La Petite Boulain

by G Lawrence

  Whilst I could see why the common people loved him, I could also understand the fear Louis’ nobles felt at having a king who was so very dull, aged and ordinary. It did not set them very high in the stakes of the courts of Europe.

  But this was all to change when Mary Tudor arrived! The old man who went to bed early and rose early, who was frugal with his money and appetite was suddenly invested with a bride who loved everything he shied away from. Unhappy though she was to be placed in a match with an old man, Mary Tudor was fond of the many pleasures that her new position could afford her. She wanted endless rounds of dances, feasts, hunting and masques; she was as elegant and refined as a princess should be, but it was obvious from the start that the court was about to change.

  There was a new power in the Court of France. But the Queen’s reign had not started smoothly.

  Before I arrived in France, and a few weeks after they were married, Louis had both surprised and outraged his new bride when he sent almost all of her waiting women home to England and replaced them with French attendants. Although this was not an unusual occurrence in royal marriages, the young Tudor bride was deeply offended. As with all the Tudors, friendship and her own pride mattered to Mary a great deal. Louis had injured both her feelings of loyalty to her friends, and her Tudor self-esteem... a dangerous mixture.

  Louis had to work hard and provide many very costly presents to make the hurt up to her. He was entirely spellbound by his delightful new queen, and although he would not have the Queen of France surrounded by English women, he did want to be on good terms with her. I imagine he found her bed to be rather more exciting a prospect than those of his previous two brides.

  But all princesses must send home the women who accompanied them to their new court and country; it is the way of things. No king wishes to have his court awash with creatures of another realm; therein lie far too many opportunities for crafty spying by kings of other nations. A handful of English attendants were left to her from the many hundreds who had accompanied Mary to France. Out of the few that remained behind to serve the new Queen was my sister, and I soon arrived after Mary Tudor’s coronation.

  The removal of Mary Tudor’s English attendants had left her with few people that she could converse with easily. Her French was not unaccomplished, since she had the education of a princess behind her, but she longed to speak English, perhaps out of a feeling of homesickness. I had been selected to act as the Queen’s lady-in-waiting, but also as her translator, if required, and something of a tutor to her in the French Court. Mary, my sister, had no real gift for languages, although she muddled along well enough, but she was allowed to remain mainly due to the affection that Mary Tudor had for her sweet lady-in-waiting. My sister Mary had made an impression on Mary Tudor, and our father had done everything he could to ensure her position with the Princess.

  Mary Tudor greeted my arrival in France with some relief. Her own tutor, whom she had selected to accompany her to France, was named Jane Popincourt, but Jane had apparently not been approved to accompany the Princess from England to France due to a lack of proper morals. Whispered to have been a mistress of the English King, Jane Popincourt was not considered to be a good example of a modest lady to accompany a princess. And so the English Princess was left without her tutor, and whenever there was a post which needed filling, our father seemed able and willing to mention a name to fill it to his advantage. Mary Tudor had been somewhat offended to receive notice that one of her ladies was not considered worthy to accompany her, but Louis started as he meant to continue, before the match even took place, he sent his bride-to-be a fabulous jewel to appease her, a vast diamond adorned with a pendant-shaped pearl, named the “Mirror of Naples”. He was to lavish many and various gifts upon his princess whenever he came to upset her.

  Mary Tudor was not ignorant of the French language; ignorance would have been difficult since French was spoken often at the English court. But she worried about her accent, whether it was refined enough, if it seemed crass… much as I had done when I came to Mechelen. If there was something this fiery Princess would not suffer, it was looking or feeling a fool in front of others; her pride was strong. And with that pride came the opportunity for my entry to the Court of France.

  I think that many of the French Court, along with Louis, were hoping that a son and heir would soon follow this marriage. The French crown could not, by law, pass to a woman, or through the line of a woman, and so Louis’ daughters could not inherit their father’s throne. If Louis died without an heir then his throne went to the young François de Valois, Count d'Angoulême, the nearest male relation to Louis. François was married to Louis’ daughter, the Princess Claude, perhaps as a way for the old King to ensure his bloodline still reigned after his death. But not-so-secretly we all knew that Louis despaired of the idea of handing his throne to the young, bold and rather licentious François. Louis had apparently said of François: “this big boy will spoil everything”. Louis was hoping for a son to come from his loins and grow in the belly of the fiery Princess of England. Whilst it was certainly not impossible for an old man to conceive a child with a young pretty princess, the task was not one Mary Tudor warmed to. Although Louis was captivated with her beauty from the first moment he saw her, glowing and beautiful on her horse as she rode into Paris to meet him, the feeling was not reciprocated by the Tudor Princess.

  She had had another groom in mind for her hand, even before her marriage to Louis had been decided.

