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PREFACE
     
    The Boleyns were not a great family. They traced their origins to Geoffrey and Alice, parish gentry in Norfolk at the turn of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. They made their way by a mixture of business acumen and well planned marriages, which gave them access to the court. Sir Geoffrey, Lord Mayor of London and the founder of their fortunes, married (as his second wife), Anne the daughter and co-heir of Lord Hoo and Hastings. His son, William, married Margaret, the daughter of Thomas Butler, Earl of Ormond, and their son, Thomas, married Elizabeth, daughter of Thomas Howard Earl of Surrey. This last marriage brought them into the ranks of the higher Tudor nobility, because Surrey became Duke of Norfolk in 1514, and his son, Elizabeth’s brother, became the third Duke in 1524. The second daughter of this marriage, Anne Boleyn, notoriously became Henry VIII’s second queen in 1533, a circumstance which spelled first triumph and then disaster for her family. There they might have remained, among the wreckage of Tudor politics, if the accidents of mortality had not brought Anne’s daughter to the throne as Queen Elizabeth I in 1558. Although not Boleyn by name, Elizabeth was very much a Boleyn in her behaviour, and particularly in her sexuality. She reigned in the way which no king could have done, and left a dazzling image to posterity. The other third generation Boleyn was Henry Carey, Elizabeth’s cousin by way of his mother Mary, who was Anne’s sister. Henry served his kinswoman faithfully, and it was through him that the Boleyn genes were transmitted into the seventeenth century and beyond.
    It was through the sexuality of his daughters that Sir Thomas Boleyn became a great man – temporarily at any rate – and by the same means that he was brought low. This was not typical of the Tudor nobility, but it does make them a fascinating study for the twenty-first century, and a source of endless entertainment. Philippa Gregory has colonised this territory in a number of books, and at least one film, but those are fiction and her chronology is imaginative. This work is history, and is an attempt to reconstruct the fortunes of a remarkable family from the records. It will, hopefully, be none the less interesting for that, because the marriages and sexual adventures which lay at its heart were real enough. These exploits caused fascination and scandal at the time, and Henry’s relationship with Anne not only brought about a political revolution at home, but outrage all over Europe. It was not by accident that ‘Anna Boleyna’ featured as a carnival demon in Spain until well into the twentieth century.
    In a sense a lifetime of working on Tudor history lies behind it, and I have incurred more debts of gratitude that I could possibly list. The most recent is to the History Faculty of Oxford University, which has extended its hospitality to me, and to the graduate seminars which I have been privileged to attend. My thanks are also due to my wife, Judith, who has been an unfailing source of inspiration, and to Jonathan Reeve of Amberley Publishing who suggested this as a subject worthy of attention.
    DL
    Burford, Oxfordshire
    January 2011

NOTES
     
    1 Origins – the Blickling Years
    1. History of Parliament, Biographies (1936), p. 90.
    2. Calendar of the Patent Rolls, 1452–61 , p. 216.
    3. A. B. Beavan, The Aldermen of the City of London (1904), I, pp. 90, 272; II, pp. 10, 164.
    4. History of Parliament , loc cit.
    5. Cal. Pat., 1446–1452 , pp. 130, 225.
    6. Ibid, p. 472. Gascony fell to the French in 1453.
    7. History of Parliament, loc.cit .
    8. Ibid.
    9. Charles Ross, Edward IV (1974), pp. 166-7.
    10. R. Sharpe, Letter Books of the City of London (1894–9). Letter Book L, p. 19.
    11. ODNB , sub Thomas Boleyn. Thomas Butler was the brother and heir of John Butler, 6th Earl of Ormond, who died in October 1476.
    12. Cal. Pat., 1476–85 , pp. 343, 466. William Boleyn’s story is complicated by the