The Boleyn Women: The Tudor Femmes Fatales Who Changed English History (12 page)

The gossip surrounding Henry VIII and Elizabeth was later used and developed by the Jesuit writer, Nicholas Sander, who was writing in the reign of Elizabeth’s granddaughter, Elizabeth I. Sander, who was strongly opposed to Elizabeth I, wrote a scurrilous account of her mother, Anne Boleyn, something which was embellished by the following passage:

Anne Boleyn was the daughter of Sir Thomas Boleyn’s wife; I say of his wife, because she could not have been the daughter of Sir Thomas, for she was born during his absence of two years in France on the king’s affairs. Henry VIII sent him apparently on an honourable mission in order to conceal his own criminal conduct; but when Thomas Boleyn, on his return at the end of two years, saw that a child had been born in his house, he resolved, eager to punish the sin, to prosecute his wife before the delegates of the archbishop of Canterbury, and obtain a separation from her. His wife informs the king, who sends the marquis of Dorset with an order to Thomas Boleyn to refrain from prosecuting his wife, to forgive her, and be reconciled with her.
     Sir Thomas saw that he must not provoke the king’s wrath, nevertheless he did not yield obedience to his orders before he learned from his wife that it was the king who had tempted her to sin, and that the child Anne was the daughter of no other than Henry VIII. His wife then entreated him on her knees to forgive her, promising better behaviour in the future. The marquis of Dorset and other personages, in their own and in the king’s name, made the same request, and then Sir Thomas Boleyn became reconciled to his wife, and had Anne brought up as his own child.
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Sander’s work is not so wholly inaccurate that it should be dismissed out of hand: he correctly recorded that the king did indeed enjoy a relationship with Elizabeth’s elder daughter, Mary Boleyn, with the claim that ‘he had her brought to the court, and ruined her’, although the claim that she had first come to his attention through his visits to her mother are likely to be false given that Mary was in France for some months before returning to England to take up a court position when she first caught the king’s eye.

The idea that Henry VIII could possibly have been the father of Anne Boleyn is entirely false. In his account, Sander claims that Anne was born after Henry VIII became king during an absence of Thomas Boleyn from England of at least two years. Henry VIII came to the throne in 1509 at the age of seventeen. Thomas Boleyn, who attended the king’s Coronation, took part in a court masque in January 1510, as well as jousts in May 1510 and February 1511.
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He further appeared in a court masque in December 1514. The earliest period in which his two-year absence could have taken place is therefore some point between February 1511 and December 1514. It is true that he served as ambassador to Brussels for nearly a year during this period, an appointment that could, perhaps, have been misidentified by Sander as in France. However, although there is some uncertainty over Anne Boleyn’s birth date, it is certain that she was not born between 1512 and 1514. Thomas Boleyn used his friendship with Margaret of Austria, Regent of the Netherlands, which developed during his mission to Brussels, to secure a place in his household for his younger daughter, with a letter written by Anne to her father surviving from this period: clearly, this letter was not the work of a two-year-old. In addition to this, both Boleyn sisters served in the household of Mary Tudor, Queen of France in 1514, with Anne then transferring to the household of Francis I’s wife, Queen Claude: this was hardly the career of an infant. Quite apart from the fact that Henry VIII was highly unlikely to want to marry his own child, his taste in wives and mistresses tended towards women in their twenties and even thirties, making it unlikely that he would seek to marry a girl in her early teens when he first began to attempt to make Anne Boleyn his queen in 1527. Sander was clearly intent upon slander in his work when he declared that Thomas Boleyn warned the king off Anne, telling him that he knew her to be Henry’s own child, something to which Sander claims that the king replied, ‘Hold your tongue, you fool, hundreds are compromised; and be her father who he may, she shall be my wife.’

