Six Wives (40 page)

    George is supposed to have been 'educated among the Oxonians', though there is no trace of him in university or college records. But either at Oxford or elsewhere he received an excellent education. Having inherited the family talent in languages, he shone in Latin and French. He was also an accomplished poet and translator, and developed a taste for abstruse speculation in religion and political theory. All this marked him out from the run-of-the-mill English gentleman of the day, who was more at home with the sword than the pen. But equally it provided a link with his future brother-in-law Henry VIII, who likewise prided himself on his intellectual sophistication.
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    Curiously, Anne's education is much better documented than her brother's. Her 'Oxford' was a succession of French-speaking continental royal households which, in everything but Latin, gave her a training at least as good as George's.

    Her first placement was in the household of the Archduchess Margaret. Margaret, the daughter of the Emperor Maximilian, had become the favourite aunt of the much-intermarried royal families of Europe. In her youth she had been married three times in quick succession: to Charles VIII of France, who repudiated her; to Catherine of Aragon's brother Juan, who died prematurely; and to the Duke of Savoy, who likewise died young. Widowed for the third time at the age of twenty-four she returned to her native Netherlands, where two years later she became Regent for the future Charles V, who was her nephew through his father, Philip the Fair, and Catherine of Aragon's nephew through his mother, Juaña the Mad. She also supervised the education of Charles and his sisters Eleanor, Elizabeth and Mary.
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    It was a task for which Margaret was well suited, both emotionally and intellectually. Despite her three marriages, she had no children of her own to distract her and she was multi-lingual, a competent poet in both Latin and French, an important patron of Flemish painting and the builder of an architecturally progressive palace at Mechelen. Much of the palace still stands, and, with its brightly patterned brick and long galleries supported on stone columns and arches in the classical style, it anticipates the buildings Henry and Anne were to throw up together at York Place. Finally, the Archduchess was an able politician and a formidable character, whose formal style of address was (not without reason)
Très Redoutée Dame
('Most Dread Lady').

    The result was that her household became an international finishing school, where the élite of three or four countries vied to put their sons and daughters. There, their parents could be confident, their offspring would not only be well educated and trained but also brought up alongside Charles, who was the future ruler of half of Europe, and his sisters, who were the Queens-to-be of Portugal, Denmark and Hungary. For, in the sixteenth century as in the twenty-first, who you knew was at least as important as what you knew.

    Thomas Boleyn encountered Margaret's household for himself when he was sent as English ambassador to the Netherlands in 1512–13. He made a good impression and was impressed himself in turn. When he had audience with the Archduchess, he found her surrounded by ladies-in-waiting who included natives of France, Spain and England, as well as the Netherlands. Boleyn, ever with an eye for the main chance, decided that his clever second daughter should join their number.

    Soon after his return to England in the spring of 1513, Boleyn sent Anne to Margaret with an escort and a letter to the Archduchess. Anne was most welcome, Margaret replied, and she hoped to treat her as her father would wish. 'At the least', she continued, 'I trust that, on your return [to the Netherlands], there will be no need for any other interpreter [
truchement
] between you and me than her.' About the girl herself, she was as flattering as any father could wish. 'I find her so well behaved and agreeable for her young age, that I am more obliged to you for sending her than you are to me [for receiving her].'
⁴

    Anne was given formal instruction in French by Symonnet, a tutor in the Archduchess's household. She began her lessons by writing out letters which he had composed for her to copy. Then, at the next stage, they moved on to dictation. One of these dictation exercises survives, in the form of a letter sent to her father. It was written at La Vure. La Vure, now known by its Flemish name of Terveuren, was the
château
, set in a seven-hundred-acre park on the outskirts of Brussels, that Margaret used as a summer retreat for herself and her young charges.

