Read The Life and Death of Anne Boleyn Online

Authors: Eric Ives

The Life and Death of Anne Boleyn (7 page)

The probability that Anne Boleyn had been useful at the Lille and Tournai meetings is reinforced by what happened in the summer of the following year. On 14 August, Sir Thomas Boleyn wrote to the Archduchess Margaret from the court at Greenwich to ask her to release Anne and to return her in the care of the escort he had sent. The reason for this sudden withdrawal, which to judge from his letter caused Sir Thomas acute embarrassment — as well it might — was a sudden turnabout by Henry, who had abandoned the marriage between his 18-year-old sister Mary and the Archduke Charles, which had been reconfirmed only the previous autumn at Lille. Instead she was to marry Louis XII of France, a very decrepit 52. The affianced bride would need attendants who could speak French, and had not Sir Thomas a daughter who did? She must be sent for. And, as Sir Thomas wrote to his ‘most redoubted lady’, ‘to this request I could not, nor did I know how to refuse.’
26
In August 1514, therefore, Anne was on the list for France, but what happened then is not clear. Her sister Mary was also to go, and a list in the French archives shows that Mary Boleyn was one of the ladies in the household of the new queen of France, but it makes no mention of Anne.
27
The English sources concur. Mary Tudor left for France with a large escort and, after an appalling Channel crossing, arrived at Abbeville for the wedding, which took place on 9 October.
28
The expectation was that the main party would then return to England, leaving a selected group to remain with Mary Tudor. This included one, and only one, Mistress Boleyn. In the event Louis XII refused to put up with the interference of some of the older women and sent them packing the day after the wedding, but among those retained was yet again a single ‘Madmoyselle Boleyne’.
29
The new queen stigmatized the survivors as ‘such as never had experience nor knowledge how to advertise or give me counsel in any time of need’, but these inexperienced young attendants evidently did not include Anne.
30
Where then was Anne? Did she go to France at all in 1514? Some scholars have certainly suggested that she went to France some years later, at a date so far unknown. The objection to this is the unambiguous statement in 1536 by Lancelot de Carles, the French diplomat who reported her execution: ‘My lord, I am well aware that you know and have known for a long time that Anne Boullant first came from this country when Mary [Tudor] left to go to join the king [Louis XII] in France to bring about the alliance of the two sovereigns.’
31
It could, of course, be argued that after such a time the two Boleyn sisters were being confused, but the French seem to have been well aware of their separate identities.
32
If, then, both sisters were in Mary Tudor’s entourage, why was Anne not named? One hypothesis is that she was one of her sister’s attendants and so does not figure on the establishment lists; perhaps she was too young to count. This seems unlikely in the light of the specific request to Sir Thomas to bring Anne back from Flanders to join Mary Tudor’s party. On the other hand, if Anne was recruited as an interpreter, it would be common Tudor practice to pay and list such a person, or at least to list them, even if the pay was omitted. It is hard to resist the conclusion that Anne did not cross to France with the king’s sister in the autumn of 1514. Again, where was she? The likely answer would seem to be ‘somewhere in the Low Countries’. From the date of Sir Thomas’s letter to the departure of the wedding party from England was exactly seven weeks, to the wedding a further seven days.
33
It would have been possible for Anne to make it, provided there was not a hitch. One possible delay was that Margaret of Austria left Mechelen on 21 August to visit the islands of Zeeland, and the message from London dated 14 August may not have arrived in time to detach Anne from that expedition, or to allow her to say her goodbyes.
34
Another possible source of delay was that Margaret was personally affronted by the jilting of her nephew Charles and politically endangered by the
rapprochement
between England and her sworn enemy, France. She actually attempted to obstruct Henry’s volte-face and might well have taken her time before giving permission for Anne to leave to assist in a marriage she so detested.
35
Whatever the reason, we must imagine Anne Boleyn catching up with Mary Tudor in Paris, where she was crowned on 5 November, and after the establishment lists which now survive had been drawn up; no doubt Anne would have appeared in later lists, but there were none. Louis lasted for eighty-two days with his young bride, and on 1 January 1515 Mary was a widow.
