9

The Sister of Your Former Concubine

Although it is often claimed that Mary Boleyn’s affair with Henry VIII was of great significance and duration, it does not appear to have lasted very long. Reginald Pole, in 1538, wrote that Henry had “soon tired” of her, although in the next few lines he rather contradicts that and says the King kept her “for a long time” as his concubine. Maybe it was a long time compared to his other affairs. Mary is not recorded at court after 1522, which suggests that her liaison with the King was brief. But how brief is a matter for conjecture—the term itself is relative, as is “a long time.” An affair lasting one or two years could well be described as brief as lasting a long time. Did this one last weeks, months, or even years? We do not know, although it has been claimed that it was a long-term relationship that endured for four or five years,¹ and that—unusual in the history of Henry VIII’s extramarital affairs—it went on longer than any of the others,² although that may not have been the case, as Elizabeth Blount was probably his mistress for four or five years. Another claim is that “the affair with Mary was over well before [her son Henry] was conceived,” i.e., before summer 1524,³ but there is nothing to support that assertion beyond speculation.

It has been pointed out by many writers that in September 1523, Henry VIII had in his navy a hundred-ton ship called the Mary Boleyn, and some claim that this had been named in honor of Mary, who was supposedly still his mistress at that time,⁴ even going as far as to say that Mary was the King’s acknowledged mistress by 1523,⁵ although there is no record of him ever acknowledging her. Yet in December 1526, Henry’s “expenses of war” included payment “to my Lord of Rochford for a ship called the Anne Boleyn.”⁶This strongly suggests that both vessels had in fact been owned—and named—by Thomas Boleyn, and that Henry bought both ships from him.⁷ The fact that the Mary Boleyn was not called the Mary Carey implies that she had been built before 1520. In any case, it is highly improbable that Henry VIII, who was so covert in conducting his extramarital affairs, would have blazoned his mistress’s identity to the world on the prow of a ship; that would have been against all the accepted rules of courtly love.

Most historians believe that his affair with Mary had ended by 1524–26.⁸ It has been suggested that the grant of the keepership of Greenwich Palace to William Carey in May 1526 “must signal the end of the King’s affair with Mary,”⁹ but, as has been demonstrated, it probably had nothing to do with her.

The truth is, we do not know when—or why—it ended; but certainly it was over by February 1526, when the King gave a very public signal that he had a new love. If one accepts that Katherine Carey was Henry’s child, and Henry Carey was not—as the evidence strongly suggests—then the chances are that relations between Henry VIII and Mary Boleyn had ceased by 1524.¹⁰

Possibly Henry simply tired of Mary. Pole implies that she was not successful at holding his interest, and it has more recently been suggested that she “did not have that sharp, incisive mind that enabled her sister Anne to hold onto her conquest” in the years to come,¹¹ and that she had probably “begun to bore” the King.¹² The most convincing theory is that Henry lost interest¹³—or was scared off—when Mary became pregnant—probably by him—in 1523,¹⁴ since, earlier on, he seems to have broken off with Elizabeth Blount when she was having his child, pregnancy having had “the effect of dampening his lust”¹⁵—which it surely would have if Mary had been expecting her husband’s baby. It may be that Mary did not want the King near her during her first pregnancy,¹⁶ sex being regarded as potentially harmful to the unborn child, and that Henry sought satisfaction in other arms.

It is unlikely that Mary—or Elizabeth Blount before her—got pregnant deliberately, after practicing contraception with her royal lover for years, and that Henry felt betrayed, as has been suggested;¹⁷ what would Mary have achieved by doing that? Not a good marriage, like Elizabeth Blount, for she was already wed, but scandal and notoriety—exactly what the King, in maintaining strict secrecy, and Mary, by her absolute discretion, had tried to avoid.

There is also nothing to support the assertions that, when the affair ended, Mary “wasn’t too upset about it,”¹⁸ or that she “settled back into court life quite contentedly as Carey’s wife.”¹⁹ There is no evidence that she was “pensioned off” by the King²⁰ or “paid off”²¹ when he tired of her. The later grants to Carey have been seen as “a gesture of thanks” to a mistress who had not been “exactly seduced and abandoned.”²² Nor is it true that, after Mary had been “cast off,” her husband “was obliged by the King to send her away from court,”²³ or that she voluntarily left.²⁴ In all probability, Mary did not leave the court when the affair ended, but remained there, living with her husband as before. Nor did she “fade into obscurity,”²⁵ for she had never been flaunted publicly as the King’s mistress.

It is often assumed that Mary was replaced in the King’s affections by her sister Anne,²⁶ who was to be the great love of his life, and whom he began courting probably in 1525²⁷—and certainly by February 1526.²⁸ Again, we cannot say for certain that Anne supplanted her sister, or that Mary was jealous when she witnessed “the man she loved” falling for her sister,²⁹ for, as has been argued, her affair with the King was probably over by the end of 1524, many months before Henry set his sights on Anne.