  Princesses do not choose their princes, not unless they are very fortunate. And this princess had set her sights on a rather lowly match. Mary Tudor had fallen in love with Charles Brandon, now the Duke of Suffolk and her brother’s best friend. This was the same man who had visited the Court of Burgundy with King Henry when I was there, and made a fool of himself over the Regent, Margaret. Whilst Mary Tudor’s brother was aware of her feelings for his friend, King Henry was not one to let such a trophy as his beautiful sister throw herself away on a match with a mere English subject. To have his sister installed as the Queen of France was a much better use for her, so away she went; to marry an old man and to bring further glory to the country of England.

  So you see; it was not only my father who was happy to use his family to advance his own interests. It was the fate of all nobles and royalty to marry where they were told, not where they desired. Perhaps that is why the history of my life is in many ways so remarkable… for eventually, I was to do just the opposite of what was normal.

  I joined the party just after the marriage had taken place; Mary and Louis had been wed by proxy before the Princess had set out to France. In order to make the match legal before the couple had even met, a noble member of the French King’s court had symbolically consummated the union. Before witnesses, the Duc de Longueville, the representative of Louis, had climbed into a royal bed with Mary and touched his naked thigh against hers.

  Thus was a binding contract of marriage, an allegiance of countries and peoples made, between her thigh and his.

  Once I had settled in my apartments that I shared with some other ladies in Mary Tudor’s retinue, I sought out my sister. Mary was now sixteen to my fourteen years and in the time that we had been apart she had grown taller and more beautiful. Her figure had filled out; her breasts were ample and on easy display for admirers in her low-cut gown. Her clothing was of the best that our father’s money could buy, as were mine, but she wore the English styles which were not as sophisticated as the clothing I had learned to design and make myself at Mechelen. Her gowns were all much lower cut than mine, and I noted that I was not the only one to see this; the young men of the court were most appreciative.

  When first we saw each other we rushed together and were breathless in the pleasure of seeing one another again. I saw her eyes travel over the fabric and cut of my dress and I took a little pleasure in seeing envy creep through her clear and wonderful eyes.

  “You are so grown!” she said to me as we walked through the beaut
iful gardens of the court. “You are very elegant, my little sister, and you seem as old as me now, perhaps more so,” she said with a giggle.

  “At Margaret’s court, we were taught so,” I replied, smiling at her as I twirled a jewelled ornament on my belt. “We were instructed to walk with elegance, to sing and dance well. I learnt also to design and make my own clothing,” I gave a little shrug. “I am no more elegant than all the women who are there, and any elegance you do see is due to the graciousness of the Regent Margaret, not I.”

  Mary smiled and looked around her. The gardens were full of courtiers wandering and taking the air. “Shall we have much pleasure here, do you think?” she asked with the naughty look I remembered so well. “There are many handsome men to be found at this court.”

  “Are men the only pleasure to be found then?” I asked with a short laugh. “Then our pleasures shall be short-lived indeed! If all there is to amuse us is the prattling of young gallants then I shall become most jaded!” I raised one of my eyebrows at her. “I shall wish for some dancing, some singing and music; you shall have all the young cockscombs you wish for.”

  “Oh Anne, I intend to!” she said, and smiled saucily.

  Suddenly I understood why the young men looked her over so boldly. There was a promise to Mary, no mystery or challenge… there was within her smile and her way of moving an absolute promise of pleasure. She was a sensual creature. In some ways I felt the same within my own blood, but there was something so open about Mary’s attention to pleasure, and her desire for it, that it chilled me. There would be no challenge with her, no chase. If Mary liked a man and he liked her, then there would be no obstacle put in his way; he would simply beckon, and she would come running, with her arms and legs open wide.

  I seemed to see all this in an instant, and I felt cold. It was as though my older sister did not understand the rules of court life, or the game of courtly love. She did not seem to understand the need to save herself for marriage, the need to value her virtue. If there was an opportunity for a liaison with a good-looking man, then she would take it. There was no subtlety; there would be no clever play at the game of courtly love to be the mistress of a man in name but not in practise. Mary was as open in her heart as she was in her words and that was not the way that things were done at court. To become a mistress in the game of courtly love was one thing; that was respectable and admirable. To become a mistress in the true sense was something else entirely. If that came to happen, it was not accepted publicly unless the man chose to acknowledge his mistress, and that only happened if the man was important and powerful. Even then, the woman would be recognised as morally deficient and earn the disapproval of many. The refusal to allow Jane Popincourt to accompany the Princess Mary was a good example. The men in these affairs, of course, received no censure, or very little. The rules of morality were different for men and women, it seemed. Women suffered in reputation by indulging in the sins of the flesh, whereas men were but considered normal and healthy for doing so. I had learned that there was a value to remaining a maid. Mary, however, seemed to set little store by the rules of morality, or the rules of courtly love.

  I would never be that way, I swore then, for at Margaret’s court I had learnt to take pride in myself, in my virtue and my accomplishments. I was worth more than to waste myself, my name and my future prospects on a fleeting affair. I was not merely the plaything of any man to be picked up, used and cast away when he wished. My sister’s open desire for affairs of the heart left me cold. That was not the life I wished for, for myself.

  I had learned well at Margaret’s court that the promises of young men are not to be trusted, I wondered if Mary had learnt the same. Soon, I should find that Mary cared as little for the promises of young men as they did. She would pursue a life bent on happiness, and she would pursue it often without reference to or regard for the rest of our family. Although through most of my life I abhorred her selfishness, as I thought it was then, I can see now that perhaps my appealing sister, who sought a life of personal satisfaction and contentment, may well have been the wiser of the two Boleyn daughters.

  That first meeting with Mary after almost two years certainly opened my eyes. I had thought that perhaps all women were raised to see the world as I had been at Mechelen, but the houses Mary had lived in had given her different ideas. She had certainly not picked up these thoughts at Hever from our mother; Elizabeth Boleyn would have been entirely shocked with the idea of her daughter speaking so. Mary had formed these ideas somewhere in the time which had passed between our parting and our reunion. But for now I wanted to be happy merely to be with my sister again, no matter how worried her attitude to men made me.

  Our father, too, was in the entourage, although I barely saw him between his other responsibilities. When I first came to his rooms, he was busy with papers; the King of England had plenty of work for a useful man such as our father and Thomas Boleyn was advancing well throughout the court circles. He had been appointed ambassador to the Court of France and was handling further negotiations between the slippery King Louis and Henry, King of England.

  He, like Mary, looked me over when I arrived. I felt suddenly as I had on the first morning I had met Margaret at Mechelen; that sudden fear that I would be found wanting. But when he had looked me up and down, he grunted in approval, nodding to me, and I was relieved; he was satisfied then with what I looked like and how I held myself. I dressed now in the French fashions, to fit in at court, although I still gave every dress my own twist and style. My hair was gathered under a French hood adorned with simple but beautiful pearls. My velvet dress conformed to the fashions of the French Court, but my richly embroidered sleeves, tended to by my own needlework, were longer and wider at the ends than generally seen, giving my figure an elegance that went beyond my years.

  I had started to work on this new style of dress which accentuated all my best features at Mechelen; long-hanging sleeves, which widened at the end, accentuated the slimness of my young waist and the cups of my growing breasts. My clothes were of bright colours that I could carry well, being so dark of hair and pale of skin. I could look exotic in bold colours where pale, fair beauties looked washed out. The insides of my sleeves were red as was the kirtle I wore, which could be seen through a long slit at the front of the dress. My outer gown was a deep, forest green. The confident colours contrasted well with my black hair and set my eyes to seem darker and more sparkling. Golden and silver rings were placed on some of my long fingers, and a golden chain held a little Book of Hours and a pomander at my waist. My complexion was clean and fresh, and I held myself well. I was no true beauty, unlike my sister, but I knew well by this time how to make the best of myself and seem like a natural beauty. In my darkness and my dress, I stood out even amongst the many glorious women of the Court of France. I was far more sophisticated in my appearance even than the last time he had seen me.

  I saw him look me over and take in all my physical attributes; my father was a man of business, after all, and having a daughter who could make herself seem more beautiful than she was, was a good investment to own. He seemed satisfied with me… on the outside, at least.

  So far, so good; I had passed the first test.

  Now there would come the testing of my other accomplishments. In some ways I realised that I was an instrument, a tool that my father wished to use, but this was not as much of a sadness as you might think. My family was important to me and I wished to help in our mutual advancement and greatness. This was partly why my suspicions about Mary’s intentions at court were such a worry to me. I did not wish us to be disgraced in any way.

  I looked back at my father, wondering if there had been changes in him since the last time I had seen him. His black curling hair had started to grey slightly in strands all over his head, but his hair was still quite dark in general. His face was more worn than when last I saw him, but there was still that grim fire of ambition in his eyes and energy in his movements.

  “Duchess
Margaret the Regent has spoken well of you,” he said, speaking to me in French; it was a test that I recognised immediately. I almost smiled; he would see now how far I had come since Lille.

  “The Regent Margaret was ever-gracious and good to me, father.” I replied in perfect French. My accent was unimpeachable, impeccable; I might have been a natural born French woman for how fluidly and beautifully I spoke the language now. “I was sad to leave such a gracious sovereign, but grateful to have another opportunity granted to me… by you.” I sank to the floor in a graceful curtsy, holding my elegant position with firm poise and grace and looking up at him with sparkling eyes.

  Thomas Boleyn smiled; a wide, proud smile, and he laughed shortly. It was like a bark. I rose, and smiled at my father.