Free The Boleyn Women: The Tudor Femmes Fatales Who Changed English History by Elizabeth Norton

7
THE KING’S NEW LOVE
    Mary Boleyn was not the only Boleyn woman to attract amorous attention at court in the 1520s, with her sister, Anne, arriving home from France in 1522 after she was recalled to England to marry James Butler and settle the Ormond inheritance. Anne, like her father, had no enthusiasm for this solution and she soon set about arranging her own higher-status marriage.
    Anne Boleyn had been absent from England for nearly a decade by 1522. With her French grace and manners she immediately caused a stir at court, with one favourable sixteenth-century biographer, George Wyatt, commenting:
    In this noble imp, the graces of nature graced by gracious education, seemed even at the first to have promised bliss unto her aftertimes. She was taken at that time to have a beauty not so whitely as clear and fresh above all we may esteem, which appeared much more excellent by her favour passing sweet and cheerful, and these, both also increased by her noble presence of shape and fashion, representing both mildness and majesty more than can be expressed. 1
    Unlike her sister, Anne did not conform to contemporary ideals of beauty, with dark hair and skin and dark eyes. Even those commentators hostile to her agree that there was something unusual and compelling about her which made up for any defects in her appearance. The later sixteenth-century writer, Nicholas Sander, after slandering Anne with claims of a number of monstrous deformities, admitted that ‘she was handsome to look at, with a pretty mouth, amusing in her ways, playing well on the lute, and was a good dancer. She was the model and mirror of those who were at court. For she was always well dressed, and every day made some change in the fashion of her garments.’ 2 Anne seemed more French than English in her homeland and became one of the leaders of fashion at court, with George Wyatt commenting that she artfully hid a minor defect on the tip of one of her fingers with stylish, long hanging sleeves which were soon copied by the women of the court. 3
    Although Anne was nominally promised to James Butler, no steps were taken to bring matters to a conclusion, and within a few months of her arrival she had acquired a considerably more prominent suitor in the shape of Henry Percy, heir to the Earl of Northumberland. 4 Percy, a young man of a similar age to Anne, was a member of Cardinal Wolsey’s household. It was soon noted that, whenever Wolsey came to court, his young attendant would visit the queen’s chamber to ‘fall in dalliance among the queen’s maidens’. He soon turned his attention solely to Anne herself and, according to William Cavendish, who was a contemporary of Percy’s in Wolsey’s household, ‘there grew such a secret love between them that at length they were engaged together, intending to marry’.
    There is some doubt as to the extent that matters reached between Anne and Percy as they conversed privately in the queen’s apartments. Wolsey, although a regular visitor to the court, was not usually resident there and so meetings between the couple must have been fairly snatched in nature, particularly as Percy or Anne would have been called away by their respective employers when service was required. In 1532 Percy’s wife, Mary Talbot, claimed that her marriage was invalid due to her husband’s earlier binding betrothal to Anne, something which would have made her own marriage invalid. This corroborates Cavendish’s account and, while a somewhat desperate attempt to end her own unhappy marriage, is likely to have some truth to it, particularly as by 1532 Anne was the king’s own fiancée and, as such, any claim that she was effectively already married would have been a very dangerous one to make. A letter survives from Percy, written at the time of Anne’s fall to the king’s then chief minister, Thomas Cromwell, which refutes any betrothal, with Percy claiming that
    this shall be to signify unto you that I perceive by Sir