Claire Ridgway talked in-depth about the Boleyns at the Tudor Summit 2018.
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Transcript of Claire Ridgway on the Boleyns
Heather:
I am so excited that this next speaker is here. If you have been looking at any blogs about the Tudors online at all in the last decade or so, you will have come across her. It’s just such a thrill to be able to have her, and to have her share her knowledge with us. It is Claire Ridgway.
Claire Ridgway is a British writer of history books about the Tudor dynasty, with a particular focus on the life of the Boleyn family. Since 2009, she has run the websites TheAnneBoleynFiles.com and ElizabethFiles.com. Claire is also involved in supporting the community history website, The History Files. I’m so thrilled to have Claire Ridgway here, and we can just jump right into the questions.
Claire:
The family that Anne came from was landed gentry. She wasn’t common. She wasn’t even middle class in the kind of way we’d say it. She was not aristocratic. Her mother’s perhaps were aristocrat, but the Boleyns, they weren’t aristocracy, but they were wealthy. They were landed gentry. Her great-grandfather was Lord Mayor of London. He was a mercer, as well, but he’d risen to Lord Mayor of London. So, landed gentry.
I think Gareth Russell explained it really well. He’s done a course on the six wives of Henry VIII on MedievalCourses.com. He talks about how, in those days, the aristocracy and the gentry mixed. There wasn’t quite a class system like we think of it. There was a mix between the gentry and the aristocracy, and it was quite fluid. Anne wasn’t this commoner.
The Howards, obviously, she was descended from the Howards, with her mother being Elizabeth Howard, and they were born in one of the premier families of England, so that was good blood. They descended from Thomas Brotherton, I think, who was the first Duke of Norfolk in the time of Edward I. You’ve got that aristocracy then in her blood.
The Boleyns, we don’t know much about the Boleyns, their background. There’s this thought that they probably descended from the Counts of Boulogne, hence the name. There are so many spellings of Boleyn that you see, but one of them is Boulogne, as in the place in France. Perhaps they came over with the Norman invasion of William the Conqueror, and Boulogne became Boleyn.
There’s thoughts like that, but also Thomas Boleyn was descended from the Butlers of Ireland, who were a very wealthy, landed family. His mother was Lady Margaret Butler, and she was an heiress of her father, Thomas Butler, the Earl of Ormond. The family seat was the Castle of Kilkenny, which is absolutely stunning. I haven’t been there myself. I really want to, but it’s stunning.
She wasn’t just this common woman who become lady-in-waiting, and then rose to be queen. It’s not fair to say. It makes great fiction, I think, but not very real, really. She’s a bit of a mix, still, with who she descends from.
She had royal blood. There was royal blood in her because of the Howards. There were various lines of royal blood. She did, like all of Henry’s wives, she had royal blood. And the nobility and the gentry were so small in those days. England didn’t have the population that it does today. That’s why everyone seems to be related, really.
Heather:
Yeah, sure. Can you tell me a little bit … You talked about her family and her ancestors. What about her parents specifically?
Claire:
Yeah, Thomas and Elizabeth. They were both born around the same time. We don’t have specifics because, unfortunately, parish records just didn’t … They didn’t have to register births and that, but we believe that Thomas and Elizabeth were both born around circa 1476-77.
Elizabeth Boleyn was the daughter of Thomas Howard, who was the Earl of Surrey, and who was then created later the Second Duke of Norfolk. She was a child of his marriage to Elizabeth Tilney. As I said, the Howards were one of the premier families of England at the time, a very, very important family with a long history of service to the monarch.
Unfortunately, they picked the wrong side at the Battle of Bosworth. They were being loyal to their king, and the Howards were on the side of Richard III. Of course, after which, Richard was defeated by Henry VII. The Howards then had to really show Henry VII that they could be loyal to him. They ended up losing the title the Duke of Norfolk for a while, but they were restored once they’d shown loyalty to the new king.
Thomas Boleyn was from a Norfolk family, the Boleyns. Both he and Elizabeth were based in East Anglia. That’s probably how they got to know each other, how the two families got to know each other. We think that they were married, going from the jointure of their marriage, in that we think that they were married about 1499 or so, 1498 or 1499, the turn of that century, and that they had at least five children.
