Appendix I

Of Her Grace’s Kin

When Mary died, all that William Stafford inherited from her was the manor of Abinger in Surrey, which he sold in the early 1550s.¹ In the month of her death, July 1543, at the head of a hundred foot soldiers he himself had furnished, he began four months’ military service in France, when Henry VIII took Boulogne,² and in 1545 he fought under Edward Seymour, Earl of Hertford, when the English invaded and laid waste southern Scotland. There, he distinguished himself by gaining for the King “two prizes, viz., theFrançois of Dieppe and the other Scottish ship,” which were “taken by Mr. Stafford.”³ It was probably for this that he was knighted, on September 23 that year.

Having converted to the Protestant faith—which may have come about as a result of his connection with the reformist Boleyns, if not before—William found favor under his old commanding officer, Edward Seymour, when the latter became Duke of Somerset and Lord Protector during the minority of Henry VIII’s heir, Edward VI. Stafford sat in the new king’s first Parliament in 1547. Edward retained him as a Gentleman Pensioner, and he became the young monarch’s standard bearer. He seems not to have suffered as a result of Somerset’s fall in 1549; in 1550, after John Dudley, Duke of Northumberland, had seized power, Stafford was granted an annuity of £100 (£20,000) in recognition of his good service to Henry VIII, and entrusted with securely conveying three noble French hostages from Dover to London. He seems to have had no problem in shifting his allegiance, and voluntarily reported to Northumberland the words of a servant who had spoken out in defense of the fallen Somerset.

In 1551, Stafford accompanied Edward, Lord Clinton (Elizabeth Blount’s widower), to Paris to represent Edward VI at the christening of a son of Henri II of France, and when he returned to England, he took part in a great tournament held at court to mark the new year of 1552. But his career foundered after he was involved in a fight with Adrian Poynings, a fellow soldier, in November 1552, which resulted in Stafford being briefly incarcerated—yet again—in the Fleet prison in London. That cost him the Privy Council’s respect and confidence.

William apparently mourned Mary for nearly nine years. It was not until 1552 that he remarried, his bride being fifteen-year-old Dorothy Stafford, a distant connection; she was one of the fourteen children of Henry, Baron Stafford, by Ursula Pole. Ursula was the granddaughter of Edward Stafford, Duke of Buckingham, a descendant of King Edward III who had been executed for treason in 1521; her mother had been Margaret Pole, Countess of Salisbury, a niece of Edward IV and Richard III and therefore also of the old Plantagenet royal blood; in 1541 the countess, at the ripe age of sixty-seven, had been executed by Henry VIII simply because he saw her as a threat to his throne. Her father, George, Duke of Clarence, had been attaindered for treason and executed in the Tower of London—probably drowned in a butt of Malmsey wine—in 1478.

Aside from her dangerous pedigree, Dorothy had no dowry to speak of, and we might wonder why William married her. He was now a staunch Protestant, while many members of her family were devout Catholics. Her grandfather, grandmother, great-grandfather, and uncle had been executed for treason, and another uncle, Cardinal Reginald Pole, had been an exile in Italy since speaking out against Henry VIII’s marriage to Anne Boleyn. We might conclude, therefore, that this outwardly unsuitable union was yet another love match, as William’s marriage to Mary Boleyn had been, and perhaps, again, an impulsive one.

They had little else to offer each other. William had incurred increasing debts, and in 1552 he had exchanged a royal annuity he had been granted for a cash payment of £900 (£180,500) to avoid financial embarrassment.

William and Dorothy had three sons and two daughters: the eldest son, Sir Edward Stafford, served for a time as England’s ambassador in Paris, while the eldest daughter, Elizabeth, became Lady of the Bedchamber to Elizabeth I.

When Henry VIII’s daughter Mary, a staunch Catholic, succeeded to the throne in 1553 and outlawed the Protestant religion, William Stafford quickly realized that exile was preferable to persecution. In March 1554 he left England and settled in Geneva, Switzerland, with his wife and children, his sister, a cousin, and his servants. Geneva was an obvious choice, because it was where the Lutheran theologian and reformer John Calvin had founded a theocracy, controlling the city through his College of Pastors and Doctors and his Court of Discipline. Calvin’s stern brand of religious doctrine and his moral severity must have appealed to Stafford. Calling himself “Lord Rochford,” a title to which he had no right, he became involved in the affairs of Geneva, and was nearly killed in the fighting during the uprising in 1555 that confirmed Calvin’s autocracy.

By then, with the fires of Smithfield alight in England, so many English Protestants had sought refuge in the city that an English congregation was set up. Stafford became a member, and his son John was the first infant to be baptized into it, on January 4, 1556, with John Calvin standing as godfather.

William survived Mary Boleyn by thirteen years, dying on May 5, 1556, in Geneva. Ten days later, in ignorance of his death, the Privy Council in England ordered that no payment of money was to be sent abroad to him. Calvin took custody of little John Stafford and forbade the child’s mother to leave Geneva with him. Only after she had appealed to her brother-in-law, Sir Robert Stafford, and he had threatened to invoke aid from the French, did Calvin back down. Dorothy took her family to Basel, where she lived until 1559, when Elizabeth I, her distant cousin, now having ascended the throne, she knew it was safe to return to England.

