Mary Boleyn: The Great and Infamous Whore by Alison Weir
8
Hiding Royal Blood
During her marriage to William Carey, Mary Boleyn bore two children. The elder was Katherine, born probably in March or April 15241 and almost certainly named for the Queen.2 It has been claimed that this was in gratitude for Katherine’s “politeness and forbearing,”3 although it is by no means likely that Katherine knew that there was anything to be forbearing about.
The younger child was Henry Carey, born on March 4, 1525.4 Even allowing for the dating of the Tudor year from Lady Day, March 25, the inscription on his tomb in Westminster Abbey states that he was in his seventy-second year when he died on July 23, 1596; that would place his date of birth in March 1525, which is corroborated by the inscription on his portrait at Berkeley Castle (the seat of his descendants), painted in 1591, which records his age as sixty-six. His father’s inquisition postmortem, taken in 1528, states that on June 22 that year, his heir, Henry Carey, was aged two years, fifteen weeks and five days,5 but the ages of heirs given in inquisitions postmortem are not always accurate, and it is much more likely that he was three years, fifteen weeks, and five days, since the epitaph commissioned by his family and the portrait commissioned by himself are far more likely to bear the correct date, which is 1525.6 Young Henry was almost certainly named in honor of the King, as were so many boys at that time. It is possible that Henry VIII and Katherine of Aragon were the respective godparents of the Carey siblings, but there is no record of this.
On the assumption that the affair between the King and Mary Boleyn was flourishing through the early 1520s, it is often suggested or claimed that one or both of Mary’s children was fathered by the King.7 One writer has even gone so far as to assert that news that she was to have a child “caused a smile,”8 while another believes “there is no smoke without fire in these matters.”9
In popular culture there is little doubt that Mary’s affair with Henry VIII bore fruit. In the 1969 film, Anne of the Thousand Days, Valerie Gearon played a bitter Mary Boleyn who is great with the King’s child and banished to her bedchamber at Hever Castle when he visits. In both filmed versions of The Other Boleyn Girl, Mary is shown as bearing the King a son. Film is such a powerful medium that many now believe that Henry Carey was Henry VIII’s child.
But the relationship produced no acknowledged offspring,10 and there is no reliable contemporary assertion that either of Mary’s two children was the King’s issue.11 The evidence for Henry’s paternity of the Carey siblings is mostly circumstantial and inferential—“positive proof is lacking”12—and there are good historical reasons why some of it should be rejected. Contrary to what has been claimed, close analysis of the circumstantial evidence does not make “a powerful case” for both the Carey children’s royal paternity,13 and there is no contemporary source that suggests that either the King or his successors at any time acknowledged those children as his issue. Mary “was not known to have borne him any child,”14 while, with one dubious exception, “no claim was ever made that any of [her children] were sired by the King.”15 Furthermore, as will be seen, there is clear evidence that Henry Carey was the lawful issue of William Carey.16
It is simply not true that there were “serious doubts” about the paternity of Mary’s son, that “rumor was busy” at the time of his birth, or that “many” people maintained that Henry VIII was his father.17 There is no reference to rumors of the King’s paternity circulating in 1525, at the time of Henry Carey’s birth,18 and in fact the first and only reference to a rumor dates from ten years later. In November 1531, a Venetian diplomat, Lodovico Falier, after describing Princess Mary to his masters, reported: “The King has also a natural son, born to him of the widow of one of his peers; a youth of great promise, so much does he resemble his father.”19 It has been suggested that this might refer to Henry Carey,20 since Mary was a widow in 1531, but so also was Elizabeth Blount, whose husband, unlike William Carey, had been a peer of the realm; thus Falier must have been referring to Henry Fitzroy.
