Read The Life and Death of Anne Boleyn Online
Authors: Eric Ives
The Life and Death of Anne Boleyn (3 page)
ads
Our appreciation of what it meant for Thomas Boleyn, and his daughter after him, to make a career at court is grievously impaired by our knowledge of later times, of Fanny Burney’s boredom and the insipid routine of the Victorian palace. Until late in the last century, historians left court life to the writers of fiction and the imagination of Hollywood. Yet there was one great difference between later courts and those of Tudor times. The earlier court was concerned with real power, real decisions and real wealth. Though display was highly important, to be a courtier was to be at the sharp end of politics, power and profit. And since Anne Boleyn, no less than her father, was first and last a phenomenon of the court, we need to explore the milieu to which she belonged.
The starting-point is a commonplace. In the sixteenth century, power was exercised by the ruler in person, or by direct delegation. This was the reality in England and in the rest of Europe alike. Policy was what the prince laid down; advancement and honour were in his gift; his person personified the community. This is not to deny that all government was necessarily politically constrained - and in England also limited by formal structures such as parliament and the due process of law - but in practical day-to-day terms, government was a response to the will of one man. The ultimate demand on any subject was to be called to obey ‘on your allegiance’.
The consequences that flowed from this ‘personal monarchy’ determined the shape of Anne Boleyn’s life. In the first place, it meant that royal authority operated in terms of royal favour. There was no way in which men could challenge a policy when that policy was the king’s will, other than themselves trying to gain the ear of the king so as to persuade him to will something different. This was precisely what Thomas More was unable to do when Henry VIII put pressure on the pope and the English Church in his effort to end his marriage to Katherine of Aragon. Open opposition would be treachery, but access to the king’s mind and emotion was blocked by Anne Boleyn. Royal favour was just as vital in the exercise of power. The king gave executive authority to the men he trusted, and they acted so as to retain his trust. Thus Henry’s interest in Anne had enormous implications for the government of the country at large. Favour was equally crucial in the matter of rewards. These were expressions of standing with the monarch, and it was thus of great significance when someone like Anne gained the influence which could ease her supporters into grants, offices and honours. A further consequence of personal monarchy was competition. The struggle for power was a struggle around the king’s person, a battle for his favour; politics were thus court politics. Decisions, likewise, were court decisions, and promotion and advancement were things achieved at court. The court made Anne Boleyn, and it would be the court which destroyed her.
To say that Thomas Boleyn and his children after him set out to be courtiers is, therefore, to say a great deal; they were taking the road to power, prestige and profit. Whether it was the road to honour is a different question, and most historians have felt that Anne’s father personified all that was bad about the court. P. W. Sergeant’s verdict that ‘it is clearly hopeless to attempt a defence of Sir Thomas’ may seem totally justified in the case of a man who, on his way to an earldom, slipped, or appears to have slipped, two daughters in succession into the king’s bed.
9
Friedmann’s judgement, ‘mean and grasping’, is certainly correct.
10
In the autumn of 1536, when the Crown was desperately scraping up money to combat the northern rebels, Henry was delighted to be told that Cromwell had approached Boleyn for an excessive sum:
9
Friedmann’s judgement, ‘mean and grasping’, is certainly correct.
10
In the autumn of 1536, when the Crown was desperately scraping up money to combat the northern rebels, Henry was delighted to be told that Cromwell had approached Boleyn for an excessive sum:
his Grace, being very merry said there was a servant of King Edward’s, his grandfather, which once made a suit unto him for 1000 oaks [so] that he might only obtain 20, and so he trusted your request to my lord of Wiltshire should purchase [bring in] £500 or such a matter by the reason it was so great, which being less would else percase [perchance] have wrought nothing with him.
11
Equally warranted was the contemporary opinion that Thomas ‘would sooner act from interest than from any other motive’.
12
When returning from an embassy in Spain in 1523 he brought with him an important messenger from Charles V, only to dump him when they reached London and leave the total stranger to find his own accommodation!
