The Boleyn Women: The Tudor Femmes Fatales Who Changed English History (27 page)

Queen Anne’s paternal aunt, Alice Boleyn Clere, was finally able to retire home following her niece’s death, leaving her responsibilities with Princess Mary behind. She died in October 1539, probably at her home of Ormesby where she was buried, according to her wishes, with her husband.
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Alice’s eldest son, Sir John Clere, was a soldier, serving first as treasurer of the king’s army in 1549 and later serving with the navy.
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He was on campaign at Orkney in 1557 when he and seventy-nine of his men were drowned in a skirmish. The family remained closely connected to the Boleyns and it was the Cleres who eventually inherited Blickling, with Alice’s grandson, Edward, buried in a fine tomb in Blickling church. Alice’s sister, Lady Shelton, outlived most of her generation, dying in January 1556. She had been a widow for nearly twenty years and had remained close to her many children. She almost certainly approved when her eldest son, another Sir John Shelton, joined her former charge Princess Mary at Kenninghall in July 1553 when she claimed the throne.
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Lady Shelton remained close to her own birth family until the end, requesting that her brother, Sir James, should supervise her will.

Contrary to Queen Anne’s fears, her mother did not die of sorrow at her fall, although the deaths of two of her three children must have blighted the last years of her life, particularly given her estrangement from her surviving daughter, Mary. There is some evidence that she was reconciled with her daughter, against her husband’s wishes, with Thomas refraining from taking any action to Mary’s detriment while his wife was still alive. Soon after her death, he abandoned this principle, promising the king that, rather than passing his Ormond inheritance to Mary, he would instead make over his lands to Princess Elizabeth.
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By waiting until after his wife’s death, it is evident that Thomas knew that she would not support this position, even if, as a regular attendant on her daughter, Queen Anne, she had got to know her infant granddaughter.

Thomas Boleyn wrote to Thomas Cromwell from Hever in July 1536 to thank the minister for his ‘goodness to me when I am far off, and cannot always be present to answer for myself’.
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It is clear that, for a time, Anne Boleyn’s parents were not welcome at court, although in October 1536 Thomas was commanded by the king to raise troops during the rebellion in Lincolnshire and Yorkshire known as the Pilgrimage of Grace, indicating that he had not been entirely forgotten by his former son-in-law.
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He was not able to retain his office of Lord Privy Seal, which was passed to Cromwell.
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Elizabeth Howard Boleyn did not remain away from court for long, as her presence is recorded in June 1537 when Lady Lisle’s agent sought her advice on a question of etiquette.
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She may already have been in ill health as she was suffering from a severe cough in April 1536 ‘which grieves her sore’.
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The couple evidently did not remain at court for long, with Thomas writing letters from Hever in August and September of that year.
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Thomas Boleyn returned again to court in January 1538 and was ‘very well entertained’.
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Elizabeth accompanied him and was still in London at the time of her death in April 1538, staying in a house near Baynard’s Castle.
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Within a few days of her death, her body was taken from the house in which she died by barge to Lambeth, accompanied by her brother, Lord Edmund Howard, and half-sister, Lady Daubney, as chief mourners.
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As befitted her rank as a countess and daughter of a duke, Elizabeth’s body was conveyed in some state, with torches burning and four banners decorating the black-covered barge. A white cross stood out strikingly against the black.

She was buried at Lambeth, which was close to her brother’s London residence and was commonly used as a burial place for members of the Howard family who died in the capital. This burial place shows her continuing pride in her lineage and accounts for the fact that she did not select Hever as her burial place, where her husband later chose to be buried. Thomas Boleyn did not long survive his wife.
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In spite of rumours that he would marry the king’s niece, Lady Margaret Douglas, in July 1538, he did not take a new bride.
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He died in March 1539 and was buried at Hever with his tomb marked by a fine memorial brass. His funeral was not on the same scale as his wife’s, although his fellow Knight of the Garter, Lord Lisle, paid for memorial Masses to be said for his soul.
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With the death of his childless only son, Thomas Boleyn’s heir male became his brother, Sir James Boleyn. Since he was survived by his daughter, he also had an heir general, who, in theory, inherited all property not entailed on the male line. Since Anne Boleyn died under an attainder and, in any event, her daughter was legally illegitimate, Thomas’s only heir general was his eldest daughter, Mary Boleyn, who had survived the fall of her sister and brother. The Crown also had a claim to half of the estates as the beneficiary of Anne’s attainder. It has been claimed that Thomas recognised Mary as his heir, allowing her the use of Rochford Hall in Essex, which may have become her main residence.
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However, there is no real evidence of this and, given Thomas’s promise to the king to make Princess Elizabeth his heir, any reconciliation with Mary must be doubtful.