Sander’s story, the central point of which was to highlight a scandalous paternity for Anne Boleyn rather than to focus on a supposed royal affair for her mother, is therefore entirely improbable. However, the evidence of Throckmorton’s letter, other contemporary rumours and the fact that Sander later developed the tale does suggest that there was some substance to the claims and that there may have been some kind of relationship between them, even if it was not one that produced a child. The evidence that Elizabeth was a mistress of Henry VIII must therefore be considered. In
The Garland of Laurel
, Skelton very pointedly compared Elizabeth to Criseyde and commented that Criseyde’s legendary lover, Troilus, Prince of Troy, would have loved her if he had seen her, presumably in preference to Criseyde herself. It is just possible to posit a deliberate comparison between Troilus, Prince of Troy, and Henry, Prince of England, falling in love with the charms of the beautiful Elizabeth Howard in their youths, an allusion which, given the fact that the poem was not published until 1523, Skelton could have added to an earlier draft of his work after witnessing a relationship between Elizabeth and Henry VIII. However, given the fact that it is Troilus, Criseyde’s princely lover, who is betrayed by her, rather than any husband, it is probably stretching the source too far to posit from this that Elizabeth had a reputation for faithlessness in her lifetime as one recent writer has suggested.
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If anything, Skelton’s poem positively highlights Elizabeth’s character, calling her both demure and sage in her conduct.

Another point which must count against Elizabeth being Henry VIII’s mistress in the period before he became king is quite how over-protected the young prince was known to be by his father, whose hopes of founding a dynasty rested on the shoulders of his only living son. A surviving poem,
The Justes of the Moneths of May and June
, describes jousts held in the late spring of 1507 when the future Henry VIII was sixteen. In his description of the June jousts, the poet recorded that Prince Henry was a prominent spectator, a prince ‘most comely of stature’ who was eager to engage the combatants in talk of the jousts and clearly displayed an ambition to take part himself, something that would never have been allowed by his over-protective father.
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The poet recorded of the future king that:

And though a prince
And a king’s son he be
It pleaseth him of his benignity
To suffer gentlemen of low degree
In his presence

To speak of arms and of other defence
Without doing unto his grace offence.

Henry VII was simply not prepared to hazard the person of his only son in any way, and, given the generally held belief that sexual activity could be dangerous to an adolescent, it would seem highly improbable that such a cloistered young man could have taken a mistress, particularly after the premature death of his elder brother, Prince Arthur, within a few months of his own marriage when a youth of fifteen.

If there was any relationship between Henry VIII and Elizabeth it must have taken place after 1509 when Henry came to the throne and when Elizabeth had secured a court appointment as one of his wife’s ladies. Henry tended to draw his mistresses from the households of his wives and this is therefore not impossible in relation to Elizabeth: both Mary Boleyn and her predecessor, Bessie Blount, were members of the queen’s household. Skelton’s description suggests that Elizabeth Howard was a beautiful woman with an extrovert personality and she may therefore have captured the king’s attention.

In 1509 she was in her mid-thirties and still attractive. Henry VIII’s taste in women, although fairly eclectic, does suggest an interest in more mature women: his first wife, Catherine of Aragon, with whom he believed himself to be in love, was twenty-four at the time of their marriage, while Henry was seventeen. Anne Boleyn was probably already aged twenty-six at the time that she first caught the king’s eye, eventually marrying him when she was in her early thirties. Jane Seymour was aged around twenty-seven or twenty-eight at the time of her marriage, while Henry’s sixth wife, Catherine Parr, was thirty-one. Admittedly, one of the criticisms levelled at the appearance of Henry’s fourth wife, Anne of Cleves, was that when she arrived in England for the first time she was found to look older than expected. However, there is no evidence that Henry himself voiced this complaint, instead directing his criticism to her figure, manner and personal hygiene. Even Henry’s mistresses tended not to be young girls: he is believed to have been involved with the married Anne Hastings early in his reign, as well as the mature Jane Poppincourt. The exceptions to this are Henry’s fifth wife, Catherine Howard, who may have been as young as fifteen at the time of her marriage and was certainly under twenty, and his mistresses Bessie Blount and Mary Boleyn, who were in their late teens and early twenties respectively.

