As with most strongly physical relationships, theirs blew hot and cold. Chapuys alternately rejoiced that ‘the concubine’ appeared to be losing favour, and lamented that Henry’s affection was as strong as ever. They quarrelled, danced, hunted and copulated with all the enthusiasm of a couple in love. But she reacted very badly when he was rumoured to be pursuing another damsel at the court, and that quarrel did not go away quite so easily. Nevertheless, she was pregnant again at Christmas 1535, and expectations were rising for the third time. Then, in January 1536, Catherine of Aragon died at Kimbolton. The Earl of Wiltshire was heard to mutter that it was pity that Mary had not gone the same way, but in the politics of marriage it was Catherine who mattered, and the landscape would never be quite the same again. Anne’s shield had been removed.
GEORGE & JANE – THE GRIMSTON YEARS
As with his sisters, there is controversy over George’s date of birth, but the prevailing view is that he was born about 1504, and was thus the youngest of the three siblings. Nothing is known for certain about his education, except that it appears to have been in the best humanist tradition, and may have taken him to Oxford as an adolescent.
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He appears at court for the first time when he took part in the christmas revels in 1514–15, an introduction which he certainly owed to his parents, both of whom were active courtiers. By 1516 he was a page in the King’s chamber, and in April 1522 received along with his father a grant in survivorship of various minor offices in Kent, formerly in the possession of the Duke of Buckingham.
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If he did put in any time in Oxford, it would have been between the years 1518 and 1522, but he certainly never graduated. That would have been normal for a young man of his status, but the lack of any subsequent reference to such a time makes it highly uncertain. In July 1524, probably when he achieved his majority, he was granted the manor of Grimston in Norfolk, where he may have taken up residence when his duties at court permitted. By 1525 he was a member of the Privy Chamber, a position which he lost when Wolsey re-shuffled the personnel in 1526. This was not due to any loss of favour on George’s part, because he was shortly after installed as an Esquire of the Body, and in September 1528 received a modest annuity of 50 marks (£33 6s 8d), presumably over and above his regular fee.
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As was appropriate for the brother of the King’s leading lady, he was created Keeper of the Palace of Beaulieu (al. Newhall) in Essex with all the various privileges attached to that office, and in July 1529 he was appointed to the lucrative and not very onerous post of Keeper of St Mary’s hospital in London – better known as Bedlam. At some point during September 1529 he was knighted, not for any military service which he had performed, but simply in recognition of his status as the son of Viscount Rochford. This was about the time of Wolsey’s fall from grace, but not being a member of the council, George, unlike his father, was not involved in those events as far as we know.
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George was modest about his linguistic accomplishments. In July 1530 he confided to William Bennet that he was reluctant to write directly to either Geronimo de’ Ghinucci or Gregory Casales because neither his Latin nor his Italian was up to it.
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Like the rest of his family, however, he had excellent French, and that may have prompted Henry to send him on his first diplomatic mission to Francis I, almost before the honour of knighthood had settled upon him. On 18 September Du Bellay wrote to Anne de Montmorency that the Grand Esquire (George), accompanied by the Dean of the Chapel (John Stokesley) were shortly to depart, as he thought to the Emperor. He was mistaken, and on 8 October the King himself wrote to Montmorency accrediting Sir George Boleyn and Dr Stokesley to the court of France in place of Sir Francis Bryan who was recalled. They were instructed to confer about the Duke of Albany’s activities in Scotland, to which Henry took exception, and about the possibility of convening a General Council of the Church, to which the King was presumably thinking of referring his matrimonial problem.
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The documentation of their mission is scanty, and they were back in England shortly after Christmas. Henry, however, seems to have been well pleased with the efforts of this tyro diplomat and early in 1530 despatched him again, this time to attend the meeting between the Pope and the Emperor, and to offer congratulation to the latter on his coronation. In addition he was briefed to try, once again, to secure a favourable verdict from the Pope in his Great Matter, and in this, once again, he was completely unsuccessful. It may, indeed have been an error of taste to send the brother of so interested a party as Anne Boleyn upon such a mission, but that was not made apparent. Instead the Emperor and the Pope were upon the best of terms, and regarded the English intrusion as nuisance.
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By the end of March, George was back in England. After the creation of his father as Earl of Wiltshire in December 1529, he was styled by the honorific title of Viscount Rochford, and, like his father, benefited from the self interested generosity of Cardinal Wolsey. In the same month, while he was in France, he received an annuity of £200 out of the revenues of the bishopric of Winchester, and 200 marks (£133 6s 8d) from those of the Abbey of St Albans. Since such temporalities were, or were about to be, in the hands of the King following Wolsey’s surrender, it is uncertain how real these grants were, but the King apparently chose to honour them.
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On 13 July 1530 he signed (as a baron) that letter from the nobility of England to Clement VII, petitioning him to find in favour of the King. The security of the English succession, they pointed out, depended upon a favourable verdict, and if it were not accorded, ‘other means’ might be found necessary. It had no effect.
Meanwhile, in 1526, he had married. His bride was the eminently suitable Jane Parker, the daughter of Henry Parker, 10th baron Mountjoy. She was about the same age as himself, and had been introduced at court at about the same time, surfacing in 1522 when she played the part of
Constancy
in the siege of the Chateau Verte. It was probably an arranged marriage, because the King gave them £20 a year as a marriage gift, and there are no great signs of affection between them. They had no children. Indeed George may well have taken himself to other beds, because that George Boleyn who matriculated as a sizar at Trinity Hall, Cambridge in November 1544, and was therefore born in about 1529, is supposed to have been his son.
