George Boleyn, Viscount Rochford

• 1. Introduction

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  George Boleyn, Viscount Rochford, stepped onto Tower Hill on the morning of the 17th of May 1536 to face the axe. The crowd watching was, by all accounts, almost completely silent. That silence was remarkable. State executions in Tudor England were usually raucous affairs, with jeering and shouting from the crowd. But George's scaffold speech was so long, so eloquent, and so carefully argued that the vast audience held still to hear every word.

  Who was this man, and how did a courtier described even by his enemies as possessing "sense, wit, and courage" end up on a scaffold at thirty-one? The answer runs through royal courts, diplomatic missions, religious reforming zeal, and a judicial process that many watching believed was rigged from the start. George Boleyn was no bystander in the drama of Henry VIII's reign. He was a participant, an agent, and ultimately a victim of it.

• 2. A Family Built for Court

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  Blickling Hall in Norfolk was most likely where George was born, around 1504, the youngest surviving child of Thomas Boleyn and Elizabeth Howard. That parentage placed him at the intersection of two of the most powerful families in England. His mother was the daughter of the Earl of Surrey, who would become the 2nd Duke of Norfolk. Through her, George was the nephew of the 3rd Duke of Norfolk and first cousin to the poet and soldier Lord Henry Howard, styled Earl of Surrey.

  Hever Castle in Kent became the family's chief residence in 1505, when Thomas Boleyn inherited it from his own father. The three surviving Boleyn children, Mary, Anne, and George, grew up there. Their father had two other sons, both named Thomas and Henry, who died before reaching adulthood. George's birth year of approximately 1504 is supported by several converging sources. George Cavendish wrote in verse that George was about 27 when he joined the Privy Council in 1529. Foreign diplomats at the time considered him too young to serve as Ambassador to France in October 1529. And Thomas Boleyn himself, in a letter written after his children's executions, told Thomas Cromwell that his wife had given him a child every year after their marriage around 1498-1499, which would place all five Boleyn children within the window of 1500 to 1504.

  A career at court was simply the expected path for a boy born into this family. George was introduced to Henry VIII's festivities at the age of ten, during the Christmas season of 1514-15, where he took part in an indoor melee alongside his father, Charles Brandon, and Nicholas Carew. He became one of the King's pageboys shortly afterward.

• 3. Education and Character

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  Fluent French, working Italian, and Latin were the tools George carried into adulthood. Mastery of languages was not merely cultural polish at the Tudor court; it was a professional requirement for anyone destined for diplomatic work. George's sisters were educated abroad, but George is thought to have stayed in England for most of his early years, though his first biographer raises the possibility he spent time in France during his father's embassy there beginning in January 1519. Whatever the case, tradition holds that he attended the University of Oxford, though he does not appear in the university's records, a gap that was not unusual for aristocrats of the period.

  Three distinct voices from the period sketch George's personality. Thomas Wyatt, the poet and a friend of the Boleyns, credited George with "great wit"; in sixteenth-century usage, wit meant primarily intelligence rather than humor. Wyatt also noted that George was too proud, though he equally acknowledged that many mourned his death as a genuine loss. George Cavendish, who served Cardinal Wolsey and was openly hostile to the Boleyns, granted George good looks and charm even while criticising his womanising. Historian David Starkey later summed up the family resemblance by saying George had "many of Anne's talents and all of her pride".

  Eustace Chapuys, the Imperial Ambassador who was actively trying to damage the Boleyns' reputation, had only one specific complaint about George: that he could not resist debating Lutheran theology whenever the two of them met socially. That single detail says a great deal about where George's deepest commitments lay.

• 4. Diplomat and Religious Reformer

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  George first appeared in official records as an adult in April 1522, when he and his father received a joint grant of manor houses in Kent. Two years later, at the age of 20, the King gave him Grimston Manor in Norfolk as a solo grant, thought to be an early wedding present from a monarch already fond of his company. The Privy Purse expenses from this period regularly list George playing bowls, tennis, cards, and archery with Henry, as well as hunting together and placing large bets on their games.

  Six months after being appointed Gentleman of the Privy Chamber in 1525, Cardinal Wolsey reorganised the Court and stripped George of the post, halving the number of gentlemen as part of a structure called the Eltham Ordinance. Wolsey was using the reorganisation to remove those he saw as threats. The fact that a 21-year-old was considered threatening enough to purge was, as one historian noted, something of a backhanded compliment.

  George's diplomatic career began in earnest in late 1529 when he was knighted and sent to France on his first embassy. He attended six missions to France in total. On his first trip, between late October 1529 and late February 1530, he travelled with John Stokesley, Dean of the Chapel Royal, to persuade French universities to support Henry's divorce from Catherine of Aragon. The universities initially refused. George then convinced King Francis I to write a strong letter in favour of the divorce, which reversed that decision. The French ambassador Jean du Bellay noted that George was considerably younger than most foreign diplomats and that his appointment would cause amusement. But du Bellay also said George deserved more honor than was ordinarily extended, and that his reception ought to reflect that.

  On his second embassy in March 1533, George brought Francis news of Anne's marriage to Henry. He returned with a letter from Francis asking the Pope to concede to Henry's wishes. The Bishop of Paris, who had previously found George's youth amusing, now called him "the most unreasonable young man who ever crossed the sea". Du Bellay, for his part, grudgingly praised the force and respect George commanded in that meeting.

