CHAPTER 15

The Concubine’s Little Bastard

Anne’s daughter Elizabeth was just two years and eight months old when her mother was put to death; she had been left at Greenwich during those dark days. Sarah Gristwood and Maria Perry have both raised the question of just how closely Elizabeth bonded with her mother: nourished by a wet nurse from birth, she was only three months old when she was removed from Anne’s care and assigned her own household at Hatfield, away from the court, which the little girl was rarely to attend during her infancy. Thereafter she lived under the constant care of her Lady Mistress, the capable and aristocratic Margaret Bourchier, Lady Bryan, whom Henry VIII made a baroness in her own right; and Anne had been merely an occasional visitor and a sender of costly gifts, never a constant presence in her child’s life. So there could not have been a close relationship between them, and in later life Elizabeth, using the royal plural, was to write that she was “more indebted to them that bringeth us up well than to our parents”—for her father was a similarly distant figure.

Yet that was the norm for royal and aristocratic children in the sixteenth century, and the Queen’s words should not be interpreted as a criticism. Thus it may well have been that Elizabeth’s “emotional life was unaffected by her mother’s misfortunes.”¹ The loss of her mother—that remote figure—may have had less impact on her than we imagine, its most vivid consequences perhaps the change in her status and the cessation of pretty gifts. What counted most was that Lady Bryan, now a venerable sixty-eight, remained at the center of the child’s world, an ever-constant, stable, and reassuring presence,² while Katherine Champernowne (later Astley), who was to replace her as the mother figure in Elizabeth’s life, was already installed as one of her gentlewomen.³

During the weekend immediately following Anne’s execution, when the King moved to Hampton Court, he gave orders for his daughter to be taken from Greenwich to the nursery palace at Hunsdon in the care of Lady Bryan. There is often an assumption that Elizabeth was spurned by her father in the weeks after her mother’s death—indeed, it has been conjectured that he could not at that time bear to set eyes on her,⁴ and even that he grossly neglected her,⁵ for in August 1536, Lady Bryan had to beg Cromwell for new clothes to replace those that her charge had outgrown, revealing in the process that no one in Elizabeth’s household had received instructions as to her changed status:

My Lady Elizabeth is put from that degree she was afore, and what degree she is of now I know not but by hearsay. Therefore I know not how to order her, nor myself, nor none of hers that I have the rule of, that is, her women and grooms; beseeching you that she may have some raiment. For she hath neither gown, nor kirtle, nor petticoat, nor no manner of linen, nor forsmocks [aprons?], nor kerchiefs, nor rails [nightgowns], nor body-stitchets [binding cloths or corsets], nor handkerchiefs, nor sleeves, nor mufflers, nor biggins [close caps in the style of Flemish beguines worn by very young children for the purpose of aiding the closure of the fontanelle].

Lady Bryan also mentioned disapprovingly that Elizabeth’s governor, Sir John Shelton, allowed the young child “to dine and sup every day at the board of estate,” from which it is clear that the little girl was still being treated as befit the daughter of a king. It is also clear that the recently widowed Lady Bryan feared that her own authority was being undermined. “A succorless and redeless [without advice] creature,” as she described herself, she was obviously concerned that she might be dismissed in the wake of her former mistress’s fall and the radical change in her charge’s status, and begged Cromwell to “be good to my little lady and all hers.”⁶

Because it is evident that Elizabeth was still being treated as a princess, this wardrobe crisis probably resulted from a mere administrative lapse, the King (to whom all decisions relating to Elizabeth had been referred since her infancy) being away on his nuptial progress in August, or followed an unexpected growth spurt. It did not necessarily mean that Anne Boleyn’s fall had undermined Henry’s affection for their daughter,⁷ and there is no evidence that she was out of favor. At the end of June he gave orders for her household to be reorganized, allocating her thirty-two servants. Lady Bryan had told Cromwell she was sure the King would have much cause for pride in his daughter, “for she is as toward a child and as gentle of conditions as ever I knew any in my life, Jesu preserve Her Grace.”⁸ And on July 21, Lady Mary (now restored to favor through the good offices of Cromwell and Jane Seymour) had no compunction about writing to Henry from Hunsdon: “My sister Elizabeth is in good health, and such a child toward as I doubt not but Your Highness shall have cause to rejoice of in time coming.”⁹

