4

A Very Great Whore?

Sometime during her six-month sojourn in France, the teenage Mary Boleyn apparently succumbed to the temptations of the court—and they were manifold. The sybaritic and notoriously licentious Dauphin, later King François I, who epitomized all the ideals expected of, and admired in, a Renaissance monarch, and whose magnificent court, despite being one of the great centers of European culture and civilization,¹ was to become a byword for debauchery, set the tone. He was habitually “clothed in women,” considered whoring a daily sport on a par with hunting,² and boasted of his special “petite bande” of courtesans. From 1518, he acknowledged several maîtresses-en-titre in succession—an arrangement that would no doubt have horrified Henry VIII and his courtiers—not to mention indulging in casual affairs with numerous “sweethearts,” in which he drank “from many fountains.”³ A notorious voyeur, he commanded spyholes and secret doors to be made in his palaces, so that he could watch women undressing and making love. He himself declared that “a court without ladies is like a year without springtime, or a spring without roses.”

François was then twenty-one, an impressive six feet in height, and broad-shouldered, with an athletic physique and slim legs, although already he was putting on weight. He was considered handsome, with his dark, saturnine looks and long Valois nose, his cynical eyes and sensual, mocking lips, and he was undoubtedly attractive to women. A contemporary described him as “young, mighty, and insatiable, always reading or talking of such enterprises as whet and inflame himself and his hearers.”⁴ Cultivated, intelligent, artistic, and open-handed, yet at the same time wily and extravagant, he was also spirited, literate, and a brilliant, merry, and witty conversationalist who had impeccable courtly manners and boundless ambition. To his contemporaries, he exemplified all the kingly virtues.

He had lost his virginity at fifteen, and thereafter was “all fire and flame for the ladies.”⁵ Married that same year, he grew fond of his wife, the patient, plain, plump, and crippled Claude, but treated her chiefly as a brood mare. His were rarely affairs of the heart; he loved women in two ways, for sex and for their beauty, of which he was a connoisseur. On the evidence of portraits of his mistresses, he was attracted to plump brunettes, which leaves one to wonder whether Mary Boleyn fit that description. It is certainly possible, since her sister Anne was a brunette and her son, Henry Carey, had brown hair.

The French court might have been one of the greatest cultural and artistic centers in Christendom, but English observers often professed themselves shocked at the lax morality that prevailed there. Gallantry was the order of the day, with “rejoicing and entertainment,” but promiscuity reigned. “Rarely did any maid or wife leave that court chaste,” wrote a contemporary.⁶ One of François’s princely relations commissioned a gold cup engraved inside with an image of a couple having sex, and he would watch with prurient interest as the lady he fancied drained it to reveal the erotic relief, and await her reaction. The King’s own almoner, a priest called Buraud, felt obliged to apologize to his mistress for having satisfied her only twelve times in one night, claiming it was the fault of a medicine he was taking.⁷

There is just one piece of evidence to suggest that, for a brief spell, Mary Boleyn became the mistress of King François himself, but it dates from more than twenty years later. On March 10, 1536, Rodolfo Pio, Bishop of Faenza, the Papal Nuncio in Paris, was to write that “the French king knew her here in France ‘per una grandissima ribalda et infame sopre tutte’ ” (“for a very great whore, and infamous above all”).⁸ It is this statement—bolstered by later gossip that actually referred to Anne Boleyn—that has led numerous writers to assume that Mary acquired a notorious reputation at the French court.

For example, it has been asserted that Mary’s “first venture into the wider world and the dazzling experience of the French court went to her head”;⁹ that she “was so liberal with her favors that she acquired a very unsavory reputation,”¹⁰ “on both sides of the Channel, for sleeping with anyone.”¹¹ These, and many more claims of a similar nature, are dubious assumptions—because, according to the historical evidence, Mary never incurred notoriety or infamy as a royal mistress.

Pio was demonstrably not the most accurate of sources, often treating gossip as fact; for example, the information he was to relay about the arrest of Anne Boleyn in 1536 was incorrect; and he was the originator of the notorious story that Henry VIII lay unconscious for two hours after a fall from a horse that year,¹² a tale that was uncorroborated by any observer in England, but is still widely believed today, even by some historians, who have constructed elaborate theories about this concussion being responsible for brain damage that would explain the King’s “sudden” change of character and later cruelties.

As the Pope’s official representative, Pio was naturally inclined to vilify the antipapal Boleyns, especially in 1536, after Henry VIII’s break with Rome and Anne Boleyn’s elevation to queenship. Pio’s letter was written only six weeks after Katherine of Aragon’s funeral and Anne Boleyn’s final miscarriage (which occurred on the same day, January 29), and his comments about Mary were made after he averred incorrectly that Anne—“that woman”—had only pretended to be pregnant and had faked her miscarriage. He did not scruple, therefore, to make disparaging remarks about Mary, whom he—again incorrectly—supposed to have been the only lady in attendance on her sister during her premature confinement, in order to abet Anne in her deception and preserve secrecy. No other commentator records Mary’s presence on that tragic occasion, and it is doubtful she was even in England at the time.

We might wonder if this statement that François I had known Mary for a great whore is as suspect as others made by Pio, yet the inaccuracies in his reports lie chiefly in his accounts of events in England, which were evidently based on garbled hearsay and rumor. He was actually present at the French court, so had access to more reliable information, and the ear of the King, so we cannot lightly dismiss what he wrote. Yet he did not specifically state that François himself had described Mary as a great and infamous whore—although many modern writers¹³ have assumed that the King actually called her that—only that he knew her as one.

