The Anne Boleyn Collection II: Anne Boleyn & the Boleyn Family (34 page)

So if George Boleyn was such a renowned poet, where on earth is this poetry? Well, either destroyed or attributed to someone else are the likely answers. After all, George died a convicted traitor and a man who allegedly committed incest with his sister, the Queen. A reader of the 16th century "
Tottel's Miscellany
", a collection of poems from the era, including those by Wyatt and Surrey, may well be reading the works of George Boleyn without even realising it. John Harington, John Bale and Horace Walpole all attribute one particular poem to George, although Tottel assigns it to Wyatt. It is called
The Lover Complayneth the Unkindnes of his Love
and the first verse goes:-

"My Lute awake, perform the last Labour that thou and I shall waste.And end that I have now begun!And when this song is sung and rest,My Lute be still, for I have done!"

As well as being a poet, George was also a royal favourite. In
The Tudors
series, George is actually conspicuous by his absence in Season One; in this series, the King spends all his leisure time with Charles Brandon, Sir William Compton and Anthony Knyvert. However, George was a gentleman of the privy chamber until Cardinal Wolsey weeded him out in 1526 via the Eltham Ordnance. Even before Anne came on the scene, George was receiving grants, offices and land. For example, he was awarded the keepership of Penshurst in 1522, after the fall of Stafford, the Duke of Buckingham, and in 1524 he was given Grimston Manor in Norfolk. George's name is also mentioned frequently in the Privy Purse Expenses, showing that he played dice, bowls and cards with the King and also accompanied him hunting. He was clearly a close friend of the King.

Then we have George the diplomat. Like his father before him, he was an important diplomat and carried out many missions to France on behalf of the King, including those in December 1529, March 1533, Summer 1533, April 1534, July 1534 and May 1535. Those are all recorded in
Letters and Papers
. He was also very influential in Parliament. It is noted that his attendance rate was higher than many others, possibly because of his reformist persuasions and his desire to push Reform.

Of course, we'll never know who the real George Boleyn was. Although I can argue here against the theories of Warnicke, Weir and Gregory, because there is a lack of evidence to support them, we just cannot know for sure what George was like. Evidence has been twisted to fit theories, fiction has taken over and the majority of the public probably believe that what they see or read in
The Tudors
and
The Other Boleyn Girl
is fact-based. George Boleyn the poet, reformer and diplomat just isn't remembered.

George Boleyn was executed on 17th May 1536 on Tower Hill and was laid to rest in the chancel area of the Chapel of St Peter ad Vincula, Tower of London.

Notes and Sources

1 Hirst, "The Tudors."

2 Gregory, The Other Boleyn Girl.

3 Chadwick, The Other Boleyn Girl.

4 "The Anne Boleyn Files."

5 Warnicke, The Rise and Fall of Anne Boleyn: Family Politics at the Court of Henry VIII, 4.

6 Ibid., 218.

7 Weir, The Lady in the Tower: The Fall of Anne Boleyn, 100.

8 Ibid., 243.

9 "Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, Henry VIII, Volume 10 - January-June 1536," n. 876.

10 Ives, The Life and Death of Anne Boleyn, 344.

11 Cavendish, The Life of Cardinal Wolsey, Volume 2, 2:22.

12 Cherry, "George Boleyn's Sexuality."

13 Cavendish, The Life of Cardinal Wolsey, Volume 2, 2:22.

14 Weir, The Lady in the Tower: The Fall of Anne Boleyn, 101.

15 Cherry, "George Boleyn's Sexuality."

16 Ives, The Life and Death of Anne Boleyn, 278.

17 Gruffudd, "Gruffudd's Chronicle."

18 Warnicke, The Rise and Fall of Anne Boleyn: Family Politics at the Court of Henry VIII, 218.

19 de Lisle, The Sisters Who Would Be Queen, 49.

