Against this conclusion is the fact that a poet is as capable of glossing over the past as anyone else. The testimony of Wyatt’s grandson is not the only reason to believe that Sir Thomas was more taken with Anne than he later admitted. In 1530 Chapuys reported that the duke of Suffolk had revived stories about a courtier who had earlier been rusticated on suspicion of too great an interest in Anne, and this could very well have been the poet.
44
Admittedly there is no evidence that Wyatt was formally rusticated during Anne’s lifetime, but he did make a spur of the moment decision to join Sir John Russell on a diplomatic mission to Italy, which can be dated to early January 1527.
45
Russell, George Wyatt tells us, had already set out by boat down the Thames when, obviously calling at Greenwich for last-minute instructions, he encountered Thomas.
46
Hearing of his journey, Thomas had announced then and there, ‘I, if you please, will ask leave, get money and go with you’ - and promptly did just that. Since it was about this time that Wyatt must have realized that the king was now seriously in pursuit of Anne, he could well have been taking the chance (and Henry gave him permission) for a visit abroad to extract himself tactfully.
What of Anne’s feeling for Wyatt? Were they as cool as the poems suggest? That Anne was fond of Wyatt seems very probable. In 1533 Chapuys described the poet as one ‘whom she loves very much’, and particularly in her early years at court his attentions cannot have been unwelcome. Percy’s was the greater scalp, but even at 19 Wyatt’s enviable combination of physique and good looks, intelligence, an articulate personality, spontaneity and good humour made him very attractive. Yet there was one absolute block to the relationship going further than friendship. Separated from his wife because of her adultery, Wyatt was in no position to offer Anne anything but a place as his mistress. We can guess that Mary Boleyn might have counted ‘all well lost for love’, but as Anne’s conduct with the king was to show, the younger sister thought otherwise. Any feelings she had for Thomas certainly did not prevent a characteristically robust response to Suffolk’s scandalmongering in 1530.
47
Anne immediately asked Henry to send Wyatt away. The king obliged, but clearly with reluctance. Soon he was interceding for Wyatt and persuading Anne to allow him back into favour. Whereas in 1527 Henry may have been happy to see Wyatt out of the way, he evidently did not see him later as a skeleton in Anne’s cupboard. 1536 confirms this. Wyatt’s arrest in May shows that he could be linked with Anne; his release suggests strongly that the link was known to be innocent.
Anne’s friendship with Wyatt is further illuminated by a bizarre tale in the
Cronica del Rey Enrico.
48
This tells how, when Henry became interested in Anne, he angrily refused to hear evidence from Wyatt that she was ‘a bad woman’ and no fit wife. Instead Thomas was rusticated for two years, only to be arrested in 1536, though thanks to Cromwell’s favour and his earlier attempt to warn the king, he escaped execution. He thereupon wrote to Henry, setting out the evidence that he had not been allowed to present. He had arrived at (presumably) Hever on a night when her parents were away, and gone up to Anne Boleyn’s chamber, where she was already in bed.
49
‘Lord, Master Wyatt,’ she said, ‘What are you doing here at such a late hour?’ Thomas — one is tempted to say Sir Jasper — explained that he had come for ‘consolation’: ‘And I went up to her as she lay in bed and kissed her, and she lay still and said nothing. I touched her breasts, and she lay still, and even when I took liberties lower down she likewise said nothing.’ Nothing discouraged, Wyatt began to undress, but then a great stamping was heard in the room above. Anne got up, put on a skirt and disappeared upstairs for an hour. When she came down she refused to let Wyatt come near her, although within a week he did have intercourse with her. And Wyatt’s explanation for Anne’s curious disappearance? She obviously had a lover waiting in the room above!
Of itself, this alleged visit to Hever is a farrago of rubbish, a reworking of a well-known novella from the
Decameron.