This ambiguous wording might imply that the King merely had knowledge of her being free with her favors, yet it seems odd for Pio to have singled out only François for knowing this, when certainly—if it were true—other people must have known it too; and if he had intended that meaning, he would surely have written that Mary was known to be a great whore. No, the word “knew” is almost certainly meant in the biblical sense here, and it is used to show that François knew Mary as a whore, rather than as amaîtresse-en-titre. How Pio discovered this is unclear; it could well have come from King François himself, speaking man-to-man of the moral shortcomings of the Boleyns; or Pio could have heard it from any number of people at court. The fact that a minor matter for scandal dating from more than two decades before was brought up at all suggests that there was some substance to the allegation. What is surprising is that Pio does not mention Mary’s later relations with Henry VIII; clearly he did not know about them, which shows that that liaison was never notorious either. Instead, he derided her for an earlier affair that must have been of much shorter duration, but—far from conferring infamy on Mary—was of such little consequence that no other source mentions it.

It does not seem likely that François I—an experienced libertine and notorious womanizer—would have called Mary “a very great whore, and infamous above all.” That was certainly saying something, for the French court was reputed to be the most scandalous in Christendom.¹⁴ If Mary’s reputation had been that notorious, we would have other reports of it. What could this young girl have done to shock such a seasoned man of the world as the French king? Only weeks before, her mistress, Mary Tudor, had been complaining about her young attendants’ lack of experience and knowledge of the world. Had Mary, in such a short time, become practiced enough at lechery to merit such a scathing insult? It seems unlikely.

By March 1536, although François had long been a friend to Anne and her faction, his good relations with Henry VIII had become frosty, and the latter was leaning toward an alliance with France’s enemy, the Emperor Charles V. At the time Pio wrote his report, François would not have been well disposed toward his English rival. Moreover, Anne had miscarried a son, and her future now seemed uncertain. One might suspect that, in this political climate, François felt at liberty to denigrate the Boleyns, and that he might have grossly exaggerated what he remembered of Mary. Yet the French court historian Brantôme states that “King François, who was very fond of the ladies [although he was convinced that they are most changeable and fickle], never would have any slandering of them at his court, but insisted on their being accorded great honor and respect.” It is unlikely, then, that he would have spoken so unchivalrously of Mary.

It seems therefore that the zealous Pio, who, as the Pope’s spokesman, hated everything that the Boleyns stood for, was reporting what he had been told in private by the French king or someone else in the know, and himself exaggerated it to score a political point; and that the description of Mary as an infamous whore comes from Pio, placing his own construction on Mary’s conduct, and not from François I.

This theory effectively demolishes a reader’s thoughtful suggestion that François’s cruel jibe about Mary was made because she had actually spurned his advances. That she did so, at least to begin with, is certainly possible, given that, later on, she seems to have surrendered to Henry VIII against her will. It has also been suggested that Pio’s remark of 1536 was based on what François had learned, during Henry’s visit to Calais in 1532 (when he was accompanied by both Boleyn sisters), of Mary’s affair with the English king¹⁵—but Pio did not mention this, as might be expected if that were the case; or that a jealous François had been angered to hear that Mary had taken up with his rival, Henry VIII,¹⁶ although this does not take account of the years that had elapsed between the two liaisons. Had François been so enamored of Mary, he could easily have arranged for her to stay on at the French court after 1515, yet there is no record of her there, while there is plenty of evidence for his other affairs—even short-lived ones.

The complete absence of any corroborative contemporary evidence to support the claim that Mary was the most infamous of whores fatally undermines Pio’s statement—and all the modern myths about her reputation. There is no other proof whatsoever that Mary Boleyn “quickly adapted to the immoral atmosphere” of the French court,¹⁷ or that she soon learned to enjoy “sexual dalliance,”¹⁸ or became very free with her favors and adventurous in bed. She has been seen as “an inviting, eager girl, ripe and nubile”¹⁹ whose “youth, beauty, and inexperience led her into a series of short-lived encounters as she was passed from the King, who quickly tired of her, to his favorites,”²⁰ while jumping into bed with François and his cronies “seemed to her to be a dazzling career of advancement.”²¹ There is no evidence to support any of this. One writer has even fantasized about Mary becoming “an adept at those Paris refinements which, while they scandalize, are irresistible to the most virtuous of men. Her heart was generous, her body responsive. At Fontainebleau, at Amboise, she had refused no one.”²² Small matter that Mary is not known to have visited Fontainebleau and never traveled as far south as the Loire Valley.

This same writer accused Mary’s parents of abandoning her to “the vicissitudes of foreign courts” where she could not protect herself from men,²³ when in fact Sir Thomas Boleyn was affording his daughter the best opportunity of advancement and a good marriage in placing her in Mary Tudor’s train. It has been said he had cared little that, in sending his daughters to France, he had exposed them to the most licentious court in Europe,²⁴ but presumably he had trusted to their youth, their training, and Queen Mary’s protection. As for the unsubstantiated assertion that he was the first to criticize when word of Mary’s “many affairs” got back to England²⁵—what “many affairs,” one might ask? The worst that could be said, on the evidence we have, is that Mary had a brief liaison with François I. The rest is pure imagination.

There is a modern perception, though, that her reputation was soon such that she was “known to be at everyone’s disposal. Even at the lascivious French court, there was a code of discretion; Mary had offended it. She was either sent or withdrawn hastily to England.”²⁶ It has been imagined that, after being quickly discarded by François I, Mary was “laughed at by courtiers,”²⁷ that this “warmhearted and ductile girl made the mistake of scattering her favors too widely and making her affairs too public”²⁸ and that she would return to England “with a colorful reputation for wanton behavior.”²⁹ Again, all this is supposition.

In fact, Mary’s liaisons with François I and later with Henry VIII were conducted so discreetly that not a single comment was made about them at the time. François I, as we have seen, was notorious for his amours. From 1518 his maîtresses-en-titre would preside publicly over his court, attracting much comment. In an era in which few courtiers commissioned portraits of themselves—the number painted by Jean Clouet, for example, was modest—several of these mistresses had theirs done to mark their elevation to the royal bed, among them Françoise de Foix, Dame de Châteaubriant; Marie de Langeac, Dame de Lestraunge; Marie de Macy, Dame de Montchenu; Anne d’Heilly, Duchess d’Étampes; and Marie d’Assigny, Dame de Canaples.³⁰ Had Mary Boleyn been of any significance in the King’s life, there would surely have been some evidence of it. But clearly she was not.

