Your Grace shall also understand that the Queen here, with the King’s mother, make all the search possible to bring to the assembly the fairest ladies and demoiselles that may be found … I hope at the least, Sire, that the queen’s Grace shall bring such in her band, that the visage of England, which hath always had the praise, shall not at this time lose the same …
[140]
The two queens and their entourages met for the first time at the jousts which were held on Monday, 11 June, where their competition was given edge by the favours of the jousters. The noble ladies were, we are told:
… all vieing with each other in beauty and ornamental apparel, and for the love of them each of the jousters endeavoured to display his valour and prowess in order to find more favour with his sweetheart …
[141]
Neither Catherine, who was running to fat, nor Claude, who was thirty-one weeks pregnant, were parties to this game, but it is to be assumed that the Duchess of Suffolk and Mary Boleyn were on the English side, and Margaret of Angouleme (the King’s sister) and the daughters of Lorraine on the French side. In this glittering company, Anne passed quite unremarked, but she was certainly present, and Sir Thomas probably took advantage of the opportunity to present her to Henry VIII. There must have been something of a Boleyn family reunion.
[142]
Contemporary commentators, the Venetians in particular, preferred the French style of beauty, describing Catherine’s companions as neither very graceful nor very handsome, but Polydore Vergil writing later on the English side, disagreed. Such things are a matter of taste.
One of the things that Anne did do while in the court of France was to make the acquaintance of Margaret of Angouleme. Whether there was any real friendship between them is a matter for speculation. Similar tastes in religious matters would argue that there was, but the difference in their rank makes it unlikely.
[143]
That Margaret was aware of the young Englishwoman, and may have shown her some favour, is very probable, but the suggestion of intimacy in Anne’s later correspondence is almost certainly wish fulfilment. It used to be thought that Anne served some time in the Duchess of Alencon’s household, but recent research has demolished that thesis.
[144]
Anne stayed with Claude until the later part of 1521, when her father decided to call her home. Sir Thomas was aware, as Francis was not, of the terms of the treaty of Bruges which Wolsey had recently signed with the Emperor, which committed England to war with France in the summer of 1522. In January 1522, the King of France noted that she had gone, and that the English scholars studying in Paris had likewise departed. These, he rightly adduced, were signs of a deteriorating relationship. The court of France would soon be an impossible place for Anne to be, and although Queen Claude may have regretted it, her English bird had flown.
There was also, however, another reason for her recall. In August 1515, Thomas Butler, Earl of Ormond, had died, leaving two daughters as his heirs general and a cousin, Piers Butler, as his heir male. One of these daughters was Margaret, Sir Thomas Boleyn’s mother. Livery of her share of the estate was granted within four months, and as far as the English lands of the earldom were concerned, appears to have been effective.
[145]
Ireland, however, was a different matter. Gerald FitzGerald, the Earl of Kildare, Lord Deputy at the time, and the Council of Ireland, favoured Sir Piers, recognised him as Earl of Ormond, and made the Irish lands over to him. A legal tussle and a political row ensued, because Henry declined to recognise the
soi disant
earl, and the latter showed no inclination to give way. Then Sir Thomas’s brother in law, the Earl of Surrey, was appointed Lord Lieutenant, and in 1520 he came up with bright idea for solving the conflict. If Sir Thomas’s daughter, Anne, were to marry James Butler, Sir Piers’ son and heir, then the present situation could be frozen and the two claims united in their children.
[146]
What Anne St Leger, Margaret’s sister, thought of this proposal is not known. Wolsey, in whose household James Butler was living, was enthusiastic, the King undertook to advance the proposal with Sir Thomas, and Wolsey was still writing from Bruges as late as November 1521, expressing his desire to talk it through with the King when he returned from his embassy.
[147]
Anne said that she would not agree to marry any man that she had never met, and that may have been an additional reason for her recall. It may also have been a sign of impending reconciliation that Piers was appointed Lord Deputy of Ireland on Surrey’s recall in 1521, although the ambiguity over his status appears to have continued. The marriage, however, never took place. Either the young people themselves were opposed or, more likely, Sir Thomas went off the whole idea. Eventually Sir Piers lost patience and discontinued the negotiation, even threatening to resolve the conflict by violence.
[148]
It was eventually settled in 1529, when he conceded the title of Ormond and accepted that of Ossory instead, together with the Irish estates. The English and Welsh lands remained in the hands of Margaret Boleyn and Anne St Leger.
So Anne made her debut at the English court at the beginning of 1522, having been placed alongside her sister in the household of Queen Catherine. Her French manners and general courtly panache seem to have made an instant impression, but since Mary was almost certainly the King’s mistress by this time, the Queen’s reaction to her advent can only be speculated upon. Anne’s first public appearance was at York Place on 1 March when she took part in that Burgundian extravaganza, the siege of the chateau verte, in which she played the part of
Perseverance
, one of the eight female defenders of the chateau. We have a long and detailed description of the development of this siege, which was laid by the King and seven other ‘male virtues’ –
Nobleness
,
Loyalty
, and so on – all magnificently attired.
[149]
Having summoned the castle to surrender in due form, and received a suitably scornful response, the besiegers bombarded it with dates and oranges, to which the besieged responded with sweetmeats and rosewater. Inevitably the male virtues prevailed, and led out their captives to the dance, after which their masks were removed and they all sat down to a sumptuous banquet. We do not know that Anne made any particular impact in the entertainment – indeed she would scarcely have had a chance to do so – or even just what she looked like. Unlike Mary, who was fair and pretty, she seems to have been dark, and not noticeably beautiful, except for her eyes, which were frequently remarked upon. The only detailed description comes from that Elizabethan recusant polemicist Nicholas Harpesfield, who could not have known her, and who was concerned to expound the ‘monster’ myth which arose from her later fate:
Anne Boleyn was rather tall of stature, with black hair and an oval face of sallow complexion, as if troubled with jaundice. She had a projecting tooth under the upper lip, and on her right hand six fingers. There was a large wen under her chin, and therefore to hide its ugliness, she wore a high dress covering her throat …
[150]
The family tradition of course was quite different, conceding only a trace of a nail upon one of her fingers, but even George Wyatt, who represented that tradition, did not claim that she was great beauty.
[151]
About her attractiveness and sexuality, however, there can be no doubt, and that soon brought admirers. Among these was Sir Thomas Wyatt, the diplomat and poet, who recorded his infatuation sadly and in cryptic verse several years later, at the time of her fall. However, exactly when this flirtation occurred, and how far it went is the subject of much learned controversy.
[152]
Sir Thomas was estranged from his wife, and may well have sought agreeable female company, but the story of his warning the King off a looseliving woman belongs to the anti-Boleyn propaganda of later years. It would also have to date the affair to after 1525, and that is almost certainly too late. If Wyatt was actually involved with Anne at all, it would have had to be between 1522 and 1525, at which time we know that she was conducting a relationship with Henry Percy, the son of the fifth Earl of Northumberland. The principal source for this story is the account written in 1557 by George Cavendish. However, Cavendish, unlike Harpesfield, would have been an eye witness of the events which he recorded, having entered Wolsey’s service in 1522, and been a Gentleman Usher at the time. Having commented upon her ‘gesture and behaviour’, Cavendish went on:
In so much [that] my Lord Percy, son and heir of the earl of Northumberland, who then attended upon my Lord Cardinal ... when it chanced the Lord Cardinal at any time to repair to the court, the Lord Percy would then resort for his pastime unto the Queen’s Chamber and would there fall in a dalliance amongst the Queen’s maidens ...
[153]
By that means he became ‘conversant’ with Anne Boleyn, and their relationship grew closer, until at length they were ‘insured’ together, intending to marry. There were, however, a number of snags to this hopeful plan. Sir Thomas, who would not have objected to having the future Earl of Northumberland as his son-in-law, was still at this stage hoping to match her with James Butler, while Percy was pledged to Mary Talbot, daughter of the Earl of Shrewsbury. Beyond this point, however, Cavendish is not a reliable guide because these events must have occurred in the autumn of 1522, whereas he represents the King as being offended with the liaison on the grounds of his own interest in the lady, which had not developed by that time.
[154]
Wolsey’s hostility, of which Cavendish makes much, was not therefore based upon any knowledge of the King’s mind, but rather upon his knowledge of the Talbot commitment and of the Earl’s intentions in that respect. If the King was offended by the idea, it was on account of his knowledge and approval of the Butler marriage, upon which he had bestowed a certain amount of time and effort. In an invented exchange of speeches, Cavendish has Wolsey berating Percy for having offended both his father and the King by seeking to bind himself to an unworthy spouse, and Percy replying that he was of full age to chose for himself, and that in any case Anne Boleyn was not unworthy of a nobleman. Her father, indeed, was mere knight, but her mother and grandmother came of noble houses, and he besought the Cardinal’s favour with the King. In any case, he declared, he had gone too far in the matter to withdraw with a good conscience.
[155]
Whether this means that he had actually slept with Anne, or that he wished Wolsey to think that he had is not known. Consummation of such a union would have been a very hazardous business, as both parties would have been aware, and it is unlikely that Anne would have permitted such intimacy, however smitten she may have been by young Henry. The Cardinal duly sent for the Earl of Northumberland and appraised him of the situation, whereupon the Earl roasted his son as ‘proud, presumptuous, disdainful and a very unthrift waster’ which scarcely seems justified by the alleged offence. Cowed by this exhibition of paternal ire, and threatened with disinheritance, the young man had given way, and cancelled whatever understanding he had with Anne.
[156]
Instead he went ahead and married Mary Talbot in the summer of 1525, and the marriage was a complete disaster, but that cannot have been much consolation to Anne, who was, according to Cavendish ‘greatly offended’, as well she might have been. He traces Anne’s subsequent hostility to Wolsey to this sequence of events, but in that he is surely using hindsight, because at this juncture she would have had no particular influence, and there is abundant evidence later of her attempts to ingratiate herself with the Cardinal at a time when his influence seemed to be crucial to her own chances of success. It would, in any case, have been foolish to manifest enmity to Wolsey in 1523, when these events probably occurred. Because he was then at the height of his power; and Anne was not foolish.