The Gentleman Usher George Cavendish, who wrote a biography of his master, Cardinal Wolsey, clearly got his dates wrong in claiming that Anne returned to England after Queen Claude’s death in 1524, and that the King then set his sights on her, and ordered Wolsey to put an end to her dalliance with Lord Henry Percy, heir to the 5th Earl of Northumberland (and a first cousin of William Carey), because he wanted her for himself. Anne had come home in 1522, and the courtship with Percy probably developed in 1523, for he had been employed in the north as Warden of the East and Middle Marches from late 1522 to early 1523.³⁰ His kinship with William Carey, Anne’s brother-in-law, would have been a good pretext for contriving an introduction to Anne.³¹

The affair between Anne and Percy cannot have lasted long, for Wolsey must have intervened in the late summer of 1523. The young couple had indeed wished to marry, but Percy was already promised to Lady Mary Talbot;³² his father was sent for, to talk some sense into the boy, and the formal betrothal to Lady Mary had been arranged by September 1523.³³ Anne, burning with resentment against Wolsey, was sent home in disgrace to Hever.³⁴ There is no evidence that Henry VIII showed any interest in her for some time after that, so it is more likely that he—or Wolsey—had objected to her making marriage plans with Percy on the grounds that the daughter of the Earl of Shrewsbury was a much better match for Northumberland’s heir than Anne Boleyn, the daughter of a mere knight.

It is possible that, between ending his affair with Mary Boleyn and falling for her sister Anne, Henry pursued Elizabeth Amadas, the wife of the goldsmith Robert Amadas, who was made Master of the Jewel House in 1524; and that it was only after Henry VIII had tired of chasing Elizabeth Amadas, or been spurned, that he embarked upon his pursuit of Anne Boleyn.

Robert Amadas was the most successful goldsmith working at the Tudor court, and indeed, the richest in England. By 1521 he was supplying commissions to the King, Cardinal Wolsey, and many lords and courtiers. Elizabeth Amadas was of Welsh descent, the daughter of a courtier, Hugh Bryce, whose father had also been a royal goldsmith. Her date of birth is not known, but she was still unmarried and not yet of age in 1498. Her daughter, of the same name, was born in 1508, and married Richard Scrope of Castle Combe in 1529, so if Elizabeth Amadas had married at twelve, the youngest age at which the Church permitted a wife to cohabit with her husband, and bore her daughter a year later, she would have been in her mid-twenties in the early 1520s, and—more realistically—may have been about the same age as the King.

A volatile woman, given to tantrums and strange visions, she was not prepared to maintain the kind of discretion required by Henry, and later had no compunction in revealing that “the King had often sent her offerings and gifts, and that Mr. Dauncy had come as bawd between the King and her to have had her to Mr. Compton’s house in Thames Street.”³⁵ She did not say whether she had actually gone there, and, as a supporter of Queen Katherine, it is unlikely that she would have wanted to, or that she in fact did. In the absence of any other evidence for her having an affair with the King, we should assume the latter.

“Mr. Dauncy” was probably Sir John Dauncey, a Knight of the Body and Privy Councillor to Henry VIII, whose son William married Sir Thomas More’s daughter Elizabeth in 1525. Sir William Compton, it will be remembered, had abetted Henry in his intrigues with the Stafford sisters in 1510 and seems to have shared his amorous interest in Elizabeth Carew and Elizabeth Blount in 1514; he may well have acted as “bawd” between these ladies and the King. Given this, Mrs. Amadas’s account of Henry’s pursuit of her does ring true. Since Compton died in 1528 (Dauncey died many years later), the affair (if affair it was) with Mrs. Amadas must have been played out well before that year, because the King almost certainly began courting Anne Boleyn in 1525, and thereafter had eyes for no one but her; and, of course, this episode with Mrs. Amadas may even have belonged to the earliest years of his reign.

It was in July 1533 that Elizabeth Amadas, calling herself “a witch and prophetess,” publicly predicted, along with many other wild prophesies, that “my Lady Anne [Boleyn, then Queen of England] should be burned, for she is a harlot.” Mrs. Amadas had even drawn up a painted roll of her predictions, and asserted that they had been known to her for twenty years. Naturally, her “ungracious rehearsals” incurred the wrath of the authorities, but she remained unbowed. Under interrogation, she asserted that because the King—the cursed “Mouldwarp” (an ancient name for a mole, one who works in darkness)—“has forsaken his wife, he suffers her husband to do the same.” She insisted that she was “a good wife,” in common with Queen Katherine and Elizabeth Stafford, Duchess of Norfolk, for her spouse had forsaken her like theirs; and, to underline the King’s perfidious nature, she revealed that she had once been the object of his amorous interest.