In fact, there is only one dubious contemporary source for Henry Carey being the King’s son.21 On April 20, 1535, John Hale, Vicar of Isleworth, confessed before the Council that bills laid against him by four gentlemen were true, and admitted, “I have maliciously slandered the King and the Queen’s Grace and their Council, for which I ask forgiveness of God, King Henry VIII, and Queen Anne, and shall continue sorrowful during my life.” He excused his rash words by saying he had suffered “a fervent ague [and] several falls from my horse, from one of which was troubled my wits, as also by age and lack of memory.” Then he tried to shift the blame to one of his accusers, “Mr. Skidmore,” alleging that he had conversed with him “concerning the King’s marriage and other behaviors of his bodily lust,” and claiming that “Skidmore” had pointed out to him “young Master Carey, saying he was our sovereign lord the King’s son by our sovereign lady the Queen’s sister, whom the Queen’s Grace might not suffer to be in the court.”22 Hale was at least correct on the latter count, for it was probably common knowledge by then that Anne Boleyn would not “suffer” her sister Mary to come to court after they fell out for good in 1534.23
This same John Hale was a member of a group of dissidents who had been fed salacious calumnies about the Boleyn family by Richard Reynolds, a monk of Syon Abbey who had denied the King’s new title of Supreme Head of the Church of England,24 granted him by Parliament in the wake of the breach with Rome. “Mr. Skidmore” was in fact Thomas Scudamore, a priest at nearby Syon Abbey,25 a religious house that had once been highly favored by Katherine of Aragon, who had visited frequently to make her devotions;26 it is therefore unsurprising that malicious gossip about Anne Boleyn’s family was rife there, and the community would have known that, in asserting that Henry Carey was the King’s son, they were impugning the legitimacy of Anne’s marriage.
Hale himself was violently opposed to that marriage, and had accused the King of indulging in “foul pleasures” and being “mired in vice,” fulminating that Henry’s life was “more stinking than a sow,” and lambasting him for “wallowing and defiling himself in any filthy place. For how great soever he is, he is fully given to his foul pleasure of the flesh and other voluptuousness.” Hale also asserted that Henry had violated most of the women of his court, and married Anne Boleyn “out of sheer fornication, to the highest shame and undoing of himself and all his realm.” It was he who had claimed that Henry kept his own brothel of maidens at Farnham Castle “when he was with the old Lord of Winchester”—which, as we have seen, was highly unlikely—and that “the King’s Grace had meddled with the Queen’s mother.”27
It was because Hale refused to take the oath acknowledging the royal supremacy, and the invalidity of the King’s union with Katherine of Aragon, that he was hanged and disemboweled at Tyburn in May 1535. He was not executed for claiming that Henry Carey was the King’s son, as has been implied.28 Nor can that one statement show “at the very least … that contemporary opinion in 1535 believed that the affair had been ongoing just nine years earlier in 1526.”29 One man’s seditious opinion was not necessarily the view of others, and Hale’s tirade can be dismissed as that of a hostile and unreliable witness.
It has been noted that Henry VIII was so discreet in his extramarital affairs that we know very little about them. Had he been indulging in wholesale fornication with every woman at court, as Hale appears to imply, there would undoubtedly be plenty of surviving testimony to it. But despite present-day claims that Henry Carey was “widely rumored” or “commonly supposed” to have been the King’s son,30 there is no evidence beyond Hale’s highly suspect testimony that there were any rumors circulating about Henry Carey’s paternity—and even if there had been, “court gossip is not always a reliable source of information.”31
Infinitely less compelling as evidence of Henry’s paternity is the grant of the borough of Buckingham “in tail male” to William Carey on February 20, 1526,32 nearly a year after Henry Carey was born; “tail male” was the most popu
When one compares the pattern of grants made to William Carey with the birth dates of the Carey siblings, there are no grants that coincide with Henry Carey’s birth and could consequently be seen as possible evidence of the King’s paternity. Most arguments in favor of the latter rest on Carey having been born in 1526, not 1525,35 and thus the grant of 1526 cannot be connected with his birth. Moreover, in 1538, Henry VIII stated to the Emperor Charles V that Henry Fitzroy—who had died of a pulmonary infection two years earlier—was “our only bastard son.”36 In the case of Katherine Carey, however, a grant was made only two or three months after her birth,37 which may be significant, and has credibly been seen as a reward to Carey “for his compliant role as nominal father to the King’s bastards.”38
It has been said that “the most compelling argument” against Mary’s children having been sired by Henry VIII is “the apparent low fertility of the King.”39 Henry’s fertility has been the subject of much popular and learned debate in recent years, with his genetic makeup, health, or possible impotence being held responsible for the deaths of many of his children in the womb or in infancy—and it is time to set the record straight.
