by Amy Licence
Fitzroy’s investiture must have delighted his mother Bessie, whose husband Gilbert Tailboys attended the ceremony, but it also represented a significant blow to Queen Catherine. Fitzroy’s quiet childhood may have enabled her to maintain a dignified denial about his existence but this public event, and all that his investiture entailed, made the boy a main figure at court from that point onwards, when he was given his own establishment at Durham House, her former home. A private letter written by Lorenzo Ohio, the Venetian ambassador, described the event and the return of the party to Windsor, wearing gowns lined in lynx fur as it was cold. If Henry had not insisted she attend the ceremony, Catherine may well have waited at the castle, as even Ohio noticed it had been the cause of some tension between them: ‘The queen resents the earldom and dukedom conferred on the king’s natural son and remains dissatisfied, at the instigation, it is said, of three of her Spanish ladies, her chief counsellors, so the king has dismissed them [from] the court, a strong measure, but the queen was obliged to submit and to have patience.’9
Catherine was not just thinking of her own position. The investiture of Henry Fitzroy also posed a potential threat to the succession of her own child, although Mary’s status was formally recognised around the same time. Following the custom of male Princes of Wales of the last three generations, the princess was sent to Ludlow Castle, the traditional training place for the heir to the throne. Yet Catherine’s memories of her marriage to Arthur and brief life there must have left her in constant fear for her daughter’s good health, as well as the considerable pain of separation. Henry’s response made it clear that she had no choice but to accept the situation and bite her tongue. For the time being, she complied.
PART FIVE
Anne Boleyn
29
The Other Boleyn Girl, 1513–22
I was quite pleased to see you sing and laugh,
Dance, play, read and write,
Paint and portray, play the monochord,
The strings of which you well make sound.1
When Mary Boleyn danced as Kindness in the Chateau Vert pageant in March 1522, the part of Perseverance had been taken by her younger sister, Anne. Believed to have been born in around 1501, Anne was probably the middle child of the three surviving Boleyn offspring, although some historians have placed her birth as late as 1507. However, the known events of her early life confirm the likeliness of the earlier date and have been widely accepted by most historians and biographers. Born at Blickling and raised at Hever, Anne was around twelve years old when she was sent to the court of Margaret of Savoy in the Netherlands, arriving in the summer of 1513, shortly before Henry himself, who was on campaign against the French. This was the customary age for sending young members of the nobility into service, or to complete their education, in great households, as is seen by the arrival of maids such as Bessie Blount in Catherine’s establishment.
A letter Anne wrote home in 1514 has provided the main piece of evidence for judging her age, although there are numerous difficulties about applying modern standards of spelling and composition to a child’s text written over five hundred years ago. In it, Anne apologises for her many mistakes and poor handwriting, explaining that it was the first letter she had written for herself, as her previous efforts had been copied from models supplied for her. However, it must be remembered that Anne was not writing in her native tongue but in French, a language she was still learning, and her age cannot be confidently assessed from the internal evidence of the letter. Even her mentor, Margaret, at the age of thirty-seven was not fluent in Flemish, the language of her city of residence, and had to ask for assistance on occasion.2 Anne clearly impressed Margaret, though, as she wrote to Sir Thomas that she was ‘more beholden to you for sending her to me, than you to me’.3
So Anne probably arrived at the court of Margaret of Savoy aged twelve, conveyed there by a Claude Bouton, Captain of the Guard to Prince Charles of Castile, soon to become Emperor. Although Margaret owned considerable properties across the Netherlands, her main residence was in the Hof van Savoye in Malines, a building she was expanding and developing, with its decorative red-and-white brickwork, steep sloping roofs and dormer windows with gable decoration. The impressive new Renaissance palace was a mark of Margaret’s taste and her establishment of a centre for leading humanist scholars, artists, musicians and thinkers. In her extensive library was the Trés Riches Heures de duc de Berry; her art collection included Van Eyck’s Arnofini portrait and she retained Gerard Horenbort as her illuminator and miniaturist. She employed Erasmus, poet Jean Second and physician Cornelius Agrippa among a host of talented men in a range of fields, including Adrian of Utrecht as tutor to Prince Charles. Castiglione referred to her as one of the ‘noblest’ examples of contemporary womanhood, who governed her state ‘with the greatest wisdom and justice’.4 The extent of Margaret’s learning was outlined by her court poet, Jean Lamaire:
Besides feminine work of sewing and embroidery, she is excellently skilled in vocal and instrumental music, in painting and in rhetoric, in the French as well as Spanish language; moreover, she likes erudite, wise men. She supports good minds, experts in many fields of knowledge and frequently she reads noble books…yet not content merely to read, she takes pen in hand and describes eloquently in prose as well as in French verse, her misfortunes and admirable life.5
Anne was educated in the nearby Hotel de Bourgoyne on Keyershof,6 alongside Prince Charles’ sisters, the nieces of Queen Catherine. They were Eleanor, who had been born in 1499, Isabel, born 1502, and Mary, born 1505. Antonio Beatis, a papal secretary, visited the city in 1517, only three years after Anne’s residence, and thought that it was ‘a superb city, very large and well-fortified. Nowhere have we seen streets so spacious and elegant … a number of canals whose waters follow the movement of the oceans traverse the city.’7 Beatis described Margaret herself as ‘not unpleasant looking and her appearance is truly Imperial and her smile full of charm’.8 These influences, stemming from a formidable mentor, placed Anne at the heart of the European humanist Renaissance, at a stage of her life when her opinions and tastes were being decisively formed.
Anne’s letter of summer 1514 was not composed in Malines, though. At that point, the court had departed for Veure, a royal palace with 700-acre park and hunting grounds, half a day’s ride from Brussels, which was a common Hapsburg family retreat during the warm weather. It had been established in the thirteenth century by Henry I, Duke of Brabant, and developed into a royal palace over the following centuries, before being demolished in 1782. A print surviving from 1726 shows it dominated by a large central building with gabled roof, rising high above the three- or four-storey range with its long windows and turreted towers. A drawbridge gives down onto a small bridge crossing the wide moat, in which an artificial square island is laid out in formal gardens. Margaret is recorded as being in residence there between 1 June and 21 August, at which point Princess Mary’s marriage to Louis XII was being planned and Anne was recalled to attend her in France.
Anne would have been reunited with her elder sister in France, although it is not clear whether she arrived in time for the wedding. Following the death of Louis, both girls remained to serve Queen Claude but Anne stayed longer, after Mary had departed for England at the end of 1519. It is likely that, during her time at the French court, Anne encountered another significant humanist scholar, another highly educated and accomplished woman: Marguerite of Navarre, sister to Francis I. Best known today as the author of the collection of short stories called The Heptameron, she was described by Erasmus as possessing ‘prudence worthy of a philosopher, chastity, moderation, piety, an invincible strength of soul, and a marvellous contempt for all the vanities of this world’. In service to Claude, Anne would have visited the chateau of Blois, which Francis was improving, as well as Fontainebleu and Chambord; she may even have seen Leonardo da Vinci, when he was presented to the court at Amboise in 1516.9 The queen’s court had retreated there after an outbreak of plague. One of Anne
’s earliest surviving possessions was a Latin book of hours from Bruges, dating from 1450; later she would build a considerable collection of evangelical works in English and French.10
In January 1519, Sir Thomas was posted to Paris as ambassador and would have seen both his daughters frequently. That March he stood in for Henry at the christening of Francis and Claude’s fourth child and would soon begin work on the arrangements for the Field of Cloth of Gold that would reunite all his family members. By 1521, when relations between England and France had soured, Boleyn left Francis for the court of the Emperor and it seemed expedient to withdraw Anne in the developing political climate. That November he had a suitable marriage for her in mind, writing to Wolsey from Bruges11 to try to hasten arrangements so that Anne could leave, which she did the following January.