Dorothy may have been the “Mistress Stafford” who was one of four gentlewomen who had attended Elizabeth during her imprisonment in the Tower in 1554.⁴ That would account for the established bond between herself and the new Queen, for Elizabeth herself sent Dorothy assistance to aid her return home in August 1559, and in 1563 made her Mistress of the Robes, always treating her as a friend and kinswoman, the widow of her uncle, William Stafford, whom she remembered having known as a child. She would have met him during her visits to court in the 1540s, when she would also have had opportunities to get to know her Carey cousins—and perhaps her aunt, Mary Boleyn.

Around 1544, Elizabeth was painted in a dynastic family group commissioned by Henry VIII, which now hangs at Hampton Court Palace. She is wearing a pendant in the form of an A that must have belonged to Anne Boleyn, who favored pendants displaying her initials: three of them feature in portraits of her. The fact that, by the age of ten or eleven, Elizabeth had formed such a positive view of her mother (whose name was not supposed to be mentioned in her presence) that she was prepared publicly to display her connection with her, in defiance of her father, points to her having been fed sympathetic opinions about Anne. There were Boleyn connections in Elizabeth’s household, among them her governess, Katherine Champernowne (later Mrs. Astley), who might have voiced these, but it is also possible that Elizabeth had been given information about her mother by Mary Boleyn and her children, or even by William Stafford, who shared Anne Boleyn’s passion for reform. That would have been one reason why she showed her Carey cousins such warmth. The fact that there is no record of her ever seeing Mary after 1534 does not mean that they did not meet again.

Dorothy never remarried—which, again, might argue that her marriage to William had been a love match. She would serve the Queen faithfully for four decades and survive her by seventeen months, dying in 1604. The epitaph on her plain tomb in St. Margaret’s Church, Westminster, records that she served Queen Elizabeth “forty years lying in her bedchamber, esteemed of her, loved of all, doing good all she could to everybody, never hurt any, a continual remembrancer of the sues of the poor.”

This was the lady whom William Stafford had chosen as his second wife, marrying her against the odds, probably for love, as he had Mary Boleyn. That he mourned Mary for nearly a decade—and then paid her memory the compliment of marrying yet again where his heart dictated—is surely testimony to his genuine feelings for her, and the happiness of their union. It speaks volumes for Stafford’s own character that he should win such a prize as Dorothy, and that, in an age that put a high premium on dynastic advantage, he should have twice spurned material gains in order to marry the lady of his choice.

Henry VIII, as Henry Carey’s guardian, made suitable provision for his ward; this is not “inexplicable,”⁵ as has been asserted, because, as King, he had a duty to act in loco parentis, looking to the boy’s welfare and his future. As we have seen, he also provided for Katherine Carey, which may be more significant.⁶ By 1545, Henry Carey was a member of the King’s household,⁷ and that same year, Henry VIII found a bride for him: Anne, the sixteen-year-old daughter of Sir Thomas Morgan of Arkstone, Herefordshire, a relatively obscure Welsh gentleman. They were married on May 21, 1545.⁸ Not for Carey a grand match with the daughter of a duke, as had been arranged for Henry Fitzroy—which is further proof that Carey was not the King’s son. Indeed, this marriage with Anne Morgan seems hardly to have been commensurate with the young man’s status as a royal ward with a substantial landed inheritance. Nor did Henry VIII bestow any special gifts or favors on his ward, who grew up supported only by a modest income.⁹

The Careys were a prolific family, and Henry and Anne were to have twelve children—nine sons and three daughters; interestingly, none was given the name Mary, in honor of Henry’s mother, which might suggest that he was not overkeen on preserving her memory for posterity. Reared under Anne Boleyn’s auspices, and then the King’s, he may have been inculcated with the wisdom that Mary was best consigned to anonymity, given the compromising nature of her affair with Henry.

Henry Carey recorded details of his family in a copy of Froissart’s Chronicles.¹⁰ The Carey offspring were called by contemporaries “the tribe of Dan,”¹¹ which has been seen as a possible allusion to their being descended from Henry VIII.¹² In the Bible, Dan was the son of Jacob by his wife’s handmaid, Bilhah, and possibly a comparison was being drawn with Mary Boleyn, although she had never been a “handmaid” to Katherine of Aragon. But there is another comparison to be drawn: the tribe of Dan sent more men to war than any other of the tribes of Israel, and did not receive their rightful inheritance, just as Henry Carey and his sons felt that he was never properly rewarded by Elizabeth for his decades of loyal service.¹³ This is probably the real basis for the nickname. Certainly it weighs lightly against the other evidence for William Carey’s paternity.

Henry Carey and Anne Morgan would be married for over fifty years, and the epitaph that she and their eldest son were to place on Henry’s tomb describes him as “the best of fathers and dearest of husbands”—notwithstanding his infidelities over the years.