Her affair with François was probably so brief and covert that we might not expect to find a record of it; but there is also no contemporary record of her behaving in such a manner as to incur notoriety or gain a reputation for promiscuity—when there certainly would have been if she was conducting herself so immorally as to earn for herself the dubious distinction of being known as the most infamous whore at the licentious French court. It was acceptable for men to indulge themselves in this way; but in a young, unmarried woman of good birth, it would have been worthy of comment, Furthermore, such conduct would have reflected badly on Mary Tudor, who was responsible for the moral welfare of her female attendants—as Louis XII had been well aware when he dismissed Jane Popincourt from her service.

Pio does not reveal when François and Mary had briefly been lovers, but his statement, written in Paris, that the King “knew her here in France,” must surely indicate that it happened when Mary was at the French court in 1514–15,³¹ as most writers³² have concluded. There is no evidence, however, to back up the statement that, because of her promiscuity, Mary was dismissed from Queen Claude’s service in 1519.³³

It has also been suggested that the affair could have flourished during Mary’s two later sojourns in France: at the meeting of the English and French courts known as the Field of Cloth of Gold in 1520, or during Henry VIII’s visit to Calais in 1532, when she accompanied her sister Anne and met with King François.³⁴ Yet in 1520, Mary was newly married, in the train of the virtuous Queen Katherine, and accompanied by her parents and her aunt. It would not have been easy, in such circumstances, to have indulged in a secret affair with the King of France, given the extensive interest that attended the Field of Cloth of Gold, that very public event. In 1532, Calais was an English possession and not part of France, so it is hardly likely that Pio was referring to Mary having an affair with François there: Calais was not “here in France.” Nor is François likely to have uttered his disparaging remarks about Mary’s virtue at this meeting,³⁵ as they were not reported by Pio until three and a half years later, and in very different circumstances.

When, in 1514–15, might this affair with King François have occurred? Circumstantial evidence might suggest that it was toward the end of that period. It has been said that the liaison was going on for a few brief “months” in 1515,³⁶ but that is pure guesswork, and had it lasted that long, it might have attracted interest or comment. In 1515, François’s favored mistress was a beautiful Parisian called Jeanne le Coq, whom he visited by night, accessing her house in Paris through a neighboring monastery; but that is not to say he had renounced other women. There had been opportunities for his affair with Mary to flourish in the three months of Mary Tudor’s queenship, and he could also have pursued her during his visits to the Hôtel de Cluny, or wherever she was lodging after she had been temporarily dismissed from the Dowager Queen’s household. It has been surmised that Queen Mary’s example in marrying for love indecently soon after her husband’s death “gave her namesake carte blanche to behave in a similar manner”³⁷—but the two cases do not bear comparison, and it is unlikely that Mary Boleyn was more than infatuated with her royal pursuer.

More credibly, the affair could have happened after Mary Tudor left the seclusion of her chamber at the Hôtel de Cluny and returned to Paris, where, on February 13, she watched from an upstairs window as the new king made his state entry into his capital, and later attended the celebratory banquet. It has even been claimed that the affair took place when Mary Boleyn was supposedly in the service of Queen Claude³⁸—which she never was.

Everything points to her affair with François having been “extremely brief,”³⁹—a heat-of-the-moment episode or one-night stand, even—and there is no evidence at all that, when François “soon tired” of Mary, he “passed her on to his courtiers,”⁴⁰ nor that this “shocked” or “frightened” Anne [Boleyn].⁴¹ And it may be unsafe to assert that it was probably at this point that Anne discovered “how women really could be exploited and mistreated, that she decided to protect her greatest asset, her purity, at all costs”;⁴² for Anne herself, as we will presently discover, had been “corrupted” at the French court.⁴³

We might infer from Anne Boleyn’s speedy preferment at the French court—it was she who was appointed a maid of honor to Queen Claude, a highly sought-after position—that she was the cleverer and more charming of the Boleyn girls, the one thought most fit for the high honor of serving first the Archduchess Margaret and then the Queen of France and, later, the French king’s sister; and that Mary Boleyn was less accomplished and able, and therefore somewhat in her younger sister’s shadow—in the eyes of her family at least. That may be true, and if so, Sir Thomas Boleyn’s disappointment in his elder daughter would surely have been compounded by finding out that she had lost her virtue to the King of France and—as if that was not bad enough—had not received in return any tangible benefits such as a financial reward or even an honorable marriage.

It makes sense of the later events and course of Mary’s life to assume that her family did find out what had passed between her and François I. It is unlikely that Mary herself told them—what girl of gentle birth would confess to compromising her honor, unless there were to be consequences that had to be dealt with discreetly? We don’t, of course, know that there were not, and it would be fruitless to speculate; but for the rest of her life, as will become clear, there is intermittent evidence to suggest that Mary was held in little account or affection by her family; and one gets a sense that she was a continuing disappointment to her “outstandingly learned” father,⁴⁴ and probably to the rest of the family too.

It would make sense that Mary Tudor also knew about her maid of honor’s fall from grace—and that she found out toward the end of her sojourn in France. Someone in her household—Madame d’Aumont, possibly, whose duty it was to be vigilant in all matters concerning the conduct of her charges—might easily have noticed something amiss, and may even have tackled the girl, forcing a confession. The matter would then have been reported to Queen Mary, who, responsible as she was for the moral welfare of the young ladies in her household, would have been duty bound to write to Sir Thomas Boleyn. Discretion would have been essential, given the recent scandal of Mary Tudor’s marriage to the Duke of Suffolk, and we might imagine that that lady was not best pleased to learn that Mary Boleyn had risked linking her to further scandal. This is all informed speculation, of course, but it is credible because it provides an explanation for subsequent events—and for the Boleyn family’s antipathy toward Mary.

