The Boleyn Women: The Tudor Femmes Fatales Who Changed English History (6 page)

The marriage of William and Margaret proved fruitful, with a number of children surviving to adulthood. William was evidently a fond father, making bequests to his eldest son, Thomas, who was born in 1477, as well as younger sons James (born 1480), William and Edward in his will.
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Young William became a priest and later served as Archdeacon of Winchester, dying in 1571.
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He was educated at Gonville Hall in Cambridge, where his great-uncle had been master and was later promoted by his niece, Queen Anne Boleyn.
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Sir William Boleyn also remembered his daughters, Alice and Margaret, who were then unmarried, as well as the eldest surviving daughter, Anne, who had by them married Sir John Shelton, in his will. Alice and Anne came to prominence in middle age under their niece, Queen Anne Boleyn.

William and Margaret’s youngest daughter, Margaret, married John Sackville of Buckhurst in Sussex and had a family. A further daughter, Jane, predeceased her father. She was presumably the second daughter to survive to adulthood as she died married, as the wife of Sir Philip Calthorp of Norwich.
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The will of her sister, Alice Boleyn Clere, includes a bequest to her niece, Elizabeth Calthorp, of a pomander of gold, something which demonstrates that Jane bore at least one child who was still living and unmarried in 1539, over thirty years after her mother’s death.

As well as losing their daughter Jane in her early adulthood, William and Margaret had the misfortune to lose at least three children in childhood. A daughter, Anne, received a fine memorial brass in Blickling church, showing her as a grown woman with hair pulled back tightly from her face and a furred and pleated gown. This depiction of Anne as an adult was wistful and the inscription on the brass makes it clear that she died as a very young child in 1479, aged only three years, eleven months and thirteen days. It appears from the fact that her age was so specifically noted that her fourth birthday had been anticipated in the family and her death was sudden. Certainly, she was a much-loved child as can be seen from the expense incurred in providing her with such a fine memorial brass: given her early birth in 1475, coupled with the choice of the name Anne, after both her grandmothers, she was probably their eldest daughter. She is also likely to have been the couple’s eldest child, with their eldest known son only being born in 1477. She was certainly not forgotten and a later daughter, who survived to adulthood, was named after her. A son, Anthony, died on 30 September 1493 at the age of around ten, and was buried close to the altar at Blickling.
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Another son, John, who appears to have been an infant, had already died in 1484 and is also reported to have been buried at Blickling.
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Regardless of his father’s original plan for him to go into trade, William Boleyn quickly began to take steps to build a solid court career, being created a knight of the Bath at the Coronation of Richard III in 1483.
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In 1498 William and Margaret hosted a visit of the king to Blickling: a significant honour.
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The visit went well and a few years later William was appointed to the post of Third Baron of the Exchequer. He moved his family’s primary landed interests away from Norfolk and, by 1489, he was described as being a gentleman of Kent, where his residence of Hever Castle was situated.
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William maintained his close links to Norfolk, being appointed to commissions of the peace in the county in 1483 and 1485, for example.
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He served as sheriff of both Kent and Norfolk on occasion. In 1482 he was commissioned alongside Edward IV’s brother-in-law, Anthony, Earl Rivers, and a small number of other gentlemen to arbitrate in a dispute among other members of the local Norfolk gentry which had led to murder, trespass and other offences, with the commissioners being required to report directly to the king and his council.
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His increasing prominence was helped by the favour which Henry VII showed to Margaret’s father, appointing him as ambassador to Burgundy in 1497, for example. He was also a member of the king’s Privy Council and had earlier acted as ambassador to France, as well as serving as chamberlain to Queen Elizabeth of York.
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With the death of their stepmother in around 1501, Margaret and her elder sister must have begun to consider their eventual succession as their father’s heiresses a certainty, with their prospective shares being increased with the death of their younger half-sister in 1510.