In March 1546, Carey came of age, and inherited all the lands given by the King to his father in Buckinghamshire, Essex, Hampshire, and Wiltshire, including the borough of Buckingham, as well as those left to him by his mother. Rochford Hall was part of that inheritance. Late that year, aged only twenty-one, he secured his election as Member of Parliament for Buckingham, a seat he would hold four times. He sat in that Parliament with his stepfather, Sir William Stafford, and his brother-in-law, Sir Francis Knollys. He was the first of eleven members of Parliament to live at Rochford Hall.¹⁴

Henry Carey seems not to have had any special attachment to Rochford Hall. He set in train restoration works, then sold the manor and estate around 1552 to Richard, Lord Rich, who was greatly to enlarge the house.¹⁵ By coincidence, Rich’s great-grandson was to marry Penelope Devereux, Mary Boleyn’s great-granddaughter.

Henry Carey would probably have come to know his cousin, the future Elizabeth I, when he was serving in Henry VIII’s household, if he had not been acquainted with her before, when he was the King’s ward. An entry in Elizabeth’s Hatfield accounts for 1551–52 shows that he was already one of her circle, for it records that she made a gift of money “at the christening of Mr. Carey’s child.”¹⁶ That child was probably his daughter Philadelphia, born around 1552, who married Thomas, 10th Baron Scrope; she and her older sister, Katherine, Countess of Nottingham, became Elizabeth’s favored maids of honor when she was Queen.¹⁷

The accession of Elizabeth I in November 1558 dramatically changed the lives of Mary’s children. Both were immediately made welcome at court, where they were to enjoy glittering careers. Their cousin Elizabeth held them in great affection, leading some writers to suggest that this may—or must—have been because one or both of them were in fact her siblings,¹⁸ but as her cousins, they were her closest blood relatives aside from her cousinly rivals on her father’s side: Mary, Queen of Scots; Margaret Douglas, Countess of Lennox; Lady Katherine Grey; and Lady Mary Grey; all of whom were too near in blood to the throne for comfort and could never be trusted. The Carey siblings, apart from being no dynastic threat, were unfailingly loyal, and this in itself would account for Elizabeth’s love for them, and for the lavish funerals in Westminster Abbey with which she later provided them.¹⁹

The acknowledged existence of Carey half siblings would undoubtedly have been a major embarrassment to Queen Elizabeth, and could have compromised the legitimacy of her title,²⁰ for she had been declared illegitimate in 1536 on the grounds that her parents’ marriage had never been lawful on account of Henry VIII’s affair with Mary Boleyn having created a bar to his marriage to her sister Anne, and that ruling had never been reversed. In the eyes of Catholic Europe, the new Queen was a bastard, a heretic, and a usurper. Unlike her half sister, Mary I, Elizabeth, on her ministers’ advice, had not, upon her accession, had her parents’ marriage declared good and valid. Thus she carried the stain of bastardy with her all her life. It would therefore have been politically—and personally—disadvantageous for Katherine to have been openly acknowledged as Henry VIII’s natural child by Mary Boleyn, living proof of the impediment to Elizabeth’s mother’s marriage. Such a revelation would have drawn unwelcome attention to the Queen’s bastard status at a time when her throne was insecure; it would have exposed Henry VIII’s hypocrisy in pursuing an annulment of his marriage to Katherine of Aragon, and it could have undermined the foundations of the English Reformation, and the Protestant Anglican settlement of 1559 that built upon it.

It would be wrong, however, to compare the Careys’ position to that of Edward Stafford, Duke of Buckingham, who had been executed for treason in 1521 for, among other things, “openly boasting his descent from King Edward III,” which, it has been said, was “not a mistake Mary’s children were to repeat.”²¹ Buckingham had been of legitimate royal descent, and therefore posed a real dynastic threat to Henry VIII; but no one could ever claim that Katherine and Henry Carey had any kind of claim to the throne or represented a similar threat. Even if the Careys were Henry VIII’s children, they could never have challenged Elizabeth’s position.

If Henry had been Katherine Carey’s father, the one person who would surely have known about it was Elizabeth herself, who grew up to be very close to Katherine, as she did to her other bastard half sister, Etheldreda, and who would have maintained strict discretion, referring to Katherine simply as her kinswoman. Katherine herself may well have preferred to keep her paternity a secret to avoid further sullying her mother’s memory; and it is certain that she would never have done anything that undermined her cousin’s throne.

Elizabeth’s closeness to the Careys can be explained by their kinship. In a letter written in 1579, she referred to Henry Carey as “our cousin of Hunsdon”;²² she signed letters to Katherine Carey as “your loving cousin,”²³ and Katherine was called the “kinswoman and good servant” of the Queen by a correspondent.²⁴ Mary, Queen of Scots, in a letter to Elizabeth I,²⁵ referred to “one of the Knollyses”—that is, one of Sir Francis’s children by Katherine Carey—as “your relation.” Had Katherine been Henry VIII’s daughter, her children would have been Queen Mary’s own cousins, and therefore her relations too. Mary freely acknowledged her own bastard half siblings, and at least one historian has wondered why she never made political capital out of the blood relationship between her rival Elizabeth I and her Carey cousins.²⁶ But if Katherine Carey had been Elizabeth’s half sister, the Queen of Scots was probably never aware of it.

