8

Hiding Royal Blood

During her marriage to William Carey, Mary Boleyn bore two children. The elder was Katherine, born probably in March or April 1524¹ and almost certainly named for the Queen.² It has been claimed that this was in gratitude for Katherine’s “politeness and forbearing,”³ although it is by no means likely that Katherine knew that there was anything to be forbearing about.

The younger child was Henry Carey, born on March 4, 1525.⁴ Even allowing for the dating of the Tudor year from Lady Day, March 25, the inscription on his tomb in Westminster Abbey states that he was in his seventy-second year when he died on July 23, 1596; that would place his date of birth in March 1525, which is corroborated by the inscription on his portrait at Berkeley Castle (the seat of his descendants), painted in 1591, which records his age as sixty-six. His father’s inquisition postmortem, taken in 1528, states that on June 22 that year, his heir, Henry Carey, was aged two years, fifteen weeks and five days,⁵ but the ages of heirs given in inquisitions postmortem are not always accurate, and it is much more likely that he was three years, fifteen weeks, and five days, since the epitaph commissioned by his family and the portrait commissioned by himself are far more likely to bear the correct date, which is 1525.⁶ Young Henry was almost certainly named in honor of the King, as were so many boys at that time. It is possible that Henry VIII and Katherine of Aragon were the respective godparents of the Carey siblings, but there is no record of this.

On the assumption that the affair between the King and Mary Boleyn was flourishing through the early 1520s, it is often suggested or claimed that one or both of Mary’s children was fathered by the King.⁷ One writer has even gone so far as to assert that news that she was to have a child “caused a smile,”⁸ while another believes “there is no smoke without fire in these matters.”⁹

In popular culture there is little doubt that Mary’s affair with Henry VIII bore fruit. In the 1969 film, Anne of the Thousand Days, Valerie Gearon played a bitter Mary Boleyn who is great with the King’s child and banished to her bedchamber at Hever Castle when he visits. In both filmed versions of The Other Boleyn Girl, Mary is shown as bearing the King a son. Film is such a powerful medium that many now believe that Henry Carey was Henry VIII’s child.

But the relationship produced no acknowledged offspring,¹⁰ and there is no reliable contemporary assertion that either of Mary’s two children was the King’s issue.¹¹ The evidence for Henry’s paternity of the Carey siblings is mostly circumstantial and inferential—“positive proof is lacking”¹²—and there are good historical reasons why some of it should be rejected. Contrary to what has been claimed, close analysis of the circumstantial evidence does not make “a powerful case” for both the Carey children’s royal paternity,¹³ and there is no contemporary source that suggests that either the King or his successors at any time acknowledged those children as his issue. Mary “was not known to have borne him any child,”¹⁴ while, with one dubious exception, “no claim was ever made that any of [her children] were sired by the King.”¹⁵ Furthermore, as will be seen, there is clear evidence that Henry Carey was the lawful issue of William Carey.¹⁶

It is simply not true that there were “serious doubts” about the paternity of Mary’s son, that “rumor was busy” at the time of his birth, or that “many” people maintained that Henry VIII was his father.¹⁷ There is no reference to rumors of the King’s paternity circulating in 1525, at the time of Henry Carey’s birth,¹⁸ and in fact the first and only reference to a rumor dates from ten years later. In November 1531, a Venetian diplomat, Lodovico Falier, after describing Princess Mary to his masters, reported: “The King has also a natural son, born to him of the widow of one of his peers; a youth of great promise, so much does he resemble his father.”¹⁹ It has been suggested that this might refer to Henry Carey,²⁰ since Mary was a widow in 1531, but so also was Elizabeth Blount, whose husband, unlike William Carey, had been a peer of the realm; thus Falier must have been referring to Henry Fitzroy.

In fact, there is only one dubious contemporary source for Henry Carey being the King’s son.²¹ On April 20, 1535, John Hale, Vicar of Isleworth, confessed before the Council that bills laid against him by four gentlemen were true, and admitted, “I have maliciously slandered the King and the Queen’s Grace and their Council, for which I ask forgiveness of God, King Henry VIII, and Queen Anne, and shall continue sorrowful during my life.” He excused his rash words by saying he had suffered “a fervent ague [and] several falls from my horse, from one of which was troubled my wits, as also by age and lack of memory.” Then he tried to shift the blame to one of his accusers, “Mr. Skidmore,” alleging that he had conversed with him “concerning the King’s marriage and other behaviors of his bodily lust,” and claiming that “Skidmore” had pointed out to him “young Master Carey, saying he was our sovereign lord the King’s son by our sovereign lady the Queen’s sister, whom the Queen’s Grace might not suffer to be in the court.”²²Hale was at least correct on the latter count, for it was probably common knowledge by then that Anne Boleyn would not “suffer” her sister Mary to come to court after they fell out for good in 1534.²³

This same John Hale was a member of a group of dissidents who had been fed salacious calumnies about the Boleyn family by Richard Reynolds, a monk of Syon Abbey who had denied the King’s new title of Supreme Head of the Church of England,²⁴ granted him by Parliament in the wake of the breach with Rome. “Mr. Skidmore” was in fact Thomas Scudamore, a priest at nearby Syon Abbey,²⁵ a religious house that had once been highly favored by Katherine of Aragon, who had visited frequently to make her devotions;²⁶ it is therefore unsurprising that malicious gossip about Anne Boleyn’s family was rife there, and the community would have known that, in asserting that Henry Carey was the King’s son, they were impugning the legitimacy of Anne’s marriage.

