12

A Poor Honest Life

On January 29, 1536, Anne Boleyn gave birth to the stillborn male fetus whose survival would have guaranteed her safety. The secrecy surrounding this event spawned widespread rumors. In Paris, Rodolfo Pio, Bishop of Faenza, the Papal Nuncio—as has been demonstrated, a man not notable for the accuracy of his reports—claimed that “that woman” had never even been pregnant, but had faked a miscarriage, and “to keep up the deceit, she would allow no one to attend on her but her sister.”¹ This is the only mention of Mary Boleyn being in attendance on Anne after the former’s banishment, and no English account mentions her being there. Given the dubious source, Pio’s wild assertion that Anne had never been pregnant (when we have a reliable description of the fetus),² and the probability that Mary was then living in Calais, it is, sadly, far more likely that the sisters were never reconciled. Nevertheless, some historians still claim that “in this sad time, the only comfort came from Anne’s sister Mary, who overcame her differences with Anne in order to be with her,”³ with one going so far as to state that Mary “most certainly was at Anne’s side” when she miscarried.⁴

Mary and William would soon have cause to be very grateful for being banished from the court, for the fortunes of the Boleyns suffered a fatal crash on May 2, 1536, when Queen Anne was arrested on charges of plotting the death of the King and committing adultery with five men, one of whom was her brother, Rochford, who was arrested that same day. Another was Sir Henry Norris, William Carey’s former colleague in the privy chamber. Both were imprisoned in the Tower of London with the other accused men. The evidence strongly suggests that they were the victims of a court coup masterminded by the King’s principal secretary, Thomas Cromwell, who knew Anne and her faction to be his mortal enemies.⁵

On May 15, in the great hall of the Tower, Anne and Rochford were arraigned for treason before a committee of their peers that probably included their own father, Wiltshire.⁶ Both were condemned to death. The evidence for incest rested chiefly on the testimony of Rochford’s wife. We can only conjecture what Mary thought of her father’s complicity in the legal process against her brother and sister, and her sister-in-law’s part in their fall. Maybe Wiltshire was already the bête noire of her life, and even if he was not, she would surely have been chilled to learn that he had it in him to abet the destruction of his own children. It would not be surprising if she never wanted to see him again after this.

Rochford was beheaded, with his sister’s other alleged lovers, on May 17 on the public scaffold on Tower Hill, and his body buried beneath the altar pavement of the royal chapel of St. Peter ad Vincula within the Tower of London. On his death, all his honors and property were forfeited to the Crown.

Before he sent Anne to the scaffold, the King had their marriage declared invalid, and their daughter Elizabeth legally deemed a bastard. The grounds were kept secret, but Eustache Chapuys, the Imperial ambassador, shrewdly guessed that it had been Henry’s sexual relations with Mary Boleyn, which had created a barrier to his union with Anne, and which was without doubt the means by which their marriage was annulled⁷ on May 17, the day Mary’s brother Rochford had died on the block. This would also explain the secrecy surrounding the annulment.⁸

According to a new Act of Succession passed in July 1536, the marriage had been void from the first on account of “certain entirely just, true, and unlawful impediments hitherto not publicly known, and since that time [of the marriage] confessed by the Lady Anne before the most reverend father in God, Thomas, Archbishop of Canterbury,” and by the King himself, presumably also to Cranmer.⁹ These impediments must have been Henry’s carnal relations with Mary Boleyn, about which both Henry and Anne certainly had known at the time they were wed.

The Pope had, of course, dispensed with the affinity thus created, so the King and Anne had entered into their union in good faith (in which case their daughter could have been deemed legitimate on its dissolution), but the Dispensations Act passed afterward, in 1534, provided that existing dispensations issued for causes “contrary or repugnant to the Holy Scriptures and the laws of God” were invalid.¹⁰ Evidently it had been made clear to Henry VIII that the dispensation of 1528 came under that category, even though Archbishop Cranmer must have found it to be good—and indeed relied on it—when he confirmed the marriage in 1533,¹¹ and never ventured to question its validity in 1534—when to do so would, in fact, have been treason. But now Cranmer found it politic to follow the old canon law in reaching his decision.

Henry may have felt that his affair with Mary Boleyn had provoked divine wrath after all;¹² or, as it has been pithily put, he forgot that an adulterous relationship created kinship “when it suited him to forget, and remembered it when it suited him to remember.”¹³Soon after the annulment, he restored the old canon law forbidding marriage with the sister of a former mistress.¹⁴ The affair with Mary had therefore served a useful—and entirely unforeseen—purpose.

Two days after her marriage was annulled, Anne was beheaded within the Tower. It is highly unlikely that Mary Boleyn was a witness to her sister’s fall, for no source records her presence in the Tower or at the execution. In all her recorded utterances during her imprisonment, Anne never mentioned her sister—but she did not refer to her little daughter either, so we can infer very little from her silence.

In fact, in all the many documents pertaining to the fall of Anne and Rochford, there is no mention of Mary Boleyn, except (briefly) in the context of the annulment. She was almost certainly not at court at the time, but probably at Calais, at a safe distance from the maelstrom that engulfed her siblings. The whole process against them had happened so quickly that she probably received no warning as to what was to happen, and heard news of the unfolding events days after they had taken place. And once she knew of the legal process against Anne and George, she probably realized there was nothing she could have done to help them, and that it was safer to remain in Calais in blessed obscurity. She may have felt that she had no choice but to follow the lead set by her father and her uncle Norfolk, and distance herself from the doomed pair.¹⁵ There is no record of any member of the Boleyn family trying to contact Anne and Rochford while they were in the Tower, or attempting to intercede for them; even had they been inclined to do so, either action could have had unhappy consequences. Yet the loss of her sister and brother had to have affected Mary—and indeed her whole family—dreadfully.

