The Boleyn Women: The Tudor Femmes Fatales Who Changed English History (3 page)

The lives of the earliest Boleyn ladies were, to a large extent, obscure. The women, many of whose names no longer even survive, lived lives centred on Salle. They would have kept their houses and been involved in agriculture. The family was always reasonably prosperous, although their claims to gentry status were tenuous. This all changed with the career of Geoffrey Boleyn II and his marriage to his second wife, Anne Hoo, who laid claim to being a member of the nobility.

The marriage of Geoffrey Boleyn II to his first wife Dionise would have been entirely forgotten if it were not for its brief mention in Geoffrey’s will. Geoffrey’s second wife, Anne Hoo, the mother of all his surviving children, was considerably more prominent and brought the Boleyns to the fringes of the nobility for the first time.

Until the time of his great-granddaughter, Queen Anne Boleyn, Geoffrey Boleyn II was the most prominent and illustrious member of the Boleyn family. One historian has posited that Geoffrey’s father might also have been engaged in business in London.
¹
It is not impossible that Geoffrey Boleyn I did indeed have some business connections, as evidenced by the fact that his son was set up in trade in the capital. However, in the main Geoffrey Boleyn I’s interests were based in Salle, where he was a prosperous farmer. By the 1430s Geoffrey Boleyn II had been set up in London as a hatter.
²
This was a respectable trade but one in which he was not destined to remain for long, instead becoming, in 1435, a member of the prestigious Mercer’s Company in London, indicating that, by that stage, his affairs had taken on a more general trading nature. He was already somewhat established as the entry in the wardens’ account book for 1435 for the Mercer’s Company also refers to his apprentices, of whom Robert Hastings and William Brampston are known for the period.
³
He was able to pay the significant fee of over 5 pounds for his entry. Geoffrey quickly became an active member of the Mercer’s Company, with his name regularly featuring in company accounts, including a number of fines for defaulting on summons made on him to court in 1437–8, 1438–9 and 1440–1.
⁴
Geoffrey evidently had a dislike of such appointments, as can be seen in the fact that, in October 1458 and again in July 1461, he received an exemption for life from the king for his good service to the king’s father:

From being put on assizes, juries, inquisitions, attaints or recognisances and from being made trier of them, taxer, collector or assessor of customs, taxes, tallages, fifteenths, tenths or other subsidies, knight, mayor, sheriff, escheator, commissioner, constable, bailiff or other officer or minister of the king against his Will.
⁵

Geoffrey’s wife, Anne Hoo Boleyn, also benefited from the first of these grants, ensuring that she would not be forced into any official capacity against her will. The fines that Geoffrey received from the Mercer’s Company did nothing to hinder his rise in the company and by 1443 he had been appointed as one of its wardens. During his term of office Geoffrey had five apprentices admitted to the company, the highest number among the company members.
⁶
In 1449 he was appointed as a Member of Parliament for London.
⁷
In 1451 he was also one of five men who lent the king the combined sum of £1,246, a huge sum, to pay for the war in France, something which stands as a testament to his financial prosperity.
⁸
He may have been less than committed to Henry VI’s Lancastrian cause, however, as in 1461, when the members of the Mercer’s Company agreed to together lend £100 to the prominent Yorkist the Earl of Warwick, Geoffrey supplied the highest sum.
⁹
That same year the company also granted 1,000 marks to the new king, Edward IV, ‘for the speed of the earl of Warwick in to the North’ with Geoffrey this time supplying the joint-highest sum at over 13 pounds.
¹⁰
In June 1453 he hosted the officers of the Mercer’s Company in his own house while elections were held for wardens of the company, another indication that he was one of the most prominent, and wealthy, of his fellows in the city.
¹¹

In 1457 Geoffrey reached the pinnacle of his career when he was elected as Lord Mayor of London.
¹²
This role allowed him to mix with barons, abbots and chief justices in ceremonial processions and banquets and, in addition, provided him with a seat on the royal council.
¹³
Although Geoffrey only served for a year, it was far from being a merely ceremonial appointment, with Geoffrey and his aldermen and sheriffs receiving a royal commission in November 1457 to raise 1,137 archers in London and its suburbs.
¹⁴
The following August he was given a commission with others to enter the dwellings, houses, warehouses and cellars of any Genoese merchants in London in order to make inventories and confiscate their goods and merchandise.
¹⁵
As a merchant himself, this was not entirely to Geoffrey’s taste and the commission was later vacated because no action had actually been taken to carry out its commands.