Hale himself was violently opposed to that marriage, and had accused the King of indulging in “foul pleasures” and being “mired in vice,” fulminating that Henry’s life was “more stinking than a sow,” and lambasting him for “wallowing and defiling himself in any filthy place. For how great soever he is, he is fully given to his foul pleasure of the flesh and other voluptuousness.” Hale also asserted that Henry had violated most of the women of his court, and married Anne Boleyn “out of sheer fornication, to the highest shame and undoing of himself and all his realm.” It was he who had claimed that Henry kept his own brothel of maidens at Farnham Castle “when he was with the old Lord of Winchester”—which, as we have seen, was highly unlikely—and that “the King’s Grace had meddled with the Queen’s mother.”²⁷

It was because Hale refused to take the oath acknowledging the royal supremacy, and the invalidity of the King’s union with Katherine of Aragon, that he was hanged and disemboweled at Tyburn in May 1535. He was not executed for claiming that Henry Carey was the King’s son, as has been implied.²⁸ Nor can that one statement show “at the very least … that contemporary opinion in 1535 believed that the affair had been ongoing just nine years earlier in 1526.”²⁹ One man’s seditious opinion was not necessarily the view of others, and Hale’s tirade can be dismissed as that of a hostile and unreliable witness.

It has been noted that Henry VIII was so discreet in his extramarital affairs that we know very little about them. Had he been indulging in wholesale fornication with every woman at court, as Hale appears to imply, there would undoubtedly be plenty of surviving testimony to it. But despite present-day claims that Henry Carey was “widely rumored” or “commonly supposed” to have been the King’s son,³⁰ there is no evidence beyond Hale’s highly suspect testimony that there were any rumors circulating about Henry Carey’s paternity—and even if there had been, “court gossip is not always a reliable source of information.”³¹

Infinitely less compelling as evidence of Henry’s paternity is the grant of the borough of Buckingham “in tail male” to William Carey on February 20, 1526,³² nearly a year after Henry Carey was born; “tail male” was the most popular form of entail, limiting the grant to the recipient and the male heirs of his body, who, crucially, must have been lawfully begotten.³³ Fee tails were created in order to ensure that lands and grants made by the Crown remained in the family of the beneficiary; “the male entail kept land in the hands of men as long as it was biologically possible.”³⁴ Had Henry Carey been the King’s son, no fee tail would, or could, have been created.

When one compares the pattern of grants made to William Carey with the birth dates of the Carey siblings, there are no grants that coincide with Henry Carey’s birth and could consequently be seen as possible evidence of the King’s paternity. Most arguments in favor of the latter rest on Carey having been born in 1526, not 1525,³⁵ and thus the grant of 1526 cannot be connected with his birth. Moreover, in 1538, Henry VIII stated to the Emperor Charles V that Henry Fitzroy—who had died of a pulmonary infection two years earlier—was “our only bastard son.”³⁶ In the case of Katherine Carey, however, a grant was made only two or three months after her birth,³⁷ which may be significant, and has credibly been seen as a reward to Carey “for his compliant role as nominal father to the King’s bastards.”³⁸

It has been said that “the most compelling argument” against Mary’s children having been sired by Henry VIII is “the apparent low fertility of the King.”³⁹ Henry’s fertility has been the subject of much popular and learned debate in recent years, with his genetic makeup, health, or possible impotence being held responsible for the deaths of many of his children in the womb or in infancy—and it is time to set the record straight.

Henry Tudor was one of eight children. Only four lived beyond infancy: Arthur, Margaret, Henry, and Mary. The others were Elizabeth (died aged three), Edmund, Duke of Somerset (died aged fifteen months), and Edward and Katherine, who both died soon after birth. This was not unusual in an age of high infant mortality.

By Katherine of Aragon, Henry had six children: three sons who died soon after birth, Mary, who lived to maturity, a daughter who was born dead, and one who died soon after birth. Katherine of Aragon came from a family of ten: five of her siblings had died at birth or been stillborn. Thus there was a history of proportionate infant mortality on both sides, which may or may not be significant. Furthermore, Giles Tremlett has recently put forward a convincing theory that Katherine suffered from anorexia, which would have had a bearing on her fertility.

Henry’s second wife, Anne Boleyn, became pregnant four times. Her first child was a daughter, Elizabeth I. Her second died at or near full term, and was almost certainly a son. Her third and fourth pregnancies ended in miscarriages, the latter of a son. This suggests to me that Anne may have been rhesus negative.⁴⁰ Anne herself was born of parents who had had a child “every year,” yet only four lived to adulthood. Again, there is a history on both sides of infant mortality.

Henry had a son by Jane Seymour, who might have presented him with more children had she not died in childbed,⁴¹ for she came from a family of ten, which may have been one reason why he decided to marry her. This successful mating might suggest that Henry’s first two wives had been genetically “at fault” for the premature loss of their children. The King also had one acknowledged bastard son by Elizabeth Blount, and evidence that will be presented later in this chapter strongly suggests that he also had two bastard daughters, both of whom married and bore children. By the time Henry married his three last wives, he was prematurely aging, ailing, and grossly obese; a report by the French ambassador, Charles de Marillac, that his fifth queen, Katherine Howard, was enceinte was probably unfounded, as we hear no more of it. There is an ongoing debate about the King’s possible impotence in his later years.⁴² Even if he did suffer from it then, it can have had little bearing on his relations with Mary Boleyn, since the earliest possible “evidence” dates from the 1530s.

