A Frenchman at the Court of Anne Boleyn

The name of the poet Nicholas Bourbon the elder is unlikely to turn up in a game of Trivial Pursuits. Born in 1503 at Vandoeuvre in Champagne, he wrote in Latin and is remembered, if at all, because of his friendship with vernacular writers such as François Rabelais and Clémont Marot. In his day, however, Bourbon’s verse enjoyed a European reputation. Never modest, he said of Lyons, his adopted city: ‘Mantua boasts of Virgil, Greece of Homer; the region of Lyons rejoices in Borbonius’.

What makes Bourbon interesting for British historians is that in 1534 he visited England and nearly fifty of his poems were written about England, addressed to Englishmen or were composed there. They appear in the third book he published, printed at Lyons in 1538 under the grandiloquent title Nicolai Borbonii Vandoperani Lingonensis Nugarum Libri Octo ac Auctore Rescens Aucti et Recogniti that is Eight Books of Trifles by Nicolas Borbonius of Lyons, the Vandoeuvrian, Recently Enlarged and Revised. As the response of a foreign, professional writer to sixteenth-century England, Bourbon’s verse is unique, but his visit at the height of the early Reformation is also a useful reminder of the links between religious affairs in England and across the Channel. The connection with France is often overlooked, but should come as no surprise. It was, as Philip Sidney would say, the ‘sweet enemy’. Henry VIII spent almost a third of his time fighting or preparing to fight the French, but he also competed jealously with Francis I ‘his brother of France’ over everything from palace decoration to the muscles of the respective royal legs. And where fashion could pass, so could ideas and individuals.

Early religious reform in France was noticeably moderate. The emphasis of its leaders, men like Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples and Guillaume Briçonnet, bishop of Meaux, was on personal spirituality inspired by a direct engagement with Christ through a Bible shorn of medieval glosses and embodying the best of humanist scholarship. Their challenge was to put the gospel [Gk. evangelion] into daily practice, which makes ‘evangelical’ a convenient adjective to describe the movement. It was a message which effectively marginalised the elaborate penitential machinery of shrines, relics, penances, rituals and so forth which preoccupied the late medieval church but many found it attractive. Francis I was not unsympathetic. His sister Marguerite was a notable evangelical and Bourbon was her client.

Nicholas Bourbon was the son of an ironmaster but he did not follow his father into the business. Instead he studied at the College de Troyes and by the time he reached thirty had become a recognised Latinist teaching in Paris. It was there in 1533 that he published his first book under the simple title Nicolai Borbonii Vandoperani Nugae. It was republished in 1538 as the first of the Libri Octo.

England comes into Bourbon’s story because Anne Boleyn, the key evangelical figure at the English court, owed her evangelicalism to France. The most striking evidence of this is in the reformist books from French presses that she collected, a number of which still exist, including her copy of Lefèvre’s French translation of the Bible, published in Antwerp in 1534. Some were specially translated for her by her younger brother, the equally evangelical George Boleyn, Lord Rochford. Nor was this mere book collecting. Louis de Brun, a French epistolographer, vividly described seeing Anne early in 1529, immersed in a French translation of St Paul’s letters, almost certainly Lefèvre’s earlier version of the New Testament which conservatives in Parish had wanted burned. The origin of such interests was very probably the religious atmosphere of the household of Claude, the first wife of Francis I. Anne joined this in 1514 and became intimate enough with the queen for Francis to protest when she was called back to England in 1521.

Anne’s evangelical sympathies were well known on the continent. Bourbon’s friend Clémont Marot prepared for her, either on his own behalf or for a like-minded patron, a ‘customised’ version of his Sermon du bon pasteur et du mauvais, commonly called Le Pasteur Évangélique. In elegant italic script, highlighted with colour and adorned with a superb illumination of the queen’s arms surrounded by a wreath of oak leaves and Tudor roses, the poem extols Henry as the ally of Francis I and concludes with a celebration of Anne Boleyn as the hope of the Tudor dynasty.

O ma dame Anne, O royne incomparable,
Ce bon pasteur qui vous a aggreable
Vous doint ung filz qui soit l’ymaige vifve
Du Roy, son Pere, et qu’il surcroisse et vive
Tant que vous deux le puyissiez veoir en l’age
Que l’homme doibt ou jamais estre saige.

