Contents

Cover

About the Book

About the Author

Also by Alison Weir

List of Illustrations

Genealogical Tables:

The Boleyns

The Carey Connections

The Carey Family

The Knollys Family

The Stafford Family

Dedication

Title Page

Preface

Introduction

1: ‘The eldest daughter’

2: ‘The best of husbands’

3: ‘Into the realm of France’

4: ‘A very great whore’?

5: ‘William Carey, of the privy chamber’

6: ‘The assault on the Castle of Virtue’

7: ‘Living in Avoutry’

8: ‘Hiding royal blood’

9: ‘The sister of your former concubine’

10: ‘In bondage’

11: ‘High displeasure’

12: ‘A poor honest life’

Appendix I: ‘Of Her Grace’s Kin’

Appendix II: Portraits of ‘Mary Boleyn’ and William Carey

Picture Section

Notes and References

Select Bibliography

Index

Copyright

About the Book

Mary Boleyn is remembered by posterity as a ‘great and infamous whore’. She was the mistress of two kings, Francois I of France and Henry VIII of England, and sister to Anne Boleyn, Henry VIII’s second wife. She may secretly have borne Henry a child and it was because of his adultery with Mary that his marriage to Anne was annulled. It is not hard to see how this tangled web of relationships has given rise to rumours and misconceptions that have been embroidered over the centuries.

In this, the first full-scale biography of Mary Boleyn, Alison Weir explodes much of the mythology that surrounds her subject and uncovers the facts about one of the most misunderstood figures of the Tudor age.

Her extensive, forensic research has facilitated a new and detailed portrayal, in which she recounts that, contrary to popular belief, Mary was entirely undeserving of her posthumous notoriety as a great whore or the ‘hackney’ whom the King of France famously boasted of riding.

Weir also presents compelling new evidence that almost conclusively determines the paternity of Mary’s two oldest children.

In this astonishing and riveting book, Alison Weir shows that Mary’s story had a happy ending and that she was by far the luckiest of the Boleyns.

About the Author

Alison Weir lives and works in Surrey. Her non-fiction books include The Six Wives of Henry VIII, Children of England, Eleanor of Aquitaine, Henry VIII: King and Court, Mary, Queen of Scots, Katherine Swynford and Elizabeth of York. Her novels include Innocent Traitor, The Lady Elizabeth and A Dangerous Inheritance.

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By the same author

Non-Fiction

BRITAIN’S ROYAL FAMILIES:
The Complete Genealogy

THE SIX WIVES OF HENRY VIII

RICHARD III AND THE PRINCES IN THE TOWER

LANCASTER AND YORK:
The Wars of the Roses

CHILDREN OF ENGLAND:
The Heirs of King Henry VIII 1547–1558

ELIZABETH THE QUEEN

ELEANOR OF AQUITAINE

HENRY VIII:
King and Court

MARY QUEEN OF SCOTS
AND THE MURDER OF LORD DARNLEY

ISABELLA:
She-Wolf of France, Queen of England

KATHERINE SWYNFORD:
The Story of John of Gaunt and His Scandalous Duchess

THE LADY IN THE TOWER:
The Fall of Anne Boleyn

ELIZABETH OF YORK:
The First Tudor Queen

THE LOST TUDOR PRINCESS:
A Life of Margaret Douglas, Countess of Lennox

As co-author

THE RING AND THE CROWN:
A History of Royal Weddings, 1066–2011

Fiction

INNOCENT TRAITOR

THE LADY ELIZABETH

THE CAPTIVE QUEEN

A DANGEROUS INHERITANCE

THE MARRIAGE GAME

SIX TUDOR QUEENS:
Katherine of Aragon, The True Queen

Quick Reads

TRAITORS OF THE TOWER

Illustrations

The author and publisher have made every effort to trace and contact the relevant primary copyright holders for each image. The publishers would be pleased to correct any omissions or errors in any future editions.

This book is gratefully dedicated to my editor, Anthony Whittome, to mark his retirement

Mary Boleyn

‘The Great and Infamous Whore’

Alison Weir

Preface

I OWE A debt of gratitude to several kind people for their assistance with this book. To Nicola Tallis, who is surely destined to be one of our great popular historians of the future, for so generously sending me her research paper and numerous related documents on Mary Boleyn, and for encouraging me to write this book and listening so enthusiastically to my arguments. To Douglas Richardson, for emailing me so much helpful information and for his very judicious observations on the paternity of Mary’s Carey children. To Anthony Hoskins, for so kindly sending me copies of his article ‘Mary Boleyn’s Carey Children’ and his unpublished responses to Lady Antonia Fraser’s views on that article, with other related essays, letters and press cuttings. Anthony, we may not agree on all points, but it was so generous of you personally to share all this, and your conclusions, with me. To Carole Richmond, who – just as I was finishing revising the text – very kindly drew my attention to, and sent me, Elizabeth Griffiths’ ground-breaking article on the Boleyns at Blickling, which has proved invaluable. To Josephine Wilkinson, author of Mary Boleyn, for assistance with sources and permission to publish her theory on the ‘sister’ who was present when Anne Boleyn miscarried in 1536.

