Could Henry VIII have fathered Mary Boleyn’s children, Catherine and Henry Carey?
In this episode, I explore the facts and fiction surrounding their paternity. Mary was once the king’s mistress, but how much of what we’ve heard holds up to scrutiny?
Join me as I examine whether the Carey children were royal bastards or if it’s just another myth…
Transcript:
I’m continuing my series on Henry VIII and his alleged illegitimate children today by considering whether Henry VIII fathered Mary Boleyn’s children, Catherine and Henry Carey.
Mary Boleyn was definitely King Henry VIII’s mistress at one point, but although fiction likes to make rather a lot of their relationship, making it a huge romance, we don’t actually know anything about it. We only know they slept together because after he had proposed to Anne Boleyn, Henry VIII applied to the pope for a dispensation to marry her. This dispensation was for the impediment of, and I quote, “affinity arising from illicit intercourse in whatever degree, even the first”. This meant that the king had slept with someone closely related to Anne, i.e. her mother or sister.
Now, we know that the king wasn’t referring to Elizabeth Boleyn, Anne and Mary’s mother, because when Sir George Throckmorton told the king that it was rumoured that he had “meddled both with the mother and the sister”, Henry replied firmly, “never with the mother”. Dr Pedro Ortiz, the imperial ambassador at Rome, also wrote of how the king had asked for a dispensation to marry Anne “notwithstanding the affinity between them on account of his having committed adultery with her sister”. Emperor Charles V, speaking to one of Henry VIII’s ambassadors in 1530, also said that “the said king had kept company with the sister of her whom he now, it was stated, wanted to marry”, and the emperor’s ambassador at the English court, Eustace Chapuys wrote that “Even if he could separate from the queen, he could not have her [Anne], for he has had to do with her sister”.
We don’t know how long the affair was or when it began.
Let me emphasise that, we don’t know when it happened.
I’m always having people tell me that Mary and the king slept together in 1522 and that we know that because the king rode out at the Shrovetide joust on 2nd March 1522 with a motto which translates to “She has wounded my Heart” embroidered on the trappings of his horse. The theme that Shrovetide was about unrequited love and the king was wooing Mary Boleyn, who played a part in the Chateau Vert pageant two days later, taking the role of “Kindness”. But for me, that’s quite a leap. Court pageants would often have a them, often a courtly love one, and there’s not one iota of evidence that points to Mary Boleyn, who’d been married for two years to William Carey, an esquire of the king’s privy chamber, being the king’s mistress or being wooed by the king at this point. She may have played “Kindness” at the pageant, but she was one of a group of court ladies playing parts. For example, Mary Tudor played Beauty, Anne Boleyn played Perseverance, Jane Parker Constancy, the Countess of Devonshire Honour etc. etc. There’s certainly no record of the king paying her any special attention.
So, we don’t know when she slept with the king.
We don’t know much about the king’s private life. We only know about his relationship with Elizabeth, or Bessie, Blount because he acknowledged the son she gave birth to in the summer of 1519 as his son and raised him to a double dukedom. It seems likely that he took Bessie as his mistress while his wife, Catherine of Aragon, was pregnant in 1518. Bessie’s son, Henry Fitzroy, was born on 15th June 1519, so he was conceived in September 1518 when Catherine was about 6 months pregnant. Sex was generally avoided in pregnancy, plus Catherine had suffered stillbirths in the past, so the king took a mistress. Catherine lost that baby so with Bessie pregnant and Catherine recovering, I think the king could well have noticed Mary Boleyn at this point. She who would have been around 18 or 19, a similar age to Bessie, perhaps a year or so younger, and she was at court, having returned from France with Mary Tudor in 1515. For me, a relationship at this point this makes much more sense than him sleeping with her in the 1520s when Mary was married.
Why?
Well because after Bessie had given birth to Henry Fitzroy, and then perhaps a daughter, Elizabeth, the king had Cardinal Wolsey organise a marriage match for her. A decent marriage match to Gilbert Tailboys. And then there’s no evidence of the king being involved with her again.