Robert Amadas might have abandoned his wife, but immediately after she was arrested, he was sued by the King—on the “information of certain words spoken by Mistress Amadas”—for a huge sum of money in respect of some plate that was conveniently found to have been missing from the Jewel House; it may have been the price of his wife’s freedom.³⁶

Mary Boleyn almost certainly “went quietly,”³⁷ but even if she was not supplanted in the King’s affections by Elizabeth Amadas, by 1526 there can be no doubt that Henry had eyes only for her sister.

In February 1526, on Shrove Tuesday, Henry VIII appeared in the tiltyard at Greenwich in a magnificent jousting outfit of cloth of gold and silver embroidered in gold with the words Declare je nos (“Declare I dare not”), which was surmounted by a man’s heart engulfed in flames.³⁸ There can be little doubt that the object of his new passion was Anne Boleyn. In one of Henry’s love letters to Anne, probably written in 1527 (or possibly even earlier),³⁹ he wrote of having been “struck by the dart of love” for more than a year. In the spring of 1526, having in mind the kind of courtly symbolism that he had displayed four years earlier when probably pursuing Mary Boleyn, he ordered from his goldsmith four gold brooches: one represented Venus and Cupid, the second a lady holding a heart in her hand, the third a gentleman lying in a lady’s lap, and the fourth a lady holding a crown.⁴⁰

It would be foolish to conjecture that Henry had already envisaged making Anne his second queen, but a crown could also symbolize aloofness or virginity, which would both have been more apposite, for—unlike her sister—the bolder Anne seems from the first firmly to have proclaimed her virtue and to have kept her royal suitor at arm’s length. No doubt Henry initially expected the younger sister to fill the same role as the elder had done,⁴¹ but Anne had learned a salutary lesson from the experiences of Mary Boleyn and Elizabeth Blount—Mary was a “living example of Henry’s fickle nature”⁴² and had gained little personal advantage or material benefits from taking the King as a lover,⁴³ at least while their affair was going on. Although there is no evidence to support the claim that Anne had “witnessed her own sister in tears, the scapegoat of Henry’s black mood or whim,”⁴⁴ Mary’s failure to hold the King’s interest and affections was a salutary warning to her younger—and sharper—sister, and evidence of “the pitfalls of court life”⁴⁵—and clearly Anne did not intend to risk becoming another discarded royal mistress.

That was the way her contemporaries saw it. In 1538 the King’s cousin, Cardinal Reginald Pole, from the safe haven of Italy, where he had chosen exile in January 1532, unwilling to become embroiled in Henry VIII’s “Great Matter,” published his treatise, Pro ecclesiasticae unitatis defensione (A Defense of the Unity of the Church), addressed to the King (and based on an earlier letter to Henry), stating in no uncertain terms Pole’s views on his sovereign’s marriage to Anne Boleyn:

At your age in life, and with all your experience of the world, you were enslaved by your passion for a girl. But she would not give you your will unless you rejected your wife, whose place she longed to take. The modest woman would not be your mistress; no, but she would be your wife. She had learned, I think, if from nothing else, at least from the example of her sister, how soon you got tired of your mistresses; and she resolved to surpass her sister in retaining you as her lover.

Now what sort of person is it whom you have put in place of your divorced wife? Is she not the sister of her whom first you violated and for a long time after kept as your concubine? She certainly is. How is it, then, that you now tell us of the horror you have of illicit marriage? Are you ignorant of the law which certainly no less prohibits marriage with a sister of one with whom you have become one flesh, than one with whom your brother was one flesh? If one kind of marriage is detestable, so is the other. Were you ignorant of the law? Nay, you knew it better than others. How did I prove it? Because, at the very time that you were rejecting your brother’s widow, you were doing your very utmost to get leave from the Pope to marry the sister of your former concubine.

No one had ever dared to address Henry VIII in such accusatory terms. Pole’s treatise infuriated the King, and was to have fatal repercussions for his family, but that aside, we might wonder how he had come to know about Henry’s affair with Mary Boleyn. He was abroad in Italy from February 1521 to 1527, so was not in England when it was flourishing. Of course, he could have found out about it at the English court, where he was active from 1527 until he went into voluntary exile in 1532; but his letter suggests that he got his information later at the Papal Curia, where he had seen, or been shown, a dispensation issued in 1528 (see this page), at the King’s request, permitting him to marry within the forbidden degrees of affinity. Without it, Mary Boleyn having been his mistress, Henry’s proposed marriage to her sister would have been incestuous.