13
12
When returning from an embassy in Spain in 1523 he brought with him an important messenger from Charles V, only to dump him when they reached London and leave the total stranger to find his own accommodation!
13
Courts and courtiers had, of course, existed since time immemorial, and in Western Europe a vigorous tradition of comment had long condemned the courtier as a self-seeking sycophant and the court as a living hell.
14
Not only did the deadly sins of sloth, gluttony and lust flourish there, but to succeed a courtier had to embrace the other four as well — pride, avarice, envy, anger — along with falsehood, flattery and servility. The wealth, power and prestige which success at court could bring attracted countless young men and women to attempt their fortunes there. But the price was their integrity, their morality, their health, their spiritual safety and their self-respect. A telling instance is provided by the love notes which passed between Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn during morning mass in the royal chapel. They wrote them in an illuminated Book of Hours, and there is something gross in the king’s scrawl below the miniature of the blood-stained Man of Sorrows:
14
Not only did the deadly sins of sloth, gluttony and lust flourish there, but to succeed a courtier had to embrace the other four as well — pride, avarice, envy, anger — along with falsehood, flattery and servility. The wealth, power and prestige which success at court could bring attracted countless young men and women to attempt their fortunes there. But the price was their integrity, their morality, their health, their spiritual safety and their self-respect. A telling instance is provided by the love notes which passed between Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn during morning mass in the royal chapel. They wrote them in an illuminated Book of Hours, and there is something gross in the king’s scrawl below the miniature of the blood-stained Man of Sorrows:
If you remember my love in your prayers as strongly as I adore you, I shall hardly be forgotten, for I am yours.Henry R. forever.
Anne replied:
By daily proof you shall me find
To be to you both loving and kind.
And, with deliberate enticement, she chose to write this below a miniature of the Annunciation, the angel telling the Virgin Mary that she would have a son.
15
15
On this view, then, the court was a Moloch that sucked in good people, body and soul, and spewed out a noisome plague of parasites — Anne among them — corrupting the community in the process. On the other hand, to the landed elite from which courtiers came, even menial duties could be intrinsically honourable. According to traditional chivalric values, still very much alive, what made service honourable was the rank of the person served. To take an extreme example, the most influential of Henry’s courtiers was the man who occupied the post of ‘groom of the stool’ — by the time of the king’s death he would be a knight and a member of the privy council — and his duty was to make provision for the king’s natural functions and to attend the monarch when he relieved himself on the close stool, the royal commode.
Apologists could also stress that the courtier bore a great moral responsibility. Precisely because of the potential for corruption, it was imperative to surround a prince with good advice and men of honour. In 1536, in the northern uprising which followed the political upheavals which took Anne’s life, one of her enemies, Sir Thomas Tempest, reminded the rebels of the lessons of history:
It is necessary that virtuous men that loveth the commonwealth should be of his council ... such virtuous men as would regard the commonwealth above their prince’s favour... In this noble realm, who[ever] reads the chronicles of Edward II [will see] what jeopardy he was in for Piers de Gaveston, [the] Spensers and such like counsellors and ... Richard II was deposed for following the counsel of such like.
16
Only the virtuous adviser could resist the potential of the court for corruption, and thereby help to make princely rule virtuous.
This line of thought appealed very much to the new, lay, intellectual fashion which we call Renaissance humanism. Since the ruler was the embodiment of the community, serving him presented the supreme opportunity to apply the moral philosophy which the humanist study of classical literature taught. As Thomas More wrote in
Utopia
, ‘You, if you be disposed and can find in your heart to follow some prince’s court, shall with your good counsels greatly help and further the commonwealth. Wherefore there is nothing more appertaining to your duty, that is to say to the duty of a good man.’
17
The personal qualities that humanist education inculcated were important too: effective speech, impressive appearance and manner, personal achievement and
sprezzatura,
that unique something which combined nonchalant ease with
savoir faire;
these were exactly what was needed to command attention and allow the courtier to achieve his aim ‘to become the prince’s instructor’. More’s own entry into public service was not, as is sometimes suggested, a turning away from the ideals of humanism; it was their fulfilment.