20 Warnicke, The Rise and Fall of Anne Boleyn: Family Politics at the Court of Henry VIII, 218–219.

21 Gray, Gender, Rhetoric, and Print Culture in French Renaissance Writing, 17–18.

22 Thundy, "Matheolus, Chaucer, and the Wife of Bath."

23 Percival, Chaucer's Legendary Good Women, 106.

24 Carley, The Books of King Henry VIII and His Wives, 131.

25 Holinshed, Holinshed's Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland, 6:1613.

26 Cavendish, The Life of Cardinal Wolsey, Volume 2, 2:20.

27 Walpole, A Catalogue of the Royal and Noble Authors of England: With Lists of Their Works, 64.

28 Bapst, Deux Gentilshommes-Poetes de La Cour de Henry VIII.

21.
Jane Boleyn (née Parker) – History's Scapegoat

I once saw a Tumblr "confession" which said "Jane Parker deserved her execution more than any woman Henry VIII put to the block". Many people seem to agree with that sentiment. She's seen as the devil incarnate, a jealous and spiteful woman who was implicated in the deaths of her husband and two queens. Not a week goes by when I don't read a comment online suggesting that Jane Boleyn got "what was coming to her" when she was executed in February 1542, that it was karma and that she got her just desserts. But where does this view come from?

Well, let's take a look first at the Jane Boleyn of popular culture: Philippa Gregory's
The Other Boleyn Girl
and
The Boleyn Inheritance
, and
The Tudors
TV series.

Jane of The Other Boleyn Girl

As I said in my chapter on George, Jane is referred to as a "monster" and Gregory writes of her "avaricious desire for scandal".
¹
George and his sisters hate her and the way she snoops around. The name "nosy parker" fits her well because she listens at doors and looks through keyholes. She is drawn to gossip "like a buzzard to carrion", and is always the first to know things and pass them on to others. The Jane of Gregory's novels is also the woman who betrays her husband and her sister-in-law by giving evidence against them in May 1536. The "despised" wife gets her own back on the Boleyns who made fun of her.

In
The Boleyn Inheritance
,
²
which tells Jane's story after the fall of the Boleyns, she brings down another queen. She is used by the plotting Duke of Norfolk, who wants Jane to gather evidence against Anne of Cleves, Henry VIII's new queen. The Duke reminds Jane how she has played the traitor before and so she signs a statement regarding Anne of Cleves. In the false statement, she tells that, although she and the other ladies advised Anne on sexual matters, Anne didn't want to know; it appears to be all Anne's fault that the King could not consummate their marriage.

Jane is a liar. She gave evidence at George and Anne's trial to save the "Boleyn inheritance" (the lands, titles and wealth that George and Anne had built up), she betrays Anne of Cleves and then, when Catherine Howard falls, Jane feigns madness to try and save herself from execution.

Jane is also portrayed as a jealous and lustful woman. She tells of how "jealousy and lust brought me so low that it was my pleasure, a wicked sinful pleasure, to feel his touch on me and think of him touching her", and she talks about how she got a kick out of imagining George with his sister, Anne. This part of her character leads to her being the chief instigator of the affair between Catherine Howard and Thomas Culpeper. It is Jane who tells Culpeper that Catherine wants him, and who offers to let him into Catherine's privy chamber to talk to her while she chaperones them. When the couple do meet, Jane is a voyeur. She watches them make love and is "aroused with stolen lust."

There really is nothing to like about Jane's character in Gregory's books and it is little wonder that those who read them feel that she got her comeuppance when she was beheaded in February 1542.

Jane of The Tudors

The Jane of
The Tudors
series is very similar to Philippa Gregory's Jane, but because Jane is a victim of George's cruelty, the viewer can be more forgiving of her betraying the Boleyns and giving false evidence. Her statement is portrayed as an act of revenge against a wicked husband.

Later in the series, we also see Jane acting as the go-between between Catherine Howard and Culpeper. She arranges meetings between them, acts as a look out and encourages their affair. Culpeper accuses her of acting like a madam in a brothel, and it's quite an apt description. Jane is also Culpeper's lover. Although Culpeper is attracted to Catherine, he sleeps with Jane first after getting her rather tipsy on wine and then seems to use Jane as a way of getting to Catherine. Jane doesn't seem particularly bothered by this because she can derive sexual pleasure from watching Catherine and Culpeper through the keyhole.

