The Boleyns (26 page)
In a sense the whole story of Elizabeth’s reign could be entitled ‘the Boleyns in power’, but that would be unrealistic because she derived her claim and a fair bit of her personality from her father. What is realistic, however, is to look at how she addressed the issues arising from her gender and sexuality, because that was her inheritance from her mother. Direct comparisons are not possible, because Anne was never a sovereign, and her power always lay in her ability to manipulate her husband. Elizabeth had no husband, but she did have a council and lovers of various degrees of intimacy whom she also had to control. As we have seen, she spent almost half her reign coping with pressures from within the realm that she should marry, and nobody knows whether, or when, she decided that that would not work. One international negotiation succeeded another, and all ended in failure because there was no way in which the obligations of a ruler could be squared with the duties of a wife. What these did do, however, was to provide a theme by which foreign policy could be conducted. This was a theme which no king could have used because of the differences between a male and a female consort, the latter being a mere adjunct and the former a king matrimonial. Elizabeth’s objective was to maintain the security and integrity of her realm, without having to fight major wars in order to do so. So she played the feminine card for all that it was worth, and for more than twenty years it worked. A king could not have expected to retain his authority, either at home or abroad, without fighting, but she could, and did. She also had to deal with her council and courtiers, all of whom were men. She had, admittedly, a female Privy Chamber to retreat to when the pressures of the masculine world became intolerable, and that had a politics of its own, but it was not a centre of power in the same sense that Henry VIII’s Privy Chamber had been.
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Courtiers, ultimately, would do as they were told, but councillors were a different proposition. Elizabeth took seriously her obligation to rule with counsel, but was denied the kind of male bonding which had traditionally determined relations between kings and their advisers. It was one thing for councillors to pretend to be in love with their mistress, but quite another to admit any degree of intimacy. The relationship which fitted her predicament best was that which she enjoyed with William Cecil, which was that of a niece with a surrogate uncle. This enabled her to quarrel with him, and reject or ignore his advice, without ever forfeiting that special relationship which underpinned her regime for almost forty years. Elizabeth modelled all the associations which mattered to her on aspects of the family. The Earl of Leicester was her ‘husband’ (without any of the rights which real marriage would have conveyed), Lord Burghley was her ‘uncle’, the Earl of Essex her ‘son’ and so on. Henry Carey, who was her real cousin, was much favoured and employed, but does not really feature in this make believe family. Elizabeth also played the female card in other ways. She threw tantrums in which neither the recipients nor the observer knows where the play-acting ended and the real rage began. She even became violent on occasions – with her female attendants. She procrastinated endlessly when she was expected to be decisive, but whether out of a genuine inability to make up her mind, or out of a mischievous desire to keep her servants on their toes, no one is very certain. Sometimes events made up her mind for her, and sometimes she eventually came to a resolution – as with the fate of Mary of Scotland – but never did her indecisiveness matter in the long run. Similarly she changed her mind. Having resolved to send Sir Francis Drake to sea in 1585, she countermanded his instructions, but only when he was safely out of sight of land! These devices had her councillors hopping up and down with frustration, and even Cecil found her practices hard to take at times, but it all seems to have been in the service of never being taken for granted. At the beginning of her reign her councillors believed that, being a mere woman, she would follow their directions in everything, and that she was determined not to do. God had given England to her to rule, and she would be answerable to him, and not to a bunch of her own servants. In short, Elizabeth became a man manager of the sort that only a certain kind of woman can be, and that skill she undoubtedly inherited from her mother. Had she been a subject, and had she married, she would very probably have taken a risk too far, as Anne did, although probably not at such a cruel cost.
The only occasion in which her control slipped and almost fell was in her early relationship with Robert Dudley, and that too carries echoes of her mother’s misadventures. The kind of evidence of clandestine gestures, private rendezvous and ill-considered words which was produced against Anne at her trial could equally have been produced against the Queen in the summer of 1560. The court gossips were so certain that Dudley was her lover that they circulated rumours that the Queen was pregnant by him, and in France Catherine de Medici scoffed ‘the Queen of England is to marry her horsemaster’.