I should like to thank my historian friends, Tracy Borman, Sarah Gristwood, Siobhan Clarke and Susan Ronald, for all the lively discussions about this book, and their professional support while I was writing it.

My agent, Julian Alexander – is it really twenty-three years we’ve been working together? – has been, as ever, enthusiastic and dynamic in his advocacy of my work, and always a friendly and encouraging voice at the other end of a phone. In a year in which we have set up my own historical tours company, at Julian’s suggestion, he has worked indefatigably to get us off the ground whilst supporting me in my writing career. That’s some feat!

I wish also to thank my professional colleagues, Siobhan Clarke and John Marston, for shouldering many of the administrative burdens of Alison Weir Tours Ltd, so that I could get on with finishing this book. And to my lovely husband, Rankin, the mainstay of my life, thank you for shouldering nearly everything else, and for the occasional glass of wine placed on my desk when the stress gets too much!

I wish to express my deepest gratitude to my dear mother, Doreen Cullen, for all her selfless support of my work over the years, and for her unending enthusiasm, praise and encouragement.

I am singularly blessed in having three outstanding editors. A huge thank-you goes to my commissioning editor, Will Sulkin, and to my editorial director, Anthony Whittome, without whose brilliant creative support and boundless interest and enthusiasm this work would not be in print. I want to thank you also, Tony, for all the excellent work you have done on my books over the past twelve years, and for being such a wonderful friend. I feel very privileged to be one of the authors you have chosen to work with following your much-lamented retirement. I have learned so much from you, and it is thanks to you that I am much more knowledgeable about writing and publishing books than I was twelve years ago.

I wish also to acknowledge all the support and advice given to me by my American editor, Susanna Porter, and her lovely team, who welcomed me so warmly to New York last summer. I’d like to make special mention of my publicists too: Lisa Barnes at Ballantine, Clara Womersley at Jonathan Cape and Ruta Liormonas at Doubleday, and to thank them for all their hard and highly professional work on my behalf, and for making publicity such fun.

Finally, I should like to acknowledge all the efforts put in on my behalf by the unsung heroes of the publishing team at Jonathan Cape and Random House, notably Neil Bradford, Sophie Hartley and Kay Peddle.

I thank you all, from the bottom of my heart.

Alison Weir

Carshalton, Surrey

January 2011

Introduction

MARY BOLEYN HAS gone down in history as a ‘great and infamous whore’. She was the mistress of two kings, François I of France and Henry VIII of England, and sister to Anne Boleyn, Henry VIII’s second wife. She may secretly have borne Henry a child. It was because of his adultery with Mary that his marriage to Anne was declared invalid. It is not hard to see how this tangled web of covert relationships has given rise to rumours and myths that have been embroidered over the centuries, and particularly in recent years, so that the truth about Mary has become obscured. In all my years of writing women’s histories, I have never tackled a subject who has been so romanticised, mythologised and misrepresented.

It may seem strange, in the pages that follow, to see popular history books, some of them decades out of date, compared with serious academic studies, and yet the former are important because it is through them that the mythology of Mary Boleyn has been largely created, nurtured and reaffirmed; and it is helpful to see where and how misconceptions originated.

Everyone knows Henry VIII as the king who married six times. His matrimonial adventures have been a source of enduring fascination for centuries, and the interest shows no sign of abating. On the contrary, in the wake of Philippa Gregory’s The Other Boleyn Girl (2001), the two film versions of it, and the successful (but alarmingly inaccurate) TV drama series The Tudors, it has become elevated to a virtual obsession, as one can see reflected only too clearly in numerous websites and blogs on the internet, where historical personages like Anne Boleyn now have what are virtually fan clubs. We have also witnessed in the public’s eye a disconcerting blurring of the demarcation line between fact and historical fiction.

Comparatively little is known or understood about Henry VIII’s extramarital adventures. Most recent popular history books have thrown little new light on that subject, or have merely confused it further, and thanks to them, and to the widespread appeal of The Other Boleyn Girl, many people have the wrong idea about the woman whom that novel has made the most famous of Henry’s mistresses, Mary Boleyn. Was she really such a ‘great and infamous whore’ with a notorious reputation? Is it true that the King was the father of her children? I am often asked these and numerous questions about Mary, and am constantly being made aware, not only of various misconceptions that are accepted as facts by a majority, but also of the views of many others who are well informed on the subject and are wondering why Mary Boleyn is so misrepresented. It is for these reasons – and because I have done a lot of unpublished research on her over four decades – that I have written a biography of Mary.

