(© Unknown Artist – The National Portrait Gallery)
One of the many criticisms that surrounded the scandalous notion of King Henry VIII divorcing his almost-perfect-for-the-role Queen and first wife, Catherine of Aragon, was that he was leaving her, a Spanish Princess bred for queenship who embodied everything of what a ideal queen should be, for a low-born woman with evangelical beliefs in a hugely Catholic country. Many within Henry VIII’s court sought to discredit not only Anne but the entire Boleyn family, labelling them as power-hungry wannabes who would do anything to triumph over their enemies and this continued for many centuries following the execution of Queen Anne and the death of her closest relatives.
However, despite Anne not having received the proper training for queenship alike her predecessor Catherine of Aragon, that does not mean to say that she had an advantage that not many other women had that provided her with the strength but the intelligence to hold the prestigious position of Queen of England. And that advantage was her education.
As we learned through the previous post, Anne Boleyn – Her early Life: Humble beginnings, Anne was fortunate enough to receive an extremely high level of education in comparison to other young girls of her social standing. This was only possible due to her father Thomas Boleyn’s position within the English court as he first sent her to the court of Archduchess Margaret of Austria in Mechelen (formerly a part of the Netherlands) until her father would send Margaret of Austria a letter informing her of his instructions to return Anne to England to escort Mary Tudor to the French court for her wedding. And this decision would be one that changed Anne Boleyn’s life in a great many ways and quite possibly made her into the woman that she is so famously known for today. So, let us take a step back in time to 1515, shall we?
. . .
As you might expect with specific dates and events in history, there is no precise date for when Anne Boleyn left the court of Margaret of Austria to return to England. However, we know for a fact that she did leave sometime after August 1514 as Thomas Boleyn wrote a letter, dated on 14th August 1514, to Margaret requesting her permission for Anne to be released from her court and returned to England. The purpose of her returning to England was to accompany an eighteen-year-old Princess Mary Tudor, the younger sister of Henry VIII, to marry the fifty-two-year-old King Louis XII of France. This was an exciting, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and Thomas Boleyn knew this as his own words to Margaret of Austria explained this was a request that “I could not, nor did I know how to refuse.” [1]
After all, who would refuse their daughter the chance to accompany a Princess to her wedding to become a Queen which could potentially offer her the opportunity to become a lady-in-waiting to the Queen of France?
Naturally, Anne was still a vulnerable, innocent, and impressionable teenager at this point and so young ladies had to be accompanied by a chaperone, which Thomas Boleyn so ably provided upon Margaret’s approval for Anne’s departure. However, despite Thomas Boleyn’s request for Anne to be returned to England and then sent alongside her sister Mary Boleyn to accompany Princess Mary Tudor, this did not happen. Historian Eric Ives pointed out that, although Mary’s name, written as “Marie Boulonne”, was present, Anne’s name was missing from the list of ladies paid to accompany Princess Mary. This shows that only Mary Boleyn accompanied the Princess as per her father’s wishes, not both. Instead, Anne left the court of Margaret of Austria and was readily sent straight to the French court where both Mary Boleyn and Mary Tudor already resided as the wedding had already taken place but Mary was yet to be crowned Queen of France. Eric Ives also provided a reason for why Anne was not part of Mary Tudor’s entourage and that might have been because Margaret was, at the time of which the letter was dated and sent, visiting the islands of Zeeland, so she might not have had the chance to read the letter and then she organised for Anne to leave immediately for France rather than to delay her any further [2].
Imagine what thoughts might have been running through young Anne Boleyn’s mind as she was travelling to the French court to serve the soon-to-be-crowned Queen Mary of France. She might have been anxious to be serving a Queen, she might have been excited to see what the future lay in store for her especially since the French court most likely provided more opportunities for young ladies like her rather than the Tudor court. Anne might have pictured the influential people that she might have the chance to speak to or how she would have further occasions to broaden her education by studying Latin or philosophy. In all honesty, I believe that Anne might have felt slightly worried about living in France for the next few years (as King Louis XII was aging and would potentially only live for another couple years) but I feel she would have embraced this new chapter in her life. After all, with her father’s connections within the French court and his ambitious nature (which was the norm for all men in such times, not just for the Boleyns), she must have wondered if he would find her a high-status husband with power and influence within the French court. Anne was aware, even at a young age, that her future was only secured for good once she married someone who could provide both her and her family with potential power and status in France.