In the month of Elizabeth’s accession, November 1558, Henry Carey was knighted. On January 13, 1559, his fortunes changed dramatically when the Queen raised him to the peerage as Baron Hunsdon, granting him the royal palace of Hunsdon House in Hertfordshire, where she herself had resided at various times during her childhood, and lands in Hertfordshire, Kent, and Hampshire worth a princely £4,000²⁷ (£681,000) a year to “maintain his rank.”²⁸ There is no evidence to support the assertion²⁹ that Henry Carey had spent his early years at Hunsdon; it was a royal property, and Elizabeth now had it in her gift. Henry’s uncle, John Carey, a Groom of Henry VIII’s Privy Chamber, had been appointed paymaster and overseer of the King’s works there in 1537–38.³⁰

Queen Elizabeth was always to show great affection and trust for Lord Hunsdon: in 1560 she appointed him Master of the Queen’s Hawks, and in 1561 she made him a Knight of the Garter. The following year, when Elizabeth was thought to be dying of smallpox, it was Hunsdon who called in a German physician, and then, when that physician had given up hope, persuaded him to persevere—some said at the point of a dagger. From what she believed to be her deathbed, Elizabeth particularly commended Hunsdon to the kindness of her Privy Council.³¹ He was entrusted with important diplomatic missions, such as when he was sent to convey the insignia of the Garter to Charles IX of France in 1564, and for many years, alongside his more able peers, William Cecil, later Lord Burghley; Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, the Queen’s favorite; and, later, Sir Francis Walsingham, he was at the forefront of state affairs.

Those years saw him well endowed with offices: Privy Councillor (1577), Captain of the Gentlemen Pensioners, the Queen’s personal bodyguard (1583), Lord Chamberlain (1585), Lord Warden General of the Northern Marches (1587), Chief Justice in Eyre south of the River Trent (1589), High Steward of Ipswich and Colchester, Chief Justice of the Queen’s Army (1591), and High Steward of Oxford (1592). He was also Lord Lieutenant of Norfolk and Sussex, and a member of that legal elite, the Inner Temple, along with his kinsmen Thomas Howard, 4th Duke of Norfolk, and Charles, Lord Howard of Effingham. However, the Queen never advanced him beyond the rank of a baron, and the two titles he wanted all his life were never to be his: those of Earl of Wiltshire and Ormond, which had been borne by his grandfather, Thomas Boleyn, to whom he always insisted he was rightfully co-heir. But Elizabeth remained deaf to his pleas.

The post of Lord Chamberlain was an important one, for it put Hunsdon at the head of the Queen’s household and in command of the conduct of the court.³² It also ensured that he would have the benefit of “the continual presence of her Majesty, to take any advantage of time and occasion for having of suits”;³³ this meant that he was in an ideal position to exercise the very lucrative privilege of patronage. Yet, despite the honors heaped on him, Hunsdon was never a wealthy man, for he had spent several thousand pounds of his patrimony in Elizabeth’s service, much of it for her relief during her imprisonment in the Tower in Queen Mary’s reign; he was not greedy, and his income, the fruit of Elizabeth’s favor, was never exorbitant;³⁴ moreover, he had a large family to support. Thus he was perennially short of money.

Hunsdon was “very choleric but not malicious,” a plain main “of an honest stout heart,” whose “custom in swearing and obscenity in speech made him seem a worse Christian than he was”;³⁵ but the Queen liked that in him, and his bluntness. She took it well when, in 1572, angry at her hesitation over sending the Duke of Norfolk, who had been found guilty of treason, to the scaffold, Hunsdon castigated her: “It is small policy, not worthy to be termed mercy, to be so careless of weighty matters that touch the quick so near!” She knew him to be “a fast man to his prince, and firm to his friends and servants, such a one that upon occasion would have fought for his prince and country.”³⁶ His loyalty to the Queen was unflinchingly staunch.

Elizabeth liked the fact that Hunsdon never involved himself in factional politics. In fact, there were long periods when he rarely visited the court, being often deployed far away on his duties, and when he did go there, he was regarded with fear and suspicion by many courtiers. His innate bluntness and lack of tact—traits he shared with his grandfather, Thomas Boleyn—did not endear him to them, and he was never popular. His soldiers, however, idolized and respected him. “He loved sword-and-buckler men, and such as our fathers were wont to call ‘men of their hands,’ of which sort he had many brave gentlemen that followed him; yet [he was] not taken for a popular or dangerous person.”³⁷

A distinguished soldier, a good jouster, and a “valiant man,”³⁸ Hunsdon was appointed Governor of Berwick in 1568, retaining the post for twenty years. That year, he was in York as one of the English commissioners at the trial of Mary, Queen of Scots, and Elizabeth proposed his eldest son, George Carey, as a putative husband for Mary, who had fled to England some months earlier and been taken into custody, as she posed a great danger to Queen Elizabeth’s security. This “remarkable” proposal has been seen as indicating that George Carey must have had royal blood to be considered a suitable match for the Queen of Scots,³⁹ but only four years earlier, Elizabeth had proposed Sir Robert Dudley, her Master of Horse, as a bridegroom for Mary, and he was certainly not of royal blood.