With Anne in attendance on the Queen, the King would have seen her often about the court, while his friendship with her father and her brother-in-law, William Carey, and his dalliance with her sister, had already brought the Boleyns firmly into the royal circle, so Henry probably already knew Anne socially. Thus far can it be said that she “owed much of her swift rise to favor at court to her sister.”⁴⁶

Her banishment to Hever appears not to have lasted too long; if Mary was still the King’s mistress at that time—around 1523–25—she may even have interceded on Anne’s behalf with Henry and asked him to let her sister return to court; and it was probably after Anne reentered the Queen’s service that Henry’s courtship began. The psychologist J. C Flügel has suggested that, in pursuing the sister of his former mistress, the King was unconsciously impelled by his “craving for sexual rivals, for incest, and for chastity in his wives, thereby making his marriage couch a nightmare of recriminations, fears, and frustrations.”⁴⁷ That is pure speculation; a more credible theory is that Henry saw much of Mary in Anne—“it is even possible that at first he saw little else especially if the Mary he had known had been lost to him through pregnancy and motherhood.”⁴⁸

We can only conjecture as to how this impacted on the relationship between the sisters. In a letter written by Mary in 1534 (see Chapter 11), there is more than a suggestion that there was some rivalry between them. Maybe what had passed between the King and her sister, the bastard child that may have resulted from their affair, and the affinity created by their relationship, made it difficult for Anne to consider taking Henry as a lover—unless, of course, she welcomed the opportunity to compete with her sister and, “if possible, to surpass her.”⁴⁹

Of course, Mary might not have been abandoned by Henry: the decision to part may have been mutual, or even hers. At the other extreme, Anne may have stolen her sister’s lover, and that certainly would not have made for good relations between them, and might have left Mary seething with jealousy.

It is unlikely that Anne Boleyn feared being “tarred with the brush of her sister’s reputation,”⁵⁰ because, as has been established, there is no evidence that, as a result of her affair with the King, Mary had “entirely lost her reputation”⁵¹—how could she have done that, with discretion having been so rigorously maintained?

It may well be that Mary’s passive acceptance of the situation angered the Boleyns, for it would have flown in the face of years of the social and political advancement that was their creed. Ambitious as they were, they would have found it hard to understand. We might conjecture that, after the affair had ended, Mary’s father and brother felt only scorn and contempt for her⁵²—and Anne may have too. Anne was not one to arouse her family’s disapprobation for not making the most of Henry VIII’s interest, and they would have no cause to complain of the way she handled it to her—and their—advantage. It has been suggested that when the King lost interest in Mary, her father, “in his selfish greed,” may “have sought to maintain his power by the means of the charms” of his younger daughter, Anne.⁵³ Again, there is no evidence, but, given how suggestible Henry was, the theory might just be credible.

According to Sander, when Mary saw that Anne was “preferred to her, and that she herself was slighted not only by the King but by her sister,” she went to the Queen “and bade her be of good cheer; for though the King, she said, was in love with her sister, he could never marry her, for the relations of the King with the family [Sander is here alluding to both Mary and her mother having been Henry’s mistresses] were of such a nature as to make a marriage impossible by the laws of the Church.”

“The King himself,” Mary is supposed to have said, “will not deny it, and I will assert it publicly while I live; now, as he may not marry my sister, so neither will he put your Majesty away.” Katherine is said by Sander to have thanked her “and replied that all she had to say and do would be said and done under the direction of her lawyers.”

As has been explained already, the fact that Katherine did not use the canonical impediment created by Henry’s affair with Mary Boleyn, either in an attempt to block his marriage to Anne, or to discredit his doubts of conscience in regard to their own marriage, is strong evidence that she knew nothing about his relations with Mary Boleyn. So it is almost certain that this conversation with Mary never took place, and that Sander made it up or repeated gossip that was informed by the benefit of hindsight. Moreover, the chronology is all wrong. Sander has Mary reacting to Henry abandoning her for her sister, but even if their liaison ended as late as February 1526, Henry did not pursue an annulment until the spring of 1527, and then in only the greatest secrecy.⁵⁴

Maybe Mary did feel slighted by both Anne and Henry, but if so, she probably had the good sense to hide it well, for it seems the King continued to hold her in some affection, especially since she was probably the mother of his child;⁵⁵ the grant of the office of Prior of Tynemouth in 1527–28 to Thomas Gardiner, at her behest, and Henry’s care for her in her coming time of penury, suggests that, some years after their affair had ended, some warmth remained.

Henry might have finished with Mary Boleyn, but he could not have known that their affair was to have complicated repercussions, and that he was to have bitter cause, in the short term, to regret it—and, in the longer term, to be thankful that it had happened.

Sometime after 1522, William Carey had been promoted from Esquire of the Body to the important and prestigious post of Gentleman of the Privy Chamber.⁵⁶ This was a significant promotion, a further indication of the high regard in which Carey was held by Henry VIII. As has been noted, in January 1526, under Cardinal Wolsey’s reforms of the royal household enshrined in the Eltham Ordinances, which were approved that month by the King, William Carey features high on the list of members of the King’s household; despite the Cardinal’s purges, he was one of six Gentlemen of the Privy Chamber allowed to remain in post, alongside Sir William Taylor, Sir Thomas Cheyney, Sir Anthony Browne, Sir John Russell, and Sir Henry Norris.⁵⁷ The fact that Carey was retained in this office after his wife’s liaison with the King had ended and Henry began courting Anne Boleyn is proof that his rise at court was due chiefly to his own merits.