    Anne begins by thanking her father for his letter in which he set out his hopes for his daughter. 'Sir, I understand from your letter that you desire me to be an entirely virtuous woman when I come to the [English] Court.' As an inducement, Boleyn had held out the prospect of conversation with Catherine of Aragon. 'You tell me,' Anne continued, 'that the Queen will take the trouble to converse with me and it gives me great joy to think of talking with such a wise and virtuous person.' The prospect, she assures him 'will make me all the keener to persevere in speaking French well'. It also reminded her of her present deficiencies. 'Sir, I beg you to excuse me if my letter is badly written.' Then she (or rather Symonnet composing in her name) offered the explanation, which contains a vignette of his teaching methods. 'I assure you the orthography is my own, while the others were only written by my hand. Symonnet dictates the letter to me and leaves me to write it myself.' Anne's spelling in the letter is indeed bad – so bad that at times the meaning is scarcely comprehensible.
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    But – thanks to Symonnet's teaching and the Archduchess's encouragement – Anne made rapid progress. In May the following year the Archduchess announced her intention of spending the summer once more at La Vure. Then, in August, there came a bombshell.

* * *

It had been the assumption that King Henry VIII's sister, Mary, would marry the Archduchess Margaret's nephew, Charles, shortly after his fourteenth birthday in February 1514. Mary had been betrothed to him in 1508, and in the English Court she was always addressed as the Princess of Castile. Margaret was a great supporter of the English alliance. She was still sore at her own humiliating rejection by Charles VIII of France. And she was well aware that the prosperity of the Netherlands was largely dependent on the English trade: London merchants exported English wool and cloth to the Netherlands and imported in return the luxury goods, including tapestries, illuminated manuscripts, sculptures and paintings, at which Flemish craftsmen excelled. But while Margaret enthused about England, her menfolk sent out mixed signals. Ferdinand of Aragon, Charles's maternal grandfather, double-crossed Henry VIII and scarcely bothered to conceal the fact; while Margaret's father, Maximilian, the boy's paternal grandfather, postponed the marriage-day yet again – waiting, Micawber-like, for something better to turn up (for, like Micawber, Maximilian was always short of cash).

    The result, as we have seen, was that Henry VIII lost patience, threw over the Habsburg alliance and married Mary instead to Louis XII of France. The Anglo-French treaties were proclaimed on 10 August 1514. Four days later, Thomas Boleyn wrote to Margaret to inform her of the marriage and to tell her that Mary had specifically asked for his daughter, 'la petite Boulain', as one of her attendants. Would the Archduchess give Anne leave to return with the escort he had sent?

    Boleyn begged
'Ma très redoutée Dame'
to be pleased with the news. She certainly was not. England was now allied to her old enemy the French. And
'la petite Boulain',
whom she had taught French, was now going to put her skills to use by smoothing relations between the French King and his wife who, despite the best efforts of her teachers, did 'not have the language perfectly'. It was a poor return for her efforts.
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    As it happened, Anne was not back in England in time to travel to France with Mary and her household. Instead, she seems to have made the journey directly, by land. Did this mean that she also missed the spectacular falling-out between the French King and his wife's Lady Mistress, Lady Guildford, which resulted in Louis's packing off most of Mary's attendants back to England? At all events, Anne survived the purge.

    Soon, however, she was caught up in the much greater upheaval of Louis's death and Mary's widowhood, which was terminated abruptly by Mary's clandestine marriage to her brother Henry's favourite, Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk. Was Anne's role in these events the basis of the life-long enmity between her and the Duke and Duchess of Suffolk? It seems probable. At any rate, Anne did not return to England with Mary at the beginning of 1515. Instead – how and through whose good offices we do not know – she was placed in the Household of the new Queen of France, Claude, daughter of Louis XII and wife of the new French King, Francis I.
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* * *

    The other lessons Anne learned in France were more agreeable. Francis's Court was the centre of an advanced, brilliant, Italianate culture. And the French King himself was the perfect gentleman to every woman except his wife. Anne thrived in this atmosphere of stylish cultivation. Years later, her accomplishments were still remembered at the French Court. She perfected her knowledge of French. She polished her musical skills, learning 'to sing and dance . . . [and] to play the lute and other instruments'. But the instrument on which she became most adept was herself. 'She was beautiful, had an elegant figure and eyes that were even more attractive.' For her eyes were large and black and she deployed them with a practised skill: 'Sometimes keeping them in repose; on other occasions, sending them forth as messengers, to carry the secret witness of the heart.' 'Such was their power, that many men were hers to command.'

