The Boleyns and the Howards in Popular Culture

Above: Thomas Howard, duke of Norfolk, The Other Boleyn Girl (2008), left.
Thomas Boleyn, earl of Wiltshire, The Tudors (2007-10), right.

The Boleyns and the Howards have been mythologised and misrepresented in many mediums of popular culture ever since the sixteenth century. In stories of Anne Boleyn's rise to power, in particular, her Boleyn and Howard relatives are typically depicted as power-hungry, merciless courtiers who stop at nothing, including murder, treason and incest, to achieve what they want and cement their power. But how accurate are these portrayals? The short answer is: we don't know. Chroniclers did not record the motives of these individuals, even if they were aware of them, and depictions of the Boleyns, in particular, are frequently hostile.

As Claire Ridgway of The Anne Boleyn Files notes, Thomas Boleyn, father of Anne, is frequently presented as a manipulative, cunning man who stops at nothing to achieve his ambitions, including placing both his daughters in the king's bed and turning on his two youngest children when they fall from grace. Historians have, to some extent, supported this characterisation, with Paul Friedmann terming Thomas 'mean and grasping' and P.W. Sergeant going so far as to say that 'it is clearly hopeless to attempt a defence of Sir Thomas'. But we simply do not know if Thomas pressurised both Mary and Anne to seduce Henry VIII, as is portrayed in both The Other Boleyn Girl and The Tudors. This seems to be a very modern conceptualisation, in effect portraying Thomas Boleyn as a pimp who advertises his beautiful daughters while coldly calculating the best odds for them. But, in both cases (especially regarding Anne), it appears to have been nothing of the sort. Rather, Henry VIII fell in love with these women, and Thomas probably made the best of his good fortune, rather than avidly scheming to manipulate his king into falling in love with his daughters.

Yet popular culture has not favoured this line of approach. In particular, in The Tudors, Nick Dunning offers a portrayal of Thomas that is cold, calculating, deceptive and ruthless. He turns on Mary when she displeases him and bullies and manipulates Anne to do what he wants her to do. The Imperial ambassador Eustace Chapuys, who loathed the Boleyn family, depicted Thomas as a heretic, liar and bully. He was said to have a hot temper and even staged a masque at the downfall of Thomas Wolsey in which the late cardinal was taken to Hell, to burn in eternity. 

In The Other Boleyn Girl, both the novel written by Philippa Gregory and the 2003 and 2008 film adaptations, Thomas Boleyn plays far less of a role than in The Tudors, and particularly in the 2008 film starring Scarlett Johansson and Natalie Portman, he is a weak, ineffectual man, pitied by the audience for his spineless demeanour and nervous behaviour. In short, it seems safest to agree with Claire Ridgway regarding Thomas:

'I guess we'll just never know what kind of man Thomas really was but he cared enough about his daughters to make sure that they received a top notch education...' 'Thomas Boleyn can be described as ambitious and self-seeking, but I do not think he was an evil man who manipulated his children and then turned his back on them in their hour of need. In my opinion, he was simply a product of Henry's court and his time, a courtier who enjoyed basking in royal favour but who knew the sense of hiding when things got too hot. He was a survivor.'



Portrayals of Thomas's brother-in-law, and the uncle of Anne Boleyn, Thomas Howard duke of Norfolk have been similarly negative. Historians have, once again, in some measure supported this negative characterisation. Joanna Denny, who wrote biographies of both Anne and her cousin Katherine Howard, described Thomas Howard thus:

'He was a monolithic figure, a monster and ruthless in his cold-hearted use of those around him, including the members of his own family, who were just pawns for his ambition... His survival was just part of his astonishing luck, ironically cheating the scaffold of another Howard at the last hour and dying in his bed'.

A prevailing view in both popular culture and academia seems to be of the Howards and Boleyns as power-hungry, cold-hearted schemers who 'pimped' their female relatives out and ruthlessly sacrificed them when they fell from grace. It might appear that way, but it was not necessarily the case. Claire Ridgway has already raised questions about the exact role played by Thomas Boleyn and the Boleyn family in Henry VIII's pursuit of Anne Boleyn, and it is fair to do the same with Katherine Howard and the Howards. I agree with Antonia Fraser that the Howards were probably pleasantly surprised when the king became infatuated with Katherine and asked for her hand in marriage. As Fraser contends, she was not a suitable candidate for queenship, because of her murky past. My research indicates that Thomas Howard, duke of Norfolk, probably had no idea about his niece's sexual escapades when she married Henry VIII.

Modern viewers love a good drama, and TV offers this. But it is essential to separate facts from fiction. To be fair, it is not just the Howards and Boleyns who have been conceptualised in this negative manner as power-hungry schemers who used their women for their own ends. The Seymours, in both The Tudors and the novel The Other Boleyn Girl, encourage Jane to accept Henry's advances, and are depicted as just as scheming and ruthless as their Boleyn rivals. But the fact of the matter is this: we just do not know if these families actively sought to raise their prestige and bolster their power at court by dangling their women in front of the king, or whether they made the most of their fortune when he favoured one or another of them. Surely, with so little documentary evidence, and given the mostly hostile nature of the evidence which has survived, it is best not to condemn these figures at a distance of so many years, when the cultural, social and political worldview was completely alien to our own today.

