10

In Bondage

The lands granted to William Carey by the King were inherited by his lawful, acknowledged heir, three-year-old Henry Carey.¹ William had not been a man of substance. In March 1527, as we have seen, his lands had been valued for a subsidy at just £333.6s.8d (£107,500).² These became the property of his heir. His lucrative offices and keeperships, along with their revenues, immediately reverted to the Crown, and suit was at once made for them after his death.³ For Mary, there was nothing, and probably nowhere to live, as she had no right to stay in the courtier lodging that had been assigned to her husband. All she had to survive on were the rents from his Essex manor,⁴ and the annuity from Tynemouth Priory.

She appealed several times to her father for succor, but Thomas Boleyn remained impervious to her pleas, and would not even receive her. It may well be that, as has been suggested, “his affection for his children lasted only as long as they were useful to him,”⁵for he appears to have proved that, in regard to Mary, on several occasions. Possibly he felt there was no mileage in wasting his wealth on someone who could bring him no advantage, even if she was his daughter; he might too have realized that, as she was poor and probably past thirty—middle-aged by Tudor standards—Mary would now find it hard to secure a worthy husband, and could end up being at his charge for good. Or they may have quarreled, possibly because he had disapproved of her affair with the King. She had not only compromised her honor a second time, but “had not collected on her investment.”⁶ This theory is even more credible if, outraged at her risking her good name at the French court, Thomas had sent Mary to rusticate at Brie in 1515.

By Tudor standards, Mary had been promiscuous, and it is easy to see why her father, her sister, her family, and Henry VIII all saw her as an embarrassment. It has credibly been suggested that her ambitious parents had even “developed feelings of dislike” for her,⁷ and that Sir Thomas’s treatment of Mary strengthened Anne’s resolve not to give in to the King and so end up like her sister.⁸

It is unfair to state that “William Carey dead made rather more impact than he had living,”⁹ yet his death revealed how fully Henry trusted Anne Boleyn’s “judgment and ability to manage things.”¹⁰ Early in July, the King granted her the wardship and marriage of Henry Carey.¹¹

Making provision for fatherless heirs to estates was the responsibility of the sovereign. In Tudor times a grant of wardship gave the guardian custody of the lands of his or her ward during the child’s minority, until he reached the age of twenty-one, and the right to use the income from them. In return, the guardian was obliged to maintain the estates of the ward and ensure that he was properly cared for and educated. Putative guardians usually paid a hefty fee for the privilege of acquiring a wardship, which could prove highly lucrative and repay the investment with interest. Wardships were vigorously enforced by the Tudor monarchs, who used them to increase their personal revenue. In 1535, Henry VIII passed the Statute of Uses, which asserted the rights of the Crown over wards, and in 1540, he founded the Court of Wards to regulate the system. In the case of Henry Carey, it is likely that the wardship was a gift from the King for the lady with whom he was by now so besotted that he would have given her anything within his power.

Thralldom aside, Henry was right in thinking that Anne would be far more more able and better placed to do much for her nephew than his impoverished and possibly unambitious mother, whom he clearly judged less competent and in no good position to exercise control of her son’s lands and income. This would hardly have taken “a great weight off Mary’s mind,”¹² and relieved her of the burden of providing for her son,¹³ for it deprived her of the use of his revenues, which had been diverted to her sister, and left Mary in penury and with no legal authority over her child. Above all it can only have caused bad blood between the sisters, and given Mary further cause for envy or jealousy.

To his credit, the King made Thomas Boleyn face up to his responsibilities as a father. Around June 15, having evidently discussed the problem of Mary with Anne, he wrote to her: “As touching your sister’s matter, I have caused Walter Walshe to write to my Lord [Rochford] mine mind therein; whereby I trust that Eve shall not have power to deceive Adam; for surely whatsoever is said, it cannot so stand with his honor, but that he must needs take her, his natural daughter, now in her extreme necessity.”¹⁴

