Mary Boleyn played much less of a part in Anne’s life than did their brother. Her one claim to fame is that, for a time in the 1510s or early 1520s, she was Henry VIII’s mistress. Of this there can be no doubt, despite efforts to prove the contrary. It was most tellingly demonstrated when the king himself was taxed with having slept with both Anne’s sister and her mother and made the naïvely revealing reply: ‘Never with the mother.’
64
The rumour of a relationship between Henry and Thomas Boleyn’s wife did circulate widely, but nothing can be discovered to upset the king’s denial; most probably there was some confusion of Elizabeth Boleyn with Elizabeth Blount, Henry’s known mistress.
65
Later Catholic controversialists transmuted the mistake into the claim that Anne Boleyn was Henry VIII’s daughter! To achieve such a feat Henry would have had to have been astute enough to escape his father’s well-attested protectiveness, as well as somewhat precocious — in 1501 he was 10 years old.
66
For Mary Boleyn there is, again, no known date of birth, but in 1597 her grandson, Lord Hunsdon, petitioned for the Boleyn earldom of Ormonde on the ground that she had been the elder sister.
67
Some historians have argued that he was mistaken, but this is totally implausible.
68
Although daughters did not normally inherit peerages, the eldest could hope that, where a title became extinct in the male line, it would be revived for her husband and their children. Thus, if Anne really was senior to Mary, any claim to the earldom belonged to her daughter, Queen Elizabeth, not her sister’s son. On such a delicate matter Hunsdon must have been doubly sure of his ground.
69
Of course, if Mary Boleyn’s liaison with the king could be firmly dated, this might put the issue of her priority beyond challenge. Unfortunately the first contemporary indication that Henry had slept with one of Anne’s close relatives (unnamed) comes in a missive to the pope in 1527.
70
For the liaison to have begun before her marriage to William Carey in February 1520, Mary must certainly have been the elder sister, since by 1518 and possibly earlier, Henry’s mistress was Elizabeth Blount. In 1519 she bore him a son, Henry Fitzroy, later duke of Richmond.
71
Moreover, for what it is worth, Mary is said to have had the reputation of ‘a great wanton and notoriously infamous’ when she was in France in 1514.
72
The alternative possibility — but one that says nothing about Mary’s place in the Boleyn offspring - is that her affair with Henry postdated the marriage to William Carey and that she succeeded Elizabeth Blount after the latter’s marriage to Gilbert, later Lord Tailbois.
73
This is the more likely. Mary used her influence to get Thomas Gardiner appointed to Tynmouth Priory not earlier than 1520 and her husband was the beneficiary of a spate of royal grants in 1522, 1523, 1524 and 1525.
74
It may also be relevant to note the long delay before she became pregnant, something which might be expected of a period when she was taken up with a man of such known low fertility as Henry VIII. Perhaps the king had realized that it was safer to risk begetting children whose paternity could be denied than bastards who only emphasized his lack of legitimate heirs. Once Mary had begun to cohabit with William Carey, her two children came in quick succession.
75
Whatever the date of Mary’s liaison with Henry VIII, other indications confirm that Hunsdon was right in claiming that she was older than Anne. After the daughters had gone to France in 1514 — 15, it was Anne who remained for further training and Mary who was brought back and launched at the English court, a most curious choice if Anne were not the junior. Then there was the decision to leave Anne to make her career in France; clearly there was no place for her in Boleyn family plans. Furthermore, Anne’s failure to marry while in France suggests that she was not much of a prize. Nor was a marriage for Anne discussed in England until nearly two years after Mary was Mistress Carey.
76
Here, perhaps, we can call in Sir Thomas Boleyn’s own reflections in a letter to Thomas Cromwell in the summer of 1536, when his world had crashed around him, with George and Anne both dead, and most of the gains he had striven for threatened by the loss of royal favour. His early years, he recalled, had been financially straitened, not only because of the fifty pounds a year, but because his wife brought him ‘every year a child’.