Her parents’ evident disapproval—their dislike, even—may well have dated from this time.⁴⁵ Even Anne Boleyn, who conceivably was taken into Mary’s confidence, and would have surely known the reason for her sister’s disgrace—may have shared their feelings. As far as the family were concerned, there was good reason for their disapproval, and Sir Thomas Boleyn may have felt compelled to act upon it, as will be discussed shortly. He could not allow Mary to remain where she was; her very presence in the Queen Dowager’s household was compromising to that lady, and besides, he was probably of the opinion that his daughter needed to be taught a lesson.

What does all this tell us about Mary? The myth of her “extremely wanton reputation”⁴⁶ has predictably colored historians’ assessments of her character.

Some see her as a generous, amiable, easygoing, warmhearted but not very clever person,⁴⁷ or “an obliging if colorless girl,”⁴⁸ but that view presupposes that she fell willingly into royal beds. It has even been said that her reputation “was gone before she reached seventeen,”⁴⁹ and that her character was therefore “beyond rescue.” Even so, she was “a not altogether unamiable personality.”⁵⁰ She has been described as “pretty but insipid,”⁵¹ “eager to please and generous,”⁵² and “charming and agreeable.”⁵³

One author writes of her “docility,”⁵⁴ where another sees her as “a high-spirited, rather giddy girl who enjoyed all the pleasures of the court on offer.”⁵⁵ She has been called “racy,”⁵⁶ and it has been suggested that “the air of innocence her Rubens-like coloring gave her hid a nature passionate, responsive, thoughtless, and weak”; she was “sexually pliant” and almost certainly “did not possess the stubborn spirit and bad temper of her sister.”⁵⁷

Others have been even more creative in their assessment of Mary Boleyn. It is evident that she became an object of fantasy for male writers of an earlier generation. One imagined her “discreetly letting it be known that she was always prepared to continue an interesting religious or political discussion in bed.”⁵⁸ Another thought she “was by nature simple.”⁵⁹ She was also called “a lighthearted and easy-spirited girl, the sort of being who is soon in intimacy with men, knows the morose valleys between the heights of their ardor and the heights of their disdain, and is aware that she must inveigle or humor the beasts, or be beaten. She had not much iron in her character. She was one of those ingratiating yet simple women to whom it would never be of great importance to say no, who are pliant and sweet, who cling like ivy and are as easily detached.” She “yielded to the happy moment.”⁶⁰

That is a view echoed by some modern writers: one describes Mary as “a woman who lived for the moment and dived head first into love affairs,” someone who was kind and loving and “followed her heart.”⁶¹ The last statement was self-evidently true, given that, years later, Mary was to defy her family, and the King and Queen, to make a second marriage for love. Another author writes of her “spirited behavior,”⁶² and she is also seen as passionate,⁶³ on the evidence of a letter written in the wake of that misalliance—which was probably true as well.⁶⁴

There is little evidence to show that Mary was “serenely sure of herself,”⁶⁵ and none that she saw her “road to advancement” as being “through her use of her feminine wiles to manipulate men” or believed that “her reputation was to be sacrificed to be close to men of the highest influence.”⁶⁶ She was not “remarkably successful” in realizing any such ambitions.⁶⁷ Even if this were the case—although there is evidence that she was reluctant to become Henry VIII’s mistress—Mary seems to have lacked the ability or will to carry through any grand design; she emerged from her affairs with kings barely the richer, and having wielded little or no influence. As for manipulating men, she was clearly not adept—at least in her younger years.

If, as seems likely, François I was Mary’s first lover, we can hardly blame her—reluctant or not—for submitting to him, or even for having her head turned. She was young, inexperienced, living at a licentious court in a foreign land, and the daughter of a mother who may have been known for her infidelities. He was the King of France, all-powerful and commanding—how could a young, untried girl deny him? One brief amorous episode in youth does not define a woman’s character. In fact, it tells us very little about her.

Anne Boleyn, it has been claimed, “must have been horrified at Mary throwing herself away so cheaply”;⁶⁸ given, of course, that Mary did, for the chances are that she had little say in the matter. But Anne too risked becoming the subject of scandal at the French court. In July 1535, King François was to confide to Rodolfo Pio “how little virtuously she has always lived, and now lives”;⁶⁹ he may have been referring to Anne’s later reputation, but in 1536, Henry VIII himself would reveal to Eustache Chapuys, the Imperial ambassador in England, that it was only after he had begun having sexual relations with Anne that he found out she had been corrupted in France.⁷⁰ After her death, when offered a French bride, the King insisted “he had had too much experience of French bringing up and manners”⁷¹—a clear reference to Anne Boleyn. Evidently Anne was discreet and clever enough to ensure that barely a soul knew of these early falls from grace.

Contrary to modern popular opinion, Mary Boleyn too seems to have been discreet; aside from taking her cue from her royal lovers in this, she would no doubt have feared for her reputation, and hopefully had some regard to her future and her family’s ambitions and sensibilities. Given the absence of any contemporaneous evidence that hints at promiscuity on her part, it is surely time for the traditional view of her as a willing, even adventurous, sexual partner who cared little for the loss of her good name, and was “a full participant in the sensual pastimes of the French court,”⁷² to be rebutted.

In 1512, François’s mother had written to a correspondent that her son had a disease in his private parts, which had fortunately been cured,⁷³ almost certainly by the administration of mercury, which was the standard cure for syphilis at that time. Joanna Denny repeats the oft-told tale that François caught it again from a later mistress, La Belle Ferronière, but that is a fabrication dating from the seventeenth century, when the story was put about that the lady’s cuckolded husband, Le Ferron, deliberately got himself infected with the pox so that his wife would pass it on to the King. In the 1600s that legend was spun around a famous portrait of a woman by Leonardo da Vinci, now in the Louvre.

Syphilis was first recorded in 1494, when a French army occupied Naples, and it was soon rampant throughout Europe, particularly in the higher ranks of society. The Italians naturally called it “the French disease”—the French, of course, called it “the Italian disease.” Most people referred to it as “the great pox”; the name syphilis was not used until 1530.