  Religious reform ran as deep in George as in Anne. He translated two religious texts from French into English as gifts for his sister, dedicating them to her as Marchioness of Pembroke. These translations set out Lutheran doctrine and represent what the source describes as a joint commitment by both siblings to Church reform. When Anne received a pamphlet by Simon Fish called "A Supplication for the Beggars", it was George who, according to Fish's wife, pushed Anne to show it to the King.

  In 1531, Henry chose George specifically to argue the case for royal supremacy before Convocation, the Church's advisory body. George was formally called to Parliament on the 5th of February 1533, and his attendance record outstripped that of any other Lord despite his heavy schedule of overseas missions. He voted in favour of every statute that curtailed the Pope's authority in England. He twice held the proxy vote of Thomas West, 9th Baron De La Warr, an adherent to the old faith. West later sat on the jury that tried him.

• 5. The Fall

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  In 1536, Anne miscarried a son. That loss, falling at the same moment Henry became infatuated with Jane Seymour, one of Anne's own maids-of-honour, set the machinery of destruction in motion. Thomas Cromwell devised a plot in which Anne was accused of adultery with five men. One of those men was George. The specific charges against him were incest with the Queen and conspiracy with Anne to kill the King.

  On the 23rd of April 1536, George was expected to be named to the Order of the Garter. The honour went instead to Sir Nicholas Carew, a known opponent of the Boleyns. The following day, Henry directed Cromwell to establish a commission to investigate treasons. Anne and George were arrested on the 2nd of May 1536, the day after the May Day joust at which George had been one of the principal competitors.

  Anne stood trial before her brother, pre-judged by the earlier convictions of the four other men. George stood trial a few hours after Anne on Monday the 15th of May. Because Anne had already been found guilty of incest, the structure of the proceedings made it nearly impossible for George to be acquitted. Chapuys, who observed the trial, reported that those in the room were betting 10 to 1 in George's favour, and that the court chronicler Charles Wriothesley said his defence was a marvel to hear. Chapuys himself noted that George was convicted on nothing more than a presumption.

  George's wife Jane has sometimes been accused of providing evidence against him. The source material does not support this. The only thing traceable to Jane is a letter in which she reported that Anne had told her Henry was not able to satisfy a woman. No document from the trial itself names Jane as a witness against her husband.

  The court found George guilty unanimously. The original sentence was to be hanged, drawn, and quartered, later commuted to beheading. He spent his final days so distressed by his outstanding debts that Sir William Kingston, Constable of the Tower, wrote to Cromwell twice asking him to ease George's conscience by settling the matter.

  Cromwell, speaking to Chapuys after the executions, boasted that he had gone to considerable trouble arranging the plot, suggesting he had done it partly to help engineer an alliance with Spain. In the same conversation he praised both Anne and George for their sense, wit, and courage.

• 6. Tower Hill, 17 May 1536

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  George Boleyn and four other men, Sir Henry Norris, Sir Francis Weston, Sir William Brereton, and Mark Smeaton, were beheaded on Tower Hill on the morning of the 17th of May 1536. The silence of the crowd during George's speech was noted precisely because it was unusual. Executions of this kind typically drew noise.

  His speech ran long and focused on religious conviction rather than personal grievance. He followed the convention of the day by admitting, as a condemned man must, that he was a sinner deserving of death. But he threaded his denial of guilt through the language of fortune rather than innocence. He said he would still be alive had he not trusted in the vanity of the world, the flatteries of the court, and the treacheries of fortune. By laying the blame on fortune rather than on his own crimes, he came as close as convention allowed to denying the charges.

  He asked forgiveness of anyone he had offended, begged God's pardon, and then spoke at length about his religious beliefs before submitting calmly to the axe. Anne was beheaded two days later, on the 19th of May 1536. Their maternal uncle, Thomas Howard, 3rd Duke of Norfolk, had presided over the court that sentenced them both.

• 7. Legacy and Later Portrayals

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  George Boleyn's death left a visible gap in the record of English religious reform. He had been the man Henry trusted to argue royal supremacy before Convocation in 1531, a diplomat whose six embassies to France produced concrete results, and a translator who carried Lutheran ideas into Anne's hands in English prose.

  His afterlife in fiction has often overshadowed the historical record. The 1830 opera Anna Bolena by Gaetano Donizetti includes a character called Lord Rochfort drawn from George. He appeared on screen in the 1969 film Anne of the Thousand Days, played by Michael Johnson, and in the 1970 television series The Six Wives of Henry VIII, played by Jonathan Newth. Philippa Gregory's 2001 novel The Other Boleyn Girl gave George a prominent role; Steven Mackintosh played him in the 2003 television film and Jim Sturgess in the 2008 cinema version. The television series The Tudors, which began in 2007 with Padraic Delaney in the role, portrayed George as bisexual and his marriage as abusive, choices that depart significantly from what the historical sources actually record.

  Historian Retha Warnicke proposed in her 1989 biography of Anne Boleyn that the men accused alongside Anne were chosen because of ambiguity over their sexuality, and that George may have been charged with sodomy as well as treason. In fact none of the men was charged with sodomy, and no contemporary sources, not even Chapuys, who was actively searching for ways to discredit the Boleyns, ever recorded any rumour of homosexuality attached to any of them. George carried the canopy at the christening of Princess Elizabeth on the 10th of September 1533; that niece would one day reign as Queen Elizabeth I, though she was only two years old when her uncle lost his head.