This does not mean, of course, that Anne (and her sister Mary) would not have been overwhelmed by the French court upon arrival. Both would have been teenagers with very limited experience in the real world who did not have their parents or their brother to turn to when they needed support. The two sisters would have done their best as attendants or ladies to Queen Mary during her marriage to King Louis XII however, it was to be a short-lived one. Less than three months after their wedding, King Louis XII died on 1st January 1515. It was believed that his cause of death was due to his body being worn out by his ‘exertions’ in the bedchamber, however historians believe his cause of death is more likely to have been from the effects of gout. Regardless of what caused the King’s death, this now left both the Boleyn sisters and the now-Dowager Queen Mary questioning what was to happen to them. Whilst Mary Tudor had the luxury of being the sister of Henry VIII who would provide her with the means to travel back to England to inevitably marry for a second time, unfortunately Anne and Mary Boleyn had no idea what lay in store. Perhaps they thought that their father would order them to return with the Dowager Queen and try and find them positions within other prominent courts.
As a result of King Louis XII being unable to produce a living male heir with Mary Tudor, this meant that his throne would pass not to a son but to someone else entirely. Whilst this might have frightened him to think of what might happen to his country, King Louis had planned for this promptly before his death. Whilst the King did not have any sons, he had two daughters whose futures he had to secure before his death; Claude and Renée. Before his death in 1515, Claude married her cousin and favourite of her father, Francis of Orléans who would be named her father’s successor and become King Francis I of France. Her sister Renée was the Countess/Duchess of Chartres (a position of high power) who would later become the wife to Ercole II d'Este, Duke of Ferrara, the eldest son of yet another influential woman; Lucrezia Borgia.
Francis would immediately become King on 1st January 1515 on the day of Louis XII’s death although he would not be crowned until the 25th January of that same year and Claude had to wait until 10th May 1517, two years later, to be officially crowned Queen Consort of France.
Francis would also make several unsuccessful attempts (most likely with the support of Henry VIII) to arrange a marriage for Mary Tudor. It is even rumoured that Francis hoped that, in the chance that his wife dies in childbirth (something that was not uncommon for Queens), Mary would potentially consider him as a suitor. Whether or not this is true, we do not know but what we do know is that Mary’s first marriage had left her very unhappy and she had expressed this to her brother Henry VIII before the marriage even took place. In agreeing to marry Louis XII, Mary had her brother swear that “if she survived him, she should marry whom she liked” [3]. Essentially, Mary was asking her brother to allow her the freedom to choose her second husband, a most likely reason for why Francis’ arranged marriage attempts were unsuccessful. Mary would indeed freely choose her second husband and it would cause a huge scandal across England and France when her choice of husband was none other than her brother’s best friend and closest advisor; Charles Brandon, the Duke of Suffolk. The couple would marry secretly in March 1515 on the journey home from France, a journey that, prior to his arrival to France, Charles had been specifically made to promise to Henry VIII that he would not propose to Mary. However scandalous their marriage was, it certainly made Mary Tudor happy to know that she had married a man whom she loved and who returned that love.
As for Anne and Mary Boleyn, it seems that their paths went in different ways. Both sisters were taken on into the service of Queen Claude’s household; Mary was made a chamberer and Anne was bestowed the prestigious honour of being a maid of honour to the Queen. For those who do not know, a chamberer or a chambermaid was someone who served their mistress in the privacy of the chamber by performing tasks that were perhaps not the most glamorous e.g. helping the Queen bathe or emptying her chamber pot. A maid of honour was someone who attended on the Queen but was inferior to a lady-in-waiting who would have been a trusted friend and ally to the Queen. Anne might have assumed the role of a lady-in-waiting once she was married. That did not mean that Mary’s role was demeaning or not as important as Anne’s but one might assume that Anne’s previous experience at the court of Margaret of Austria made her more worthy of the title of maid of honour in the eyes of Queen Claude.
However, Mary’s time in the household of Queen Claude and in France is believed to have been a short one, at least according to some historians. There is very little documented about Mary Boleyn’s time in France and much of what we know of her comes years later in 1519/1520 when she married her first husband, William Carey, in 1520 back in England. From accompanying Mary Tudor to her wedding in 1515 to her very own wedding in 1520, she almost disappears entirely from records and we do not know why. However, what has been recorded about her time in France is quite possibly a false claim made many years after her time in France and made when her sister, now Queen Anne, was on the receiving end of insults, false accusations and flat out lies from her enemies. This rumour is what makes Mary as equally scandalous as her sister and many historians argue that the sheer lack of legitimate evidence proves that it was merely created to bring further shame to the Boleyns.