For more than a century a tale has circulated that Mary’s daughter, Katherine Carey, was one of the four distressed young ladies who attended Anne Boleyn in the Tower during the four days after her condemnation, and accompanied her to the scaffold.¹⁶ The story appears to derive from Augustus Hare, writing in 1878 of Katherine’s tomb in Westminster Abbey, but he does not cite his source; there is no contemporary evidence to support the tale, and surely Katherine, at twelve, would have been considered too young for such a grim duty. There is no record of her serving Anne Boleyn, and she is not recorded as a maid of honor until 1540, when she entered the service of Anne of Cleves, Henry VIII’s fourth wife. At the time of Anne’s fall, she may have been in Princess Elizabeth’s household, and a witness to her little cousin’s loss of status, for after being declared a bastard, the two-year-old was now to be styled the Lady Elizabeth, and her household was accordingly reduced. It was still royal, by any standards, and she continued to be served as if she were still a princess.

After Anne Boleyn’s death, the wardship of Katherine’s brother, Henry Carey, reverted to the Crown, and Henry VIII, as sovereign, took on responsibility for the boy. When Carey’s tutor, Nicholas Bourbon, returned to France after the execution of his patron, Queen Anne, the King asked Sir Francis Bryan—who had replaced Sir Henry Norris as Chief Gentleman of the Privy Chamber—to send Henry Carey and his fellow royal wards, Henry Norris the younger and Thomas Hervey, to Woburn Abbey in Bedfordshire. Here, they lived with the lay community, at the expense of the monks—the abbey would not be dissolved for another two years—and Bryan appointed his protégé, James Prestwich, as their schoolmaster. Soon another boy joined the little school: George Basset, who was “merry, and applieth his learning very well”¹⁷—probably better than Henry Carey did.

Master Carey “was not badly educated: he wrote fluently, in a simple, expressive style, full of proverbs and homely sayings much to the point.”¹⁸ But he did not do well in his Latin lessons—it would later be said of him that “his Latin and his dissimulation were both alike equally bad.”¹⁹ And although, in adult life, he owned a copy of Jean Froissart’s Chronicles²⁰—standard reading for a noble soldier—in which he entered the dates of birth of his children, it seems he did not shine intellectually: it would be said of him that he “neither was wise nor seemed wise”²¹ and, according to an anonymous Elizabethan poem, “fool hath he ever been” with “his wits dull as lead.”²² It may be that he took after his mother in these respects, although he cannot have been a stupid man, as he managed to retain a succession of important posts for more than thirty years in the reign of Elizabeth, who was never prone to handing out offices and favors to the undeserving, however close they were to her in blood. Thus these slurs may have been purely malicious or provoked by envy.

Henry and his young friends remained at Woburn for two years, but their schooling was dramatically disrupted in 1538, when the abbey was dissolved after the Abbot, Robert Hobbs, had made “treasonable utterances” that were reported to Thomas Cromwell, and was duly hanged. The tutor Prestwich was now discovered to be a staunch Catholic who “always stiffly maintained the Bishop of Rome’s part,” could “never assent to the new learning,”²³ and was indoctrinating his pupils with subversive religious and political beliefs. He was also found to be associating with “certain persons inhabited near to Woburn and other places thereabouts” who had been under government surveillance.²⁴ Already, Thomas Hervey had succumbed to Prestwich’s teachings, and would remain a lifelong Papist.²⁵

Maybe Sir Francis Bryan had deliberately intended that the evangelical teachings instilled by Nicholas Bourbon in his pupils should be overlaid by more traditionalist views. John Longland, Bishop of Lincoln, had promised him that God would reward him for “redressing and punishing such errors as hath been used in this worldly country, of children,”²⁶ but such defiance in the climate of the Reformation bordered on treason. The King must have been horrified when he learned how his wards were being fed such sedition, and Mary and her family would no doubt have felt the same. On May 25, 1538, Bryan dismissed Prestwich from his service, on the pretext that Henry Carey was being transferred to the guardianship of Sir John Russell, who was Comptroller of the Household and soon to be a Privy Councillor. Prestwich fled north, where he was executed for denying the royal Supremacy the following year.²⁷

If Henry Carey was taken into the care of Sir John Russell, he could not have had a more eminent guardian and exemplar. Honest, pleasant, and adroit, Russell was created a baron in March 1539 and then appointed—as part of Cromwell’s administrative reforms—Lord President of the Council of the West, being thereby invested with responsibility for Devon, Cornwall, Dorset, and Somerset; in April 1539 he was made a Knight of the Garter, and in July, High Steward of Cornwall. Although the Council of the West toppled with Cromwell in 1540, Russell remained a great power in the west, and was appointed Lord High Admiral in 1540. He resigned that office in 1542 to follow his military career. During Henry VIII’s invasion of France in 1544, he failed to take Montreuil, but was Captain General of the vanguard of the army when the English took Boulogne in 1545. He was a close companion of Henry VIII during the latter’s declining years, and was named one of the executors of the King’s will, and one of the sixteen councillors appointed to govern England during the minority of Edward VI, who created him Earl of Bedford and gave him Woburn Abbey. Prior to that, his chief seat had been at Chenies, Buckinghamshire, which he had acquired on marriage; when in the west, he resided at Tavistock Abbey in Devon, which had been given to him by the King in 1539. Nothing is left of it today apart from the refectory, two gateways, and a porch; the imposing church had entirely disappeared by the eighteenth century. Russell also owned Covent Garden in London, with seven acres in Long Acre.