As Lieutenant General of the Queen’s forces in the north, Hunsdon was instrumental in suppressing the Northern Rebellion of 1569–70, one of the most dangerous crises of Elizabeth’s reign; in February 1570; although heavily outnumbered, he decisively defeated the rebel army under Leonard Dacre, and chased the latter over the Scottish border. As he himself put it, it was “the proudest charge, upon my shot, that ever I saw.”⁴⁰ When Elizabeth was given the news, she added a note in her own hand to the official letter of congratulation:

I doubt much, my Harry, whether that the victory were given me, more joyed me, or that you were by God appointed the instrument of my glory; and I assure you that, for my country’s good, the first might suffice; but for my heart’s contentation, the second pleased me … Your loving kinswoman, Elizabeth R.⁴¹

The next year, Hunsdon was made warden of the East Marches of the Scottish border, and played a key role in striving to keep Scotland peaceful during the turbulent period of regencies that followed the flight of the deposed Mary, Queen of Scots, to England. In time, he became Captain General of all the English forces defending the northern border.

Hunsdon was not a faithful husband. He kept at least two successive mistresses, and fathered several bastards. While posted in the North, he lived with a woman who later married one Hodson; she bore him a son, Valentine Carey, who was to enjoy a successful career as a soldier under his father’s command before becoming Bishop of Exeter. There is a suggestion, in an anonymous doggerel of the period, that Hunsdon underwent mercury (quicksilver) treatment for venereal disease:

Chamberlain, Chamberlain,

He’s of her Grace’s kin,

Fool hath he ever been

With his Joan Silverpin:

She makes his cockscomb thin

And quake in every limb;

Quicksilver is in his head

But his wit’s dull as lead

—Lord, for thy pity!⁴²

When the threat of the Spanish Armada was looming in 1588, Hunsdon was summoned south to command a force of 36,000 men at Tilbury Fort, and was expressly enrolled by the Queen on July 20 as Lieutenant, Principal Captain, and Governor of the Army “for the defense and security of our own Royal Person”;⁴³ in this capacity, he was present on the day she went to Tilbury to rally her troops and deliver her famous, inspired Armada speech. “He had the charge of the Queen’s person both in the court and in the camp at Tilbury.”⁴⁴ In 1590, Hunsdon was appointed joint Earl Marshal of England with William Cecil, Lord Burghley, and Admiral Charles, Lord Howard of Effingham. Two years later he was one of the commissioners who tried Sir John Perrot, the reputed “bastard son” of Henry VIII.

Hunsdon was not always in Elizabeth’s good books. When he once outstayed his leave of absence from court, the Queen became incandescent with rage, and exploded to his son: “God’s wounds! We will set him by the feet and set another in his place if he dallies with us thus, for we will not be thus dallied with withal!”⁴⁵ The storm soon blew over, though, for Elizabeth could not stay angry with her cousin for long.

Hunsdon shared with his fellow nobles the contemporary passion for collecting exotic plants and medicinal herbs.⁴⁶ He was a patron of the painter Nicholas Hilliard, and it was he who commissioned one of that artist’s finest miniatures of Elizabeth I, which shows her seated on a chair playing a lute.⁴⁷ As Lord Chamberlain, carrying his white staff of office, he is depicted posthumously, walking before the Queen’s chariot in a painting of c. 1601, attributed to Robert Peake, which shows her being carried in procession to Blackfriars; it is now at Sherborne Castle.⁴⁸

As Lord Chamberlain, it was Hunsdon’s responsibility to arrange masques, plays, and other entertainments for the Queen. He clearly had a great love of the theater, and following in the steps of Elizabeth’s favorite, the Earl of Leicester, and other noblemen, he gave his name and his patronage to a company of players, becoming, in 1594, the first patron of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, among whom were such luminaries as William Shakespeare and the actors Richard Burbage, Thomas Pope, and William Kemp. It was, initially, a political appointment, because, in the wake of Shakespeare’s controversial Titus Andronicus, these actors were regarded by the Privy Council as seditious, and the loyal Hunsdon was seen as the right man to keep them in check—as he did.⁴⁹ Shakespeare immortalized him as Philostrate, Master of the Revels to King Theseus, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, an uncontentious play written to please his patron. He also celebrated Hunsdon’s great victory over the Northern rebels in 1569 in Henry IV, Part 1.⁵⁰

Hunsdon’s company performed at the Theatre in Shoreditch, the first purpose-built London theater;⁵¹ under his patronage they produced many of Shakespeare’s greatest plays and, in 1599, built the Globe Theatre in Southwark. Sadly, Hunsdon did not live to see this.