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The name of his mother is not known, and the speculation that it might have been Jane in a prenuptial fling is unsubstantiated and unlikely. He took a series of degrees, culminating in a D.Th. in 1576, in which year he was appointed Dean of Lichfield. The only signs that he may have been considered (in a sense) royal kindred came with his appointment to a prebend in York Minster on 29 September 1559, and to another at Canterbury in plurality in December 1566. If he was George’s bastard, he outlived his royal kinswoman, dying in London in 1609.
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Jane was inevitably expected to attend upon the dominant Boleyn lady, who was Anne, and was in her entourage when she accompanied Henry to his rendezvous with Francis I in October 1532. She also attended her coronation on 1 June 1533, and her lying-in in September. She was probably present when Anne was created Marquis of Pembroke in September 1532, but the records are silent in that respect. However, she appears thereafter to have fallen out with her husband’s family, being banished from the court in December 1534, and spending some days in the Tower in 1535 as a result of taking part in a female demonstration against the Queen.
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Life at Grimston must have become distinctly uncomfortable, as Jane became increasingly suspicious of George’s relations with other women, including his sister Anne. By 1536 she was far from being either loyal or supportive.
It may also have been that a part of the shadow which had fallen between them was caused by religion. There is no sign that Jane was anything other than strictly orthodox in her faith, and she had no patronage of any significance to indicate otherwise, while George was clearly in the evangelical camp.
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John Foxe later listed Lord Rochford along with Cromwell and Anne herself as favourers of the Gospel in these years.
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Chapuys thought him a perfect Lutheran, and disliked talking to him because of his propensity to start religious arguments. He appears to have been personally responsible for the translation into English of Le Fevre’s
Epistres et Evangiles
, the original edition of which had been published at Alencon in 1532, and also of
L’Ecclesiaste
, published in 1531. Both these manuscripts now survive in the British Library, and both are dedicated to Anne. However, they cannot have been for her exclusive use, because her French was every bit as good as his, and it is natural to suppose that they were intended as a contribution to that evangelical propaganda campaign which did not eventually come about because of the King’s hostility.
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They probably circulated among the Queen’s ladies, and may well have been partly responsible for the hostility which Jane Rochford was showing by 1535. The translation was undertaken at Anne’s request, and the dedication indicates the degree of closeness which existed between them:
To the right honourable lady, the Lady Marquis of Pembroke, her most loving and friendly brother sends greetings.
Our friendly dealings, with so divers and sundry benefits, besides the perpetual bond of blood, have so often bound me, Madam, inwardly to love you, daily to praise you, and continually to serve you, that in every of them I must perforce become your debtor for want of power … considering that by your commandment I have adventured to do this, without the which it would not have been in me to have performed it … I shall be ready to obey, praying him on whom this book treats to grant you many good years …
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George was certainly one of these courtiers who was committed to the idea of printing the bible in English, and may well have been responsible for keeping Anne in touch with the French reformers through his frequent diplomatic sorties across the Channel. Ironically, the most unequivocal expression of that commitment came in the scaffold speech which he made in May 1536, when, with his life on the line, there is no reason to doubt the truth of what he said:
Truly so that the word should be among the people of the realm I took upon myself great labour to urge the king to permit the printing of the scriptures to go unimpeded among the commons of the realm in their own language …
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This enthusiasm helped to set him at odds with his own father, but it did not make him a Lutheran, or a heretic of any kind. He did indeed advocate an invitation to Philip Melanchthon in 1535 ‘considering the conformity of his doctrines here’, but that was in association with the Duke of Norfolk, and clearly reflects a misunderstanding of Philip’s theology.
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As the King was well aware, Archbishop Arundel’s early fifteenth-century prohibition of translations referred only to unauthorised copy, and for that the Royal Supremacy offered the perfect answer. Let the King authorise it himself! George, like Anne, was an active evangelical, but he never transcended the boundaries which the King laid down for his subjects, and was never accused of heresy. In 1531 he was deputed to argue the King’s case in convocation, and that indicates a high degree of trust. His death, like that of his sister, was a victory for conservative forces within the court, but it was not a victory over the King.
That Jane was to some extent involved in the charges against her husband in May 1536 seems reasonably well established. The lost journal of Anthony Anthony, which was used by Gilbert Burnet in the late seventeenth century was explicit that ‘the wife of Lord Rochford was a particular instrument in the death of Queen Anne’, apparently by carrying stories about Anne’s infidelities to the King. These stories related to her brother as well as to Mark Smeaton and others, and Burnet speculated that they may well have been provoked by jealousy of ‘a familiarity between the Queen and her brother beyond what so near a relationship would justify’.
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These stories must relate back to 1534, because that was when Jane’s intimate association with Anne came to an end, but they could well have been remembered against him, or brought up afresh at the time of his trial. That she actually gave evidence at his trial is unlikely because the close relationship between them would have precluded that, but in a case that was largely circumstantial, such stories may well have carried considerable weight, especially if skilfully deployed, as they would have been by Cromwell. Jane in any case seems to have felt that Cromwell owed her a favour because before the month was out, she was writing to him, asking that the King should grant her the moveable property of her late husband, which was in his hands by virtue of George’s attainder. Her only income, she alleged, was an annuity of 100 marks (£66 13s 4d) which had been settled on her by the Earl of Wiltshire for the term of his life.
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That this had not been cancelled probably indicates that she was less estranged from Thomas than she was from George, and indicates a religious element in their relationship.