According to some lurid accounts, François I died of syphilis in 1547; others, more convincing, state that his last illness was a disease of the urinary ducts. An autopsy showed that he had a stomach abscess, shrunken kidneys, decaying entrails, an abraded throat, and one shredded lung.⁷⁴ These conditions are not typical of syphilis, even in its later stages; there had been, for example, no mention of the mental disorders associated with the disease,⁷⁵ nor do François’s later portraits show any collapse of the bridge of his nose, which can be eaten away by it. Thus, after 1512, there is no evidence beyond rumor that François I had syphilis, or that he was “known to be heavily infected” with it.⁷⁶

It has been suggested that Mary Boleyn could have contracted the “great pox” from François and later passed it on to Henry VIII.⁷⁷ That is highly unlikely. Syphilis was endemic in Europe in this period, and highly topical, yet it was not until the late nineteenth century that anyone suggested that Henry VIII suffered from it.⁷⁸ Only in 1888 did Dr. Currie first put forward the theory that the King contracted it as a young man. The Victorians found it easy to believe that, with his notorious marital record, and his infidelities, it must follow that Henry had syphilis. It has been speculated that he could have caught it from one of his mistresses, including Mary Boleyn, whose favors he had shared with François I⁷⁹—even though there is no evidence that the latter had the disease.⁸⁰

The standard sixteenth century cure for syphilis was mercury, yet there is no mention of that in the complete set of Henry VIII’s apothecaries’ accounts that survive today. Furthermore, syphilis was as widespread and notorious then as AIDS is today, and the unpleasant side effects of mercury would have been obvious—and well known—to ambassadors and other observers. Yet not one ever hinted that Henry VIII had the pox. Despite all this, Currie’s theory is still widely accepted as fact. It is surely time, therefore, to lay that myth to rest also.

Escorted as far at St. Denis by François I, the Duke and Duchess of Suffolk departed from Paris on April 15, bound for Calais, where they waited to receive Henry VIII’s permission to return to England. After a smooth crossing in beautiful weather, they and their retinue landed at Dover on May 2, and were received by a host of nobles and their ladies, sent by the King to greet them. They were then escorted by Cardinal Wolsey to the royal manor of Barking, Essex, where they were formally forgiven by King Henry,⁸¹ who welcomed the couple home, and afforded them a fine public wedding at Greenwich Palace on May 13, 1515.

Confusion reigns as to what happened to the Boleyn sisters at this point and over the next few years. It is often stated that both girls remained at the French court, transferring to the service of Claude, the wife of Louis XII’s successor, François I, after Mary Tudor returned to England.⁸² Some say that only Mary Boleyn was found a position there,⁸³ while one writer—misreading the letter sent from La Veure, quoted above—claims that Anne joined her in 1517, and that Mary finally returned home with the English court after the Field of Cloth of Gold in 1520.⁸⁴ The claim that Anne went to France with her father in 1519⁸⁵ rests on not “a scrap of evidence,”⁸⁶ as does the assertion that Sir Thomas Boleyn, “far from regarding his daughter’s fall from grace as some kind of ambitious career move, swiftly recalled” the disgraced Mary to England “in the wake of Mary Tudor.”⁸⁷ And there is no basis to the claim that Anne was only “a frequent visitor at the French court,”⁸⁸ or that, around 1519, her father removed her and placed her in Queen Katherine’s entourage.⁸⁹ Nor is there any evidence to show that Mary Boleyn came back to England with Mary Tudor in 1515, “and did not return until her father was appointed ambassador to France in February [sic.] 1518. She remained for two years and was so liberal with her favors that she acquired a very unsavory reputation.”⁹⁰ We are once more in the realm of myth here.

There is no mention in contemporary sources of Mary remaining at the French court. There is overwhelming evidence that Anne stayed on. As for Mary returning to England with Mary Tudor in April 1515,⁹¹ that is by no means certain.

In the years after Anne Boleyn supplanted Katherine of Aragon in Henry VIII’s affections, her former mistress, Mary Tudor, took the Queen’s part and showed nothing but enmity toward Anne. It has been suggested that that enmity may have had its roots in France, with Anne making no secret of the fact that she “blamed Mary Tudor for her sister’s wild behavior and all its consequences”;⁹² for although Mary Boleyn’s behavior may not have been so wild, still her virtue had been lost. It is said that, if Anne had somehow conveyed her anger to Mary Tudor, that could have accounted for her remaining at the French court, instead of returning home in the French Queen’s service. Yet this seems a highly unlikely scenario, unsubstantiated by any source, and there was probably a much more positive and compelling reason for Anne remaining in France.

It was doubtless due to her own abilities and talents—or to Sir Thomas Boleyn’s influence—that Anne was offered a place in the household of the virtuous Queen Claude. To be appointed to serve the Queen was a high honor, as competition for places in her household was fierce, and it is unlikely that Anne Boleyn would have secured hers without having displayed the kind of qualities that the young Claude—and, more importantly, her formidable mother-in-law, Louise of Savoy—admired. For Thomas Boleyn, this placement no doubt brought with it the hope that Anne would secure a rich and titled husband in France.

Anne’s life in Queen Claude’s household was probably quite dull, for it was like living in a nunnery. It was here that she spent her formative years, in company with nearly three hundred other well-born young ladies. She would have been expected to follow the Queen’s example and conduct herself modestly and decorously, and her days were governed by an almost convent-like routine of prayers and good works. Above all, she was expected to guard her chastity.

Claude’s life had been difficult. A cripple, she had been lame from birth, yet she was constantly pregnant during these years. François I was serially unfaithful to her, and she was dominated by her mother-in-law, Louise of Savoy. Because she was ill at ease in the hothouse atmosphere of the court, Claude resided mainly at the beautiful chateaux of Amboise and Blois in the Loire Valley, and on the rare occasions when she was obliged to go to court, she kept a watchful eye on her female attendants, knowing that they were likely prey for every predatory male there.

