Anne Boleyn’s fatal French connection

When describing the celebrations at Greenwich, English chroniclers focused on the great lengths to which Henry had gone to impress his French guests. At a newly constructed banqueting house, a majestic triumphal arch led into a candlelit theatre with a spectacular ceiling, lit by candles and mirrors, creating the illusion of the heavens, with stars and planets and signs of the zodiac.

French chroniclers, however, took a different tack. Henry’s choice of dancing partner, they noted, was not the king’s wife, Catherine of Aragon, but “Mistress Boleyn, who was brought up in France with the late queen”.

Six years later, in 1533, Henry and “Mistress Boleyn” would complete the journey from dancing partners to husband and wife, instigating one of the most consequential marriages in British royal history. Theirs was a tempestuous relationship, one that both divided and electrified public opinion in England.

Yet, as the French diplomatic reports prove, Henry's subjects weren’t the only ones watching their every move with alarm and incredulity; the king’s love affair with Anne was the talk of Europe, too.

Just as importantly, Henry and Anne Boleyn’s marriage shaped – and was shaped by – European geopolitics. Almost every aspect of Henry and Anne’s relationship maps onto international diplomacy. Theirs really was a love affair played out on a European stage.

Given Anne’s background, it’s perhaps hardly surprising that the French tracked closely her romance with the English king, nor that she would influence Anglo-French relations as queen.

Anne had, after all, spent almost seven years of her adolescence serving Queen Claude, the young wife of French king Francis I, as a demoiselle (maid of honour).

During the formative period, Anne received a masterclass in what powerful women could achieve. Louise of Savoy, Francis’s mother, and Marguerite of Angoulême, the king’s sister, showed how far women could carve out their own roles to shape and steer events.

Claude, Louise and Marguerite were often together with the queen’s demoiselles in attendance, and what Anne saw and heard then influenced her for the rest of her life.

On his accession to the French throne in 1515, Francis appointed Louise to his privy council. She acted as regent when he was out of the country, conducted her own independent diplomacy and exercised a vice-like grip over the royal court. As for Marguerite, she was a shrewd, versatile politician, and an acute, discerning observer of all that went on.

During her time in France, Anne was also exposed to the many glories of a Renaissance court – and would go on to champion its social etiquette, taste and architectural models after she became Henry’s queen.

International crisis

All that, though, lay a long way in the future. For when, back in 1521, Anne left the French court for good and returned home to England, she was all but unknown to Henry VIII. In any case, Henry was then poised to join Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor and king of Spain, in a war against the kingdom she had just left: France.

Only when Henry and Charles quarrelled over the war effort, and Cardinal Wolsey (lord chancellor of England) turned towards France, did the king begin to fall for Anne. By the beginning of 1526, eternal peace with France was the mantra – and Anne, chic and beguiling, was the epitome of everything French.

Henry was soon besotted with her and, when she insisted on marriage, the king spent six years seeking an annulment of his marriage to Catherine of Aragon. That quest would spark a full-blown international crisis.

Wolsey was among those tasked with delivering the divorce. Yet Anne always suspected the cardinal’s commitment to the cause and, when he failed to secure the annulment, she engineered his downfall.

With Wolsey arrested and stripped of his office, Anne, for all practical purposes, became Henry’s chief minister. She now guided the king in his foreign policy, and took initiatives on her own account – or did so jointly with her father, Thomas, or brother, George, who went on six separate missions to France.

Following Louise of Savoy’s example, Anne kept a close eye on diplomats sent abroad, several of whom were expected to report directly to her as well as to Henry.

As Jean du Bellay – one of several French diplomats Anne regarded as personal friends, greeting them in the French manner with a kiss on the cheek – explained, she and her father had set out to monopolise power. “All the other councillors have no credit except what it pleases la Demoiselle [Anne] to give them, which is as true as the Gospel.”

Anne’s ultimate aim was to secure a fresh treaty with the French going far beyond the Treaty of Westminster in its scope. This she achieved in the summer of 1532 via a series of interventions that Gilles de la Pommeraye, the new French ambassador, hailed as “more than his master, the king, could ever sufficiently acknowledge or repay”.

