Lancelot de Carle

• 1. Introduction

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  Lancelot de Carle was standing in London in the spring of 1536, watching a queen lose her head. He was there as a secretary to the French ambassador, Antoine de Castelnau, a young scholar from Bordeaux serving a diplomatic posting far from home. What he witnessed and then committed to verse would haunt the historical record for nearly five centuries. His 1,318-line poem about the fall of Anne Boleyn would be suppressed, copied, argued over, and eventually recognised as one of the most contested eyewitness accounts of a Tudor execution. Yet Carle himself remains almost invisible behind the poem. Who was this man who moved between poets, kings, cardinals, and popes? What drove him to set down, in rhyming French verse, the arrest, trial, and death of the second wife of Henry VIII? And why did Henry VIII himself write a furious letter demanding the poem be destroyed?

• 2. A Bordeaux Family

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  Jean de Carle, Lancelot's father, held one of the most prestigious legal positions in southwest France: second president of the Parlement Bordeaux, a post he occupied from 1519 to 1521. The family was rooted in Bordeaux, where Jean had married Jacquette, daughter of Baude de Constantin, in 1500. The couple had three sons and a daughter. Lancelot's sister Marguerite would later marry Étienne de La Boétie, which drew the family into the orbit of the philosopher Michel de Montaigne. Montaigne was related to La Boétie, making Lancelot de Carle connected by marriage to one of the most celebrated thinkers of the French Renaissance. Lancelot's two brothers distinguished themselves in local government service, following their father's legal path. Jean de Carle died before 1556; Jacquette died around December 1556 in Bordeaux. Lancelot, by then a bishop, was the family member who had travelled furthest from home.

• 3. The Poet's World

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  Pierre de Ronsard and Joachim du Bellay, the two leading figures of the literary movement known as La Pléiade, both dedicated works to Lancelot de Carle. That level of recognition places Carle among the most esteemed literary figures of his generation in France. He wrote in French, Latin, and Italian, and also translated biblical and classical texts, including a French rendering of Homer's Odyssey attributed to him by La Croix du Main. Antoine du Verdier described Carle as an "excellent poet in Latin and French and well learned in Greek". Carle collaborated with Clément Marot and Michel d'Amboise on a collection called Les Blasons du Corps Féminin, published in Paris in 1543. His later works included a paraphrase in French verse of Ecclesiastes in 1561, and two collections of biblical canticles in 1562. The German composer Wilhelm Killmayer set one of Carle's poems in a song cycle called Blasons anatomiques du corps féminin in 1968, four centuries after Carle's death. A 1560 publication titled Exhortation ou Parénèse en Vers Héroïques Latins et Français was dedicated to his nephew, Jean de Carle.

• 4. The Anne Boleyn Poem

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  The poem Carle wrote about Anne Boleyn carries a long title that translates roughly as A Letter Containing the Criminal Charges Laid Against Queen Anne Boleyn of England. It is dated the 2nd of June 1536, just weeks after the queen's execution. Carle was serving as secretary to the French ambassador when he wrote it, and there is reason to believe the poem may have begun as a diplomatic report to Francis I. It runs to 1,318 lines and covers Anne's early life as well as the arrests, trials, and executions of the queen and her co-accused in May 1536. The poem acknowledges that its information came from a variety of sources inside England, but Carle declined to name any of them or vouch for their accuracy. Scholars have since found factual errors that Carle could, in principle, have verified. The poem was not published until 1545, yet thirteen copies survive: two printed versions and eleven manuscripts, held across the British Library, the Royal Library of Belgium, the Bibliothèque nationale de France, and departmental archives in Bordeaux, Soissons, and Valenciennes. None of the manuscripts precisely matches any other, and no documentary evidence confirms which, if any, is Carle's original. The French literary scholar Georges Ascoli examined most of the surviving versions in 1920 and chose one he believed closest to the original, the manuscript in the Bibliothèque Nationale catalogued as f. fr. 12795. A complete English translation appears in Susan Walters Schmid's Anne Boleyn, Lancelot de Carle, and the Uses of Documentary Evidence.

• 5. Henry's Fury, History's Debate

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  In June 1537, while Carle was back in France, Henry VIII discovered that the poem existed. He wrote directly to Stephen Gardiner, his ambassador in Paris, calling the poem "a French book, written in form of a tragedy" and expressing outrage that it had been composed inside the house of the French ambassador in England and then printed in France. Henry ordered Gardiner to press the French king to suppress all copies, leaving the punishment of the poem's makers to royal discretion. Whether Carle or anyone else faced punishment from the French king is unknown. The poem circulated widely despite Henry's protests. A separate and long-accepted account held that another Frenchman, Crispin de Milherve, was the actual eyewitness at Anne's trial and execution, while Carle was thought to have been absent. In 2009, the historian John Guy argued in a review of Alison Weir's book on Anne Boleyn's fall that French scholars had demonstrated the two men were actually the same person. Guy noted that a French scholar had proven as early as 1844 that the Milherve text had been doctored, and that by 1927 a comparison of all genuine manuscripts showed the two poems were identical and attributed to Carle. In 2010, Professor George W. Bernard of the University of Southampton went further, arguing that Carle's letter might support the possibility that Anne Boleyn was genuinely guilty of the adultery charges brought against her.

• 6. Bishop and Royal Councillor

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  After his time in London, Carle rose steadily through the structures of the French court. He served as almoner to Francis I and then, in 1545, as almoner to the dauphin of France, the future Henry II. He also acted as royal councillor and advised both Charles, Cardinal of Lorraine, and Catherine de Medici. In 1547, he travelled to Rome to reconcile the Pope and the French king. As a reward for that mission, he was appointed Bishop of Riez, in the Alpes-de-Haute-Provence, in 1550. Pope Julius III granted his bulls on the 28th of September 1550; the document describes him as a clericus, meaning he had not yet been ordained a priest. He undertook a second mission to Italy in 1554. Unlike many bishops of his era, Carle spent substantial time in his diocese and worked to calm civil unrest in Provence. He had the interior of his newly built cathedral decorated with paintings in the sanctuary and apse; those works were later destroyed by Huguenot iconoclasts, a decade after his death. In October and November 1564, he participated in the Colloquy of Poissy, a formal attempt by the French Crown to broker agreement between Catholics and Huguenots, which ultimately failed. He also wrote letters to Charles IX describing the actions and final days of M. de Guise, published in Paris in 1563.

• 7. Final Years and Legacy

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  Carle died in Paris in July 1568. His will, dated the 19th of May 1557, left his property to Francois de Carle, described as his nephew and the eldest son of his brother Pierre. The church historian Joseph-Hyacinthe Albanès later wrote that Carle's withdrawal to Paris in his final years worked to the detriment of his diocese, where the bishop's absence allowed the spread of heresy to go unchecked. The cathedral paintings he commissioned did not survive him by long. Yet the poem about Anne Boleyn outlasted everything else he built or wrote. Its debated authorship, its contested accuracy, and its possible origins as a secret diplomatic report keep it in circulation among historians of the Tudor court. The question of what Carle actually saw in London in the spring of 1536, and how much he chose to invent or obscure, remains open.