The King’s reference to Eve deceiving Adam has been seen as moralizing on Henry’s part about Mary as “a sinful Eve,”¹⁵ or as evidence that Mary had been unfaithful to her husband. It has been asserted that the words “whatsoever is said” refer to gossip about Mary’s poor reputation, and suggest that questions were being raised “as to whether she [Eve] would prove to be pregnant,” and, if so, whether or not the child was her husband’s—or if Mary was pretending to be pregnant in order to obtain help from her father.¹⁶While these possibilities are all plausible, there is no proof to support them, or that Mary had “drifted from one unsavory situation to another at the Tudor court,”¹⁷ and a deeper reading of the letter suggests that Henry’s words probably do not refer to Mary at all, but imply that some female—possibly Mary’s own mother—was influencing her father against her.¹⁸ Clearly Henry did not want “Eve”—whoever she was—to prejudice Sir Thomas Boleyn against his daughter. If he had been referring to Mary, he would surely have wanted her to keep quiet about anything that might do that, because he wanted Sir Thomas to help her. This was hardly a “cavalier attitude”¹⁹ toward his former mistress.

Boleyn now had no choice but to take Mary under his roof and maintain her, and it seems that she returned to Hever Castle. But on December 10, 1528, again at Anne’s behest, Henry assigned Mary a substantial annuity of £100 that had formerly been paid to her late husband.²⁰ This was a generous gesture, since £100 in present-day values would be the equivalent of at least £32,000. It gives the lie to those who claim that Mary got nothing out of her affair with the King. For Henry had no need or obligation to assign that allowance to her. Her father had been constrained to be responsible for her, and she was living under his roof, at his charge. Her son’s future had been assured by the grant of his wardship to her sister Anne. Why, then, was Henry so generous?

Was it to please his new love, Anne Boleyn? Probably, to a degree. But it is also possible that the King was making provision for Katherine Carey, now that William Carey was no longer around to be a surrogate father to a royal bastard. That would certainly account for Henry’s open-handedness, which is comparable to the inexplicably large grant that he made to Etheldreda Malte, who was almost certainly his bastard daughter, some eighteen years later. Bolstered by the other circumstantial evidence, this is one of the most compelling arguments for Henry’s paternity of Katherine Carey.

Mary now had a comfortable income—her father, with his ever-expanding family, had once existed on half that amount. There is no record of her leaving the parental roof for a house of her own, though; it seems she stayed at Hever Castle, notwithstanding her father’s diffident attitude toward her, and, probably, her mother’s. Later, she was to refer to her life at this time as being “in bondage.” Maybe she stayed for the sake of her daughter, so that she could put money aside for her—Katherine would need a dowry one day, and the greater it was, the more chance she would have of making a good match. And Thomas Boleyn was often away at court, leaving behind him a household of women: his burdensome daughter Mary; his possibly estranged wife, who may have resented Mary’s presence at Hever; his insane and aging mother; and his four-year-old fatherless granddaughter. It cannot have been the happiest of households.

No one seems to have made an effort to find Mary a second husband, even though she now had a reasonable fortune and powerful connections.²¹ But Thomas Boleyn had shown himself somewhat laggardly in arranging marriages for both his daughters when they were younger, so may not have felt inclined to bestir himself now on the unrewarding Mary’s behalf; and it may be that, as the 1530s approached and her affair with the King became the subject of whispered court gossip, prospective suitors were put off. Few landed Tudor gentlemen wanted flighty wives who might compromise their inheritance.

With William Carey dead, Anne Boleyn was ready once more to take up the cudgels on behalf of his sister Eleanor’s advancement, using it to score a point over the man she regarded as her secret adversary, Cardinal Wolsey. Wolsey, however, had preempted her and sent a commissioner, Dr. John Bell, Archdeacon of Gloucester, to Wilton to examine the nuns and arrange matters to his satisfaction; he supported the view of most of the convent that the Prioress, Dame Isabel Jordan, was the best candidate.

At the abbey, Bell interviewed Eleanor Carey, and (as Henry VIII later informed Anne Boleyn) she “confessed herself to have had two children by two sundry priests,” and that she had recently left her convent for a time to live with a servant of Lord Willoughby de Broke as his mistress.²² Bell then considered the merits of Eleanor’s older sister, Dame Anne Carey, but she too was found to have loose morals. Clearly, both sisters were prime examples of women with no vocation who had been pushed into a convent by their family, possibly because the latter could not afford a dowry for them, or because they wished to dedicate a child to God in return for blessings they believed He had bestowed on them—or even, in this case especially, to hush up scandal.²³ The Carey sisters’ conduct is symptomatic of the kind of laxity that would soon be made prima facie grounds for the dissolution of the monasteries.