What was this rumour?
Well… that Mary had become the mistress of King Francis or at least engaged in a short affair during her time at his court. The rumour went even further to explain that Mary was known as the King’s ‘English mare’ or his ‘lackey’, a crude way of describing his sexual activities with Mary. King Francis, similar to Henry VIII, was a known womanizer and engaged in many indiscreet affairs during his reign. So, it should come as no surprise that Mary would be later accused of engaging in an affair with two womanizing Kings, with the second being a legitimately proven affair with Henry VIII as he himself confirmed it when he sought and received a papal dispensation to marry the sister of a woman with whom he had engaged in illicit/unlawful intercourse [4].
Mary’s alleged affair with King Francis was only spread about or became ‘common knowledge’ many years later in the late 1530s.
This does not discredit the theory that the affair might have taken place but the lack of evidence leaves this ‘affair’ unproven and unsolved.
Regardless, this rumoured affair would cause scandal for both Mary, Anne, and her family sooner or later. If we consider this affair did take place, it might explain the reason for Mary’s sudden disappearance from records until her return to England in 1519 where she entered the household of Queen Catherine of Aragon, the first wife of Henry VIII, as a maid-of-honour. If Mary had slept with the French King, it would have greatly shamed both her and her sister in the eyes of the French court and Queen Claude, a woman known for her piety and her views on virtue and respectability in the woman of her court.
However, I very much doubt that this alleged affair did take place for three main reasons.
Firstly, if Mary had betrayed her mistress, Queen Claude would have immediately removed her (and quite possibly Anne by association) from her court and requested she return to England. As this did not happen since Anne remained in Queen Claude’s service for many years, we can take this as a form of evidence that the affair was only an alleged one. Secondly, Thomas Boleyn (Anne and Mary’s father) held great power and influence within the French court, more especially from 1518 to 1521 when he was appointed Ambassador to France. If this affair had taken place, it would have shamed Thomas also and more than likely cost him the position he so treasured. And lastly, the claim that Mary was the mistress of Francis I only came into play in around 1536, years after the affair allegedly took place and coincidentally in the same year that saw the downfall and execution of Mary’s sister, Queen Anne Boleyn—the first Queen ever to be executed but sadly not the last.
These claims first came from Rodolfo Pio, the Bishop of Faenza in a letter to Prothonotary Ambrogio dated on 10th March 1536—just two months before Queen Anne was arrested and taken to the Tower. By this point, many within the English court as well as figures from across the globe were beginning to make their distaste and flat-out hatred towards the Queen and the Boleyns explicitly clear. This was potentially due to the fact that the King’s boredom and desire to be rid of his second wife had become common knowledge, although Queen Anne still hoped she could prevent being discarded like her predecessor had before her.
In his letter, Rodolfo Pio speaks in a hostile, cruel manner not only about the Boleyns but also to Henry VIII and his hatred towards him for his choice to marry Anne and make her his Queen. Now, before we examine his words, we must dive a little deeper into who Rodolfo Pio was and why his claims must not be taken at face value.
Firstly, Rodolfo Pio was a Catholic bishop who, in support of Catherine of Aragon and the Catholic faith, held an extreme bias against Henry VIII and the Boleyns as a result. He sought and delighted in chances to present them in a negative and almost unforgivable light to everyone he could, even to the people he was insulting. In fact, in almost every piece of ‘evidence’ that we are presented with in regards to the sinful behaviour of the Boleyns, it has been written by their enemies or people who have a known bias against them. Even if their words are true, the mere fact that they were enemies of the Boleyns makes it difficult to trust the information they present us.
There was no certain number of how many enemies the Boleyns had across the globe but as evangelicals in a primarily Catholic world, it can be assumed that there were hundreds upon hundreds of people who would say anything to cause the downfall of the Boleyns. In these desperate times, the Boleyns had to be careful who they trusted and whom they spoke to as anyone could be turned into an enemy if the wrong thing was said. Even Anne’s own uncle would become an enemy as it was his final verdict of ‘guilty’ at Anne’s trial which sent her to the chopping block.