We know that they definitely had five children. We don’t know the age order of them. There are so many arguments about who was born first and what year they were born, because again, no parish records for birth. Mary, Anne, George, and then Thomas, then Henry. We know that Mary, Anne, and George were the only children to actually survive into adulthood.
Though Alison Weir has claimed that at least Thomas survived into early adulthood, but I find no evidence of that. Their graves, with little crosses on, are the type that were used for children. They’re buried in Penshurst in Hever. That’s who they were.
Thomas was the son of Sir William Boleyn of Blickling, which is in Norfolk, and Lady Margaret Butler. As I said before, his paternal grandfather was Sir Geoffrey Boleyn, a wealthy mercer and Lord Mayor of London, and then his maternal grandfather was the Earl of Ormond, so he wasn’t… Elizabeth wasn’t going… It was a good match. Some people say that Elizabeth, she should have had a better match being a Howard, but he was a good match. Thomas, he wasn’t a commoner. It was a good match for both.
Then we have Thomas being… I think he can be described as ambitious, very ambitious, and very talented as well. I’ve written down some of his early career highlights. Just focusing on very early 1497, so probably just before he marries Elizabeth:
He fought on the king’s side against the rebels in the Cornish Rebellion. 1501, he attended the wedding of Catherine of Aragon and Arthur, Prince of Wales. 1503, he was chosen as part of the escort to take Margaret Tudor to Scotland for her marriage to James IV.
In 1509, he was chosen as an esquire of the body for Henry VII, and then on the accession of the new King Henry VIII, he kept that, and he was knighted Knight of the Bath as part of the coronation celebrations for Henry VIII. You’ve got that happening before Henry VIII came to the throne. He was already on the rise before Henry VIII came along.
Heather:
Sure. Then their children, when did they first to either the English court, I suppose in the case of George would have spent time… You write in your book about him spending time with his father in the English court, and then the girls going to France, or to Margaret of Austria’s court. How did that get arranged, and how did that happen?
Claire:
Yeah. Early education would have been at home. They were of the gentry, so it would have been at home. They would have been educated at home. Thomas Boleyn, he was like Thomas More. He was a Renaissance man. He gave his daughters the opportunities that a lot of families would only have given to their sons. He was a humanist. He was interested in education, and literature, and religion. You can imagine these children having quite an enlightened education, but it would have started at home.
We don’t know anything about Mary‘s early life. In fact, Mary is this blank canvas. She makes great fiction because you can just do anything with her, because she’s just this blank. We don’t know anything about her or Anne’s early education at home.
But we know that George was being prepared to follow in his father’s footsteps as a diplomat. Thomas was very gifted with languages, and we know that George could speak French, Latin, and Italian. He was fluent in French. He was obviously being prepared to follow in his father’s footsteps at court.
Of course, we have Anne going to Mechelen in the Low Countries before moving to France. The first record we have of George at court is Christmas 1514-1515, the Christmas period, the 12 days of Christmas, where he’s recorded with his father as taking part in the Christmas celebrations in a mummery. He was being a mummer at some kind of mass or play.
Then we know at some point following that he became one of the king’s pages. This doesn’t necessarily mean that he was at court all the time serving the king. Sometimes it was just a title rather than you actually being a servant, but he was chosen as one of the king’s pages.
The next thing we know really about the children is Mary Boleyn being picked to go to France with Mary Tudor. She was being taken off there to marry Louis XII. He was quite a bit older than her. Mary was chosen as the maid of honor.
We have Thomas Boleyn… He must have been a real charmer. He must have been very good at negotiating, because when he went over to the Low Countries to negotiate with Margaret of Austria, to negotiate really with her father Maximilian, but Margaret was doing the negotiation, he had such a good relationship with her, became such good friends with her. They gambled together, and they became close. That led to him securing a place at her court for Anne.
I know I’ve said that Anne wasn’t a commoner, but she also wasn’t a princess of Europe. Margaret’s household, her maids of honor, were very, very important people, or very important women. That was an amazing opportunity, and it shows not only Thomas’s closeness to Margaret, but I think it also shows that Anne must have had something about her. Thomas must have really praised his daughter to get this place.
We have Anne going off in 1513 to Mechelen to serve as a maid of honor to Margaret of Austria, then we have her being recalled just a year later because she then gets chosen, with her sister, to go and serve Mary Tudor in France. We don’t know when Anne arrived in France. We don’t know whether she got there in time for the wedding of Mary and Louis, but it was obviously some time in that autumn.