Mary Boleyn represents only one short episode in Henry VIII’s chequered love life; all we can say with certainty is that she was his mistress for a short period while he was married to his first wife, Katherine of Aragon. Mary’s true historical significance – and importance – lies in the implications of her royal affair for her more celebrated sister, Anne Boleyn.

My interest in Mary, and my research, goes back to the 1960s, when she was regarded as little more than a footnote to history – in which obscurity she remained until the publication of Philippa Gregory’s novel. Since then, I have written about Mary briefly in three books: The Six Wives of Henry VIII, Henry VIII: King and Court and The Lady in the Tower: The Fall of Anne Boleyn, while my unpublished research comes from my extensive original version of The Six Wives of Henry VIII, written in 1974. A serious historical treatment of Mary Boleyn is long overdue. There has been just one admirable, but sadly brief, study by Josephine Wilkinson; I understand that Dr Wilkinson was constrained by a disadvantageous word limit when she had so much more to say, and she has most generously agreed that I can claim that this is the first full biography of Mary.

Recently, in The Tudors, Henry VIII has been portrayed as a great lover and sensualist. Many people are asking if this is true! Although the evidence is fragmentary, there are many tantalising references in contemporary sources that can help to provide an answer to the paramount question: what was Henry VIII like as a lover? Was he the virile Adonis portrayed in The Tudors? Was he, in fact, a bit of a prude in bed? The answers to these questions necessarily have a bearing on Henry’s relations with Mary Boleyn, and they form a part of this book.

Having had some experience in constructing women’s histories from fragmentary source material – in, for example, Eleanor of Aquitaine; Isabella, Queen of England, She-Wolf of France; and Katherine Swynford – and having collated information on Mary Boleyn and Henry VIII’s extramarital career for earlier books and projects, I had a good basis for crafting what has turned out to be an unexpectedly fascinating – and astonishing – story from the surviving evidence relating to Mary Boleyn’s life. In her case, the sources are richer than for those medieval ladies, for she lived in an age of flowering literacy and diplomacy, and we have far more insights into her existence through letters, diplomatic dispatches and archival records than is the case with any medieval woman.

As is my usual practice, I consulted all the primary sources first when preparing this book, researching into the expanding and ever-changing narrative, which is, I have found (thanks to Sarah Gristwood), the most effective way to write historical biography. Only then did I look at the secondary and present-day sources, leaving Josephine Wilkinson’s biography of Mary Boleyn until last, as I wanted to research my subject thoroughly beforehand and did not wish to be seen to be drawing upon her work. In this process, I found that some modern historians had reached the same conclusions as I had already, and in such cases that is signified by ‘cf.’ (compare) in the references section. I have also made it clear where I have benefited from their insights and research.

There is no escaping the fact that an air of mystery pervades every aspect of Mary Boleyn’s life.¹ There is so much we don’t know about her, and only so much we can infer from the scant sources that have survived. She is in the shadow of her famous sister in more than one way. Furthermore, much that is inaccurate has been written about her. Many of the misconceptions come from novels like The Other Boleyn Girl and others of its kind, namely The Last Boleyn by Karen Harper (2006) and Court Cadenza by Aileen Quigley (1974) (republished as The Tudor Sisters by Aileen Armitage) – because people often make the mistake of thinking that what an author of fiction writes must be history – and accurate history.

Yet even historians have often been guilty of making sweeping, unsupported assumptions about Mary Boleyn. This became staggeringly clear when, having researched the original sources, I turned to the secondary ones, which are – with only a few honourable exceptions – littered with inaccuracies. For example, many modern works state categorically that one or both of Mary’s children was or were the King’s, even though this has never been proven. Time and again, mere assumptions are presented as hard facts – I have lost count of the number of times I have noted a source not being cited – and dubious evidence is accepted indiscriminately, as will repeatedly be highlighted in the pages that follow. Some writers merely recirculate and perpetuate old myths, and even sound and respected, reliable and conscientious historians can be guilty of repeating the same misinformation about Mary Boleyn. I have to confess that I too, in earlier books, have sometimes accepted without question what others have written about her.

It is thanks to such accounts that misconceptions about Henry VIII’s private life remain widespread. In fact, it is the persistence of the mythology surrounding Mary Boleyn that has been the most disconcerting aspect of my research. For much of what we might read about Mary, even in history books, should be treated with caution, based as it is on false assumptions. And yet, as will appear in the pages that follow, it is sometimes the case that even the most fanciful and unreliable historians can provide us with compellingly credible – and useful – insights into Mary’s character and conduct.

One could go on; the fact is that – as we will see – much of what has been written about Mary Boleyn in history books belongs more properly to historical novels. For this reason, this book is not only a biography but also a historiography of Mary Boleyn.

What follows is a tale that has never fully been told, a rigorous assessment of what we know – and don’t know – about Mary Boleyn, which hopefully will enrich our understanding of this much-misrepresented lady and her relations with Henry VIII.