Anne was known to be willing to offer sanctuary to reformers from across the Channel, and it is no surprise, therefore, that she should come to Bourbon’s assistance when his first Nugae got him into trouble in 1533. Soon after publication he had been arrested and accused before the Parlement of Paris of attacking the church. Although released from prison in March 1534 on the personal order of Francis I, this was on condition that he admitted that his verses had gone too far and with the warning to keep on the right side of the church in future. The experience cost him more than a spell in prison and humiliation. While he was incarcerated, all his clothes, books and other possessions were looted, together with his pet nightingale.

As his verses make clear, Bourbon’s release was in response to a request from Henry VIII, prompted by Anne Boleyn.

A poor man, I lie shut in this dark prison: There is no one who would be able or would dare to bring help: Only you, Oh Queen: you, Oh noble nymph both can and will dare: As one whom the King and God Himself loves.

Precisely how the queen of England came to know of the poet’s plight is not clear. Bourbon names his contact in England as one of Anne’s evangelical allies, the king’s physician William Butts, but he also hints at the involvement of Jean de Dinteville, a French diplomat favoured by Anne. Bourbon repaid them with his pen. De Dinteville received a teasing poem about his mistress (the two men had been at school together) while in a letter from France soon after he left England Bourbon said of Butts: ‘There is no one to whom you could more safely commit your health than to Dr Butts. I hold this man in the highest esteem for his own worth’.

Bourbon arrived in England in the spring of 1534, being horribly seasick on the way. He was lodged with Cornelius Hayes, the king’s goldsmith – where he complained of the cold – and Anne Boleyn put him to his profession, teaching a select group of boys from her circle. There was her nephew Henry Carey who would be ennobled by her daughter as Lord Hunsdon. Henry Norris who would be another of Elizabeth’s favourites, was the eldest son of Sir Henry Norris, the royal groom of the stool, the person closest to Henry VIII. Henry Dudley was the son of John Dudley the future Duke of Northumberland and brother to Robert Dudley, Elizabeth’s Earl of Leicester. Thomas Harvey was the son of Sir Nicholas, the reformist ambassador to Charles V. The boys were about ten years old and for them Bourbon, wrote his second book, the Paedagogion, published in 1536 and later included in the Nugarum Libri Octo. As well as teaching, Bourbon lionised among the resident foreign community, sucked up to the élite and everywhere he wrote verses.

First place among the recipients of Boubon’s ‘English’ verses goes to Anne Boleyn. She figures in six poems and joins the king in a seventh. Cranmer features in three, Thomas Cromwell in two and in another Cranmer and Cromwell figure together, along with Henry VIII. Among the others are two for Hugh Latimer, two for John Dudley and two for Henry Knyvet of the Privy Chamber. Dr Butts gets several references, in prose as well as verse, as does William Boston, the Abbot of Westminster. Several continental residents also appear, and so, too, the martyr Thomas More.

In the nature of the classical models that he followed, Bourbon’s epigrams and short poems aim for wit and elegance, not substance. The title Trifles was, the unkind remarked, entirely appropriate. His poems to Cranmer are typical. For example:

The reason why I write to you so often, Archbishop Cranmer, is the brilliant reputation of your name. Britain is too rich with you so great a hero, Latium and Greece have nothing greater. So great are you that you cannot be greater or more distinguished unless you were to surpass yourself and wish to be God. From the Heavenly Father we have you, Archbishop, as you are: He gave you as such a leader to his people.

What the verses lack in content is, however, made up by context. In the first place we can tell what this intelligent foreigner picked up of affairs in England. A particular instance is a poem entitled ‘To that famous Englishman, Thomas Cromwell’ which begins with an allusion to classical beliefs about omens:

For a long time I have had a ringing in my right ear and my heart has been leaping for joy. What this portends I do not know. But what do I hear now? God grant that this rumour is true, that you, Cromwell, have been raised above all the bishops in your country and advanced with new honours by the king, and that the British state with you as its lord is much happier than it is wont to be. Oh wondrous happening. Now I know what it means that my heart has long been leaping for joy and that there has been a ringing in my right ear.

The cause of these congratulations is clearly Cromwell’s appointment in January 1535 as vicegerent, Henry VIII’s chief executive for church affairs.