There is little evidence for the relationship between William and Margaret. In his will, which was written shortly before his death in October 1505, William requested that his heir, Thomas, pay Margaret 200 marks a year out of the revenues of some of the principal Boleyn manors.
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There is no real evidence of affection and it was close to his mother, Anne Hoo Boleyn, that William asked to be buried, rather than requesting burial beside his wife when she died. Given the high number of children born to the couple they obviously spent a considerable amount of time together although Margaret, like her mother-in-law before her, ploughed her energies into supporting and advancing her children, in particular her eldest son.

Margaret had been a widow for nearly ten years when her father died, at the advanced age of around ninety, in August 1515. She was herself already well into her sixties – elderly for the time. The 7th Earl of Ormond was extremely wealthy, possessing seventy-two manors in England alone, as well as his extensive Irish estates.
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He was described by an eighteenth-century biographer as ‘the richest subject the king had, and left £40,000 in money besides jewels, and as much land to his two daughters in England, as at this day would yield £30,000 per annum’.
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This was an astronomical sum and, even if considerably exaggerated, the sheer extensiveness of the earl’s lands in both England and Ireland demonstrate vast wealth.

Margaret had a very close relationship with her eldest son, Sir Thomas Boleyn, who identified strongly with her prestigious family background. It is significant that when he was first ennobled by the king in 1525, he took the title of Viscount Rochford. Rochford, in Kent, had been one of his grandfather’s leading English manors and was also the location of the old earl’s only English peerage, that of Baron Rochford, which was the title the earl used when summoned to attend Parliament.
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Although Thomas was a Boleyn family name, it seems likely that Thomas Boleyn was named for his grandfather, who treated him as something of a favourite. In his will, drawn up shortly before his death, the seventh earl paid his younger daughter’s eldest son the compliment of leaving him a precious family heirloom: a white ivory horn, garnished with gold which, according to the earl ‘was mine ancestors at first time they were called to honour, and hath since continually remained in the same blood; for which cause my lord and father commanded me upon his blessing, that I should do my devoir to cause it to continue still in my blood’. The horn, quite apart from its obvious monetary value, was of great sentimental importance to the old earl, and was also rumoured to have been the cup from which St Thomas Becket drank.
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In the event that Thomas Boleyn did not leave male heirs of his own, the seventh earl asked that the horn be passed to another grandson, Sir George St Leger. In the event that this male line also failed, it was to pass first to any other male heirs of his two daughters, before being bequeathed to the male heirs of his father, the fourth earl, which were represented in the person of Piers Butler, a descendant of the fourth earl’s younger brother, ‘so that it may continue still in my blood hereafter as long as it shall please God’.
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In later life, Margaret continued to enjoy a happy relationship with her son, with Thomas paying 9
s
8
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to fur one of her gowns as a gift in late 1526, for example.
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At his death, the seventh earl’s two daughters were his heirs-general and co-heiresses to any property that was not entailed upon his heir male. It was necessary to look back several generations to the younger brother of the earl’s father, whose great-grandson in the male line was an Irish landowner named Sir Piers Butler, to find the heir male.
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With the earl’s death leaving separate heirs general and heirs male, there was an immediate dispute over just how the inheritance should be divided, with the two sisters, who were English resident, obtaining possession of the English estates, while Piers immediately took possession of the Irish lands, as well as declaring himself to be Earl of Ormond. To further complicate matters, Sir James Ormond, an illegitimate son of John Butler, 6th Earl of Ormond, who had acted as his uncle’s steward in Ireland, laid claim to the inheritance, retaining some of the Irish manors for his own use.
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It has been suggested that the attempts of the sisters, Margaret Butler Boleyn and Anne Butler St Leger, to obtain their inheritance were wrongful and this appears largely to be based on the prominence of Piers Butler’s branch of the family at court from the early sixteenth century onwards. An earlier biographer of the family accused the daughters of obtaining the English lands through trickery, acting with their father to suppress deeds which demonstrated that the lands should pass to his heir male.
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He also claimed that ‘this earl’s daughters endeavoured to dispossess Piers Earl of Ormond of all the Irish estates’, only being prevented when the king himself intervened and passed them to Piers. The Butlers were popular with Elizabeth I during her reign due to their kinship connection with her mother and the Boleyns, with it being considered by the early seventeenth century that the court was the ‘natural habitat’ of the family.
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In addition to this, Piers’s grandson, Thomas Butler, 10th Earl of Ormond, was educated with the future Edward VI at court and would have been known personally to the children of Henry VIII.
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In the early seventeenth century the Piers Butler branch of the family were ennobled as Dukes of Ormond and later writers were unwilling to offend the powerful family when discussing their dispute with the daughters of the seventh earl. The facts however do not support either Margaret, or her sister, acting in such an underhand way. They had a very strong claim to all the Ormond possessions, and the title itself, if they were strong enough to claim it.