In the new year, Louis dies. Mary Tudor manages to marry Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, and then of course returns to England. We don’t have the records of this, but Mary Boleyn doesn’t really come up in the French records after that. So I think Mary Boleyn probably went back to England with Mary Tudor and her entourage. We know that Anne was kept on in France by the new queen, Francis I’s wife Queen Claude, and she went on to serve her.
The next we hear of Mary Boleyn is 1520, when she marries William Carey, who’s one of Henry VIII’s privy chamber. The next we hear of Anne in England, we hear of her being recalled from France in late 1521, because there were marriage negotiations with the Butler family, whom she’s related to in Ireland, and James Butler.
Also, she’s been chosen to serve Catherine of Aragon. She gets called back, probably arriving sort of Christmas, I would say. It’s late 1521 or early 1522. We know that she was definitely back for Shrovetide 1522, because in March, she plays Perseverance in the Chateau Vert Pageant, so we have that.
I don’t think I’ve missed anything. That’s the records we have of them at court.
Heather:
Sure. Let’s talk about Mary. There’s all these stories about her and the French king, and then attracting Henry. What’s the truth around the French side to start with, and then how she attracted Henry?
Claire:
Yes, I think Eric Ives got it right. I was talking to him about Mary, and he said to me, “What we know about Mary Boleyn could be written on a postcard with room to spare.” I do think sometimes I might try a Mary Boleyn biography, and it will just be two pages, followed by the rest of the book just blank.
Because she’s just this blank canvas. All we have are rumors. We have this reputation as her being this whore. This mare that the king of France could ride. All derogatory kind of stuff. But we don’t know whether that’s just because of the whole blackening of the Boleyn name. There isn’t any definitive evidence of her having an affair with the king of France. There just was no heart, nothing concrete at all.
We know that she must have had a sexual relationship at one point with Henry VIII. But we only know that because of the dispensation that Henry applied for when he wanted to marry Anne Boleyn, and he had set his sights on marrying her.
In 1527, he applied for dispensation to marry a woman… This dispensation was to get around the impediment of affinity, and it said, “In whatever degree even the first.” That means that he slept with someone that was very closely related to Anne, i.e. her mother or a sister. That leaves Elizabeth then or Mary.
When he was confronted later over rumors that he’d slept with Anne’s sister and mother, he said, “Never with the mother,” but he didn’t say, “Oh, and not with the sister, either.” He was kind of saying that he had slept with Mary.
As I say, Mary’s this blank canvas for fiction. You have the other Boleyn girl, Mary as Henry VIII’s true love. They have this long relationship, and children, and it’s just so romantic. But we know absolutely nothing about the relationship at all. Most historians date it, and I’ve been guilty of this in the past as well, dating the start of this affair to early 1522, because you have Henry riding out at the Shrovetide joust.
At these jousts, these pageants, there was always a theme. There was always this chivalric theme of love or unrequited love. It was very medieval. He rode out at this joust with the motto… “…She has wounded my heart.” He didn’t say, “Mary Boleyn has wounded my heart.” Rather it was “she”.
This might just have been purely a chivalric theme, but people take that to be talking about Mary. She’s rebuffing his advances, he’s heartbroken. I think that’s quite a leap, really. I think it could easily be said that it was just the theme of those Shrovetide celebrations. There was always a theme.
At Epiphany, for example, there was always a theme for pageants. At Shrovetide, there was always a theme. They could just see that he just picked a theme that he liked. He might not have been referring to a specific woman. If he was referring to a specific woman, it might not have been Mary. It’s just too much of a leap. Who’s to say it was Mary?
I think as well, with the dating of their relationship, if we look at Bessie Blount, Elizabeth Blount, who served Catherine of Aragon and who we definitely know was a mistress of the Henry VIII, because she had his acknowledged illegitimate son, his M.O. with her was that he had this relationship with her, and then after he’d finished with her… We don’t know whether he just had Henry FitzRoy with her or whether there was a daughter, Elizabeth, as well.