Mary Boleyn married William Carey in February 1520 and I think it’s more plausible that the king arranged this match for her, with a man who served in his privy chamber, a man who was a royal favourite and a relative of the king, after he’d tired of her, perhaps even after just a one night stand. Mary went on to have two children during her marriage to William Carey, a daughter, Catherine, who’s believed to have been born in 1524, and a son, Henry, who was born in March 1526.
But Henry VIII owned a ship named The Mary Boleyn in the early 1520s so she must have been more than a one night stand, it must have been a real romance, I hear some of you cry. She must have been his true love!
Well, nope.
As Lauren Mackay has pointed out in her book on Thomas and George Boleyn, the ship in question was not named after Mary. It was a French warship that the English fleet had captured, and its name was the Mary of Boloyne, the French port of Boulogne. Other ships captured were the Mary of Homflete, or Honfleur, the Galley of Dieppe, the Michael of Dieppe and the Griffin of Dieppe. So, not Boleyn but Boulogne.
But hang on, the king paid William Carey off for turning a blind eye to his wife’s adultery with the king and bringing up the king’s children, I hear some of you shout again.
Nope.
While some historians and bloggers cite the grants that William Carey received between 1522, when the king apparently started his relationship with Mary, and his death in 1528 as evidence, I call BS.
I’m not saying there weren’t grants, but William Carey was a royal favourite, a loyal member of the king’s privy chamber. I looked at the rewards he received between 1519 and 1523, before either of the Carey children were born, and there are lots and lots. For example, in June 1519, he received an annuity of 50 marks, he received payments for playing tennis and cards with the king, and in 1522 and 1523 he received all kinds of lucrative keeperships and stewardships, such as Newhall and Writtell, and a wardship.
But this is not at all unusual. In the same lists of grants, you see men like Henry Norris and William Compton receiving similar rewards as they were also members of the privy chamber and good friends of the king. For example, Norris received an annuity at the same time as Carey, and he and Compton were also receiving manors, lordships and keeperships. Henry VIII could be incredibly generous to those who served him loyally and men he counted as friends.
Yes, Carey received grants and rewards after his marriage to Mary Boleyn, but he’s not at all unusual. You see the same names coming up in the lists of grants. If you’re going to say that his rewards are evidence that the king fathered his children, then the king was fathering a lot of courtiers’ children. Was the king sleeping with the wives of Henry Norris and William Compton too? Did he father their children?
But what about how the king helped Mary Boleyn after she was widowed in 1528? He granted the warship of her son to Anne Boleyn and granted her an annuity. Well, yes, that’s true. But she was his sweetheart’s sister and his ex-lover. The wardship of Henry Carey was a win-win situation, it took a financial burden off Mary and was good for Anne in that she controlled the boy’s holdings and his marriage prospects etc. As for the annuity, he was simply granting Mary her late husband’s annuity, and there are a number of examples of widows of yeomen of the crown in Henry’s reign being assisted with an annuity. It was a reward for their husbands’ loyal service. William Carey died of sweating sickness while in service to the king.
Henry VIII didn’t acknowledge either of Mary Boleyn’s children as his and there’s no evidence that he did anything to provide for them apart from the help he gave their mother in 1528. He certainly didn’t provide Catherine Carey with a dowry.
Little Henry Carey was given a good start when he became Anne’s ward. She arranged for him to be educated by French poet and reformer Nicholas Bourbon, a man she had helped save from persecution in France. Henry Carey was educated with the sons of other prominent courtiers, like the son of Sir Henry Norris, the king’s good friend and groom of the stool. It was a huge advantage, and he went on to have a successful career, but at no point was the king recorded as showing a special interest in him.
In Elizabeth I’s reign, Carey’s offices and titles included: 1st Baron Hunsdon, Master of the Queen’s Hawks, Knight of the Garter, Lieutenant General, Warden of the East Marches, Keeper of Somerset House, Privy Councillor, Captain General, Lord Chamberlain of the Household, Lord Chamberlain Lieutenant, Principal Captain and Governor of the Army, Chief Justice in Eyre, High Steward of Ipswich and Doncaster, Chief Justice of the Royal Forces and High Steward of Oxford.
