court career, but what is known is that he married Jane Parker sometime during 1524. They were certainly married by January 1526 because a note of that date in Cardinal Thomas Wolsey's hand confirms that an extra £20 a year had been awarded to "young Boleyn for him and his wife to live on". There has always been much speculation as to whether the marriage of George and Jane was happy but there is no way to know for certain, as the state papers are virtually silent with regard to Jane. There is no mention of the couple having any children, which as the brother-in-law and sister-in-law to the king, there surely would have been had such a child existed. It had been thought that George Boleyn, Dean of Lichfield, may have been their son; but it is more likely that he was a distant cousin. There is no record of the couple having a child, and Jane makes no mention of a child for whom she is responsible when she wrote a begging letter to Cromwell following George's death. Whether or not the marriage of George and Jane was happy, George had a reputation as a womaniser. George Cavendish, gentleman usher to Cardinal Wolsey, in his poetry entitled Metrical Visions lambastes the young man for his womanising, saying: Yet in the same poem Cavendish, who was a staunch Catholic and hated the Boleyns and what they stood for, acknowledges George's good looks and charm, saying: Thomas Wyatt in his poetry recognises George's "Great wit" (although wit in the 16th century could suggest that a person was witty and charming, it mainly meant intelligence, and it is George's intelligence that Wyatt was referring to.) Wyatt's verse with respect to George reads: Historian David Starkey referred to George as having "many of Anne's talents and all of her pride". For all George's good looks and talent, as can be seen from the above verse, Wyatt, who was a friend of the Boleyns, also says that George was too proud. Although Wyatt's poem is often used to suggest George was hated for his arrogance, there is nothing to support this. Despite George's pride, Wyatt acknowledges that at his death many considered his death to be a great loss. It may also be that the allegations of George's womanising are exaggerated, since there was no scandal surrounding the Boleyns' marriage, and none of