    In short, by her late teens she had become the perfect, quintessentially French,
cocotte
. 'You would have never taken her for an English woman in her manner and behaviour,' wrote Lancelot de Carles in his poetic reminiscences about her, 'but a native-born French lady.' For a Frenchman, this was the ultimate accolade.
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* * *

Once again, the vagaries of foreign policy intervened. Anglo-French relations soured rapidly in the wake of The Field of Cloth of Gold, and in late 1521, Anne was recalled to England. She had made enough of an impact for Francis I himself to complain at the removal of 'the daughter of Mr Boullan', 'who was in the service of the French Queen'. Wolsey, when the complaints were submitted to him, had his answer ready. 'He himself was responsible for her recall', he explained, 'because he intended, by her marriage, to pacify certain quarrels and litigation between [Sir Thomas] Boleyn and other English nobles.'
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    At the age of twenty, Anne Boleyn was launched both into the English Court and the aristocratic marriage market.

A
t some point in the winter of 1521–2 Anne arrived back in England. Her birth, her father's office in the royal Household and her own lengthy training in France more or less entitled her to a position at Court and, by early in the New Year, she seems to have been in post as one of Queen Catherine's ladies-in-waiting. She must have made an immediate impact, since she was given a leading part in the festivities for Shrovetide.
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* * *

Shrovetide (the modern Pancake Tuesday) was a time of celebration and release before the rigours of Lent. It was often marked by the performance of a play in the King's Hall; in 1522, however, the festivities took a more complex form. There was a joust on 2 March and a revel on the night of Shrove Tuesday itself, 4 March. The two had a linking theme: the power of women and love, and the corresponding weakness of men. It was a subject on which Anne, thanks to her experience in France, was a past-mistress.

    In the joust, the King led a band of eight knights, each of whom rode under the double device of letters of 'L' and a wounded heart embroidered on the trapper of his horse. 'L' stood for
Elle
or She, the personified powerful Woman; the heart was the Man's heart that She held in her thrall. Each of the jousters also had a personal motto, likewise embroidered on his horse-trapper. Henry's was
mon naverray
, which, with the letters of 'L' and the tormented heart, signified
Elle mon coeur a navré
(She has broken my heart). The opposing band of knights, led by the Duke of Suffolk, had trails of pansies embroidered on their trappers, which, no doubt, like Ophelia's, were 'for thoughts' (of love).

    The joust took place in the tilt-yard at Greenwich and was watched by Queen Catherine, Princess Mary and their ladies-in-waiting. The sixyear-old Mary wore her Valentine's brooch spelling out the name of her fiancé, none other than Charles V, in jewels; while Anne Boleyn, we can guess, turned her eyes of jet-black – now hot, now cold – on whichever jouster had proclaimed himself her servant. She had plenty of opportunity for such games, as the festivities continued.

    The theme of women's power over men's hearts was continued in the Shrove Tuesday revel. In this Henry and his companions, now dressed in cloth of gold caps and blue satin cloaks, laid siege to the
Chateau Vert
(the Green Castle). The Castle had three towers, with battlements clad in green tin-foil and each flying a banner: the first of 'three rent [torn] hearts', the second of 'a lady's hand gripping a man's heart' and the third of 'a lady's hand turning a man's heart'. The Castle was defended by eight noble ladies. Each lady impersonated one of the virtues of the ideal wife/mistress and had the name of her virtue embroidered in gold on her caul or hair-net of silk. Assisting these ladies in the defence of the Castle were the eight female vices: Scorn, Disdain, Malebouche (Badmouthing) and the rest. These vices were played with gusto by the boys of Wolsey's Chapel.