There is no record of Henry Carey actually being placed with Sir John Russell, and perhaps going to live at Chenies, or in Covent Garden, or even at Tavistock; yet it is credible that he was given into the comptroller’s care, for he was to follow in Russell’s footsteps in so many ways, loyally serving a sovereign to whom he was close, and who trusted him; holding responsibility for regional administration, pursuing a distinguished military career, and enjoying a prominent place and high offices at court.

Mary’s father, Wiltshire, survived the coup that had destroyed two of his children, at whose deaths, chillingly, he had expressed “no protest or hint of sorrow.”²⁸ Understandably reluctant to support his widowed daughter-in-law, Lady Rochford, who had been left destitute when the husband she had betrayed was attaindered, he was forced, at the direct solicitation of the King and Cromwell, to make out of his own diminished resources a more ample allowance to her.²⁹ By 1537, Lady Rochford had returned to court to serve Queen Jane Seymour, who died in October that year after bearing Henry VIII his longed-for son, Prince Edward; Lady Rochford was one of the ladies in attendance at her funeral in November.³⁰ She would serve two more of the King’s wives, and in 1539 two Acts of Parliament restored her jointure and other lands, among which was the manor of Blickling in Norfolk,³¹ where she seems to have resided from this time.

The late 1530s brought more tragedy to Mary. Not two years after the brutal deaths of her estranged brother and sister, she lost her mother too—probably without ever having been reconciled to her. Elizabeth Howard died on April 3, 1538 at the Abbot of Reading’s house beside Baynard’s Castle in London; four days later she was buried with suitable state in the Howard aisle in Lambeth Church.³² Apparently she had already been ailing at the time of her children’s arrests in 1536,³³ so the horror of their executions, the pain of their loss, and the humiliation of the family’s disgrace had perhaps broken her.

Not so her husband, Mary’s father. The only clue as to his state of mind in the wake of the savage destruction of two of his children, in which he had been complicit, was his request to the humanist scholar Erasmus, in the year after their deaths, to write a short commentary on the 23rd Psalm, to be dedicated to himself. But Wiltshire was a survivor. Although he was deprived of his office of Lord Privy Seal after Anne’s fall, he retained his place on the King’s Council. Only months after Anne and Rochford died, he was helping to suppress the rebels who led the northern Pilgrimage of Grace against the King’s religious reforms. In October 1537 he attended the christening of Prince Edward, the son born to Henry VIII’s third wife, Jane Seymour, who had supplanted his daughter in the King’s affections, and whom Henry had wed only ten days after Anne’s execution.

Wiltshire kept in with Cromwell and other influential people at court, was prominent at state functions and in the ceremonies of the Order of the Garter, and, by 1538 was again “well entertained” at court, where it was rumored that he was about to wed the King’s niece, Lady Margaret Douglas.³⁴ But he did not long outlive his wife, passing away on March 12, 1539, at Hever Castle, aged sixty-one.³⁵ There is little evidence to support Sander’s assertion that he “died of grief,” yet it might be fair to assume that grief had played its part in hastening his end.

“My good lord and master is dead,” wrote his auditor, Robert Cranewell, to Cromwell. “He made the end of a good Christian man.” The letter was dated “Hever, March 13.”³⁶ Wiltshire was buried in thirteenth century Hever Church, where a fine memorial brass showing him wearing his Garter insignia marks his resting place. The King himself ordered Masses to be said for his soul.³⁷ If Mary had been in Calais since 1534–35, which is likely, then she would never have seen her parents again, or made her peace with them. It is probably significant that it was only after their deaths that she came back to England, so that she could take possession of her inheritance.

Wiltshire had left no male heir. In February 1538, the disputed earldom of Ormond was granted to his cousin, Piers Butler. Because Boleyn’s heir had died under attainder, the viscountcy of Rochford and the earldom of Wiltshire, which had been granted in tail male, fell into abeyance, the latter bestowed in 1550 on William Paulet, later Marquess of Winchester. It would not be until 1621 that the viscountcy of Rochford was revived for Mary Boleyn’s great-grandson, Henry Carey, 4th Lord Hunsdon.³⁸

Wiltshire’s two co-heiresses were his daughter, Mary, and his granddaughter, Elizabeth, daughter of Henry VIII by Anne Boleyn. Anne’s share of his estates had been confiscated by an Act of Attainder passed in June 1536 after her execution, and her child had been declared illegitimate and unfit to inherit. So when Boleyn’s extensive property was divided, half of it, including Hever Castle, Seal, and Blickling, reverted to the Crown. It has already been noted that Blickling was transferred by Act of Parliament in 1539 to Lady Rochford.