When the King visited Mary at Hunsdon in August, he was probably reunited with Elizabeth too, and she was soon to be seen again at court, where the French Cardinal du Bellay observed that “the King is very affectionate to her [and] loves her very much.”¹⁰Even so, that summer she was the subject of much conjecture in a court that was still seething with gossip and speculation about Anne Boleyn’s “abominable and detestable” crimes.¹¹ Some of those tales undoubtedly concerned Elizabeth’s paternity.

Chapuys himself reported—with more relish than truth—that “the Archbishop of Canterbury declared by sentence that the Concubine’s daughter was the bastard of Mr. Norris, and not the King’s daughter,”¹² as the indictment had implied. This mistaken assumption reflects the gossip to which the secret proceedings at Lambeth undoubtedly gave rise, suggesting that the true grounds for Cranmer’s annulment of Anne’s marriage to the King were never openly divulged, and were the subject of much speculation. Dr. Ortiz, the Emperor’s ambassador in Rome, had already predicted—prematurely, as it turned out: “It is intended to declare the child not to be the King’s.”¹³

It was claimed in the anonymous Portuguese letter written on June 10, 1536, that after Anne’s execution, “the council declared that the Queen’s daughter was the child of her brother, and that she should be removed from her place [in the succession],”¹⁴ while in the Low Countries rumor even had it that Elizabeth was the result of a casual encounter between her mother and a peasant: “It is now said,” wrote Jean Hannaert of Lyons on June 2, “that her pretended daughter was taken from a poor man.”¹⁵ In England there was similar covert speculation.¹⁶ If Elizabeth were not the King’s daughter, then even the debased status of a royal bastard was not rightfully hers.¹⁷ It was almost certainly because of the gossip that Lady Bryan was informed in August that “it was the King’s pleasure that my Lady Elizabeth shall keep her chamber and not come abroad.”¹⁸

There is evidence that Lady Mary herself would take with her to the grave the belief that Mark Smeaton was Elizabeth’s real father. When her half sister was little, Mary played a mother’s part to her and clearly cherished her dearly, but as Elizabeth grew more like Anne Boleyn, Mary’s affections cooled, for every time she looked at her, she was reminded of the injuries, insults, and ignominy she and her mother had suffered at Anne Boleyn’s hands.¹⁹

As queen, when any sympathy for her half sister had soured and there remained only suspicion and resentment, Mary was heard to remark several times on the resemblance between Elizabeth and Mark Smeaton,²⁰ and to say that Elizabeth’s morals were no more admirable than her mother’s had been. Shortly before her death, she confided to Bernardo de Fresneda, the confessor of her husband, King Philip II of Spain, that Elizabeth had “the face and countenance of Mark Smeaton, who was a very handsome man,” and thus “was neither her sister nor the daughter of King Henry.”²¹ Mary once sarcastically told Simon Renard, the Imperial ambassador, that Elizabeth was merely “the offspring of one of whose good fame he might have heard, and who had received her punishment.”²²

It would have been anathema to Mary “to see the illegitimate child of a criminal who was punished as a public strumpet” inheriting the throne²³—a child, moreover, who had “a bewitching personality” and deplorable “characteristics in which she resembled her mother.”²⁴ Thus Mary was perhaps deluding herself, since there is no evidence that Henry VIII ever doubted that Elizabeth was his daughter. As Alexander Aless told Elizabeth in 1559, citing it as proof of Anne Boleyn’s innocence, “Your father always acknowledged you as legitimate.” Doubtless she resembled him too greatly for there to be any doubt, something several people would remark upon during the course of her life, among them those who observed that she looked more like him than Mary did; and one only has to look at the many portraits of Elizabeth I to see that she was her father’s daughter, in coloring and in profile. Moreover, he was to restore her to the succession in 1544, something he would never have done had he any doubts about her paternity.