And his sister, Catherine, served Elizabeth as her Chief Lady of the Bedchamber.
People argue that Elizabeth favoured the Careys because they were actually her half-siblings, but there’s no evidence that Elizabeth believed them to be her half-siblings. She was showing favour to her first cousins. Elizabeth’s pre-accession household had a number of Boleyn relatives in it, and she appears to have placed great importance on family ties. They served her loyally, they were family, and she rewarded them as such.
I’m not saying that it’s impossible that the Carey children were fathered by Henry VIII, I’m just saying that there’s no evidence that they were and that it shouldn’t be repeated as fact. It’s rather a leap in my opinion. For me, there’s far more circumstantial evidence that Elizabeth Tailboys was Henry VIII’s daughter, and even Ethelreda Malte. I believe the Carey children were fathered by William Carey.
But what do you think? I’d love to know.
I 100 percent agree with you.
We have nothing to go on regarding Mary Boleyn’s relationship with King Henry V111 or the paternity of her children, as Eric Ives once wrote, what we do know about her can be written on a postcode with room to spare, therefore it is based on really if you believe the kings grants to her husband were a favour for rearing his bastards and wether you believe Elizabeth 1st favoured them for being her half siblings as well as maternal cousins, if you look at both Catherine and Henry Cary there is no resemblance between them but siblings don’t necessarily have to look like each other, in most cases one takes after the mother and the other takes after the father, it is not an impossibility that maybe Catherine being the elder could have been fathered by the king, and some point out a likeness in her jowly face and colouring to Henry V111, and Alison Weir believes there is the same likeness between her and Elizabeth of York, but Iv said this before, I can see a likeness to William Cary in Catherine’s wide mouth and apart from what could be a slight resemblance and the fact Henry did acknowledge he had slept with Mary, there is nothing else to go on, Cary was a cousin of the king having Beaufort blood in him so somewhere in the genes that can account for some likeness between Catherine and Henry, but as for her younger brother, he was born several years into his mothers marriage and I do think that makes him more a son of William than Henry, she was obviously sleeping with him and Henry at this time was heavily involved in his great matter, his affair with Mary must have been long past but history always keeps us guessing and I believe it’s just this interest in Mary and her offspring that speculates about who their true father was, writers have embellished this because it makes for good fiction, but really that’s all it probably is, Elizabeth 1st loved her cousins devotedly due to I feel that connection with the mother she had lost tragically when just a toddler, she adored Catherine so much she kept her with her as much as she could, rather selfishly as she did not have much time for her husband, both her and her brother were rewarded handsomely by the queen, held important posts in their lifetime and given magnificent tombs when they passed, Henry Cary’s in Westminster is awesome in its splendour, more befitting a kings than that of a member of the peerage, surely however these monuments are just proof of the reverence the queen held them in, had Henry been King Henry’s son he would have been acknowledged by him for a son was the greatest gift of all, like gold was to Midas, he would surely have been feted like Henry Fitzroy was, been given a Dukedom and an aristocratic wife, and I am sure that had the son been acknowledged as his child, then surely would Catherine have been, mere female though she was, but Henry V111 did neither, and whilst some can say,’ but Anne Boleyn would not have liked it’, and it might have ruined his quest for the annulment, it was an age where kings were expected to have mistresses and bastards, so it might not have helped his case much with the consanguinity issue, but after Anne was long dead, he never claimed them as his, when to do so would by then not have mattered, some will always ponder if Catherine and Henry Cary or maybe just Catherine were the kings offspring, but there will never be definitive proof unless the old rogues corpse is exhumed for DNA testing and a descendant of the Cary children’s is tested, but we know that is never going to happen, one cannot disturb the rest of King Henry V111 merely to satisfy the thousands who have Mary Boleyn’s blood in them.
I think the best possible hint that at least Catherine Carey might have been fathered by Henry VIII is in the portrait of her daughter, Laetitia Knollys, who has a very marked resemblance to Elizabeth I. That said, this can equably be dismissed if Anne and Mary looked very alike in life; it would follow their offspring would too.
Unless someone wants to exhume and run DNA tests, I strongly doubt we will ever know.