The Crown did not wait long to seize what was due, but when Cromwell’s letter arrived at Hever Castle on March 26, just two weeks after Wiltshire’s death, Boleyn’s man in Kent, John Tebold of Seal, had to confess that “much of the goods in the manor place of Hever had been removed by advice of the Archbishop of Canterbury.”³⁹ By a royal grant of July 1538, Archbishop Cranmer enjoyed “the full jurisdiction and authority of the Crown” in many “churches, vicarages, villages, and parishes” in Kent, including Hever;⁴⁰thus he was able to save some of Wiltshire’s goods for the elderly Margaret Butler, Lady Boleyn, and her granddaughter Mary, proving himself once again a friend to the Boleyns, whose chaplain he had been. “Part of the stuff and all the implements yet remain,” Tebold assured Cromwell. He had “stayed them,” on the advice of Sir Thomas Willoughby, “till the King’s further pleasure.” Willoughby himself wrote to Cromwell that very day to say he would “give Tebold his aid in taking possession of the manor of Hever, and in entertaining the old Lady Boleyn there in best wise to her comfort.”⁴¹

By the end of that year of 1539, Mary and William had come home to England, and he was back at court. In November, “young Stafford that married the Lady Carey” had been among those appointed to attend upon the Lord Admiral, the Earl of Southampton—the former Sir William FitzWilliam, who had been active in the overthrow of the Boleyns—on December 11, at St. Pierre, a mile south of the Lantern Gate at Calais, for the reception of Henry VIII’s fourth bride, Anne of Cleves, upon her arrival in Calais, en route to England. Wearing their “best array,” these lords and gentlemen escorted Anne into the town, and as she passed through the Lantern Gate, the cannon along the quayside exploded in a salute. Just inside the gate, Lady Lisle and a host of ladies and gentlewomen sank into deep curtsies as the Princess appeared. Mary Boleyn may well have been one of their number, for she was acquainted with Lady Lisle, who had danced with her in a masque during Henry VIII’s visit to Calais in 1532; they must have known each other at court before then, and it follows that they had met in recent years in Calais, William being in the Lisles’ service.

After Anne of Cleves had inspected the King’s ships in the harbor, she rode through the narrow streets of Calais to the Exchequer Palace, escorted by the Admiral and his chosen gentlemen, with William Stafford among them. And so they brought her to her lodgings, and “there attended on her daily” until she was ready to sail to Dover. William and Mary would probably have been present at the jousts held on the day after Anne’s arrival, and, with bad weather delaying the future Queen’s departure, they may also have been present at the banquets and tournaments that were subsequently organized to keep her entertained. It was not until December 26 that a fair wind blew up and the Admiral was finally able to escort the Princess on board the ship that was to take her to England. The crossing was to take seventeen hours.⁴²

It seems that Mary and William returned to England with Anne of Cleves. We can only speculate that Lord Lisle must have praised William’s good service and given him a very warm recommendation, and that Southampton acted on it; or that William’s prominence at the reception of Anne of Cleves implied that his return to royal service had already been approved. It would have been known that he needed to return to England to take charge of his wife’s inheritance, and his immediate restoration to the King’s good graces, and promotion to a sought-after place at court, might not only have been well deserved—given the abilities he was to show in royal service in the years to come—but could also have been a reward for the care he had taken of Henry’s bastard daughter since his marriage to her mother.

In January 1540, Stafford is recorded as a Gentleman Pensioner in the King’s household. It seems that his appointment had taken effect almost as soon as he arrived in England. The Gentlemen Pensioners had been refounded the year before (they had originally been instituted in 1509), as an elite guard for the King, and it was their duty to keep watch in the presence chamber. Their members were the scions of noble houses or from the greatest gentry families, and they were well paid. The equivalent of a household cavalry, they were fifty in number, and served under the captaincy of the respected courtier, diplomat, and statesman Sir Anthony Browne. They wore either dark velvet doublets or liveries of red and yellow damask, with gold medallions on chains of office around their necks, and were expected to provide their own weapons: a poleaxe, a dagger, and a sword.

There was so much demand for places among the Gentlemen Pensioners that the King had to create a separate band called the Gentlemen at Arms, but that did not satisfy the clamor, and by the end of his reign there were 150 Gentlemen Pensioners. Stafford had been very lucky to secure such a prestigious post, and to be one of the company of fifty Gentlemen Pensioners drawn up on Blackheath as the King passed through their ranks to receive Anne of Cleves on January 2, 1540.⁴³

With one half of her father’s estate now in the hands of the Crown, and the rest in the hands of executors, pending its transfer to herself as his sole surviving heiress, Mary, now probably in her early forties, may have had concerns as to where she would live on her return to England. Gentlemen Pensioners were entitled to lodgings at court only when they were on duty, based on a rotation, so it would not now have been possible for her to live there with her husband.

She may have gone to her grandmother for a short time. Old Lady Boleyn did not long survive her son, dying sometime between September 30, 1539, and March 20, 1540. An inquisition postmortem on the Earl of Wiltshire, taken on September 30, 1539, while his estate was being wound up, reveals that the elderly Lady Boleyn had been incapable of managing her affairs for the past twenty years, during which time Wiltshire had assumed control of her estates; shortly before his death, “my Lord [of Wiltshire] covenanted that my lady his mother should have 400 marks [just £130] a year out of them. The deed was made last year and enrolled in Chancery.”⁴⁴ This was a mere pittance, given her rich estates, which had enabled her son to live in wealth for years. Thus, if Lady Boleyn was still alive when Mary returned to England, it is therefore unlikely that she was able to offer her granddaughter much support.

We might infer from Sir Thomas Willoughby’s undertaking to entertain “the old Lady Boleyn [at Hever Castle] in best wise to her comfort”⁴⁵ that the King had permitted her to live out her days there. Thus Mary may have returned to Hever to succor the old lady until she died—or, if she was already dead, then Mary possibly went to stay temporarily with her father-in-law, Sir Humphrey Stafford, at Cottered. Lady Boleyn’s death, at the age of seventy-five, must have come as a merciful release,⁴⁶ and meant that Mary could look soon to inherit her grandmother’s share of the rich Ormond inheritance, and become a wealthy woman.