We might wonder if Mary was truly able to recall what Smeaton had looked like. Prior to 1529 he was an obscure member of Cardinal Wolsey’s household, and even after he was preferred to the Privy Chamber that year, he was apparently regarded as relatively lowly and insignificant. Mary herself had been sent away from court in 1531, and did not return until some months after Smeaton’s execution, so even if she could remember him, she would not have laid eyes on him for five years. Possibly she was basing her assertions on the rumors circulating at that time, the speculation of others, or—which is most likely—malicious lies spread later by Elizabeth’s enemies in the hope of impugning her claim to the throne. Or perhaps it just was wishful thinking on Mary’s part, born of the vain hope of excluding Elizabeth from the succession.

There are some indications that Henry VIII was concerned lest Elizabeth showed signs of inheriting her mother’s coquettish character and morals, which in itself is further evidence that he believed in Anne’s guilt. He insisted that her household be staffed by “ancient and sad [i.e., sober, serious] persons,” and once turned down the application of a young gentlewoman in favor of that of one “of elder years,” grumbling that there were already too many young people around his daughter.²⁵ He was perhaps remembering the youthful crowd who had laughed and flirted with Anne Boleyn in her privy chamber, with disastrous consequences. He saw to it too that Elizabeth’s rigorous education was framed so as to constrain her to the narrow paths of virtue, as well as to erudition, although this was by no means unusual at that time, women being universally regarded as morally weaker than men; yet this child, the daughter of so notorious a mother, would have been perceived as having more need of such instruction than most. It would be no exaggeration to say that in this respect Elizabeth would always bear the stigma of being Anne Boleyn’s child.

Yet that stain, and the taint of bastardy, would have been far outweighed by her being the daughter of the King. And there was little shame, in that period, in having a mother who had perished on the scaffold. A Mantuan visitor to England was surprised to discover that “many persons, members of whose families have been hanged and quartered, are accustomed to boast of it.” It was, he learned, the mark of a gentleman to own such relations.²⁶

We do not know when or how Elizabeth, a highly precocious little girl, discovered that her mother had “suffered by sword,”²⁷ but that she immediately noticed the change in her status is apparent in her sharp comment, made very soon after Anne’s death, to Sir John Shelton, her governor and great-uncle: “Why Governor, how hath it, yesterday my Lady Princess, and today but my Lady Elizabeth?” As Tracy Borman has pointed out, this suggests that Elizabeth was not given any information to prepare her for her mother’s death or even informed of it, but found out what had happened only gradually; for surely the grim truth was too harrowing to be disclosed in graphic detail to such a young child. She was at Hunsdon with Mary when Lady Kingston visited on May 26, 1536, and presumably gave a firsthand account of Anne’s execution to the princess, but it is doubtful Elizabeth was allowed to overhear it. Most likely, she learned of the death of her mother in gradual stages from her kindly governesses, Lady Bryan and Katherine Champernowne.

But the subject seems to have remained taboo. The shocking details of Anne’s crimes—adultery, incest, murder, and the suspicion of witchcraft—were perhaps seen as too shameful to be openly discussed, let alone with her child. And given the dearth of surviving comments on her fate, it is possible that some people felt it was too dangerous or politically compromising to express an opinion. As has been demonstrated, the evidence we have suggests that most accepted the official line. So Elizabeth may have grown up to an awareness that there was a dark and dreadful mystery about her mother’s fate that needed to be unraveled.