Thus it could not be said with any certainty that Henry—a man who fathered fourteen children, seven of them sons—suffered from “low fertility,” allegedly caused by performance anxiety related to the need to sire an heir.⁴³

There was no stigma attached to royal bastards—even those born in adultery—in those days, and owning them would not normally have had “manifold catastrophic effects.”⁴⁴ Kings and princes unashamedly acknowledged their illegitimate issue in this period, and there were good pragmatic reasons for that. Natural sons could help to enforce the sovereign’s authority and assist him in government, as young Fitzroy did when he was appointed to preside over the Council of the North, in an area that Henry VIII would visit only once in his reign; later, Fitzroy would use his influence on his father’s behalf in the remote Welsh Marches, a region in which the King never set foot. Edward IV’s natural son, Arthur Plantagenet, Viscount Lisle, was Henry VIII’s deputy in Calais. Royal bastards could also be useful in making advantageous marriage alliances to gain land, loyalty, and profit; Richard III, for example, married off his natural daughter Katherine Plantagenet to secure the allegiance of the powerful Herbert family. A king’s sons could serve as commanders in war, or in the diplomatic field, or as channels of patronage at court. For Henry VIII, the father of just one surviving legitimate daughter so far, a bastard son was also living proof of his virility and his ability to sire boys. As Henry was not blessed with numerous surviving legitimate issue, it might seem reasonable to suppose that “he needed all the children he could lay claim to.”⁴⁵ But that is rather a sweeping assumption.

Henry had not delayed acknowledging Henry Fitzroy; it is clear that, right from the time of Fitzroy’s birth, people knew that the boy was the King’s son—it is just not true that there is no record of his existence before his ennoblement in 1525, or that Henry kept it a secret;⁴⁶ indeed, the very name bestowed on the boy—Fitzroy: son of the King—proclaimed his royal paternity, and from birth, he was called “Lord Henry Fitzroy.” His godfather, Wolsey, gave the young child New Year gifts,⁴⁷ and five months before the boy’s ennoblement in June 1525, a Venetian envoy reported that the King “loves him like his own soul,”⁴⁸ which suggests that the child was very much in evidence.

Yet there were reasons why Henry would not openly have acknowledged any bastard child that Mary Boleyn bore him. Unlike Elizabeth Blount, she was a married woman, and owning up to a bastard born in adultery, and the betrayal of one of the gentlemen who were closest to him at court, would have provoked scandal and undermined the King’s image of himself as a virtuous prince with a conscience. And Henry had no need to acknowledge any child by Mary, for there was a presumption in law that any issue born to a married woman was the child of her husband.

It has been argued that, although Henry did not acknowledge the Carey siblings (on the assumption that they were his), “they remained close to the throne, for they shared the same father as Mary and Elizabeth Tudor.”⁴⁹ Yet even if they had been Henry’s children, they could never have been close to the throne in the sense of having a claim to it, for royal bastards could not succeed. Unlike nowadays, there was a rigid distinction in Tudor times between legitimate and illegitimate children. Bastards, simply, had no rights of inheritance, and it would have taken an Act of Parliament to settle the succession on a royal bastard, which would have meant acknowledging him or her to begin with, and persuading the landed establishment—and the commons of the realm—that the normal laws of inheritance should be overlooked. This was what Henry VIII was planning to do for Henry Fitzroy, in the event of Queen Katherine failing to bear a son, but it is debatable whether his subjects would have accepted a bastard for their king.

Had Henry claimed Mary’s children as his own after 1527, he would have jeopardized his plans to marry her sister, Anne Boleyn, since his sexual relationship with Mary placed him within the forbidden degrees of affinity to Anne, and rendered any union between them as incestuous, as the King now believed his marriage to Queen Katherine, his brother’s widow, to have been.⁵⁰ Living proof of the King’s affair with Anne Boleyn’s sister would not only have raised the embarrassing issue of incest, but would also have been evidence of a canonical impediment to any union with Anne and compromised the nullity suit he was pursuing in Rome, which turned upon the fact that Katherine had been his brother’s wife and was therefore forbidden to him. The existence of a bastard born to him by her sister would have undermined his moral arguments, as well as his scruples of conscience. As time went by, and he married Anne in defiance of the Pope, he would have wanted to suppress any evidence that might impugn the legitimacy of that marriage. From 1534, after he was proclaimed Supreme Head of the Church of England, he could not have risked any slur on his moral probity.⁵¹

Thus Henry had every reason to maintain discretion—and probably neither he, nor Mary Boleyn and her family, would have wanted publicly to embarrass her husband William Carey and inflict on him the shame of being publicly branded a cuckold.

That there was a need to maintain discretion is likely. Although, given the almost conclusive evidence, we can be fairly certain that Henry Carey was not the King’s child, and that the grants made to William Carey a year after his son’s birth were not of any significance in this respect, those made in June 1524—notably the three manors lately held by Buckingham—and later were perhaps—although this is not proven—discreet provision for Katherine Carey, who was probably the King’s daughter.

Some historians⁵² believe that Mary never conceived a child by Henry VIII, but there are good grounds for arguing that Katherine Carey was fathered by the King.