As Lord Chamberlain, Hunsdon was also in charge of the Queen’s Players, and through them, around 1592, he met Emilia (or Aemilia) Bassano, the gifted daughter of Baptista Bassano, musician to Henry VIII and Elizabeth I. The beautiful Emilia, whom A. L. Rowse once identified as the “Dark Lady” of Shakespeare’s sonnets,⁵² became the mistress of Hunsdon in his old age. His junior by forty-four years, she was an accomplished player on the virginals and, in publishing a book of religious verse, Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum, she became the first professional female English poet. After Hunsdon’s death, she told the astrologer and reputed magician Dr. Simon Forman that she had been “maintained in great pride” by her aging lover, who “loved her well” and was generous to her with money and jewels. Hunsdon even got her pregnant, and, to maintain discretion, “she was for color married to a minstrel,” an Italian called Alfonse Lanier (or Lanyer), with whom she was reputedly unhappy. The boy she bore in 1593 was called Henry Lanier, and his doting father settled on Emilia a life annuity of £40 (£5,000).⁵³ Henry Lanier would grow up to become a court musician to King Charles I.⁵⁴

Hunsdon had always lived in hope that the Queen would bestow on him the earldoms of Wiltshire and Ormond, which had been borne by his grandfather and earlier forebears. There is a story that, as he lay dying on July 23, 1596, in his lodgings at Somerset House (of which he was keeper) in London, Elizabeth “gave him a gracious visit” and caused a patent creating him Earl of Wiltshire, and the robes she had had made for him, to be laid on his deathbed. But Hunsdon “could dissemble neither well nor sick.”

“Madam,” was his characteristically blunt response, “seeing you counted me not worthy of this honor while I was living, I count myself unworthy of it now I am dying.”⁵⁵ His death—coming within a week of that of his brother-in-law, Sir Francis Knollys—plunged Elizabeth into a melancholy mood.

Lord Hunsdon was buried in a princely tomb in St. John the Baptist’s Chapel in Westminster Abbey⁵⁶ that—according to the inscription thereon—was built by his widow, Anne, and his heir, George Carey.⁵⁷ It was not, as some writers claim, paid for by the normally parsimonious Queen,⁵⁸ although she did pay out £800 (£80,500) for his obsequies,⁵⁹ which demonstrates how deeply she held him in affection. At thirty-six feet in height, his monument was—and remains—the highest in the abbey, and it is certainly one of the grandest. It was constructed of marble and alabaster, painted in black and white and then gilded, with a sarcophagus in an arched recess framed by classical columns, trophies, pedestals, obelisks, and heraldic shields displaying the Boleyn bull and falcon, all crafted in the Italian style by an unknown sculptor. The underside of the arch was paneled with Tudor roses, as in Queen Elizabeth’s own tomb, and in the center are prominently displayed the Carey arms, surmounted by domed and balustraded pavilion supporting a swan.⁶⁰ All that was omitted was an effigy. The heading of the inscription reads Sepulturae Familiae de Hunsdon, Consecratum, and it has been pointed out that the use of the name Hunsdon rather than Carey is “striking,”⁶¹ although in fact members of the peerage were commonly referred to by their titles. Hunsdon’s tomb has been called “an overwhelming example of Elizabethan monumental art”⁶² and “an unabashed celebration of worldliness,”⁶³ and some have seen it as a monument to an unacknowledged prince. That, of course, is unlikely.

Seven of Lord Hunsdon’s children survived him. He was succeeded in his title by his eldest son, George Carey, who died in 1603, the same year as Elizabeth I. The next son, John, then became the 3rd Baron Hunsdon. He died in 1617, when his son Henry took the title. It was for Henry that James I revived the title of Viscount Rochford in 1621. Henry was succeeded in 1666 by his son John, who died without male heirs in 1677, when the titles Baron Hunsdon and Viscount Rochford became extinct.

Legend long had it that Katherine Carey, Countess of Nottingham, Hunsdon’s eldest daughter, withheld from Queen Elizabeth the famous “Essex ring,” which the Queen had given to her favorite, Robert Devereux, declaring that if ever he found himself in trouble, he was to send it to her. Accordingly, when Essex was sent to the Tower on a charge of treason in 1600, he is said to have contrived to send the ring to his cousin, Lady Nottingham, with a message begging her to take it to the Queen, but his enemy, Robert Cecil, dissuaded her, with the result that Essex perished on the block. When Lady Nottingham was on her deathbed, in February 1603, she is said to have confessed all to the Queen, who had hitherto been a close friend.

“God may forgive you, but I never can,” Elizabeth is supposed to have replied,⁶⁴ angrily taking the dying woman by the shoulders and shaking her in her bed.

A ring that Elizabeth had given Essex did exist, and three centuries after her death it was placed under glass at the side of her tomb; it is now in the Norman Undercroft Museum in Westminster Abbey. The rest of the tale is nothing but a legend, and Elizabeth sincerely mourned Lady Nottingham, whose death in February 1603 is thought to have hastened the Queen’s own end.