Henry Tudor was one of eight children. Only four lived beyond infancy: Arthur, Margaret, Henry, and Mary. The others were Elizabeth (died aged three), Edmund, Duke of Somerset (died aged fifteen months), and Edward and Katherine, who both died soon after birth. This was not unusual in an age of high infant mortality.
By Katherine of Aragon, Henry had six children: three sons who died soon after birth, Mary, who lived to maturity, a daughter who was born dead, and one who died soon after birth. Katherine of Aragon came from a family of ten: five of her siblings had died at birth or been stillborn. Thus there was a history of proportionate infant mortality on both sides, which may or may not be significant. Furthermore, Giles Tremlett has recently put forward a convincing theory that Katherine suffered from anorexia, which would have had a bearing on her fertility.
Henry’s second wife, Anne Boleyn, became pregnant four times. Her first child was a daughter, Elizabeth I. Her second died at or near full term, and was almost certainly a son. Her third and fourth pregnancies ended in miscarriages, the latter of a son. This suggests to me that Anne may have been rhesus negative.40 Anne herself was born of parents who had had a child “every year,” yet only four lived to adulthood. Again, there is a history on both sides of infant mortality.
Henry had a son by Jane Seymour, who might have presented him with more children had she not died in childbed,41 for she came from a family of ten, which may have been one reason why he decided to marry her. This successful mating might suggest that Henry’s first two wives had been genetically “at fault” for the premature loss of their children. The King also had one acknowledged bastard son by Elizabeth Blount, and evidence that will be presented later in this chapter strongly suggests that he also had two bastard daughters, both of whom married and bore children. By the time Henry married his three last wives, he was prematurely aging, ailing, and grossly obese; a report by the French ambassador, Charles de Marillac, that his fifth queen, Katherine Howard, was enceinte was probably unfounded, as we hear no more of it. There is an ongoing debate about the King’s possible impotence in his later years.42 Even if he did suffer from it then, it can have had little bearing on his relations with Mary Boleyn, since the earliest possible “evidence” dates from the 1530s.
Thus it could not be said with any certainty that Henry—a man who fathered fourteen children, seven of them sons—suffered from “low fertility,” allegedly caused by performance anxiety related to the need to sire an heir.43
There was no stigma attached to royal bastards—even those born in adultery—in those days, and owning them would not normally have had “manifold catastrophic effects.”44 Kings and princes unashamedly acknowledged their illegitimate issue in this period, and there were good pragmatic reasons for that. Natural sons could help to enforce the sovereign’s authority and assist him in government, as young Fitzroy did when he was appointed to preside over the Council of the North, in an area that Henry VIII would visit only once in his reign; later, Fitzroy would use his influence on his father’s behalf in the remote Welsh Marches, a region in which the King never set foot. Edward IV’s natural son, Arthur Plantagenet, Viscount Lisle, was Henry VIII’s deputy in Calais. Royal bastards could also be useful in making advantageous marriage alliances to gain land, loyalty, and profit; Richard III, for example, married off his natural daughter Katherine Plantagenet to secure the allegiance of the powerful Herbert family. A king’s sons could serve as commanders in war, or in the diplomatic field, or as channels of patronage at court. For Henry VIII, the father of just one surviving legitimate daughter so far, a bastard son was also living proof of his virility and his ability to sire boys. As Henry was not blessed with numerous surviving legitimate issue, it might seem reasonable to suppose that “he needed all the children he could lay claim to.”45 But that is rather a sweeping assumption.
