by David Loades
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.
However, it would have been her intention to secure an advantageous marriage, and in that so far she had been conspicuously unsuccessful. James Butler was not to her taste, and Henry Percy, who clearly was, was forbidden by forces which were too powerful for even the most accomplished seductress to master. A prolonged courtly love affair with Thomas Wyatt, if it actually occurred, would have been no substitute for a marriage bed, and other suitors do not seem to have been queuing at her door. This may have been because of the Butler negotiation, and the King’s known interest in it, or it may have been down to Anne herself. Accomplished as she was in the courtly arts, she was also highly intelligent, and possessed a mind of her own, not qualities which would have endeared her to the average early Tudor nobleman. A wife was supposed to be docile, and above all faithful, neither of which was to be expected of this free-spirited and flirtatious damsel.[157] There was one man, however, who would not be put off by this combination of attributes, and that was the King. At what point Henry began to manifest an interest in her, and what the level of that interest was, has been the subject of much speculation.[158] The chances are that it began as a conventional courtly love exercise. Henry had played these games with numerous ladies in the past, and each time it had set tongues around the court wagging and kept the diplomatic gossips busy. There was usually nothing in these tales, except that the King was amusing himself in his customary fashion, and even Catherine did not take them seriously. However, at some time, probably in the summer of 1525, Henry decided that Anne was different. It may well have been that her resp
onses were wittier than usual, and the sidelong glances more convincing. At any rate he was sufficiently attracted to end his relationship with her sister, and set out on the uncharted waters of soliciting a girl who was his intellectual equal. It may well have been an exhilarating experience.
Calendaring the development of that experience is, however, a difficult matter, because it is necessary to work backwards from the known events of 1527. In April of that year the King began a secret consultative process aimed at securing the annulment of his eighteen-year-old marriage to Catherine, and in May began a collusive suit in Wolsey’s Legatine court to obtain such a verdict, on the basis of his conviction that by wedding his brother Arthur’s widow he had offended against the law of God set out in the Book of Leviticus.[159] Wolsey was understandably anxious to keep these proceedings secret, especially from Catherine. The Queen was the aunt of the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V, and if she got wind of what was intended would undoubtedly invoke his aid to get Wolsey’s proceedings quashed in Rome. Henry, however, was in a highly emotional state, and in June confronted his wife with the news that they had never been truly married, thus anticipating the verdict, and sending her messengers scurrying off to Valladolid to request that intervention which Wolsey had dreaded.[160] In spite of these adverse developments, and the fact that the collusive case had been dropped, in August Henry sent to the Pope to request permission to marry a woman related to him in the first degree of affinity, once his present marriage was dissolved. This was the degree of affinity which existed between Henry and Anne as a result of his liaison with her sister, and indicates that he had proposed marriage to her by that time, and that she had accepted him. As a way ahead it was useless because of its proviso, but at least it indicates the state which the couple’s relationship had reached by that time. It has been reasonably deduced that Henry had first proposed at Easter that Anne become his mistress on some recognised and stable basis, and that she had turned him down.[161] By the summer she would have known of the breakdown of the King’s relationship with Catherine, and intimated to him that she would be prepared to become his second queen. He had accepted her on those terms, and that explains his approach to Rome. Neither of them at that time appears to have expected a long wait.
However, the way in which they had got to that point is much more problematical. Henry seems to have given up sexual relations with his wife at some time in 1524, presumably on the grounds that there was no point now that she was passed the menopause and he had a satisfactory partner in Mary Boleyn. In the summer of 1525 he passed Mary over to her husband, and thereafter had no partner that anyone knows about, which perhaps explains his developing ardour for Anne. Between then and the spring of 1527 the interpretation of that ardour depends upon a sequence of undated letters, because even the usually sharp eyed Imperial ambassadors did not notice anything out of the ordinary until the summer of 1527, and the Venetians did not associate him with Anne until the spring of 1528.[162] The first three of these letters show the King trying to turn a conventional courtly love attachment into something more meaningful. The first accompanied the gift of a buck, the fruit of a recent hunting expedition, and chides his mistress with not having replied to his earlier epistles, or kept her promise to write. It is signed ‘written with the hand of your servant ... HR’ and has been tentatively dated to the autumn of 1526.[163] Some time later, and after an exchange of letters now lost, he wrote again, complaining that he had been ‘now above one whole year struck with the dart of love’, and asking that she ‘certify me of your whole mind concerning the love between us two’. He promised to ‘take you for my only mistress … to serve only you’. This could have been a proposition in the crude sense, or it could have been another manoeuvre in the complicated game. Anne apparently took it in the latter way, and responded with coy professions of chastity.[164] If she was playing hard to get, she was doing it convincingly, and the next sequence of letters begins with one of apology from the King for having offended her. She had apparently absented herself from the court, and this had caused Henry some soul searching. Faced with the unusual situation of having to court a woman rather than having her provided by diplomatic means or droit de seigneur, he had rushed her defences in an unacceptable manner. Realisation of this fact, and of his need for her, then forced the King to reconsider his position. At some point during the summer of 1527 he offered her marriage, and that changed her attitude entirely. Hitherto, we may imagine, she had been placed in a very difficult situation, overawed in a sense by the size of the fish which she had (probably inadvertently) hooked. He could, as her sovereign, simply have commanded her to his bed, but he had not done so, playing instead the courtly gallant, and taking her coy professions of reluctance seriously.[165]