The result was a full offensive and defensive alliance: a Treaty of Mutual Aid that saw Francis agreeing to assist Henry with troops and ships if he was attacked, and vice-versa. If Charles V placed a trade embargo on English merchants, Francis would do the same to Flemish merchants.

The treaty was a landmark moment in Anglo-French relations in the 16th century – and it seems to have marked a milestone in Henry’s relationship with Anne, too, for the king now ordered Catherine of Aragon to quit the royal palaces for ever, leaving Anne to preside.

In a ceremony borrowed from Marguerite of Angoulême’s creation as Duke of Berry in 1517, Henry made Anne Marquis of Pembroke in her own right (entitling her to sit in the House of Lords), with de la Pommeraye as guest of honour.

Queen before her time

Things got even better for Anne at an Anglo-French summit staged at Calais and Boulogne in October 1532. Here, King Francis treated Anne as if she was already queen, dancing with her and sending her expensive gifts. The success of the summit was the trigger for Henry and Anne to begin sleeping together – and to marry.

That marriage first took place “privily” in a clandestine (probably illegal) ceremony in November 1532, followed by a secret (but procedurally correct) repeat in January 1533. Yet Henry had still failed to secure papal approval of the divorce he so desperately sought. Here, once again, amicable relations with the French promised a solution.

After the summit in Calais and Boulogne, Francis invited Pope Clement VII to a conference in the south of France. Clement agreed to attend and to handle Henry’s divorce case “so dexterously that no harm will be done to him”; in return, Henry promised to take no unilateral steps against the church until after the conference.

Francis genuinely believed that Clement had treated Henry shabbily. But various schemes for reconciliation between England and Rome, proposed by Jean du Bellay and others, were scuppered by Henry’s strident repudiation of papal powers. Relations cooled further when Henry chose to marry Anne without first notifying his French ally.

They were about to get worse. When Francis secured papal approval for his second son Henry’s marriage to Clement’s niece, Catherine de’ Medici, and held the nuptials before bringing up the question of the English king’s annulment, Henry railed against him, calling him “a traitor, a villain and the pope’s gull”. The two headstrong monarchs were now increasingly at loggerheads.

Much of the fallout coincided with Anne and Henry’s honeymoon tour of Surrey. That intended moment of triumph was interrupted by George Boleyn rushing back from France with the news that Clement had censured Henry, declared his marriage to Anne unlawful and ordered him to return to Catherine.

Under French pressure, the pope allowed a temporary suspension of the sentence to give Henry time to comply. Anne – seven months pregnant with her daughter, Elizabeth – panicked, and she and Henry quarrelled.

Undeterred, Anne set about drawing up a plan for a new Anglo-French summit to be held in the summer of 1534. When Francis agreed, she sent her brother to France to finalise the arrangements, leaving Henry to commission eye-wateringly expensive renovations at the royal lodgings in Calais.

But Henry nurtured doubts, suspecting Francis to be too closely linked to Clement after the de’ Medici marriage, so the plan came to nothing.

Personal greetings

Still hoping for help from France, Anne was elated when, later in the year, Francis sent Philippe Chabot – Seigneur de Brion, the new admiral of France – to London at the head of a large retinue. Anne personally greeted him at Whitehall Palace as he disembarked from the king’s great barge, The Lion.

Henry entertained Chabot magnificently, but the admiral was cool. Staying for only 15 days, he skipped all but one of the tennis matches Henry laid on for him, and all but two of the banquets and masques.

Then, in late January 1535, Palamèdes Gontier, Francis’s secretary, made a proposal to Henry: if the English king barred his elder daughter, Mary, from the succession, Anne’s daughter, Elizabeth, could be betrothed to Francis’s third son, Charles, Duke of Angoulême. In return, Francis wanted unlimited subsidies to fund an invasion of Piedmont and Lombardy – an open-ended commitment to which Henry took exception.

Before Gontier returned to France, he spoke privately to Anne. As Gontier reported back to Chabot, she complained bitterly of Francis’s vacillation, which had caused her husband doubts and was threatening their marriage. Only with unqualified French support, she believed, could Henry hold at bay the threat of papal sanctions against him.

