Mary Boleyn: The Great and Infamous Whore

by Alison Weir

  It is impossible to say whether “Henry VIII was a regular visitor to Hever Castle at this time,” making secret visits in pursuit of “his romantic involvement” with Mary,25 for there is no record of him calling upon Mary privately at her family home, where, later on, he probably courted her sister Anne; to be fair, there is no actual record of his courting Anne there either, though the chances are that he did, for there is evidence in his letters of her retreating to Hever at that time. Henry was well placed to visit Hever, for in 1521, after Buckingham’s execution, the duke’s property had reverted to the Crown, and one of the houses that Henry had acquired was Penshurst Place, where he had once enjoyed good hunting with Buckingham. Henry had appointed Sir Thomas Boleyn to manage Penshurst, and may have used it as a base for discreet visits to Hever when courting Anne. It has also been stated that, earlier, “Henry was frequently at Penshurst Place in the company of her sister, dropping in while hunting or to pay a family visit” and that “much of the affair with Mary Boleyn was conducted at Penshurst.”26 The King, it is claimed, was often at Penshurst in the 1520s,27 but no contemporary source supports such assertions, and the evidence we do have strongly suggests that Henry did his courting far closer to home—at court.

  Since Mary was married and residing mainly in the court, it is far more probable that she was secretly admitted to the King’s lodgings for her trysts with him. It is also possible that he arranged meetings with her at Jericho in Essex, the house where Elizabeth Blount had retired to give birth to Henry Fitzroy.

  Henry VIII is said to have installed his mistresses in Duke Humphrey’s Tower (later called Greenwich Castle), a moated hunting lodge that had been built in 1433 by Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, brother of Henry V, on the hill overlooking Greenwich Park, on the site of the present Royal Observatory.28 It has been seen as significant that, on May 12, 1526, William Carey was appointed keeper of the manor, garden, and tower of Pleasaunce at East Greenwich, with his fees being paid out of the issues (royal rents) of Kent29—Pleasaunce (or Placentia) being the old name for Greenwich Palace. The tower referred to in the grant could have been the donjon that housed the royal lodgings in the palace (“the manor”), but it is more likely to have been Duke Humphrey’s Tower, which was demolished in 1675.

  The keepership of the manor and tower of Pleasaunce had been granted in 1517 to Nicholas Carew, whose wife Elizabeth had perhaps enjoyed a brief spell of intimacy with Henry VIII around 1514. There has been unfounded speculation that Duke Humphrey’s Tower may have been used later as a rendezvous for Elizabeth Carew’s friend Elizabeth Blount and the King,30 and that it “must have been Mary Boleyn’s lodging during the time she was the King’s mistress.”31 But it is unlikely that Mary Boleyn ever resided there, for her affair with Henry was almost certainly over by 1525–26, when Henry had the decaying tower “newly repaired and builded,” added a gatehouse, enclosed the whole within a wooden fence, and renamed it “Mire-flore.”32 It is said that he built a second tower,33 but it is more likely that he rebuilt the original one, since Anthony van Wyngaerde’s drawing of Greenwich Palace, dated 1558, shows only a single square keep on the hill behind, which has recently been confirmed as accurate by archeological excavations.34 The tower was only included in this important grant to William Carey because it formed part of the manor of Greenwich, while the assignment of this very important keepership after Henry’s affair with Mary had ended is testimony to Carey’s growing importance in his own right.

  In 1535 the hostile John Hale, Vicar of Isleworth, a staunch supporter of Queen Katherine, who thought the King “mired in vice,” stated that “Cowsell the porter” had once told him that “our sovereign lord” kept “a short of maidens over one of his chambers at Farnham, while he was with the old lord of Winchester”35—meaning Farnham Castle in Surrey, the old lord of Winchester being the venerable and devout blind Richard Fox, who had been Bishop of Winchester since 1501 and died in 1528.36 But there is no other evidence to support Hale’s assertion, and it is hardly credible that Henry would have established what was in effect a private royal brothel in the episcopal palace of the bishops of Winchester, or had assignations with Mary Boleyn there.

