Six Wives (41 page)

    First, Ardent Desire stepped forward to begin the action. This was a speaking part probably played by William Cornish, the Master of the Children of the Chapel Royal, and the likely deviser of the revel. Dressed 'all in crimson satin with burning flames of gold', he called on the ladies of the Castle to surrender. The vices, Scorn and Disdain, proudly refused. Then, with a salvo of real guns (fired outside), the siege began. The attackers hurled oranges and dates; the defenders replied with rosewater and comfits (sweet cakes). In their enthusiasm, three of the boys tore off their cauls and 'cast . . . them down out of the castle'. Eventually, the boy-vices were driven out and Henry and his lords 'took the ladies of honour as prisoners by the hands, and brought them down, and danced together very pleasantly'.

    The ladies of the Castle were the
crème de la crème
of the Tudor Court. They were led by Henry's sister Mary, Queen Dowager of France and Duchess of Suffolk. Then came Gertrude, daughter of Lord Mountjoy and wife of Henry's cousin, the Earl of Devon. And in third place, immediately after these two royal ladies, was 'Mrs Anne Boleyn'.
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    There are some signs that the ladies were typecast for the parts they played. Mary, who still had the looks which had driven her elderly first husband, the French King Louis XII, to over-exert himself into an early grave, was Beauty. The Countess of Devon, wife of the first peer of the Blood Royal, was Honour. It would, therefore, be nice to know why Anne was chosen for the part of Perseverance. Was it the set of her jaw? Or her confidence, polished like marble by her years in France? And would the characterisation prove accurate?

    Anne had arrived indeed. She had been back in England for only a few weeks. But she had taken, as of right, a position at the centre of Henry VIII's Court. She would never leave it.

    Anne's debut in the marriage market, which had provided the pretext for her recall from France, was equally high-flying. Her proposed husband was a member of the nobility. The marriage was suggested by her uncle, Thomas Howard, who was soon to succeed his father as Duke of Norfolk. The King himself was interested in the outcome and the negotiations were handled on his behalf by the King's minister, Cardinal Wolsey.

    It was not the last time that Wolsey and Norfolk were to find themselves involved in the quest to find Anne a husband.

* * *

The background to this first marriage scheme lay in Anne's own tangled family history. As we have seen, Anne's paternal grandmother, Margaret, was the second daughter and co-heiress of Thomas Butler, Earl of Ormond. When Ormond died in 1515, Anne's father, Thomas Boleyn, inherited the lion's share of Ormond's English estates, including the honour of Rochford in Kent. But there was no agreed succession to the earldom itself. Instead, it was disputed between Boleyn and Piers Butler, Ormond's cousin, male heir and unchallenged head of the Butler family in Ireland. As the Butlers were one of the two great 'Old English' families in Ireland, the dispute became a running sore in Irish politics. An obvious solution was to unite the rival claims by marrying Anne Boleyn to Piers Butler's son and heir, James, who was kept as a sort of hostage for his father's good behaviour in Wolsey's Household in England.

    Thomas Howard first floated the idea in 1520 when he was governing Ireland (in so far as Ireland was ever governed) as a harassed and reluctant Lord Lieutenant. And he revived it in 1521 after he had fallen ill and was pressing urgently for his recall. His unspoken motive was that the marriage would smooth the way for Piers Butler to be recognised as Earl of Ormond and appointed Lord Lieutenant of Ireland in his place. Wolsey threw his weight behind the scheme, assuring the King that, on his return from the Calais peace conference, he would 'devise with your Grace how the marriage betwixt [James Butler] and Sir Thomas Boleyn's daughter may be brought to pass'.

    But, despite Wolsey's assurances, the 'perfecting' of the marriage never happened. Had something gone wrong between the young couple? James, to judge by his later portrait drawing by Holbein, was a handsome, strapping fellow. But he was still a teenager. So perhaps he was too young – or Anne too old. The more likely explanation, however, is that the two fathers failed to reconcile their differences. Piers Butler was confident he could make good his claim to both the title and the estates in Ireland, by force if necessary; Thomas Boleyn was equally confident that the King's favour would grant him the victory. Without common ground between the two men, the scheme foundered and James was allowed to return to Ireland in 1526. By then Anne had found another prospective husband in Wolsey's Household – and lost him as well.
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* * *

The 1522 Shrovetide entertainment had taken place at Wolsey's palace of York Place. Perhaps it was then that Anne first saw Henry Percy. Percy, almost exactly of an age with Anne, was the son and heir of the Earl of Northumberland. Like James Butler, he was resident in Wolsey's household as a sort of hostage for the good behaviour of his father, who was the greatest of the northern lords and was never fully trusted by Henry VIII.