Utopia
, ‘You, if you be disposed and can find in your heart to follow some prince’s court, shall with your good counsels greatly help and further the commonwealth. Wherefore there is nothing more appertaining to your duty, that is to say to the duty of a good man.’
17
The personal qualities that humanist education inculcated were important too: effective speech, impressive appearance and manner, personal achievement and
sprezzatura,
that unique something which combined nonchalant ease with
savoir faire;
these were exactly what was needed to command attention and allow the courtier to achieve his aim ‘to become the prince’s instructor’. More’s own entry into public service was not, as is sometimes suggested, a turning away from the ideals of humanism; it was their fulfilment.
Attitudes to the court and to courtiers were thus ambivalent. More himself was well aware that in the real world of the Renaissance court, compromise was the most that morality and honesty could hope to achieve.
18
His own career would show how difficult that was, but the dilemma was also explored at first hand in the poems of a courtier whose life was to be closely linked with that of Anne Boleyn, Sir Thomas Wyatt. Born about 1503, the son of a lifelong courtier, Thomas was at court in his early teens and, according to some stories, became Anne’s lover in the 1520s. Thereafter, apart from several embassies abroad and a number of periods in the Tower or under house arrest, he spent the rest of his life in the royal household.
19
His satires are particularly revealing. Two are addressed to ‘mine own John Poyntz’, a minor courtier at one time in Anne’s own service, and a third to Anne’s cousin Francis Bryan, one of the most prominent men at court. In the first, possibly written in 1536 soon after his release from the Tower after being arrested as one of Anne’s supporters, Wyatt bitterly attacks the dishonesty, the prostitution and the denial of integrity necessary for success at court and, in particular, the moral hypocrisy demanded of him:
18
His own career would show how difficult that was, but the dilemma was also explored at first hand in the poems of a courtier whose life was to be closely linked with that of Anne Boleyn, Sir Thomas Wyatt. Born about 1503, the son of a lifelong courtier, Thomas was at court in his early teens and, according to some stories, became Anne’s lover in the 1520s. Thereafter, apart from several embassies abroad and a number of periods in the Tower or under house arrest, he spent the rest of his life in the royal household.
19
His satires are particularly revealing. Two are addressed to ‘mine own John Poyntz’, a minor courtier at one time in Anne’s own service, and a third to Anne’s cousin Francis Bryan, one of the most prominent men at court. In the first, possibly written in 1536 soon after his release from the Tower after being arrested as one of Anne’s supporters, Wyatt bitterly attacks the dishonesty, the prostitution and the denial of integrity necessary for success at court and, in particular, the moral hypocrisy demanded of him:
None of these points would ever frame in me -
My wit is nought, I cannot learn the way.
And much the less of things that greater be,
That asken help of colours of device
To join the mean with each extremity:
With the nearest virtue to cloak alway the vice,
And as to purpose likewise it shall fall
To press the virtue that it may not rise,
As drunkenness, good fellowship to call.
20
However, Wyatt was also well aware of the attraction of the royal court:
I grant sometime that of glory the fire
Doth touch my heart; me list not to report
Blame by honour, and honour to desire.
21
His third satire is warm in its approval of Bryan’s rejection of the lure of private self-indulgence:
Likest thou not this? ‘No.’ ‘Why?’ ‘For swine so groins.In sty and chaw the turds moulded on the ground,
And drivel on pearls, the head still in the manger,
[As] of the harp the ass to hear the sound.
So sacks of dirt be filled up in the cloister
That serves for less than do these fatted swine.
Though I seem lean and dry, without moisture,
Yet will I serve my prince, my lord and thine,
And let them live to feed the paunch that list,
So I may feed to live both me and mine.’
By God, well said!
22
Wyatt, however, sees no escape from the courtier’s dilemma, in this case, how to afford to give this devoted service. Buy friends, maintain virtue only as a front, batten on the rich and elderly, marry for money and take your pleasure on the side; if a female relative is attractive, then sell her for a good price to ‘thy better’, and never let friendship get in the way of advantage — this is the only recipe.