The post of Gentleman of the Privy Chamber had been established in 1518. The King’s Gentlemen were with him twenty-four hours a day, whether “waking, sleeping, eating, drinking, working, [or] relaxing”; they were mostly “expert and superbly qualified manipulators,”⁵⁸ and among the most influential people at court—which was why Wolsey feared their influence.

On May 12, 1526, William Carey received the last of the grants made to him by the King; an unforeseen tragedy would preclude him from receiving any more, although it is more than likely that they—and a knighthood at the very least—would have come his way. He was appointed “Keeper of the manor, garden, tower &c. of Pleasance, East Greenwich, and of East Greenwich Park”;⁵⁹ this effectively made him responsible for Greenwich Palace—Henry VIII’s birthplace and one of his most important and favored residences—and its environs, with the right to lodgings there whenever he needed them.

On that same date, Carey was assigned the keepership of “the manor and park of Ditton, Bucks., and all foreign woods belonging to the same, with 3d [£4] a day.”⁶⁰ Ditton Park was another royal property, often used as a nursery palace for Princess Mary; later, in 1533, it would be given to Anne Boleyn as part of her jointure as queen. Some authors have seen these two last grants as tokens of gratitude on the part of the King to a man who had so patiently been cuckolded,⁶¹ but they assume that Mary’s affair with Henry had only just ended, when the likelihood is that it had finished more than two years earlier. It is possible, even likely, that the grants were discreet provision for the upbringing of the King’s bastard daughter, made to ensure that she would be brought up in sufficiently royal surroundings.

By 1527, William Carey was a man of moderate substance, with a landed estate worth £333.6s.8d (£107,500), as assessed that year for a subsidy.⁶² Yet he was not rich in terms of income. Even with board and lodging provided, it was expensive to keep up appearances at court, with the cost of decking oneself out in appropriate dress being very high. Sumptuary laws restricting the wearing of fine materials and jewelery to the upper ranks of society were strict, but a gentleman like William, attending on the King in his privy chamber, would be permitted—indeed expected—to be well turned out, in silk shirts, gold, and silver ornaments, furs and good-quality fabrics, and of course, he would need armor for jousting. A man’s worth was judged on outward display, and no doubt there was competition when it came to raiment and the furnishing of courtier lodgings. And a courtier’s wife, like Mary, would have had to be provided with attire that reflected her own status and her husband’s rank.

In the spring of 1527, as Keeper of Greenwich Palace, Carey was involved in mounting a lavish reception there for the French ambassadors who had come to negotiate a “Treaty of Eternal Peace” between England and France, which would be sealed by the marriage of the Princess Mary to Henri, Duc d’Orléans, the second son of François I. The German artist Hans Holbein, recently arrived in England, executed his first royal commission for this occasion, designing at Greenwich two triumphal arches and painting a ceiling showing the earth environed by the seas, and a vast picture depicting—somewhat tactlessly—Henry VIII gaining victory over the French. He also executed portraits of all the prominent courtiers who were responsible for organizing the ceremonies and celebrations to mark the event, and he probably painted William Carey too.⁶³

As Carey’s wife, Mary Boleyn was no doubt present at the tournaments, recitals, masques, dances, and plays that were put on at Greenwich and Hampton Court to entertain the ambassadors. And no doubt she, like everyone else, was shocked when the celebrations were abruptly curtailed when news arrived that the city of Rome had been brutally sacked by mercenaries in the pay of the Emperor Charles V, and that the Pope himself was now the Emperor’s prisoner.

It was during the festivities at Greenwich that one of the French ambassadors ventured to question the legitimacy of the Princess Mary—or so Henry VIII later claimed. The ambassador did not give offense, but merely voiced a concern with which the King had become increasingly preoccupied.

For some years now—long before his eye had lighted upon Anne Boleyn, and perhaps even Mary Boleyn, for he insisted he had first raised the matter with his confessor in 1522—Henry had been fretting about the validity of his marriage. Katherine was his brother Arthur’s widow, and although she had sworn that Arthur had left her a virgin, the Book of Leviticus prohibited a man from marrying his brother’s wife; those who did, it warned, would be childless. With only one daughter surviving from Katherine’s six pregnancies, Henry considered himself as good as childless—and professed himself in dread lest he had offended God by this marriage.

By 1527, with Katherine no longer fertile, he was genuinely desperate for a son to succeed him, and passionately in love with Anne Boleyn. He was also conscious of the unpalatable fact that Anne was forbidden to him, just as he believed Katherine to be, for, thanks to his affair with Mary Boleyn, he had placed himself in the same degree of first collateral affinity to Anne as existed—so he was protesting—between himself and Katherine, and created “an adamantine Levitical barrier.”⁶⁴ More so, in fact, because Katherine’s first marriage had not been consummated, whereas Henry had had sexual relations with Mary, and therefore any marriage between him and her sister would have been incestuous without doubt.⁶⁵ The impediment in Leviticus was categorical: “Thou shalt not take the sister of thy wife as a concubine, nor uncover her turpitude whilst thy wife still liveth.” It did not actually matter that Mary had never been Henry’s wife; what counted was the “unlawful intercourse” that had taken place between them. It was that which had created the affinity. This was Mary Boleyn’s greatest historical significance.