In July 1540, Henry would grant the manors of Hever and Seal to his fourth wife, Anne of Cleves, as part of their nullity settlement; Hever Castle would never revert back to the Boleyns, and now passed into peaceful obscurity, in which state it would remain until William Waldorf Astor purchased it in 1903 and set in train its lavish transformation.

In November 1539, when Katherine Carey was fifteen, she had been appointed, against great competition, a maid of honor to Anne of Cleves. Her great-uncle, the Duke of Norfolk, had secured similar positions for two of his other great-nieces, Katherine Howard and Mary Norris, at that time,⁴⁷ but he had not visited Calais for some time, and was probably still estranged from Mary Boleyn, so it is unlikely that Katherine’s appointment owed anything to his influence.⁴⁸ However, if Katherine was the King’s daughter, then Henry VIII himself may have ordered her appointment. Unlike her brother, Katherine was not the King’s ward, and he was not obliged to make provision for her, although, of course, if she was his child, his interest in her is easily explained; if not, he may have shown her favor for the sake of her brother or her good service to the Lady Elizabeth. But it is perhaps telling that, of all the girls of noble and gentle birth who might have been lucky enough to gain places in the new Queen’s household—and the clamor for such places was great—Katherine, who had little merit as the daughter of Henry’s former mistress and niece of his executed wife, was one of the few that were chosen. Soon afterward she was to make a good marriage to an up-and-coming courtier. This all points to Henry doing his duty as a father in providing for her.

Katherine came to court ready to serve the new Queen prior to the latter’s arrival in January 1540. It turned out that she, the daughter of one of Henry VIII’s mistresses, was to serve alongside another, for one of Anne of Cleves’s ladies-in-waiting was Elizabeth Blount, now the respectable Lady Clinton.

When, in April 1540, William Stafford, on Mary’s behalf, petitioned Thomas Cromwell for “the profits of the Ormonds’ lands in Essex,” he was probably shocked to be told, “That cannot be.” As Wiltshire’s auditor, Robert Cranewell, explained to Master Secretary, “After my lady’s [the Countess of Wiltshire’s] decease, my lord often told me that he had promised the King to make all the Ormond lands sure in fee simple to the Lady Elizabeth for default of issue male of his own body.”⁴⁹ Evidently Wiltshire was still sufficiently angry with Mary to consider depriving her of her share of the Ormond inheritance and arranging for it to go to his niece. But an unwritten promise to the King had no force in law, and it seems that Wiltshire had either had second thoughts, or just never got around to formalizing his wishes. Even so, it seems that the Crown pressed its claim, presumably in the hope that some documentation of Boleyn’s promises actually existed. As a result, Mary and William were obliged to wait three years before they could take “livery,” or possession, of her grandmother’s property.⁵⁰

It is often claimed that when her grandmother died, Mary inherited Rochford Hall in Essex and made it her home. Rochford Hall was “an important building on a grand scale,” situated four miles east of Rayleigh and three miles north of Prittlewell (the south end of which became the modern Southend-on-Sea). The hall had been built in the fifteenth century on the site of an earlier house (c.1216) by Mary Boleyn’s forebears, the Butler earls of Ormond, who owned the property until 1515, when it passed to Wiltshire’s mother, Lady Margaret Butler.⁵¹ The nearby church of St. Andrew, standing only a hundred yards from the house, was probably built by her father, Thomas Butler, 7th Earl of Ormond, whose arms appear on a stone shield above the west door.

Ormond’s Rochford Hall was extended and upgraded in Tudor times. In 1923 the Royal Commission on Historical Monuments concluded that the present fabric dates probably from 1540–50. It is unlikely, however, that the rebuilding began under the auspices of Mary Boleyn and William Stafford; it was probably Henry Carey who was responsible for ordering the works, which were carried out according to the very latest architectural fashions and building techniques.⁵²

Fragments of carved stonework found in the walls indicate that spoils from dissolved monasteries were used in the rebuilding of the house; these were perhaps acquired by William Stafford, who later, during the iconoclastic holocaust unleashed in the reign of Edward VI, would gain a bad reputation for forcibly carrying off the bells of the churches of Rochford, Ashingdon, South Shoebury, Hawkwell, and Foulness for his own benefit; he sold off three of them to raise money to repair sea walls on the nearby coast.⁵³

Rochford Hall stood in an eight-acre walled park; the northern boundary wall, with its Tudor diapered bricks, still survives today. Tradition has it that, in 1540, Mary had a circular dovecote with a thatched roof erected in a meadow to the south of the hall—but Mary was not living at the hall in 1540. The dovecote was taken down after being struck by lightning in 1888. In the latter half of the sixteenth century, Rochford Hall was turned into one of the most palatial houses in the country, and thus it remained for a century and more, but in 1760 about half of it was destroyed by a disastrous fire and either pulled down or left in a ruinous condition; in 1893 the place was said to have “a ghostly air about it, even more so than most decayed mansions.”⁵⁴ Further damage was done by German bombers in 1940. Rochford Hall was partially restored in 1987, but nevertheless, substantial parts of the house that Mary and her family knew survive today, although the great hall and chapel have long since disappeared.

Desirable property that it was, Mary could not inherit Rochford Hall until the matter of the Ormond inheritance was resolved, and she and William must have been frustrated at the delay, for gaining possession of her grandmother’s lands would have brought them considerable wealth.