Elizabeth Naughton argues that she also had a daughter with the king. After he’d finished with Bessie Blount, he then arranged a really good match for her. He helped her. He organized a good marriage for her. I think that if you go with that M.O., that it’s more likely that he slept with Mary, whether it was once, twice, a few months drawn out, who knows? Then arranged a good match for her. William Carey was a good match.
He was a member of the king’s privy chamber. He was related to the king as well. He was close to the king. Henry even went to their wedding and gave them a wedding present. I think that, 1520, organizing a marriage for her after the king’s finished with her, rather than… How can he organize a marriage for her and then sleeping with her? To me that really doesn’t make sense.
Of course you get people then saying that, “Look at William Carey. Look at the records for all the grants he’s given. All of these wonderful manors that he’s given. All this money.” We know Henry VIII is seen as this monster and this tyrant, but if you read through his grants, and letters, and papers, he was also extraordinarily generous to people who served him loyally, and people that were his friends.
You see the same names coming up all the time. Those that were in his privy chamber, like Charles Brandon, Henry Norris, and William Carey. If you say that Henry was rewarding William Carey because he was sleeping with his wife, and he was just keeping Carey happy, then you could say that about other men, as well.
He must have been sleeping with Charles Brandon’s wife. He must have been sleeping with Henry Norris’s wife. All these men… You can argue various points. Just to me, it makes more sense that he had a relationship with her before matching her with Carey, but who knows? Great fiction.
Heather:
Sure. Do we know anything about how her parents reacted to this first affair with Mary? Then, like we talked about, there’s this idea that they were pimping their daughters about. How did they react with Mary? Do we know that? How did that inform how they reacted with Anne?
Claire Ridgway:
Thomas Boleyn, either he’s seen as this weak man who is controlled by his wife, and the Duke of Norfolk, who was, of course, Elizabeth’s brother, his brother-in-law, or you’ve got Thomas being really, really ambitious, and him working on his wife and the Duke of Norfolk to pimp out their daughters to the king so that they can advance. They want the crown, for goodness sake. That makes good fiction, but it has absolutely no basis in historical fact whatsoever.
As I said to you earlier, by 1509, Thomas Boleyn was already on the rise. That was before Henry VIII came to the throne. Then you have this magnificent rise that carries on in the same way after Henry VIII comes to the throne. Even before either, even if you go for the date of prior to 1520, and Mary being involved with the king, there’s this still great rise before that.
His name regularly appears in lists of grants and appointments in the 1510’s. He was a royal favorite. He was a trusted diplomat due to his gift of languages. Also, I think he was probably a very diplomatic character, as well. He was good at getting what the king wanted.
In 1516, he was canopy-bearer at Princess Mary’s christening. That’s important. In 1517, he was picked as the official carver for Margaret Tudor’s visit to London. He was a member of the king’s Privy Council by 1518. So he’d started his rise under Henry VII, and had just continued in the same vein under Henry VIII.
Thomas Boleyn had absolutely no need whatsoever to pimp his daughters out to the king. He was already a royal favorite, and perhaps it would have been a risk as well to pimp out his daughters to the king. Because if the king hadn’t liked it, something had gone wrong with the flirtation, relationship, then Thomas might have been blamed, and his career might have suffered.
It’s hard to know how Thomas and Elizabeth felt about Mary’s relationship with the king. Because obviously, we don’t even know any details about Mary’s relationship with the king. But there does seem to have been a breakdown in the relationship between Mary and her parents.
Because when she was widowed in 1528, William Carey sadly died in the big epidemic of sweating sickness, the same one that Thomas Boleyn suffered from, and Anne Boleyn suffered but survived. William Carey dies, leaving Mary in quite dire straits financially. Really not as dire straits as poor people. But she’s used to a certain level of living. The king had to actually step in and persuade Thomas Boleyn to actually provide for Mary.
I think that points to some kind of breach in that Thomas Boleyn wasn’t already helping her. She was having trouble. Surely a loving parent who’s got a good relationship with his daughter would already be helping provide for her. So I think there was some breakdown there.
As far as Anne’s relationship with the king, and the king courting Anne, Chapuys, in one of his dispatches writes how the Duke of Norfolk and Thomas Boleyn had actually tried to dissuade the king from marrying Anne. That doesn’t point to either of them pimping Anne out to the king, if they were actually trying to dissuade him.