Even so, in his letter Pio discusses a conversation he has with King Francis that not only ‘proves’ that Mary was his mistress but that Anne Boleyn was a liar and not all she appeared to be:
‘Francis said also that they are committing more follies than ever in England, and are saying and printing all the ill they can against the Pope and the Church; that “that woman” pretended to have miscarried of a son, not being really with child, and, to keep up the deceit, would allow no one to attend on her but her sister, whom the French king knew here in France “per una grandissima ribalda et infame sopre tutte” [a great prostitute and infamous above all].’ [5]
From this section, we can already tell that there are a number of inaccuracies with the first being that his claim that Anne faked a miscarriage is completely false as we know for a fact that Anne did have a miscarriage. Additionally, Mary could not have attended Anne or helped her with ‘keep[ing] up the deceit’ because Mary had been banished from court two years prior by Anne herself after she married a man of lower rank than her without the consent of the King or the Queen. Pio’s words are simply fiction and lies created to add further fuel to the fire and they cannot be taken as the truth.
There are two other men whose accounts acted as ‘evidence’ of the affair between Mary and Francis; Nicholas Sander and William Rastall both wrote books describe a conversation that supposedly details the affair. However, both of them were also Catholics like Pio and were using him (and Rastall also used Sander as a reference) as a reference for their accounts, throwing their believability into question.
Regardless of whether their words possessed any truth within them, their words made many believe that Mary had been the mistress to both the King of England and the King of France which we simply cannot prove to be a fact due to the lack of evidence.
Nonetheless, the question of whether Mary Boleyn was the mistress to King Francis I has often led to the question of whether her sister Anne might have been his mistress as well and this is based off two of the sources we mentioned just above. You see, Nicholas Sander and William Rastall’s accounts were not actually of Mary having an affair with the King but of Anne and we know this because they also make several commonly misconceived claims about Anne to link her to witchcraft such as her having a projecting tooth and an extra finger [6]. And many have been led to think that, prior to her affair with King Henry VIII, it had indeed been Anne, not Mary, who was the French King’s mistress. This was yet another lie conceived to add further ‘evidence’ of Anne’s deceit and sexual promiscuity before her marriage to the King. In their accounts which are both written many years after Anne’s death, they say that Anne:
“behav’d herself so licentiously, that she was vulgarly call’d the Hackney of England, till being adopted to that King’s familiarity, she was termed his Mule” [6].
There is no actual evidence to Anne’s supposed carnal relations prior to her marriage to Henry VIII and, in all honesty, the ‘evidence’ given to prove that she had been unfaithful during their marriage was either from forced confessions (which I do not believe anyone would actually believe given that they are forced to say lies) or from known enemies of Anne and the Boleyns. We see this in how Mark Smeaton was arrested and underwent an unknowable number of hours of painful torture within the home of Thomas Cromwell, prompting him to confess to having carnal relations with the Queen (and also confessing that Henry Norris and her brother George had also) within twenty-four hours of his arrest. Mark Smeaton was of the lowest social ranking than all the other men accused and wrongfully executed and therefore the law did not prohibit Thomas Cromwell from using torture in order to receive a confession of guilt.
Why on earth Henry VIII would have believed and accepted this confession is beyond me—anyone would admit to a crime if they underwent unbearable torture and I honestly think Henry VIII just wanted any excuse or any evidence to get rid of Anne, even if he knew it was not true. The dates and places of which Mark Smeaton confessed that he and the other men had slept with the Queen are proven to be inaccurate as Anne was either away from court or could be proven to have been engaged in her royal duties. One example of this is his confession of having carnal relations with the Queen at Greenwich Palace on 13th May 1535 but we know for a fact that she was not present at Greenwich Palace because she was at Richmond Palace that day. This further proves that Mark Smeaton was just confessing to whatever Thomas Cromwell told him to since Cromwell wanted to have the confession as quickly as possible in order to speed up Anne’s own arrest. Ultimately, both Cromwell and Henry VIII would use it as evidence even if it could be easily proven inaccurate.
The evidence used to condemn Anne Boleyn to die by beheading was simply fabricated by Cromwell to give the King what he wanted; to be rid of Anne Boleyn in order to marry Jane Seymour.
. . .
But what of Anne’s time in France under the employment in the household of Queen Claude? What experiences might she have had? What was the household of Queen Claude like?