However, setting aside the Boccaccio embroidery, the story is built on friction between Henry and Wyatt over Anne, and a rustication which parallels Chapuys’ reports. If, as is frequently the case with the
Cronica,
the source of the story is the Spanish merchant community in London, it would appear that the existence of some link between Anne and Thomas was not unknown in the City. Of course, the story could well be a retrospective attempt to explain the contradiction in Wyatt’s treatment in 1536, something which the poet himself used to joke about grimly — ‘God’s blood! was not that a pretty sending of me ambassador to the emperor, first to put me into the Tower, and then forthwith to send me hither?’
50
But why should merchants, interested in Wyatt because of his subsequent career as the English ambassador in Spain, bother with his previous behaviour unless the poet’s interest in Anne Boleyn had been common knowledge, well beyond what his verse suggests, and that Wyatt left court because of it?
51
Catholic voices had no doubt. Wyatt and Anne had an illicit sexual liaison. The earliest report is that of Nicholas Harpsfield, archdeacon of Canterbury and a former religious exile, writing in the reign of Mary. Commenting on the bull allowing Henry to marry Anne despite any unconsummated pre-contract, Harpsfield added that the king was so bewitched that he would even ‘marry her whom himself credibly understood to have lived loosely and incontinently before’.
52
The lover in question was Wyatt who, on hearing that Anne was to marry Henry, had gone to the king and said:
Sir, I am credibly informed that your grace intendeth to take to your wife the Lady Anne Boleyn, wherein I beseech your grace to be well advised what you do, for she is not meet to be coupled with your grace, her conversation [way of life] hath been so loose and base; which thing I know not so much by hearsay as by my own experience as one that have had my carnal pleasure with her.
At this, Harpsfield says, the king was ‘for a while something astonied’ - one might imagine he would be — but then he said, ‘Wyatt, thou hast done like an honest man, yet I charge thee to make no more words of this matter to any man living.’ And of course, the marriage went ahead.
Harpsfield tells us that he had this tale from ‘the right worshipful merchant Mr. Anthony Bonvise ... which thing he heard of them that were men very likely to know the truth thereof’. What he says of Bonvisi’s connections is true.
53
He was a banker from Lucca with close and friendly ties with English ministers, both traditionalists and innovators, and through Stephen Gardiner’s chaplain, he knew Wyatt himself. This might suggest that Bonvisi had the sources and also the neutrality expected of an international banker. As Harpsfield himself wrote, ‘This worthy merchant would oft talk of [More] and also of Sir Thomas Cromwell, with whom he was many years familiarly acquainted, and would report many notable and as yet commonly unknown things, and of their far [much] squaring, unlike and disagreeable natures, dispositions, sayings and doings, whereof there is now no place to talk.’
54
That’s as may be, but Bonvisi was not neutral. He had supported Thomas More in the Tower and the ex-chancellor called him ‘the apple of his eye’.
55
In September 1549 he left England for Louvain without permission, accompanied or soon followed by Harpsfield, More’s nephew, William Rastell, More’s adopted daughter, Margaret Clement, and her husband, John.
56
Indeed, the survival of More’s circle apparently owed a good deal to Bonvisi; Nicholas Sander is specific that it was Antonio who supported these catholic exiles at Louvain.
57
Therefore, not only was Bonvisi anything but disinterested, he was telling his stories among the same coterie which produced the claim that Anne Boleyn had been fathered by Henry VIII! There is also inherent improbability in the story. With Wyatt sworn to secrecy by the king, how did Bonvisi’s informants get their knowledge? The answer could be ‘after Wyatt’s involvement in Anne’s exposure in 1536’, but the accusation that she was an adulterous wife would have collapsed at any suggestion of a known premarital reputation. Furthermore, the notion that Henry would overlook Anne’s sleeping with Wyatt at the very time she was holding him at arm’s length is ludicrous.
By the time the next generation of recusants told the story, it had become modified and embellished under the influence of the Katherine Howard episode. Sander has Wyatt initially tell the council, and when Henry is informed, his reaction is to dismiss the stories and affirm his belief in Anne’s virtue.
58
Having his word doubted, says Sander, made Wyatt angry and he offered to give the king visible proof of Anne’s affection for him. The king’s response was ‘that he had no wish to see anything of the kind — Wyatt was a bold villain, not to be trusted.’
