The Boleyn Women: The Tudor Femmes Fatales Who Changed English History (7 page)

Thomas Boleyn, like his father and grandfather, had made a prestigious match to Elizabeth Howard, the daughter of the 2nd Duke of Norfolk. In 1520 Thomas’s brother-in-law, the Earl of Surrey, was sent to Ireland to act as the king’s deputy there. Before he went, Thomas pressed his brother-in-law for his assistance in resolving the dispute over the Irish inheritance. Privately, Henry VIII was prepared to recognise the legal right of Margaret and Anne’s claim, writing in a personal letter to Surrey of ‘Sir Pierce Butler, pretending himself to be Earl of Ormond’.
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However he was certainly not prepared to offend the prominent Irishman, something to which Surrey, aware of the difficulty in maintaining English control over Ireland, concurred. Surrey found Piers to be a useful ally, writing to the king’s chief minister, Cardinal Wolsey, on 3 November 1520:

Beseeching your Grace to cause thankful letters to be sent from the King’s Grace to the Earl of Ormond [i.e. Piers Butler], as well for his diligence showed unto me, at all times, as also for that he showeth himself ever, with his good advice and strength, to bring the king’s intended purposes to good effect. Undoubtedly he is not only a wise man, and hath a true English heart, but also he is the man of most experience of the feats of war in this country, of whom I have, at all times, the best counsel of any of this land.
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Surrey had no intention of alienating Piers, regardless of his family loyalty to his brother-in-law. Even before this letter was written, however, Surrey had put his mind to ways in which the dispute could be brought to an end, writing to Cardinal Wolsey on 6 October of that year to suggest that a marriage should be arranged between Piers Butler’s eldest son, James, who was conveniently then resident in England and a member of Wolsey’s household, and Thomas Boleyn’s remaining unmarried daughter, the future Queen Anne Boleyn.
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Surrey hoped that this would cause ‘a final end to be made’ between Thomas Boleyn and his Irish cousin. This solution was, to the English government, an excellent one, with the king writing back to his deputy to confirm that:

And like as ye desire Us to endeavour ourself, that a marriage may be had and made betwixt the Earl of Ormond’s son, and the daughter of Sir Thomas Boleyn, knight, Comptroller of our Household; so we will ye be mean to the said Earl for his agreeable consent and mind thereunto, and to advertise Us, by your next letters, of what towardness ye shall find the said Earl in that behalf. Signifying unto you, that, in the meantime, We shall advance the said matter with our Comptroller, and certify you, how We shall find him inclined thereunto accordingly.
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Faced with the king’s own personal interest in the matter, Thomas Boleyn could do very little but acquiesce, and he recalled his daughter from France where she had spent some years serving in the household of the Queen of France. On the face of it, the match had much to recommend it and James Butler, who was born in around 1496, was only approximately five years older than his French-educated cousin.
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He was highly educated himself and later evidence suggests that he was a well-liked and personable young man.

The future Queen Anne Boleyn had arrived in England by early 1522, joining the household of Queen Catherine of Aragon. She had little interest in her Irish suitor, quickly beginning her own relationship with a more prestigious potential husband. It is not impossible that she played a role in the stalling of the marriage negotiations: as her sixteenth-century biographer, the favourable George Wyatt pointed out, ‘she was indeed a very wilful woman’.

The fact that the marriage negotiations came to nothing strongly suggests that the Boleyn family, headed by Thomas and his mother, were not favourable to the proposed solution, offering, as it did, only the possibility that one of Thomas’s daughters would be Countess of Ormond, rather than actually securing the title and lands for the family. This position must have looked hopeless however when, in March 1522, Piers Butler was appointed to act as Deputy in Ireland following Surrey’s return to England.
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Although apparently initially favourable to the Boleyn marriage, by May 1523, Piers had come to understand that it was unlikely to occur, with the Earl of Kildare writing to the king that he had heard that he intended to defend his claim to the earldom by force if necessary.
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This was something that the king could not sanction and it may have been an attempt to compensate the Boleyn family, as much as the king’s then romantic interest in Thomas’s eldest daughter, Mary Boleyn, that he created Thomas Viscount Rochford at a lavish ceremony in June 1525, at the same time that the king’s own illegitimate son, Henry Fitzroy, was given two dukedoms and an earldom.

