“On 5 April 1530, George received money ‘for the use of Master Weston for 4 games which he won of the King’s Grace at tennis at 4 Angells a game.’ Although it is supposed that Henry VIII hated losing, and that his courtiers took pains to deliberately lose when playing him, the Privy Purse Expenses show this was not the case. The King regularly lost all kinds of games, and he lost huge sums of money to George Boleyn at a variety of different pursuits. Payments were made to George in August and September that year for the hunt, and for archery at Hundson.”
George Boleyn: Tudor Poet, Courtier and Diplomat
Tag: history
“Instead of ruling over and against the court, [Cromwell] ruled through the court: instead of building up his own great household he packed the King’s– and at the very center in Henry’s Privy Chamber. But most striking of all is the men he [chose]: Peter Mewtis, grandson of a French immigrant who had turned his London house into a weaving shed; Ralph Sadler, son of Sir Edward Belknap’s clerk; Richard Moryson, a beggarly scholar. In more ordinary times they would have made their careers as merchants, or lawyers, or dons. Never in a thousand years would they have become courtiers if the all-powerful Cromwell had not made them so.
Only once did Henry object to these strange recruits. Richard Moryson was, I guess, a tedious prig; at any rate Henry drew the line and his appointment, though gazetted, took no effect. ‘I blush as long as I am at the court,’ Moryson complained to his patron. Stung perhaps by this insult to a good servant; more likely disturbed by the rebuff to his own power, Cromwell tried and again and this time successfully foisted Moryson on the reluctant king.”
– Wolsey and Cromwell: Continuity or Contrast? – David Starkey | Published in History Today, Volume 35, Issue 11: November 1985
“What the King ought to have done was to cast away from him, and from the service of his Queen, the lady who is the cause of all this evil. She might have been disposed of in marriage, or shut up in a convent, or sent to Madame [Margaret] with a post of honour in her household. This being done, and the King fasting for several days upon bread and water, with severe penance besides for the scandal given, he should then have commended himself to God and placed the affair in the hands of His Holiness, the only authority in such matters. I would consent to lose my head on the block, if after a month of such a life the King did not become a better husband than ever he was before, and retrieve his soul, ensure his estate, and restore the Queen in all her rights so unjustly taken away from her. Should he do that he would no longer suffer from scruples, and everyone would consider him a good Christian.”
—
Dr. Garay in a letter to Charles V
Spain: October 1530, 16-25
Pages 766-784
Calendar of State Papers, Spain, Volume 4 Part 1, Henry VIII, 1529-1530
#henry: ye so…i’m not doing…any of that sh*t#djjdsjdjdj idk WHY this was so funny to me but just like.#it’s just not realistic dr.
“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.
Henry VIII’s Privy Purse Expenses from November 1529 to December 1532 show that when George [Boleyn] was not on embassy abroad, he was the King’s constant companion. One of the King’s favoured few, the high regard in which he was held is obvious from these entries.
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.”
–David Starkey | Published in History Today, Volume 41: Issue 6, June 1991
“A dispatch from Chapuys to Charles V, dated 28th January, mentions Anne being pregnant and is backed up by a letter from George Taylor to Lady Lisle, dated 7th April, in which Taylor writes ‘The Queen hath a goodly belly, praying our Lord to send us a prince.’
In July 1534, Anne’s brother George Boleyn, Lord Rochford, was sent on a diplomatic mission to France to ask for a postponement of a meeting between Henry VIII and Francis I because of Anne’s condition. Anne was described as being ‘so far gone with child she could not cross the sea with the King.’ “
“There is yet another mention of Anne’s pregnancy in a letter from Chapuys dated the 27th July. Also, Eric Ives writes of how there is evidence that Henry VIII ordered a silver cradle, decorated with precious stones and Tudor roses, from Cornelius Hayes, his goldsmith, in April 1534 and he would not have spent money on such a cradle if he was not sure that Anne was pregnant.
““It seems very likely that the proposed meeting was cancelled because sometime between 26 June and 2 July, disaster struck – Anne was delivered of a stillborn baby, after which the king[…] left her behind at Hampton Court and commenced his already delayed summer progress.
On 18 July we hear from John Husee that ‘The King is now at Oking [Woking Palace Surrey], and comes hither on Tuesday, and will tarry here and at Eltham till Friday, when he will meet with the Queen at Guildford. Southwark, 18 July.’
The king was planning to visit the Princess Elizabeth at Eltham Palace before joining the queen at Guildford, where they were reunited sometime toward the end of July or the beginning of August. The king and queen had been apart for more than a month, their longest period of separation since 1528, when Anne had retired from court in anticipation of the arrival of Cardinal Campeggio.”
“ The secret of the disaster was so well kept that it was only on 23 September that Chapuys reported that the queen — or “the lady” as he insisted on calling her — was not, after all, to have a child. We have to remember that the ambassador had been out of touch with the court while it was on summer progress. Away from the public eye, with a smaller number of attendants than at other times and with both Anne and Henry desperate to conceal it, total discretion was achieved.
“ – Eric Ives“At The Mercy Of The Queen (2012) has Anne experiencing a stillbirth in late June, and shows us afterwards crying over her son’s body.