Fighting back tears, Anne declared that Chabot should understand that he must find some remedy urgently “so that she may not be hung out to dry and cast away. Already she sees her- self very close to both these fates and in more grief and trouble than before her marriage.”

Anne had every reason to fear for her future. Soon after his sister’s conversation with Gontier, George Boleyn returned to France, meeting Chabot in Calais several times, but he made no progress.

Realising the danger, he hastened to London and, instead of reporting first to Henry, headed straight for Anne’s apartments to warn her. “Wrangling words” followed in the Privy Council.

Souring relations

Subsequent events would bear out Anne’s fears as the balance of power shifted. Thomas Cromwell – Henry VIII’s tough and resourceful minister, a man with oceanic ambitions who was increasingly briefing against the Boleyns – now found it possible to reassure Eustace Chapuys, ambassador of Charles V, that Anne’s plans for a fresh Anglo-French league were on hold. Cromwell declared that he would persuade Henry never to send George to France again.

What Anne had really wanted – and George had attempted to secure – was to persuade Francis to break with Rome, like Henry. Yet she did so at the very moment when Francis was reasserting his Catholic orthodoxy in the face of rising Catholic-Protestant tensions across France, so that was always going to be a non-starter.

That Henry and Anne’s relationship was inextricably linked with international diplomacy became ever more evident in the second half of 1535, when Pope Clement’s successor, Paul III, sentenced the English king to be deprived of his kingdom.

Cromwell blocked Anne’s attempts to appeal to Marguerite of Angoulême, and the unravelling accelerated in the new year. When, in January, Anne miscarried a male foetus, she claimed it was caused by anxiety over Henry’s potentially fatal jousting accident five days before.

“I see,” Henry said unmoved, “that God will not give me male children.” In response, Anne rounded on him for lusting over Jane Seymour.

All of this is common knowledge. But there is more. With opinion in France turning against him, Henry opened a bidding war between Francis and Emperor Charles for his support. The Privy Council was split, but overall opinion swung against France. Cromwell led those wanting to restore the Habsburg alliance. He had his reasons: he alone fully understood the critical importance to the English economy of the overseas trade and credit markets that Charles controlled.

Henry under attack

Still undecided, Henry made a show of continuing commitment to Anne over the Easter festival of 1536. He resumed dining and sleeping with her, and was making plans to take her to Dover to inspect the defences and afterwards to Calais where he had established a gun foundry.

Matters lay in the balance until 29 April, by which time Henry had read fully deciphered dispatches from Rome sent by Richard Pate, his ambassador to Charles V. One paragraph brought him up short: as Pate reported, Charles was actively considering enforcing Pope Paul’s decree depriving Henry of his kingdom, a move to which Francis’s agents had raised no objection. With Catherine now dead, a settlement with Charles was possible – and prudent, given the latest threats from Rome.

Did Henry’s desire to reach an accord with Charles – who reviled Anne – make it inevitable that he would repudiate his queen? Cromwell wasn’t sure, so he set about sealing her downfall. Within hours, his spies were reporting that they had overheard her conversing with a young musician, Mark Smeaton, in her privy chamber. Next day, Smeaton was arrested.

When revelations of a further damaging encounter between Anne and the king’s groom of the stool, Henry Norris, came to light, the stage was set.

Playing into Cromwell’s hands was the fact that Anne had reorganised the queen’s ‘side’ of Henry’s court on novel and (in malevolent eyes) subversive lines, adopting French protocol by which the sexes mingled freely in her privy chamber.

No one disputes that these sexually charged allegations were the chief cause of Anne’s downfall. However, by charting the queen’s considerable influence on Anglo-French relations in the 1520s and 30s, we believe we have given her and Henry’s story an intriguingly fresh dimension.

John Guy and Julia Fox are historians and authors. Their latest book, Hunting the Falcon: Henry VIII, Anne Boleyn and the Marriage That Shook Europe, was published by Bloomsbury in September 2023.

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This article was first published in the November 2023 issue of BBC History Magazine