The Careys played a pivotal role in the events surrounding the finale to the Tudor dynasty and the accession of the Stuarts. Two of Mary Boleyn’s grandchildren—Robert Carey, later Earl of Monmouth, and Philadelphia Carey, Lady Scrope—supported the ailing Queen Elizabeth in her last illness. Another legend involving a ring had it that when the Virgin Queen finally died at Richmond Palace in March 1603, Lady Scrope removed her coronation ring from her finger and dropped it from a window of the gatehouse to Robert Carey, who was waiting on his horse below, ready to ride north to Scotland to bring King James VI news—and proof—of his accession. Of course, the Queen did not die in the gatehouse, as the legend claims, and the ring was sawed from her finger while she still lived, but Carey certainly bore it to Edinburgh, having—as we may infer from his own account—acquired it by stealth.⁶⁵

According to her memorial plaque in Westminster Abbey, Katherine Carey and Francis Knollys had sixteen children—eight boys and eight girls—of whom at least eleven survived infancy. Only fifteen are shown in effigy as kneeling weepers on their parents’ magnificent but empty tomb at Rotherfield Greys, built in memory of Francis and Katherine by their son William in 1605. There are seven sons on one side, seven daughters on the other, and an infant lying beside the effigy of its mother.

The births of the children—who may well have been Henry VIII’s grandchildren—were recorded “in order” by Knollys himself in his Latin dictionary;⁶⁶ he listed fourteen children: eight sons and six daughters, and the last to be recorded was Dudley, born in 1562, the only one of the brood who is known to have died young, being “killed” in the year of his birth. It is almost certain that he is the infant lying with the recumbent figure of Katherine Carey at Rotherfield Greys.⁶⁷

So how can we account for the missing daughter? The Westminster Abbey plaque is likely to be correct, as it was mentioned by William Camden in his memorial of Westminster Abbey in 1600, and had probably been in place long before Knollys’s death in 1596.⁶⁸ Probably the unnamed daughter died at birth, or was stillborn—reason enough for her father not to list her in his diary. Some modern genealogists claim that there was a daughter called Cecilia who served Elizabeth I, but there is no mention of her in the Knollys family papers. It would appear that she has been confused with her sister Elizabeth, whose portrait bore an incorrect inscription in the seventeenth century.⁶⁹

Unlike her brother, Katherine called one of her daughters (the eldest) Mary, almost certainly in honor of her mother, and another was called Anne, perhaps after her aunt, Anne Boleyn. One son was called William, probably after William Stafford, suggesting that the latter had become a much-loved stepfather.

After Edward VI came to the throne in 1547, Francis Knollys distinguished himself in the war against the Scots, and for this he was knighted by the King’s uncle, Lord Protector Somerset. A staunch Calvinist, Knollys was forced—like his stepfather-in-law, William Stafford, to flee abroad when Queen Mary I began burning Protestants for heresy. Katherine followed him before June 1557; there is a gap of nearly three years between pregnancies, which suggests that they were apart for a considerable time. At least five of their children went with them. When Katherine left England, her “loving cousin,” the future Elizabeth I, wrote a sad letter of farewell, and signed it “cor rotto” (broken heart).⁷⁰ This is evidence that the two women had already become close and laid the enduring foundations of future friendship. The shared bond of religion had surely brought them closer in the difficult days of Bloody Mary’s reign, and Elizabeth’s assurance that she would wait “with joy” for Katherine’s “short return” betrays her hope that her sister’s rule would not last long.

On Elizabeth’s accession in 1558, the Knollyses deemed it safe to return home, and Sir Francis was made a Privy Councillor, Vice Chamberlain of the Queen’s household, and Governor of Portsmouth. Amidst fierce competition for places at court, Katherine was appointed a Lady of the Privy Chamber, alongside her sister-in-law, Anne Morgan; her nieces, Katherine and Philadelphia Carey, were serving as maids of honor. The new queen had a policy of advancing her Boleyn relatives, but only on their merits; she liked Katherine for herself, and the Carey family were her closest blood relations on her mother’s side, toward whom she always behaved with far more familiarity than with other members of her court. The Knollys children, like their cousins, the young Careys, were all welcomed at Elizabeth’s court, and many of them made good careers or marriages there, some of the daughters waiting upon the Queen. They all basked in her favor, and may have been substitutes for the grandchildren she never had.⁷¹

Elizabeth “loved Lady Knollys above all other women in the world.”⁷² Katherine had an attractive personality, being graced with “wit and counsel sound” and “a mind so clean [and] devoid of guile.”⁷³ In 1560, Elizabeth granted her, jointly with her son Robert, the manor of Taunton for life. After the death of Elizabeth’s beloved former governess, Katherine Astley, in 1565, Katherine Carey became chief Lady of the Bedchamber to the Queen, with whom she was “in favor, above the common sort,” according to Thomas Newton, who published An Epitaph upon the Worthy and Honourable Lady, the Lady Knowles in 1569. She was given “some of the most expensive presents Elizabeth ever gave,”⁷⁴ and entrusted with the safekeeping of gifts presented to her mistress.⁷⁵ However, Elizabeth’s love for Katherine was marred by selfishness: she wanted her in constant attendance, regardless of the needs of her cousin and her family; and the strain of this, balanced with the demands of a large brood of children, often drove Katherine to “weep for unkindness.”⁷⁶