  Mary Boleyn attracted little or no attention at the English court. She was not “an important person.”37 As we have seen, while her sister Anne was rapidly gaining a reputation as a setter of trends with her French manners and her innovations in dress, Mary was not deemed worthy of mention. As Friedmann wrote, none of Henry’s mistresses (with the notable exception of Anne Boleyn) “ever held a brilliant position at court.” Mary was not “in a powerful position,”38 as has been claimed, and it is unlikely that she enjoyed much influence over the King, or that she made many demands on him. She may not have had the ability or ambition to interest herself in affairs of state; certainly she did not exploit her position.39

  Henry VIII almost certainly did not like or permit his mistresses to interfere in matters of state; on the contrary, he usually kept them very much in the background. His pursuit of Anne Boleyn only became public knowledge after he had decided to marry her. Elizabeth Blount, the mother of his son, had exercised no political influence that we know of, and her affair with the King lasted at least four years; there are very few references to her in contemporary sources, and even her pregnancy was not commented on. Nor are any lavish gifts to her recorded during the years when she was probably Henry’s mistress.

  Royal mistresses fell into several categories: some were ambitious, desiring power, wealth, and titles. Some did it for love or lust. A few, like Anne Boleyn, were set upon marriage and a crown. Mary was married already, and if she had hoped to profit materially from her affair with the King, she was destined, at the time, to be disappointed. Although it would not be true to say that in the long run she gained nothing for herself or her family, she is not known to have asked for any favors for herself, and—unlike some royal mistresses—she received very little in the way of lucrative gains40 during her affair with the King, while her husband remained plain Mr. Carey.41 She did not, on the evidence, hold out against Henry’s importunings in the hope of some reward for her services;42 indeed, at the time, she herself received few, if any, benefits,43 and the affair brought her little profit,”44 unless one counts the grants made to her husband, which could not be said with certainty to be rewards for her compliance. We do not know if she asked the King for favors for her family, and we can only speculate that the Boleyns “jeered” at her for not having profited from the association,45 although it is fair to say that Henry was “never overly extravagant in his extramarital affairs.”46

  There is nothing to support the imaginative statement that “triumphant visits” by Mary and her father to Hever Castle made Anne feel like “the family Cinderella,”47 or the claim that the Boleyns “looked with complacency if not satisfaction” upon their daughter’s liaison with the King.48 More convincing is the assertion that “Mary had badly let down [her] father and sullied the family’s name. In consequence, she became something of a pariah.”49 Later evidence would tend to confirm this.

  Mary, as the King’s mistress, might have seemed to have had everything, yet she enjoyed little in the way of privileges, and no power whatsoever.50 On only one occasion is she known to have taken advantage of her influence with Henry VIII to exercise patronage,51 and that was in 1527–28, some years after their affair ended, when she used it to secure the appointment of Thomas Gardiner, one of the King’s chaplains, as Prior of Tynemouth, Northumberland. A hosteler’s book from Durham Cathedral shows that, in 1527, Peter Lee, the hosteler—an officer who looked after the conventual guest house—was proposed as Prior of Tynemouth; if he ever went there, he was soon replaced by Thomas Gardiner, who was in post by 1528 and held the office until 1536.52 Gardiner was so grateful to “Lady [sic.] Mary Carey” for her efforts on his behalf that he granted her an annuity of a hundred marks (£10,700) out of the priory’s revenues.53 Whether Mary received her annuity regularly, or at all, is a matter for speculation
, as she was in such “extreme necessity” after being widowed in 1528 that the King had to order her father to take her under his roof. Possibly she did not begin receiving payments until 1529, in arrears.

  The ability to exercise this kind of patronage might suggest that, for a brief period at least, Mary meant more to the King than one of his “petty dalliances,”54 although even when their affair was going on, she was hardly enjoying royal favor to the full.55 Given that Henry was hotly pursuing Anne Boleyn when he granted Mary this favor, his bounty may have been spurred by his desire to impress his beloved rather than out of any abiding regard for his former mistress.