It would appear that Henry VIII himself, in giving orders that the child keep to her chamber when rumors about her paternity were rife, was determined to keep her in innocence as to what happened to her mother for as long as possible, and spare her the gruesome details. Tellingly, when in 1549 her stepfather, Admiral Thomas Seymour (who had tried to seduce her when she was a mere adolescent), informed one of Elizabeth’s servants that he was going to Boulogne, which the English pronounced “Boleyn,” he added, “No word of Boleyn!”²⁸ This is all at variance with the assertion that the child Elizabeth was probably subjected to a barrage of propaganda about her bastardy and the wickedness of her mother;²⁹ given the way in which Anne Boleyn’s name, initials, and images had been speedily and thoroughly obliterated, and that the King was rarely heard to refer to her again, the theory that after 1536 she was a subject best avoided seems more credible.

For all the silence, however, Anne’s terrible end, and the awareness that her father had ordered her mother’s execution, however justified, must have overshadowed Elizabeth’s childhood. Over the years, guarded revelations, gossip, rumor and innuendo, picked up from any number of sources, and the growing awareness of her bastard status, must have caused the maturing Elizabeth recurring distress and enduring insecurities, and certainly affected her emotional development. Her painful awareness of her mother’s fate was probably one of the factors that prompted her decision never to marry. Another was almost certainly the execution of her father’s fifth wife, Katherine Howard, in 1542, on charges of immorality that must have awakened painful thoughts of Anne Boleyn. Elizabeth was only eight then, but it was around this time that she announced to young Robert Dudley (who would recall this many years later, when he was Earl of Leicester and hoping to marry her himself), “I will never marry.” Thomas Seymour’s shocking, and ultimately fatal, attempts to seduce the adolescent Elizabeth would have left their mark; he too may have seen her as easy game, her mother’s daughter.

Elizabeth herself tried more than once to explain her aversion to marriage, an aversion she made clear to Archbishop Parker in 1559 when “she took occasion to speak in bitterness of the holy estate of matrimony;” indeed, she spoke so vehemently that Parker afterward told her minister, William Cecil, he “was in a horror to hear her.”³⁰ In 1561 she would tell a Scots envoy that the marital conflicts and disasters within her own family—she did not mention Anne Boleyn specifically—had led to her conviction that wedlock was an insecure state: “Some say that this marriage was unlawful, some that one was a bastard, some other, to and fro, as they favored or misliked. So many doubts of marriage was in all hands that I stand [in] awe myself to enter into marriage fearing the controversy.”³¹ She was referring no doubt to her father’s matrimonial career and to the disputed marriages of both his sisters. Four years later, in conversation with a French diplomat, Elizabeth expressed the fear that, were she to marry, her husband might “carry out some evil wish, if he had one,”³² and later still she once burst out that she “hated the idea of marriage every day more, for reasons which she would not divulge to a twin soul, if she had one, much less to a living creature.”³³

There were doubtless other repercussions too. Her tendency, in later life, to shy away from unpalatable facts and to fence around them—witness her prevarication over the death warrant of Mary, Queen of Scots—may also have had its roots in the traumas of her early childhood. She cannot have failed to draw comparisons between Anne Boleyn and the condemned Mary, and with others sentenced to beheading, including her cousin, Thomas Howard, the fourth Duke of Norfolk; and her reluctance to send Mary and Norfolk to the block may have had a lot to do with her awareness of what happened to her mother, as well as to her own near brush with the headsman in 1554.

