The Anne Boleyn Collection II: Anne Boleyn & the Boleyn Family (27 page)

Although Thomas and Elizabeth were happy to reap the rewards when Mary and Anne were in favour with the King, they abandoned Anne and George when they were arrested, and Thomas advised Mary to "keep out of sight." He thought she was mad for wanting to help them and advised her against it.

As you can see, they weren't your dream parents. Money and status definitely came first, and their children were just a means to an end.

The Thomas Boleyn of The Tudors

Although
The Tudors
has, in many ways, followed Philippa Gregory's example and maligned Thomas Boleyn, I do prefer its portrayal of Thomas because he's a "somebody", not just his brother-in-law's puppet.

So, how is he portrayed in the series?

The good

• •
  Thomas is close to the King.
  We see him playing chess with the King and reassuring Henry that Francis I is nowhere near as good looking as Henry: "Your majesty, no one has calves like you." We see the King entrusting him with important missions and embassies.
  
• •
  He's important and influential.
  We see him interacting with the Dukes of Norfolk, Buckingham and Suffolk, and also Cardinal Wolsey and Thomas Cromwell. He is a powerful man even before the King starts courting Anne. For example, the Duke of Buckingham calls Thomas to him for support when he is plotting against the King. Ambassadors also seek him out because they know he has influence.
  
• •
  Thomas has a career.
  He is an ambassador and is given offices and titles like Lord Privy Seal and Comptroller of the King's Household, during which latter position we see him uncovering Wolsey's corruption.
  
• •
  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 Dean
  ³
  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.
  
• •
  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 terminer
  ⁴
  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.