Guest Post: Remembering Anne Boleyn: Reminisces of Mary Howard & the Devonshire group by Sylvia Barbara Soberton

Remembering Anne Boleyn: Reminisces of Mary Howard & the Devonshire group by Sylvia Barbara Soberton

Happy Sunday! I'm delighted to announce that today we have a guest post by Sylvia Barbara Soberton, author of the best-selling book entitled The Forgotten Tudor Women. 

Over to Sylvia . . . 

In my book, The Forgotten Tudor Women, I explore the tumultuous lives of three courageous women: Margaret Douglas, Mary Howard and Mary Shelton. These three women all started their careers at court as maids of honour to Henry VIII’s second wife, Anne Boleyn.

Anne Boleyn

On 19 May 1536, Anne Boleyn was beheaded on what her contemporaries and the majority of historians today believe to have been trumped-up charges of adultery with four men, incest with her own brother and plotting the King’s death with one of her alleged lovers. Through the course of her meteoric rise to power right up until her execution, Anne Boleyn was an unpopular figure. The common people believed that she had usurped the place of their beloved Katherine of Aragon, Henry VIII’s first wife and queen. Foreign monarchs were slow to acknowledge Anne’s position as Queen and mother of the heiress to the throne, and the situation at court, where political factions scrambled for power, was even worse.  

Mary Howard

Although Anne Boleyn was surrounded by female servants on a daily basis, only one of them allowed her memories to be recorded for posterity. This woman was Mary Howard, Duchess of Richmond, Anne  Boleyn’s first cousin, who was described as “chief and principal of her waiting maids”.[1] Mary started her career at court on 1 September 1532, when she played a prominent part during the ceremony of Anne’s ennoblement as Marquess of Pembroke. Anne took her young cousin under her wing and, despite the protests of Mary’s mother, she arranged her marriage to Henry VIII’s illegitimate son, Henry Fitzroy. Little is known about the personal relationship between Mary Howard and Anne Boleyn, but considering that Mary was known to have been one of the chief and principal ladies serving the Queen, we may assume that they were close.

Anne Boleyn’s tenure as Queen came to an abrupt end in May 1536 when she was arrested and executed. Henry VIII remarried eleven days after his wife’s judicial murder, and it seemed that life at court went on as normal. Behind the closed doors, however, some people gave vent to their despair. Thomas Wyatt, the poet who was imprisoned as Anne’s alleged lover but later cleared of charges and released, wrote a heartbreaking poem where he recorded:

“I was made a filling instrument

To frame other, while I was beguiled”.[2]

Thomas Wyatt’s biographer, Nicola Shulman, explained that Wyatt was a “filling instrument” in the sense of betraying or defiling the honour of other people, presumably those who died with the Queen. The fact that Wyatt was romantically linked with Anne Boleyn in the past answers the question of why he was imprisoned in May 1536 but doesn’t offer an explanation as to why he was released. Thomas Cromwell rewarded Wyatt with a large sum of £100 in May 1536, a date implicating the poet may have been interrogated and coerced into providing damning details about Anne Boleyn’s circle. Whatever he confessed to the authorities, it is clear that Wyatt felt guilty. His poem was copied into the Devonshire Manuscript, a courtly anthology strongly associated with Mary Howard, Margaret Douglas and Mary Shelton, who were among its most prominent contributors. Did they feel the same? Were they forced to testify against their royal mistress? It seems highly likely because Thomas Cromwell later claimed that Anne Boleyn’s ladies-in-waiting provided damning details, and three of her serving women—Elizabeth Somerset, Countess of Worcester, Nan Cobham and one other unnamed maid—were mentioned in contemporary correspondence as the Queen’s accusers.

John Foxe

At some point during the reign of Edward VI, Mary Howard employed John Foxe as tutor to her nieces and nephews, her wards since her brother’s execution in 1547. Living in the Duchess of Richmond’s household provided ample opportunities to talk about people associated with spreading the good religious works during Henry VIII’s reign. Anne Boleyn was seen by her enemies as “the cause and principal nurse” of spreading “heresies” in England.[3] Although Anne’s personal faith is still a matter of debate among historians, it is certain that she was anti-papal, keen on reforming the Church from within and eager to promote reading the Bible in the vernacular. In his Actes and Monuments (best known as The Book of Martyrs), John Foxe recorded that Mary Howard was one of Anne Boleyn’s “chief and principal” ladies-in-waiting and was thus well acquainted with the Queen’s daily doings. When compiling materials for his book, Foxe talked to Mary Howard, who recalled “how Her Grace carried ever about her a certain little purse, out of which she was wont daily to scatter abroad some alms to the needy, thinking no day well spent wherein some man had not fared the better by some benefit at her hands.”[4]

Mary Howard's handwriting

Foxe’s book also contains a rich description of Princess Elizabeth’s christening on 10 September 1533, and this event was most likely related to him by Mary Howard, who carried a rich chrism of pearl and stone. The fact that Mary Howard kept these memories alive proves that she cherished them, and perhaps Mary’s early religious views were shaped by Anne Boleyn’s religious tendencies. Mary had not only sheltered the Protestant John Foxe, but also read the Bible in the vernacular and enjoyed debating its contents with like-minded individuals so much so that her elder brother, the Earl of Surrey, warned her about “going too far in reading the Scripture”.[5] Anne Boleyn had famously encouraged her ladies to read the New Testament translated by William Tyndale, which she held wide open at her desk, and it is possible that Mary began to develop her own religious views under Anne’s wing. 

Mary left court, probably in the summer of 1536, and did not join the household of Henry VIII’s new wife, Jane Seymour. It may be that Mary voluntarily shunned court after Anne’s execution, although the arrest of her half uncle, Thomas Howard, and the death of her young husband, Henry Fitzroy, in the summer of 1536 certainly influenced her decision. 

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[1] John Foxe, Book of Martyrs: The Actes and Monuments of the Church, Volume 2, p. 372.

[2] Nicola Shulman, Graven with Diamonds, p. 195.

[3] Letters and Papers, Volume 10, n. 601.

[4] John Foxe, Book of Martyrs: The Actes and Monuments of the Church, Volume 2, p. 372.

[5] Letters and Papers, Volume 21 Part 1, n. 769.