I think Thomas was clearly ambitious. He was ambitious for himself, and he was ambitious for his children. But I don’t believe that his ambition was at the expense of his family, at the expense of his daughters. I don’t think that history backs that idea up in any way, but great to make fiction.
Heather:
Alright, sure. What about George Boleyn, who you wrote a book about? Again, we don’t seem to know that much about Jane, his wife, but what can you tell me about their relationship? About what George was doing during this period in his rise?
Claire:
Unless someone leaves a diary or there are letters between husband and wife, there’s no details on someone’s personal relationship because it is personal and private. There’s certainly no evidence, but I think it was in “The Tudors” isn’t it, where Thomas Boleyn pretty much forcing down the aisle to marry Jane, and they absolutely hate each other. There’s no evidence in primary sources that George was forced to marry Jane. Or that he then was a bully to her and treated her badly. Again, that makes good fiction, but it’s not factual.
We know the marriage was arranged, but that’s perfectly normal for people of their standing, to have matches made between two families that would benefit both families. But we also know from examining marriages at that time, that if someone, either the bride or groom, really detests the person that their family had, that generally, the match wouldn’t go ahead. If someone really didn’t want it to happen, the match wouldn’t have gone ahead.
So there’s no evidence that either of them opposing the match. Also, they would have known each other before they got married, because both families were at court, and both families were East Anglian families. They would have known each other. So there’s no historical evidence of them being forced into it.
George, it’s hard to say what his character was like. I’m sure like many other male courtiers that he might have been a bit of a lady’s man while his wife is busy. Perhaps he was a lady’s man, but there’s no evidence of his being linked to any particular woman at court. There’s no evidence of them having an unhappy marriage. He appears to have been childless unless you go down the roots of George Boleyn, Dean of Lichfield, being a child with heirs, we just don’t know.
No one’s been able to link that George Boleyn definitively to our George Boleyn. People argue that a childless marriage in those times where contraception wasn’t good, and it was really important to have children to carry on the name and all that. We don’t know. Jane wasn’t very important, and she have had miscarriages, she might have had stillbirths. There was no need, she wasn’t a queen where these things are recorded.
Even with the queens, Catherine of Aragon who we argue about, how many pregnancies they had, the records just don’t exist. She might have had trouble or she might of been barren. She might have been infertile. George might have had problems, might have been infertile. Just because their marriage seems to have been childless does not mean that it was unhappy.
We’ll say half this myth, and it is a myth, that Jane hated George so much that she provided evidence to bring down the Boleyns in 1536. She hated George and Anne and was gonna do it her own ways to bring them down. She is never named in historical sources as being one of the key witnesses.
We have names. Lady Worcester being named by… We have Lady Bridget Wingfield providing posthumous evidence against them. But Jane isn’t actually named by any of the contemporary sources. She’s named by fictional sources or by late sources, but nothing at the time.
Actually, in May 1536, that’s for George’s arrest, Jane sent him a letter. We don’t know exactly what the letter said. But from George’s comments and the comments about the letter, it was a letter of comfort, and it said that she was going to petition him on his behalf. We don’t have a record of that petitioning or anything, and some of the documents were damaged in a fire, in the …House fire, and are mutilated or missing. So she might have or she might have realized that actually, she’d get nowhere with that, we don’t know. We’ve got that.
Also, I thought what I’d find quite poignant is that, when Jane was executed alongside Katherine Howard in 1542, an inventory was taken of her possessions because, of course, her possessions were then going to be seized by the crown because she was a traitor. All her clothes seem to have been black. You could say, well Catherine Howard, all her ladies had to wear black, and it was because black was expensive. But for all her clothes, all of her fabric to be black, that suggests to me that she was still in mourning for her husband. That’s not the actions of a woman who hated her husband.
Now, you have that, and then you have George’s reputation as this rapist. This is based on George Cavendish‘s “Metrical Visions”, which is poetry. It’s all in verse, and he says of George,
“My living bestial, I forced widows, maidens I did deflower.”
So he makes George to be a horrible man, but there’s no other evidence of that, not even hearsay that George deflowered maidens and raped widows and that. No one, not even those that disliked George would say that. And… I’m sure would have jumped on rumors of George being this rapist.