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Elizabeth was the queen, and no husband was going to call her to account, but public opinion did, and that opinion did not like what it saw. Her council were very worried, because apart from that minority which supported the idea, everyone assumed that such behaviour could only lead to a disparaging marriage. Just as Henry’s courtiers had put two and two together, and concluded from Anne’s words to Sir Henry Norris that she had a secret plan to poison the King, so Elizabeth’s courtiers concluded that she was determined to marry Dudley. When his wife died in suspicious circumstances, it was generally believed that this was part of a most dishonourable plot, to which the Queen was privy. Had Elizabeth succumbed to the logic of the situation, and followed her own sexual inclinations, she would have married him; at which point William Cecil would have resigned, and the nobility would probably have risen in rebellion. None of this happened because the Queen got a grip on herself in time, and by a titanic effort of will succeeded in converting a lover into a friend. What would have happened if Anne had seen the warning signs in time, and never conducted that fatal flirtation with Sir Henry Norris? Would Cromwell have found some other means of getting rid of her, or would he have swallowed the reverse and renegotiated his relations with the Boleyns? Such uncertainties, depending as they do upon the personal reactions of monarchs, are inevitable when dealing with a personal monarchy. Contemporary culture made the sexual peccadillos of women more important than those of men, because a woman’s honour was bound up with her chastity in a way which was not true of men. Elizabeth recognised this later in her reign when she became ‘the Virgin Queen’, and used the integrity of her own body as a symbol for the inviolable sovereignty of her realm. No king could have used such imagery, least of all the much married Henry VIII, but a queen could only retain full control by eschewing marriage, and thereby turning the succession into a lottery. For Anne no such choice was available, and she was forced to put her sexuality to the service of her political agenda. Unfortunately in doing so she gave hostages to fortune which eventually destroyed her.
By comparison with Elizabeth, Henry Carey is unimportant, except that it was through him that the Boleyn line was continued. He does not seem to have inherited his mother’s sexual appetite, or if he did it was mostly absorbed by his marriage. Only the existence of Valentine Carey suggests any hint of Mary’s waywardness. He was a staunch Protestant, and that he undoubtedly owed to his upbringing, but there is no suggestion that he was sympathetic to the puritan lobby which developed in the court after 1570. Insofar as he played a part in the factional rivalries of the period, it was as a supporter of William Cecil, but he was not a prime mover in any cause, and his opinion on some of the issues which divided the council is not known. What is known is that he was a strong opponent of Mary of Scotland, and sympathetic to the King’s men in that country, which attitude he derived partly from his Protestantism, and partly from long and varied experience of dealing with successive regency governments. He had no military pretensions, and apart from his encounter with Leonard Dacre, very little experience. He was a follower rather than a leader, and gives the impression of being regarded as a safe pair of hands. Elizabeth seems to have been fond of him, but whether for his personal qualities, or out of a sense of duty to a kinsman is not very clear. She endowed him lavishly, both with lands and with minor offices, and eventually made him her Lord Chamberlain, but he was not a favourite in the same sense as Lord Burghley, let alone the Earl of Leicester. In fact his political career was low key, and that applied even more to his son and successor George. George was given the important office of Governor of the Isle of Wight in his father’s lifetime, and the lord chamberlainship after his death. Both of these offices he seems to have discharged to the satisfaction of the Queen, but there is no suggestion that these services were regarded in anyway as distinguished. His younger brother Robert was created Earl of Monmouth in 1626, and his son Henry, the third Lord Hunsdon, Viscount Rochford in 1621 and Earl of Dover in 1628.
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However, apart from a nod to his family history in the title of Rochford, these appear to have been promotions which arrived with the rations rather than being rewards for exceptional service.
So should the Boleyns be regarded as a political family, in the same sense as the Howards or the Cecils? Probably not, because it was the women who were the leaders and movers, and the men the followers, in a manner altogether exceptional. Anne was a remarkable politician, in a way which neither her sister nor her father were. This was a quality which she shared to some extent with her brother, but not with her sister’s children. Her daughter was even more remarkable, and it is through Elizabeth that the family’s claim to fame really lies. A unique combination of her father’s intelligence and imperious personality with her mother’s sharp wit and feisty sexuality, she demonstrated how a woman’s body could contain the heart and stomach of a king. For Elizabeth alone the historian should be grateful to Sir Thomas Boleyn and his offspring.
1 Origins – the Blickling Years
1.
History of Parliament, Biographies
(1936), p. 90.
2.
Calendar of the Patent Rolls, 1452–61
, p. 216.
3. A. B. Beavan,
The Aldermen of the City of London
(1904), I, pp. 90, 272; II, pp. 10, 164.
4.
History of Parliament
, loc cit.
5.
Cal. Pat., 1446–1452
, pp. 130, 225.
6. Ibid, p. 472. Gascony fell to the French in 1453.
7.
History of Parliament, loc.cit
.
8. Ibid.
9. Charles Ross,
Edward IV
(1974), pp. 166-7.
10. R. Sharpe,
Letter Books of the City of London
(1894–9). Letter Book L, p. 19.
11.
ODNB
, sub Thomas Boleyn. Thomas Butler was the brother and heir of John Butler, 6th Earl of Ormond, who died in October 1476.