  Mary has been described as “a lighthearted lover”56 who basked in the warmth of the King’s amorous attentions and “scintillated in the gorgeous apparel and jewels that were a sign of his affection”;57 “a willing, uncomplaining plaything who submitted to a one-sided bargain in which she gave Henry everything he wanted and got nothing in return.”58 But there is no contemporary source to give credence to such fantasies, no record of gifts of clothing and jewelery.

  Mary’s function as a kept concubine was, it seems, purely to meet Henry’s sexual needs when required, and probably to provide him with pleasant company in private. Theirs may well have been “an authentic and passionate relationship,”59 but if Henry did have emotional—as opposed to physical—feelings for Mary, they cannot have been enduring, and it would be fair to surmise that he never had for her the all-consuming longing he later felt for her sister Anne.60 Mary’s only recorded comment on Henry, made in 1534, was that he “ever was wont to take pity,”61 which surely refers to his generous provision to her and her children over the years, and his intervention with her father on her behalf; and it was no doubt a timely compliment paid at a time when she was desperate to regain his favor.

  It has been asserted that Mary had flung herself into the affair “with a passion,”62 and that her later behavior shows that she had been in love with the King;63 but it is hard to see how those conclusions were reached, especially since she had probably not gone willingly to Henry’s bed, and we have no evidence as to her feelings for him thereafter. The claim that her affair with Henry “improved a mediocre marriage”64 is unproven.

  There is a theory that William Carey refrained from claiming his marital rights while his wife was the King’s mistress,65 but while this is possible, there is no good evidence to substantiate it. It has been said that Henry expected his sexual partners to be chaste,66 but that applied more to his wives; the sparse information we have suggests that he was happy to share the favors of Elizabeth Carew and Elizabeth Blount with men such as William Compton.

  The four-year gap between Mary’s marriage and the birth of her first child, and the three-year gap between her second child’s birth and her widowhood, have been seen as significant. It has been suggested that Carey delayed the consummation of the union because Mary was twelve at the most when she married,67 but, as we have seen, she was almost certainly around twenty years old. One opinion is that she was only fertile during her affair with the King, and that her fertility “resumed” when she married for the second time in 1534.68 Another view is that she only conceived when she began cohabiting with her husband after her royal affair had ended,69 and that this suggests that Henry was no longer as potent or fertile as he had been during the earlier years of his marriage to Katherine. But as we do not know for certain when Mary’s affair with Henry began or ended, both theories are unsupportable.

  Given that Henry probably did not begin pursuing Mary until 1522, we could hardly expect to find William Carey refraining from intercourse with his wife in the first two years of their marriage. During Mary’s second marriage, she is known to have borne only one child in nine years. This suggests that, like her mother and sister, she suffered miscarriages or gave birth to unrecorded children who were stillborn or died young—or that, if she was as fertile as her two offspring, who had twenty-eight children between them, she resorted to some form of contraception,70 possibly deliberately avoiding getting pregnant by her royal lover. As a respectable married woman, she may have feared the consequences of “presenting her husband with a bastard, even if it was the King’s.”71 The fact that Mary bore Henry VIII “no acknowledged child” may indicate that she was a good deal more cautious than her undeserved reputation would indicate.72

  Certainly Henry was still sleeping with the Queen, hoping to conceive an heir, during his affair with Mary. He continued to have sexual relations with Katherine until 1524,73 and even after 1525, by which year she was “past the ways of women,” he still shared her bed on occasions.

  All of this begs the question: what was Henry VIII like as a lover? From youth, he evidently had always seen himself as a knight errant, the embodiment of Arthurian chivalry, and it appears that—to a point—he conducted his relationships with the opposite sex according to the time-honored rules of courtly love, by which the man was a humble suitor for the favors of his mistress, who was usually above him in station, often married, and supposedly unattainable. The word “mistress,” in this context, did not necessarily imply a woman who lived or bedded with a man outside wedlock, but the female equivalent of “master.”