And actually, George Cavendish says all kinds of things about the king as well. He’s quite awful about Thomas Culpepper…, and he uses the same kind of language he uses about George and Thomas Coultrop, about King Henry VIII as well. Nobody accuses Henry VIII with sexual practices, being a rapist or being homosexual, which of course was the worst thing you could be in those days.
It’s very, “Neh, not again,” in historical sources. They might have had an unhappy marriage, who knows. But there’s certainly no evidence of it being–
Heather:
Sure. So then, Anne and George, what was their relationship like, as brother and sister? Can you talk a little bit about that?
Claire:
They were certainly close, and I think it’s because they were very similar. It’s funny that they were close with the fact that Anne, obviously, spent many years in France, away from her family. But I think her and George were very similar. They were highly intelligent. The George and Anne that I get from reading the sources, is that they didn’t suffer fools gladly. They were witty and they could be spiteful as well.
I think, we know their closeness because of the translations of religious texts that George did for Anne. That’s such a beautiful thing to do for anyone. They were religious texts that he was interested in. He was interested in the new ideas from the continent and they were obviously texts that he knew Anne would be interested in.
I mean they’re just useful, and they’re illuminated. He’s got her badge…done. They’ve got dedications on them. I can’t remember the wording, I haven’t written it down for my notes, except it’s actually, his dedication is quite witty and excites you, and makes the mickey out of her as well. It’s the wit and the words of someone that loved you. A loving brother who could actually take the mickey out of you without offending you.
So, yes, I would say incredibly close. Anne when got to the Tower in 1536, she went straight to “Where’s my brother? What’s happening with my brother?” I think she was consumed with worry, worry about her family,… and it must have been awful with him executed with the days before her. Knowing that him and her friends, men that she cared about, being brutally killed in this way. I think they were very close, they had a shared faith, shared ideas, shared ambition.
What I would want to do, I could time travel, I’d go and be a fly on the wall when you have George Boleyn and Thomas Wyatt and Anne making up poetry and verses and discussing literature, and having a good old gossip as well. Because I think it would have been quite …for our times, and very witty.
Heather:
Can you talk to me a bit then, about religion? You talked about the translations and that segues nicely into what Anne… Anne will forever be linked, of course, with the Reformation and then moving on to the dissolution, but she wasn’t really a… well can you tell me what she was thinking as she saw the dissolution happen then, and that side of her.
Claire:
I must have had “Horrible Histories” on one day, when it was talking about the Reformation and England sapping with strength from the …Protestantism. Henry VIII, one minute he was warm, one minute he was… and Anne Boleyn being Protestant.
I had to come in at that point, I was in the other room and I heard them say Anne Boleyn Protestant. I’m thinking, “No, no kids. Don’t listen to this.” It’s far too early in the 1530’s to use labels like Protestant. It’s far too early. You could say it a bit later. You could say it with Anne Askew and Katharine Parr and Catherine Brandon, but I don’t believe you can use the term Protestant in the 1530’s because all of these ideas that are seeping in from the continent were very, very new. Anne Boleyn certainly wasn’t a Protestant.
Guy Bedwell who has written about Jacques de Senarclens, which was one of the French reformists who Anne was very interested in, and she read his books. He described Lefèvre as
“neither as a Catholic with a bad conscience, nor as a crypto-Protestant, but rather as an evangelical who firmly believed that the truth when positively proclaimed would triumph over error.”
I think that is a really, really good description of the Boleyns, particularly Anne. She was influenced by French reform, she’d been for how many years, 7 years at the royal court in France. She had spent time with Margaret of Anjou and she’d… I can imagine her discussing these new ideas that were coming out, with other maids of Queen Claude.
We know from the literature that she owned, works by …, Jacques Lefévre d’Etaples, and these were all French. She wasn’t really reading works from… Well, Germany didn’t really exist then but she wasn’t reading Luther. He… reform was definitely French. It was justification by faith, that was definitely a big… We linked that with Luther, and that came from French reforms well, but you’re got to heaven, you’ve got…, through your faith in Jesus Christ and the great God, not for anything you did but by accepting Jesus Christ as your Savior, through Christ alone.
So you’ve got the justification of faith idea, she believes in the authority of scripture, and she was very much involved as a patron of the Bible in English. She believed that people should be able to read the Bible, so she supported the dissemination of the Bible in English, and the authority of scripture. Once the people should be able to read the Bible themselves so they knew what scripture said.