Mary’s whereabouts after Anne Boleyn’s fall are not known. Her recent biographer suggests that she and Stafford may have spent some years living in Calais, although there is no direct evidence for this; a paucity of references to Mary in the sources can, after all, be explained by her living often away from court, as her equally poorly documented mother had often done.
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Stafford is recorded as being present in the English-held town in 1539 to welcome Henry VIII’s fourth bride, Anne of Cleves, and so, perhaps, Mary joined him. She is not mentioned in any of the substantial surviving correspondence of Lady Lisle, who was the wife of the governor of Calais, friendly with Mary’s mother and related to her distantly through marriage, something that does throw a six-year residence in the town into doubt. Mary Boleyn’s credit was also low at court in the immediate aftermath of her sister’s fall. In a letter written early in 1537, for example, the prior of Tynemouth wrote to Cromwell asking for his house to be released from paying a pension to Mary, who had assisted his predecessor and the priory, stating that she could no longer do any great good to either the prior or the house.
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Mary and her husband, William Stafford, were disappointed, for a time, in their hopes of profiting from the Ormond inheritance, of which her venerable grandmother, Margaret Butler Boleyn, remained entitled to an income of 400 marks a year until her death not long after her son’s.
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It took Mary and her husband until April 1540 to finally gain control over her Ormond inheritance, as well as other Boleyn properties such as Hever.
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Stafford was, by that stage, beginning to rise in royal service, something that may have been due to the king’s lingering affection for his former mistress. He rose to the rank of esquire of the body to the king during Mary’s lifetime.
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The couple later sold a substantial portion of their lands to the king, ensuring that they were more financially comfortable than they had hitherto been. There is no evidence that Mary returned to court after her sister’s death and she may have lived quietly on her estates. Her wealth increased again in May 1543 when she received the Boleyn family lands previously held by her grandmother, Margaret Butler Boleyn, and sister-in-law, Jane Rochford, as part of their widow’s dowers.
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Mary was still only in her mid-forties but was probably already in ill health, dying on 19 July 1543. She was survived by her second husband and her two children by her first marriage. As a married woman she was unable to make a will, with her property instead divided between her husband and son.
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William Stafford eventually remarried and continued to have a successful court career, dying as a Protestant exile during the reign of Mary I in 1556.

Although the king perhaps retained the vestiges of affection for Mary Boleyn, it was not her influence that provided for her father’s return to court following Queen Anne’s fall. Thomas Boleyn’s return to royal favour late in 1537 coincided with the king once again taking a romantic interest in Mary Shelton and a desire to please her was probably behind her uncle’s rehabilitation. As it happened, the king’s interest in Mary proved brief, with him soon moving on to Margaret Skipwith, a contemporary at court. In spite of this, Mary Shelton remained at court, eventually taking a position with Henry’s fifth wife, Catherine Howard. With the arrest of her mistress, Queen Catherine Howard, Mary Shelton found herself once again without an appointment at court. Mary was, by 1542, approaching her mid-twenties and, while she was no longer an object of interest to the king, continued to attract suitors. She was a close friend of the king’s niece, Lady Margaret Douglas, and his daughter-in-law, Mary Howard, the widowed Duchess of Richmond. The three moved in literary circles, remaining close to the duchess’s brother, Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, and Sir Thomas Wyatt, who died towards the end of 1542.