Henry had not delayed acknowledging Henry Fitzroy; it is clear that, right from the time of Fitzroy’s birth, people knew that the boy was the King’s son—it is just not true that there is no record of his existence before his ennoblement in 1525, or that Henry kept it a secret;46 indeed, the very name bestowed on the boy—Fitzroy: son of the King—proclaimed his royal paternity, and from birth, he was called “Lord Henry Fitzroy.” His godfather, Wolsey, gave the young child New Year gifts,47 and five months before the boy’s ennoblement in June 1525, a Venetian envoy reported that the King “loves him like his own soul,”48 which suggests that the child was very much in evidence.
Yet there were reasons why Henry would not openly have acknowledged any bastard child that Mary Boleyn bore him. Unlike Elizabeth Blount, she was a married woman, and owning up to a bastard born in adultery, and the betrayal of one of the gentlemen who were closest to him at court, would have provoked scandal and undermined the King’s image of himself as a virtuous prince with a conscience. And Henry had no need to acknowledge any child by Mary, for there was a presumption in law that any issue born to a married woman was the child of her husband.
It has been argued that, although Henry did not acknowledge the Carey siblings (on the assumption that they were his), “they remained close to the throne, for they shared the same father as Mary and Elizabeth Tudor.”49 Yet even if they had been Henry’s children, they could never have been close to the throne in the sense of having a claim to it, for royal bastards could not succeed. Unlike nowadays, there was a rigid distinction in Tudor times between legitimate and illegitimate children. Bastards, simply, had no rights of inheritance, and it would have taken an Act of Parliament to settle the succession on a royal bastard, which would have meant acknowledging him or her to begin with, and persuading the landed establishment—and the commons of the realm—that the normal laws of inheritance should be overlooked. This was what Henry VIII was planning to do for Henry Fitzroy, in the event of Queen Katherine failing to bear a son, but it is debatable whether his subjects would have accepted a bastard for their king.
Had Henry claimed Mary’s children as his own after 1527, he would have jeopardized his plans to marry her sister, Anne Boleyn, since his sexual relationship with Mary placed him within the forbidden degrees of affinity to Anne, and rendered any union between them as incestuous, as the King now believed his marriage to Queen Katherine, his brother’s widow, to have been.50 Living proof of the King’s affair with Anne Boleyn’s sister would not only have raised the embarrassing issue of incest, but would also have been evidence of a canonical im
Thus Henry had every reason to maintain discretion—and probably neither he, nor Mary Boleyn and her family, would have wanted publicly to embarrass her husband William Carey and inflict on him the shame of being publicly branded a cuckold.
That there was a need to maintain discretion is likely. Although, given the almost conclusive evidence, we can be fairly certain that Henry Carey was not the King’s child, and that the grants made to William Carey a year after his son’s birth were not of any significance in this respect, those made in June 1524—notably the three manors lately held by Buckingham—and later were perhaps—although this is not proven—discreet provision for Katherine Carey, who was probably the King’s daughter.
Some historians52 believe that Mary never conceived a child by Henry VIII, but there are good grounds for arguing that Katherine Carey was fathered by the King.
The recent discovery of a Latin dictionary in which Katherine’s husband, Sir Francis Knollys, listed the births of their children, in order, has assisted the debate about Katherine’s birth date and paternity, although it provides no real proof of the latter. This dictionary, which had originally been produced in 1551 in Venice, and was probably acquired by Sir Francis during his exile in the 1550s, is now in a private collection, and its existence only recently came to light.53 The handwriting has been verified in comparison with a letter written by Knollys in 1575, now in the British Library. The dictionary provides firsthand evidence that Katherine’s youngest son, Dudley, was born in May 1562, which tends to corroborate the traditional identification of a portrait of a pregnant Elizabethan lady as Katherine Carey.