She also believed in the… this came from French Reform as well… living your life to glorify God. There, this humble idea, the Catholic idea of good works. Doing good works would get you to heaven and paying your way… very unfair hit, I’m trying to be simplistic.
Anne, the reform that she was reading was still an emphasis on good works, charity, good deeds, that that was more to glorify God and because it was a part of the good Christian life. If you believed in what the Bible said, then you would naturally be doing good works. These were the kind of ideas coming from French, and these are the literature that Anne was reading.
You call Anne and George evangelical. I think probably had they both survived 1536, they may well have gone on to become like Anne Askew, Catherine Parr, and more what we’d call Protestant. So as ideas, more ideas were flooding in, but yeah, I would say she was an Evangelical woman with a personal faith, but she was still a Catholic.
She did not… she refused to be a patron of, I think it was Tristan …’s work because that was actually against the miracle of the mass. She didn’t go so far as denying transubstantiation, denied the miracle of communion. She didn’t go that far. She wasn’t a radical in that way, but I think had time gone on, then she might well have become more Protestant.
I think it was G.W. Bernard who says that because you can’t label her Protestant then actually she was closet Catholic and wasn’t interested in reform at all. The idea that the Boleyns were only interested in reform because it was fashionable and would help with their rise, and with their ambition, but that can’t be said.
Anne seems to clearly as a person of faith, she kept the Bible out in her room, she encouraged her ladies to read it. She received manuscripts from George that were religious texts. You don’t give someone religious texts when they’re not at all interested.
We also hear her father Thomas. Sometimes he’s seen as this reformer, other times he’s seen as not sharing his children’s faith. He actually, let me find my notes. It’s Thomas Thebold or “Teh-bold”, I’m not sure how you pronounce it. He was godson of Thomas Boleyn, and he actually went off to the continent and he was reporting back to Thomas Boleyn on the state of religion on the continent. What was going on with regards to reform, he had links with French reformers, how were they being persecuted.
So he was reporting back, and he was also linked from… as well, and he was one of Frommelle’s agents, but it says that he was traveling in Europe, supported by the Earl of Wiltshire, feeding back on the religious persecution, but he also sent Thomas an epistle by French reformer Clément Marot and read his literature too. He’d been forced to flee France due to his religious views. Thebold says that he hopes to hear from Thomas and then buy a Renard Roux books, a let of St. Paul’s churchyard.
And when you dig into Reginald, or Renard Roux he’s a reformer. His bookshop is this… this face in London where reformers go to share ideas. Thomas Boleyn was definitely a reformer as well. There’s just too much evidence of him supporting reform, being a patron of Ceasar Thorne, to say that he wasn’t interested in some ideas as to his children.
I’m trying to remember how many books Anne Boleyn owned that were, oh, here it is. Eric Ives wrote about how there’s 9 books that still exist that belonged to Anne and George, one or the other. Seven are religious and 6 of those are reformist in character. Anne and George were reading literature that was cutting edge, new ideas, and of course they had Tyndale’s English Bible which she’s ordered. It was available to some households.
But as far as the Reformation is concerned, you have this idea, Anne Boleyn starting the English Reformation all by herself. But, no. She obviously, being a patron of reformers and we certainly know that she helped people within the church rise within the church due to her influence and patronage.
Of course, she was Henry VIII’s wife. She did mark this passage in “The Obedience of a Christian Man” where it talks about rulers only being answerable to Christ, in service to God, rather than this idea that a ruler was under the dominion of the Pope. Henry VIII latched onto this, not because Henry VIII was wanting to be a Protestant or was affected by these religious ideas. It wouldn’t help him with his annulment, that’s all he wanted.
The break with Rome has more to do with Henry’s request for the annulment rather than Henry VIII wanting to get rid of Catholicism in England. We have her being more of a catalyst I would say, than being someone that actually started the Reformation. You can’t deny her true faith and her patronage and she helped reformers.
We have her helping Nicholas Ahlborn escape prison in France. He came over and she helped organize his employment. He taught Henry Carey, her nephew, and I think Henry Norris’s children as well. She helped people escape persecution and that, but yes, she didn’t start the Reformation, that’s going too far.
Heather:
All right, okay, great. So I’ve reached the end of my questions
Claire:
Well, I could talk about the Boleyns all day.
