Henry spent a fair part of 1525 trying to get his mind straight. Rebuffed by the Emperor, he made peace with France. Rebuffed by his own subjects, he cancelled the Amicable Grant. Frustrated in his attempts to get a male heir, he convinced himself that his marriage had offended against the laws of God, and began to contemplate his options for the succession. One possibility was to legitimate the son whom Bessy Blount had borne him. Henry Fitzroy had always been acknowledged, and had been brought up in a quasiroyal establishment apart from his mother. Now the King decided to ennoble him and on 18 June in a well publicised ceremony, created him first Earl of Nottingham and then Duke of Richmond and Somerset.
[87]
There is no conclusive evidence that the King ever intended to include him in the succession, and it may have been that his elevation had more to do with Wolsey’s plans for governing the ‘dark corners’ of the land than with any plan of Henry’s. The child was soon despatched to the north of England with a suitable council to govern in the king’s name, but his headship was purely nominal, and the person to whom that council answered was Wolsey. At about the same time his nine-year-old sister, Mary, was sent to the Welsh Marches, similarly equipped and for the same purpose.
[88]
However, Richmond was a royal title and the gesture was a significant one. Other peerage creations and promotions at the same time are equally suggestive. Henry Brandon, his nephew and the son of the Duke of Suffolk, was created Earl of Lincoln, the title born by John de la Pole, Richard III’s designated heir. Henry Courtenay, his cousin, was promoted from the earldom of Devon to the marquisate of Exeter, and Thomas Boleyn was created Viscount Rochford. There is nothing in the contemporary record to suggest that Henry was doing any more than honouring his chosen favourites, but all in different ways proposed answers to the succession dilemma. It is a little early to imagine that Thomas Boleyn was being identified as the father of a potential alternative to Catherine, but the chronology of the King’s relationship with Anne is highly uncertain, and in any case he was certainly the father of Henry’s last mistress. Henry appears to have parted with Mary Boleyn on amicable terms, and that may have been in no small part due to Thomas’s calming influence. In any case Sir Thomas (or possibly Lord Boleyn) had long since earned his promotion by years of diligent and effective service. He was also one of the first peers created whose elevation owed nothing to their lineage and everything to their function at court, in diplomacy and in administration. In spite of his wife’s connections, he was a new man. A few months later Lord Rochford and Elizabeth his wife were assigned lodgings in the King’s house ‘when they repair to it’, a privilege which only those close to the King could ever hope to enjoy.
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MARY & THE KING’S FANCY – IN & OUT OF FAVOUR
Mary was the oldest of Sir Thomas’s three children, born probably in 1499. There is no concrete evidence for this, but nearly a century later in 1597 her grandson George, the second Lord Hunsdon, petitioned for the Boleyn earldom of Ormonde on the grounds that Mary was the oldest child.
[90]
Circumstantial but convincing evidence points to a birth date for Anne in 1501 and for George in 1504, so that indicates 1499, or possibly 1500, as the relevant date for Mary. Lord Hunsdon is unlikely to have been mistaken since the daughter of her sister Anne was none other than the Queen herself, who would have had a prior claim if Anne had been the elder. George Carey’s petition was unsuccessful, but that was for other reasons. There has been over the years a great deal of controversy about the respective ages of the Boleyn siblings. George Cavendish, for example, a near contemporary source, makes George the eldest, and he was followed recently by Philippa Gregory in her fictional reconstruction of Mary’s life,
The Other Boleyn Girl.
However, Eric Ives sets out the evidence for the order adopted here persuasively, and he has been followed very recently by George Bernard, so I have taken the scholarly consensus.
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It is not known where she was born. Tradition says Hever Castle in Kent, and that is probably right because her grandfather William was Sheriff of Norfolk in 1499, and therefore likely to have been resident at Blickling. Both Thomas and Elizabeth were much about the court over the next few years, but it is not known whether their children were with them. Nothing is known of Mary’s upbringing or education except what can be deduced from her later life. She was literate, and presumably numerate, but never followed her father’s and sister’s gift for languages. Nor did she correspond with the learned, or exchange ideas with humanist divines. Her books, if she ever had any, have been long since dispersed and were never recorded. She was not intellectually precocious, and the chances are that she was trained mainly in those domestic and courtly accomplishments which would have made her an attractive bride for some aspiring courtier. At the age of about fifteen, when her father secured for her a place among the ladies accompanying the King’s sister Mary to France, she was probably already known about the court.
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She was pretty, and had perhaps already begun to attract attention in an undesirable way, so Sir Thomas may well have felt that a few years in the well-chaperoned entourage of the Queen of France would provide a safe environment in which she could finish growing up. If such was his thinking, he was disappointed because King Louis lasted only a matter of weeks. Moreover, immediately after his wedding he had taken the precaution of dismissing some of his wife’s more senior attendants on the ground that they were interfering in the relationship.
