The Boleyns (6 page)
This is a pity, because it was probably at Calais that she first met a dashing young man named William Stafford, who was then an officer of the garrison there. Stafford was the second son of Sir Humphrey Stafford of Blatherwick, Northants., and was a distant kinsman of the last Duke of Buckingham. He seems to have been quite a lot younger than the thirty-three-year-old Mary, probably about twenty.
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At any rate, she fell in love, and he followed her back to England, where he became a hanger on at court, and was a servitor at Anne Boleyn’s coronation. Mary seems to have taken the initiative in their relationship, because Stafford at this point is a shadowy figure, seen mainly in the light of her opinion. Early in 1534 she became pregnant by him, and they were secretly married. For some reason this caused mortal offence to her family. Anne was particularly alienated, although whether by her extra-marital pregnancy or by the marriage which followed it is not apparent. As the Queen’s sister, Mary should have gained official permission for this marriage, and that she clearly failed to do so may have been the cause of the angst. Anne may well have felt that, having survived several years in the King’s bed, her decision to conceive at this point was a statement of some kind. The Queen, who was pregnant herself in the spring of 1534, may also have felt betrayed when her sister had to withdraw from attendance on her due to her own condition. An Imperial report of December 1534 declares that ‘the Lady’s sister was … banished from Court about three months ago … because she had been found guilty of misconduct …’
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William Stafford, for all his exalted kindred, seems to have been thought unworthy to marry a Boleyn. Her annuity of £100 a year was cancelled, and Anne withdrew whatever favour she had extended in respect of the children. So distressed was Mary by these rejections that she wrote to Thomas Cromwell in December, lamenting her plight and begging for his assistance. Her husband was young, and did not deserve so much disfavour. She saw much honesty in him, and he loved her as truly as she did him. ‘For well I might have had a greater man of birth and a higher, but I assure you that I could never have had one that should have loved me so well nor a more honest man …’ Her problem, she implied, was not with the King but with her family. Not only was Anne rigorously against her, but her brother and her uncle the Duke of Norfolk were ‘very cruel’ as well.
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She did not name her father, but the suggestion is that he shared the family’s aversion.
Cromwell appears to have done his best. The King wrote to the Earl of Wiltshire inviting him to make suitable provision for his daughter, being, presumably, unwilling to offend Anne by doing so himself. It is not clear that anything happened immediately, but after the catastrophic fall of Anne and George in May 1536, the remaining Boleyns were reconciled and Thomas allowed Mary and her husband the use of Rochford Hall in Essex, which was part of his estate.
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The wardship of Henry and Catherine would have reverted to the Crown on Anne Boleyn’s attainder, and was regranted to Mary. On 3 April 1537 the Prior of Tynemouth wrote to Cromwell, begging permission to cancel the annuity of 100 marks which she had been granted for obtaining the preferment of his predecessor, because ‘the said lady can now deserve no such annuity as she can do no good for me or my house …’ But this somewhat pusillanimous request was clearly refused, and the annuity went on being paid – at least it was paid out of Augmentations after the Priory was dissolved.
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Between 1539 and 1542 Mary inherited most of her father’s lands, albeit in trust for her son, including Rochford Hall. It was William who obtained in 1541 a licence to alienate the manor of High Roding in Essex, but this did not take effect, presumably because his wife objected. Nor did the Staffords go on being frozen out of the court. ‘Young Stafford that married my lady Cary’ was one of those gentlemen appointed to attend of Anne of Cleves when she arrived to marry King Henry in January 1540, while Catherine Carey, then aged thirteen, was named among the ladies of the new Queen’s Privy Chamber.
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Mary was now at last in control of William Carey’s estate, and she and her husband disposed of quite a lot of it by sale over the years 1539 to 1543. In October 1542 they were pardoned for having alienated 700 acres at Fulborne in Cambridgeshire without license.