The Butler family’s old English barony, upgraded to a viscounty, was no compensation for an earldom and the family continued to push for the restitution of the title. It was only with the relationship between Henry VIII and Thomas’s daughter, Anne Boleyn, which led to the couple becoming betrothed in 1527, which resolved the matter. In 1527 Cardinal Wolsey was instructed to draw up articles of an agreement to be entered into by Margaret and her sister and Piers Butler.
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The three parties signed in February 1528, agreeing that the earldom of Ormond would be placed entirely at the king’s disposal. The family estates were divided equally between the two sisters, save where it could be demonstrated that their deeds required them to pass to the heir male. At the same time, the sisters agreed that the bulk of the Irish lands would be leased to Piers and his family: a compromise which saved the face of all involved given that Piers had no intention of giving them up. Six days later the king created Piers Butler, Earl of Ossory, in compensation for the loss of his hopes of the Ormond title and in recognition of his efforts in Ireland. That this settlement was legally fair can be seen in the fact that the two sisters were treated equally, with the elder, Anne St Leger, being given precedence in the document. However, the settlement cost Henry VIII financially with the need to bestow and endow a new earldom and it seems highly unlikely that he would have brokered its terms if it was not for the influence of his fiancée: rather, he would probably have allowed the status quo
to continue, regardless of the Boleyn family’s protests. At the end of the following year, after a decent interval, Henry VIII created Thomas Boleyn as Earl of Ormond, as well as resurrecting the old Butler title of Earl of Wiltshire. This was the culmination of all Margaret Butler Boleyn’s hopes, particularly as her own son was granted the family titles in preference to her nephew. It also suitably aggrandised the king’s fiancée.

Thomas Boleyn’s acquisition of the Ormond title had obviously been assisted by the prominence of his daughter. With the fall of Queen Anne Boleyn in May 1536 and the execution of her only surviving (and childless) brother, George, at the same time, Thomas Boleyn quite understandably retreated from court for a time. Although it was never suggested that he should lose his titles of Earl of Wiltshire and Ormond, he had lost the king’s favour. Piers Butler and his son, James, on the other hand, had continued to grown in esteem and had proved themselves great allies to the English in Ireland. James Butler, who was recorded in a grant of land in October 1537 to have ‘shed his blood in the wars against the Geraldines and other rebels’, also proved to be a successful treasurer of Ireland.
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After being disappointed in his marriage to Anne Boleyn, he had married the heiress of the Earl of Desmond and proved to be a loyal and useful ally to the English.

In 1537 a further agreement was finally reached in which it was agreed that, since Piers had been found to be the seventh earl’s heir male and that he had been reputed and accepted as the Earl of Ormond for some time, he should be allowed to make use of the title again, receiving a new creation of the earldom of Ormond.
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In recognition of the undoubted rights of Margaret and her son, this creation did not in fact strip Thomas of his own Irish earldom, with it instead being noted that ‘the Earl of Wiltshire is contented he [Piers] be so named Earl of Ormond in Ireland, semblably as the two Lords Dacres be named the one of the South and the other of the North’. That it was intended that there were to be two independent earls of Ormond – one in England who was also Earl of Wiltshire and one in Ireland who was also Earl of Ossory – is clear from the fact that Thomas Boleyn’s grandson, Lord Hunsdon, felt confident enough to appeal for the return of the Boleyn earldom of Ormond during the reign of his cousin, Elizabeth I, on the basis that the title could pass to heirs general and that he was the eldest son of Thomas’s eldest daughter, Mary Boleyn.
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That Hunsdon was prepared to do this in spite of the prominence and favour shown to the Butler Earl of Ormond at the time is testament to the fact that it was envisaged that there were to be two earls bearing the same title.

