Mary Boleyn: The Great and Infamous Whore by Alison Weir
On April 26, 1540,60 Katherine Carey, aged sixteen, was married to Sir Francis Knollys, aged twenty-six, a Gentleman Pensioner of Henry VIII’s household and a colleague of William Stafford. No royal grants or gifts marked the marriage, although the King’s influence may be perceived in an Act of Parliament that was passed that same year confirming the couple’s title to the manor of Rotherfield Greys, near Henley in Oxfordshire, previously held by Knollys’s father.61 It was here, at Greys Court, a fourteenth century manor house and tower with a Tudor house added on, that Katherine and Francis made their home. In 1542, Francis was elected MP for Horsham. The couple’s first child—Mary Boleyn’s first grandchild—was born in 1541 and named after the King, as was the popular custom among courtiers.62
In July 1540, after Anne of Cleves’s marriage had been annulled—Henry VIII, finding her physically repellent, had refused to consummate the union—Katherine Carey transferred to the service of the King’s fifth wife, Katherine Howard.63 Her aunt, Lady Rochford, was also in the new Queen’s household as a lady-in-waiting.
William Stafford must also have given satisfaction as a Gentleman Pensioner because in 1541 he was made an Esquire of the Body to Henry VIII. Prior to that, on New Year’s Day, at Greenwich Palace, he and five other gentlemen had each presented the King with two bows as New Year’s gifts, and been given 10s. (£150) each in return.64
In October 1541, in exchange for the manor of Henden, Kent, “and the park called Henden Park, [with] lands in the parishes of Brasted, Sundridge, and Chiddingstone, Kent, and other lands sold by him to the Crown on July 5,” Henry VIII granted William Stafford, “Esquire of the Body,” the manor of Ugthorpe, near Whitby in Yorkshire, and “diverse tenements thereto belonging in Lythe,65 Yorkshire, parcel of the late priory of Gisborne, Yorks.”66 After exchanging Henden, Mary and William probably lived at Southborough or at one of their Kentish properties.
Stafford also received in exchange “the messuage or mansion commonly called the ‘Unicorn,’ alias ‘Unicorn’s Horn,’ in Cheapside in the parish of St. Mary le Bow, London, in tenure of John Droke,” which was part of “the possessions of the late priory of Ely; and that part of a tenement usually called the ‘Unicorne,’ alias ‘Goodcheapfield,’ in West Cheap, in the said parish of St. Mary le Bow, in tenure of Leonard Ewe, part of the possessions of the hospital of St. Mary without Bishopsgate.”67 The Unicorn was a substantial building that stood on the corner of Cheapside and Queen Street; in Elizabethan times it became a fabric dealer’s shop—“at the sign of the Unicorn”—and in the eighteenth century it was the workshop of the engraver John Boydell. Goodcheapfield was named after the local family of Goodcheap, one of whom had been Lord Mayor of London. It is unlikely that the Staffords ever lived in these London properties, as they were rented out to Messrs. Droke and Ewe, but they would have received substantial rents from them.
Nor is it likely that Mary ever visited Ugthorpe, for William sold it almost immediately to Roland Shakerly, citizen of London.68 William probably had a general plan to “trade up” as, hard upon the heels of the grant of exchange, the King granted him permission to alienate the properties he had received.69 Certainly the couple got rid of other lands, because in October 1542 we find a pardon issued to William Stafford and Mary his wife, and their son-in-law Francis Knollys and Katherine his wife, for the alienation without license of two messuages (dwelling houses with outbuildings and a courtyard or garden), seven hundred acres of land, fifty acres of meadow, sixty acres of pasture, one hundred acres of furze and heath, common of pasture for a thousand sheep and 59s. 2½d (£910) rent in Fulbourn. The case was heard before Sir John Baldwin and his colleagues, justices of Common Pleas, at Westminster on October 23, and the parties were fined.70 What this document does suggest is that Mary’s was a united family and that its members worked together for its common interests.