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Although Mary did not occupy any position in the Queen’s chamber, William Stafford was a gentleman Pensioner by 1540, and a Esquire of the Body by 1541. He was also named to lead 100 footmen in the ‘army for Flanders’ which was notionally assembled in July 1543, and actually served in the Boulogne campaign of the following year, when he was accompanied by six men.
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Intriguingly, a William Stafford, who was probably the same man, was imprisoned in the Fleet in April of that year for having eaten meat in Lent. This William Stafford was discharged by the council on 1 May, and his brush with the law does not seem to have done him any harm at all. Presumably his evangelical attitude was sympathetically regarded by the dominant party.
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This modest level of favour continued and in May 1543 he and his wife were granted livery of the lands of Margaret Boleyn, deceased, who was Mary’s grandmother, and had outlived her son and grandson. Mary’s son, Henry, being still underage, the lands were allowed to come to her. At the same time the Staffords received livery of the lands of Jane Rochford, George’s widow, who had been executed in 1542 and whose possessions were in the hands of the Crown by virtue of her attainder.
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Perhaps the Duke of Norfolk was now reconciled to her marriage, because someone was looking after their interests, and it was not Thomas Cromwell, who had fallen to the executioners axe in 1540. At some point before July 1543 Mary, but not her husband, was granted the wardship of William Bailey, together with lands in Wiltshire, Kent and Hertfordshire.
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Mary died at Rochford Hall in July 1543, and the legal position in respect of her estate appears to have been exceedingly complex. Lands held jointly with William remained to him, but those which were in her name alone reverted to the Crown, together with the wardship of Henry and Catherine, who were seventeen and fifteen respectively at that point. Catherine may already have been married to Sir Francis Knollys, because her wardship does not feature in the records, and Henry was taken into the royal household, where he appears in 1545. Presumably his estates were released to him at about that time. As might be expected from his brush with the Act of Six Articles, William emerged as a Protestant once Henry was dead, and warmly supported the policy of the new Protector, the Duke of Somerset. He had by that time acquired something of a reputation as a soldier, having served in 1544 as a member of the Royal Household. He also went briefly to Scotland in 1545, in a punitive raid which the Earl of Hertford (as Somerset then was) had launched in September. On the 23rd of that month he was knighted.
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As a known supporter of the regime, Somerset found a place for him in the parliament of 1547, in which he sat for the borough of Hastings – a town with which he had no known connection. At the age of about thirty-five, his career was taking off, and from 1548 to 1553 he served as Standard Bearer of the Gentlemen Pensioners, a position of some standing in the court. Nevertheless he seems to have gone on selling lands, because in February 1544 Sir John Gresham and Sir John Williams were granted lands in Kent ‘lately held by William Stafford and Mary his wife’, which had been purchased by the King. In 1545 he was released of a debt of 200 marks to the Crown, which also suggests continued financial difficulties, as well as the favour which was already developing.
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At some time between 1545 and 1550 he married again, his second wife being Dorothy, the daughter of Henry Stafford, first Lord Stafford, and hence a distant kinswoman, who presented him with three sons to continue his line. Dorothy was also a daughter of Ursula Pole, granddaughter of George, Duke of Clarence, so these sons would have had a distant claim to the throne. The child which Mary had been carrying in 1534 presumably died, and his first wife may well have been too old to conceive again. In 1551 he was sufficiently well known to accompany the Marquis of Northampton when he went to France to bestow the Order of the Garter on King Henry. As late as 24 June 1554 he was paid £900 in respect of his services; services which presumably dated back to before July 1553.
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Sir William was distinctly uncomfortable with the restored Catholicism of Mary’s reign, and when it became obvious that persecution was looming, at the beginning of 1555, he quitted the realm without license and went with his extended household to Geneva, where he was received as a resident on 29 March. Apparently he soon became embroiled in the politics of the city, and was set upon and almost killed in the aftermath of the May rising of that year, for which reason he was shortly thereafter permitted to wear a sword. When the English congregation was organised on 1 November 1555, William and his household became members, and his son John, to whom Calvin stood as godfather, was the first child to be baptised there on 4 January 1556.