The fact that William Carey, on his deathbed, had asked for Wolsey’s help in making Eleanor Prioress, rather than Abbess, suggests he had been aware that she would be lucky to get either. It might be inferred from this that he had known about her promiscuous life; if so, then pushing for her election to high office marks out both him and his brother John as pragmatic men with few ethical scruples. One is tempted to wonder if William had taken a similar view of Mary’s adulterous affairs, and if his ambition had overridden any resentment or distaste he may have felt.

When the King found out the truth about Eleanor Carey and her sister, he commanded—in the interests of placating his beloved—that neither they nor Isabel Jordan should be Abbess, on the grounds that all three had at some time been guilty of misconduct; possibly Anne’s partisans had either made it up about the Prioress or had raked up some old scandal,²⁴ but in the light of this revelation, Henry wrote to Anne to explain the situation, saying he would not, “for all the gold in the world, clog your conscience nor mine to make [Dame Eleanor] ruler of a house which is of such ungodly demeanor; nor, I trust, you would not that, neither for brother nor sister, I should so distain mine honor or conscience.”²⁵ His reference to “brother or sister” implies that Mary had put pressure on Anne, on her sister-in-law’s behalf, and that George Boleyn too was supporting Eleanor. From this it might be inferred that the King was irritated by Mary’s interference.²⁶

And [Henry went on], as touching the Prioress [Isabel Jordan], or Dame Eleanor’s eldest sister, though there is not any evident case proved against them, and that the Prioress is so old, that of many years she could not be as she was named; yet, notwithstanding, to do you pleasure, I have done that neither of them shall have it, but some other good and well disposed woman, [and] the house shall be better reformed, and God the much better served.²⁷

Anne was most put out, therefore, when, in July 1528, Wolsey forced the election of the Prioress, Dame Isabel Jordan.²⁸ This earned him, on July 14, a scorching reproof from the King, who had been well aware of Anne’s preference for Eleanor Carey,²⁹ for it seemed that the Cardinal had gone out of his way to offend her. The next day, Wolsey made a groveling apology to Henry for his hasty action, and hastened to send Anne “a kind letter” and a “rich and goodly present,” for which she thanked him profusely in an extravagantly worded response;³⁰ and thus the matter was diplomatically brought to a satisfactory conclusion—for Wolsey at least. Even the late William Carey could not have complained about the passing over of his naughty sister.

By November, when the furor had died down, Isabel Jordan had been quietly installed as Abbess.³¹

For a time, Mary Boleyn apparently resided at Hever, living on the King’s pension, rearing her daughter Katherine and coming to terms with her widowhood. Her son may have been left in her care until it was time for his education to begin; he was, after all, rather young to be parted from his mother.

Very little is recorded of Mary during the six years of her widowhood. She was a silent witness to the meteoric career of her sister Anne and the ascendancy of her family, but either she preferred to remain in the background, or it was deemed fitting by others that she should do so. It has been perspicaciously observed that “in the brilliant advancement of her sister, she seems to have been eclipsed and neglected.”³² She is not mentioned at court for a long time, and it may be that while Anne remained in her anomalous position—neither mistress nor wife and queen—she was not wanted there, even to attend upon her sister. Secrecy about Mary’s affair, and the dispensation covering it, had been successfully maintained for several years, but somehow or other, as the furor over the divorce escalated, word got around that the King had kept Anne Boleyn’s sister as his mistress. Although their affair would never become an open scandal, there was talk of it at court, at the very least. The presence of the former mistress with whom Henry shared a compromising bond of affinity might have been just too uncomfortable for him, and the Boleyns, at a time when a favorable decision from the Pope was eagerly anticipated.