Anne’s intended husband was her cousin, James Butler. The family were connected through Anne’s paternal great-grandfather, whose co-heiress, Margaret, married into the Boleyn family, bringing with her the Irish title of Earl of Ormond. However, the earldom had been claimed by the Butlers in the absence of a male heir and, by the 1520s, the obvious answer was a marriage between the descendants of each line. The match may have even been suggested by the king himself. Born around 1496, James Butler had been raised in Ireland and arrived at court around 1513. He had fought with Henry in France that year at the age of around seventeen and was seriously wounded in the leg, causing him to limp for the rest of his life.12 After returning to Ireland for some years, he entered Wolsey’s household in around 1520 and would encounter Anne’s brother, the young George Boleyn, who would also soon find a position there.13 It is very unlikely that the pair had met before, given Butler’s Irish roots and Anne’s foreign education, so, sometime in 1522, they would have been introduced.
Descriptions of Anne vary wildly, with many tainted by later political and religious agendas, or simple hindsight. The portraits of her which survive have some features in common but the lack of surviving images from her lifetime suggest a that process of destruction followed her fall from grace; it is almost inconceivable that, in a court where the master portraitist Hans Holbein was employed, Anne did not sit for him as queen. In fact, the survival of a pen-and-ink sketch identified by Dr John Cheke, who served Anne, which depicts her in a bonnet and state of undress, may well have been in preparation for a larger work. Holbein is known to have designed jewellery for Anne and created sketches for the pageantry accompanying her coronation, so it seems likely that a portrait would have been commissioned from him at some point during Henry’s courtship of her or their marriage. A most likely date would be to celebrate the coronation itself. Two other significant portraits, held at Hever Castle and in the National Portrait Gallery, depict a woman with clear facial similarities – a long face, with small and pert mouth, dark eyes and high cheekbones – while the clothing and French gable hood are so close as to suggest one was a copy of another.
It seems to have been the consensus among her contemporaries that Anne was not a conventional beauty, as Catherine had been in her youth. Her best feature, according to the Venetian diplomat Sanuto, was her ‘black and beautiful’ eyes; apart from these, he described her as having a ‘swarthy complexion, long neck, wide mouth, bosom not much raised’. The French diplomat de Carles agreed that her eyes were ‘most attractive’ and that she knew how to use them to good effect, to send flirtatious messages. The poet Thomas Wyatt referred to Anne in poetry as ‘brunet’, and the following century his grandson George Wyatt echoed the idea of her dark colouring and added that she had several small moles and the ‘little show of a nail’ upon one little finger, perpetuating the myth that Anne had six fingers. This, and examples such as Thomas Wolsey’s private name for her, ‘the night crow’, in contrast with the comment from one of his servants that Anne ‘stood out for her excellent grace and behaviour’, shows how far she was able to divide opinion.
Anne’s physical attraction lay in her exotic difference from the English concept of curvaceous, blue-eyed, blonde- or red-haired beauty, but, more than this, she had a European polish and charm, an intelligence, wit and humanist education and an unquantifiable sexual appeal that many would find irresistible. According to French courtier Brantome, she set a new fashion with her European style, devising new clothes that were copied by other ladies at court, but was still ‘the fairest and most bewitching of all the lovely dames’,14 perhaps as the prototype of ‘Greensleeves’ with her long, trailing gowns. George Wyatt elaborates: ‘In this noble imp, the graces of nature graced by gracious education … a beauty not so whitely as clear and fresh above all we may esteem, which appeared much more excellent by her favour passing sweet and cheerful … her noble presence of shape and fashion representing both mildness and majesty.’15 However, George Wyatt was born after Anne’s death and had never seen Anne in the flesh.
For some reason though, James Butler was able to resist her. The marriage that Thomas Boleyn had planned in order to resolve the Ormond family feud was abandoned at some point in the mid-1520s. This has never satisfactorily been explained, as it provided a convenient resolution and Anne was a good catch, being the daughter of such an important diplomat and courtier on the rise. Perhaps her father realised she had the potential to make a better match, or that her talents would be better served at home. It might be that the young people objected to the union, as they were usually permitted the right of veto in cases of personal dislike, although the 1533 sketch by Holbein the Younger shows a fairly pleasant-looking man. Perhaps there was something in the nickname he attracted of ‘the lame’, following his injury in 1513, to which the swift-footed dancer in Anne objected. James would go on to marry the heiress Lady Joan Fitzgerald and father seven sons. Although the marriage between James and Anne was off, the problem of the title remained.