Heather:
You’ve been so generous with your time. Now I wanna give you a chance to plug all your stuff, because you’ve got a lot of stuff happening. You’re gonna be able to get more people involved with you and your books and your courses and all of that. Can you tell us a little bit about that?
Claire:
Yes, I’m probably spreading myself far too thin, really. There aren’t enough hours in the day for everything I do. I still blog, The Anne Boleyn Files, that’s still going I think since 2009 I’ve been writing about her mum, which is going on the anniversary of that, 9 years.
Heather:
Yeah. That’s like I just started in 2009. Good things started in 2009.
Claire:
Yeah, 2009 was the year.
Heather:
The 500th anniversary, yeah.
Claire:
I spend quite a lot of my week on The Tudor Society. I started that summer 2014. I do a lot of work on that, because every week I do a video talk, every Friday on that same theme. At the moment I’m just been doing a series on Catherine of Aragon’s for example. I spend a lot of time doing research and writing for The Tudor Society, and that’s one thing.
Medievalcourses.com, I’ve done one course for that on the life of Anne Boleyn which from her birth to her execution, her legacy. I’ve worked with Gareth Russell. I’m on The Borgias, Toni Mount has done some medieval courses for that as well. What else am I doing, that as well… I’ve said this is my year and I’ve promised myself … I have some projects on the back burner for years now. You kind of lose track of them.
“The Fall of Catherine Howard, A Countdown” I have promised myself that if it doesn’t get published this year, at least will finally get nearly finished. She’s been waiting for me since 2012 now, I actually started researching that book. Things get in the way and projects come up, but I’ve said that it’s going to be Catherine’s year. I’m going to finally get that done.
That’ll be the same format as “The Fall of Anne Boleyn, A Countdown”, just counting down the days. I’ve been arguing with myself about how I’m going to start the book, whether it’s going to start from the All Hallows, Cromwell leaving the message for Henry VIII about Catherine, because that, I think is the real way that her fall began. But you could say that her fall began when she became queen, so I’ve been arguing with myself. That’s going to be a day-by-day account of all of the events that lead to Catherine’s fall and execution.
What else do I have in the pile? Oh, I’ve been working with Dmitri Hvorostovsky, an artist. He’s just published a book, with Debra… the Tudor. They just are coloring in on the Wars of the Roses and just before Christmas it was, Dmitri sent me some pages that he’d done on Anne Boleyn. He actually did one for our Anne Boleyn Fall’s ad campaign, he did an Anne Boleyn coloring.
I’ve kind of been persuaded to a Life of Anne Boleyn coloring book as well, so that will be text from me. Not artwork, you wouldn’t like artwork from me, artwork from Dmitri. He said that’s ongoing. I’ve been throwing myself into French and Italian and all sorts of contemporary sources about Anne Boleyn’s fall and execution and doing some translation. That’s a project I’d like to get out sometime, is the burying in these, translating them into English instead of sharing them with a writer or audience, rather than just… to use them.
So, yeah, life is crazy. But life is good, I won’t confuse being neck-deep compared to not even neck-deep, it’s this deep into history every day is a dream come true. I would say The Tudor Society is probably my main thing. It’s what takes up most of my time at the moment, and I really enjoy that. I just love the community aspect of it. I love Tudor history lovers. Some of the people that, when you talk, when you talk Tudor, peoples’ eyes don’t glaze over, they’re actually interested in what you have to say.
Oh and also tours. I’m going on 2 tours this year so wow. I used to do The Anne Boleyn Experience with the Anne Boleyn Files a few years ago. Taking people to the Tower of London, staying at Hever. So I did buddy up with British History Tours, Phillipa Lacey Brewell. We’re also doing Discover the Tudors Tour in September. So yeah, Tudor, Tudor, Tudor.
Heather:
Great. All Tudor, all the time!
Claire:
Yes, but this is my year. If my book doesn’t come out by the end of the year, Catherine Howard is still not being mentioned at all, everyone needs to write me and say, “Where is it?”
Heather:
Okay, perfect. We’ll hold you accountable to that.
Heather:
Well, thank you so much for taking your time and sharing some things all about the Boleyn family. I’ve learned so much, so thank you.
Claire:
Thank you for inviting me. As I said, any excuse to talk Tudor and I’m there!
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