It cannot have been easy for the twenty-year-old Elizabeth, imprisoned in 1554 in the Tower by Mary I on suspicion of treason, and expecting daily to be summoned to the scaffold, to be incarcerated for three months in those same rooms in the Queen’s lodgings that Anne Boleyn had occupied prior to her condemnation in 1536; in fact, we might conclude that Mary, who must have known where Anne had been held, deliberately intended that Elizabeth should suffer this added refinement to her punishment. And Elizabeth’s permitted perambulations took her along the wall walk, which overlooked the scaffold before the House of Ordnance, a scaffold built for the deposed nine-days queen, Lady Jane Grey, on the exact place where Anne Boleyn had perished, and on which Anne’s daughter might yet meet her end. Years later, when she was queen, Elizabeth revealed to a French nobleman that the prospect of the axe cleaving into her neck had been so terrible to her during those anxious days that she resolved to ask that a French swordsman be sent for, to dispatch her as her mother had been dispatched.³⁴

Elizabeth cannot but have thought of Anne when she came to the Tower in triumph, prior to her coronation in January 1559,³⁵ and again when she passed through a triumphal arch in Gracechurch Street during her state progress through the City of London to Westminster, for above her, as part of one of the pageants mounted in her honor, the “Pageant of the Roses,” the citizens had erected life-sized figures, seated together for the first time in twenty-three years, of “King Henry the Eighth with a white and red rose in front of him, with the pomegranate [the symbol of their fortuitous fertility] between them, and Queen Anne Boleyn, mother of the present Queen, with a gold crown on the head and a gilt scepter, and in front of her small branches of little roses [and] the coat of arms and device of the same Queen.”³⁶ Above them both was the figure of Elizabeth, “seen in majesty.” The lightweight crown that Elizabeth wore after her coronation may have been the one made for Anne Boleyn in 1533.³⁷ There must have been many such reminders of her mother.

Elizabeth had been brought up to idolize Henry VIII, and clearly revered his memory, often referring to him with pride, and styling him “Her Majesty’s dearest father” in official documents. She grew to maturity believing that he had always loved her, whatever he had thought of her mother, and that it was because of her close resemblance to him that he ordered she be reared as a king’s daughter, rather than as the dubious offspring of a traitor, and left well provided for at his death.³⁸ “She prides herself on her father and glories in him,” observed a Venetian envoy after she had ascended the throne in 1558.³⁹ When she rode in state through London before her coronation in 1559 and a man in the crowd cried, “Remember old King Henry the Eighth!” she was seen to smile delightedly.⁴⁰ She seems to have borne Henry no grudge for his treatment of her mother, regarding him as much the victim of conspiracy as Anne; and in all her long life, she rarely referred to Anne Boleyn.⁴¹

This reticence is perhaps understandable, given the conspiracy of silence about Anne that probably blighted Elizabeth’s formative years. It has been said—incorrectly—that we do not know whether she believed her mother to have been wrongly convicted.⁴²Unlike her half sister Mary I, when Elizabeth came to the throne in 1558, she did not have the annulment of her parents marriage reversed by Parliament, and there was no official push to rehabilitate Anne Boleyn’s reputation. There was much discussion about this at the time, and the decision not to repeal the 1536 Act of Succession was finally made on the advice of Sir Nicholas Bacon, then Lord Keeper of the Great Seal, who pointed out that as Elizabeth was lawful heiress to the throne under the terms of the Act of Succession of 1544 and Henry VIII’s will, there was no point in reviving the heated controversies about the validity of her parents’ marriage, Anne’s fall, and her own legitimacy. This made sense because Elizabeth’s hold on the throne was still tenuous and there were many who already regarded her as a bastard, a heretic, and a usurper. Instead Parliament merely drew up a statute confirming her title—sparsely worded compared with that of Mary I—passed another act confirming her as Anne Boleyn’s sole heiress and enabling her to inherit her mother’s property, forfeited on Anne’s conviction for treason.⁴³

Several writers have regarded as significant Elizabeth’s failure to translate her mother’s remains to a more honorable resting place, as James I was to do for his mother, the executed Mary, Queen of Scots, in 1612, when he had her body moved from Peterborough Cathedral to Westminster Abbey. Yet it is almost certain that if the idea of moving Anne ever occurred to her, Elizabeth left it alone for the reasons Sir Nicholas Bacon had cited. It was just not advisable to revive old controversies and the dreadful events of 1536, and her presence at the reinterment of Anne Boleyn would have been the equivalent of making a provocative public statement that might impugn her father’s memory and her own status. There was also the problem of the funeral rite, for Anne had died in the Catholic faith. Moreover, she was already buried in a royal chapel, so Elizabeth may have felt that, for many good reasons, she was better left there undisturbed.

