“In a number of Henry’s letters [to Anne Boleyn], it is apparent that the bearer is often George Boleyn. In one, Henry writes ‘the great affection I have for you has induced me to send you this bearer, to be better informed of your health and pleasure, and because, since my parting from you, I have been told that the opinion in which I left you is totally changed, and that you would not come to court.’ He ends by saying, ‘beseeching you to give credence to this bearer in all that he will tell you from me’; it is more than likely that Henry is talking about George, since no mere courtier would be trusted with such personal information, and the circle of people who knew of the relationship between the King and Anne was limited [in 1527]. From the contents of this letter, it is also apparent that the King visited Anne at Hever reasonably regularly throughout this period. As one of his closest companions, George would have accompanied him, particularly as Hever was his home and Anne was his sister.
The Privy Purse Expenses put to rest the notion that George enjoyed royal favour purely because of his sisters’ relationships with the King. [Henry VIII] would never have suffered the continued presence of a courtier whom he did not personally like, or one from whose company he did not derive pleasure, [and] George was a regular companion to the King for at least 12 years.”
“Both Henry’s defence of the papacy and his breach with it highlight another aspect of this multifarious man: his bookishness. Henry was not the first English king to be literate, but he was probably the first to be thoroughly at home with books. He was certainly the first to write and put one into print himself. Much of the preparatory work (for which Henry naturally had research assistants, like Thomas More) for his Assertio septem sacramentorum must have taken place in the library at Greenwich. This was Henry’s second addition to the palace after the tiltyard, and similarly displaced his father’s at Richmond. Its contents were different too, as Janet Backhouse points out. Henry VII’s library, like Edward IV’s which was incorporated into it, consisted mainly of big, boldly illuminated books. These, like their coffee-table equivalents today, were for patrons who looked at books rather than read them. Henry VIII, on the other hand, read, marked and inwardly digested his, and his annotations, in his unmistakable hand, are still extant in his manuscripts and provide some of the most valuable guides to the otherwise unfathomable processes of his mind.”
