Anne Boleyn: Henry VIII's Obsession Read Online Free Page A

new French queen. Given the warm relationship between Thomas and Margaret, this was probably very far from his wishes for his daughter but he had no choice but to comply and wrote in 1514 requesting that Margaret release Anne from her household. Anne would have been dismayed to leave the most cultured court in Europe. She may also have borne the brunt of Margaret’s anger at the English alliance with France and the breaking of Charles’s betrothal. Certainly, news of Mary Tudor’s new betrothal was greeted with bitterness in the Netherlands. According to Hall’s Chronicle, ‘the Dutchmen heryng these newes were sory, and repented then that they receyved not the lady, and spake shamefully of this marriage, that a feble old & pocky man should mary so fayre a lady’. Margaret of Austria probably shared these sentiments and Anne’s last weeks in Brussels may have been uncomfortable. There was no time for her to return to England and she travelled directly to France to meet Mary Tudor. Anne had already spent over a year away from her home and it would have been a much more confident Anne who joined Mary Tudor at some point during the new French queen’s early days in France. Anne would also have been reunited with her sister, Mary, who had secured a place in Mary Tudor’s household and travelled with her from England.
    If Margaret of Austria had been angered by news of Mary Tudor’s betrothal to Louis XII, the bride herself was completely dismayed. Louis XII was in his fifties and had long suffered from ill health, including gout. Mary Tudor on the other hand was only in her late teens and was renowned as the most beautiful princess in Europe. As the youngest of Henry VII and Elizabeth of York’s surviving children, Mary had always been spoiled by her brother and she had developed an independence unusual in a princess of her time. When she was told by her brother of the marriage he had arranged for her, she refused it. Finally, she and Henry reached a compromise of which she reminded him later:
‘For the good of peace and for the furtherance of your affairs you moved me to marry with my lord and late husband, King Louis of France, whose soul God pardon. Though I understood that he was very aged and sickly, yet for the advancement of the said peace, and for the furtherance of your causes, I was contented to conform myself to your said motion, so that if I should fortune to survive the said late king I might with your good will marry myself at my liberty without your displeasure. Whereunto, good brother, you condescended and granted, as you well know, promising unto me that in such case you would never provoke or move me but as mine own heart and mind should be best pleased; and that wheresoever I should dispose myself, you would wholly be contented with the same. And upon that, your good comfort and faithful promise, I assented to the said marriage, which else I would never have granted to, as at the same time I shewed unto you more at large’.
     
    Henry would probably have said anything to ensure that his sister agreed to the marriage and he repeated his promise to Mary on the beach at Dover before she sailed for France. Mary Boleyn, who was waiting with Mary Tudor’s other attendants, may well have witnessed the princess’s distress as she took her leave of her brother at Dover on 2 October 1514 and she would have reported this to her sister when they were together in France.
    It is unclear when Anne joined Mary Tudor in France. She may perhaps have been present at Mary’s marriage on 9 October in the cathedral at Abbeville. Her absence from a list of ladies retained by Louis XII to serve his wife suggests that she had not yet joined the French queen at the time of the marriage and she may have been retained by an angry Margaret of Austria. If this was the case, she missed the major trauma in Mary Tudor’s household when her husband sent all but a few of her English ladies home to England. While this was a trauma