  When he was not divorcing or beheading his queens, Henry generally treated them with respect and courtesy, unless—like Anne Boleyn—they called him to account for his infidelity and other failings, in which case they got short shrift. After complaining about him being unfaithful to her, Anne was brutally told to “shut her eyes and endure as more worthy persons have done,” and that he could lower her as speedily as he had raised her.74 But Henry’s views on marriage, and on sex within marriage, were more profound than those angry words would suggest. “Who does not tremble when he considers how to deal with his wife?” he asked, in his treatise A Defence of the Seven Sacraments against Martin Luther, written in 1521, just before he became interested in Mary Boleyn. “For not only is he bound to love her, but so to live with her that he may return her to God pure and without stain, when God who gave shall demand His own again.”

  The King was probably “not a man of adventure in regard to women.”75 Proceedings in the royal marital bed are likely to have been conducted with a certain reverence and restraint, and it was perhaps for this very reason that Henry took mistresses, so that he could indulge his baser lusts. Yet the fact that Anne Boleyn was able to hold him at arm’s length for at least six years proves that—faced with an unequivocal no from a woman he believed to be virtuous—Henry was too much of a knight and a gentleman to resort to rape. This restraint, however, did not extend to all women, particularly those of the lower orders, as the episode of William Webbe’s “fair wench” may demonstrate; and it apparently had not been exercised for very long when the King was pursuing Mary Boleyn.

  Henry’s unusual discretion about his amorous affairs might suggest that he was an inhibited man. There is evidence that he was even prudish and embarrassed by references to sex.76 He was shocked when he found out, after marrying Anne Boleyn, that she had been “corrupted in France,”77 although it is not clear exactly what he meant by that. He was never coarse in speech—he was recorded to have blushed when, in 1538, a French ambassador suggested he might like to try out several potential brides before choosing one.78 Once, when visiting “a fair lady” at Duke Humphrey’s Tower, in true courtly fashion he challenged a courtier, Sir Andrew Flammock, to complete a verse in praise of her beauty, and began it:

  Within this tower.

  There lieth a flower

  That hath my heart …

  Whereupon Flammock added:

  Within this hour

  She pissed full sour

  And let a fart.

  Henry was deeply offended, and waved the man out of his sight, growling, “Begone, varlet!”79 It has been claimed that the lady in question must have been Mary Boleyn,80 but—as we have seen—her affair with the King had probably ended before the rebuilding of Duke Humphrey’s Tower, and Sir Andrew Flammock did not come
to prominence until much later in Henry’s reign,81 so the story cannot belong to the early 1520s. In 1542 the diplomat Sir William Paget felt bound to apologize to the King for repeating François I’s “unseemly” reference to “a strumpet of the bordello.”82

  Yet Henry’s seventeen surviving letters to Anne Boleyn prove that he had it in him to be a passionate and importunate lover. He could not make sufficient demonstrations of his infatuation with his fifth wife, Katherine Howard, and openly caressed her “more than he did the others.”83 According to the disapproving Reginald Pole, the King was “soon tired [or ‘sated’] of those who had served him as his mistress,”84 but that could not be said of Elizabeth Blount; possibly she, like Anne Boleyn after her, was sparing with her favors. The fact that Elizabeth retained Henry’s interest for four years or more suggests that theirs was not just a physical affair. Maybe Henry was truly in love with her, and this was the first grand passion of his life. Its longevity is probably witness to Henry’s heart being engaged as well as his loins.

  As for Mary Boleyn, it has been observed that, while it is often assumed that she was “colorless and insipid, the docile willing dupe of those who took advantage of her,” she may in fact consciously—and calculatingly—have opted for a more obscure role than her sister did, “out of a wise instinct not to tempt fate too far.”85 It would be her saving grace in the long run.

  Yet that begs another question: how far did Mary have control over her life? If she had had little choice in succumbing to two kings, would she really have chosen not to take advantage of the situation, given whose daughter she was? Or did she just not have what it took to exploit her position to her own advantage? Given the fact that the King expected her to remain invisible and without influence, she may have had little choice in the matter. Indeed, she may have welcomed the anonymity. Being a married woman, and the wife and daughter of prominent men, she seems to have felt it was best to hide her shame behind a veil of discretion and wait until such time as her royal lover had tired of her. As time would tell, that proved to be by far the wisest choice.