However, it was not long before they came into the Boleyn inheritance, the legacy of Mary’s father. On April 15, 1540, at Hampton Court, the King granted to “William Stafford and Mary, his wife, livery [possession] of lands, the said Mary being daughter and heir of Thomas, late Earl of Wiltshire and Ormond, and kinswoman and heir of Margaret Boleyn, widow, deceased, late wife of Sir William Boleyn, deceased.” The lands in question were “the manors of Southt, alias Southtboram [Southborough, between Tunbridge Wells and Tonbridge] and Henden in Henden Park,⁵⁵ and all lands in Hever [excepting the castle] and Brasted,⁵⁶ Kent, which belonged to the said earl.”⁵⁷ These lands were worth £488 (£150,000) annually.⁵⁸

The Boleyns had long had a connection with the manor of Brasted (pronounced Braystead). Along with Tonbridge, it had been one of the manors of the Duke of Buckingham that the King retained after the duke’s execution in 1521, appointing the then Sir Thomas Boleyn a life interest in their management.⁵⁹ In 1531 the King granted the manor of Tonbridge to Boleyn, now Earl of Wiltshire, and in default to his daughter Anne. A little later Wiltshire was also given the manor of Brasted. There is no surviving record of this grant, which is known only through a subsequent grant of 1540. On Wiltshire’s death in 1539, Brasted and Tonbridge reverted to the Crown along with Hever and other lands, and the following year, Henry VIII bestowed Brasted on Sir Henry Islay. What the Staffords received from the King in April 1540 were certain detached lands in Brasted, Hever, Chiddingstone, and Sundridge, as well as the manors of Henden and Southborough in Kent.

Southborough, which had been held by Sir Thomas More before it was granted to Lord Rochford in 1535, was some distance from Hever, but Henden, at Ide Hill, the highest point in Kent, was nearby. Henry VIII had granted it to Sir Thomas Boleyn in 1516. The sixteenth century timbered manor house, with a moat that may have surrounded an earlier building, still survives, much altered; in Mary’s day it stood in a park of three hundred acres. The Staffords may have resided there for a time, but their tenure would be brief.

On April 26, 1540,⁶⁰ Katherine Carey, aged sixteen, was married to Sir Francis Knollys, aged twenty-six, a Gentleman Pensioner of Henry VIII’s household and a colleague of William Stafford. No royal grants or gifts marked the marriage, although the King’s influence may be perceived in an Act of Parliament that was passed that same year confirming the couple’s title to the manor of Rotherfield Greys, near Henley in Oxfordshire, previously held by Knollys’s father.⁶¹ It was here, at Greys Court, a fourteenth century manor house and tower with a Tudor house added on, that Katherine and Francis made their home. In 1542, Francis was elected MP for Horsham. The couple’s first child—Mary Boleyn’s first grandchild—was born in 1541 and named after the King, as was the popular custom among courtiers.⁶²

In July 1540, after Anne of Cleves’s marriage had been annulled—Henry VIII, finding her physically repellent, had refused to consummate the union—Katherine Carey transferred to the service of the King’s fifth wife, Katherine Howard.⁶³ Her aunt, Lady Rochford, was also in the new Queen’s household as a lady-in-waiting.

William Stafford must also have given satisfaction as a Gentleman Pensioner because in 1541 he was made an Esquire of the Body to Henry VIII. Prior to that, on New Year’s Day, at Greenwich Palace, he and five other gentlemen had each presented the King with two bows as New Year’s gifts, and been given 10s. (£150) each in return.⁶⁴

In October 1541, in exchange for the manor of Henden, Kent, “and the park called Henden Park, [with] lands in the parishes of Brasted, Sundridge, and Chiddingstone, Kent, and other lands sold by him to the Crown on July 5,” Henry VIII granted William Stafford, “Esquire of the Body,” the manor of Ugthorpe, near Whitby in Yorkshire, and “diverse tenements thereto belonging in Lythe,⁶⁵ Yorkshire, parcel of the late priory of Gisborne, Yorks.”⁶⁶ After exchanging Henden, Mary and William probably lived at Southborough or at one of their Kentish properties.

Stafford also received in exchange “the messuage or mansion commonly called the ‘Unicorn,’ alias ‘Unicorn’s Horn,’ in Cheapside in the parish of St. Mary le Bow, London, in tenure of John Droke,” which was part of “the possessions of the late priory of Ely; and that part of a tenement usually called the ‘Unicorne,’ alias ‘Goodcheapfield,’ in West Cheap, in the said parish of St. Mary le Bow, in tenure of Leonard Ewe, part of the possessions of the hospital of St. Mary without Bishopsgate.”⁶⁷ The Unicorn was a substantial building that stood on the corner of Cheapside and Queen Street; in Elizabethan times it became a fabric dealer’s shop—“at the sign of the Unicorn”—and in the eighteenth century it was the workshop of the engraver John Boydell. Goodcheapfield was named after the local family of Goodcheap, one of whom had been Lord Mayor of London. It is unlikely that the Staffords ever lived in these London properties, as they were rented out to Messrs. Droke and Ewe, but they would have received substantial rents from them.