Gossip was already lively in 1529. After the new Imperial ambassador, Eustache Chapuys—a man who was to prove indefatigable in Queen Katherine’s cause—arrived in England that year, it did not take him long to find out about Henry’s relations with Mary Boleyn. In December he wrote to the Emperor: “Had [the King], as he asserts, only attended to the voice of conscience, there would have been still greater affinity to contend with in this intended marriage than in that of the Queen, his wife; a fact of which everyone here speaks quite openly.”³³

As he often did, Chapuys was probably exaggerating when he referred to “everyone,” as many courtiers would surely not have deemed it politic publicly to cast aspersions on the King’s doubts of conscience; and the gossip could not have been that widespread, since other sources would have recorded it, and Henry’s opponents—not to mention the Queen—would have made more political capital out of it. As it was, only two people are known to have spoken of Mary Boleyn: George Throckmorton and John Hale. As we have seen, in 1533, Elizabeth Amadas, whose husband was goldsmith to the King, and the priest at Chepax, Yorkshire, were not aware of Henry VIII’s affair with Mary Boleyn. Yet even with all this discretion being maintained, the revelation that Henry stood in the same degree of affinity to Anne as he did to Katherine must, in certain privileged circles, have undermined his credibility, integrity, and sincerity. Nor can the inevitable besmirching of Mary Boleyn’s public reputation have done anything for that of her sister, which had already, in the eyes of many, been severely compromised.

In January 1530, when Charles V received Chapuys’s report, he summoned Dr. Richard Sampson (later Bishop of Chichester), the English ambassador at his court, and declared that Henry VIII’s scruples of conscience did not appear to be justified, especially “if it were true, as his Majesty had heard (although he himself would not positively affirm it), that the King had kept company with the sister of her whom he now wanted to marry.” Sampson, who enjoyed Anne Boleyn’s patronage, did not respond to this challenge.³⁴The Emperor, understandably, was not satisfied, but he let the matter rest there, being preoccupied with other, more pressing business and about to leave for Bologna for his long-delayed crowning by the Pope.³⁵ It is one of the great enigmas of the divorce that Charles V never made an issue of the King’s affair with Mary Boleyn; yet the reason may lie in Charles’s doubts as to whether there had actually been one.

On December 8, 1529, Thomas Boleyn was created Earl of Wiltshire and Earl of Ormond,³⁶ and Mary became entitled to style herself Lady (or Dame) Mary Rochford, after his subsidiary title,³⁷ which would soon pass to his son, George, who had been knighted in 1529 and was created Viscount Rochford before July 1530. All the Boleyn siblings now used the badge of a black lion rampant, as previous heirs to the earldom of Ormond had done.³⁸ Henceforth, Thomas Boleyn, Earl of Wiltshire, would be one of the chief peers of the realm, and would continue to serve the King energetically at home and abroad, and to advance the fortunes of his daughter Anne and himself.

In November 1530, Henry VIII gave Anne Boleyn £20 (£6,500) to redeem a jewel from Mary;³⁹ either it was one he had given her during the course of their affair, or—more likely—she had won it from him by gambling.⁴⁰

The following summer Henry VIII sent Katherine of Aragon away from court; he would never see her again, nor would she be permitted contact with her daughter, Princess Mary. That Christmas, people remarked on the absence of mirth from the festivities at Greenwich, without the banished Queen and her ladies being present; even Anne Boleyn was absent, but on New Year’s Day 1532 she returned to court and was “lodged where the Queen used to be, and is accompanied by almost as many ladies as if she were Queen.”⁴¹ For his New Year’s gift, Henry gave her a room splendidly hung with cloth of gold and silver and heavy embroidered satin. All the Boleyns presented Henry with gifts, and in return for her present of “a shirt with a black collar,” which she may have stitched herself, “Lady Mary Rochford” received from Henry a piece of gilt plate, either a cup, salt cellar, bottle or goblet.⁴² Being the recipient of such a gift on this occasion strongly suggests that Mary was back at court, probably as one of Anne’s vast train of ladies, and other evidence shows that she was periodically in attendance on her sister from this time—if she had not been before.