“Perfect … he is perfect … see his little fingers, long and slender like my own. And his hair, the color of his father’s. So tiny he is, so frail and helpless … I cannot bear it ! I cannot bear that he never even drew a breath on this earth. Why send him? Why send him to me when he cannot draw one breath?”
“Despite the French king having verbally indicated his favour towards the divorce, the university theologians […] had thwarted his wishes and compiled a long list of signatures [against the divorce]. The bulk of Europe was under Imperial control, and the University of Paris was hard to win over.
George [Boleyn] had been sent to try to procure the direct intervention of the French king by means of a written missive. By then, the French court had left for Paris and gone to Dijon, so George set off […] accompanied by a train of courtiers who had been sent to France to accompany him. His aim was to persuade Francis to write to Pierre Lizet, the President of the Parliament of Paris, a man of great power and influence both in Paris and with the Sorbonne.
Stokesley surmised in his letter to Wiltshire that the mission would fail, as Charles V was holding Francis’s two eldest sons as hostages. He felt it highly unlikely Francis would make any direct move, which would, in the circumstances, have the effect of antagonizing Charles.
George was to use every method at his disposal to get Francis to provide direct support. And to the surprise of all, that was exactly what Francis did. George succeeded in obtaining from him a letter instructing President Lizet to dissuade the theologians from disobeying him, and threatening them with punishment if they did so. Francis’s letter is written in the strongest possible terms, saying he is much dissatisfied with those that gave an opinion [against] the King of England’s divorce, and insisting that the fault must be corrected. Francis also promised George that if Beda continued to oppose Henry VIII’s annulment, he would be banished from France.
Remarkably, George, an inexperienced diplomat, had been successful in persuading the King of France to put his full weight behind Henry’s cause, irrespective of the fact that Catherine of Aragon’s nephew was holding Francis’s sons hostage.”
–
“George is described in his entry in Athenae Oxonienses as a man who “was much adored there [at court], especially by the female sex, for his admirable discourse and symmetry of body.” He is also attributed popularity, particularly with the ladies, by George Cavendish, who would have seen George at court.
Despite his antagonism toward the Boleyns, Cavendish cannot prevent himself from singing the personal virtues of George Boleyn, who he portrays as being graceful, attractive, and highly intelligent.
Cavendish’s verse praises the quality of his poetry and his wit (intelligence), and mentions the positions of trust to which he was exalted at an unusually young age:
A rare thing saw or seldom ever heard / So young a man so highly to be preferred
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Things that The Tudors’ Writers Did Right: Anne’s Dances in her Chamber
“…the chronicles and letter-writers pass over them in virtual silence once [Anne] has become Queen. Only the accident of her trial lets us see her dancing with her ladies and the gentleman of the court in her bed chamber. ” – Eric Ives in The Life and Death of Anne Boleyn
“It disappoints me that so many people admire Anne Boleyn. She had a good side but also an intolerant and vengeful side which I think is glossed over. She relished keeping Katherine and Mary apart while Katharine was fatally ill. She encouraged her husband to execute those who opposed her marriage such as Sir Thomas More and Cardinal John Fisher. This and much more. Anne didn’t deserve to be executed especially on those bogus charges. She was framed, but this doesn’t make her innocent.” – Submitted by Anonymous
All reports of Anne allegedly “encouraging” Henry VIII to have More and Fisher executed come from sources that are clearly biased against her, some of whom lack credibility due to their flagrantly obvious lies in regards to other topics:
“William Roper, the chancellor’s son in-law, claimed that it was Anne’s personal vendetta against More which encouraged Henry to demand that he conform.”
“It was More’s nephew, William Rastell, religious exile and (briefly) judge of the court of Queen’s Bench, who gave currency… to the lie that Henry VIII was Anne Boleyn’s father. He also alleged – with obvious echoes of Herodias, Salome and Herod – that Anne put on a great banquet for Henry at Hanworth, where she ‘allured there the king with her dalliance and pastime to grant unto her this request, to put the bishop [Fisher] and Sir Thomas More to death’.
In his edition of More’s English works, Rastell even edited out remarks by Sir Thomas which were favourable to the queen. What More had written in a letter to Thomas Cromwell in March 1534 was:
So am I he that among other his Grace’s faithful subjects, his Highness being in possession of his marriage and this noble woman really anointed queen, neither murmur at it nor dispute upon it, nor never did nor will, but without any other manner meddling of the matter among his other faithful subjects, faithfully pray to God for his Grace and hers both long to live and well, and their noble issue too, in such wise as may be to the pleasure of God, honour and surety to themselves, rest, peace, wealth and profit unto this noble realm.”
[ x ]
As for Bishop John Fisher, Anne Boleyn attended his Requiem Mass– this would be an odd thing to do if she’d encouraged his execution.
As for “relishing” keeping Katherine and Mary apart…what evidence proves that was something she solicited, much less enjoyed? Reports from Chapuys would suggest this, but no others do. It was Henry that insisted they be kept apart (although I don’t know if this is something he “relished”); and he was the only person with the power to guarantee they remained so– not Anne.
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