The question of the Ormond/Butler inheritance was settled in February 1527, which was probably after Anne had accepted the king’s proposal of marriage. An indenture was made between Henry and the heirs of Sir Thomas Butler, Earl of Ormond, and Sir Thomas Boleyn, Viscount Rochford, for which Wolsey was to act as mediator. From that point forward, the title of Earl of Ormond was to revert to the grant of the king.16 He would give the title to Anne’s father in 1529 and, after the death of Sir Thomas, it passed briefly to Piers Butler and then to his son James and his heirs. Given the dating of this indenture, it might seem that the Boleyn–Butler match was eventually abandoned because of Henry’s interest in Anne, although in reality, it had lost its impetus five years before.
Anne was now in her early twenties, an age at which many of her contemporaries were married, her future uncertain. She entered the household of Catherine of Aragon and would have been selected to play a role during the visit of Charles V in the summer of 1522, based on her linguistic abilities and her connection with Margaret of Savoy and the court of Charles’s childhood. Anne was also probably present at Eltham, where Henry and Catherine kept Christmas that year, and at Greenwich the following June, where Henry entertained the recently deposed King Christian of Denmark, Norway and Sweden and his queen, Isabella. Anne would have been in attendance while Catherine stood under the cloth of estate in the great hall to receive them before removing to the queen’s apartments, where Catherine entertained Isabel, who was her niece, as the daughter of her sister Joanna and Philip the Handsome. With the royal couple came their children, including a two-year-old daughter named Christina, who would feature fifteen years later in Henry’s marital plans. After feasting every day at Greenwich ‘for a season’, the family were lodged in Bath Place in London, before being accompanied to Dover with many gifts from Henry and Catherine.
Henry and Catherine passed the Christmas season of 1523 at Windsor Castle. By this point, with arrangements for the Butler match foundering, Anne had decided to take her future into her own hands.
30
Henry Percy’s Fiancée, 1522–23
Lo! what can take hope from that heart
That is assured steadfa
stly;
Hope therefore ye that live in smart,
Whereby I am the most happy.1
In the early 1520s, George Cavendish was one of many young men who entered the service of Thomas Wolsey. He recorded the details of the cardinal’s household, which numbered around five hundred people and served as something of a training ground, or finishing school, for young gentlemen wishing to enter the king’s service. Included in that number were James Butler, the more experienced Thomas Cromwell, George, only son of Sir Thomas Boleyn, and Sir Henry Percy, son of the 5th Earl of Northumberland and a cousin of William Carey.
Cavendish confirms that Henry used Wolsey’s house as a location for his own recreation or pleasure, arriving secretly by river to dance with ‘meet’, ‘apt’ or appropriate women, who also served to garnish the place with ‘other goodly disports’:
And when it pleased the kings majesty for his recreation to repair unto the Cardinal’s house (as he did dyvers [many/various] tymes in the yere) at which time there wanted [lacked] no preparations or goodly furniture, with [food] of the finest sort that myght be provided for money or frendshippe. Suche pleasures were than devysed for the kyng’s comfort & consolation as myght be invented or by man’s wit. The banquets were set forth with Maskes and Mumerreys in so gorgeous a sort and Costly manner that it was an heavyn to behold. There wanted [lacked] no dames or damselles meete or apte to daunce with the maskers or to garnysshe the place for the tyme, with other goodly disportes … I haue seen the kyng sodenly come in thither in a maske, with a dozen of other maskers all in garmentes like Shepherdes made of fine Clothe of gold and fine Crimson Satin paned and Caps of the same… and other persons attending upon them with visors and clothed all in Satin of the same Colours and at his commyng and byfore he came in to the hall ye shall understand that he came by water to the water gate without any noise where against his coming was laid charged [prepared] many chambers.2