The name “Mary Rochford” also appears in the list of recipients for New Year’s gifts in 1534; the list for 1533 is missing, but doubtless she featured in that too.⁴³

On October 7, 1532, when Henry VIII rode out from Greenwich on the first stage of his journey to Calais to meet once more with François I, taking with him Anne Boleyn and two thousand lords, gentlemen, and attendants, Mary went too, as one of the twenty or thirty⁴⁴ ladies whom the King had summoned to accompany his “dearest and most beloved cousin,” as he diplomatically referred to Anne.⁴⁵ The Boleyn sisters’ uncle, Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk, was also in the King’s entourage.⁴⁶

When Anne had assembled her train of ladies in August, she had written to Mary, bidding her to prepare for the journey, and confiding to her that “that which I have so long wished for will be accomplished.”⁴⁷ She had high hopes of King François using his influence with the Pope on Henry’s behalf, and she was also aware that, with the death of William Warham, Archbishop of Canterbury, that month, a major obstacle to Henry’s taking matters into his own hands had been fortuitously removed. Even before that, there had been speculation at court that the King himself would declare his marriage to Katherine null and void and marry Anne. But, Chapuys wrote to the Emperor on August 9, “even if he could separate from the Queen, he could not have her, for he has had to do with her sister.”⁴⁸ Evidently Chapuys did not know about the dispensation issued in 1528, while Charles V seems to have continued to pay little heed to what he probably dismissed as scurrilous gossip.

After spending a night at Stone in Kent, where Bridget, Lady Wingfield, entertained the royal party at her castle, the great cavalcade, more than two thousand strong, rode on to Canterbury, where Mary probably witnessed Elizabeth Barton, the notorious “Nun of Kent,” publicly declaiming her seditious prophecies before the King, who merely ignored her and went on his way to the house of Sir Christopher Hales, where he and Anne, and probably Mary too, lodged overnight.

Before dawn on October 11, after spending the third night of the journey in Dover Castle, Mary sailed to France on The Swallow with her sister and the King; the weather was good. It was a smooth crossing, and the royal party made land at Calais at ten o’clock in the morning, to be greeted by a thunderous royal salute.⁴⁹ They were afforded a civic reception by John Bourchier, Lord Berners, the Governor of Calais, and then conducted in a torchlit procession to the church of St. Nicholas to hear Mass. Mary was accommodated with Anne’s other attendants in the seven fine rooms assigned to her sister in the Exchequer Palace in Calais.⁵⁰ This was a large residence with a long gallery, a tennis court, and gardens on both the King’s and Queen’s sides of the building.⁵¹

Being in such close daily proximity to Anne and the King, Mary may well have been aware that Henry and Anne had interconnecting bedchambers,⁵² proof that Anne—who now had marriage within her sights, with the prospect of the Boleyns’ chaplain, the sympathetic reformist Thomas Cranmer, becoming Archbishop of Canterbury—had at last surrendered to the King. “[He] cannot be an hour without her,” Chapuys observed,⁵³ while a Venetian envoy reported that Henry was now accompanying Anne to Massand everywhere [author’s italics], as though she were Queen already.⁵⁴

François I was to bring no train of ladies with him to Calais; his second queen, Eleanor of Austria, was the Emperor’s sister and Katherine of Aragon’s niece, and under no circumstances would she have been willing to receive Anne Boleyn. The other French royal ladies had shown equal disdain, and so Anne and her female attendants perforce had no official place in the proceedings, and had to be left behind at Calais when Henry sallied forth to Boulogne to spend four days with his brother monarch. But Anne made the best of a bad situation, and throughout the ten days of merrymaking that marked their stay, Mary would have joined the courtiers in hawking, gambling, and feasting on delicacies sent by the French: carp, porpoise, venison pasties, and choice pears and grapes.

On Friday, October 25, King Henry arrived back at Calais, bringing King François with him. It seems that Anne and her ladies were not present at the lavish welcome ceremonies, although they would have heard the three-thousand-gun salute fired in the French king’s honor, and Anne would have been gratified to receive the costly diamond he sent her by the Provost of Paris.