The recent discovery of a Latin dictionary in which Katherine’s husband, Sir Francis Knollys, listed the births of their children, in order, has assisted the debate about Katherine’s birth date and paternity, although it provides no real proof of the latter. This dictionary, which had originally been produced in 1551 in Venice, and was probably acquired by Sir Francis during his exile in the 1550s, is now in a private collection, and its existence only recently came to light.⁵³ The handwriting has been verified in comparison with a letter written by Knollys in 1575, now in the British Library. The dictionary provides firsthand evidence that Katherine’s youngest son, Dudley, was born in May 1562, which tends to corroborate the traditional identification of a portrait of a pregnant Elizabethan lady as Katherine Carey.

This portrait, by Steven van der Meulan (d.1563), is dated 1562; it is now in the Mellon Collection at the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven, Connecticut, and has been traditionally identified “probably” as Katherine Carey, whose last child, as we have just seen, was born in May 1562.⁵⁴ Some perceive “a plausible resemblance” between the sitter and the effigy of Katherine at Rotherfield Greys, Oxfordshire,⁵⁵ which may not be apparent to everyone, but what is striking is that both sitter and effigy are wearing what appear to be identical pendants, fashioned from pearls and diamonds in a circular setting around a central stone.⁵⁶ This is fairly convincing evidence that they both depict the same person, and that the sitter in the portrait is indeed Katherine Carey, although the evidence in the diary does not conclusively “prove for the first time that the details on Katherine’s portrait are correct.”⁵⁷ Nevertheless, the provenance of the picture tends to support that identification, as it was in the possession of Katherine’s descendants until 1974, when it was sold, along with other Knollys family portraits, at Sotheby’s.⁵⁸ This is bolstered by the existence of a portrait of Katherine’s brother, Henry Carey, Lord Hunsdon, also attributed to Steven van der Meulan,⁵⁹ which has been dated to 1561/3, the same period. Van der Meulan painted Elizabeth I and luminaries of her court, so it is credible that both her Carey cousins commissioned him to execute their portraits.

The portrait of the expectant lady bears what is almost certainly a contemporary inscription—Aetatis suae 38 Ao Dom 1562—which shows that the sitter was in her thirty-eighth year when it was painted. If this is a heavily pregnant Katherine and her child was born on May 9, 1562, the picture must have been painted in the weeks before she gave birth, probably in March or April, and she would therefore have reached the age of thirty-eight between spring 1562 and spring 1563; thus she must have been born between spring 1524 and spring 1525, and conceived between summer 1523 and summer 1524. Given that her brother was born in March 1525, she was probably born in March or April 1524. It is possible that Mary Boleyn’s affair with the King was still going on in the summer of 1523;⁶⁰ possible too that Henry VIII was indeed Katherine’s father, and that Mary’s pregnancy put an end to the affair, as seems to have been the case with Elizabeth Blount. The taboo against sex during pregnancy would have created a natural distancing between the couple; furthermore, Henry may have wanted to disassociate himself from a gravid Mary so that no one would question the child’s legitimacy.

Possibly Mary became pregnant by William Carey, and that put an end to her relationship with Henry; or she conceived “as soon as she left Henry for her husband,”⁶¹ for it is also possible that the affair had ended in 1523, before Mary became pregnant with Katherine. The information in Sir Francis’s dictionary is not, therefore, “evidence that his wife, the Lady Katherine, was Henry VIII’s daughter,” nor does the discovery of the dictionary put it “beyond reasonable doubt that Mary’s daughter, at least, was a royal bastard”;⁶² such evidence as the dictionary provides is purely circumstantial. It does not confirm “that Katherine was born in the years when Mary was the King’s mistress”⁶³ because we do not know exactly when Mary was the King’s mistress, or if their affair was still going on in 1523. Nor does it follow that, even if Katherine was Henry’s child, “there is but one conclusion: both of Mary’s children were Henry’s bastards.”⁶⁴

If the King was Katherine’s father, Mary would have had every reason to keep that as secret as she had her royal liaison. Naming the child after the Queen could have been a ploy to deflect any covert speculation or gossip, or to forestall Katherine’s suspicions, and anyway there was that presumption under English law that her children were the lawful issue of William Carey. Henry VIII could not have taken advantage of that in the case of Henry Fitzroy, whose mother had not been married when she bore him; he had had to acknowledge the boy, and seems to have been proud to do so, if only to prove to the world that he could father sons. Yet if Mary Boleyn had borne him a child, whatever rumor whispered, it could easily have been passed off as her husband’s, and the King would have been absolved of all responsibility for it—and Mary protected from the stigma of bearing a bastard. Henry would have had good reason to be relieved that his paternity of Katherine did not have to be acknowledged; he could preserve his carefully cultivated image of a virtuous king, and he was not obliged to own another bastard “whose existence only emphasized his lack of legitimate heirs.”⁶⁵ And Katherine was, after all, a mere girl, and therefore unimportant.

It would have taken an Act of Parliament to nullify the legal presumption of paternity,⁶⁶ and there was no reason why Henry VIII would have wanted to pursue this course, or court scandal by doing so.