In 1542, Mary confirmed the transfer of the manor of Filby in Norfolk, which she had inherited from her father, to her uncle, Sir James Boleyn, having probably conveyed it to him in order to raise money; her claim to her grandmother’s estate was still in dispute. In April 1541, by Letters Patent of Henry VIII, William Stafford and “Dame Mary Carey,” his wife, had received license to alienate the manors of Roding, Great Holland, Hawkwell, Foulness Island, Great Wakering, and Rochford, Essex, to William Neville and John Hever, clerk to the Privy Seal; but they were “to be regranted to the said William and Mary, and the heirs of the body of the said William,” and if he left no issue, they were to go to “the said Mary and her heirs.” This, however, was not done until May 1543, when Mary finally received formal livery (transfer of possession) of her grandmother’s estates.71
It is said that Mary made a gift of these Essex manors to her husband between 1539 and 1542, and that they took up residence at Rochford Hall.72 But, as it turned out, Mary was in possession of that house for only a matter of days.
Queen Katherine Howard went to the block for crimes of adultery in February 1542. It is possible that William Stafford gave evidence against her, and against her former lover, Francis Dereham, whom she had appointed her secretary, for in November 1539, Margaret, Lady Howard, deposed “to much familiarity between Dereham and the Queen before marriage, and since the marriage has heard one Stafford say, ‘If I were as Dereham, I would never tell to die for it,’ and that ‘there was a thing that stuck upon his stomach’.”73 That same month, we find this “Stafford” telling the Privy Council that he had heard “either of the [Dowager] Duchess of Norfolk or the Lady Howard that she said once in the Queen’s chamber to a lady or gentlewoman, ‘This is he [Dereham] that went into Ireland for the Queen’s sake.’ ”74 In December, Stafford—evidently questioned again—stuck to his story.75
Identifying this witness as William Stafford begs all sorts of questions. If it was indeed him, then we might conclude either that he gave this evidence in the hope of currying more favor with the King, or out of gratitude for his recent preferment at court; or, which is more likely, he felt that he had a moral duty to report this information—which chimes with what we know of him in later life. As we have seen, Stafford was more than a reformist—in the not too distant future, he would become the friend of John Calvin, having chosen to go into exile for the sake of his strict Protestant faith. It is entirely credible that he already held such views in 1541, when it was dangerous to profess them publicly, as they were heretical and the penalty was burning at the stake. It is also credible that Stafford collaborated with the reformists at court in bringing down the Catholic Howards.
If that were true, it was not Mary’s only family connection with the scandal. In 1541, when evidence of Queen Katherine’s infidelity was uncovered, “that bawd, Lady Rochford”76 was discovered to have acted as her procuress and go-between. Committed to the Tower and attained for treason, she “had shown symptoms of madness till they told her she must die,”77 but seemed lucid enough when she went to the block on May 13, 1542.
On her death, Blickling Hall passed to Mary’s uncle, Sir James Boleyn, who had been Anne Boleyn’s chancellor.78 He died in possession of it in 1561, and was buried in the nearby church, after which Blickling came into the possession of his great-nephew, Sir Edward Clere (1536–1606).79
These years of tragedy and loss must have blighted Mary’s life. In a short space of time she had lost her brother, sister, mother, father, grandmother, and sister-in-law. She may well have come to hate Lady Rochford after what she had done to George Boleyn, but the scandal of her crimes, and the horror of her end, must have had some impact, resurrecting painful memories of the fate of Anne and Rochford.
It seems too that, as a consequence of Anne’s fall and her own probable years abroad, Mary had little contact with her niece, Elizabeth; we know, however, that in adult life Elizabeth warmly recalled having known William Stafford when she was a child; she would no doubt have seen him about the court when he was in service there, guarding her father. We might pause to wonder if Elizabeth showed lifelong favor to her Car
Given Elizabeth’s enduring affection for her Boleyn relatives, and her evident belief in her mother’s innocence,80 a belief that appears to have been instilled in childhood, probably by members of her household who had known (or been related to) Anne Boleyn, a relationship with Anne’s sister, however tenuous, may have brought her comfort. Possibly—although this can only be speculation—Mary Boleyn was one of those who imparted to the future Queen Elizabeth a sympathetic view of her mother’s conduct.