François was lodged in the Staple Inn on the main square of Calais, some way from the Exchequer Palace. Here, on the evening of October 27, Mary attended her sister at a lavish supper and banquet given by Henry in the great hall in honor of the French king. The hall looked magnificent, hung with gold and silver tissue and gold wreaths glittering with pearls and precious stones, which reflected the light from the twenty silver candelabra, each bearing a hundred wax candles. A dazzling display of gold plate adorned a seven-tier buffet. Henry VIII was dressed to impress too, in purple cloth of gold with a collar of fourteen rubies and two great ropes of pearls, from one of which hung the famous Black Prince’s ruby (now set in St. Edward’s crown, which is used for coronations). The company feasted on 170 dishes, with a lavish variety of meats, game, and fish cooked according to English or French recipes.

Afterward, Mary and five other ladies took part in a masque led by Anne, who made her entrance in an outfit of cloth of gold slashed with crimson satin, puffed with cloth of silver and laced with gold cords. “My Lady Mary” followed immediately in Anne’s wake,⁵⁵ having been given precedence over the ladies of higher rank, no doubt to underline the fact that her sister was soon to be the Queen of England. Mary and her fellow performers were dressed alike in gorgeous costumes “of strange fashion,” comprising loose gowns of cloth of gold slashed with crimson tinsel laced in gold, and all wore masks. Among these ladies were Mary’s sister-in-law, Jane Parker, Lady Rochford, her cousin, Lady Mary Howard (Norfolk’s daughter), her Howard aunts—Dorothy, Countess of Derby, and Elizabeth, Lady FitzWalter—and Honor Grenville, Lady Lisle. These ladies were escorted by four maids of honor wearing crimson satin and black tabards of cypress lawn.

The ladies danced before the two kings, and afterward, Anne boldly advanced to King François and led him out onto the floor, at which Mary and her companions invited King Henry and the other gentlemen present to join them, the Countess of Derby choosing Henri d’Albret, King of Navarre, François’s brother-in-law. We do not know if Mary actually danced with Henry VIII on this occasion, but the King did take great pleasure in removing the ladies’ masks afterward “so that [their] beauties were showed.” After an hour spent dancing, King François had a long private conversation with Anne.⁵⁶

The next day, the two kings met to attend a chapter meeting of the Order of the Garter and to watch a wrestling match, and on the morning of October 29, Henry escorted François to the French border, where they said their farewells.

It is possible that, during her sojourn in Calais, Mary met William Stafford, the man who was to become her second husband, who was then one of two hundred persons in the King’s retinue.⁵⁷ It is sometimes averred that he was serving as a soldier with the Calais garrison at this time, but he does not seem to have taken up that post until after June 1533.⁵⁸ Mary was later to reveal that it was Stafford who pursued her and fell in love with her before she did with him; but although William was distantly related to the noble family of Stafford, he was no match for the daughter of an earl and sister of a future queen. And even if some attraction and kindness—and perhaps a more intimate connection—did spring up between him and Mary in Calais, nothing was to come of it for some time.

Violent storms in the Channel forced the English court to stay on at the Exchequer for a further fortnight,⁵⁹ allowing Henry and Anne time to enjoy what was essentially their honeymoon, and perhaps affording Mary and her new suitor the opportunity to get to know each other better. The idyll came to an end at midnight on November 12, when the King seized the opportunity afforded by a favorable wind to sail home to England. The voyage took twenty-nine hours, and after landing at Dover, Mary rode through Kent with the royal party at a leisurely pace, lodging at Leeds Castle and Stone Castle before finally arriving at Eltham Palace on November 24.⁶⁰ Soon afterward, the King returned to London.

In January 1533, learning that Anne was pregnant, Henry secretly married her in a turret room in York Place, with her parents, her brother, Lord Rochford, and “two favorites”⁶¹ as witnesses; it has been suggested that Mary was one of them,⁶² but if so, she wouldsurely have been listed with the family members, rather than being described as a “favorite.” Certainly, contemporary sources do not convey the impression that she was a favorite with Anne and the King, and although it might follow that Anne would have her sister and perhaps her sister-in-law as attendants, there were others to whom she was closer; the favorites might even have been gentlemen of the King’s Privy Chamber, men such as Sir Henry Norris, Sir Nicholas Carew, or Sir Francis Bryan.

