impaired. I put an end to this my lucubration, after having very humbly craved your good-will and affection. Written at Hever, by

"Your very humble and obedient daughter,
"ANNA DE BOULLAN."

It is impossible to believe that such a letter was written by an infant of seven years old, unassisted by her governess.

Anne Boleyn is named in the list of the English retinue of Mary queen of France, as her fourth maid of honour. Her coadjutors in this office were the grand-daughters of Elizabeth Woodville, lady Anne Gray and Elizabeth Gray, sisters to the marquess of Dorset: they were cousins to king Henry. The other was the youngest daughter of lord Dacre. The document in which they are named is preserved in the Cottonian library, and is signed by Louis XII. Four was the smallest number of maids of honour that could have been appointed for a queen of France, and assuredly a child of seven years old would scarcely have been included among them, especially at a time when the etiquettes of royalty were so much more rigidly observed than at present. There can be no doubt that mademoiselle de Boleyn, as she is called in that catalogue, was of full age to take a part in all the pageantry and processions connected with the royal bridal, and to perform the duties pertaining to her office, which could not have been the case had she been under fourteen years of age.

The fair young Boleyn, as one of the maids of honour to the princess Mary, had, of course, a place assigned to her near the person of the royal bride at the grand ceremonial of the espousal of that princess to Louis XII. of France, which was solemnized August 13, 1514, in the church of the Grey Friars, Greenwich, the duke of Longueville acting as the proxy of his sovereign. In September, Anne attended her new mistress to Dover, who was accompanied by the king and queen, and all the court. At Dover they tarried a whole month on account of the tempestuous winds, which did great damage on that coast, causing the wrecks of several gallant ships, with awful loss of lives. It was not till the 2nd of October that the weather was

2

1 The above translation of the original French letter, preserved among archbishop Parker's MSS., Coll. Corp. Christi, Cantabr., is from the invaluable collection of royal letters edited by sir Henry Ellis; second Series, vol. ii.

2 Lingard.

sufficiently calm to admit of the passage of the royal bride.' Long before the dawn of that day, Anne and the rest of the noble attendants, who were all lodged in Dover-castle, were roused up to embark with their royal mistress. King Henry conducted his best-loved sister to the sea-side, and there kissed her, and committed her to the care of God, the fortune of the sea, and the governance of the French king, her husband. She and her retinue went on board at four o'clock in the morning. Anne Boleyn, though bidding adieu to her native land, was encouraged by the presence of her father sir Thomas Boleyn, her grandfather the duke of Norfolk, and her uncle the earl of Surrey, who were associated in the honour of delivering the princess to the king of France. Great perils were encountered on the voyage, for a tempestuous hurricane presently arose and scattered the fleet. The ship in which Anne sailed with her royal mistress was separated from the convoy, and was in imminent danger for some hours; and when at last she made the harbour of Boulogne, the master drove her aground in the mouth of the haven. Fortunately the boats were in readiness, and the terrified ladies were safely conveyed to the shore. Wet and exhausted as the fair voyagers were, they were compelled to rally their spirits the instant they landed, in order to receive, with the best grace their forlorn condition would permit, the compliments of a distinguished company of French princes, prelates, nobles, knights, and gentlemen, who were waiting on the strand to offer their homage to their beautiful young queen. To say nothing of the inconvenience, it must have been mortifying enough to Mary and her ladies, to make their first appearance before the gallants of the court of France in the plight of a water-goddess and her attendant Nereids. Thus was the future queen of England, Anne Boleyn, initiated into some of the pains and penalties of grandeur, to which she served her early apprenticeship in the court of the graceful princess whom she was in after days to call sister.

The fair travellers were conducted with solemn pomp to the town of Boulogne, where they obtained needful rest and re

freshment, with the liberty of changing their wet garments. Anne proceeded with her royal mistress and the rest of the train, by easy journeys, till within four miles of Abbeville, when the bride and all her ladies, clad in glittering robes, mounted white palfreys, forming an equestrian procession of seven-and-thirty. Queen Mary's palfrey was trapped with cloth of gold: her ladies were dressed in crimson velvet, a costume peculiarly becoming to the sparkling black eyes and warm bru nette complexion of the youthful maid of honour. A series of splendid pageants graced the public entrance of queen Mary and her ladies into Abbeville. On the following Monday, being St. Denis's-day, Anne Boleyn was an assistant at the nuptials of her royal mistress with the king of France, which were solemnized with great pomp in the church of Abbeville. After the mass was done, there was a sumptuous banquet, at which the queen's English ladies were feasted, and received especial marks of respect. But the next day, October 10th, the scene changed, and, to the consternation, and sorrow of the young queen, and the lively indignation of her followers, all her attendants, male and female, including her nurse, whom she called 'her mother Guildford,' were dismissed by the king her husband, and ordered to return home. Anne Boleyn and two other ladies were the only exceptions to this sweeping sentence.' She therefore witnessed all the pageants that were given in honour of the royal nuptials, and took a part in the fêtes. Her skill in the French language was doubtless the reason of her detention, and in this she must have been very serviceable to her royal mistress, who, but for her company, would have been left a forlorn stranger in her own court. It has been stated by a French biographer, from the authority of records of contemporary date, that when sir Thomas Boleyn returned to England, he placed his daughter, whose education he did not consider complete, in a seminary, probably a convent, in the village of Brie, a few miles from Paris, under the especial care of his friend and kinsman Du Moulin, lord of Brie and Fontenaye.2