But Henry was determined to marry Anne, and in 1527, he commenced proceedings to have his union with Katherine annulled, and thus embarked on his celebrated—some would say infamous—“Great Matter,” which would end in the Reformation and the severance of the English Church from that of Rome. Those events are beyond the scope of this book, but as they form the backdrop to Mary’s story, they will be referred to where appropriate.

With Pope Clement VIII still a captive of the Emperor, Katherine’s nephew, there was little chance of a “divorce” being granted, but the King was nevertheless optimistic. One thing was troubling him, though. In September 1527 he had sent his secretary, Dr. William Knight, on a secret mission to Rome to discuss his “Great Matter” with Pope Clement VII. After Knight had left, the King, clearly worried about the canonical difficulty in marrying Anne, evidently realized that he should have been more specific about his relations with Mary Boleyn, so in late October or early November he drafted a bull of dispensation himself, its object being to remove the impediment of “affinity arising from illicit intercourse in whatever degree, even the first,” in respect of any marriage the King might make in the event of his union with Katherine being annulled. Neither Mary Boleyn nor Anne was named. The reason for his discretion, and for the need for secrecy to be maintained, was that the last thing Henry wanted was the Pope or anyone else pointing the finger and saying that his scruples over his marriage “had little to do with God and more to do with Anne Boleyn.”⁶⁶ It was essential, now more than ever, that his affair with Mary Boleyn did not become common knowledge.

The granting of this bull would allow the King to marry Anne, as soon as he was free, despite the affinity that his adultery with her sister had brought into being.⁶⁷ Henry sent this document after his secretary, with instructions to maintain all secrecy concerning it, and his covering letter is testimony to how secret his affair with Mary had been kept:

I do now send you a copy of another [bull] which no man doth know but they which I am sure will never disclose it to no man living … Desiring you heartily to use all ways to you possible to get access to the Pope’s person and then solicit this bull with all diligence; and in doing so, I shall reckon it the highest service you ever did me … This bull is not desired except I be legitimately absolved from the marriage with Katherine.

In December, Cardinal Wolsey—who was clearly privy to his master’s concern—wrote to Sir Gregory Casale, Henry VIII’s envoy at the Papal court in Rome:

Though the King does not fear the consequences which might arise, yet, remembering by the example of past times what false claims have been put forward, to avoid all color or pretext of the same, he requests this of the Pope as indispensable.

But the Pope was of course a prisoner of the Emperor, Katherine’s nephew, whose mercenary troops had sacked Rome the previous May. In December, Charles ordered Clement not to annul his aunt’s marriage, effectively tying the Pontiff’s hands. But dispensations such as Henry had requested were commonly granted,⁶⁸ and Clement had no wish to alienate the King of England, who had always shown himself to be a good, devout, and loyal son of the Church. That month, he escaped to Orvieto, where he set up his court, and when Dr. Knight arrived and was received in audience, Clement—as a sop to the English—sanctioned the bull authorizing Henry VIII to wed within the prohibited degrees, should the occasion arise, provided his first marriage was proved unlawful.

On January 1, 1528, the dispensation was issued, specifically allowing Henry, whenever he was free to marry again, to take to wife any woman, “in any degree [of affinity], even the first, ex illicito coito [arising from illicit intercourse].”⁶⁹ Effectively, Clement, who—for fear of Charles V—could not bring himself to annul Henry’s marriage to his sister-in-law, was actually giving him permission to marry not only the sister of his former mistress, but even his mother or his daughter. In 1533, Dr. Pedro Ortiz, a Spanish doctor of theology who was sent to Rome by the Emperor to defend Queen Katherine’s interests, was in no doubt as to why the bull had been granted, and reported: “It is certain that some time ago, [Henry VIII] sent to ask his Holiness for a dispensation to marry [Anne Boleyn], notwithstanding the affinity between them on account of his having committed adultery with her sister.”⁷⁰

Given that, for the present, there was no realistic prospect of the Pope annulling Henry’s marriage to Katherine, the bull was utterly worthless.⁷¹

On March 3, 1528, there is a mention of William Carey in a letter sent from Windsor Castle by Thomas Heneage, one of his fellow gentlemen in the Privy Chamber, to Cardinal Wolsey: “Mr. Carey and Mr. [Anthony] Browne are absent, and there is none here but [Henry] Norris and myself to attend the King in his bedchamber, and keep his pallet. Every afternoon, when the weather is fair, the King rides out hawking, or walks in the park, not returning till late in the evening. Today, as the King was going to dinner, Mistress Anne spoke to me, saying she was afraid you had forgotten her, as you had sent her no token. I was requested by my lady her mother to give her a morsel of tunny [tuna].” This is one of the few references to Elizabeth Howard, Lady Boleyn being at court. She was there at this time as a chaperone for Anne.