What is persuasive about the portrait called “Katherine Carey” is that the sitter bears a striking facial resemblance to both Henry VIII and Elizabeth I. This is subjective evidence, of course, but there is a strong similarity in the setting of the eyes; the Tudors had distinctive heavy lower lids, and this, and the familial winged eyebrows, can be seen in portraits of Henry VII, Henry VIII, Arthur Tudor, and Henry Fitzroy, and came from the Plantagenets, as portraits of Henry VIII’s grandfather, Edward IV, show. Katherine Carey has these same features. She also has a prominent chin and rounded jowls, like those that are apparent in portraits of Henry VIII and his mother, Elizabeth of York. She has red hair, as did nearly all the Tudors, whereas William Carey’s was brown; the color of Mary Boleyn’s hair is not known, nor is it known if red hair featured in the Boleyn and Carey families. Katherine’s nose is not hooked like Henry’s, and her mouth is wider, but those characteristics could have come from her mother’s side, while her resemblance to Elizabeth can be explained by the fact that their mothers were sisters.

This is not, of course, conclusive evidence, for it could be entirely coincidental that Katherine resembled the King in some facial respects; they were already related by blood, and portraits of William Carey show that he too had distinctive lower lids and winged brows, heavy jowls and a wide mouth, like Katherine’s. Yet her overall resemblance to Henry VIII, especially around the eyes, is stronger, and impacts immediately on the viewer.

Apart from this portrait, there is no other known likeness of Katherine to aid the debate.⁶⁷ There is no resemblance to Henry VIII in portraits of Henry Carey, despite assertions to the contrary;⁶⁸ and we can ignore unfounded claims that “contemporary rumor said Master Carey looked very much like the King,”⁶⁹ for he had the dark hair and the long, thin face of the Boleyns.

Even more compelling evidence that Katherine Carey was the King’s child was to emerge after William Carey’s death, long after Mary Boleyn had ceased to be Henry’s mistress, in the form of an annuity granted to her, as will be seen.

Recently, Sally Varlow uncovered further evidence suggesting that Katherine’s royal paternity was no secret to some at the Elizabethan court. In 1582, Sir Philip Sidney was amorously pursuing Katherine’s granddaughter, Penelope Devereux, Lady Rich, and it has long been established that he addressed Penelope as Stella in “Astrophil and Stella,” his famous cycle of poems and songs about lovers. Varlow cites one possibly significant reference, in which Sidney calls Stella “rich in the riches of a royal heart.”⁷⁰ But there are other, perhaps more blatant, hints: he gives her the royal title of “her Grace” in two places, and, in a verse that refers to strange tales “broidered with bulls”—a clear reference to the Boleyn arms—speaks of “hiding royal blood full oft in rural vein.” He calls her “Princess of Beauty,” or “a princess high, whose throne is in the mind,” refers to Stella being “so right a princess,” or “a queen,” and says how her “humbleness grows one with Majesty,” which are possibly other allusions to her royal blood. In fact, the royal theme, and the language of majesty, recurs throughout the cycle. We might infer from this that Sidney knew that Tudor blood ran in Penelope’s veins, and although his poem is not prima facie proof of that, given that poetic language is subject to various interpretations, taken with the other evidence it acquires a certain significance.

If Katherine were the King’s child, again, discretion was deliberately maintained, even after the deaths of Anne Boleyn, Mary Boleyn, and Henry VIII, with only a very few people being in on the secret. By then Mary Boleyn’s name had acquired a certain notoriety, and Katherine, as she grew older, probably had no wish to blacken it further or dishonor the memory of both her parents; in this, she may have showed respect for her mother’s wishes.

Contrary to what has been portrayed in films, there is no evidence whatsoever that Mary, pregnant with the King’s child, ever “took to her chamber” for six weeks, as was the custom prior to a royal birth. This tradition had been laid down in the previous reign byHenry VIII’s grandmother, the Lady Margaret Beaufort, for the births of legitimate royal children. Great ceremony surrounded a queen taking to her chamber, with all her male officers being replaced by female ones; this was virtually a state occasion, and one of the King’s mistresses usurping that queenly role would have provoked outraged comment. Nor would it have been in keeping with Henry VIII’s policy of complete discretion in regard to his extramarital affairs.

The rest is speculation. We cannot ever know for certain the truth of the matter, only that there is a strong possibility that Katherine was the King’s child.

There have been claims that Henry VIII fathered other bastard children, although only one is based on compelling evidence.⁷¹ It has often been said that Henry would have had good reason to acknowledge any natural child born to him, and this has been used as an argument against claims that Mary Boleyn’s children were his. But it seems that Henry had another bastard whom he did not acknowledge, which strengthens the theory that Katherine Carey was his daughter.

In all but that one case, the evidence for Henry’s paternity is slender indeed. In 1592, Sir John Perrot (1528–92), when on trial for high treason, “boasted that he was King Henry’s son.”⁷² The husband of his granddaughter Penelope Perrot, Sir Robert Naunton (1563–1635), in his Fragmenta Regalia, published posthumously in 1653, also claimed that Perrot was Henry VIII’s son. “Compare his picture, his qualities, gesture, and voice, with that of the King’s, which memory retains yet amongst us,” Naunton wrote. “They will plead strongly that he was a surreptitious child of the blood royal.” The portrait of Sir John Perrot in Haverfordwest Town Museum, Pembrokeshire, certainly does bear a resemblance to Henry VIII.