The situation of Mary and her attendants in a Paris where she was no longer queen was not enviable . The new king, Francis I, probably did not force his attentions on the young widow, as A. F. Pollard believed, but he was determined to exploit his temporary prize, at least to prevent her marrying a prince hostile to himself.
36
Henry sent over Charles Brandon to negotiate relations with the new monarch and to arrange Mary’s return, with as much of her dower and jewellery as was possible. Suffolk, already in love with the beautiful
reine blanche,
as the French called a queen in mourning, had neither the stamina to resist Mary’s Tudor determination nor the wit to see that Francis was playing him like a fish. Before he knew what was happening, he woke up in Mary’s bed, secretly married to his sovereign’s sister. Several abject weeks of grovelling and a series of humiliating bribes to Henry VIII were necessary before Wolsey could secure the king’s forgiveness, and permission for the pair to return to England. The match with Brandon was resented by his rivals for Henry’s favour, but it was also a flagrant instance of a princess marrying beneath her. Although we have no details, there was certainly talk among Mary’s attendants at Brandon’s undue familiarity, and one might guess that somewhere here is the root of the dislike Mary Tudor had in later life for Anne Boleyn; the pert contempt of a 14-year-old product of the Habsburg nursery, well aware of Brandon’s earlier and foolish behaviour with Margaret of Austria, might be hard to forgive and forget.
37
Whatever the truth of this supposition, Anne Boleyn did not come back to England with Suffolk and Mary in April 1515, although her sister probably did. Neither, however, did Anne return to Mechelen and the Archduchess Margaret, but she entered instead the household of Francis I’s wife, Queen Claude. Precisely how this was arranged is a mystery. Claude herself was only 15 years old and had been married to Francis for less than a year, and there are no known links between the Boleyns and either. Claude, however, was the daughter of Louis XII, and it could be that she had taken a particular liking to Anne when she joined the entourage of her young stepmother, Mary Tudor. If so, it might be natural, when Mary’s brief time as queen of France came to an end, for her successor Claude to offer Anne a place in her household. Something of the kind was certainly the understanding of Lancelot de Carles, writing in 1536: ‘After Mary had returned to this country, Anne was kept back by Claude, who later became queen.’
38
Once again the common-sense explanation is Anne’s command of the language. Claude, whose appearance bordered on deformity, had a warm and gentle nature but could only have talked to her stepmother and to the magnificent English visitors she had to entertain at the time of the coronation by means of some interpreter: Anne perhaps?
Anne Boleyn was to stay with Claude for nearly seven years, a period for which we have no direct evidence. No doubt she visited her father when he became ambassador to the French court, and tradition has it that she had some sort of base at Briare on the Loire above Orléans.
39
This is by no means impossible, for the town was well placed in relation to the movements of the court of Queen Claude, where Anne’s duties kept her much of the time. Although only of an age with Anne, Claude’s short life (she was to die in 1524) was a succession of almost annual pregnancies spent very largely in the Upper Loire at Amboise and at Blois which, although it was the queen’s own palace, was the site of the first major building scheme of her husband, Francis I.
40
Waiting on the queen of France could not have been markedly different from waiting on the regent of the Low Countries, and it is clear that Anne continued to soak in the sophisticated atmosphere around her. De Carles particularly emphasized her musical ability — ‘she knew perfectly how to sing and dance ... to play the lute and other instruments’ — and her skill was such as to be remembered even in hostile reminiscences.
41
Nicholas Sander, the Elizabethan recusant exile, said that Anne could play ‘on the lute and was a good dancer’, while another and possibly earlier Roman Catholic source referred to her ‘plausible qualities, for such as one to delight in, for she could play upon instruments, dance &c.’
42
Some confirmation, if not of her skill in performance, at least of her developing musical taste in France, is to be found in the Royal College of Music manuscript mentioned earlier.
43
It was, of course, at Cloux, just outside Amboise, that Leonardo da Vinci came to settle in 1516 as a pensioner of the French king.
44
That Anne saw him seems probable; whether it meant anything to her we cannot know. One area of painting where we can show a response on Anne’s part is book illumination. Claude of France was a noteworthy patroness of the miniature, a taste inherited from her mother, Anne of Brittany, who undoubtedly commissioned for her daughter the primer now in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.