Anne’s long sojourn at the French court is well documented. In 1536, Lancelot de Carles, who was attached to the French embassy in London during her lifetime, and was clearly not aware that she had previously been in Brussels, wrote that she “first went out of this country [England] when Mary [Tudor] left it to go and seek the King of France” in 1514; and that when Mary returned to England in 1515, Anne was “retained by Claude, the new queen, at whose court she became so graceful that you would never have taken her for an Englishwoman but for a Frenchwoman born.” This is corroborated by the contemporary author of the so-called Spanish Chronicle, who wrote: “This Anne Boleyn was brought up in France at the court of the King.”⁹³

In 1583, Charles de Bourgeville, in his Les Recherches et Antiquités de la Province de Neustrie, referred to Anne Boleyn being “brought up in France” after “she came there when King Louis XII married the sister of the King of England.” William Camden stated that Anne was maid of honor firstly to Queen Claude and later to King François’s sister, Marguerite of Valois, Duchess of Alençon. Lord Herbert also wrote that Anne “lived some time in France, whither, in the train of the Queen of France, she went A.D. 1514 … After the death of Louis XII, she did not return with the Dowager, but was received into a place of much honor with the other queen [Claude], and then with Marguerite, Duchess of Alençon, with whom she remained till some difference grew betwixt our King and François in 1522.”

The French sixteenth century historian Jean du Tillet also recorded that Anne finally went back to England in 1522. Early that year, François I had complained that the popular “daughter of Mr. Boleyn” had been summoned home. This could not have been Mary, as she had been married in England in February 1520.⁹⁴

George Cavendish, Cardinal Wolsey’s gentleman usher, obviously got his information rather muddled when he recalled that “Mistress Anne Boleyn, being very young, was sent into the realm of France, and there made one of the French Queen’s women, continuing there until the French Queen died.” He was not referring to Mary Tudor (who died in England in 1533), but to Queen Claude, who passed away in 1524, two years after Anne returned home, but he clearly knew that Anne had been appointed to serve Claude while in France, and he may mistakenly have thought that Claude had died before Anne left the French court in 1522.

The evidence that it was Anne Boleyn, and not Mary Boleyn, who remained at the French court, and spent several years there, is therefore overwhelming. But historians have sought in vain for any record of Mary’s presence at the French court between 1515 and 1520. So what became of her?

We hear nothing of Mary in the five years after her possible return to England. One historian states that she remained at the English court,⁹⁵ but there is no evidence of her being there. Some historians assert that when she returned to England, she became one of Queen Katherine’s ladies-in-waiting,⁹⁶ but again there is no evidence that she was ever appointed a maid of honor in the Queen’s household. Nor is there any contemporary record of a “darkening cloud of scandal and gossip” accompanying her return,⁹⁷ which might have precluded her being chosen to serve the virtuous Katherine of Aragon.

Did Mary Boleyn remain in the service of Mary Tudor? Although the Duke and Duchess of Suffolk found it a struggle to keep up the payments of their fine owed to the King, and to maintain sufficient state to appear at court, Mary Tudor kept a household appropriate to her rank, and we know that she retained at least one of the girls who had attended her in France. This was Anne Jerningham, who (probably in 1515) married Sir Edward Grey. In 1516, Lady Grey carried her mistress’s firstborn son, Henry Brandon, at his christening, and she was still in Mary Tudor’s household in 1517, when Queen Katherine visited her sister-in-law.

Of the other girls who had served Mary Tudor in France, Florence Hastings had been widowed in 1505, and as genealogies often incorrectly show her as dying after 1511, no one has until now identified her as the only possible “Lady Grey of Wilton”⁹⁸ who could have been in Mary Tudor’s household, so clearly she lived at least until the spring of 1515, but nothing further is known of her. Like Anne Boleyn, both Lady Elizabeth Grey and Mary Fiennes stayed on at the court of France, where they served Queen Claude after Mary Tudor’s departure. Jane Bourchier seems to have married Edmund Knyvett soon after her return to England, as their son John was born in c. 1517–18; there is no record of her in Mary Tudor’s English household.

Thus we have a record of just one of those six girls being retained by the “French Queen” (as Mary Tudor was now known in England), and as there is no further mention of Mary Boleyn being in her service, it seems likely that she had been dismissed with the rest⁹⁹ when her mistress returned to England—and dismissed, possibly, for her misconduct. Mary Tudor, having only recently, and with great difficulty, extricated herself from the scandal of her ill-advised marriage, would not have wanted a girl of dubious moral probity in her household. Where she herself had erred merely in making a secret marriage, with the blessing of the Church, Mary Boleyn had committed the sin of fornication, which could not be condoned.

It seems that the termination of Mary’s service was managed amicably, and perhaps of necessity discreetly, because Mary Tudor remained—at least for a time—friendly toward the Boleyn family, and in 1517, when her daughter Frances was christened at Hatfield, Anne Tempest, the wife of Mary Boleyn’s uncle, Sir Edward Boleyn, stood proxy for the Queen as godmother.¹⁰⁰

So if Mary was not in the service of Queen Claude, Katherine of Aragon, or Mary Tudor, where was she in these years? Maybe she returned to Hever Castle to await the marriage that her father would in time arrange for her.

But there is another possibility—a possibility that arises from her having been confused with her sister by two sixteenth century writers. According to Lord Herbert, William Rastell—Sir Thomas More’s editor and biographer, and therefore a hostile source—claimed that when Anne Boleyn was fifteen, she was caught in a compromising situation with one of her father’s servants and was sent to France in disgrace. Here, she “behaved herself so licentious that she was vulgarly called the Hackney of England, till, being adopted to that king’s [François I’s] familiarity, she was termed his mule.” A hackney, in sixteenth century parlance, was a horse for hire and another name for a prostitute; the French once derisively called Elizabeth I “the hackney of her own vassals.”¹⁰¹ A mule, then as now, was an infertile hybrid breed with a reputation for being stubborn; probably Rastell’s reference to a mule was meant to imply an incapacity to bear children—he knew of course that Anne Boleyn had produced just one daughter and not the desired son.