59
Refuting Sander took many lines of George Wyatt’s heavy prose, and all to labour the obvious implausibilities and the improbability of a character such as Henry responding to Wyatt’s warning in the way suggested.
60
George was, however, clearly unaware of an alternative Catholic eyewitness tradition which directly discredits all these recusant stories of misbehaviour between Wyatt and Anne. It is found in the writings of George Cavendish, not that he was other than hostile to Anne.
The Life and Death of Cardinal Wolsey
makes her pride very clear; his
Metrical Visions
accept entirely the story of her adultery:
My epitaph shall be: - ‘The vicious queen
Lieth here, of late that justly lost her head,
Because that she did spot the king’s bed.’
61
Yet despite his prejudices, Cavendish goes out of his way to make the point that Anne was still a virgin when she married:
The noblest prince that reigned on the ground
I had to my husband, he took me to his wife;
At home with my father a maiden he me found,
And for my sake, of princely prerogative,
To an earl he advanced my father in his life,
And preferred all them that were of my blood;
The most willingest prince to do them all good.
62
It is a conclusion which commands respect. After all, it is difficult to traduce Anne Boleyn both for promiscuity before and promiscuity after marriage; if she had always been as lecherous as some conservatives wanted to believe, Henry was more stupid than wronged.
6
A ROYAL SUITOR
A
N abortive arranged marriage with Butler, a failed romance with Henry Percy and a flirtation with Thomas Wyatt hardly made the early 1520s a success for Anne. She was certainly interested in an ‘advantageous marriage’, but had she been too choosy, or had other suitors, despite her evident fascination, been put off by her independence?
1
However, to a man interested in a temporary liaison, independence might be an attraction, and the person who had no doubt that he could make Anne his mistress was the king. Having by or before 1526 discarded Mary Carey, Henry turned his interest on the younger sister.
Anne’s former attendant, Anne Zouche (nee Gainsford), told George Wyatt how this began, or how she remembered it beginning:
[Thomas Wyatt] entertaining talk with [Anne Boleyn] as she was earnest at work, in sporting wise caught from her a certain small jewel hanging by a lace out of her pocket, or otherwise loose, which he thrust into his bosom, neither with any earnest request could she obtain it of him again. He kept it, therefore, and wore it after about his neck, under his cassock, promising himself either to have it with her favour or as an occasion to have talk with her, wherein he had singular delight, and she after seemed not to make much reckoning of it, either the thing not being much worth, or not worth much striving for.
Thus far the story is typical of courtly dalliance.
3
The theft of the jewel and its subsequent exploitation is exactly parallel to Charles Brandon’s theft of Margaret of Austria’s ring, and Anne’s reaction is very much that of Margaret, refusing to take such a male display routine with any seriousness.
Thomas Wyatt’s attentions, so the story goes on, had the effect of whetting the king’s interest. Henry first tested Anne’s ‘regard of her honour’ by ‘those things his kingly majesty and means could bring to the battery’, and then set out ‘to win her by treaty of marriage’,
and in this talk took from her a ring, and that wore upon his little finger; and yet all this with such secrecy was carried, and on her part so wisely, as none or very few esteemed this other than an ordinary course of dalliance.
A few days after this, the king made an occasion to warn Wyatt off. Playing bowls with Thomas and some other courtiers, Henry claimed that his wood held shot when it clearly did not; pointing with his little finger with the ring on it, ‘he said, “Wyatt, I tell thee it is mine”, smiling upon him withal.’ The point was taken, but Wyatt, ‘pausing a little, and finding the king bent to pleasure’, decided on a bold response. He produced Anne’s jewel and proceeded to use the ribbon to measure the distances, remarking, ‘If it may like your majesty to give me leave to measure it, I hope it will be mine.’ The king’s good humour vanished — ‘It may be so, but then am I deceived’ - and he stalked off to see Anne. She, discovering what was wrong, explained the business of the jewel to Henry, and sunlight was restored.