23
It was one that Wyatt, Thomas Boleyn, his daughters, indeed every courtier at some time had to follow. Yet despite his disgust, back to court Wyatt came, again and again, and it was on the way to meet the imperial ambassador and escort him to the king that he caught pneumonia and died at Sherborne in Dorset. We would describe Wyatt as a poet, but the Sherborne parish register calls him
regis consiliarius
, ‘counsellor to the king’.
24
23
It was one that Wyatt, Thomas Boleyn, his daughters, indeed every courtier at some time had to follow. Yet despite his disgust, back to court Wyatt came, again and again, and it was on the way to meet the imperial ambassador and escort him to the king that he caught pneumonia and died at Sherborne in Dorset. We would describe Wyatt as a poet, but the Sherborne parish register calls him
regis consiliarius
, ‘counsellor to the king’.
24
There is no evidence that Anne’s father shared Wyatt’s qualms of conscience or that Anne, who did, acquired them in the Boleyn household. Yet even if Thomas Boleyn typifies the self-seeking courtier, he did have many of the qualities a ruler looked for. He was a man of some education, far and away the best speaker of French in the Tudor court, with Latin as well, and cultured enough to commission several items from Erasmus.
25
He was, as we shall see, careful to ensure that Anne had the best available education, and he was obviously also responsible for the education of her brother, George — possibly a product of Oxford and later a recognized court poet.
26
Thomas Boleyn was also adept at courtly entertainments, notably the tournament. He fought with the king himself at Greenwich in May 1510, and nine months later he was one of the ‘answerers’ at the great Westminster challenge of February 1511.
27
A tournament was very much more than an occasion for martial combat. By combining display, drama and symbolism, it could approach a major art form.
28
Thus on the second day of the 1511 tilt the leading answerer, Charles Brandon, entered the lists in dead silence, concealed beneath a moving tower; when the door was unlocked, he rode out in the costume of an old, bearded pilgrim, only to cast off this disguise and appear in polished armour once the queen, in whose honour the festivity was being held, had consented to his taking part.
29
Anne’s father was third into the tiltyard, alongside the marquess of Dorset, and together they continued the theme:
25
He was, as we shall see, careful to ensure that Anne had the best available education, and he was obviously also responsible for the education of her brother, George — possibly a product of Oxford and later a recognized court poet.
26
Thomas Boleyn was also adept at courtly entertainments, notably the tournament. He fought with the king himself at Greenwich in May 1510, and nine months later he was one of the ‘answerers’ at the great Westminster challenge of February 1511.
27
A tournament was very much more than an occasion for martial combat. By combining display, drama and symbolism, it could approach a major art form.
28
Thus on the second day of the 1511 tilt the leading answerer, Charles Brandon, entered the lists in dead silence, concealed beneath a moving tower; when the door was unlocked, he rode out in the costume of an old, bearded pilgrim, only to cast off this disguise and appear in polished armour once the queen, in whose honour the festivity was being held, had consented to his taking part.
29
Anne’s father was third into the tiltyard, alongside the marquess of Dorset, and together they continued the theme:
like two pilgrims from St. James [of Compostella], in tabards of black velvet, with palmers’ hats on their helmets, with long Jacob’s staves [pilgrim staffs] in their hands, their horse trappers of black velvet, their tabards, hats and trappers set with scallop shells [pilgrims’ badges] of fine gold ... their servants all in black satin, with scallop shells of gold in their breasts.
30
ads
Other books
BackTrek by Kelvin Kelley
Chicken Soup for the Canadian Soul by Jack Canfield
On the Run with Love by J.M. Benjamin
Dark Realm, The by Sharp, Anthea
More Awesome Than Money by Jim Dwyer
Dirty Little Secrets by Erin Ashley Tanner
Agatha Christie by The House of Lurking Death: A Tommy, Tuppence SS
Claimed by Her Alpha by Alex Anders
Zip Gun Boogie by Mark Timlin
Peeler by Kevin McCarthy