Nor is it likely that Mary ever visited Ugthorpe, for William sold it almost immediately to Roland Shakerly, citizen of London.⁶⁸ William probably had a general plan to “trade up” as, hard upon the heels of the grant of exchange, the King granted him permission to alienate the properties he had received.⁶⁹ Certainly the couple got rid of other lands, because in October 1542 we find a pardon issued to William Stafford and Mary his wife, and their son-in-law Francis Knollys and Katherine his wife, for the alienation without license of two messuages (dwelling houses with outbuildings and a courtyard or garden), seven hundred acres of land, fifty acres of meadow, sixty acres of pasture, one hundred acres of furze and heath, common of pasture for a thousand sheep and 59s. 2½d (£910) rent in Fulbourn. The case was heard before Sir John Baldwin and his colleagues, justices of Common Pleas, at Westminster on October 23, and the parties were fined.⁷⁰ What this document does suggest is that Mary’s was a united family and that its members worked together for its common interests.

In 1542, Mary confirmed the transfer of the manor of Filby in Norfolk, which she had inherited from her father, to her uncle, Sir James Boleyn, having probably conveyed it to him in order to raise money; her claim to her grandmother’s estate was still in dispute. In April 1541, by Letters Patent of Henry VIII, William Stafford and “Dame Mary Carey,” his wife, had received license to alienate the manors of Roding, Great Holland, Hawkwell, Foulness Island, Great Wakering, and Rochford, Essex, to William Neville and John Hever, clerk to the Privy Seal; but they were “to be regranted to the said William and Mary, and the heirs of the body of the said William,” and if he left no issue, they were to go to “the said Mary and her heirs.” This, however, was not done until May 1543, when Mary finally received formal livery (transfer of possession) of her grandmother’s estates.⁷¹

It is said that Mary made a gift of these Essex manors to her husband between 1539 and 1542, and that they took up residence at Rochford Hall.⁷² But, as it turned out, Mary was in possession of that house for only a matter of days.

Queen Katherine Howard went to the block for crimes of adultery in February 1542. It is possible that William Stafford gave evidence against her, and against her former lover, Francis Dereham, whom she had appointed her secretary, for in November 1539, Margaret, Lady Howard, deposed “to much familiarity between Dereham and the Queen before marriage, and since the marriage has heard one Stafford say, ‘If I were as Dereham, I would never tell to die for it,’ and that ‘there was a thing that stuck upon his stomach’.”⁷³ That same month, we find this “Stafford” telling the Privy Council that he had heard “either of the [Dowager] Duchess of Norfolk or the Lady Howard that she said once in the Queen’s chamber to a lady or gentlewoman, ‘This is he [Dereham] that went into Ireland for the Queen’s sake.’ ”⁷⁴ In December, Stafford—evidently questioned again—stuck to his story.⁷⁵

Identifying this witness as William Stafford begs all sorts of questions. If it was indeed him, then we might conclude either that he gave this evidence in the hope of currying more favor with the King, or out of gratitude for his recent preferment at court; or, which is more likely, he felt that he had a moral duty to report this information—which chimes with what we know of him in later life. As we have seen, Stafford was more than a reformist—in the not too distant future, he would become the friend of John Calvin, having chosen to go into exile for the sake of his strict Protestant faith. It is entirely credible that he already held such views in 1541, when it was dangerous to profess them publicly, as they were heretical and the penalty was burning at the stake. It is also credible that Stafford collaborated with the reformists at court in bringing down the Catholic Howards.

If that were true, it was not Mary’s only family connection with the scandal. In 1541, when evidence of Queen Katherine’s infidelity was uncovered, “that bawd, Lady Rochford”⁷⁶ was discovered to have acted as her procuress and go-between. Committed to the Tower and attained for treason, she “had shown symptoms of madness till they told her she must die,”⁷⁷ but seemed lucid enough when she went to the block on May 13, 1542.

On her death, Blickling Hall passed to Mary’s uncle, Sir James Boleyn, who had been Anne Boleyn’s chancellor.⁷⁸ He died in possession of it in 1561, and was buried in the nearby church, after which Blickling came into the possession of his great-nephew, Sir Edward Clere (1536–1606).⁷⁹

These years of tragedy and loss must have blighted Mary’s life. In a short space of time she had lost her brother, sister, mother, father, grandmother, and sister-in-law. She may well have come to hate Lady Rochford after what she had done to George Boleyn, but the scandal of her crimes, and the horror of her end, must have had some impact, resurrecting painful memories of the fate of Anne and Rochford.

It seems too that, as a consequence of Anne’s fall and her own probable years abroad, Mary had little contact with her niece, Elizabeth; we know, however, that in adult life Elizabeth warmly recalled having known William Stafford when she was a child; she would no doubt have seen him about the court when he was in service there, guarding her father. We might pause to wonder if Elizabeth showed lifelong favor to her Carey cousins not only for their own sake, but on account of her affection for her aunt, Mary Boleyn. She evidently came to know and love her cousins in youth, so, even though there is no record of Mary visiting the court after Anne Boleyn’s death, or of her seeing Elizabeth, it is conceivable that they had some contact, or were in touch with each other through the good offices of Stafford.

Given Elizabeth’s enduring affection for her Boleyn relatives, and her evident belief in her mother’s innocence,⁸⁰ a belief that appears to have been instilled in childhood, probably by members of her household who had known (or been related to) Anne Boleyn, a relationship with Anne’s sister, however tenuous, may have brought her comfort. Possibly—although this can only be speculation—Mary Boleyn was one of those who imparted to the future Queen Elizabeth a sympathetic view of her mother’s conduct.