[93]
Mistress Boleyn was one of those retained, but it is likely that her intended chaperone was not, and that left the girl rather more exposed than she should have been. Queen Mary, who at eighteen was not very much older than her namesake, was similarly exposed, and quickly found refuge in the arms of Charles Brandon, the Duke of Suffolk, whom Henry had sent to bring her home. After 1 January 1515, Mary Boleyn may therefore have witnessed more sexual manoeuvring than was good for her. It is possible that the ex-Queen took the initiative in her relationship with Brandon, and having got him into bed, left him with no option but to marry her. It is also possible that King Francis, who was a notorious womaniser, was fishing in that same pool, and that Mary acted to forestall him. The evidence as to what happened is conflicting, because according to one story Henry had anticipated and approved some such outcome, while another version has the King seriously put out by his friend’s effrontery.
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The truth seems to have been that Henry had extracted from Brandon a promise that he would do nothing until the couple were back on English soil, and that it was the breaking of that promise which caused his anger. King Francis, whose intentions (if they ever existed) were strictly dishonourable, seems to have approved of the match, and even to have expected it; but he was anxious to prevent Henry from deploying his sister on the international market, and that may have contributed to Henry’s annoyance.
[95]
Sir Thomas, however, was not to be deterred. He had sent his daughter to France to learn some courtly polish in a reasonably safe environment, and when that household turned out to be anything but safe, he withdrew her. When the King’s sister, now the Duchess of Suffolk, returned to England in May 1515, Mary Boleyn did not accompany her. With her sister Anne, who had joined her in the Queen’s service sometime before Christmas, she was transferred to the household of the new Queen of France, Claude, who was a girl of exactly her age.
[96]
This argues extraordinary favour, because the competition for such places among the French nobility would have been fierce. Either Francis was impressed by Sir Thomas, who he can scarcely have met, or he was impressed by Mary, and the latter is more likely. A few years later, a Venetian envoy described Sir Thomas as ‘much hated’ at the French court because he was suspected of retailing information to the Archduchess Margaret, although there is no hint of that in Francis’s correspondence with Henry.
[97]
Claude’s chamber, in short, was anything but a safe place for a young girl to be. The Queen was enduring annual pregnancies and was unavailable to her husband for long periods of time. We do not know that Francis amused himself with her attendants in consequence, but it is a reasonable assumption. Anne quickly learned to fend off these unwelcome attentions, but Mary may have been less successful. Rightly or wrongly she acquired a reputation for easy virtue, ‘
per una grandissima ribaldaa et infame sopre butte
’, as one observer put it, and her father read the warning signs.
[98]
If she was to secure an acceptable marriage, either in France or in England, such reports could do her inestimable harm. So at some point, probably before his next diplomatic mission in 1519, he called her home. He seems to have acted in time, because rumours of her misdemeanours had not yet crossed the Channel, and he was able to secure a place for her in the straitlaced chamber of Queen Catherine. Catherine had been recently forced to endure her husband’s infidelity with Elizabeth Blount, and had been shamed by the birth of her son, probably in July of that year, so it is unlikely that she would have been wanting to put more temptation in his way. Perhaps he pressed her to accept Mary, or perhaps not. Probably Sir Thomas exercised his charms on the Queen, or, even more likely, his wife Elizabeth, who had been a member of that charmed circle for a number of years, persuaded Catherine to accept her daughter. By 4 February 1520 she was well enough established to be married, her groom being William Carey, an up and coming member of the King’s Privy Chamber, and the King was the principal guest at their wedding.
[99]
These facts have caused endless speculation about the nature of Mary’s relations with the King. That she later became his mistress is authenticated by Henry’s own admission, but it is usually thought that that did not happen until 1522, when the beginning of a number of grants to William Carey indicate a special interest in his wife. Mary used her influence to get Thomas Gardiner appointed to the priory of Tynemouth, but that is an event which cannot be securely dated.
[100]
It did not happen before 1520, but then Mary was not in a position to exercise any influence until the latter part of 1519. She took part in a number of courtly entertainments in 1520 and 1521, but that proves nothing beyond the fact that she was a well-established lady of the court. She also accompanied the Queen to the Field of Cloth of Gold in the summer of 1520, but there is no record of what she may have done there, apart from assisting the Duchess of Suffolk by looking decorative. The first indication that she might have been in any way special comes on Shrove Tuesday 1522, in the Burgundian style masque of the assault on the Chateau Verte. The King’s sister in the guise of
Beauty
, led the defenders, among whom Mary featured in the significant role of
Kindness
. Her sister Anne, then newly returned to England, also took part as
Perseverence,
but it has been rightly commented that Mary’s designation was the more suggestive.