A NOTE ON MONETARY VALUES

All monetary sums quoted in the text are in sixteenth-century values. The approximate modern equivalent (at the time of writing) is given in brackets. For converting old money to new, I have used the National Archives’ Currency Converter (www.nationalarchives.gov.uk).

1

‘The Eldest Daughter’

BLICKLING HALL, ONE of England’s greatest Jacobean showpiece mansions, lies not two miles north-west of Aylsham in Norfolk. It is a beautiful place, surrounded by woods, farms, sweeping parkland and gardens – gardens that were old in the fifteenth century, and which once surrounded the fifteenth-century moated manor house of the Boleyn family, the predecessor of the present building. That house is long gone, but it was in its day the cradle of a remarkable dynasty; and here, in those ancient gardens, and within the mellow, red-brick gabled house, in the dawning years of the sixteenth century, the three children who were its brightest scions once played in the spacious and halcyon summers of their early childhood, long before they made their dramatic début on the stage of history: Anne Boleyn, who would one day become Queen of England; her brother George Boleyn, who would also court fame and glory, but who would ultimately share his sister’s tragic and brutal fate; and their sister Mary Boleyn, who would become the mistress of kings, and gain a notoriety that is almost certainly undeserved.

Blickling was where the Boleyn siblings’ lives probably began, the protective setting for their infant years, nestling in the broad, rolling landscape of Norfolk, circled by a wilderness of woodland sprinkled with myriad flowers such as bluebells, meadowsweet, loosestrife and marsh orchids, and swept by the eastern winds. Norfolk was the land that shaped them, that remote corner of England that had grown prosperous through the wool-cloth trade, its chief city, Norwich – which lay just a few miles to the south – being second in size only to London in the Boleyns’ time. Norfolk also boasted more churches than any other English shire, miles of beautiful coastline and a countryside and waterways teeming with a wealth of wildlife. Here, at Blickling, nine miles from the sea, the Boleyn children took their first steps, learned early on that they had been born into an important and rising family, and began their first lessons.

Anne and George Boleyn were to take centre-stage roles in the play of England’s history. By comparison, Mary was left in the wings, with fame and fortune always eluding her. Instead, she is remembered as an infamous whore. And yet, of those three Boleyn siblings, she was ultimately the luckiest, and, unlike her sister, the most happy.

This is Mary’s story.

Mary Boleyn has aptly been described as ‘a young lady of both breeding and lineage’.¹ She was born of a prosperous landed Norfolk family of the knightly class. The Boleyns, whom Anne Boleyn claimed were originally of French extraction, were settled at Salle, near Aylsham, before 1283, when the register of Walsingham Abbey records a John Boleyne living there,² but the family can be traced in Norfolk back to the reign of Henry II (1154–89).³ The earliest Boleyn inscription in Salle church is to John’s great-great-grandson, Thomas Boleyn, who died in 1411; he was the son of another John Boleyn and related to Ralph Boleyn, who was living in 1402. Several other early members of the family, including Mary’s great-great-grandparents, Geoffrey and Alice Boleyn, were buried in Salle church, which is like a small cathedral, rising tall and stately in its perpendicular splendour in the flat Norfolk landscape. The prosperous village it once served, which thrived upon the profitable wool trade with the Low Countries, has mostly disappeared.

The surname Boleyn was spelt in several ways, there being no uniformity in spelling in former times, when it was given as Boleyn, Boleyne, Bolleyne, Bollegne, Boleigne, Bolen, Bullen, Boulen, Boullant or Boullan, the French form. The bulls’ heads on the family coat of arms are a pun on the name. In adult life, Anne Boleyn used the modern form adopted in this text. Unfortunately, we don’t know how Mary Boleyn spelt her surname, as only two letters of hers survive, both signed with her married name.

The Boleyn family had once been tenant farmers, but the source of their wealth and standing was trade. Thomas’s grandson, Sir Geoffrey Boleyn, made his fortune in the City of London as a member and then Master of the Worshipful Company of Mercers (1454); he was Sheriff of London from 1446–7; M.P. for London in 1449; and an alderman of the City of London from 1452 (an office he held for eleven years). In 1457, he was elected Lord Mayor.⁴ By then, he had made his fortune; his wealth had enabled him to marry into the nobility, his wife being Anne, daughter and co-heiress of Thomas, Lord Hoo and Hastings, and she brought him great estates. Stow records that Sir Geoffrey ‘gave liberally to the prisons, hospitals and lazar houses, besides a thousand pounds to poor householders in London, and two hundred pounds to [those] in Norfolk’. He was knighted by Henry VI before 1461.