Whether – with Bourbon only nine months in England – this was a first-hand assessment is, of course, open to doubt. More likely he had picked up the excitement in reforming circles at an appointment that promised final defeat for the traditionalists in the church. Bourbon was probably also repeating what he had been told, when he attributed Hugh Latimer’s appointment in September 1535 as bishop of Worcester jointly to ‘the King and Queen Anne, who suppress the unworthy and promote the deserving’. An earlier verse that praises Latimer’s preaching skills – Bourbon calls him the ‘exhorter’ – may even have been composed before he left France on the basis of reformist gossip.

Other comments, however, do give us Bourbon at first hand. He became friendly enough with Butts to make the royal physician the target of considerable ribbing. The poet’s servant John Borgio fell ill. Butts instructed him not to drink wine, only for Borgio to get worse. He was either a Frenchman or an Italian and, Bourbon wrote, abstinence was ‘contrary to nature and his national custom’! Thereupon the doctor’s son Edmund sneaked in a flagon from the cellar of William Boston, the abbot of Westminster. The fever went and Butts received the following, written as from the patient:

When I the unhappy Borgio was ill with a fever, you, stern Dr Butts, told me not to drink wine, but after Abbot Boston’s excellent vintage I got well – thanks to Bacchus not the medic.

Whilst with a hand of outstanding skill, the godlike mind of Hans was portraying my features on the panel, my jaw dropped and I uttered this song: ‘Hans painting me was greater than Apelles’.

In a poem of 1538-39 that prefaced a collection of Holbein’s Old Testament woodcuts, Bourbon ran out of superlatives: the artist outclassed Apelles and Parrhasios and that third miracle of the ancient world, Xeuxis, all rolled into one!

Bourbon’s verses also hint at Holbein’s lost output. The comments on his own portrait show that the chalk drawing which survives in the Royal Collection at Windsor clearly was worked up into a finished portrait. The picture is now lost, but Bourbon must have taken it back to France with him since a woodcut in the 1538 Lyons edition of the Nugae Libri Octo was taken from it. Another poem praises Holbein’s ‘lifelike’ portrayal of death. The most likely occasion for such a subject would be an ‘entombment’. If so, it suggests that as well as portraits, Holbein did paint at least one traditional votive piece for the English market. Another poem describes the homoerotic impact of his image of a sleeping Cupid:

In that image love slept... As I approached more closely, nothing was dearer to me in my heart; soon I was on fire with fierce flames. I began to shower it with kisses. I ceased to exist.

Since Bourbon refers to the piece as painted on ivory it was, no doubt, in miniature and possibly an example of one of the prestige objets d’art the painter was noted for. It, too, does not survive.

Bourbon’s writings also provide a roll call of evangelicals in England in the early 1530s. Cromwell, Cranmer, Latimer and Butts we know of already. The appearance of Holbein confirms a commitment to reform which is sometimes queried. One name that may seem unexpected is that of John Dudley, the future duke of Northumberland. It is usual to dismiss the Protestantism that Dudley espoused in the reign of Edward VI as something assumed for profit. However, with his eldest son going to the reformist Bourbon for lessons and the poet urging Sir John and his wife to ‘remain true to Christ’, it appears that Dudley was telling the truth when he said in 1552, ‘I have for twenty years stood to one kind of religion, in the same which I do now profess’.

The considerable prominence which Bourbon gives to William Boston, or rather William Benson of Boston, abbot of Westminster, suggests an evangelical whom historians have badly undervalued. After all, Westminster was, as Bourbon says, ‘the royal monastery’. A friend of Cranmer, Cromwell and Latimer (who preached for him) Boston had supported the royal divorce, officiated at Anne Boleyn’s coronation and at the christening of Princess Elizabeth. In 1539 he would support Cranmer in the battle to keep conservative reaction at bay. Book Two of Bourbon’s Nugae Libri Octo is dedicated to Boston and, as well as the story about Butts, it depicts a good scholar and a generous man who liked his wine, suffered from gout and was foremost among the higher clergy in enjoying a joke.

At the centre of this evangelical nexus was Anne Boleyn. Bourbon does not merely praise Anne for rescuing him. He celebrates their shared understanding of Christ:

For no crime, but through a false charge brought by certain persons and their hatred, I was shut in prison... when your pity looked upon me from the ends of the earth, snatching me in my affliction, Anne, from all my troubles... How can I express my thanks, still less, Oh Queen repay you? I confess I lack the resources. But the Spirit of Jesus which inflames you utterly, he has the wherewithal to give you your due.