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He must presumably have had an agent or agents in England to make sure that the revenues of at least some of his lands reached him in exile, because an establishment of some half a dozen people, with their servants, would have been expensive to maintain. He had lost his position as Standard Bearer of the Gentlemen Pensioners at the beginning of the reign, but was presumably one of those who benefited when a government bill for the confiscation of the property of all such exiles, as he was defeated in the House of Commons in November 1555. The Privy Council was sufficiently interested in him to attempt to prevent other money from reaching him ‘by exchange or otherwise’ in May 1556, but by the time that order was enforced (if it was), Sir William was dead. He died on 5 May 1556, and after a quarrel with his brother over the custody of young John, Dorothy withdrew to Basle, taking the child with her. She was received as a burgher of her newly adopted city on 3 November 1557.
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She returned to England in January 1559, to an appointment as Elizabeth’s Mistress of the Robes, and died at a very advanced age in 1607.
Whether Mary had been in any way sympathetic to William’s nascent Protestantism we do not know. That could have explained the hostility of the Duke of Norfolk, and even of the Earl of Wiltshire to her marriage, but is unlikely to account for the animosity of Anne or of Lord Rochford. In fact very little is known for certain about Mary as a person. Her surviving letters are few, and almost all relate to business. She seems to have been a woman steered by her emotions rather than by her intellect, and that may have been why Henry tired of her in the summer of 1525. Although reputed beautiful she seems to have been somewhat vapid as a person, and the scholarly and artistic accomplishments of the French court made little impression upon her. Once Henry had discarded her, she showed few of the skills necessary for survival in that context, and depended first on the goodwill of Thomas Cromwell and after on the tolerance of the Duke of Norfolk. We do not even know how good she was as a manager either of men or of money, because the signs left in the records are ambiguous. It is perhaps significant that William’s career only appears to have gained momentum after her death. In the context of the Boleyn story she is important first as a foil for her sister, and secondly as the means by which the Boleyn genes were transmitted into the seventeenth century and beyond.
ANNE & THE GRAND PASSION – THE PARIS YEARS
Anne was the first of the Boleyn girls to leave home. Her father had got on exceptionally well with the Regent, Margaret of Austria, during his diplomatic mission to the Low Countries in 1512–13, and had managed to secure for his daughter a place as one of Margaret’s eighteen
filles d’honneur
. When he returned to England in the early summer of 1513 therefore, Anne was promptly despatched under the care of one of the Regent’s Esquires, Claude Bouton. The Regent’s first impressions were favourable, and she wrote: ‘I find her so bright and pleasant for her young age that I am more beholden to you for sending her to me than you are to me …’
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At twelve, Anne may well have been the youngest of her attendants, but Margaret had other young charges to care for and employed a tutor named Symonnet to look after them and teach them their letters. Anne began to write in French at the dictation of her tutors, and then wrote independently to her father, expressing all the right sentiments, but in a language which was more idiomatic than accurate. As Eric Ives has observed, she really did need to work on her written French, however fluently she may have spoken it. Sir Thomas had obviously set out some guidelines for her, and Anne responded:
‘… you desire me to be a woman of good reputation when I come to court, and you tell me that the queen will take the trouble to converse with me ... This will make me all the keener to persevere in speaking French well ...’
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The objective was clearly to give her a head start at the English court, and how long her sojourn in Mechelen was intended to last is uncertain. Probably the intention was to bring her home after two or three years, when she would have been ripe for the marriage market. The Regent’s court was the great exemplum of the Burgundian tradition, and the finest place in Europe to learn deportment.
So Anne would have learned a lot, apart from improving her French. The elaborate dances which occupied such an important place in court festivities and entertainments would have been on the curriculum. A court presided over by a woman was expected to make much of the courtly love tradition, and the chivalric traditions flourished there. The pageants featured imprisoned damsels, noble knights (to rescue them), wild men, mythical beasts and ships in full sail, each with its point to make in the subtle diplomacy of the renaissance.