With Henry Norris’s execution with Anne Boleyn in May 1536, Mary Shelton perhaps lost her fiancé. In the 1540s Mary fell in love, with the object of her affections being her first cousin, Thomas Clere, the son of Alice Boleyn Clere. Thomas was the favourite son of his mother and appears to have been well liked by most people that he came across. Mary’s love for Clere may actually have caused some conflict with her sister Anne Shelton, who was married to Sir Edmund Knyvet, with the two men coming to blows on one occasion at court. Clere was a close friend and retainer of Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, the son of the Duke of Norfolk. The pair served together in France, with Surrey later recalling that when he believed himself ‘half dead’ on the field he handed his friend his will for safe-keeping, something that indicates the level of trust the pair had in each other.
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Clere was born in around 1518 and was proud both of his Norfolk upbringing and his descent through his Boleyn mother from the earls of Ormond.
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Few details of his love affair with Mary survive, although it was well known enough for Surrey to include the line ‘Shelton for love, Surrey for lord thou chase’ in a verse epitaph he composed for his friend. That marriage was not spoken of between the couple was almost certainly due to the fact that they were first cousins: such marriages were highly unusual in early Tudor England, only becoming more common in later centuries. To further complicate matters, Mary Shelton’s paternal grandmother had been Margaret Clere, the sister of Thomas’s father, so that Thomas was also a first cousin of her father’s.
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This does not mean that the couple did not consummate their relationship, especially since Mary is unlikely to have been a virgin given her affair with the king. She also appears to have had a highly modern view of love, at odds with the conventions of the day.

A remarkable manuscript known as the Devonshire Manuscript survives in the British Library. It contains a large amount of original and transcribed verse, written in at least nineteen different hands. The book is a mixture, with the exchange between Thomas Wyatt and Mary discussed earlier suggestive of courtly love, which was characterised by an exchange of verse.
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Thomas Clere was one of the contributors, as was Mary’s brother-in-law, Sir Edmund Knyvet. Mary, along with her friends, Lady Margaret Douglas and Mary Howard, Duchess of Richmond, were the main contributors. Mary contributed her own compositions to the book, such as one on a woman’s failure to cloak her feelings regarding love matters. In the poem, Mary declared that she was unable to ‘make a joke of all my woe’ and that as she was, so must she appear to the world:

That though I would it lacked might
To cloak my grief where it doth grow
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Poetry written by women was still a rarity, making Mary something of a trailblazer. There is also evidence that she had radical views about the position of women and the way in which they were portrayed in love matters.

As well as showing remarkably modern views on love, Mary’s work in the manuscript has been argued to ‘convey her disillusionment with some of the inequalities of her day, particularly in relation between the sexes’.
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The works that Mary transcribed are particularly illuminating regarding her character. It was Mary who transcribed the series of verses exchanged between the king’s niece, Lady Margaret Douglas, and her lover, Thomas Howard, after their secret relationship had been discovered, leading to their imprisonment. Margaret was a close friend of Mary’s and she would have had access to the works, possibly even as one commentator has suggested, being in a position to facilitate the correspondence itself, since her brother Thomas was a groom porter of the Tower where Howard was held.
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The inclusion of the poems, under this analysis, is seen as an act of protest against the Henrician government.

This can be coupled with the medieval verse also transcribed in the manuscript by Mary, much of it written by Chaucer. She did not simply copy the works, instead altering many of them to give them a more feminine slant. For example, in one, Mary altered a line that had originally read ‘The cursedness yet and deceit of women’ to read ‘The faithfulness yet and praise of women’. Other extracts selected (and not amended) also demonstrate the point of view that she was attempting to convey. For example, one passage copied praised the good heart of a woman while condemning a man for speaking openly about their relationship and bringing about the ruin of the woman’s reputation. It has been argued that Mary’s transcriptions make it clear that she had been part of a scandal and that she had been wronged by one particular man.
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Given her continuing relationship with Thomas Clere, it was probably not him and it may, perhaps, have been Henry VIII himself given their earlier connection and the evidence of Mary’s political opposition to him. Alternatively it could perhaps be Francis Weston, Henry Norris or even the Earl of Surrey, all of whom have been romantically linked to her. A scandal could account for it taking her so long to find a husband. The transcriptions may also provide evidence for Mary’s feelings in relation to her forbidden romance for Clere, making it clear that she believed in the rights of lovers to choose their own partners, regardless of familial or social opposition.