Richard Page (courtier)

• 1. Introduction

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  Sir Richard Page was arrested on the 8th of May 1536, swept up in one of the most dangerous political storms of Henry VIII's reign. Seven men were taken to the Tower of London that spring, accused of treason and adultery with Queen Anne Boleyn. Five of those men were executed. Page walked out alive.

  How did an English courtier of unknown parentage rise to serve a cardinal, a king's illegitimate son, and ultimately the queen herself? And how, after being banished from court in public disgrace, did he find his way back into royal favour? Those questions trace a career that touched nearly every centre of Tudor power in the first half of the sixteenth century.

• 2. From Surrey to the Cardinal

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  Richard Page's origins are a puzzle. His parentage is not recorded, and historians have placed him tentatively in Surrey or Middlesex based on circumstantial evidence. Whatever his roots, his first documented path upward ran through Cardinal Thomas Wolsey. Page served Wolsey and eventually became the cardinal's chamberlain, a role that placed him at the administrative heart of one of England's most powerful households.

  By 1516 he had been knighted and had secured a position as a Gentleman of Henry VIII's Privy Chamber, a post that meant daily proximity to the king. In 1522 he was appointed a Justice of the Peace for Surrey, and two years later he held the same office for Middlesex. These appointments were not ceremonial; they gave Page real judicial authority in the counties most closely tied to his likely origins.

• 3. Yorkshire and Henry FitzRoy

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  In 1525 Page's career took him north. He joined the Council of the North in Yorkshire, and he served as vice-chamberlain in the household of Henry FitzRoy, Henry VIII's illegitimate son, drawing wages of £20. The posting gave Page a direct role in managing the young boy's establishment at a moment when the king was testing ways to deploy his natural son as a political figure in the north.

  Page contributed something personal to that household as well. While in FitzRoy's service, he devised armorial bearings for the boy, an act that positioned Page as both an administrator and a designer of dynastic identity for a child whose status was unusually complicated.

• 4. Anne Boleyn and the Privy Chamber

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  Page's fortunes shifted decisively in 1527, the year he was appointed to the Privy Chamber, and the appointment came directly from his public alignment with Anne Boleyn against Cardinal Wolsey, still the king's chief minister at the time. Taking that side openly was a calculated risk that paid off.

  Thomas Cromwell's letters to Wolsey give a glimpse of Page's new role. In one letter Cromwell reported that Page had received Wolsey's letter directed to Anne Boleyn and would deliver it, and that Anne gave him kind words without committing to speak to the king on Wolsey's behalf. Page was operating as a messenger and intermediary in some of the most sensitive correspondence of the era.

  From 1527 to 1533 he also served as Recorder of York. During that tenure, on the 3rd of November 1529, he was knighted at the Palace of Whitehall. On the 1st of February 1530 he received a gift of crest and arms quarterly from Thomas Benolt. He also served as Captain of the King's Bodyguards during this period, a posting that combined ceremonial authority with genuine physical proximity to Henry VIII.

• 5. The Tower and the Aftermath

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  On the 8th of May 1536 Page was arrested on charges of treason and adultery with Queen Anne. The group taken to the Tower included Thomas Wyatt, Henry Norris, William Brereton, Francis Weston, Mark Smeaton, and George Boleyn, Viscount Rochford. All except Page and Wyatt were found guilty and executed.

  John Hussey, 1st Baron Hussey of Sleaford, writing to Lord Lisle on the 12th of May 1536, noted that Page and Wyatt were in the Tower but were thought to be without danger of life, though Page was expected to be banished from the king's court forever. Both men were released in June 1536, on the advice of Thomas Cromwell.

  The banishment did not last. Henry VIII summoned Page back, and in 1537 he was made High Sheriff of Surrey. That same year the king gave Page the office of Chamberlain to his son Prince Edward. A man who had been publicly disgraced and expelled from court had returned to one of the most sensitive posts in the royal household.

• 6. Marriage and Family Connections

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  In 1512 Page married Elizabeth Bourchier, daughter of Fulk Bourchier, 10th Baron FitzWarin and Elizabeth Dynham. The marriage produced a daughter, Elizabeth Page, born in 1516 and died in 1573, who married Sir William Skipwith of Ormesby.

  Elizabeth Bourchier herself carried a remarkable marital history into the union with Page. Before him she had been married to Henry Beaumont, then to a husband surnamed Verney, and then to Sir Edward Stanhope, who died on the 6th of June 1511. Through Stanhope she had a daughter, Anne Stanhope, who married Edward Seymour, 1st Duke of Somerset. Seymour was uncle to King Edward VI and served as Lord Protector during the young king's minority, which made Elizabeth Bourchier the mother-in-law of one of the most powerful men in mid-sixteenth-century England.