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So Anne would have learned the bass dance, that graceful staple of courtly revels, how to play a number of musical instruments, and how to conduct that game of artificial flirtation which was expected of all the maidens at the court. Margaret was a rigid chaperone, and was much concerned that these games did not get out of hand. They were to be played in strict accordance with the conventions, and any genuine by-play with the gentlemen of the court was strictly forbidden. At thirty-three the Regent was an old hand in these arts, and quite capable of expressing her views in graceful verse:
Trust in those who offer you service,
And in the end, my maidens,
You will find yourselves in the ranks of those
Who have been deceived …
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The remedy lay in a quick wit:
Fine words are the coin to pay back
Those presumptuous minions
Who ape the lover …
So Anne learned to flirt, not with her body, but with words and gestures in a manner which would have been well enough understood by those who approached her with tokens and looks of love. Margaret’s original training had been in France, where she had been sent at the age of three as the intended bride of Charles VIII. However, in 1491 Charles had decided to marry Anne, the heiress of Brittany, and at the age of eleven, Margaret had been returned to the Low Countries, where Maximilian had arranged tutors to continue her education.
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Her background has therefore been described as ‘Franco-Flemish’, although there were no strains between the two cultures. Brief spells in Spain and in Savoy did nothing to disturb that orientation, and when she returned to the Low Countries as regent after the Archduke Philip’s death in 1506, she established her court at Mechelen in that mould. Her palace was resplendent with tapestries and with rich fabrics of all kinds, and the finest artists and calligraphers also displayed their work there. Music, both in its sacred and its secular forms was cherished, and the best composers of the day were patronised; so Anne would have learned the most discriminating taste in every aspect of courtly life, while preserving the ‘precious jewel’ of her chastity.
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In her turn, she made an impression which lasted many years. Lancelot de Carles later recorded:
la Boullant, who at an early age had come to court, listened carefully to honourable ladies, setting herself to bend all her endeavour to imitate them to perfection, and made such good use of her wits that in no time at all she had command of the language …
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Altogether a better start for an ambitious damsel would be hard to imagine.
Anne also seems to have made herself useful, because on 30 June, not very long after her arrival, Henry VIII arrived at Calais at the beginning of the campaign which would culminate in the taking of Tournai on 23 September. His allies, the Emperor Maximilian and the Archduchess Margaret, needed to keep in touch with him, and English speakers were at a premium, so there is every chance that Mistress Boleyn was called into service as an interpreter. When Margaret joined the victors at Lille in September to celebrate their success, she was certainly accompanied by her ladies, and there Anne would have had a chance for a brief reunion with her father, who had accompanied the King.
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At first Henry had every intention of renewing hostilities in 1514, but in the course of the spring he changed his mind. The Holy League was falling apart, because not only had Ferdinand defected, but the Pope was now pressing for peace. So a treaty was signed in August which had serious implications for Anglo-Burgundian relations. Henry’s sister Mary was committed to marry the fourteen-year-old Charles of Ghent, Maximilian’s grandson and Margaret’s nephew, by the terms of their alliance. Now she was suddenly switched to the fifty-two-year-old Louis XII. Her own feelings were not consulted, and Margaret was seriously offended. Sir Thomas Boleyn may well have felt that the court at Mechelen would be an uncomfortable place in future for a young English girl, and he took advantage of the creation of a new household for Mary to withdraw her. He wrote a somewhat embarrassed letter to Margaret on 14 August announcing his decision, and the Regent, as he anticipated, was not pleased.