To make things worse, during the first decade of her reign, Elizabeth kept Sir Francis Knollys busy with diplomatic missions. In May 1568, when the deposed Mary, Queen of Scots, fled to England and was placed under house arrest, he was appointed her custodian. During the year that she was in his charge, he did his best to convert the Catholic Mary to Calvinist doctrines, but was ordered to desist by Elizabeth. Generally, though, he got on well with the latter, despite his poor opinion of her statesmanship, which he wisely took care to conceal.

Knollys had pleaded to be allowed to take his wife with him when he was sent north to take charge of Mary in 1568, but Elizabeth had refused to be parted from her. Late that year, learning that Katherine had fallen ill with a fever, he begged in vain to be recalled. His repeated requests for leave of absence to visit his ailing wife were also ignored, and he was distraught at Elizabeth’s “ungrateful denial of my coming to the court.” In his last letter to Katherine, he wrote of how he desired them both to retire from the Queen’s service and live “a poor country life”⁷⁷—much as his mother-in-law had done with William Stafford.

In his absence, Katherine had to make do with being “very often visited by the Queen’s comfortable presence.”⁷⁸ At one stage, she felt a little better and asked Elizabeth if she might travel north to be with her husband, but Elizabeth refused to allow it, arguing that “the journey might be to her danger or discommodity.” She too was fearful for Katherine’s health, and when her cousin suffered a relapse, she had her nursed in a bedchamber near to her own, and sat with her often.⁷⁹

The Queen of Scots was to blame Queen Elizabeth for Katherine’s early death at the age of forty-three, claiming that it was the consequence of her husband’s enforced absence in the North during the last months of her life.⁸⁰ But it was probably years of relentless childbearing that had undermined Katherine’s health. She passed away on January 15, 1569, at Hampton Court, greatly mourned by the Queen, while Sir Francis was still absent, guarding Mary, Queen of Scots, at Bolton Castle. Afterward, Elizabeth collapsed in “passions of grief for the death of her kinswoman and good servant, falling for a while from a prince wanting nothing in this world to private mourning, in which solitary estate, being forgetful of her own health, she took cold, wherewith she was much troubled.”⁸¹As for the bereaved husband, he was “distracted with sorrow for his great loss. My case is pitiful,” he wrote.⁸²

Elizabeth arranged for Katherine to be buried in April 1569 in St. Edmund’s Chapel in Westminster Abbey, herself outlaying £640.2s.11d (£111,300) for the funeral—far more than she ever spent on burying other cousins, even those of royal birth.⁸³ Yet—perhaps for a very good reason—this was almost a royal funeral. The obsequies were arranged under the auspices of the Duke of Norfolk, as Earl Marshal, and the Earl of Leicester, the Lord Treasurer. The funerary furniture was so valuable that it became the subject of a dispute between the chapter of Westminster Abbey and the College of Arms.⁸⁴ A mural tablet of alabaster, adorned with armorial shields—one of the first of its kind in the abbey—marks Katherine’s resting place.⁸⁵

Katherine’s eldest son, Henry, was held in high esteem by the Queen, who was to write, in 1570, that she had good reason for that, “in respect of his kindred to us by his late mother.”⁸⁶ Katherine’s eldest daughter, Laetitia, known as Lettice—“one of the best-looking ladies of the court”—became Elizabeth’s lady-in-waiting and close friend—until her secret marriage to the Queen’s favorite, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, was made public in 1578, after which a furious Elizabeth never received her at court again. Lettice’s son from her first marriage, Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, became the favorite of the aging Queen in her latter years, before he led a rebellion against her government and was executed in 1601.

It is often said that Henry VIII’s line died out with Elizabeth. None of his legitimate children left issue, and his acknowledged bastard, Richmond, was childless. But if Katherine Carey was Henry’s daughter, as seems likely, then his direct bloodline survives in numerous direct descendants.

Under the Stuarts, the Carey family remained prominent until the senior line died out in 1677. Among the illustrious descendants of Mary Boleyn are numbered Sir Winston Churchill; Lord Nelson; Charles Darwin; Sabine Baring-Gould; William Cowper; Lady Antonia Fraser; J. H. Round; Vita Sackville-West; Thomas West, the Baron de la Warre, after whom the U.S. state of Delaware is named; Lady Anne Somerset; Algernon Swinburne; Ralph Vaughan Williams; P. G. Wodehouse; Princess William of Wales; Sarah Ferguson, Duchess of York; Camilla Parker Bowles, Duchess of Cornwall; Diana Spencer, Princess of Wales (through the Earls Spencer); the late Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother; and Queen Elizabeth II.⁸⁷