Rochford had had no children with his wife, but he may have left a natural son, another George, who was appointed Dean of Lichfield by his cousin or kinswoman, Elizabeth I. This George was a poor scholar, and it seems he received no succor from his aunt Mary, who may not even have known of his existence. The fact that he was called George—a name known to have been borne in the family only by Lord Rochford—and that he chose Henry Carey, Lord Hunsdon, whom he called his “kinsman” in his will, to be one of his executors, suggests that he was Rochford’s bastard.
Mary’s husband was to enjoy royal favor for some years to come, but in 1543 he was briefly in disgrace. At a meeting of the Privy Council at St. James’s Palace on April 5 that year, William Stafford, along with his wife’s kinsmen Sir John Clere and Thomas Clere, and a Mr. Hussey, was committed to the Fleet prison “for eating flesh on Good Friday.” On April 19 the Privy Council ordered that all these prisoners were to “have the liberty of the garden” at the prison,81 and on May 1, 1543, dismissed William Stafford, Sir John Clere and Mr. Hussey “from attendance” at council meetings.82
It is likely that these misfortunes came at a difficult time, and that Mary was ill when her husband was in prison and dismissed from attendance at court. But he was not out of favor for long, and on May 15, at long last, a grant was made to “William Stafford and Mary his wife, kinswoman and heir of Lady Margaret Boleyn, widow, deceased, viz. daughter of Thomas, late Earl of Wiltshire and Ormond, son of the said Margaret,” giving them “livery [possession] of lands of the said Thomas and Margaret and of those held by Jane, late wife of Sir George Boleyn, Lord Rochford, deceased, by way of jointure.”83
It had taken three years to secure livery of Mary’s inheritance, and fifteen months to secure livery of Lady Rochford’s jointure, which had been seized by the Crown on that Lady’s attainder—but the grants came too late for Mary. She was either dying, or about to suffer a fatal accident or seizure.
It is often stated—on the premise that she had come into possession of it on her grandmother’s death—that she died at Rochford Hall in Essex, a house she would have known from childhood, and where she is said to have made a home with William Stafford. But as Mary owned Rochford Hall for precisely four days, there would surely not have been time for her to take possession, and the most she could probably have managed was a visit of inspection—given that her health permitted; so it is doubtful if she ever lived there. She died on July 19, 1543,84 leaving her eighteen-year-old son, Henry Carey, to enjoy the Butler inheritance in her stead. It is possible that her death was sudden,85 but the cause is unknown. We might even speculate that the stresses and tragedies of the past decade had hastened her end.
In her will, Mary left William Stafford the manor of Abinger, Surrey, and messuages called Whithouse and Londons, both formerly held by “Lady Mary Carewe” in Essex,86 together with the advowsons—the right to present a nominee to a vacant benefice—of the churches of Paglesham, Foulness, Hawkwell, and Leigh.87
Mary’s last resting place has never been identified. The tale that she was buried somewhere within the grounds of Hever Castle88 can be instantly dismissed on the grounds that it would have been unheard of then for someone other than a suicide to be interred in unconsecrated ground—and there is no evidence at all that Mary killed herself. It has also been suggested that she was buried in Westminster Abbey, where her children would later be laid to rest89—but Mary died long before they found favor with Elizabeth I, and her name does not occur in the detailed records of burials within the abbey. Another claim has been made for St. George’s Chapel, Windsor, as her last resting place, but again, there are detailed records of interments and she is not among them.
Possibly she was buried in St. Andrew’s Church at Rochford, which had been built in the late fifteenth or early sixteenth century by her grandfather on the site of an earlier church where, in 1380, the future Henry IV may have married Mary de Bohun, mother of Henry V.90 The church built by the Earl of Ormond has since been subject to much Victorian restoration, and if Mary was laid to rest there, all trace of any memorial has disappeared. There would be no record of her burial as the parish registers only go back as far as the seventeenth century. However, as we do not know where she was residing at the time of her death, we can only speculate where she was laid to rest.