77
The date of his marriage is unknown, but Elizabeth Howard’s jointure was settled on her in the summer of 1501, which suggests that it was relatively recent — say not before 1498.
78
If, then, we take Boleyn’s memory literally, we may suppose a child in 1499, another in 1500, a third in 1501 and so on, although two children at least died before reaching adulthood.
79
Were Mary to be the eldest and born about 1499, this would make her 15-plus when going to France in 1514 and 20-plus at marriage, with an affair with the king in her late teens or, more probably, early twenties. Anne would fit in at 1500-1, firmly dated by her journey abroad in 1513; then George at about 1504, so entering the privy chamber as an adult in 1529 at about the age of 25. There are more assumptions in this than is good for any hypothesis, but it does satisfy the evidence.
Thus Anne Boleyn followed her sister into her teens and into the second decade of the sixteenth century, and in 1513 she went abroad. It was a journey that would shape her life. Ever afterwards she would stand out from the women of the English court whom she was leaving, and always would leave, far behind.
2
A EUROPEAN EDUCATION
I
T was a long journey, the longest she would ever make. Through the hills of north Kent and its ancient towns, down to the sea at Dover and across the Channel. Like countless other girls of her age who would make a similar journey in later years, Anne Boleyn was going abroad to ‘be finished’. We have no way of knowing what she made of the Flemish nobleman who was her escort, Claude Bouton, seigneur de Courbaron. Nor can we know what the young Anne made of the sea or of the crossing which could take anything from two or three hours to a day or more. But eventually she stepped ashore on the continent for the first time. It was 1513, and she would stay there for almost nine years.
Her destination was the Habsburg court at Mechelen in Brabant. From there Margaret of Austria ruled the Low Countries as regent for a 13-year-old nephew, Charles of Burgundy, and Anne was to join her court as one of the archduchess’s maids of honour. Thomas Boleyn’s decision to send his younger daughter to Margaret was clearly prompted by Anne’s evident potential and her appropriate age, but even more by the opportunities which acceptance at Europe’s premier finishing school would open up. True, the brilliance of the Burgundian ducal entourage was approaching its end. Through a series of vicissitudes, Burgundy was being drawn into a larger unit which would eventually bring Austria, the Holy Roman Empire, Spain, Italy and the Americas under the Archduke Charles, by his better-known name of Charles V. Yet for the moment the regent had gathered around Charles and his younger sisters a court which was still the Mecca of aristocratic and princely behaviour. Also visiting from England in 1513 was William Sidney, one of Henry VIII’s favourites, while another, Edward Guildford, would arrive as late as 1518, intent on learning what the king described as ‘the right way of doing things’.
1
The opportunity for training was there because Margaret of Austria was not bringing up her Habsburg nephew and nieces in isolation. The elite of Europe vied to place their offspring as attendants on her and her charges in the knowledge that they would effectively be educated alongside Europe’s rulers of the next generation. Nowhere could a father find a better start for a future courtier. And Thomas Boleyn had something even more specific than this in mind. Henry VIII’s wife, Katherine of Aragon, was sister-in-law to the regent; indeed, Margaret had taught her the French which the queen of England relied on to eke out her scanty English. If his daughter Anne could learn continental manners and good French, there was a future for her at Katherine’s side, easing the way of the queen through the polite world of northern Europe, where French was the language
de rigueur.
2
And, of course, she would be expected from time to time to put in a good word for the rest of the Boleyn family.
What gave Thomas Boleyn the chance to place Anne so advantageously was his first diplomatic posting in 1512, which was to the court of the Archduchess Margaret. As we have seen, he got on well with the regent, who agreed to take Anne as one of her eighteen
filles d’honneur.
Thus when Boleyn returned to England in the early summer of 1513 he immediately sent Anne to Margaret.