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What Anne thought of the new arrangement we do not know. She had been happy at Mechelen, but the thought of serving the new Queen of France, and one whose command of French was definitely inferior to her own, may well have been an exciting one. Unfortunately, we do not know how, or just when, the transfer was made, because only one Mistress Bullen features in the wedding list, and that was her sister Mary. It is possible that Margaret raised objections, or put obstacles in the way of her departure. However, that is not likely and the chances are that Anne joined her sister in Paris at some time before Mary’s coronation on 5 November. Later memories of her presence are quite explicit, but no contemporary list survives to confirm it.
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Mary’s reign, however, was a brief one, and on 1 January 1515 she was a widow. For the time being, her household held together, and both the Boleyn girls would have had the chance to observe at close quarters the behaviour of the Duke of Suffolk as he played the game of courtly love in earnest with the nineteen-year-old dowager. What Mary Boleyn may have learned we do not know, but Anne almost certainly learned the difference between the conventional game and the real thing, especially when the ex-Queen actually got into bed with her lover. Charles Brandon was an old hand at courtly love. He had even played it with the Archduchess a couple of years before, but this time the chances are that he got more than he had bargained for.
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The couple were secretly married, but is unlikely that either of the sisters was a witness to that clandestine occasion, because the fewer who knew about it the better. Meanwhile, as we have seen, Henry was genuinely annoyed, and it was May before he was sufficiently placated for them to return to England, and to a public renewal of their wedding vows. Whether Sir Thomas was responsible for what then happened in France, we do not know – he was reportedly unpopular at the French court, so perhaps it is unlikely – but his two daughters were transferred to the service of Queen Claude, the consort of the new French king, Francis I. Lancelot de Carles, writing in 1536, was quite clear in recalling that Anne, at least, was retained by the express wish of the Queen.
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The two girls were of an age, and it is quite likely that Claude, who had a warm and gentle nature, was genuinely fond of her. Equally, with much future diplomatic business between England and France in prospect, and with many English visitors to entertain, either she or her husband might have thought it expedient to have some English speaking ladies on hand. Mary, as we have seen, left under something of a cloud about two or three years later, but Anne served for something like seven years, and that was as formative a period of her life as the year which she had spent at Mechelen, although in a rather different way.
Most of the evidence which we have for her years at the French court is either circumstantial or retrospective. Culturally there was little difference, but serving a girl who was almost constantly pregnant must have been a very different experience from attending the urbane and widowly Margaret. Having no family base in France, Anne must have been permanently resident in the household, which spent most of its time at Amboise or Blois on the Upper Loire.
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This meant that in courtly terms her life was much less public than it had been before. Francis was a frequent visitor, and he brought his attendants with him, so it is not safe to assume that Anne was free from unwelcome attentions, but courtly love, as that would have been practised in a full court was not on the agenda. Nor were lavish entertainments as frequent as might be supposed. She may have taken part in the ceremonial journey which Claude and the Queen Mother, Louise of Savoy, made to welcome back Francis after his victory at Marignano in October 1515, and would certainly have been present when the Queen (in an interval between pregnancies) was crowned at St Denis in May 1516. However, she was most in demand, naturally, when there was a significant English presence, as in December 1518 when an English mission arrived to negotiate a marriage between Henry’s two-year-old daughter Mary and the oneyear- old Dauphin.
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A magnificent banquet was held in the Bastille, when there was much dancing, and the ladies appeared at midnight, dressed in the latest Italian fashions. The next day there was a tournament, followed by more dancing, and Anne would have been in heavy demand as an interpreter. As we have seen, Sir Thomas was himself on mission in France in 1519, and although there is no direct evidence of the fact, he would have taken some time to spend with his daughter, whom he had scarcely seen for five years. She was now a poised and self assured eighteen-year-old. More obviously we know that Anne was called into service at that great Anglo-French junketing known as the Field of Cloth of Gold. She was among the Queen’s ladies, and must have played an ambiguous role in the ‘beauty competition’ which developed between her compatriots and the attendants of Queen Catherine. Richard Wingfield, who had recently taken over from Sir Thomas as resident ambassador, warned Henry of what to expect in that connection: