The Anne Boleyn Collection II: Anne Boleyn & the Boleyn Family (32 page)

36 Skelton, The Book of the Laurel.

37 Strickland, Lives of the Queens of England, 2:178.

38 Chapman, Anne Boleyn, 19.

39 Denny, Anne Boleyn: A New Life of England's Tragic Queen, 29.

40 Thoms, Annecdotes and Traditions Illustrative of Early English History and Literature, 16.

41 Sergeant, The Life of Anne Boleyn, sec. Appendix C.

42 "Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, Henry VIII, Volume 13 Part 1 - January-July 1538," n. 717.

43 Gunn, "Knyvet, Sir Thomas (c.1485–1512)."

44 Emerson, "Muriel Howard."

45 "Muriel Howard."

46 "Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, Henry VIII, Volume 4: 1524-1530," n. 6026.

47 Ives, The Life and Death of Anne Boleyn, 146.

48 "Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, Henry VIII, Volume 5: 1531-1532," n. 12.

49 "Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, Henry VIII, Volume 10 - January-June 1536," n. 793.

50 Ibid., n. 669.

51 "Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, Henry VIII, Volume 13 Part 1 - January-July 1538," n. 696.

52 Ibid., n. 717.

53 St Clare Byrne, "The Lisle Letters, Volume 5," n. 1086. John Husee to Lord Lisle, 3 January 1538: "My Lord of Wiltshire is again now in the Court and very well entertained."

54 "Survey of London: Volume 23: Lambeth: South Bank and Vauxhall."

55 Aubrey, The Natural History and Antiquities of the County of Surrey: Begun in the Year 1673, V:232.

56 "Survey of London: Volume 23: Lambeth: South Bank and Vauxhall," chap. 28: Norfolk House and Old Paradise Street.

57 Roberts, "Trouble in Paradise."

58 "Survey of London: Volume 23: Lambeth: South Bank and Vauxhall," chap. 28: Norfolk House and Old Paradise Street.

20.
George Boleyn, Lord Rochford – Fiction versus Evidence

In the opening credits of Season One of the TV series
The Tudors
, Jonathan Rhys Meyers says: "You think you know a story but you only know how it ends, to get to the heart of the story you have to go back to the beginning."
¹
Many people think they know who George was, but are they right?

The Boleyns are a famous, perhaps even infamous, family, but the real Boleyns have been lost to us. They're surrounded by myths and scandal. To get to the truth about them, we have to dig deep and get past the preconceived ideas, labels and stereotypes. Anne Boleyn has been rehabilitated by the work of historians like the late Eric Ives. Even though there are still some people who believe that she was guilty of adultery and incest, or that she was a witch and a whore, the majority of people now question those perceptions of her and believe that she was framed. Other members of the Boleyn family, however, have not fared so well and many of the myths that surround them and the fictional representations of them are taken as fact. Even some historians simply accept these depictions. I, however, have been brought up to question everything.

In this chapter I'm going to focus on George Boleyn, and examine how he has been portrayed by fiction and by some historians, in comparison to what we know about the real George.

The George Boleyn of The Other Boleyn Girl

Philippa Gregory's
The Other Boleyn Girl
,
^2
3
as both novel and movie, is many people's first proper introduction to George Boleyn and his wife, Jane (née Parker), and I know from the many emails I've received that what people think they know about George comes from this novel. They may have heard of Anne Boleyn in history at school, but not of George and Jane. With the exception of Mary, Gregory's depiction of the Boleyns is not a flattering one, but George is a likeable character, although perhaps lacking backbone.