In 1452 (or 1450), Geoffrey had purchased the manor of Blickling in Norfolk from his friend and patron, Sir John Fastolf.⁵ The manor had once been the property of the eleventh-century Saxon king, Harold Godwineson,⁶ and the original manor house on the site had been built in the 1390s by Sir Nicholas Dagworth, but it was evidently outdated or in poor repair, because – as has recently been discovered – it was rebuilt as Blickling Hall, ‘a fair house’ of red brick, by Geoffrey Boleyn.⁷ Geoffrey also built the chapel of St Thomas in Blickling church, and adorned it with beautiful stained glass incorporating the heraldic arms of himself and his wife, which still survives today; in his will, he asked to be buried there if he departed this life at Blickling. In the event, he died in London.

Ten years later, in 1462, Geoffrey bought the manors of Hever Cobham and Hever Brokays in Kent from William Fiennes, Lord Saye and Sele,⁸ as well as thirteenth-century Hever Castle from Sir Thomas Cobham. Sir Geoffrey now moved in the same social circles as the prosperous Paston family (Norfolk neighbours who knew the Boleyns well, and whose surviving letters tell us so much about fifteenth-century life), the Norfolk gentry and even the exalted Howards, who were descended from King Edward I, and at the head of whose house was John Howard, first Duke of Norfolk; the friendship between the Boleyns and the Howards, which would later be cemented by marriage, dated from at least 1469.⁹

When he died in 1463,¹⁰ Geoffrey was buried in the church of St Lawrence Jewry by the Guildhall in London. His heir, Thomas Boleyn of Salle, was buried there beside him in 1471,¹¹ when the family wealth and estates passed to Geoffrey’s second son, William Boleyn, Mary’s grandfather, who had been born around 1451; he was ‘aged 36 or more’ in the Inquisition Post Mortem on his cousin, Thomas Hoo, taken in October 1487.¹²

The Boleyns had arrived; they were what would soon become known as new men, those who had risen to prominence through wealth, wedlock and ability. William Boleyn, who – like his father – had supported the House of York during the Wars of the Roses, was dubbed a Knight of the Bath at Richard III’s coronation in July 1483, became a Justice of the Peace, and made an even more impressive marriage than his father, to Margaret Butler, who had been born sometime prior to 1465,¹³ the younger daughter and co-heiress of Thomas Butler, 7th Earl of Ormond.¹⁴

The Butlers were an ancient Anglo-Norman family, whose surname derived from the office of butler (an official who was responsible for the provisioning of wine), which their ancestor, Theobald Walter, had borne in the household of the future King John in 1185. They too were descended from Edward I, and had been earls of Ormond since 1329.¹⁵ Thomas Butler was one of the wealthiest peers; he had inherited a fortune of £40,000 (£20 million), and was lord of no fewer than seventy-two manors in England. He sat in Parliament as the premier baron and served as English ambassador to the courts of France and Burgundy. His wife was Anne, daughter and heiress of a rich knight, Sir Richard Hankeford.¹⁶

Before he had come into his inheritance in 1477, Butler had been chronically short of money, and Sir William Boleyn and his mother had continually come to the rescue;¹⁷ Butler repaid his debts with the hand of his daughter, and a dowry that would handsomely enrich the Boleyn family.

Lady Margaret Butler bore Sir William Boleyn eleven children, of whom there were four surviving sons: Thomas, James, William and Edward. Thomas was the eldest,¹⁸ born in 1477,¹⁹ when his mother was probably quite young, although perhaps not as young as twelve, as her mother’s Inquisition Post Mortem suggests. After Richard III, the last Plantagenet monarch, was killed at the Battle of Bosworth in 1485, the Boleyns prudently switched their allegiance to the new Tudor dynasty; in 1490, Sir William was appointed Sheriff of Kent, by which time he was probably dividing his time between Blickling and Hever. King Henry VII, the first Tudor sovereign, demonstrated his trust in him by making him responsible for keeping the peace in his locale, delivering prisoners to the assizes, and placing and guarding the beacons that would herald the approach of the King’s enemies; he gave William a commission of array against an invasion by the French, and appointed him Sheriff of Norfolk in 1501. The next year, William was made the third of only four Barons of the Exchequer, who sat as judges in the Court of the Exchequer.²⁰

In 1497, Sir William Boleyn and his son Thomas, now twenty, fought for Henry VII against the rebels of Cornwall, who had risen in protest against excessive taxation. Again and again the Boleyn family would demonstrate its solid loyalty to the Crown, and in so doing would win the notice and favour of the Tudor kings, Henry VII and Henry VIII, who valued ‘new men’ who had risen to prominence through trade and the acquisition of wealth, as opposed to the older nobility, whose power, hitherto boosted by private armies, they strove to keep in check.

The detail in Thomas Boleyn’s tomb brass suggests that some attempt was made to reflect his true appearance. It is the image of a dignified man with the long face, high cheekbones and pointed chin that were inherited by his daughter Anne and his grandson, Lord Hunsdon. He has strong features, wavy hair cut straight at chin level, and the hint of a close-cropped beard. His coat of arms, sporting three bulls’ heads, while being a play on his name, also symbolised his valour, bravery and generosity. In the case of the latter, it was little more than flattery.