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If Mary was sharing the royal bed in 1522 and 1523, then she must have had some contraceptive knowledge, which no well brought up young lady was supposed to possess. Henry had inflicted well nigh annual pregnancies on Catherine between 1509 and 1518, and another on Bessy Blount in the latter year. So whatever may have happened later, there is no reason to suppose that in the early 1520s, the King’s potency was any the less. Yet Mary survived anything between three and five years as the royal mistress without becoming pregnant. Where she had learned this art is another matter, but presumably in France, where those adventures which had earned her a reputation may also have taught her a lot about ways in which to manage her body. Henry may well have been mystified, because this was a skill which only whores were supposed to possess. On the other hand, he may not have cared, because another bastard was not going to solve the succession problem which was increasingly gnawing away at his mind.
[102]
Mistress Carey’s charms may have faded, or been replaced by those of her sister, but the indications are that Mary was handed over to her husband at some point in the summer of 1525. Her son, Henry Carey, was born on 4 March 1526, and that suggests that she began to sleep with William at some time in June or July of 1525. Although it was soon being suggested that Henry was the King’s son, those tales came from the anti-Boleyn political camp of the 1530s and need not be taken too seriously.
[103]
If there had been any doubt at the time about Henry’s paternity, there was no reason why the King should not have claimed him. He had just made a great fuss of ennobling his only acknowledged bastard, Henry Fitzroy, and would no doubt have been willing to do as much for a second – if one had appeared. The token which Mary did leave to the King was not a child but a ship. The
Mary Boleyn
was a vessel of 100 tons, which was deployed in the Irish Sea in September 1523, and appears to have been a royal ship which the King had named after his mistress. Unfortunately, no such ship appears in the King’s inventories of the time; the only vessel of 100 tons in service with the navy was the
Katherine Pleasaunce
, which had been built in 1518. We are therefore left with the intriguing possibility that Henry renamed a ship originally called after his wife in honour of his mistress!
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More mundanely it is possible that the
Mary Boleyn
belonged to Sir Thomas, and had been ‘taken up’ for some particular service in Irish waters. The records do not make this clear, and the
Katherine Plesaunce
goes on being mentioned down to 1525. From 1526 onwards Mary is overshadowed by her sister Anne, and glimpses of her in the records become few. She must have spent quite a lot of her time on pregnancy leave, because a few months after Henry’s birth she had conceived again, and bore William’s second child, a daughter Catherine, at some time in 1527. Then in the summer of 1528, the sweating sickness visited the court. Henry immediately panicked, as was his wont in such situations. Anne was sent down to her father’s house at Hever, where she and Sir Thomas both fell ill, but recovered. The King took himself off into the country, moving his lodging frequently to avoid infection, and somehow or other escaped. William Carey was less fortunate, and on 28 June 1528 he died.
[105]
William, although he has only a walk-on role in this context, was a person of consequence in his own right. Born in 1500, he was the son of Thomas Carey of Chilton Foliot, Wiltshire, and a grandson of Sir William, an eminent Lancastrian who had been beheaded after the battle of Tewksbury in 1471. His mother had been Margaret, a granddaughter of Edmund Beaufort, first Duke of Somerset, and he was thus a very distant kinsman of the King.
[106]
He appeared at court as a protégé of the Earl of Devon, some time about 1515 or 1516, and seems to have been a formidable tennis player. It may have been this quality which attracted the King’s attention because he became a founder member of the Privy Chamber, and was well enough placed to marry Mary, as we have seen. Perhaps the King already had his eye on her, because their marriage was morganatic for the first five years. William was rewarded with grants of land from the King in 1522, 1523, 1524 and 1525, so he died possessed of a considerable estate in addition to his patrimony.
[107]
These lands would have been inherited by his two-year-old son, Henry, who became a ward of the Crown. Mary seems to have passed into limbo, because at some time before December 1529 his wardship was granted to his aunt Anne, who would consequently have enjoyed the profits of the estate, and what provision she made for her sister is not known. In December 1531 Mary Carey was granted an annuity of £100 out of the Treasury of the Chamber, which suggests that she was suffering a degree of hardship.
[108]
Anne may have conceded the right to educate and bring up Henry and Catherine to Mary on an unofficial basis, because there is no sign of her having sold or otherwise disposed of the wardship, but the relationship between the two women can hardly have been an easy one, particularly while Anne was so high in favour. Over the next two or three years Mary can be glimpsed as a member of her sister’s entourage, in which capacity she no doubt attended Anne’s creation as Marquis of Pembroke in September 1532, and she certainly accompanied her when she went with the King to Calais in October. What she may have done there can only be conjectured, but she took part in the masked dance which followed Anne’s ceremonial entry at the banquet on 28 October, when she was one of the six ‘gorgeously apparelled [ladies] with visors on their faces who came and took the French king, and the other Lords of France by the hand; and danced a dance or two …’ However, after the masquing was over ‘they departed to their lodgings’ and we are told no more.
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