In both the novel and the movie, George is a cheerful, popular courtier who is trusted by Henry VIII. The King invites him to his private chapel for mass and uses George to usher Mary Boleyn, George's sister, to and from his bedchamber while he's having his affair with her. George is even popular with Queen Catherine of Aragon, who calls him her "little star Boleyn". He is not so happy and trusted at home, though. George is very unhappily married to the "poisonous", "vilely jealous" Jane Parker. His wife is "a monster" and they are described as "a silent ill-matched couple". Instead of spending time with Jane, he chooses to see his sisters, Mary and Anne. His sisters confide in him and he's the one who comforts Anne when her betrothal to Henry Percy is broken up. What could be a normal close sibling friendship is twisted, however, by Philippa Gregory into a very inappropriate relationship between brother and sisters. In the novel, he knocks at the door while Mary and Anne are bathing and Anne invites him in. He goes over and combs her hair, a very intimate act when his sister is half-naked . Then there's a scene with Mary when he kisses her "deeply on the mouth" and asks her to kiss him again like she kisses her lover, the King. In a later scene with Anne, he kisses her and strokes her bare shoulder and neck – it is far from a brotherly kiss.

But the George of
The Other Boleyn Girl
is not just sexually interested in his sisters; he is also attracted to men. Mary mentions hearing "some running joke about a young page who had been besotted with George" and George tells his sisters how Jane, his wife, offered to get him a maid and then a boy so that she could watch them together. George explains that he's "sickened by women", but "a boy is so clean and so clear..." He then confesses to Mary that he is in love with a man, Francis Weston. When Mary knocks at George's chamber one day, she hears "scuffling" from inside and when George finally answers, she sees Weston straightening his doublet. There is no mistaking what she has seen.

And then, of course, there is the thing that everybody remembers about the novel: the incest bit. In the novel, George is quite capable of incest with Anne. He has already acted inappropriately with both of his sisters, acting more like a lover than brother, so when Anne is feeling the pressure to provide the King with a son, she turns to George for help. Anne confides in Mary that she "went on a journey to the very gates of hell" to conceive and when Mary tells George that Anne felt the baby move, he suddenly looks guilty, flashing the look that Mary recognises from their childhood when he'd done something bad. Mary knows that George was Anne's "companion of her journey to the gates of hell to conceive this child for England" and when she questions him about it, he explains that it was all done "for love". He then embraces Anne like a lover. There is no misunderstanding this scene. It makes clear that Anne and George have slept together and that Anne's baby was fathered by George.

George of The Tudors

The Tudors
series is another portrayal which has affected many people's perception of George. In the series, we have the loving brother who listens to Anne reading out Henry VIII's love letters and then teases her. Anne confides in him, especially when she's worried about Queen Catherine and Princess Mary. He's her ally, the person she can turn to when she's feeling the pressure from her father and the frustration of her situation. He's her best friend.

One aspect of George that was missing from The Other Boleyn Girl was George the Reformer, the man with evangelical beliefs which were in opposition to the established church at the time. Although this part of his character is not emphasised in the series, we do see him discussing convocation with Archbishop Cranmer and Thomas Cromwell. Also, Cromwell shows George the printing press and talks about how he's going to use it to spread the message of Reform.

Unfortunately, we then have George the murderer. We see George and his father, the ambitious and manipulative Thomas Boleyn, paying Bishop Fisher's cook, Richard Rouse, to murder the bishop. John Fisher is a thorn in the Boleyns' side because of his opposition to the King's supremacy and the annulment of the marriage of Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon. The Boleyns provide Rouse with poison. He uses this to doctor the soup served to Fisher and other bishops who stand against the King's plans. Four men die as a result, but Bishop Fisher and Thomas More survive. When Rouse is apprehended for the crime, Thomas Boleyn threatens to harm Rouse's family if he betrays the Boleyns. When Rouse is boiled to death for his crime, Thomas and George watch. It is a deeply unsettling scene and shows that the Boleyns will stop at nothing in their quest for power. The George of
The Tudors
is a powerful man but he uses his power to his advantage, and not to do good. We see him threatening Eleanor Luke, the King's mistress, to get her to leave court because Anne finds Eleanor's relationship with the King troublesome, and he and his father are always in the thick of things.