In 1572, in the wake of her excommunication by the Pope, Elizabeth commanded Matthew Parker, now Archbishop of Canterbury, to search out the 1528 papal bull of dispensation, authorizing her parents’ marriage. She chose not to publish it, but kept it at hand in case it became desirable to produce it as the basis for proclaiming herself legitimate in the eyes of the Roman as well as the English Church.

There can be little doubt as to Elizabeth’s true opinion of the woman who had given birth to her. There are many clues. As early as cd. 1544-45 she was painted, age about ten or eleven, in a state portrait of Henry VIII and his family, wearing—astonishingly—one of Anne Boleyn’s initial pendants, proclaiming to all posterity that she was her mother’s daughter—and this, presumably, with the King’s sanction. Thirty years later, around 1575, she commissioned a gold ring bearing the initial E in diamonds and R for Regina in blue enamel; it opened to reveal miniature enameled reliefs of herself and Anne Boleyn. Thereafter, she wore this ring constantly, and it was only removed from her finger at her death, when it was taken to her successor, James VI of Scotland, as proof of her demise. The ring is now at Chequers, the Prime Minister’s country retreat, primary evidence that Elizabeth kept her mother’s image secretly with her for much of her adult life, and privately honored her memory.⁴⁴

In 1553, when her sister Mary ascended the throne, Elizabeth candidly intimated to Simon Renard, the Spanish ambassador, that the Queen was hostile toward her because of the injuries she and her mother had been dealt by Anne Boleyn. Clearly Elizabeth was well informed. Foreign envoys also attributed Mary’s increasing hostility to the fact that Elizabeth was Anne’s daughter: “She still resents the injuries inflicted on Queen Katherine, her lady mother, by the machinations of Anne Boleyn,” Renard observed. Later in Mary’s reign, Elizabeth, in a more bullish mood, openly—and rashly—voiced her opinion, to various people, that she was as legitimate as her sister, and of equal rank in blood as a daughter of Henry VIII. Her mother, she declared—ignoring the fact that she herself had been conceived out of wedlock—would never have cohabited with him “unless by way of marriage with the authority of the Church and the intervention of the Primate of England.” She had acted in good faith according to her conscience, and lived and died in the Church that had declared her marriage valid, all of which rendered her blameless and her daughter legitimate.⁴⁵ There was evidently no doubt in Elizabeth’s mind that Anne had been a virtuous woman.

As queen, Elizabeth adopted Anne Boleyn’s motto, “Semper eadem” (Always the same), and her badge of a crowned white falcon perched on a tree stump flowering with Tudor roses, which she had stamped on the bindings of her books. She may have felt that the tree stump, innocuous enough in her mother’s day, had become symbolic of Anne being cut down before her time.⁴⁶ She owned a set of virginals bearing the Boleyn arms, which had probably once belonged to Anne; they are now in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Elizabeth openly prided herself on being “the most English woman of the kingdom,” and given that the Tudors came from Welsh stock, she must have been paying a discreet tribute to her mother’s ancestry.⁴⁷

She would do much—subject to their merits—for some of her relatives on her mother’s side, notably the Careys: she created her cousin Henry Carey as Lord Hunsdon and Captain of the Gentlemen Pensioners, the sovereign’s personal guard; and she was grief-stricken when his sister Katherine, a gentlewoman of the Queen’s Privy Chamber and wife to Sir Francis Knollys, died in 1569, for they had been very close. Both Henry and Katherine would have been able privately to tell Elizabeth many things about her mother, who was their aunt and whom they knew in childhood. Katherine, as has been noted, may even have attended upon Anne in the Tower.