12.
Cal. Pat., 1476–85
, pp. 343, 466. William Boleyn’s story is complicated by the fact that there was another William Boleyn, described as a gentleman, who was a collector of taxes in Lincolnshire in 1463, and for the Port of Boston in 1485. However, that William appears to have died in 1491.
Cal. Fine., 1461–1471
, p. 104, and
Cal. Fine., 1485–1509
, pp. 36-7, 136.
13. Ibid, pp. 397, 490.
14.
Calendar of the Close Rolls, 1485–1500
, no. 143.
15.
Cal. Pat., 1485–1494
, pp. 294, 349.
16.
ODNB
. The Earl of Surrey was restored to his father’s dukedom of Norfolk in 1514. His son, who succeeded him in the dukedom in 1524, married Anne, a younger daughter of King Edward IV.
17. It was normal practice for noblemen and major gentry to run these schoolrooms when they had children of an appropriate age. It was also quite usual for children to be sent to other suitable homes for their upbringing, although there is no sign of that happening in this case.
18
. Calendar of the Fine Rolls, 1485–1509
, no. 668.
Cal. Pat., 1494–1509
, no. 273.
19.
ODNB
. The birth dates of all Thomas’s children are conjectural. See G. W. Bernard,
Anne Boleyn: Fatal Attractions
(2010), pp. 4- 19.
20. Ibid, p. 5.
21.
Cal. Pat., 1494–1509
, pp. 479, 484. On enfeofment to use, see K. B. MacFarlane,
The Nobility of Later Medieval England
(1973), pp. 76-8, 217-219.
22.
Cal. Fin., 1485–1509
, no. 829, 11 November 1505.
23. S. T. Bindoff,
The House of Commons, 1509–1558
(1982), sub. James Boleyn.
24. Ibid.
25. Ibid. The earldom of Wiltshire was revived for William Paulet, Lord St John, in 1550.
26. For Jane Rochford’s behaviour in the summer of 1541, see D. Loades,
The Tudor Queens of England
(2009), pp. 144-8 and L. B. Smith,
A Tudor Tragedy
(1961), pp. 173-207. Jenny Rowley- Williams,
Jane Rochford
, (2011).
27. Bindoff,
House of Commons
.
28.
Letters and Papers … of the Reign of Henry VIII
, I, no. 698. He was supporting Sir Charles Brandon.
29. For Henry’s essentially backward looking attitude at this time, and particularly his obsession with Henry V, see J. J. Scarisbrick,
Henry VIII
(1968), pp. 23-4. He commissioned a life of his hero, which was translated into English in 1513, and edited by C. L. Kingsford in 1911.
30.
Calendar of State Papers, Spanish
, II, p. 44. Scarisbrick,
Henry VIII
, p. 26.
31. Garrett Mattingly,
Catherine of Aragon
, (1963), p. 97.
32. Scarisbrick,
Henry VIII
, pp. 26-7.
33. Polydore Vergil,
Anglica Historia
, ed. D. Hay, (Camden Society, 1950), p. 163.
34. Edward Hall,
Chronicle
(ed. 1806), pp. 520 et seq.
2 Thomas at Court – the Hever Years
1.
Letters and Papers
, I, nos. 81 (11 May 1509), 707 (27 February 1511).
2. Ibid, no. 1186. War had been declared at the end of April. Scarisbrick,
Henry VIII
, p. 29.
3.
Letters and Papers
, I, no. 1229.
4
. L & P
, I, no. 1448. Eric Ives,
The Life and Death of Anne Boleyn
, (2004), p. 11.
5.
L & P
, I, no. 2055.
6. Ibid, no. 1279. On Thomas’s ease of manner, both with the Archduchess and the King, see Ives,
Life and Death
, pp. 11, 18.
7.
L & P
, I, no. 1587.
8. Edward Echyngham to Wolsey, 5 May 1513. Alfred Spont,
Letters and Papers relating to the War with France, 1512–1513
(1897), pp. 145, 53.
9. For a discussion of the deployment of this household, see Charles Cruikshank,
Henry VIII and the Invasion of France
(1990), pp. 30- 31. His Chamber Staff totalled 579.
10. Ibid, pp. 105-7.
11.
Calendar of State Papers, Venetian
, II, no. 316.
12. F. Nitti,
Leo X e la Sua Politica
(1892). Scarisbrick,
Henry VIII
, p. 51.
13.
L & P
, I, no. 2964.
14. For an assessment of Mary’s character, see
ODNB
sub Mary Stafford.
15.
L & P
, II, no. 1501. A total of eighteen courtiers took part in this performance.