In the late nineteenth century the historian J. H. Round carried out a study into the dispute over the earldom of Ormond, coming to the conclusion that it was indeed Margaret and her sister who were the rightful holders of the family estates and titles. Round pointed out that the original earldom had been one of six created in Ireland before 1330 and that it then passed from father to son or brother to brother without interruption until 1515, something which served to obscure the true inheritance rights attached to the earldom.
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The seventh earl’s English barony of Rochford lapsed at his death without a son. However, the earldom of Ormond had never been limited to only the male line and, as such, should rightly have passed to the heirs general rather than the heir male, as Margaret and her sister claimed. While the sisters had legal right on their side, it was a different matter for them to actually claim their Irish inheritance. As Round pointed out ‘the two co-heiresses were widows, widows moreover of Englishmen and of commoners. The heir male, “the Red Piers”, in addition to all his local prestige, had, to support him, the anti-feudal feeling of the natives in favour of the heir male, the preference for an Irishman-born over unknown absentees, and the undoubted, but misleading fact, that, from the accidental circumstance of none of the earls having till then left female heirs, the earldom had never passed from the male line’.
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In 1515 Margaret Butler Boleyn and Anne St Leger had very little chance of winning in their battle for the Irish estates and title, particularly as Piers had already proved himself to be a prominent, and useful, supporter of English rule in Ireland.

In spite of the near impossibility of their claim, and the fact they were both, by 1515, advanced in age, Margaret and Anne laid claim to the Irish portion of their inheritance, assisted by Margaret’s eldest son, who was a prominent courtier. A surviving letter by Margaret to her son, makes clear the affection between them and the fact that she relied on him with regard to her claims to her inheritance:

And whereas I understand to my great heaviness, that my lord my father is departed this world to Almighty God, on whose soul I beseech Jesu to have mercy, wherefore I pray and heartily desire you that you will do for me in everything as you shall think most best and expedient. And in everything that you shall do for me after as you think best, I will, on my part, affirm and rate it in as like manner as though it were mine own deed.
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Margaret was evidently feeling her age by the time of her father’s death and was anxious to allow her eldest son to take as much of the strain as possible, further commenting that ‘and if hereafter you shall think it necessary for me to come up to London to you, I pray you send hereof to me your mind, and I shall pain myself to come; howbeit if you may do well enough without my coming in my behalf, then I were loath to labour so far’. Margaret’s sister, Anne St Leger, was also happy to hand matters to Thomas Boleyn. The sisters remained on good terms with Anne applying for a licence in April 1520 to found a perpetual chantry in Devon to pray for the souls of a number of family members, including her husband, parents and sister.
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Margaret’s health may also have been in decline by the time of her father’s death as, by at least 1519, she was considered to be a lunatic.
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The evidence for her condition is contained in an inquisition held into her lands in Cambridgeshire and perhaps accounts for her apparent willingness to hand over control of her matters and lands to her eldest son. Given her advanced age for the period in 1519, it seems not impossible that her ‘lunacy’ was some form of dementia, meaning that she may have retained some limited control over her own affairs.