The George of
The Tudors
also has a very unhappy marriage. He is forced into marrying Jane Parker as a consequence of his family's ambition, and does not take the marriage at all seriously. He fools around at the wedding and makes fun of Jane when talking to his friends. On their wedding night, he brutally rapes her and on another occasion, when she questions him about where he's been, he throws her down on the bed. He despises her and treats her like something he's scraped off his shoe. Although, in one episode, he seems quite excited about finding two women in his bed, this George, like Philippa Gregory's George, prefers men. He has a sexual relationship with court musician Mark Smeaton.

Then we have George the coward. When Anne falls from power in May 1536 and George is arrested too, he pleads ignorance, telling Thomas Cromwell, "Whatever my sister has done, it's not with me or mine." He and Anne may have been best friends, but he won't risk his life by defending her. He doesn't save himself though. He is found guilty of high treason and, rather than dying with courage and dignity like his sister, he goes to the scaffold a blubbering wreck.

Now before anyone argues that
The Other Boleyn Girl
and
The Tudors
cannot be taken seriously because they're fiction, let's consider the following. In the Question and Answer section of
The Other Boleyn Girl
, Philippa Gregory is asked if George really did sleep with Anne. Her answer has confused many readers. Gregory states that Anne was found guilty of incest with George; that Jane Boleyn, George's wife, gave evidence against the siblings; and that if Anne had thought that Henry was impotent and was looking for someone to get her pregnant, then "George would have been the obvious choice." Regarding George's sexuality, Gregory explains that historian Retha Warnicke theorised that the men who were close to Anne were "a homosexual group" and that it was George's homosexuality that he "apologises for on the scaffold." So there we have Philippa Gregory stating quite clearly that although her novel is fiction, Anne and George may well have been capable of incest and that George was definitely homosexual because he confessed to it on the scaffold.

Alison Weir and Retha Warnicke

Someone once commented on the Anne Boleyn Files website
⁴
that the idea that George is bisexual or gay only stems from fiction, thus should not be taken seriously. But that's not true. What about the work of Alison Weir and Retha Warnicke, both respected and reputable historians? It is Warnicke's work that Philippa Gregory references in
The Other Boleyn Girl
and which Alison Weir cites in her work.

In her book
The Rise and Fall of Anne Boleyn
, Retha Warnicke explains that Anne Boleyn was surrounded by a group of men who were known libertines, saying that "libertines were expected to move in a progression from adultery and fornication to buggery and bestiality".
⁵
She then writes of George Boleyn's execution speech, commenting, "That Rochford refrained from specifying his crimes is consistent with the suggestion that he was guilty of sexual acts, including buggery, which were considered unnatural"
⁶
and goes on to suggest that Mark Smeaton was the courtier most likely to be George's lover because George loaned Smeaton a book attacking the institution of marriage.

Alison Weir also paints a pretty dark picture of George Boleyn. She writes that the poetry of George Cavendish, Wolsey's former gentleman usher, "strongly implies that Rochford omitted even to stop at rape" and that Cavendish's use of "bestial" must refer to "buggery".
⁷
Weir also believes that George's execution speech and his "description of his sinfulness" went beyond the usual acceptance of one's fate due to original sin, and suggests "he had indulged in what were then regarded as unnatural sexual practices."
⁸

The Evidence

The evidence used by Gregory, Weir and Warnicke to back up their depictions of George include:

• • The Charges against George listed in the Middlesex indictment
  
• • George Cavendish's "Metrical Visions"
  
• • George's execution speech
  

The Indictment

Here is the part of the indictment used against Anne and George:

"Also that the Queen, 2 Nov. 27 Hen. VIII [1535] and several times before and after, at Westminster, procured and incited her own natural brother, George Boleyn, lord Rochford, gentleman of the privy chamber, to violate her, alluring him with her tongue in the said George's mouth, and the said George's tongue in hers, and also with kisses, presents and jewels, whereby he, despising the commands of God, and all other human laws, 5 Nov. 27 Henry VIII [1535], violated and carnally knew the said Queen, his own sister, at Westminster, which he also did on divers other days before and after, at the same place, sometimes by his own procurement and sometimes by the Queen's."
⁹