    The acquaintance between Percy and Anne ripened quickly. Percy accompanied Wolsey on his visits to Court. And while Wolsey transacted business, young Percy 'would then resort for his pastime unto the Queen's Chamber'. Anne's eyes 'went forth as messengers, bearing the secret witness of her heart'. And Percy, starved of love by his proud and oppressive father, responded with passion.

    The trouble was that prudence, in the form of his father, had already disposed of him otherwise. As long ago as 1516, the Earl of Northumberland had been in negotiation with George Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury, for a marriage between Henry Percy and Shrewsbury's daughter, Mary. In terms of dynastic policy, the marriage made a lot of sense. The Percy and Talbot earldoms were among the oldest and richest in England; their estates were contiguous, and Mary Talbot came with the promise of a substantial dowry of 2,500 marks (£1,666 13s 4d). But the fathers moved slowly. In 1516, Northumberland protested that the deal was done, insisting that 'I have concluded with my lord of Shrewsbury'; almost eight years later, however, in December 1523, Shrewsbury was still corresponding with Northumberland about the exact terms of the marriage, which 'he trusts will take effect' the following spring. But this deadline too was missed.

    Meanwhile, Percy and Anne had become secret but acknowledged lovers. They entered into a form of betrothal, being 'ensured together intending to marry'. Some have even thought – though it seems unlikely – that they anticipated the ceremony and slept together.
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* * *

But Percy was not Anne's only admirer. Thomas Wyatt, poet, diplomat and man of action, was to become one of the outstanding figures of the age. He was also handsome, sensual and a known lady-killer. Anne caught his eye. But she proved no easy prey.

    Anne Boleyn and Thomas Wyatt had a great deal in common. Their fathers were both senior courtier-administrators: Sir Thomas Boleyn was now Treasurer of the Household, while Sir Henry Wyatt, Thomas's father, was, as Treasurer of the Chamber, the principal royal paymaster. They were neighbours in Kent, where Sir Henry had bought Allington Castle. And Thomas Wyatt, born in 1503, was of an age with Anne's beloved brother George. He had the same sort of education (though he went to the more fashionable Cambridge). And he shared the same sort of ambitions.

    These ambitions could only be accommodated at Court, so to Court Wyatt went. He began by odd-jobbing for his father, and in 1523 acted as courier for several large sums sent from the King's treasure to York. Then, on 24 October 1524, Wyatt senior vacated one of his lesser posts, the Clerkship of the Jewels, in his son's favour. It would be hard to think of anybody less temperamentally suited to accountancy as a career than young Wyatt and he resigned the Clerkship six years later. But at least it was a start in the royal service.

    Wyatt, however, differed from Anne in one important respect: he had gone through with an arranged marriage in his youth. In about 1520, when he was only seventeen, he had married Elizabeth, daughter of Thomas Brooke, Lord Cobham. Cobham was one of the largest landowners in Kent and a neighbour. In terms of family advantage, the marriage was a shrewd move. But it proved a personal disaster. The couple had two children, a son called Thomas after his father and a daughter christened Elizabeth after her mother. Then they separated. Information picked up much later by the Imperial ambassador dated the separation to 1525 or 1526 and stated it was 'on grounds of [Elizabeth's] adultery'. But Wyatt's own comments to his son on the failure of the marriage suggest something more complex. 'The fault', he admitted, 'is both in your mother and me, but chiefly in her.' The separation was not a judicial one but a personal, unilateral act on Wyatt's part. And it was evidently accompanied by great bitterness: for many years Wyatt would neither see his wife nor pay her maintenance.
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    Now, with the notorious, very public failure of his marriage, Wyatt stood outside the rules of conventional contemporary morality. His response was to make his own rules. 'I grant', he wrote with characteristic pithiness, 'I do not profess chastity, but yet I use not abomination.'

    Wyatt's involvement with Anne, in which he tried to tread this fine line, is difficult both to date and to document. It belongs, most probably, to the period around the final breakdown of his own marriage in 1525–6. And the key documentation for it consists of a handful of his poems. As so often in creative literature, his was emotion recollected in tranquillity. Long after, when Anne was dead and Wyatt himself was settled into a long-term liaison with his mistress, Elizabeth Darrell, he looked back on his relationship with Anne and pitied his younger self.

    In the sonnet, 'If Waker Care', he compared the two women under fanciful, symbolic names. Anne was 'Brunette' because of her colouring, but also because there was something dark and smouldering about her. Elizabeth, on the other hand, was 'Phyllis' (meaning 'green bough'), who was an innocent wood-nymph of Greek mythology. Both aroused the same intense, oscillating sensations of love in Wyatt: 'sudden pale colour', 'many sighs', 'now joy, now woe'. But they did so to very different effect. Anne – 'her that did set our country in a roar' – had been exciting, difficult and tantalizing; Phyllis, in contrast, offered 'unfeigned content'. Other poems elaborate this characterisation of Anne. She was a 'fire that me brent'; a briar-bush which had ensnared and torn him; a deer, which had seemed 'tame' but was 'wild' and had led him on a fruitless chase.

    According to Wyatt's grandson, George Wyatt, the poet's passionate approaches had confronted Anne with a dilemma. On the one hand, she found him attractive. She was also well aware that, in the intensely competitive world of the Court, to be pursued by a man of repute, like Wyatt, increased her own reputation. To that extent, therefore, she encouraged his attentions: 'which might the rather occasion others to turn their looks to that which a man of his worth was brought to gaze at in her'. But equally Wyatt, for all his charm and intelligence, could not give her what she wanted. Married already, he could only make her his mistress, not his wife. And that was not enough for Anne. Since she had already been sought on behalf of the heir to one earldom and was clandestinely betrothed to the heir of another, she had no practical reason to settle for the position of mistress. It also seems likely that she found it morally repugnant – as she did when it came to being mistress to a man of far higher status than Wyatt.

    Anne's solution to her dilemma was, as Wyatt found to his cost, to blow hot and cold: hot enough to keep him in play, but cold enough to freeze him out whenever things threatened to go too far.

    Wyatt's final complaint about Anne was that he had to share her attentions with so many others. In 'Who so list to hunt' he compares her to an elusive hind chased by a pack of hunters, each striving to outdo the other and get the honour of the kill for himself. And 'I', Wyatt, laments, 'am of them that furthest cometh behind'.

    The image of Anne as the quarry and her throng of would-be lovers as the hunt-pack is, of course, a poetic metaphor. But the
situation
Wyatt describes appears to have been sober reality. Anne, with her dark looks and exotic stylishness, had cut a swathe through the English Court, and men of all ranks – lords, knights and mere gentlemen like Wyatt himself – were competing to win her. She may even, like an English Helen of Troy, have provoked a (mock) war for her possession.
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* * *

In the autumn of 1524, there was only one topic of conversation at Court. A group of fifteen young bloods had got the King's permission to mount a novel form of entertainment for the Christmas season. They would build a mock castle to their own specifications in the tilt-yard at Greenwich and defend it against all-comers. They also offered to meet any who would take up their challenge in other more conventional forms of combat: the joust, the tournament and the fight at the barriers.

    The challenge was formally proclaimed in the Queen's Great Chamber at Greenwich on St Thomas's Day, 21 December. The herald explained that the King had given the keeping of the castle, romantically entitled the Castle of Loyalty or the
Chateau Blanc
(the White or Virgin Castle) to four 'Maidens' of the Court. Their names are not given. But one might have been Anne Boleyn. The four Maidens, the herald continued, had in turn deputed the protection of the castle to fifteen defenders.

    Prominent among the defenders was Thomas Wyatt. Equally prominent among the attackers, it was intended, should be Henry Percy. On 19 November, Percy wrote a begging letter to his brother-in-law, Lord Clifford. He told him that 'the King hath appointed me to be one of them which shall assault the Castle of Loyalty'. His master, Cardinal Wolsey, had arranged the nomination 'for my advancement to honour'. But he would require money to rig himself out in appropriate style. His father, he knew only too well, 'will do nothing for me but would be glad to have me put to lack'. Could Clifford lend him the necessary £150 by the end of the month? The sum was enormous and shows that Percy was determined to put on the best display possible.