Thomas Boleyn and his mother, if she was well enough, were aware of the practical difficulties of remaining in control of their Irish estates and, shortly before Piers acquired the earldom of Ormond in 1537, it was also agreed between the two earls that Piers would lease certain lands in Ireland which nominally belonged to the original earldom, but which Piers had taken back from squatters who had apparently occupied the lands for over 200 years.
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Such lands were never reasonably going to yield any profit to Margaret and Thomas without Piers’s aid and they accepted his tenancy without demure. In any event, the coincidence of Thomas’s return to court in October 1537, when he played a role in the christening of the king’s son, Edward, Prince of Wales, which occurred at a similar time as his agreement with Piers, may have been used to persuade him of the wisdom of agreeing to the king’s demands – with the prospect of a return to his role of courtier being offered if he acquiesced. His hopes were indeed met, with there even being rumours that he would be allowed to marry the king’s niece, Lady Margaret Douglas, after the death of his wife in April 1538.
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Margaret Butler Boleyn inherited her father’s longevity and lived to see a number of great-grandchildren, as well as outliving many of her children and grandchildren. She continued to be involved in relation to her own estates up until the end of her life, for example joining her son Thomas and granddaughter-in-law Jane Parker Boleyn, Viscountess Rochford, as a party to a sale of land in Buckinghamshire in October 1538, which had made up part of her inheritance.
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The extent of her actual involvement must however be questionable, given the evidence of the precarious state of her mental health. Her eldest, and apparently favourite, son, Thomas, died in 1539, something that must have caused Margaret considerable grief if she was well enough to understand. She was living with her son at Hever when he died, remaining at the castle until her own death.
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Thomas had also shown enough concern for his mother that only a year before his own death, he made a grant to her of 400 marks a year from the Ormond lands, ensuring that she remained comfortable in her old age.
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She died in March 1540, aged around ninety.

Margaret Butler Boleyn was one of the most important women to marry into the Boleyn family and she brought the family considerable wealth. She was not the most prestigious Boleyn bride, however, and that honour must go to her daughter-in-law, Elizabeth Howard, who married Thomas Boleyn in the last years of the fifteenth century.

While Sir Thomas Boleyn was frequently associated with his mother during his lifetime, his wife, Elizabeth Howard Boleyn, also played a major role in increasing the family’s prominence at court. Elizabeth, unlike her mother-in-law, brought little financial benefit to her marriage, but socially she was a member of one of the highest noble families in England: surprisingly, the Howards had first been ennobled only a few brief decades before her birth, a fact that accounts for her marriage to a mere knight.

The Howards, who although by the early years of Henry VIII’s reign were one of the most prominent families in England, had obscure origins. By the late seventeenth century they were claiming Anglo-Saxon forebears, with one account suggesting that ‘William the Conqueror found them in a great condition of estate and quality here, according to the mode and method of those times, bearing distinctions proper of barons: they continued most eminent in their country, and linked themselves to the greatest families in the kingdom’.
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Another claim, which was based on the similarity of names, stated that the family were descended from the Anglo-Saxon Hereward the Wake.
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It has been pointed out by a recent historian that ‘this was wishful thinking on their part and the fabrication of clever heralds’.
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In fact, the Howard family line cannot be traced back that far, with the first certain ancestor, a Sir William Howard, appearing depicted in stained glass in the church of Long Melford in Suffolk. Sir William was a lawyer of some standing who had come to the attention of Edward I in the fourteenth century, being appointed as one of the chief justices of Common Pleas.
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The family continued to prosper over the following century, increasing their lands through marriages to East Anglian heiresses on a number of occasions.
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In 1410 the head of the family, John Howard, died leaving an infant daughter as heiress to the bulk of the Howard family lands. This left John’s half-brother Robert Howard with only the small estates of his own mother. It was Robert who eventually brought his branch of the family to the highest levels of the English nobility through his own very unlikely marriage.

The second surviving son of Edward I, Thomas of Brotherton, Earl of Norfolk, left a daughter whose husband was created Duke of Norfolk.
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This couple were also survived by only one daughter, Elizabeth Seagrave, who married John, Lord Mowbray, and was the mother of Thomas Mowbray, who was created Duke of Norfolk in 1397. The first duke was followed by his son, grandson and great-grandson before the title passed to another heiress, Anne Mowbray, who died young. Robert Howard joined the household of the second Duke of Norfolk early in the fifteenth century, a position which brought him to the attention of his patron’s youngest sister, Margaret, when she returned from serving Queen Catherine of Valois in France.
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The match was highly unequal and was arranged between the couple themselves without recourse to the bride’s family. Margaret’s elder sisters made much better matches and the fact that they received manors as part of their dowries, while Margaret received none, does suggest that her family were not entirely happy with the marriage. They accepted the
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with which they were presented, with Robert remaining in his brother-in-law’s employ. The marriage proved to be brief, with Robert’s early death in 1436 although it produced three surviving children.