However, it seems more likely that Sir John was the son of Thomas Perrot, who died in 1531, and whose Inquisition Post Mortem⁷³ shows that his son and heir, John, had been born on November 7, 1529. Yet an inquisition made on April 14, 1549, terminating John’s minority, states that he had reached the age of twenty-one in November 1549, in which month he had been knighted. This is likely to be the more reliable source—inquisitions postmortem were not always accurate—so we may safely assume that Sir John Perrot had been born in November 1528.⁷⁴

It is unlikely that Henry VIII would have fathered a bastard in February 1528, when he was headily in love with Anne Boleyn and desperate to marry her, and doing his very best to prove to the Pope and the world at large that he was a moral man and that his scruples of conscience over his marriage were genuine ones. At such a crucial juncture he would hardly have risked compromising a happy outcome to his “Great Matter,” or his relationship with his “entirely beloved” Anne (as he called her in a letter sent in June 1528), by taking a mistress. That year, the Pope’s legate, having observed Henry and Anne together, reported to his master: “He sees nothing, he thinks of nothing, but Anne. He cannot do without her for an hour.” Is a man in such thralldom likely to take a mistress? It has been suggested that he did, that he continued “to enjoy other brief, lighthearted affairs,” and that the births of the children that perhaps resulted were probably “accidents.”⁷⁵ But a closer look at the facts would suggest otherwise.

Thomas Perrot’s wardship had been purchased by Maurice, Lord Berkeley, in 1523. Berkeley had also bought the wardship of his niece, Mary, the daughter of his brother, James Berkeley of Thornbury, Gloucestershire. Mary had been born around 1510, and Berkeley married her to Thomas Perrot, probably after the latter attained his majority and was knighted in 1526. As Berkeley’s wards, they had lived at Berkeley Castle, but after their marriage, they resided at Haroldstone St. Issells in Pembrokeshire, the home of Perrot’s forebears. Mary bore a son, John, and two daughters who married Welsh gentlemen. After Thomas Perrot died in 1531, she married twice more, dying after 1586.

All this places Mary Berkeley very firmly in the West Country and Wales in the period when she is supposed to have slept with Henry VIII, but the only visit Henry ever paid to the western parts (he never went further than Gloucestershire) was in 1535, by which time John Perrot was seven years old. Nor is there any record of Mary ever coming to court. Some modern writers⁷⁶ state that she was a lady-in-waiting to Katherine of Aragon, but I can find no contemporary evidence for this. In fact, there is no evidence at all, beyond his own boast—made perhaps in the hope of saving his life—to show that Sir John Perrot was Henry VIII’s natural son.

Perrot was “a tempestuous and choleric character of Shakespearean proportions,”⁷⁷ a larger-than-life man in every sense who enjoyed a varied and (for a long time) successful career. He served three Tudor monarchs: Edward VI—in whose reign he first came to court under the patronage of William, Lord Paulet—Mary I, and Elizabeth I. Edward knighted him, and Elizabeth appointed him one of the bearers of her canopy of estate at her coronation. In the years to come, she would reward him handsomely for his royal and military service. In 1570 he was appointed the First Lord President of Munster, and in 1584, Lord Deputy of Ireland. Perrot was now riding high, but he was a forceful and plain-spoken man, and his reckless conduct, blunt manner, and candid remarks proved his downfall. Often at loggerheads with the Queen, he angrily criticized her in public for not following a consistent policy in Ireland and for failing to give him adequate support in his difficult role. After four years he was recalled and preferred to Elizabeth’s Privy Council.

In 1592, thanks to the machinations of the former Lord Chancellor, Sir Christopher Hatton, whose daughter he had seduced, Sir John was tried for entering into a treasonable correspondence with Philip II of Spain, England’s enemy, and for making disparaging remarks about Queen Elizabeth, whom he had memorably called a “base bastard piss-kitchen.”⁷⁸ There is a story that, when he was found guilty, he cried, “God’s death! Will the Queen suffer her brother to be offered up a sacrifice to the envy of his frisking adversaries?”

Sentence was deferred. Had Perrot, already ailing, not died in custody in September 1592, Elizabeth might well have pardoned him; instead, she restored his estates to his son. Maybe there was some question in her mind about his paternity, but she too may not have been aware of the circumstances of his birth. Or perhaps she remembered his long and loyal service.

The notorious spy, mercenary, rebel, pirate, and recusant adventurer, Sir Thomas Stucley (or Stukeley) (1525?–78)—whose checkered life would require another book to recount—was rumored, toward the end of his life, to be Henry VIII’s son. James FitzGerald, an Irish exile who met him in Rome in 1577–78, wrote that some said he was “an illegitimate son of Henry VIII,” although others described him as the son of an English knight or the offspring of Irish parents.⁷⁹ Not knowing FitzGerald’s sources, we cannot place too much credence upon what he said. Again, the weight of evidence suggests that Thomas was fathered by the man whose surname he bore, Sir Hugh Stucley, a Devon knight whose wife, Jane Pollard, presented him with five sons. We have seen that Henry VIII never set foot in Devon, and only once traveled as far as the West Country, in 1535.

The theory that Stucley was Henry’s son appears to rest on that one report of his rumored parentage, the fact that he was treated pretty leniently by the Tudor monarchs when he got into trouble—which could be explained in several ways, although Jones states that he, like Perrot, “got away with almost anything”—and a remark that Stucley made to Elizabeth I when he was presented to her in the early 1560s. He told her he would prefer to be sovereign of a molehill than the subject of the greatest king in Christendom, and that he had a presentiment he would be a prince before he died. She is said to have replied, “I hope I shall hear from you when you are installed in your principality.” Stucley retorted that she surely would.

“In what language?” she asked, referring to his foreign exploits.