Anne Boleyn was always actively promoting her family connections, and clearly she felt the need to court the support of her brother-in-law, the influential William Carey. It has been said that, although Carey was married to her sister and thereby aligned with the Boleyn faction, he also owed a debt of gratitude and allegiance to his powerful patron, Henry Courtenay, who was supporting Katherine of Aragon, which would have placed Carey, and Mary too, in an invidious position involving a conflict of loyalties;⁷² but in fact Courtenay openly (if not inwardly) supported the King until the late 1530s, and even his wife, Gertrude Blount, a friend of Queen Katherine, was not to engage in subversive activities until after Anne Boleyn became queen in 1533. Thus, in the spring of 1528, when Anne was afforded an ideal opportunity of securing Carey’s allegiance, she seized it, not in order to wean him from his affinity with the Courtenays, but purely because he was an influential courtier who was useful to the Boleyns.

On April 24, Wolsey had learned that Dame Cecily Willoughby, Abbess of Wilton, had died.⁷³ St. Edith’s nunnery at Wilton was an ancient and rich foundation, as well as fashionable and aristocratic,⁷⁴ and its Abbess enjoyed great prestige and standing. Most of the convent favored the election of the Prioress, Dame Isabel Jordan, an “ancient, wise, and very discreet” woman,⁷⁵ to the vacant abbatial chair, but two of William Carey’s sisters, Anne and Eleanor, were nuns at Wilton, and their brother, John Carey, was keen to see Eleanor promoted to be head of the house; it was not Mary Boleyn⁷⁶ who nominated her, as has been claimed. One of Wolsey’s correspondents had warned him that “there will be great labor made for Dame Eleanor Carey, sister of Mr. Carey of the court.”⁷⁷

It may have been at the behest of John Carey—or of Mary Boleyn,⁷⁸ for it seems that she was actively pressing her sister in this matter⁷⁹—that Anne immediately recommended to the King that he put pressure to bear on the convent to have Dame Eleanor elected Abbess, and Wolsey promised the Careys that he would push for her election as Prioress, in the event of her not being elected Abbess; the letter clearly states “Prioress” rather than “Abbess,” the former being the subordinate office.⁸⁰ For the present, however, Dame Eleanor would have to be patient, as a prescribed interval had to be observed between the death of the Abbess and the election of her successor.

Late May 1528 saw the worst ever outbreak of the “sweating sickness,” an epidemic peculiar to Tudor times, which had first appeared in 1485, the year in which the Battle of Bosworth had been fought and the Tudor dynasty established. Some had seen it as the judgment of God on the victor, the usurping Henry VII. It had reappeared in 1508 and 1517, and its return in 1528, at a time when Henry VIII was pursuing his collusive suit, was seen as ominously significant. Abroad, the disease was called “the English sweat” because it was more prevalent in England.

The sweating sickness was deadly, and no respecter of persons; it could kill with terrifying speed. “One has a little pain in the head and heart. Suddenly, a sweat breaks out, and a physician is useless, for whether you wrap yourself up much or little, in four hours—sometimes within two or three—you are dispatched without languishing.”⁸¹ Victims might suffer violent sweats, virulent fever, shivering fits, tachycardia, pain in the back, stomach, and limbs, vertigo, rashes, headaches, and nervous prostration, and many succumbed on the first day. A man could be “merry at dinner and dead at supper.”⁸² There was no cure, and only those who survived the first twenty-four hours could hope to live. Needless to say, the disease brought panic in its wake: one rumor might cause “a thousand cases of sweat,”⁸³ and some people “suffered more from fear than others did from the sweat itself.”⁸⁴

Today, it is impossible to be certain what the “sweating sickness” actually was, as no cases were reported after the last outbreak in 1551. Some have speculated that it was a miliary fever such as malaria, or a particularly virulent form of “prickly heat,” or even what later came to be known as “trench fever,”⁸⁵ while another suggests it was a strain of influenza or typhus, or “a viral infection transmitted by rats.”⁸⁶ Given that bacteria can mutate, it may even have been a simple infection that, with time, ceased to be fatal.

The King had a horror of illness: he was “the most timid person in such matters you could meet with,”⁸⁷ and the very words “sweating sickness” were “so terrible to His Highness’s ears that he dare in no wise approach unto the place where it is noised to have been.”⁸⁸ No one who had come into contact with an infected person was permitted to approach the court.