Thomas was a gifted linguist, more fluent in French than any other courtier, and proficient at Latin;²¹ he was also an expert jouster, and these were talents that would make him admired and useful at court. The celebrated Humanist scholar Desiderius Erasmus thought him ‘outstandingly learned’, and was to dedicate two books to him, one of which was a commentary on the Psalms, in which Thomas Boleyn had shown an interest.²²

Thomas was to prove a highly able and hard-working statesman and diplomat, and Henry VIII himself would say that there was no skilled negotiator to equal him.²³ He was adept at dealing with his royal master, whose liking for him seems never to have died. Yet although normally affable, even congenial, Thomas Boleyn could also be chillingly dispassionate, brusque and even insolent, as he showed when on a crucial diplomatic mission to the Holy Roman Emperor in 1530; and when, during an embassy in Rome, the Pope – as was customary – offered his toe to be kissed, and Boleyn’s spaniel bit it, Boleyn refused to kiss it because his dog had defiled it, and so compromised his good relations with the Vatican.

Although he was hard-working and diligent, Thomas Boleyn’s besetting vices – by all accounts – were selfishness and avarice; ‘he could not risk the temptation of money’.²⁴ It was to be said of him that ‘he would sooner act from interest than from any other motive’,²⁵ and never was that more apparent than when he showed himself willing to participate in the destruction of two of his children in order to protect himself and salvage his own position and career.

Following in the tradition of his father and grandfather, Thomas Boleyn made a great marriage, to Lady Elizabeth Howard, the eldest daughter of Thomas Howard, Earl of Surrey. Surrey was the son of John Howard, Duke of Norfolk, who had been killed at the Battle of Bosworth fighting on the wrong side for Richard III. Henry VII had declared the title forfeit and cast the heir into prison, but Thomas Howard gradually recovered royal favour and prospered, with the earldom of Surrey being returned to him just four years later, in 1489, and the dukedom of Norfolk in 1514. Had the Howard fortunes not suffered such a reverse, Master Thomas Boleyn might not have gained such a prize as a Howard bride, even though he was the heir to an impressive landed inheritance and the families were on good terms. Elizabeth was a brilliant match for him, and marriage to her made this ambitious esquire brother-in-law to the sister of the Queen of England, for Elizabeth’s brother, another Thomas Howard (who succeeded his father as the third Duke of Norfolk in 1524), had, in 1495, married Edward IV’s daughter, Anne Plantagenet; Anne’s sister Elizabeth was Henry VII’s queen and the mother of the future Henry VIII.

The young Elizabeth Howard was very pretty – in his verses dedicated ‘To My Lady Elizabeth Howard’, the court poet John Skelton compared her to the mythical Trojan beauty Cressida, whose looks far outshone those of the radiant Polyxena, youngest daughter of Priam, King of Troy, and sister of Troilus, whom Cressida was to betray:

To be your remembrancer, Madam, I am bound:

Like unto Irene maidenly of porte [bearing],

Of virtue and cunning the well and perfect ground,

Whom Dame Nature, as well I may report,

Hath freshly enbeautied with many a goodly sort

Of womanly features: whose flourishing tender age

Is lusty to look on, pleasant, demure and sage.

Goodly Cressida, fairer than Polyxena,

For to envy Pandarus’ appetite:

Troilus, I vow, if that he had you seen,

In you he would have set his whole delight:

Of all your beauty I suffice not to write,

But, as I said, your flourishing tender age

Is lusty to look on, pleasant, demure and sage.

In comparing Elizabeth with the artist Irene, the gifted daughter and pupil of the Greek painter Cratinus (to whom Boccaccio refers in his book Famous Women), Skelton is perhaps implying that she had some artistic talent herself.

In the poem in which these verses appear, ‘The Garland of the Laurel’ (1523), Skelton describes a visit he made to Sheriff Hutton Castle as the guest of Elizabeth’s father, Thomas Howard, Earl of Surrey. In the course of it, the Countess, Elizabeth Tylney, was so impressed with Skelton’s poetry that, at her behest, her daughters, Lady Elizabeth and Lady Muriel, with some other ladies – Lady Anne Dacre of the South, Mistress Margery Wentworth (who would marry Sir John Seymour and become the mother of Henry VIII’s third wife, Jane Seymour) and Margaret Brewes, the wife of Sir Philip Tylney (Surrey’s auditor and steward of Framlingham Castle) – made for him a laureate’s garland of silk, gold and pearls in honour of his talent. No one could then have dreamed that two of these young ladies would give birth to future queens of England.

