Carle was an eyewitness to the trial and execution of Anne Boleyn, Queen consort of Henry VIII, and shortly afterwards, he wrote a poem detailing her life and the circumstances surrounding her death.
[8] Both Pierre de Ronsard and Joachim du Bellay dedicated works to him[9] Carle is best known for a 1,318-line poem about the life and death of Anne Boleyn, the second wife of Henry VIII.
It proclaims that it relates matters heard from a variety of sources in England, but does not name them, nor address their veracity, and it contains a number of factual errors that Carle could have checked.
[13] Georges Ascoli, a French literary scholar, examined most of the extant versions of the poem in 1920, and selected one that he believed closest to Carle's original.
As a detailed description of the events surrounding Anne Boleyn's arrest, trial and execution, the poem has become an invaluable resource to biographers and historians, although debate continues over its accuracy and significance.
A French scholar proved in 1844 that the text Weir is using had been doctored, and in 1927 it was shown by comparing all the genuine manuscripts that the two poems are identical and by de Carles.
In June 1537, after Carle had returned to France, Henry VIII learned about the poem and wrote to Stephen Gardiner, his ambassador in Paris:Has received his sundry letters, ... "with the French book, written in form of a tragedy, sent unto us by the same," ...
As sundry copies and impressions of it have got abroad, Gardiner is to tell the French king and the Great Master how much Henry is grieved that it should have been written in the house of his ambassador in England, "and now there (in France?)
[23] In accordance with the decrees of the Council of Trent, he established in the Chapter of his Cathedral an office called the Theologus, who was a member of the Order of Preachers.
He also undertook the interior decoration of his newly built cathedral, which featured paintings in the sanctuary and apse; these were destroyed by the iconoclastic Huguenots a decade after his death.
[24] In October and November 1564, Bishop de Carle participated in the Colloquy of Poissy, a futile attempt on the part of the Crown to bring about agreement between Catholics and Huguenots.
[25] During his last years, however, he retired to Paris, which, according to Joseph-Hyacinthe Albanès, worked to the detriment of his diocese, where the absence of the bishop facilitated the growth of heresy.