The King, convinced that his marriage to Katherine was invalid, and aware that his longed-for heir was on its way, had not waited for the formalities. Even so it was some weeks before his new Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer, declared his marriage to Katherine null and void, and his union with Anne lawful. Anne first appeared in public as Queen at Easter 1533, much to many people’s shock and consternation, and Henry afforded her a lavish coronation in June.

Prior to that, when Anne was assigned a household of two hundred persons, Mary Boleyn was among her ladies-in-waiting, in company with their sister-in-law, Lady Rochford; Lady Margaret Douglas, the King’s niece; Lady Mary Howard, daughter of the Duke of Norfolk and cousin to the Boleyn sisters; Frances de Vere, who was married to another cousin, Norfolk’s heir, Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey; Mary Shelton, daughter of Sir John Shelton by Mary Boleyn’s aunt, Anne Boleyn; another aunt, Elizabeth Wood, wife of Sir James Boleyn; Anne Savage, Lady Berkeley; and Elizabeth Browne, Countess of Worcester,⁶³ whose testimony would help to bring about Anne Boleyn’s downfall three years hence. One of the maids of honor was Jane Seymour, who would one day become Henry VIII’s third wife.⁶⁴

The fact that Anne was willing to have her sister wait upon her is perhaps further evidence that Mary’s liaison with Henry VIII was more a passing fancy than a grand passion, or an affair of the heart. Anne is hardly likely to have wanted a woman for whom her husband had entertained strong feelings brought into daily proximity to him, sister or not. And Mary is hardly likely to have wanted to be in that position, especially if she had loved Henry, or he had abandoned her.

Aware of the need to give the lie to her poor reputation, Anne demanded that her ladies be above reproach. She gave them each a little book of prayers and psalms to hang at their girdles. She kept them busy sewing garments for the poor for hours on end. They were to attend Mass daily and display “a virtuous demeanor.”⁶⁵ Anne’s silk-woman later claimed that she had never seen “better order amongst the ladies and gentlewomen of the court than in Anne Boleyn’s day.”⁶⁶ Yet Mary’s life was not all dullness, for there was much “pastime in the Queen’s chamber”⁶⁷ as well as courtly revelry, dancing, and feasting. And, as the Queen’s sister, she must have enjoyed a certain status.

Yet it is clear that Mary did not feel appreciated by Anne, or by anyone else for that matter. In contrast to her successful siblings, Mary was the one who had compromised her reputation and done very little since to win respect or admiration. Only a year later she was to write, “I saw that all the world did set so little by me.”⁶⁸ That implies a lack of self-worth, and we might even go so far as to imagine her not only having to endure the disapproval and disappointment of her family, but also secretly being despised by the courtiers who flocked around the brilliant Anne.

Mary’s presence at court may have been disturbing to the King, not because he still cherished feelings for her, but because the implications of their affair continued to haunt him. Now that he had broken with Rome, he was clearly concerned that the legality of his marriage should be beyond question, and in 1533 he had Parliament pass an act permitting marriage with the sister of a discarded mistress.⁶⁹ But the act did not put a stop to gossip about his affair with Mary, which now seems to have spread beyond the court, for that year saw several people arrested for accusing the King of marrying the sister of his former mistress.⁷⁰ The weight this lent to public disapproval of the marriage should not be underestimated.

Mary was one of the “diverse ladies and gentlewomen” who attended Anne at her coronation. The celebrations began on May 29 with a magnificent river pageant. At three o’clock, royally garbed in cloth of gold, the new queen stepped into the barge she had appropriated from Katherine of Aragon, at Greenwich Palace, and was conveyed along the River Thames to the Tower of London, where—as tradition decreed—she would lodge before her coronation. Mary and the other ladies traveled with her, along with their father and many other noblemen. As Anne alighted at the Tower, to be greeted “with joyful countenance” by the King, the cannon on Tower Wharf was fired in a “marvelous” salute.⁷¹

