Mary Boleyn: The Great and Infamous Whore

by Alison Weir

  There is no source that gives credibility to the statement that Mary was reconciled to her father, who allowed her and William Stafford to reside at Rochford Hall,57 or the assertion that she “was never fully forgiven, but persuaded her father to let her live with Stafford in one of the Boleyn properties, Rochford Hall in Essex.”58 Prior to her clandestine marriage, Mary had apparently lived at Hever Castle or at court. Before his death in 1539, Wiltshire was considering cutting Mary off and leaving her share of his property to his niece, the future Elizabeth I, so clearly they remained estranged. It is unlikely, therefore, that he would have permitted her to live at Rochford Hall with the husband of whom he deeply disapproved.

  So where did the couple live in the six years between their banishment and Mary coming into her inheritance? The answer is, probably at Calais, for William seems to have been retained by Lord Lisle: in February 1537 we find John Husee writing: “Coffin would fain have a good hawk; he liked not that [which] Stafford brought him.”59 And in 1539, William, as one of “the retinue of that town,” was among the welcoming party appointed to receive Henry VIII’s fourth wife, Anne of Cleves, on her arrival in Calais.60 Calais, where Mary had perhaps first become acquainted with William, might have held happy memories for both of them.

  Thanks to the establishment of a wool staple and corporation in 1362, Calais was a prosperous town and “an impregnable fortress.” As a strategic springboard for the debarkation and marshaling of troops, and “the key and principal entrance” to England,61 it was of the highest importance to that kingdom, and no expense was spared in maintaining its defenses.62 That was why there was a strong garrison, which comprised “a force of five hundred of the best soldiers, beside a troop of fifty horsemen.” William Stafford was one of twenty-one mounted spearmen of the garrison; the “spears” were all men of good family, many of whom progressed upward through the ranks, as William probably did. The inhabitants of Calais were seen as men of “unshaken fidelity,” and the governor who guarded it was always “one of the most trusty barons which the King has.”63

  The walls of Calais stretched from Beauchamps’ bulwark to the castle of Rysebank, with its fort and tower. The chief buildings of the town were the Exchequer Palace, the churches of St. Mary and St. Nicholas, the splendid Renaissance Hôtel de Ville with its distinctive tower in the marketplace—visible in the distance in the painting of the Field of Cloth of Gold now at Hampton Court (the present Hôtel de Ville is a replica)—and the guildhall of the staple, known as the Staple Inn. Many ships and boats were moored by the Watergate on the quay, where a round tower guarded the entrance to the harbor.64

  This was the place that Mary probably called home for nearly six years, and where she would have been able to enjoy domesticated obscurity as an “army wife.” During those years, her brother, Lord Rochford, and her uncle, the Duke of Norfolk, were to visit Calais more than once,65 but, given their hostility toward Mary, it is doubtful if they made any effort to see her.

  A letter sent by Robert, the new Prior of Tynemouth, to Cromwell in April 1537, would lend credence to the theory that Mary had moved to Calais. The Prior reminded Cromwell: “My lady Mary Carey, now Stafford, had an annuity of 100 marks, under convent seal of my house, for no cause except it should be for preferring my predecessor to his room [position]. The said lady can now demand no such annuity, as she can do no great good for me or my house, which is now onerate by first fruits and charges. I once stopped the payment, but could not continue through the command of my Lord Chancellor. These be to desire your Lordship that the said convent seal may be reversed, as this bearer shall declare. For your kindness herein your annuity of 20 nobles shall be made 20 marks.”

  Despite this overt bribe, the annuity continued to be paid to Mary, which, along with the Lord Chancellor’s earlier intervention, and the fact that the annuity continued to be paid by the Court of Augmentations after the priory was dissolved in January 1539, is further proof that it represented the King’s provision for his daughter.66

  If Mary and William did move to Calais, as seems likely, that would explain the absence of any reference to her in contemporary records at this time. It would explain how the couple managed to subsist during the time of their disgrace. And it would also explain why there is no mention of Mary in the numerous sources documenting the cataclysmic fall of the Boleyns in 1536.

  12

  A Poor Honest Life

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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