Queen Claude was known not only for her beauty and gracefulness but her piety, morality, and virtue. In contrast to her flamboyant husband, the sixteen-year-old Queen Claude devoted herself to her religion and valued modesty, chastity, and virtue in all aspects of life especially in the women she allowed into her court. Pierre de Bourdeille, seigneur de Brantôme, described Queen Claude as “the most worthy and honourable queen that has ever been since Queen Blanche…” whilst Millicent Garrett Fawcett wrote of Claude as “delicate, plain and lame” as a comment on the belief that Claude was a sufferer of scoliosis and was hunch-backed as a result. Queen Claude’s piety, kindness, and success as Queen through delivering numerous healthy children for her husband, King François I, enabled her to not only endure but triumph over her husband’s unfaithfulness and careless flaunting of his mistresses over his wife. Alike Queen Catherine of Aragon, Queen Claude has been praised for her ability to endure the presence of her husband’s mistresses as well as her grace and poise towards the whole situation as she is reported to have never spoken ill towards her husband nor his mistresses. Queen Claude’s respect and success as Queen of France would have influenced Anne Boleyn during her time in France as well as later in life when she herself would become Queen, though sadly Claude would not live to see this happen as she would die very young at the age of twenty-four in July 1524.
During her time in Queen Claude’s court, Anne Boleyn would have been exposed to or even spoken with some influential figures of the 16th century and very powerful women in her day. As a maid-of-honour to Queen Claude, Anne Boleyn would have known Louise of Savoy and Marguerite of Angoulême, the mother and sister of King Francis, very well. Both women held powerful positions within the French court and they even acted as Regent for Francis whilst he was out of the country, showing the extent of the trust Francis placed in his female relatives. Anne also would have known Queen Claude’s sister, Renée of France who was present during Claude’s many pregnancies and therefore labours. Diane de Poitiers, another famous royal mistress this time to Claude’s son King Henry II, also served Queen Claude around the same time as Anne Boleyn so it is possible that they might have shared a friendship based on their similar interests of learning and music. Anne Boleyn was certainly very fortunate to know or be in the presence of these influential women as they most certainly would have influenced her beliefs and passions in life, although we do not know the extent of the relationship between Anne and any of these women.
Anne’s time at the French court also provided her with a more in-depth understanding of a royal marriage and of a woman’s (not only a Queen’s) duty to provide healthy, preferably male, offspring for her husband. Queen Claude was pregnant seven times during her ten-year marriage to King Francis and she opted to spend her pregnancies at the Chateau of Blois where she enjoyed living for a great number of years before and during her marriage. Anne would have attended Claude during her pregnancies and very likely witnessed what childbirth was like for a Queen. This experience would have heightened Anne’s understanding of sexuality, bodily functions, illness, pregnancy, and childbirth and so on, providing her with useful information for when she would one day be married herself, only she did not know that witnessing Queen Claude’s pregnancies and labour would prepare her for royal customs for when a Queen is with child when she would become the second wife of King Henry VIII.
Religion was a very important part of Claude’s queenship as Queen Claude encouraged her ladies to join her in prayer several times a day and although Queen Claude herself was a devout Catholic, she did not prevent her ladies from educating themselves on other religions. Claude’s own devotion to her religion and her acceptance of others exploring other religious avenues is perhaps what led Anne herself to explore more radical or evangelical religious texts. Although one common misconception about Anne Boleyn’s religious beliefs is that she was completely against the Catholic faith which is not true nor was she completely a Protestant. She believed that the Church had become corrupt and abusive, did not benefit the common folk and whilst she did show support for the Protestant cause, it is believed that she still held onto some Catholic beliefs.
Whilst we do not know exactly when Anne left the service of Queen Claude, we do know that she was back in England by 1522 as her father had planned to marry her off to her Irish cousin, James Butler, the 9th Earl of Ormond and 2nd Earl of Ossory. Whatever experiences, ideas, and friendships that Anne had during her time of France would impact her in unimaginable ways as she was, unknowingly, sailing back to England to one day become one of the most famous Queens of England. Had Queen Claude lived long enough to see her former maid-of-honour, and possibly close friend, I believe that she would have showed support towards her instead of the disgust and hatred that others showed Anne when she became Queen.
Join us next time when we explore the next chapter of Anne Boleyn’s life where she entered the service of yet another Queen; Catherine of Aragon and how the love affair between her and the notorious King Henry VIII began.
Until next time!
- Have a ‘Tudor-fic’ week!
References:
Ives, Eric, The Life and Death of Anne Boleyn, p27.
Ives, Eric, The Life and Death of Anne Boleyn, p28.
Weir, Alison, Henry VIII: King and Court, p173.
https://www.tudorsociety.com/unravelling-mary-boleyn-by-sarah-bryson/
Sander, Nicholas, Rise and Growth of the Anglican Schism, in the year 1585.
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