She responded, not by letter or by word of mouth, but by sending him a token loaded with meaning in the manner loved by Tudor courtiers. It was a small model ship with a woman on board, and a pendant diamond. The message would have been clear to the recipient, because the ship had for centuries been the symbol of protection, a protection which she, as the occupant, was now giving over to her Lord and Master. In other words, Anne was accepting his offer.[166] Henry was delighted, and not a little relieved by the
… good intent and too humble submission vouchsafed by this your kindness, considering well that the occasion to merit it would not a little perplex me, if it were not aided therein by your great benevolence and goodwill …
He went on to reassure her that his heart belonged to her alone, and that he was ‘greatly desirous that so my body could be as well, as God can bring to pass if it pleaseth him …’[167] This exchange can probably be dated to July 1527, just a few weeks before the King launched his appeal to Rome for permission to remarry. Henry was intending to take his sexual abstinence seriously on the assumption that it would not be of long duration. Anne was obviously away from the court at the time of this last letter, because he goes on to urge her to persuade her father to let her return earlier than had hitherto been planned, because he was missing her company. Meanwhile, the Pope had been incarcerated in the Castel de San Angelo by a mutinous Imperial army which had sacked the city of Rome in March, and this had created the opportunity for Wolsey to set up an interim government for the Church while Clement was out of action. If that could be brought about, the Pope’s opposition to Henry’s annulment plea could be circumvented, and Wolsey set off for France on 22 July with the intention of calling a congregation of the ‘free’ cardinals – those not with the Pope in San Angelo – in order to bring this about.[168] He knew well enough about the King’s intention to seek a dissolution of his marriage, and that was clearly high on his agenda, but he appears not to have known about Anne Boleyn’s position. He knew of her existence, of course, and of Henry’s affection for her, but he did not know of the King’s commitment, in spite of keeping eyes and ears about the court. This suggests that Anne’s trinket arrived at about that time, or a little after, because part of his purpose in going to France was to sound out the possibility of a French bride for Henry. This would have cemented the Anglo-French amity which was the current foreign policy, and made any agreement with the Emperor more difficult to achieve. Such a prospect would also ensure French diplomatic backing for his plans with regard to the Church, because only by out-flanking both the Pope and the Emperor could Henry be free to marry again.[169] The timing is tight, given that Catherine’s message about her plight could only have reached Charles towards the end of June, but a lot was happening in the crowded summer of 1527.
If this timetable of events is accurate it means that Henry began his courtly pursuit of Anne at sometime early in 1526, possibly in February. He appeared at the Shrovetide jousts in that year bearing the device of a heart in flames and the motto ‘Declare I dare not’, which would have been just the sort of gesture expected of a courtly gallant.[170] It would also be consistent with his statement in February 1527 that he had been in the ‘toils of love’ for upwards of twelve months. It is not very satis
factory trying to piece an emotional relationship together in this fashion, but it is the best that the evidence permits. It is also a one-sided story because Anne’s reactions can only be reconstructed from the King’s responses. Was she as committed as he was? At what point did it become clear to her that his intentions were more serious than those of a mere gallant? Was she holding out on him in the spring and summer of 1527 in anticipation of getting a better offer than that of maitresse en titre? The long frustration which followed is also capable of more than one interpretation. Now that marriage was a commitment on both sides, did she go on resisting pressure to share his bed, or did he not press her very hard? Even if they begot a bastard who was subsequently legitimated by their marriage, that would not necessarily solve the succession problem because the Beauforts, begotten in similar circumstances by John of Gaunt in the later fourteenth century, had subsequently been barred from the Crown in a precedent which would have been well enough remembered.[171] It would be better to wait until they were properly married, then there could be no question of the legitimacy of their children. Perhaps it is also worth remembering that Anne had pledged her virginity to her future husband, and was more serious in that intention than she is usually given credit for. Because of the circumstances of her fall a decade later, Anne’s virginity was the subject of much ribald speculation among her enemies, but there is no reason not to take it seriously. In any case, Henry already had a bastard son, and although he had made a great thing of ennobling the child in the summer of 1525, there is no real evidence that he seriously intended to include him in the succession.[172]
