George Boleyn
Anne's brother
George Boleyn, Viscount Rochford (1504 – )
The younger brother of Anne and Mary, you are recognised in your lifetimes as an accomplished and attractive young man, but there is a curious blank in history where you should be. You were a busy Cout poet but your verses are lost. You were said to be handsome but no picture remains. You were committed to religious reform but your only religious writings are translations. You were oddly insubstantial and so [in this story] you are your clothes: flamboyant, expensive and a bit silly.
Mantel, Notes on characters
Week 7: Entirely Beloved Cromwell (Part 2)
A hand-devil carrying Wolsey at the farce held at Hampton Court after the cardinal’s death. Cromwell makes a mental note.
Week 9: Arrange Your Face (Part 2)
He is Lord Rochford now, and the boatmen on the river say he is sleeping with his sister. He certainly spends enough time with Anne. Cromwell sees them together at Advent with the king’s friends, her pets, the gentlemen of the privy chamber.
Week 10: 'Alas, What Shall I Do For Love?' (Part 1)
Cromwell is scathing of George, Lord Rochford. A vain man, fascinated by his own clothes. He is with the rest of the family when Cromwell visits to discuss the delicate matter of Henry Percy:
“George sits by him on a stool. George has his head in his hands. His sleeves are only medium-puffed.”
When Jane Rochford speaks the truth, George says, “I wish I could divorce you.”
After they agree they need Cromwell to figuratively beat in the skull of the Earl of Northumberland, George sits, “lost in thought”, playing with a jewelled pin. He pricks himself. “You fool of a boy,” says Uncle Norfolk.
Week 14: Devil’s Spit / A Painter’s Eye
George Rochford, “the blazing noonday planet” pays Mark Smeaton in “pearl buttons and comfit boxes” as they bring George’s friends to Anne’s bedchamber. Or so says Lady Rochford. She believes her husband and his sister Anne will poison her.
Week 17: The Map of Christendom (Part 2) / To Wolf Hall
George Boleyn represents the king at the execution of the monks. At Thomas More’s trial, he asks if More can provide his own version of his conversation with Richard Riche. But of course he cannot, because Riche was there to “remove from me the means of recording.”
Week 18: Falcons
Thomas Cromwell on Anne: “She hates Henry to listen to anyone but herself and her brother George and Monseigneur her father, and even her father gets the rough side of her tongue, and gets called lily-liver and timewaster.”
Week 19: Crows (Part 1)
Edward Seymour drops a court rumour about George and Anne. Currently, Boleyn’s men are scrapping with Nicholas Carew’s people.
When Anne became queen, George brought Cromwell in to give him advice.
It’s interesting, George Boleyn’s version of his life. He had always supposed it was Wolsey who trained him up, Wolsey who promoted him, Wolsey who made him the man he is: but George says no, it was the Boleyns.
Cromwell plays along and shows gratitude.
Week 24: The Black Book (Part 3)
When Chapuys goes to court he is greeted by George Boleyn.
At the sight of glinting George, teeth and pearl buttons flashing, the ambassador’s eye rolls like the eye of a startled horse.
Cromwell thinks: ‘I’ll miss him, he thinks, in the days when it is all over for him: when I kick him back to Kent, to count his sheep and take a homely interest in the grain harvest.’
Chapuys is tricked into bowing before Anne, her brother ‘pink with pleasure'. Afterwards, he takes the ambassador to dinner.
Week 25: The Book of Phantoms (Part 1/5)
George is with his father when Cromwell comes. Call-Me duly minutes his disgust at the situation and his threat to send Cromwell to the Tower.
He tells his father not to make deals with Cromwell. He tells Cromwell he has overreached himself. His father says, ‘I marvel, George, that you do not see where this is tenting.’
‘What?’ George says, ‘What, what?’ He is still whatting as his father tows him away.
Later, Lady Rochford tells Cromwell that Anne and George are lovers.
Week 26: The Book of Phantoms (Part 2/5)
After Mark, Norris and Weston are arrested, George is discreetly brought into custody. Cromwell does not want the explosive allegations of incest made public just yet. He does not want Anne to know.
Week 27: Master of Phantoms (Part 3/5)
George Boleyn is well past thirty, but he still has the sheen we admire in the young, the sparkle and the clear gaze.
In the Tower, Cromwell informs him of the charges against him. The accusation of incest. Boleyn warns Cromwell that he may share their fate: ‘What makes you think it will be different with you, that are not the equal of any of these men?’
Cromwell tells Boleyn he is a hypocrite. ‘You profess the gospel, my lord and that you are saved. But your actions do not suggest you are saved.’ Boleyn asks for his confessor, and Cromwell says, ‘I am your confessor now.’ George, Cromwell thinks, is ‘too proud, too singular, unwilling to bridle his whims or turn himself to use.’ He will never stoop to say, ‘Thomas Cromwell, you win.’
Week 28: Master of Phantoms (Part 4/5)
Anne asks for him in the Tower. ‘A foolish demand, in the circumstances,’ says Anne Shelton. The indictments against him are painted in lurid detail after Henry has made additions.
Week 29: The Book of Phantoms (Part 5/5) / Spoils
At his trial, he is suave and eloquent. He tries to confound Cromwell but ‘he is fighting for his life, and thus unequal to a man who seems so indifferent to the outcome.’ Cromwell tricks him into reading treason out loud in court.
In one moment of bravado, to get the applause of the crowd, he has impugned the succession, derogated the king’s heirs: even though he was cautioned not to do it.
Rochford is killed first. He makes a good speech, but it takes three blows to kill him. ‘After which, the others said not much.’
Week 31: Salvage (Part 1/3)
Cromwell remembers the last time he saw George alive. He has asked to see Cromwell and ‘when the dying ask for you, you must appear in person.’
George was settling his accounts. He couldn’t understand how he was both alive and dead: ‘I have read the gospel, but not followed it.’ He asks about Wyatt and justice. Cromwell admits that this is not justice and Boleyn sobs, holding Thomas Cromwell ‘as if grappling with Death.’
‘God bless you,’ he had said. And he had kissed Lord Rochford, as one gentleman might, leaving another. ‘You will soon be past your pain.’