Nicholas Sander—no reliable source, and no partisan of the Boleyns—embellished this story in 1585, stating that, after discovering that fifteen-year-old Anne had had affairs with his butler and his chaplain, her father sent her to France, where she was “placed, at the expense of the King [Henry VIII] under the care of a certain nobleman not far from Brie.” This place name has been variously given by Sander’s translators as Brière, Briare, or Brie. The only place called Brière lies in the vast lush, marshy area north of the Loire estuary in Brittany, much of which was forest and only navigable by boat. Paul Friedmann thought that Brière should read Briare, a town situated 240 miles south of Paris, but this sounds improbable, while there is a link between the Boleyns and a town called Brie.

Adam Blackwood, writing in 1587, states that the French nobleman with whom Anne supposedly stayed was a friend of her father’s. According to Sander, “soon afterward, she [Anne] appeared at the French court, where she was called the English mare, because of her shameless behavior, and then the royal mule, when she became acquainted with the King of France.” It is easy to see where Sander got some of his information.

Clearly both accounts, Rastell’s and Sander’s, are flawed, since Anne was probably fifteen in 1516, when, according to most reliable sources, she was in the service of Queen Claude. (Even if one accepts her date of birth as 1507, making her fifteen in 1522, the tale does not fit, because that year saw her returning to England from France.) Sander says that Anne was sent to Brie to be placed in the care of that certain nobleman before she went to the court of France; there is, indeed, a gap of four months in which her whereabouts cannot be accounted for, but she went to the French court from Brussels, not Hever. After she arrived there, she served in turn Mary Tudor, Queen Claude, and Marguerite of Valois, before returning to England. Thus we know what she was doing during those seven years.

Furthermore, if Anne Boleyn, who became Queen of England and notorious in Catholic Europe, had acquired a licentious reputation in France, we would certainly know about that too. That she did not is made clear by the fact that neither François I nor anyone else sought to make political capital out of it, when it might have been to their advantage to do so. If Anne had been so promiscuous, it would have been mentioned by her enemies in the years when Henry VIII was trying to divorce Katherine of Aragon in order to marry her. So Rastell’s account, on which Sander drew, appears to have been an invention aimed at discrediting Anne,¹⁰² with the reference to a mule probably being made with hindsight. It is hardly possible, after forty years, that there was any gossip about Mary Boleyn and François I that he could have heard, which he might have mistakenly thought related to Anne. Knowing that Anne had been at the French court, he may well have concluded, like Brantôme, that no woman left that court chaste—and embellished this with a few salacious details.

Yet many historians (with your author following suit in previous books) have associated these calumnies with Mary Boleyn: it is she who is invariably assumed to have been called the French king’s “hackney” or “mule,” and this has only served to embellish the myth of her notorious reputation. Clearly there has long been a consensus that this could not have been Anne, and that these accounts give credence to Rodolfo Pio’s statement about Mary being an infamous whore.

Both Rastell and Sander were determined to vilify Anne Boleyn and her family, while Sander was not above reporting rumor as fact, and may even have been guilty of making things up to bolster his case; not for nothing has he been called “Dr. Slander.” It was he, after all, who had asserted that Anne was her mother’s daughter by Henry VIII. For this reason, little credence can be given to his assertions.

But could it be that Sander was referring to Mary Boleyn being sent by her father to rusticate at Brie, after compromising her reputation at the French court? Several writers have suggested that he and Rastell confused Anne with her sister Mary,¹⁰³ when referring to Anne being called the French king’s hackney or mule,¹⁰⁴ but although Sander was probably wrong in following Rastell in this error, what he says about Brie may be based on truth—and may relate to Mary rather than Anne.

Sander has been responsible for spreading some blatant calumnies about Anne Boleyn—although he himself may have believed them. So it is unlikely that Thomas Boleyn had caught Mary in flagrante delicto with a member of his household. If he had found her to be that promiscuous at an early age, he would surely never have risked sending her to France in the train of the King’s sister.¹⁰⁵

There is other evidence for this French connection. In his life of the great French jurist Charles du Moulin (or Dumoulin) (1500–66), Jean Brodeau, whose work was published in 1654, states that Anne Boleyn was brought up in Brie-sous-Forges by a relation of du Moulin. He has been identified as Philippe du Moulin (d.1548), Seigneur of Brie and cup-bearer to François I,¹⁰⁶ who had married one Marie de Boulan, who is said to have been distantly related to the Boleyns a long way back.¹⁰⁷ The Almanac of Seine-et-Oise, published in 1790, states: “At Brie-sous-Forges, we see in this place the remains of the old castle where they claim was brought up the famous and unfortunate Anne Boleyn, the second wife of Henry VIII of England and mother of Elizabeth I.”¹⁰⁸

Brie-sous-Forges, which lies southeast of Paris, is now called Fontenay-les-Briis, and the Tour Anne Boleyn, which dates from around 1200, is now privately owned. There is a well-established local tradition that Anne Boleyn lived here sometime in her youth—toward 1520, according to one account¹⁰⁹—and there is even a street named after her. It has been suggested that she may have lodged briefly at Brie-sous-Forges on her way home from France,¹¹⁰ yet local folklore claims that she lived there for some time, and was even brought up there.¹¹¹ Such beliefs are not always reliable—there are historic houses in England that claim royal links that can be disproven—but the tradition in Brie goes back to the sixteenth century. Furthermore, it is documented as fact by other early historians: John Bale, in the sixteenth century, Bishop Burnet in the seventeenth, and David Hume in the eighteenth, as well as by several eminent French historians.

Philippe du Moulin is said to have known Sir Thomas Boleyn when the latter was ambassador to France in 1519–20. Nineteenth century French historians claimed that Sir Thomas placed Anne, who is described as a child, with Philippe du Moulin at Brie because her mother was having an affair with Henry VIII, and that Philippe promised to bring her up as a “young lady of high quality.” Later he is said to have presented her at the court of François I.¹¹²

There are obvious problems with this version, which does not take into account the four years between 1515 and 1519, when Anne was already at the French court in the service of Queen Claude. Nor was she a child in 1518, but a young woman of marriageable age. Again there is a tale of some scandal having been the cause of her being sent to Brie—this time, nothing to do with her having affairs with her father’s butler or chaplain, but concerning her mother and the King of England. Yet it has already been established that Elizabeth Howard is unlikely to have had an affair with Henry VIII, so again we might infer that Brie had no connection with Anne Boleyn, and that it was in fact Mary Boleyn who was sent to live there with a respectable noble family.