16. S. J. Gunn,
Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk
(1988) , pp. 35- 8.
17.
L & P
, II, no. 125, 6 February 1515.
18.
Cal. Ven
., II, nos. 594, 596, 635.
19. For a full discussion of Wolsey’s manoeuverings at this juncture, see P. Gwynn,
The King’s Cardinal
(1990), pp. 613-8.
20.
L & P
, II, nos. 1309, 1573, and p. 1470.
21. Ibid, no. 1277.
22.
State Papers of Henry VIII
, (1830–52), II, 35, 49, 58. D. B. Quinn, ‘Henry VIII and Ireland, 1509–1534’,
Irish Historical Studies
, 12, 1961, p. 331.
23.
L & P
, II, no. 1517.
24. Ibid, nos. 3756, 3783.
25. Garrett Mattingly,
Catherine of Aragon
. For Catherine’s jointure, see
L & P
, II, no. 1363.
26.
Cal. Ven
., II, 1074. Scarisbrick,
Henry VIII
, p. 71.
27. There were violent protests against the intrusion of a foreigner. Charles had been born in Ghent, and brought Netherlandish advisers with him, who were much resented. The revolt is known as the
Comuneros
.
28.
L & P
, II, nos. 4469, 4475.
29.
L & P
, III, no. 70. The danger lay in the fact that Charles now controlled three of Francis’s five possible frontiers – the Low Countries, Germany and Spain. The fourth was the English Channel, and the fifth, where conflict was most likely, was in northern Italy.
30. BL. Cotton Vitellius B xx, ff.165, 170.
L & P
, III, nos. 240, 241. Scarisbrick,
Henry VIII
, pp. 98-101.
31.
L & P
, III, no. 306.
32. Ibid, no. 702. J. G. Russell,
The Field of Cloth of Gold
(1969), p. 57.
33.
Cal. Ven
., III, no. 108.
34. Wolsey appears to have been attempting to impute some disloyalty to Sir Thomas early in 1515, although nothing came of it.
L & P
, II, nos. 124, 125. On the promise of the comptrollership, see ibid, III, no. 223.
35.
L & P
, III, no. 1004, 1011. Surrey tended to take the Irish side in this dispute.
36. Ibid, no. 1762.
37. Ibid, no. 1994.
38. Hall,
Chronicle
, p. 462. D. Loades,
The Tudor Navy
(1992), pp. 105-6.
39.
L & P
, III, nos. 2333, 2481.
40. Ibid, no. 3008.
41. Ibid, no. 2982. Helen Miller,
Henry VIII and the English Nobility
(1986), p. 19.
42.
L & P
, III, no. 3213. Wolsey wrote that Charles was ‘encouraged’ by the efforts of Bourbon, but Henry was expecting the latter to advance on Paris.
43. S. J. Gunn, ‘The Duke of Suffolk’s March on Paris in 1523’,
English Historical Review
, 101, 1986, pp. 596-634.
44
. State Papers of Henry VIII
, VI, pp. 221, 233
Cal. Span., Further Supplement
, p. 318.
45.
L & P
, III, no. 3386.
46.
L & P
, IV, no. 137.
47.
State Papers
, IV, pp. 120 et seq. Scarisbrick,
Henry VIII
, p. 133.
48. Ibid, p. 138.
49. Ibid, p. 140.
50. G. W. Bernard,
War, Taxation and Rebellion in Early Tudor England
(1986), p. 99.
51. Hall,
Chronicle
, pp. 699, 701-2.
52.
L & P
, IV, no. 1298.
53. TNA SP1/55, ff.14-15.
L & P
, IV, no. 5807. Miller,
Henry VIII and the English Nobility
, pp. 20-21.
54. D. Loades,
Mary Tudor; the Tragical History of the First Queen of England
(2006), pp. 22-3.
55.
L & P
, IV, no. 1939.
3 Mary & the King’s Fancy – in & out of Favour
1. J. Gairdner, ‘Mary and Anne Boleyn’, and ‘The Age of Anne Boleyn’, in
English Historical Review,
8, 1893, pp. 53-60 and
EHR
, 10, 1895, p. 104.
2. E. W. Ives,
The Life and Death of Anne Boleyn
(2004), pp. 15-17. G. W. Bernard,
Anne Boleyn; Fatal Attractions
(2010), pp. 5-6.
3. G. de Boom,
Marguerite d’Autriche-Savoie et la Pre-Renaissance
(Paris, 1935), p. 118. Ives,
Life and Death
, p. 16.
4.
Letters and Papers
, I, no. 3348 (3), 3357.
5.
L & P
, II, I, no. 224. S. J. Gunn.
Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk
(1988). pp. 35-38.
