Anne, at Margaret's court. A place in Margaret's court was highly sought after by royal and noble families in Europe so this showed just how much Margaret respected Thomas.
• 1514 - Grants were made to Thomas which included the life grant of the lordship of the manors of Saham Tony, Nekton, Panworth Hall, Cressingham, Parva, and the hundreds of Waylond and Grymmeshowe in Norfolk.2 By this time, as William Dean3 points out, Thomas Boleyn owned, or had been granted, the controlling interest in around twenty manors. He was also the keeper of various other estates as well as being the Keeper of the Exchange at Calais and the Foreign Exchange in all English ports.
• 1514 - Thomas secured places for both his daughters in the entourage of Mary Tudor, who was going to France to marry Louis XII.
• 1516 – He acted as a canopy bearer at the christening of Princess Mary, daughter of Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon.
• 1517 – Thomas acted as Queen Margaret of Scotland's official carver for the forty days of her visit to England.
• 1518 – Thomas was by this time a member of the Privy Council. As such, he was involved in the negotiations for the Treaty of Universal Peace signed that October.
&nb
sp; • Late 1518/early1519 – Thomas was appointed as the English ambassador to the French court. He served there as Henry VIII's ambassador and as Cardinal Wolsey's agent. While in France, Thomas became good friends with the French royal family.
• 5th June, 1519 – Thomas sponsored Francis I's baby son, Henry, Duke of Orleans, in the name of Henry VIII.
• 1520 – On his return to England, he was appointed Comptroller of the Household.
• 1520 – Thomas attended the Field of Cloth of Gold, having been chosen as one of forty select members of government, nobility and the Church who were to ride with the King to his first meeting with Francis I. Thomas's wife, Elizabeth, was appointed to attend Queen Catherine.
• May 1521 – Thomas was now the Treasurer of the Household and was also appointed to the special commissions of oyer and terminer4 which tried Edward Stafford, Duke of Buckingham. He benefited from Buckingham's fall, being granted in survivorship the manor, honour and town of Tunbridge, the manors of Brasted and Penshurst, and the parks of Penshurst, Northleigh, and Northlands, in Kent. He had also recently been granted the manor of Fobbing in Essex and Fritwell in Oxfordshire. His manors now totalled around two dozen.
• 1521 – Thomas accompanied Cardinal Wolsey to meet Margaret of Austria under the pretext of mediating between France and the Empire, but actually to secure an alliance between England and the Empire.
Thomas Boleyn had a talent for languages and was said to be the best French speaker at court. It was this gift combined with his intelligence and ambition that led to him being appointed ambassador to the Low Countries, at the court of Margaret of Austria, in 1512. There, he quickly became good friends with Margaret. His talent for negotiating, which led him to conclude business in a mere ten days, led to him winning the bet with Margaret and earning himself her Spanish courser. Between 1519 and 1523, Thomas served as ambassador to the court of France. This saw him making arrangements for the meeting between Henry VIII and Francis I at the Field of Cloth of Gold in 1520 and the Calais conference of 1521. He also served as ambassador to the Spanish court at one point.
Now, I could go on with detail after detail of Thomas Boleyn's diplomatic duties and of his grants, but I just wanted to cover the period up to 1522, when it is thought that Mary Boleyn caught the King's eye. If you cast your eye over the above list and consider that Thomas Boleyn was Treasurer of the Household by 1522, had over 24 manors and was the man Henry VIII and Cardinal Wolsey trusted with diplomatic missions, then it really is hard to argue that he owed his rise in status and wealth merely to acting as a pimp for his daughters. William Dean, who wrote a detailed thesis on Thomas Boleyn, summed it up when he said, "One cannot, as some have done, simply attribute Boleyn's advancement to Henry's preferment of his daughters up to this point. Granted, a case may be made for this influence later, but Henry had no history of doing generous things for his mistresses, much less their parents. It is more likely that Henry recognised ability and past service and rewarded Boleyn for it."5 I agree. Bessie Blount's family had not benefited from her relationship with the King and she had borne him a son, so how could Thomas Boleyn have expected to? He was already a powerful man by the time Mary slept with the King, his rise having been rapid and deserved. He was a key courtier, a trusted advisor and a skilled negotiator and diplomat. He worked hard for his rewards.
Later Career Highlights
• 1520s - Rewards for his diplomacy came thick and fast in the 1520s and included lands which had once belonged to the fallen Duke of Buckingham. Thomas was made Treasurer of the Household in 1522, a Knight of the Garter in 1523 and Lord Rochford in 1525.
• 1527 – 1529 - More diplomatic missions were carried out in 1527 to France and then in 1529 to the Pope and Emperor regarding Henry's Great Matter, the annulment of his marriage to Catherine of Aragon.
• 1529 - Thomas was created Earl of Wiltshire and the Earl of Ormonde, and after Wolsey's fall in 1530, he became Lord Privy Seal.
• 1532 - Thomas was active in Parliament and was, predictably, one of the first men to declare that neither the Pope nor Prelate had the right to make laws. He canvassed heavily for the Statute in Restraint of Appeals, an act passed by Parliament in 1533. This law is considered by many historians to be the key legal foundation of the English Reformation.
• 1534 - In July 1534, he and Sir William Paulet were sent to Princess Mary to persuade her to renounce her title of Princess and acknowledge herself as illegitimate.