3
The regent’s first impressions were good, and she wrote back to Sir Thomas:
I have received your letter by the Esquire [Claude] Bouton who has presented your daughter to me, who is very welcome, and I am confident of being able to deal with her in a way which will give you satisfaction, so that on your return the two of us will need no intermediary other than she. I find her so bright and pleasant for her young age that I am more beholden to you for sending her to me than you are to me.
4
Margaret was as good as her word. Anne was put to study under a tutor, one of the ducal household named Symonnet, and her first independent letter in French to her father (previous ones having been dictated by the tutor) survives in the library of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge (plate 14). Written from Margaret’s summer residence at La Vure, now Terveuren, near Brussels, the letter shows that, despite the charm that had won over the duchess, Anne had no illusions as to why she was there:
Sir, I understand from your letter that you desire me to be a woman of good reputation [
toufs onette fame
] when I come to court, and you tell me that the queen will take the trouble to converse with me, and it gives me great joy to think of talking with such a wise and virtuous person. This will make me all the keener to persevere in speaking French well, and also especially because you have told me to, and have advised me for my own part to work at it as much as I can.
5
Unfortunately, no intelligible English translation can give the flavour of the phonetic and idiosyncratic original; Anne did certainly need to work at her written French!
Second to learning the language was the opportunity to master the sophistication of polite society. A
fille
or
demoiselle d‘honneur
had no specific duties, but was under the direction of
la dame d’honneur,
the head of the female establishment. She was expected to play her part as an attendant on the duchess and to share in the intimate society of the court, to make herself useful and perform tasks on request, and to join in the serious business of court entertainment. Without the women, a court was reckoned a poor place indeed.
6
There was, as we shall see, far more to entertainment than previous generations of historians have realized; confidence in the work ethic has obscured the fact that once leisure is plentiful, managing it becomes a serious business. The elaborate dances, hunts, tournaments and festivities which fill so many pages in contemporary accounts were not peripheral elements in a Renaissance court; they belonged to the core of princely rule — and of the success of a prince’s courtiers. Anne Boleyn’s later achievements owed a very great deal to what she was now beginning to learn with Margaret of Austria.
The essential courtly skill was dance. All the courts of Europe danced, and being there to take part was a principal obligation on Anne and the other maids of honour. The Mechelen books of dance music are well thumbed. The staple was the bass dance, a form of couple dance which was common to aristocratic circles throughout Western Europe, so called because ‘to dance it, one moves tranquilly, without agitation, in the most gracious fashion one is capable of.’
7
Dancing was also integral to the indoor pageants and formal entertainments in which the Burgundian ducal court set the fashion for the rest of polite Europe. These were a composite art form, involving drama as well as music and dance, and organized on a single theme, very often a debate between men and women, or an assault by the one on a castle garrisoned by the other. The language was the language of courtly love and the renewed chivalric fashions of the late Middle Ages — imprisoned maidens, noble knights, exotic foreigners, wild men, vices personified, mythical beasts, mountains that moved, ships in full sail, castles making music — all the conceits of the
Roman de la Rose
and more.
Such courtly disguisings were not unknown on this side of the Channel, but they had usually been extremely simple affairs. The first in anything like the fashionable continental style would appear to have been celebrated for the marriage of Prince Arthur and Katherine of Aragon in November 1501, and the second, only weeks before Henry VII’s death, to mark the betrothal of his younger daughter Mary to Charles of Burgundy. And although Henry VIII began to celebrate disguisings almost every year, by the time Anne went abroad the full elaboration of this Burgundian court form had still only been seen in England on seven or eight occasions in all.
8
In the Low Countries the tradition went back seventy or eighty years, and Margaret of Austria was an expert at it. When she had travelled in 1500 to meet her second husband, the duke of Savoy, one display prepared for her had been an assault by Venus and Cupid on the Castle of Love; in 1504, at the marriage of one Savoyard noble, she herself had appeared in the role of Queen of the Amazons, naked sword in hand, a silver cuirass studded with jewels, and a crimson head-dress topped by a great plume.
9
Anne Boleyn could have had no better mentor.