Then there were the Knollyses and the Sackvilles, the mysterious George Boleyn, and the unidentified “Edmund Boleyn, Her Grace’s kinsman,” who received a gift of £70 (£14,400);⁴⁸ and no doubt Elizabeth would have continued to show favor to her Howard cousins as well, had they not dabbled in treason or become too closely affiliated to the Catholic cause at a time when such a stance rendered one a political enemy. Elizabeth also made Anne’s former chaplain, Matthew Parker, her first Archbishop of Canterbury. “If I had not been so much bound to the mother,” a reluctant Parker confessed, “I would not so soon have granted to serve the daughter in this place.”⁴⁹ He was, of course, referring to his promise to Anne to safeguard her daughter’s welfare.

This is not the only testimony to Elizabeth’s feelings about her mother. In 1561 she furiously demanded the immediate repression of a French tract in which Anne Boleyn was portrayed as a “Jezebel” whose “foul matrimony” was prompted by lust and whose brutal end was entirely justified.⁵⁰ Elizabeth was also greatly offended when, early in 1587, as she was agonizing over signing the death warrant of Mary, Queen of Scots, Mary’s son, James VI of Scotland, urging her to show mercy, tactlessly pointed out to her that “King Henry VIII’s reputation was never prejudged but in the beheading of his bedfellow.” He was referring, of course, to Anne Boleyn.

When, in 1572, Elizabeth restored in blood a great favorite of hers, Henry, the son of Sir Henry Norris, and created him first Baron Norris of Rycote, she was tacitly acknowledging that Norris had “died in a noble cause and in the justification of her mother’s innocence.”⁵¹ Yet her favor to Lord Rycote was not extended just on account of the fate of his father; it is more likely to have rested on his own merits and character.

A laudatory treatise on Anne Boleyn by her former chaplain, William Latymer, was almost certainly presented to Elizabeth I, to whom it was dedicated. Only a draft copy survives (in the Bodleian Library, Oxford), but that the Queen approved of its author’s determination to rehabilitate her mother’s memory is apparent in her lavishing many rewards on him.⁵²

It is also possible that Queen Elizabeth commissioned by stealth George Wyatt’s defense of her mother, written at the end of the sixteenth century. Wyatt himself claimed that he “was entreated by some who might command me [author’s italics] to further this endeavor,” and that he had undertaken the writing of his life of Anne Boleyn at “the request of him that hath been by authority set on work in this so important business, both for the singular gifts of God in him of learning, wisdom, integrity, and virtue, and also the encouragement I have had of late from the right reverend my lord of Canterbury’s Grace.” The Archbishop of Canterbury at that time was John Whitgift, who was a personal friend of Elizabeth and attended her on her deathbed in 1603.

Wyatt’s memorial was never finished, so there is no dedication that might reveal the names of his patrons. Could it be that the Virgin Queen, nearing the end of her life, felt that the record should be set straight? Unlike Mary I, she had never had the annulment of her mother’s marriage reversed, or the sentence on Anne, and she may have felt that by doing so, she would be reviving old scandals that might compromise her own legitimacy and even destabilize her crown. It would be in character, though, for her covertly to let it be known, through Whitgift and others, that she wanted Wyatt—whose extensive researches were evidently known of at court—to write a defense of Anne in answer to Nicholas Sander’s calumnies, which had reflected so badly upon Anne Boleyn and herself.

But who was the unnamed man who had been “by authority set on work in this so important business,” and who encouraged Wyatt to write his memorial? By whose authority had he done so? The fact that neither the authorizer or the authorized are identified suggests that both wished to remain anonymous. The virtues enumerated by Wyatt were of the kind typically attributed to worthy persons at that time, so they do not help us. Yet the fact that Wyatt was asked to write his defense by a man who had been authorized to further this project, and was then encouraged in his labors by the Archbishop of Canterbury himself—who was close to Elizabeth and in a position to know the workings of her conscience and her mind—suggests that she herself was the prime mover.