'Lingard. Benger. Thompson. Herbert. The abbé Libouf, who mentions this circumstance, considers that the French progenitor of the Boleyns formerly emanated from this very village, as Brockart,

Whether Anne remained with her royal mistress till the death of Louis XII. broke the fetter which had bound the reluctant princess to a joyless home, and left her free to return to England as the happy wife of the man of her heart, or the previous jealousy of the French court against Mary's English attendants extended at last to her young maid of honour and caused her removal to Brie, cannot be ascertained. It

is, however, certain that she did not return to England with queen Mary, but entered the service of the consort of Francis I., queen Claude, the daughter of the deceased king Louis XII. This princess, who was a truly amiable and excellent woman, endeavoured to revive all the moral restraints and correct demeanour of the court of her mother, Anne of Bretagne. Queen Claude was always surrounded by a number of young ladies, who walked in procession with her to mass, and formed part of her state whenever she appeared in public. In private she directed their labours at the loom or embroidery-frame, and endeavoured, by every means in her power, to give a virtuous and devotional bias to their thoughts and conversation. The society of gentlemen was prohibited to these maidens.' How the rules and regulations prescribed by this sober-minded queen suited the lively genius of her volatile English maid of honour, we leave our readers to judge after they have perused the following description, which the viscount Chateaubriant, one of the courtiers of Francis I., has left of the personal characteristics of the fair Boleyn :-" She possessed a great talent for poetry, and when she sung, like a second Orpheus, she would have made bears and wolves attentive. She likewise danced the English dances, leaping and jumping with infinite grace and agility. Moreover, she invented many new figures and steps, which are yet known by her name, or by those of the gallant partners with whom she danced them. in his Life of Du Moulin, proves, by an ancient document which he quotes, that Gualtier de Boleyn, the ancestor of Anne, was a vassal kinsman to the lord of Brie in 1344. That Anne Boleyn received much kindness from the lord of Brie and his family, is also inferred by this gentleman from the manner in which her daughter, queen Elizabeth, urged the French ambassador to bring the murderers of the wife of one of the family to justice.

1 Brantome.

She was well skilled in all games fashionable at courts.

Besides singing like a syren, accompanying herself on the lute, she harped better than king David, and handled cleverly both flute and rebec.' She dressed with marvellous taste, and devised new modes, which were followed by the fairest ladies of the French court; but none wore them with her gracefulness, in which she rivalled Venus."2 Our modern taste could dispense with her skill on the flute and fiddle, and likewise with her agile leaps and jumps in the dance, but every age varies in its appreciation of accomplishments. Like musical talent, poetical genius is often manifested in persons of the same descent. Anne Boleyn was cousin-german to the first English poet of her day, the celebrated earl of Surrey, and her brother, George Boleyn, was a lyrist of no little fame in the gallant court of Henry VIII. Several of his poems are published with those by sir Thomas Wyatt, her lover and faithful friend.

The French chroniclers have preserved a description of the costume Anne Boleyn wore at the court of Francis I. She had a bourrelet or cape of blue velvet, trimmed with points; at the end of each hung a little bell of gold. She wore a vest of blue velvet starred with silver, and a surcoat of watered silk lined with miniver, with large hanging sleeves, which hid her hands from the curiosity of the courtiers; her little feet were covered with blue velvet brodequins, the insteps were adorned each with a diamond star. On her head she wore a golden-coloured aureole of some kind of plaited gauze, and her hair fell in ringlets. This is not the attire in which her portraits are familiar to the English, but it was the dress of her youth. If we may believe Sanders, Blackwood, and, indeed, many of the French historians, Anne Boleyn did not pass through the ordeal of the gay court of Francis I. without scandal. Francis himself has been particularly named in connexion with these reports, but as nothing like proof has

In the original extract, "elle manoit fort gentilment fluste et rebec." The rebec was a little violin, with three strings.

2 This extract is made from the manuscript of the count by M. Jacob, the learned octogenarian bibliopole of Paris. He says that the unedited memoirs of the count de Chateaubriant are "trop hardis pour voir le jour."