Geoffrey Boleyn II, through his prosperity, mixed in higher social circles. His increasing prominence in the City of London brought about his marriage to Anne Hoo, the daughter of Lord Hoo and Hastings. This was the first time that the Boleyn family, which had only recently had aspirations to gentry status, had attempted to forge links with the nobility, although it must be pointed out that Anne’s father, Thomas Hoo, was only the first member of his family to hold a peerage and that his barony was a new creation. Anne was certainly not a member of an ancient noble family as later Boleyn wives would be. Her father had also not been ennobled at the time of her marriage. Lord Hoo and Hastings obtained his title when Anne was already twenty-three. Since Anne and Geoffrey’s eldest son, Thomas, reached his majority at some point between 1463 and 1466, he was evidently born between 1442 and 1445 when Anne was aged between seventeen and twenty. As discussed in the previous chapter, Thomas is most likely Anne’s son rather than that of her predecessor, Dionise, particularly given the fact that the name Thomas was a favourite in the Hoo family, with both Anne’s father and his half-brother confusingly bearing the name. The marriage of Anne and Geoffrey, who was twenty years older than his bride, took place before her father’s ennoblement and before Geoffrey became Lord Mayor of London in around 1442–44. It may even have occurred earlier as two of Anne’s younger half-sisters are known to have been married in their early teens, with one, another Anne, being widowed before she turned fifteen and a second, Eleanor, recorded as a wife when she was aged thirteen or fourteen.
¹⁶
Anne Hoo Boleyn’s marriage could therefore conceivably have occurred as early as 1437 or 1438, particularly as she was then potentially a very great heiress. In the fifteenth century it was not that uncommon for gentlewomen to marry into the merchant classes and Geoffrey’s wealth more than made up for the fact that the match was beneath Anne socially. For Geoffrey, the marriage firmly cemented his status as a gentleman and provided links to Anne’s father, an important royal servant. He had hopes that Anne would prove to be her father’s sole surviving child, with Hoo’s third marriage only producing its first child in 1448, some years after Geoffrey and Anne’s marriage.
¹⁷

Anne’s father, Thomas Hoo, was created Lord Hoo and Hastings by Henry VI in 1448 and had been elected as a Knight of the Garter a few years before. He had a somewhat complicated personal life, being married three times. His first marriage produced one son who died in his father’s lifetime, while his second, to Elizabeth, the daughter and heiress of Sir Nicholas Wychingham, produced one daughter, Anne Hoo, who was born in 1425.
¹⁸
His third marriage allowed Hoo to ally himself with a more established noble family, when he took Eleanor, the daughter of Leo, Lord Welles, as his bride. This marriage produced a further three daughters: a second Anne, who married Sir Roger Copley; Eleanor, who married into the Carews of Beddington; and Elizabeth, the wife of Sir Thomas Massingberd and then Sir John Devenish.

Family members came to prominence as royal servants in the reigns of Edward III and his two successors. Anne’s own father, Thomas Hoo, served Henry VI in France for some years, spending thirteen years as Chancellor of France for the English king. The family had lived in Sussex since at least the reign of Edward II in the early fourteenth century.
¹⁹
With the death of her elder half-brother, Anne Hoo Boleyn and her much younger half-sisters found themselves to be their father’s heirs on his death in 1455. The sisters had a rival in their uncle, another Thomas Hoo, who was his brother’s heir male. However Anne, as the eldest, was able to negotiate a beneficial settlement, with her own son, William Boleyn, being named as his uncle’s heir on his death in 1486 as a result of a settlement agreed between Thomas Hoo and Anne in 1474.
²⁰
Lord Hoo’s probate was a lengthy and disputed business and Anne was lucky to come out of it with anything from her father’s estate. Lord Hoo died so in debt that his chosen executors, his widow and his brother, ‘expressly refused to act’, with the Archbishop of Canterbury instead appointing a professional executor.
²¹
Shortly after the death that executor complained that Hoo’s widow had carried away jewels, goods, chattels and anything else that was moveable and had refused to return them, leading to the deceased’s debts remaining unpaid. Anne Hoo Boleyn’s young half-sister, Eleanor, also found herself without the bequest that she received in the will when her first, unconsummated, marriage was followed by a second match without her family’s permission, providing her mother and uncle with a pretext for withholding her funds.
²²