Two days later Mary was in Anne’s train as she went in procession through the streets of London to Westminster. She was not among the six ladies who rode on horseback immediately behind the new queen and the chief officers of her household, although her sister-in-law, Lady Rochford, by virtue of her rank, was of their number. Mary, in a rich gown of scarlet velvet—a costly material that, as the daughter of an earl, and a lady of the Queen’s privy chamber, she was entitled to wear—was relegated to the third of the chariots that followed, traveling with other ladies of the Queen’s household: her aunt, Lady Boleyn;⁷² Elizabeth Wentworth, Lady FitzWarin; Mary Zouche; Margery Horsman; and Alice St. John, Lady Morley.⁷³

Along the route, the Queen and her entourage were entertained by lavish pageants, tableaux, and music. But Anne was not popular, and although crowds had gathered, they watched in silent disapproval. According to one account, fewer than ten people greeted the Queen with “God save your Grace!” In fact, when they saw the entwined initial letters of Henry and Anne on the triumphal arches along the route, they jeered, “Ha! Ha!”⁷⁴

The triumphal progress ended at Westminster Hall. Here, Anne was led to the high dais under the cloth of estate, where “subtleties with Hippocras and other wines” were served to her, which she sent down to her ladies. When they had drunk their fill, she gave them hearty thanks, and then withdrew with a few of the most privileged—of whom Mary must have been one—to the White Hall, as the great hall at the Palace of Westminster was known.⁷⁵

The next day, June 1, 1533, Anne was crowned in a magnificent ceremony in Westminster Abbey. Dressed in crimson and purple velvet, she was received by the clergy at Westminster Hall and escorted by them to the abbey, followed by several noblewomen on palfreys or in chariots, and then by Mary and the Queen’s other ladies, all attired in “robes and gowns of scarlet.”⁷⁶ After the crowning, these ladies accompanied her back to Westminster Hall for the solemn feast that followed.

Despite all that Henry had done in order to marry her, Anne presented him, on September 7, 1533, not with the son he so desperately desired, but with a daughter, named Elizabeth for the King’s mother, Elizabeth of York, and probably for Elizabeth Howard also. Her birth must have been a cataclysmic disappointment, but Henry put on a brave face and arranged a splendid christening in the church of the Observant Friars at Greenwich Palace. The Boleyns were there in force, with Wiltshire supporting his granddaughter’s long train and his son Rochford helping to carry the canopy of estate above her head. Mary Boleyn was probably one of the “many ladies and gentlewomen” who followed in the procession. It may be significant that she was assigned no important role either at the coronation of her sister or the christening of her niece—which one might reasonably have expected, given her closeness in blood to the Queen. Maybe that was her own wish, given her growing reputation, but her family too, for other reasons, probably did not want to draw public attention to the sister who had been the King’s mistress. Perhaps Mary was content to have things that way, for the Boleyns were not popular. “There is little love for the one who is queen now, or for any of her race,” observed the French ambassador that November.⁷⁷

It is possible that Katherine Carey, who was nine when Princess Elizabeth was born, spent the next six years, until she was summoned to court, in her little cousin’s household,⁷⁸ which was set up at Hatfield Palace, Hertfordshire, in December 1533, and thereafter perambulated between the nursery palaces of the Thames Valley. Being in this early close proximity may in part account for Elizabeth’s great affection for Katherine in later life.⁷⁹ For Mary, this would have meant separation from her daughter, but for women of the aristocratic class, that was nothing unusual, for girls of good family were often sent to be reared and educated in great households, and Mary would have had the consolation of knowing that she was affording her daughter the very best grounding for the future.

But Elizabeth was not long to enjoy her exalted status as Henry’s legitimate heir. Even before her birth, cracks had appeared in her parents’ marriage. Anne, once won, had clearly been a disappointment. Henry’s discovery that she had been “corrupted” in France⁸⁰ must have disillusioned him early on, while she had clearly found it difficult to make the transition from a mistress with the upper hand to the meek and submissive wife he now expected her to be. It took only months for Henry’s long-cherished passion to dissipate, and during Anne’s pregnancy, following true to previous form, he had taken a mistress, telling her to shut her eyes as more worthy persons had done, and that he could lower her as much as he had raised her.⁸¹

The implications for the Boleyns were chilling.