The fact that the Archbishop had only begun encouraging Wyatt “of late” implies perhaps that the unknown man who commissioned the work had died. We might conjecture that he was Henry Carey, Lord Hunsdon, the chamberlain of Queen Elizabeth’s household, who died in the spring of 1596. No one would have been better placed to ask Wyatt to write his defense, for Anne Boleyn was his aunt, he being the only son of her sister Mary.

Mary Boleyn, who earned a reputation for promiscuity at the courts of France and England,⁵³ had briefly been Henry VIII’s mistress before he began pursuing her sister Anne, and it has been suggested that Henry Carey, who was born (according to the inscription on his tomb in Westminster Abbey) in March 1525, was in fact Henry VIII’s bastard son. This was rumored in the King’s lifetime: in 1535, John Hale, the Vicar of Isleworth in Middlesex, reported how a nun of nearby Syon Abbey had pointed out “young Master Carey” and told him that the boy was Henry’s natural son. It should be remembered, however, that Hale, who was to be executed that year for denying the royal supremacy, also put about the unfounded rumor that “the King’s Grace had meddling with the Queen’s mother,”⁵⁴ which Henry himself denied.

It is highly unlikely that Henry VIII was Henry Carey’s father. In 1519, when Elizabeth Blount presented the King with a bastard son, Henry FitzRoy, he had immediately acknowledged him as his own, then brought him up in princely fashion. In 1525, with Katherine of Aragon having failed to bear the King a son, the crisis over the succession was acute. That year, Henry bestowed on FitzRoy two royal dukedoms. This was not just a swipe at Katherine, who was mortified at the bastard’s public ennoblement, nor was it merely an affirmation that Henry was a virile man who could get sons on other women. Natural children were important, and a king could use them to extend his power base and affinity, make politically advantageous alliances with the nobility, and enforce the royal authority in remote parts of the kingdom such as the North—where FitzRoy was to be sent as his father’s deputy—and the Welsh Marches; and clearly Henry VIII understood this. At this time, having no legitimate heir he was in fact grooming FitzRoy to succeed him on the throne.

Therefore it was in the King’s interests, for many reasons, to acknowledge any bastards he might have, and consequently his failure to acknowledge Henry Carey is strong evidence that the boy was not his. Furthermore, there is no evidence that Mary Boleyn was the King’s mistress at the time of her son’s conception, or indeed for several years beforehand; the fact is, we do not know when, or for how long, their affair took place, and its importance has probably been much overstated.

It has been said that Henry would not have acknowledged the boy because his relationship with Mary Boleyn was an impediment to his marriage to her sister, yet it was not until 1527, more than two years after Henry Carey’s birth, that Henry resolved upon marrying Anne. It has also been claimed that a series of royal grants made to William Carey in the 1520s⁵⁵ were to support young Henry Carey, yet William was the King’s cousin (through his mother, Eleanor Beaufort) and an important and rising personage in the Privy Chamber who would doubtless have gone far had he not died young; these grants were an acknowledgment of his good service. There is no evidence that he was a complacent husband, or that he obligingly refrained from having sexual relations with an adulterous wife. The King’s former mistress, Elizabeth Blount, had been married off after the end of their affair and the birth of their son; Mary Boleyn’s marriage, in 1520,⁵⁶ probably also took place after Henry had discarded her.

Henry’s son or not, Henry Carey was certainly Elizabeth’s cousin, she was to create him Lord Hunsdon on her accession in 1558, and he, a plain-spoken soldier, would serve her loyally all his life. He too, surely, with mortality encroaching, would have wanted the record set straight about his aunt. And if the Queen had authorized him to ask George Wyatt to write his memorial as a response to the calumnies of Sander, then we have in it Elizabeth’s own views on her mother.