The evidence of Geoffrey Boleyn’s will, which is discussed below and in which he displayed a great deal of affection and trust in his wife, suggests that the marriage immediately became close, as does the fact that at least five children were born to the couple: Thomas, William, Isabel, Anne and Alice. In addition to this, Geoffrey evidently forged bonds with members of Anne Hoo Boleyn’s family, making a bequest in his will of an annuity to ‘Dame Joanne Hoo my cousin, nun of the house of Barking’, who can be identified as a kinswoman of his wife.
²³
In return, he asked specifically that Joanne pray for his soul.

With his success in trade, Geoffrey was determined to fully cement his position as a member of the gentry and, as such, he required a family seat. In 1452 Geoffrey opened negotiations with Sir John Falstolf, a wealthy landowner and a member of the king’s council, for the purchase of the manor of Blickling in Norfolk.
²⁴
A letter survives among the famous Paston letters, which was sent by Geoffrey to John Paston in 1460, detailing some of his business dealings with Paston’s patron and friend, Sir John Falstolf.
²⁵
In the letter, which is written in the hand of a scribe but signed personally by Geoffrey, he pointed out that he had purchased the manor of Blickling from Falstolf both for a ‘great payment’ and for an additional yearly annuity, which was, as Geoffrey explained, ‘to me great charge’. The negotiations for the purchase had taken place at Falstolf’s house at Southwark and, at the same time, due to the great sums that Geoffrey committed to pay for Blickling, Falstolf made an oath on his primer that he would also allow him first refusal to purchase a second manor, that of Guton in Norfolk, ‘for a reasonable price’. With Falstolf’s death, Geoffrey had trouble in securing this manor, writing to Paston as Falstolf’s executor ‘to pray you to show me your good will and favour in this behalf, wherein ye shall discharge my said master’s soul of his oath and promise, and I shall do you service in that I can or may to my power’. The manor meant enough to Geoffrey that he was prepared to ‘wait on you at any time and place where ye will assign’. However it was perhaps convenient for Geoffrey that he was the only surviving witness to Falstolf’s alleged oath, which he used to his advantage to push his claims to a desirable manor. Paston may well not have been favourably disposed to Geoffrey since it appears that he had not readily paid the purchase price for Blickling, with Falstolf petitioning the king’s chancellor in 1452 to complain that he had only received half of the sums agreed.
²⁶
Blickling became the Boleyn family’s primary seat, with Geoffrey commissioning a chapel, dedicated to St Thomas, on the north side of the chancel in Blickling church, which stood beside the manor.
²⁷
In his will, Geoffrey also left sums to pay for improvements to the church.

Geoffrey was well known to John Paston and his family by 1460 and there is some indication that the two families were not on entirely favourable terms. In 1452, for example, while Geoffrey was busy with his negotiations with Sir John Falstolf, Agnes Paston wrote from Norwich to her son, John Paston, to report that

Sir John Fastolf hath sold Heylysdon to Boleyn of London; and if it be so, it seemeth he will sell more. Wherefore I pray you, as ye will have my love and my blessing that ye will help and do your devoir that something were purchased for your ij brethren. I suppose Sir John Falstolf, and he were spake to, would be gladder to let his kinsmen have part than strange men.
²⁸

There was some jealousy between the families over Geoffrey’s land acquisitions. In November 1454 Thomas Howes, an agent of Sir John Falstolf, wrote to John Paston to say that he had raised the possibility of a marriage between Paston’s daughter and a young ward of Falstolf’s. Matters had moved so far that Howes had ‘enquired after the said child, and no doubt of but he is likely and of great wit, as I hear be reported of sundry persons’.
²⁹
However, Howes also had a warning for Paston that, while this promising child would evidently be perfect for a Paston daughter, ‘I am credibly informed, that Geoffrey Boleyn maketh great labour for marriage of the said child to one of his daughters’. Howes assured Paston of his own personal support, declaring that while he wished well to Geoffrey, he wished better to Paston.