‘The Garland of the Laurel’ is in part an allegorical poem, but its references to the noble ladies at Sheriff Hutton, Skelton’s ‘court of fame’, are authentic. In 1523, when the final version was written, Elizabeth Howard (whose parents had wed in 1472 and who must have been at least twelve by c.1498) would have been aged between thirty-seven and fifty-one, far too old in those days to be lauded a beauty. Internal evidence in the poem suggests that it had been originally composed around 1495.²⁶ It has credibly been suggested that the poem commemorates a pageant that was staged at Sheriff Hutton around May that year, in which Skelton’s ‘goodly garland’ was presented to him. His verses give an illuminating glimpse into the kind of life that Elizabeth Howard led as a young girl growing up in an aristocratic and cultivated household.

In 1523, when Skelton published his poem, it was probably much in its original form, with a few later additions. But by then, his compliment to Elizabeth Howard may have acquired a sting to its tail, as we will see in the next chapter.

Thomas Boleyn’s union with Elizabeth Howard may have been socially prestigious, but it was certainly not lucrative. Given that her father had had to buy back his lands from the King, Elizabeth’s dowry cannot have been great, and she proved a fruitful wife, which stretched Thomas Boleyn’s resources to the limit. In July 1536, in a letter to Henry VIII’s Principal Secretary, Thomas Cromwell, he recalled: ‘When I married I had only £50 [nearly £25,000] a year to live on for me and my wife, as long as my father lived, and yet she brought me every year a child.’²⁷ By this reckoning, Elizabeth was producing children annually at least up to 1505. This early struggle to make ends meet may have been responsible for Thomas Boleyn’s notorious avarice in later years.

Only four of the children survived infancy: ‘Thomas Bullayne’, whose grave in Penshurst Church, Kent, is marked by a cross and the date 1520, Mary, Anne and George. Of the rest, we know only the name of one son, Henry, whose resting place is marked by a small brass adjacent to his father’s tomb in Hever church; he probably died young. There may well have been others whose names have not come down to us. This constant childbearing renders dubious claims that Elizabeth Howard was a lady-in-waiting to Queen Elizabeth of York, who died in 1503,²⁸ unless of course she had held that post prior to her marriage, but there is no evidence for this.

Scholars have long disputed which of the surviving daughters was the oldest, some insisting that it was probably Anne,²⁹ but there survives good evidence that it was Mary.³⁰ Mary’s grandson, George Carey, 2nd Baron Hunsdon,³¹ in a letter to Thomas Cecil, Lord Burghley, dated 6 October 1597, was to argue that he ought to be granted the earldom of Ormond in right of his grandmother, stating that ‘my grandmother was the eldest daughter and sole heir’ of Thomas Boleyn, Earl of Wiltshire and Ormond – and he was in a position to know the truth. He also asserted that Mary ‘sued her livery [pressed her claim], as by the record of the same doth and may appear’, although that record does not survive. Had she been successful, she and her husband, William Stafford, would have become Earl and Countess of Ormond, but that was never likely, because the earldom had been granted to Piers Butler in February 1538, more than year before Wiltshire’s death, and the Butlers still held the title.

But George Carey had been reared in the hope that it would be restored. ‘My late lord father,’ he wrote (referring to Henry Carey, 1st Lord Hunsdon, Mary’s son), ‘as resolved by the opinion of heralds and lawyers, ever assured me that a right and title was to descend on me to the earldom of Ormond, which, if he had lived to this Parliament, he meant to have challenged . . . In that Sir Thomas Boleyn was created Viscount Rochford and Earl of Ormond to him and his heirs general [i.e. both male and female], Earl of Wiltshire to him and his heirs male³² by whose death without issue male the earldom of Wiltshire was extinguished, but the earldom of Ormond, he surviving his other children before that time attainted, he in right left to his eldest daughter Mary, who had issue Henry, and Henry myself.’

George Carey was working on the assumption that, as the heir of Mary, the elder sister, he had a better right to the earldom than Elizabeth I herself, whom he admitted to be co-heir to it in right of her mother, ‘Anne, the youngest daughter of Sir Thomas Boleyn, Earl of Ormond’. But, he concluded, ‘admit now an equality of descent, then is it to be considered whether my Grandmother, being the eldest daughter, ought not to have the whole dignity?’³³

With Queen Elizabeth’s rights to her executed mother’s confiscated property having been restored to her by Parliament early in her reign, George Carey, the most loyal of subjects, would hardly have considered claiming a peerage that, by his reckoning, would have been the Queen’s by right, had she been the elder daughter. In the event, though, Carey never presented his petition to Elizabeth. Probably he was advised not to pursue the matter, for since the restitution of Elizabeth’s rights, Mary Boleyn could now be regarded only as a co-heir to the earldom, not the sole heir;³⁴ legally, at this date, it did not matter which sister was the elder, since the Butlers had held the earldom since 1538.