If they in whom the love of Christ lives and blazes look up to you and adore you as a divine being, forgive them, Oh Queen. I think they do no wrong. Surely the honour is being paid to God who created you.

Though my Muse is begrimed with long imprisonment, yet exulting under your protection she still survives. Live on, you and your consort who, joined by His grace and linked by His love, burn with ardour for the honour of Jesus the Saviour.

Just as the golden sun dispels the gloomy shadows of night and at daybreak makes all things bright: So you, Oh Queen, restored as a new light to your French and brightening everything, bring back the Golden Age.

‘Your French’ because of Anne’s known love for the country of her adolescence, a ‘Golden Age’ because reformers across the Channel will follow her example.

The only one of Bourbon’s ‘English’ poems not favourable to its subject is the poem about Thomas More. It has alternate lines in Latin and Greek and plays on the name More as an echo of two Greek words, ‘moros’, meaning foolish, and ‘okumore’ meaning ‘bubble’.

I have seen and know someone named More, a name so very appropriate. He, though sprung from very humble origins – almost a product of the soil – [was] recently exalted with great wealth and honour. [But] by fortune which wickedly deceives [he] acted – who would believe it – against his people and his king in a way sacrilegious and like a usurper. [He was] so cocksure that he commonly said of himself ‘I remain a fool [Moros] and avoid consequences’. But his neck has just been struck by the wretched axe, Oh More, short-lived bubble.

When did Bourbon meet More? Orders to discharge the poet from his Paris prison were given on Thursday, March 19th, 1534, which meant that he could have got across the Channel and met the ex-chancellor before More was taken into custody on April 13th, for refusing to swear to the 1534 Succession Act supporting the Boleyn marriage. But can we imagine any of Bourbon’s evangelical contacts in England taking him to see More, still less a man of Bourbon’s reformed persuasion going to visit Chelsea alone or being welcomed there, humanist though he may have been? A more likely occasion was after the interview of April 13th, when More, in the hope that he could be persuaded to conform, was put in the custody of Bourbon’s patron William Boston, abbot of Westminster. It must be that it was then that Bourbon met him and, no doubt, added his persuasions to those of his host. Equally, since More never mentioned meeting so distinguished a humanist, we can conclude what Sir Thomas thought of him.

A meeting in Boston’s household would certainly suggest that the pun which Bourbon attributes to More is genuine. It accurately reflects the position Sir Thomas adopted when first detained: he might be thought a fool, but safety lay in the folly of keeping his thoughts to himself. It is also significant that Bourbon described More’s behaviour as ‘sacrilegious’ (literally ‘God-hating’). Evidently he appreciated or had been told that More was refusing to recognise that it was God who had given Henry VIII supremacy over the church. As for the term, ‘like a usurper’ (literally ‘tyrannically’), the probable reference was to More’s disloyal use of his office and influence to oppose the king’s will.

Nicholas Bourbon does not say that he saw More die and he left England before the evangelical circle he cherished was itself shaken by the destruction of Anne Boleyn in May 1536. He never changed his assessment of her. The poems dedicated to her were not tactfully suppressed or reworked for a new sponsor – something he often did. Evidently he agreed with his friend, Etienne Dolet, who proclaimed to Europe that Anne had been condemned ‘on a false charge of adultery’. But although he left England in time, Bourbon did not escape change. He arrived to find the religious situation in France totally transformed. In October 1534, while he was safe in England, a number of broadsheets [placards] had appeared in Paris and even at the royal court, denouncing ‘the horrible, great and insufferable abuses of the papal mass’. A huge conservative reaction had occurred, and on his return Bourbon felt it wiser to keep out of the public eye, and see his verses through the press at Lyons.

Nicholas was, nevertheless, a good deal luckier than his friends in England. A conservative reaction there effectively forced Hugh Latimer to resign his see in 1539. In 1540 ‘that famous Englishman’, Thomas Cromwell, was executed and Thomas Cranmer was left struggling to keep evangelical religion alive. Bourbon, however, was engaged by Marguerite of Navarre to tutor her daughter Jean, the future mother of Henry IV, and so attained the staunchest of protectors. Eventually he retired to a small country living and died in 1550. To the end he acted as France’s unofficial Latin poet laureate but he seems never to have written of England again.

Eric Ives is Emeritus Professor of English History at the University of Birmingham and the author of Anne Boleyn (Basil Blackwell, 1986).