Even after their exchange of vows, Anne kept Henry waiting. Her father was to be her escort back to Court from Hever and problems–real or manufactured–rendered the timing of his departure uncertain. Now it was planned for this day; now that. Henry was on tenterhooks and was reduced to petitioning Thomas Boleyn, his own servant and councillor, like any humble suitor. Please come two days earlier, he begged. Or at least at the time originally agreed. ‘For otherwise’, Henry wrote lamely to Anne, ‘I shall think he has no wish to serve the lovers’ turn as he said he would.’1
But, whenever Anne returned, her reception was assured. Just as her absence, Henry told her, had given him ‘greater heart-ache than the Angel [Gabriel?] or Scripture could express’, so their reunion would be more than the joys of Heaven. He was her ‘secretary’; he longed to be with her ‘privately’; he was ‘and ever will be, your loyal and most assured servant, HR, who seeks no other than AB’.
He was well and truly caught.
Now at last Anne could return to Court, confident that Henry would fulfil his vow and more: she would be his ‘sole mistress’ certainly, and, if he (and she) could manage it, his wife and Queen as well.
Four months later, Anne appeared with Henry in public for the first time. The occasion, one of the grandest and most lavish events of Henry’s reign, was the reception given for the French ambassadors at Greenwich in May 1527. It took place in a specially constructed banqueting house and theatre: the decorations of the theatre were painted by Holbein, while the banqueting house was hung with Henry’s most precious tapestries and stacked with his finest gold and silver plate. The festivities culminated in the evening entertainments of 5 May, when, by the King’s command, De Turenne, the principal French ambassador, danced with the Princess Mary, ‘and the King with Mistress Boleyn, who was brought up in France with the late Queen [Claude]’.2
What the two women thought of each other during this encounter we can only guess.
Mary, in fact, probably noticed nothing. After all, she was the star of the ball. She was publicly doted on by her father, who showed off her splendid auburn hair (so like his own before he had begun to go bald) to the ambassadors. So if she deigned to acknowledge Anne at all it would only have been as a courtesy to a nobody, who was enjoying a brief moment of glory with her father because she could communicate with the ambassadors in her excellent French. And the King’s partner seems to have been similarly invisible to the rest of the English Court, no doubt for the same reason.
But Anne knew better. She knew, though Mary did not, that she and Mary would be inveterate enemies in a struggle that would last for both their lives. And she knew that the struggle would start soon.