28 July 1540: Katherine Howard's Marriage and Thomas Cromwell's Execution

Above: Henry VIII of England (left) married his fifth wife, Katherine, on 28 July 1540 at Oatlands Palace.

28 July 1540 was a momentous day both in the reign of King Henry VIII and in Tudor history more generally; for it was the day in which the king's minister and viceregent in spiritual matters, Thomas Cromwell, was publicly beheaded on Tower Hill for crimes of treason and heresy. That very same day, Henry married for the fifth wife, taking as his consort Katherine Howard, maid of honour to his rejected fourth consort Anne of Cleves. The king was aged forty-nine and his new bride was only sixteen or seventeen.

Historians have puzzled endlessly for the reasons behind Cromwell's abrupt downfall in the summer of 1540. How was it that the most powerful man in the kingdom, after the king himself, who had been raised to the aristocracy in April when Henry granted him the earldom of Essex, fell so suddenly from power and influence? Historians disagree over whether it was Cromwell's radical religious beliefs which brought him into increasing conflict with the conservative king, his role as a scapegoat for the king's ill-fated marriage to Anne of Cleves, or factional manoeuvres at court, that accounts for his spectacular and sudden downfall.


Above: Thomas Cromwell.

It is impossible to know for certain what caused Cromwell's downfall. Possibly, it was circumstances beyond his control. In 1539 he had, with Henry's involvement, engineered a marriage for the king, who was newly single after the death of his third wife Jane Seymour, with Anne of Cleves, a marriage that was particularly significant in that it allied England with the Protestant German princes. This marriage had been arranged to protect England from a hostile Franco-Imperial alliance viewed as potentially harmful to England's security. However, this threat failed to materialise, and Henry did not consummate his marriage with Anne, not necessarily because she was ugly (a lingering myth that exists amidst legends of the six wives), but because he believed she was married to someone else; a cultural worldview that could have prevented him from consummating the union. 

Possibly, Henry had fallen in love with Katherine Howard when she arrived at court in the autumn of 1539. He selected her alongside other maidens to serve the new queen, and it was reported to Katherine's step-grandmother, the dowager duchess of Norfolk, that the king had 'taken a fantasy' to Katherine from the moment he saw her. This infatuation with his wife's maiden could have exacerbated difficulties with Queen Anne. Whatever the case, by the early summer of 1540, Henry was determined to annul his marriage to Anne and replace her with the youthful Katherine. Cromwell was cast as a scapegoat for the humiliating failure of this fourth marriage.


Above: Anne of Cleves, briefly queen of England.

On 10 June 1540, Cromwell was arrested at a council meeting and imprisoned in the Tower of London. A bill of attainder was introduced against him into the House of Lords a week later, in which Cromwell was accused of supporting Anabaptists (a radical sect of Protestantism), failing to enforce the Act of Six Articles, and even allegedly plotting to marry the Lady Mary, eldest daughter of Henry VIII. Cromwell begged the king for mercy in a number of desperate letters, but to no avail. He was condemned to death without trial and on 28 July, was beheaded on Tower Hill.

The eminent Tudor chronicler Edward Hall wrote of Cromwell's end thus:

Many lamented but more rejoiced, and specially such as either had been religious men, or favoured religious persons; for they banqueted and triumphed together that night, many wishing that that day had been seven years before; and some fearing lest he should escape, although he were imprisoned, could not be merry. Others who knew nothing but truth by him both lamented him and heartily prayed for him. But this is true that of certain of the clergy he was detestably hated, & specially of such as had borne swynge, and by his means was put from it; for in dead he was a man that in all his doings seemed not to favour any kind of Popery, nor could not abide the snoffyng pride of some prelates, which undoubtedly, whatsoever else was the cause of his death, did shorten his life and procure the end that he was brought unto.

The king later came to dearly regret the loss of Cromwell, terming him 'the most faithful servant he ever had'. He accused his ministers of bringing about Cromwell's end by false charges. But the king felt no such regrets on the day of Cromwell's death, for he was busy marrying Katherine at Oatlands Palace. Although the anonymous Spanish chronicler, writing perhaps a decade later, stated that there were great rejoicings and celebrations at court, the marriage actually seems to have been a low-key affair, much like Henry's marriages to Anne Boleyn, Jane Seymour and, later, Katherine Parr. Eleven days later, on 8 August, Katherine Howard was showed publicly as queen for the first time. She could not have known it then, but she had taken the first step towards tragedy. 


Above: Lynne Frederick as Katherine Howard and Keith Michell as Henry VIII in the 1972 film Henry VIII and His Six Wives.