“In the style of princes, to our dearest sister,” was the cheeky reply.⁸⁰

Stucley’s allusion to the correct form used in letters between princes has been misinterpreted.⁸¹ When he referred to Elizabeth as his “sister,” he was using the word in this context, as one monarch would to another, and probably mischievously to boot.

Despite his skill and daring in battle, Stucley was killed fighting in Morocco in 1578, when a cannonball took off both his legs. Queen Elizabeth’s chief minister, William Cecil, Lord Burghley, later called him “a defamed person almost through all Christendom,” and wrote that “whole volumes” could be written “to paint out the life of a man in the highest degree of vainglory, prodigality, falsehood, and vile and filthy conversation of life, and altogether without faith, conscience, or religion.”⁸² He would hardly have spoken thus of a man he knew to be the Queen’s half brother. It is hard to take seriously claims that Stucley, a constant thorn in the side of the Tudors, was Henry VIII’s son.

According to a tradition maintained by his descendants,⁸³ the poet and playwright Richard Edwards (or Edwardes) is supposed to have been Henry VIII’s son by Agnes Blewitt, born in the early 1520s, possibly around 1523–25.⁸⁴ Agnes is said to have been permitted to display the Tudor rose on her coat of arms. She was the wife of William Thomas Edwards of North Petherton, Somerset, and she herself hailed from Holcombe Regis, Devon. It is claimed that she was at court before she became pregnant—which seems unlikely—and that Henry VIII provided a stipend for Richard’s upbringing, gave Agnes land in Scotland (even more unlikely, as he did not own any in that kingdom), where the boy was brought up, and paid for him to be educated at Oxford University, where he studied law. Edwards did not practice as a lawyer, but entered the Church of England, and later wrote plays such as Palamon and Arcite, which were performed before Elizabeth I. He died in 1566.

Agnes is said to have stayed with Henry VIII at the royal hunting lodge at Huntworth in Somerset. Her son was born at North Petherton. The family’s claim that Edwards was the King’s son rests solely on the fact that he received a university education that his family could never have afforded,⁸⁵ but that could be explained in any number of ways.

The first problem with this tale is that, as has been noted, Henry VIII only ever visited the West Country in 1535; and the second problem is that there is no contemporary evidence whatsoever on which to base Henry’s paternity.

Henry VIII is convincingly credited with the paternity of just one of these alleged bastards, Etheldreda (or Audrey, or Esther) Malte, although he did not acknowledge her as his daughter. She is said to have been born in the late 1520s—again, at the time when Henry was deeply involved with Anne Boleyn, so the date is suspect—and to have been the fruit of a liaison between the King and a royal laundress called Joan Dingley (or Dyngley).⁸⁶ We know, from the experience of William Webbe, that Henry was not above seducing women of the lower orders.⁸⁷

There has been a credible suggestion that the little girl was named Etheldreda because she was born on the feast of the Saxon royal saint of that name, June 23.⁸⁸

Henry is said to have persuaded John Malte, his tailor from at least 1527 to 1545,⁸⁹ to raise Etheldreda as his own bastard daughter, and paid him well to do it. Joan Dingley had probably married a Mr. Dobson by then. Etheldreda took the surname Malte. In his will, drawn up on September 10, 1546, John Malte left a sum of money to “Audrey Malte, my bastard daughter, begotten on the body of Joan Dingley, now wife of one Dobson.”⁹⁰

In 1545, Etheldreda was betrothed to Richard Southwell, but the contract was formally broken. In autumn 1546 she married the cultivated poet John Harington, who held office as treasurer of the King’s camps and buildings at Stepney, enjoyed Henry’s “good countenance,” and later served the Lady Elizabeth (the future Elizabeth I), when she was residing at Hatfield Palace. Even though “the goodlie Esther”⁹¹ was probably the King’s daughter, her mother was of lowly estate, so Henry had done rather well by her in finding her such a husband.

In 1656, Jonathan Lesley, Deputy Clerk, wrote to a descendant of Harington describing how “the great King Henry the VIIIth matched his darling daughter to John Harington, and though a bastard, dowered her with the rich lands of Bath Priory”; he added that his information had come from Sir Andrew Markham, a collateral descendant of Harington’s second wife.⁹² The King did indeed make Etheldreda a large grant, as her dowry, of monastic lands forfeited by the dissolved nunnery of Shaftesbury, namely Kelston, Batheaston, and St. Katharine’s in Somerset, and the capital messuage of (St.) Catherine’s Court. This was a generous gesture indeed when aspiring courtiers and nobles were competing to purchase the estates of dissolved monasteries. The grant, dated September 23, 1546, was made to “John Malte, tailor, and Etheldreda Malte, alias Dingley, bastard daughter of the said John by Joan Dingley alias Dobson.”⁹³

Is it likely that such a lavish grant would have been made to the bastard daughter of a humble tailor and laundress? It is this that has been seen as prima facie—and credible—evidence for Henry’s paternity. Moreover, in May 1541 the humble John Malte had received two manors and the revenues of two estates in Berkshire,⁹⁴ which he left to Etheldreda.⁹⁵ This was probably the King making provision for his daughter.