Rochford had had no children with his wife, but he may have left a natural son, another George, who was appointed Dean of Lichfield by his cousin or kinswoman, Elizabeth I. This George was a poor scholar, and it seems he received no succor from his aunt Mary, who may not even have known of his existence. The fact that he was called George—a name known to have been borne in the family only by Lord Rochford—and that he chose Henry Carey, Lord Hunsdon, whom he called his “kinsman” in his will, to be one of his executors, suggests that he was Rochford’s bastard.

Mary’s husband was to enjoy royal favor for some years to come, but in 1543 he was briefly in disgrace. At a meeting of the Privy Council at St. James’s Palace on April 5 that year, William Stafford, along with his wife’s kinsmen Sir John Clere and Thomas Clere, and a Mr. Hussey, was committed to the Fleet prison “for eating flesh on Good Friday.” On April 19 the Privy Council ordered that all these prisoners were to “have the liberty of the garden” at the prison,⁸¹ and on May 1, 1543, dismissed William Stafford, Sir John Clere and Mr. Hussey “from attendance” at council meetings.⁸²

It is likely that these misfortunes came at a difficult time, and that Mary was ill when her husband was in prison and dismissed from attendance at court. But he was not out of favor for long, and on May 15, at long last, a grant was made to “William Stafford and Mary his wife, kinswoman and heir of Lady Margaret Boleyn, widow, deceased, viz. daughter of Thomas, late Earl of Wiltshire and Ormond, son of the said Margaret,” giving them “livery [possession] of lands of the said Thomas and Margaret and of those held by Jane, late wife of Sir George Boleyn, Lord Rochford, deceased, by way of jointure.”⁸³

It had taken three years to secure livery of Mary’s inheritance, and fifteen months to secure livery of Lady Rochford’s jointure, which had been seized by the Crown on that Lady’s attainder—but the grants came too late for Mary. She was either dying, or about to suffer a fatal accident or seizure.

It is often stated—on the premise that she had come into possession of it on her grandmother’s death—that she died at Rochford Hall in Essex, a house she would have known from childhood, and where she is said to have made a home with William Stafford. But as Mary owned Rochford Hall for precisely four days, there would surely not have been time for her to take possession, and the most she could probably have managed was a visit of inspection—given that her health permitted; so it is doubtful if she ever lived there. She died on July 19, 1543,⁸⁴ leaving her eighteen-year-old son, Henry Carey, to enjoy the Butler inheritance in her stead. It is possible that her death was sudden,⁸⁵ but the cause is unknown. We might even speculate that the stresses and tragedies of the past decade had hastened her end.

In her will, Mary left William Stafford the manor of Abinger, Surrey, and messuages called Whithouse and Londons, both formerly held by “Lady Mary Carewe” in Essex,⁸⁶ together with the advowsons—the right to present a nominee to a vacant benefice—of the churches of Paglesham, Foulness, Hawkwell, and Leigh.⁸⁷

Mary’s last resting place has never been identified. The tale that she was buried somewhere within the grounds of Hever Castle⁸⁸ can be instantly dismissed on the grounds that it would have been unheard of then for someone other than a suicide to be interred in unconsecrated ground—and there is no evidence at all that Mary killed herself. It has also been suggested that she was buried in Westminster Abbey, where her children would later be laid to rest⁸⁹—but Mary died long before they found favor with Elizabeth I, and her name does not occur in the detailed records of burials within the abbey. Another claim has been made for St. George’s Chapel, Windsor, as her last resting place, but again, there are detailed records of interments and she is not among them.

Possibly she was buried in St. Andrew’s Church at Rochford, which had been built in the late fifteenth or early sixteenth century by her grandfather on the site of an earlier church where, in 1380, the future Henry IV may have married Mary de Bohun, mother of Henry V.⁹⁰ The church built by the Earl of Ormond has since been subject to much Victorian restoration, and if Mary was laid to rest there, all trace of any memorial has disappeared. There would be no record of her burial as the parish registers only go back as far as the seventeenth century. However, as we do not know where she was residing at the time of her death, we can only speculate where she was laid to rest.

It would be in keeping that Mary Boleyn was buried quietly and without fanfares, in peaceful obscurity, as she had lived her last years. Probably this was what she had wanted all along. She did not die an infamous woman—no one commented on her end—and even though her affair with Henry VIII had long since become public knowledge at court and beyond, circumspection had nevertheless been maintained. Certainly it has now surely been established beyond doubt that Mary was never the great and infamous whore described by Rodolfo Pio and, perhaps, François I. The sheer lack of evidence is testimony to that. She probably had little choice in becoming the mistress of two kings, and barely anything is known about her supposedly scandelous relations with them—yet, to this day, she enjoys posthumous notoriety as the “hackney” whom the King of France boasted of riding, and who thereafter happily hopped from bed to bed until she was seduced by the King of England, at whose court she won infamy for a brief, glittering spell. It is time to lay that myth to rest.

Unlike her sister, Mary had not tempted fate too far. There is some irony in this, as Anne had been the one who had flown high and won all the plaudits, while Mary, for much of her life, had done the “wrong” things, and had probably been a disappointment to her ambitious family, who saw her as a failure. But Mary’s letter to Cromwell proves that she had learned what really mattered in life. Where Anne suffered much unhappiness and a cataclysmic fall, Mary—in the end—found love and stability. It has been said, with truth, that “there was not in her the stuff of tragedy; she passes out of history with a happy ending,” married to the man she loved.⁹¹ All things considered, she had managed rather well. And of all the three Boleyn siblings, she alone lived into middle age and died in her bed.