This theory makes more sense—far better sense than any involving Anne. Maybe there was a family connection with the du Moulins; certainly there had been a scandal involved—that of Mary’s illicit relations with François I. Possibly, at Sir Thomas Boleyn’s behest, Mary Tudor was able to arrange for Mary Boleyn to be taken into the household of the French king’s cup-bearer. In the protection of a respectable noble family, her reputation could be preserved and she could learn acceptable conduct. There was nothing remarkable in this: it was not unusual for girls of good family to be sent to live in a noble establishment to learn good behavior and complete their education. It may be that Mary stayed at Brie until a marriage was arranged for her, more than four years later, and that, in the wake of Anne Boleyn becoming Queen of England, people forgot that there had been two Boleyn sisters, and remembered only that one had lived at Brie—and thus the legend grew that it was Anne. We will never know the whole truth of the matter, yet the theory is credible.

Others have reached a similar conclusion, but offer a different version of this story. It is agreed that the loss of Mary’s honor in a brief affair with King François might well have “horrified her family in England,”¹¹³ but it has been suggested that Sir Thomas Boleyn, discovering that his daughter had disgraced herself at the French court, and not regarding that in any way as “an ambitious career move,”¹¹⁴ arranged for her to disappear from society and enter a convent, ostensibly for educational purposes, but effectively to teach her virtuous behavior. This echoes Sarah Tytler, who, writing in 1896, referred to Anne—at her father’s wish—entering a convent school at Brie to complete her education; Tytler too stated that Anne had been confused with her sister Mary, and that it was Mary who entered the convent. Yet there is no other source that mentions a convent.

One reader has suggested that Mary was perhaps sent to Brie because she was pregnant by King François, but there is no evidence for this, and history credits François, that legendary lover, with only one dubious bastard child, Henri de la Rue.

Given the confusing nature of the evidence for Mary’s possible sojourn at Brie, it is hardly surprising that Sander and other historians either mistakenly or deliberately confused her with her sister Anne.¹¹⁵

Thomas Boleyn’s loyal and efficient service, and the recognition he received at home and in foreign courts, continued to bring its rewards for his children. It was at one time claimed that he sent his son George to be “educated among the Oxonians,”¹¹⁶ but that is unlikely, because between 1500 and 1600, records show that the age of entry to Oxford University was invariably seventeen.¹¹⁷ What is certain is that a “Master Boleyn” took part with his father in the revels at court at the Christmas season of 1514–15.¹¹⁸ It is invariably assumed that this was George, but it was probably his older brother Thomas, and it may well have been Thomas who was sent to Oxford, for he must have been born before 1500, and lived long enough to go to university. Moreover, it is more likely that Sir Thomas Boleyn would have provided his heir with a university education, rather than his younger son. George, who was only about eleven in 1514, became a page to the King soon afterward,¹¹⁹ holding the post until 1524, so it is unlikely that he went to university at all, although he did receive an excellent education, excelling at languages like his father.

There is no shred of evidence that Mary was ever close to her brother George,¹²⁰ and the sparse sources we have tend to support the view that neither George nor Anne had much time or use for Mary.¹²¹

On August 3, 1515, an event that was to have long-term consequences for Mary occurred: her grandfather, the Earl of Ormond, died, aged either eighty-five or ninety.¹²² “I understand to my great heaviness that my Lord my father is departed this world,” Lady Boleyn wrote to her son, Sir Thomas. Having no male heir, the earl had directed in his will, dated July 31 that year, that his extensive property (which also embraced the Hankeford inheritance that had come to him on marriage) was to be divided between his two co-heiresses, Anne, the wife of James St. Leger, and Margaret, Lady Boleyn.¹²³ Each daughter received thirty-six manors, and among the property inherited by Margaret Butler was the great lordship of Rochford in Essex, including Rochford Hall, a fine manor house that would one day—briefly—be owned by Mary Boleyn. Another was New Hall in Essex, which Sir Thomas Boleyn sold in 1516/17 to the King, who rebuilt it as the palace of Beaulieu. To his grandson, Thomas Boleyn, the earl left a hunting horn of ivory and gold, which had been in his family for generations; tradition held that Thomas Becket, the ill-fated Archbishop of Canterbury, had once drunk from it.

Control of an heiress’s inheritance was usually vested in her husband, who enjoyed all rights to it, but when the heiress was a widow, control remained in her hands. Since the fourteenth century, some landowners had tried to limit female inheritance by imposing an entail, the most popular form of which was the male tail, which restricted the descent of land to men, but the Butler lands were not entailed. Nevertheless, the widowed Lady Margaret appears to have allowed her son to assume control of her inheritance, for on October 26, 1517, he was granted a license to export wood and other commodities “made within the lordship of Rochford” in his ship the Rosendell.¹²⁴ By 1519—as we know from later records—Margaret Butler had become insane and incapable of managing her own affairs, so Thomas Boleyn assumed responsibility for her estates.¹²⁵ That meant that he henceforth had substantial landed resources at his disposal.

The earldom of Ormond should have descended to Thomas Butler’s nearest male relative, his cousin Piers Butler, who assumed the title, but the late earl’s two daughters, with Margaret being backed vigorously by her son, Thomas Boleyn, all took steps to prevent Piers from coming into his rightful inheritance. The dispute would drag on until December 1529, when Thomas Boleyn, as heir general, was finally granted the earldom of Ormond, along with that of Wiltshire, by Henry VIII.

Wherever Mary was living between 1515 and 1520, she did not see her sister for several years. Anne Boleyn was to remain in France, in the service of Queen Claude, until early 1522, when a war between Henry VIII and François I was looming. But before then, Mary was to be married. Her family had arranged a most advantageous match for her.