Other evidence that Mary was the elder daughter is to be found in a marginal note made by William Camden in the manuscript of his Annales rerum Anglicarum et Hibernicarum regnante Elizabetha, published in 1615; here, he states that Anne was begotten by Thomas Boleyn ‘among other children’. Had she been the eldest daughter, Camden would surely have described her thus. In 1585, for what his evidence is worth, Nicholas Sander, one of the chief Catholic historians of the Reformation – of whom we will hear more later – called Mary the elder of the Boleyn sisters.

Other later sources have confused the issue. In 1619, Ralph Brooke, York Herald, in his A Catalogue and Succession of the Kings, Princes, Dukes, Marquesses, Earls and Viscounts of this Realm of England, wrote that ‘Anne . . . was second daughter of Sir Thomas Boleyn’, yet contradicted himself by referring elsewhere to ‘Anne the eldest, Mary the second daughter’.

Confusion seems to have reigned in one branch of the Carey family. Mary’s great-granddaughter, George Carey’s daughter Elizabeth, married Thomas, the heir of the Berkeleys, a noble Gloucestershire family, in February 1596. In a manuscript in the Berkeley collection written in 1584, twelve years before Elizabeth Carey’s marriage, Mary is called ‘the second daughter and coheir of Thomas Boleyn’. This could well be an error, but on the tombstone of Elizabeth Carey, Lady Berkeley, who died in 1635, Mary is again referred to as the second daughter, as she is also described in a manuscript, Lives of the Berkeleys, compiled over four decades and completed in 1618 by John Smyth of Nibley, steward to the family from 1596 to 1640. If Smyth repeated the earlier error in the records, from 1584, it was never corrected, although the occasion may not have arisen. There remains the matter of the epitaph; it may be that, after Lady Berkeley’s death, her family merely found this information in their papers, or obtained it from the possibly misinformed Smyth, who was still alive.

It would have been odd if Elizabeth Carey, who was Queen Elizabeth’s goddaughter, was under the impression that her great-grandmother was the younger of the Boleyn sisters, when her father, George Carey, had taken such pains to demonstrate that she was the elder. Yet there is no hard evidence that Elizabeth Carey herself did believe that Mary was the younger; or it is just possible that, if she had been told by her father that he had been advised not to pursue his claim, she decided to distance herself from it by pretending that her great-grandmother had indeed been the younger daughter. In either case, it is far likelier that George Carey, Mary Boleyn’s grandson, knew the truth of the matter.³⁵

As late as 1631, John Weever, in his Ancient Funeral Monuments, called Anne Boleyn the eldest daughter, but without revealing his source. Weever was not born until 1576, and his work has been shown to be inaccurate, and plagiarised, in parts, and therefore his evidence, according to Professor Ives, is ‘totally implausible’ when compared to the claim and arguments of George Carey.

In Harleian MS. 1233, fol. 81, there is a pedigree of the Boleyn family that was probably drawn up in the reign of Charles I: this too describes Mary as ‘second dau.’. The College of Arms holds another pedigree, formally attested in 1679 to be ‘proved out of certain Registers and Memorials remaining in ye College of Arms’, which gives Anne as the ‘eldest daur.’ and Mary as ‘daur. and heir’. Yet Mary’s seniority is supported by the wording of the Letters Patent of 1532 creating Anne Boleyn, ‘one of the daughters’ of Sir Thomas, Lady Marquess of Pembroke.³⁶ Had Anne been the elder, she would surely have been described as such. Mary was also the first sister to be found a husband, another indication of her seniority,³⁷ for it was customary in England for landed families to marry off their daughters in order of seniority. Retha Warnicke, relying on Weever, believes that Mary was the younger sister and that the Boleyns flouted this convention because Anne was still in France and they were hoping that she would make a grand match there; but this theory flies in the face of the other compelling evidence to support Mary being the elder of the two, on a balance of probabilities.³⁸

It is worth saying that this debate over seniority has raged for well over a century, and is never likely to be resolved to the satisfaction of all historians.

Further controversy surrounds the dates of birth of the Boleyn siblings. The actual date of the marriage of Thomas Boleyn and Elizabeth Howard is not recorded; the dates most often given or suggested are 1498 or 1500.³⁹ We know, from the evidence of Skelton’s poem, that Elizabeth was still unwed in May 1495, but all we can surmise is that she married Thomas sometime between then and 1498, the latest possible date estimated on the evidence for the probable births of their children, as laid out below.

There survives, however, what seems to be the jointure settled on Elizabeth Howard, dating from shortly before 29 November 1501 and granting her manors for the term of her life,⁴⁰ which must have been made after her marriage, because at this period, ‘the marriage contract created the jointure, which did not exist without it’.⁴¹ Marriage contracts would commonly state that a dowry was being paid ‘in consideration’ of the bridegroom’s family’s promise to settle a jointure on the bride,⁴² a jointure being the legal provision made for a wife in the event of her husband’s death.

⁴³⁴⁴