When word comes out about Catherine's affair with Culpeper, Jane is imprisoned in the Tower of London and there she goes insane. Gregory's Jane feigns madness, but the Jane of
The Tudors
really is mad; we see her smearing excrement on the walls and completely losing it.

The Jane Boleyn of Non-fiction

But it's not just fiction in which Jane is portrayed badly. In the "Author's Notes" section of
The Boleyn Inheritance
, Philippa Gregory explains that her Jane Boleyn was "drawn from history" and that "few novelists would dare to invent such a horror as she seems to have been." She goes on to say that Jane's "jealousy and a determination to preserve her inheritance" led to her giving evidence against George and Anne, and that her evidence against Anne of Cleves could have led to Anne being beheaded. Gregory also states that Jane encouraged Catherine and Culpeper "fully understanding the fatal danger to the young queen." A horror indeed, if we are to believe Gregory.

In
The Lady in the Tower: The Fall of Anne Boleyn
, Alison Weir writes how "most sources agree that the only evidence for incest would rest upon the testimony of Jane Parker, Lady Rochford."
³
Weir cites the corroborating sources as:

• • Edward, Lord Herbert of Cherbury - The 17th century biographer who described Jane "as the 'particular instrument' in the ruin of her husband and his sister",
  ⁴
  basing his account on contemporary evidence: namely Anthony Anthony's lost journal.
  
• • Eustace Chapuys, the imperial ambassador.
  
• • An anonymous Portuguese account.
  
• • The writings of Lancelot de Carles, secretary to the French ambassador.
  
• • Jane's execution confession.
  

Weir goes on to describe Jane's jealousy of the close relationship between George and Anne, the unhappiness of her marriage to George, the possibility that George had "subjected Jane to sexual practices that outraged her"
⁵
and her resentfulness towards Anne over her banishment from court after she plotted with Anne to remove a lady from court, a lady who had caught the King's eye. These reasons, along with her father Lord Morley's sympathy with the Lady Mary, could, Weir theorises, have led to Jane's betrayal of the Boleyns.

Lacey Baldwin Smith, Catherine Howard's biographer, says of Jane: "the lady was a pathological meddler, with most of the instincts of a procuress who achieves a vicarious pleasure from arranging assignations"
⁶
and C.Coote said "the infamous lady Rochford… justly deserved her fate for the concern which she had in bringing Anne Boleyn, as well as her own husband, to the block."
⁷
Perhaps the general public can be forgiven for judging Jane harshly, I suppose, when historians do too.

The Evidence

But did Jane Boleyn actually betray George and Anne?

No, I don't believe so; and I am not alone in thinking this way. Historian Julia Fox argues against this fallacy in her book on Jane, calling Jane "a scapegoat", and Fox's husband, historian John Guy, in a review of Alison Weir's
The Lady in the Tower
, points out the following problems with the sources Alison Weir uses to build her case against Jane.
⁸
He states:

• • That Lord Herbert of Cherbury was not quoting from the lost chronicle of Anthony Anthony, as Weir states, but actually quoting from his very own book.
  
• • That Chapuys never named Jane as the witness against George and Anne
  
• • That the Portuguese source also did not name Jane, it simply said "that person"
  
• • That Lancelot de Carles was talking about Lady Worcester, not Jane Boleyn
  
• • That Jane's execution confession did not exist, it was a forgery and the work of Gregorio Leti, a man known for making up stories and inventing sources
  

As for an unhappy marriage; well, a childless marriage is not necessarily an unhappy one. When we combine the points that John Guy makes with the fact that we have no evidence that Jane and George's marriage was unhappy, or that George was homosexual or bisexual, then we have to question these depictions of Jane. There is also no evidence that she was jealous, that she spied through keyholes, that she plotted with the Duke of Norfolk or that she slept with Thomas Culpeper; all of those claims are pure fantasy and belong only in fiction. Just as Anne and George have been maligned by fiction and history, Jane has been made into a monster and a scapegoat; "the bawd", "the infamous Lady Rochford"; and it just isn't fair or correct.