It would be in keeping that Mary Boleyn was buried quietly and without fanfares, in peaceful obscurity, as she had lived her last years. Probably this was what she had wanted all along. She did not die an infamous woman—no one commented on her end—and even though her affair with Henry VIII had long since become public knowledge at court and beyond, circumspection had nevertheless been maintained. Certainly it has now surely been established beyond doubt that Mary was never the great and infamous whore described by Rodolfo Pio and, perhaps, François I. The sheer lack of evidence is testimony to that. She probably had little choice in becoming the mistress of two kings, and barely anything is known about her supposedly scandelous relations with them—yet, to this day, she enjoys posthumous notoriety as the “hackney” whom the King of France boasted of riding, and who thereafter happily hopped from bed to bed until she was seduced by the King of England, at whose court she won infamy for a brief, glittering spell. It is time to lay that myth to rest.
Unlike her sister, Mary had not tempted fate too far. There is some irony in this, as Anne had been the one who had flown high and won all the plaudits, while Mary, for much of her life, had done the “wrong” things, and had probably been a disappointment to her ambitious family, who saw her as a failure. But Mary’s letter to Cromwell proves that she had learned what really mattered in life. Where Anne suffered much unhappiness and a cataclysmic fall, Mary—in the end—found love and stability. It has been said, with truth, that “there was not in her the stuff of tragedy; she passes out of history with a happy ending,” married to the man she loved.91 All things considered, she had managed rather well. And of all the three Boleyn siblings, she alone lived into middle age and died in her bed.
Appendix I
Of Her Grace’s Kin
When Mary died, all that William Stafford inherited from her was the manor of Abinger in Surrey, which he sold in the early 1550s.1 In the month of her death, July 1543, at the head of a hundred foot soldiers he himself had furnished, he began four months’ military service in France, when Henry VIII took Boulogne,2 and in 1545 he fought under Edward Seymour, Earl of Hertford, when the English invaded and laid waste southern Scotland. There, he distinguished himself by gaining for the King “two prizes, viz., the François of Dieppe and the other Scottish ship,” which were “taken by Mr. Stafford.”3 It was probably for this that he was knighted, on September 23 that year.
Having converted to the Protestant faith—which may have come about as a result of his connection with the reformist Boleyns, if not before—William found favor under his old commanding officer, Edward Seymour, when the latter became Duke of Somerset and Lord Protector during the minority of Henry VIII’s heir, Edward VI. Stafford sat in the new king’s first Parliament in 1547. Edward retained him as a Gentleman Pensioner, and he became the young monarch’s standard bearer. He seems not
In 1551, Stafford accompanied Edward, Lord Clinton (Elizabeth Blount’s widower), to Paris to represent Edward VI at the christening of a son of Henri II of France, and when he returned to England, he took part in a great tournament held at court to mark the new year of 1552. But his career foundered after he was involved in a fight with Adrian Poynings, a fellow soldier, in November 1552, which resulted in Stafford being briefly incarcerated—yet again—in the Fleet prison in London. That cost him the Privy Council’s respect and confidence.
William apparently mourned Mary for nearly nine years. It was not until 1552 that he remarried, his bride being fifteen-year-old Dorothy Stafford, a distant connection; she was one of the fourteen children of Henry, Baron Stafford, by Ursula Pole. Ursula was the granddaughter of Edward Stafford, Duke of Buckingham, a descendant of King Edward III who had been executed for treason in 1521; her mother had been Margaret Pole, Countess of Salisbury, a niece of Edward IV and Richard III and therefore also of the old Plantagenet royal blood; in 1541 the countess, at the ripe age of sixty-seven, had been executed by Henry VIII simply because he saw her as a threat to his throne. Her father, George, Duke of Clarence, had been attaindered for treason and executed in the Tower of London—probably drowned in a butt of Malmsey wine—in 1478.