The idea that Elizabeth Boleyn might have been Henry VIII’s mistress early in his reign cannot be entirely dismissed. However, Throckmorton’s letter, which has the king himself denying an affair with Elizabeth while failing to deny one with her eldest daughter, is probably conclusive. Henry had no reason to lie about an affair with his future mother-in-law while tacitly admitting to having one with his future sister-in-law, since both relationships would have made the validity of his marriage to Anne Boleyn suspect. The evidence suggests that Elizabeth and Henry were not lovers, with the first member of Elizabeth’s immediate family to consummate her relationship with the king being instead her niece, Elizabeth Carew, who was the daughter of her half-sister, Margaret Bryan, and had been suggested as a royal mistress early in the reign.
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That said, the obvious rumours that something had occurred between Elizabeth and the king hint at a flirtation and it is likely that Henry made his attraction to her known at court, even if it was not actually acted upon. He certainly found the women of her family attractive: marrying her daughter, Anne, her niece, Catherine Howard, and the daughter of her first cousin, Jane Seymour. The king also had an affair with Elizabeth’s daughter, Mary, her niece, Elizabeth Carew, and was rumoured to be attracted to another niece, Mary Howard, Duchess of Richmond. It would not have harmed Thomas Boleyn’s career, or the court prospects of Elizabeth’s kin, if the king had indeed been attracted to her early in the reign.

One final issue concerning Elizabeth Howard that is worthy of investigation concerns the statement, first posited by Agnes Strickland in the nineteenth century and later followed by other historians, that Elizabeth died in 1512 in childbirth.
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Strickland then claimed that Thomas Boleyn took a second wife of humble origin, something which allowed Elizabeth I to have a connection with some of her poorer subjects in Norfolk. The source from which Strickland took her statement on Elizabeth’s death appears to have confused her with her sister, Muriel, who did indeed die in 1512. In addition to this, the statement that Elizabeth I had humble maternal relatives in Norfolk also appears to have been a misreading of the sources, with a nineteenth-century commentator on Strickland’s claims pointing out that these humble maternal relatives were actually members of the Boleyn family in Norfolk rather than kin to any unidentified stepmother. There is really no evidence to support a claim that Elizabeth Howard died in 1512 and, instead, a great deal of evidence to suggest that she was the Countess of Wiltshire who died in April 1538 and was buried at Lambeth, which was, of course, the burial ground of the Howards, with Howard mourners in attendance. Elizabeth appears in sources with reasonable regularity after 1512 although, as set out above, she spent a considerable portion of her time in the country, attending to the education of her children.

The first of Elizabeth’s three children to leave home was her younger daughter, Anne. Anne Boleyn’s childhood came to an end abruptly in the summer of 1513 when she was sent to Brussels to take up a position as one of the maids in the household of Margaret of Austria. This was a very prestigious post and can only have come about through the friendship that had developed between Margaret and Thomas during his embassy the previous year. Soon after Anne’s arrival, Margaret wrote personally to Thomas Boleyn to confirm that his daughter had arrived safely and to state that Anne ‘was very welcome to me, and I hope to treat her in such a fashion that you will have reason to be content with it; at least be sure that until your return there need be no other intermediary between you and me than she; and I find her of such good address and so pleasing in her youthful age that I am more beholden to you for having sent her to me than you are to me’.
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Anne quickly learned French, as her father, who was himself fluent in the language, had hoped, writing to him proudly in French from Margaret’s court. Elizabeth must also have been with pleased with reports of Anne’s progress. It is not impossible that Anne met Henry VIII for the first time in August 1513 when Margaret moved her court to Lille to meet with the English king and his retinue, which included Thomas Boleyn. Her time in Brussels was brief and in late 1514 she left Margaret to serve the new Queen of France.

While Thomas was responsible for launching the career of the couple’s younger daughter, Elizabeth was the driving force behind the debut of her eldest child. In 1514, when Henry VIII’s sister, Mary Tudor, was sent to France to marry the aged King Louis XII, she was attended by Mary Boleyn who obtained a permanent position in her household.
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Elizabeth’s half-brother, Lord Berners, was appointed as chamberlain to Mary Tudor, while her brother, the Earl of Surrey, also attended the wedding in France, making it highly likely that it was Elizabeth who was able to use her family connections to ensure that her eldest daughter did not miss out on such a sought-after and highly prestigious position. Mary Boleyn was soon joined by her sister, Anne, in France, apparently against the wishes of her father, who had hoped that she could remain in the Netherlands. By 1514 both of her daughters had left home, which may account for the fact that references to Lady Boleyn at court increase after this period. For Elizabeth’s two daughters, it was to be their time in France that defined their characters and their futures in the years to come as they developed their careers as courtiers.