45
The Kraus Collection in New York includes two later works made for Claude, a book of prayers which was in the queen’s hands before Anne Boleyn arrived in France (it probably dates from 1511-14) and a Book of Hours which Anne may well have seen arrive from the studio in 1517.
46
What was unusual about the latter (and so effective that Claude had five illuminations of a similar style inserted in the book of prayers) was the introduction of borders in Renaissance style, a fashion which had entered France ten years earlier.
47
Two types of border are known, pilasters or columns and candelabra (though there are combinations of the two), and the effect is quite different from the
trompe-l’oeil
decoration that Anne had experienced at Mechelen. When Anne, a queen herself, had her own illuminated treasures, these would include books decorated in the new fashion, with Renaissance-style borders.
48
Experience at the court of Queen Claude thus built on the brief time that Anne Boleyn had spent with Margaret of Austria, but there was one obvious difference: life with Claude was much less public. Commentators who have been tempted to picture Anne in regular contact with the blatant sexuality of Francis I’s household and his ‘privy band of ladies’ exaggerate. Political power, and all the concomitants of decision-making, rivalry and faction, travelled with the king who, although not an unaffectionate or absentee husband, certainly did not believe in companionate marriage.
49
One possibility is that Anne accompanied Claude and Louise of Savoy on their ceremonial journey in October 1515 to welcome back Francis I after his victory at Marignano.
50
This took them to Lyons with a pilgrimage detour to the supposed tomb of Mary Magdalene at Saint-Maximinla-Sainte-Baume, and then to Marseilles, where the king and queen each made a ceremonial entry to the city. Another event which Anne probably took part in was the queen’s personal triumph in May 1516, when she was crowned at St Denis and then made her state entry into Paris, a magnificent affair which the English government saw fit to ignore.
51
It seems very likely, too, that Anne was in attendance when Claude made her solemn entry into Cognac in 1520.
52
Claude and her ladies also made appearances on two great occasions which involved the English, when Anne would certainly have been in demand as an interpreter. The first began on 22 December 1518, when a state banquet was given at the Bastille in honour of an English mission, which had come to negotiate for a marriage between Henry VIII’s daughter Mary and the dauphin, born to Claude and Francis the previous February.
53
The courtyard of the fortress was covered with an awning of waxed blue canvas painted with the heavenly bodies, the floor was carpeted with white and orange cloth, and the whole was lit from sconces and chandeliers everywhere, reflecting on the mass of gold and silver plate on tables and cupboards. The English and French delegations were seated alternately with the ladies of the court who, after some hours of dancing later in the evening, served supper at midnight, dressed in the latest Italian costumes, all under the eyes of the queen and her mother-in-law, Louise of Savoy. No sooner had the guests gone than the setting was reconstructed to allow a tournament to take place, apparently a mêlée on foot, twenty-four a side with Francis leading one of the teams. That over, the set was reconstructed yet again for another evening of dancing and feasting.
The second great occasion was the Field of Cloth of Gold, the famous meeting between Henry VIII and Francis I outside Calais from 7 to 23 June 1520. This was something of a family affair for the Boleyns, with both Sir Thomas and Lady Elizabeth there, possibly the newly wedded Mary Carey and, one must assume, brother George among his father’s allocation of eleven attendants (or one of the three gentlemen allowed his mother).
54
Called in the name of peace and friendship, the Field of Cloth of Gold was an occasion for international one-upmanship on a vast scale, no less deadly in intent for being (usually) polite. Richard Wingfield, who had taken over from Thomas Boleyn as ambassador to France four months previously, had written to Henry soon after his arrival to warn that the French royal ladies were as intent on gaining the day as their menfolk:
Your Grace shall also understand that the Queen here, with the King’s mother [Louise of Savoy], make all the search possible to bring at the assembly the fairest ladies and demoiselles that may be found. The daughters of Navarre be sent for; the Duke of Lorraine’s daughters or sisters in like manner. I hope at the least, Sir, 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.
55
 

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