Renaissance Man and Reformer
Thomas Boleyn the Renaissance man and religious reformer has been forgotten by fiction and by some history books, yet he was an incredibly gifted person who was interested in the arts and the religious ideas sweeping into England from the Continent.
As well as being a gifted French speaker, Thomas obviously had a good grip of Latin because he owned a copy of Martial's Epigrams. He was a patron of humanism and corresponded with Erasmus, the famous Dutch humanist, scholar and theologian, commissioning several pieces from the latter between 1530 and 1534. In her book Humanism in the Age of Henry VIII, Maria Dowling writes about a humanist scholar, Gerard Phrysius, who was in the service of Thomas Boleyn between 1529 and 1533.6 Thomas was also the patron of Thomas Cranmer, of John Baker, and of Robert Wakefield, who taught Hebrew at Cambridge.
Thomas was also a patron of reform and gave help to reformers when he could, something that his daughter also did when she was Queen. He kept in touch with French reformers, men like Clément Marot, the French poet, and he supported his godson, Thomas Tebold, in his travels around Europe in 1535 and 1536, spreading the news that Thomas was a patron of the New Learning and New Religion. Tebold then reported back to Thomas on the inquisition in Europe. Eustace Chapuys, the imperial ambassador, described Anne and Thomas Boleyn as "more Lutheran than Luther himself" which, although is not a correct description of their religious views, shows that they were enthusiastic about reform.
Thomas Boleyn was also "adept at courtly entertainments",7 fighting with the King in a tournament in May 1510 at Greenwich Palace and then taking part in the Burgundian-style Westminster Tournament Challenge in February 1511 as an answerer. His name is listed as a participating knight on the second day of the tournament along with the likes of Thomas Howard, Henry Stafford and Charles Brandon.8
Thomas the Pimp?
As I said earlier, Thomas's early career highlights show that he had no need to manipulate his daughters into sleeping with the King; indeed, evidence suggests that Thomas Boleyn was actually unhappy about his daughters' relationships with the King. The fact that the King had to step in and ask Thomas to provide for his daughter, Mary, after she was widowed in 1528 suggests that the Boleyns had distanced themselves from Mary after her affair with the King, and there is also evidence that Thomas was initially against Henry VIII's plans to marry Anne. Chapuys wrote to the Emperor in February 1533:
"I must add that the said earl of Wiltshire has never declared himself up to this moment; on the contrary, he has hitherto, as the duke of Norfolk has frequently told me, tried to dissuade the King rather than otherwise from the marriage."9
Then, at the end of May 1533, just before Anne Boleyn's coronation, he wrote:
"Shortly after the Duke [Norfolk] began to excuse himself and say that he had not been either the originator or promoter of this second marriage, but, on the contrary, had always been opposed to it, and tried to dissuade the King therefrom. Had it not been for him and for the father of the Lady, who feigned to be attacked by frenzy to have the better means of opposing it, the marriage would have been secretly contracted a year ago; and for this opposition (the Duke observed) the Lady had been exceedingly indignant with the one and the other."10
Chapuys was obviously convinced that Anne's father had opposed the marriage plans and that this had angered Anne.
As for Thomas being cunning, manipulative and cruel, the Duke of Norfolk actually described Thomas Boleyn as "very timid" and "not of a warlike disposition".11 He must have had driv
e and ambition to be a successful courtier; but the manipulative, cruel and overbearing Thomas Boleyn definitely belongs in the realms of fiction.
The Fall of Anne Boleyn
In April 1536, Thomas Boleyn was appointed to the commission of oyer and terminer set up to try cases of treason. This led to him trying the men accused of committing adultery with his daughter, who was by then the Queen: namely Mark Smeaton, Henry Norris, Francis Weston and William Brereton. Although some sources - Alexander Aless, Chapuys, the Bishop of Faenza and Dr Ortiz - reported that Thomas sat in judgement too on George and Anne, this is not now thought to be the case as he is not mentioned in the Baga de Secretis, the record of the opening of the trial.
Thomas lost George and Anne to the executioner in May 1536. And although he survived physically, he fell from grace and was stripped of his office of Lord Privy Seal on 29th June 1536. He was also removed from the commission of the peace in Norfolk, although he was kept on this commission in Kent. However, Thomas was the ultimate survivor and after helping squash the rebels of the Pilgrimage of Grace in late 1536, he managed to climb his way back into the King's favour and was present at Prince Edward's baptism in October 1537. Eric Ives describes how he diligently went to Order of the Garter functions, even lending Thomas Cromwell his chain and best Garter badge at one point, and how he was back at court by January 1538.12 In July 1538, three months after Elizabeth Boleyn's death, Henry Maunke wrote to Lady Lisle saying that he had "heard say that my lord of Wolshyre will marry lady Margaret Dowglas".13 The marriage never took place, obviously, but Thomas Boleyn must have been high in favour for it to be rumoured that he was going to marry the King's niece.
I often read comments about how Thomas abandoned his children to their fates and did nothing to help them, but we don't actually know that. We know that various records from that period are missing, so it is impossible to say whether or not Thomas Boleyn wrote to Cromwell or the King.
The Anne Boleyn Collection II: Anne Boleyn & the Boleyn Family Page 18