Henry was therefore aghast to learn of this latest outbreak. In great fear, he dismissed most of his courtiers and servants and left Greenwich Palace for Waltham Abbey in Essex, taking Queen Katherine and Anne Boleyn with him. In London, the epidemic raged, with forty thousand cases reported. Nor was Waltham safe. George Boleyn (who was to recover) sickened there of the sweat, and on or shortly before June 16, learning that one of Anne’s maids had also succumbed to the disease, Henry uprooted himself “in great haste” and rode off to Hunsdon House, twelve miles away, having sent Anne home to her father at Hever, because she was “suspected of having been infected.”⁸⁹

At Hunsdon, Henry remained isolated in a tower with his physicians. “The King shuts himself up quite alone,”⁹⁰ no doubt fretting about his beloved. Each day, his household became further diminished, as more and more of his attendants were sent away, and wherever he went, he had his lodgings “purged daily with fires and other preservatives.”⁹¹

Wolsey, seeing the epidemic as the manifestation of God’s wrath, begged his master to abandon all thoughts of divorce, but “the King used terrible words, saying he would have given a thousand Wolseys for one Anne Boleyn. “ ‘No other than God shall take her from me!’ ” he shouted.⁹² But God, it seemed, was not on Henry Tudor’s side, for by June 22 the King had been given the dreaded news that Anne and her father had fallen victim to the sweating sickness and taken to their beds at Hever. Immediately, Henry sent his own physician, Dr. William Butts, to attend her.

This was a difficult time for Mary Boleyn too, for that same day, William Carey also contracted the dread disease. It is clear, from an exchange of letters between Cardinal Wolsey and Thomas Heneage, that Carey had not accompanied Henry to Hunsdon; the King was now retaining very few attendants, their number having diminished daily as he moved from house to house to escape the contagion.⁹³ William had probably been one of the courtiers dismissed at Greenwich, as Henry VIII (in a letter written to Anne Boleyn after the court left Waltham Abbey) does not include him in the list of those of their acquaintance who had sickened there. It has been claimed that he was taken ill while playing truant from court to go hunting,⁹⁴ but there is no contemporary evidence to support this, or the assertion that Carey was one of those “left to die in manors Henry successively abandoned in his scramble for safety.”⁹⁵

If William Carey had been left behind at Greenwich—which seems probable, as Thomas Heneage was with him—the likelihood is that Mary was there too. If she, Heneage, or anyone else had had the courage to minister to William, they would probably have followed contemporary advice to tuck the fully clothed patient warmly in bed in a room with a roaring fire, so that he could sweat out the illness, which must have been misery on a June day; or to give him beer, treacle, herbs, or exotic potions made from powdered sapphires or gold. Or they might have tried the King’s own herbal remedy for the sweat, and the pills of Rhazis (named after an Arab physician) that he had recommended to Cardinal Wolsey.⁹⁶ At all costs, the patient was to be kept awake and not allowed to lapse into a coma.

In this case, any curative measures were in vain, for on Monday, June 22, 1528, “in this great plague, died William Carey Esquire, whom the King highly favored.”⁹⁷ He was thirty-two. The end had come with deadly swiftness: Jean du Bellay, the French ambassador, reporting that “many of [the King’s] people died within three or four hours,” names Carey as one of them.⁹⁸ Thomas Heneage, who was apparently present at the end, informed Wolsey the next day that the dying Carey had uttered a final wish, humbly beseeching the Cardinal “to be a good and gracious lord to his sister, a nun in Wilton Abbey, to be Prioress there, according to your Grace’s promise.”⁹⁹ Evidently William had not expected Eleanor to be successful in her bid to be Abbess, and he may have had good reason for that.

“This night, as the King went to bed, word came of the death of William Carey,” wrote Cardinal Wolsey from Hunsdon to Heneage. Henry must have been deeply saddened by the news, which would surely have filled him with dread, knowing that his beloved Anne was suffering from the same deadly illness. Anne, however, was luckier than her brother-in-law: by the time Dr. Butts arrived, she was on the mend, and the following morning the King was given the good news that she and her father were “past the danger” and making “a perfect recovery.”¹⁰⁰ Henry wrote to Anne to tell her that John Carey, William’s brother, had also fallen ill of the sweat—and recovered.

The epidemic had carried off not only William Carey, but also two more of the King’s most favored gentlemen of the Privy Chamber, Sir William Compton and Sir Edward Poyntz. In each case, a promising career was cut tragically short—and Henry had lost three of his friends.

William Carey’s last resting place is not recorded. Probably his body was hurriedly consigned to a grave pit with others who had succumbed to the sweating sickness. Given the danger and fear of contagion, it is unlikely that his remains were accorded a more fitting burial with his ancestors in Wiltshire.

Mary may not have mourned her husband deeply. Their arranged marriage was probably not a love match to begin with, and there is no evidence that it ever became one. Nevertheless, had William Carey lived, and continued in the King’s favor, he could, on past form, have risen very high indeed, and might—once Anne Boleyn became Queen in 1533—have won greater rewards¹⁰¹ and possibly even been elevated to the peerage. Then Mary’s life would have been very different. Instead of incurring further opprobrium and fading into obscurity, she might well have ended her days as one of the great ladies of the land.

Instead, she had been left poor and in debt by the death of her husband, who died intestate; and she had two young children to support.