After their marriage, Etheldreda and her husband settled at Kelston, near Bath, on Etheldreda’s estate. In 1554, in the reign of Mary I, they were both in attendance on the Lady Elizabeth when she was a prisoner in the Tower. “My wife is her servant, and does but rejoice in this our misery, when we look with whom we are held in bondage,” Harington wrote to Stephen Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester, the Lord Chancellor. “Our gracious King Henry did ever advance our family’s good estate, wherefore our service is in remembrance of such good kindness.” Harington went on to describe how Elizabeth “does honor us in tender sort, and scorns not to shed her tears with ours.”⁹⁶ Given the magnitude of Henry VIII’s bounty to Etheldreda, and her closeness to Elizabeth (to which this letter is testimony), it is highly likely that she was the King’s child.

Etheldreda was still alive in October 1555,⁹⁷ but had died before 1559,⁹⁸ as her husband remarried probably that year, his second wife being Isabella Markham, a maid of honor to the future Queen Elizabeth; he had been in love with Isabella for some time, probably since 1549, and wrote poems for her.⁹⁹ Their eldest son, another John, to whom Elizabeth stood godmother, was christened in August 1560, and became famed as the inventor of the water closet. As Etheldreda left no male issue—she appears to have had a daughter, Hester (or Esther), who lived until 1568¹⁰⁰ at least—Harington inherited all the lands King Henry had granted her, and thus made his fortune.¹⁰¹ He died in 1582. A portrait of Etheldreda in an embroidered gown is said to have been sold at auction at Sotheby’s in 1942 to an anonymous bidder, but its whereabouts is now unknown.

Since Etheldreda was almost certainly Henry VIII’s daughter, why did he not acknowledge her? It must have been because her mother was of lowly birth, which would have precluded Etheldreda making a grander marriage; it was one thing to acknowledge the bastard son he’d had with the gently born Elizabeth Blount, but quite another to proclaim his paternity of the humble Joan Dingley’s child.

Establishing that Etheldreda was in all probability Henry’s daughter, even though he did not acknowledge her, bolsters the case for his having had a bastard daughter whom he also did not acknowledge by Mary Boleyn. It is therefore not possible to take a broad view that Henry VIII would have acknowledged all his bastards as he had Henry Fitzroy, and that his doing so is the only proof of their paternity. Clearly, acknowledgment depended on political considerations, the sex of the child, the status of its mother, and the circumstances of its birth.

On June 18, 1525, at Bridewell Palace in London, Sir Thomas Boleyn was advanced to the peerage as Viscount Rochford.¹⁰² This was the latest in a string of honors bestowed on Mary’s father. It has often been assumed that this ennoblement, like some earlier honors bestowed on him, was a reward to a complacent father for services rendered to the King by Mary;¹⁰³ but in fact that title devolved on him through his mother, one of the two co-heirs of the Irish barony of Ormond.¹⁰⁴ Mary Boleyn had not been recorded at court during the three years prior to her father’s ennoblement, and it was probably in 1525 that the King first became enamored of her sister Anne. There is no evidence that the affair was sufficiently serious in June of that year to account for Boleyn’s ennoblement.

On the same day that Boleyn was raised to the peerage, the King made Henry Fitzroy a Knight of the Garter, which was the most prestigious honor he could have conferred on his son. He also created him Duke of Richmond and Somerset. These were two royal titles: the earldom of Richmond had been held by Henry VII before he ascended the throne, while the dukedom of Somerset had been bestowed on Edmund, a short-lived brother of Henry VIII, and before that had long been associated with the King’s Beaufort ancestors. Although only six years old, Fitzroy was now appointed Lord High Admiral of England, Wales, Ireland, Normandy, Gascony, and Aquitaine (even though the last three duchies had long been lost to the English Crown), Lord Lieutenant of Ireland and Warden of the Cinque Ports, King’s Lieutenant north of the Trent, Warden General of the Marches of Scotland, Chamberlain of Chester and North Wales, Receiver of Middleham and Sheriff Hutton in Yorkshire, and Constable of Dover Castle. He was also given a magnificent household of his own at Durham House in London, with 245 liveried attendants, as would have befit a legitimate prince. “Great feasts and disguisings” marked the elevation of Fitzroy, Boleyn, and others.¹⁰⁵

The Church, and society at large, expected a man to provide for his bastards, and help them to make their way in the world. Defaulting on this was generally regarded as a moral failure.¹⁰⁶ Henry VIII had more than fulfilled his responsibility in this regard, for never before had an English royal bastard been showered with such honors, and no natural son of a monarch had been given a title since the twelfth century. But the King had had to face the fact that his wife was “past the ways of women” and would never have another child, and his elevation of Fitzroy suggests that already he was contemplating pushing through an Act of Parliament that would make the boy his lawful heir. There was also talk that Henry meant to make him King of Ireland. From now on Fitzroy would be “well brought-up like a prince’s child” and “furnished to keep the state of a great prince”; there was talk of bolstering his status by marrying him to a foreign princess, and at one stage Henry would even toy with the idea of marrying him to his half sister, Mary. Ambassadors were instructed to refer to his son as “one who is near of his blood and of excellent qualities, and yet may easily by the King’s means be exalted to higher things.”

The fact that Henry VIII was prepared to do so much for his acknowledged natural son makes it even less likely that Henry Carey was his bastard issue, for the isolated instances of favor shown to Carey are in glaring contrast to the extravagant bounty that was heaped upon Henry Fitzroy.¹⁰⁷ Nor could it credibly be claimed that the King had scruples about upsetting Queen Katherine, for when Katherine had protested at the elevation of Fitzroy, Henry promptly dismissed three of her ladies for inciting her to do so, whereupon she was “obliged to submit and have patience.”¹⁰⁸