by Roger Powell
Nevertheless, his appointment as Constable made him one of the richest men in north Wales. Even after his allowance of nearly £300 a year for soldiers’ wages was discontinued in 1516, his income from his annuities and constable’s fee was over £240 a year. Altogether during Henry VIII’s reign, he received £6,176 l3s. 4d. from the chamberlain of north Wales and a further £1,236 l3s. 4d. from Exchequer revenues. The size of his income raises the question of how he spent his money. The wages of household servants and of soldiers or guards for the safe keeping of Beaumaris Castle would have represented a substantial item of expenditure, but it seems unlikely that he maintained a regular garrison there. During his early years, he must have incurred substantial legal costs arising from his disputes with neighbouring families and forfeiture of bonds to the crown and, of course, his time at Westminster and occasional attendance at Court must also have involved considerable expense.
In his will, made a few days before his death in 1535 at Beaumaris, de Velville made modest bequests to several churches, but left to his wife all his lands within the town and liberty of Beaumaris and the county of Anglesey (making no reference to lands elsewhere) and all his chattels for disposal. He also expressed a wish to be buried in Llanfaes Priory, the Franciscan house about a mile to the north of Beaumaris. Llanfaes was the burial place of Goronwy ap Tudor (d. 1382), one of the ancestors of the Tudors. However, when his widow made her will on 16 December 1542, she directed that she be buried in the chapel of the Blessed Virgin Mary in Beaumaris where her husband was buried, and she bequeathed £4 for the repair and building of the chapel and a further £4 for a priest to sing for a whole year for the health of her husband’s soul and her own, so that it appears that de Velville’s wishes were not complied with and it is regrettable that no monument to him survives.
De Velville also undertook that Robert Thomas ap Robert of Berain should have £20 on the day of his marriage to his daughter, Jane, and the reversion to himself and Jane of the moiety of all lands, to be of annual value of at least £10, in the possession of the survivor of himself or his wife. Jane’s endowment was more modest than might have been expected in view of the size of de Velville’s income, and suggests that perhaps he had not established himself as a large landowner. Building up an estate through piecemeal acquisitions was often a slow process and the record of de Velville’s early years in Beaumaris suggests that he may have been too headstrong to be a good man of business. Long years at Court without the responsibilities of maintaining an estate or household may indeed have accustomed him to spending rather than saving or investing.
King Henry VIII (1491–1547): Henry Carey, Baron Hunsdon (1525/6–1596)
Henry Carey, subsequently Lord Hunsdon, was born 4 March 1525/6 to Mary Boleyn, the sister of Queen Anne Boleyn, second wife of King Henry VIII. Mary’s husband, William Carey, a Gentleman of the Privy Chamber and Esquire of the Body to Henry VIII, was the son of Thomas Carey, of Chilton Folliott in Wiltshire by his wife Margaret, daughter of Sir Robert Spencer and his wife Eleanor Beaufort, daughter of Edmund (Beaufort), Duke of Somerset. William Carey was therefore of royal descent, the Duke of Somerset being a grandson of John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, 3rd surviving son of King Edward III.
The claim that Henry Carey was the illegitimate son of Henry VIII and Mary Boleyn is based on the following second hand statement made by John Hale, Vicar of Isleworth to the Privy Council that:
‘… Mr Skydmore dyd show to me yongge Master Care, saying that he was our suffren Lord the Kynge’s son by our suffren Lady the Qwyen’s syster, whom the Qwyen’s grace might not suffer to be yn the Cowrte’ (20 April 1535).
Two weeks later Master Hale was executed at Tyburn ‘for denying the King’s supremacy’.
But Mary Carey was indeed Henry’s mistress before he transferred his attention to her sister Anne, and it is generally accepted that the affair probably lasted from 1520 until 1526. Mary had married William Carey on 4 February 1519/20 and the King was present at the ceremony.
In retrospect the affair did the King little credit and when he sought to marry her sister Anne, his kinsman Cardinal Pole reminded him of the predicament he had put himself in:
‘At your age in life, and with all your experience of the world, you were enslaved by your passion for a girl. But she would not give you your will unless you rejected your wife, whose place she longed to take. The modest woman would not be your mistress; no, but she would be your wife. She had learned, I think, if nothing else, at least from the example of her sister, how soon you got tired of your mistresses; and she resolved to surpass her sister in retaining you as her lover …’
Now what sort of person is it whom you have put in place of your divorced wife? Is she not the sister of her whom first you violated and for a long time after kept as your concubine? She certainly is. How is it, then, that you now tell us of the horror you have of illicit marriage? Are you ignorant of the law which certainly no less prohibits marriage with a sister of one with whom you have become one flesh, than with one with whom your brother was one flesh? If one kind of marriage is detestable, so is the other. Were you ignorant of the law? Nay, you knew it better than others. How did I prove it? Because, at the very time you were rejecting your brother’s widow, you were doing your very utmost to get leave from the Pope to marry the sister of your former concubine.
Although written from afar in Rome, the Cardinal was singularly well informed. The reference in his letter to the fact that Henry was the first to spoil Mary Carey is interesting, and could possibly indicate that their relationship began before her marriage. However, it could equally refer to just her reputation rather than anything else more explicit. Either way Mary’s relationship with Henry was clearly over by the time her son was born.
Some historians believe that Mary was the elder and Anne the younger sister. The evidence to support this comes from a letter written by Mary’s grandson, the 2nd Lord Hunsdon, to Lord Burghley 6 Oct 1597, in which in support of his claim to the Earldom of Wiltshire, he stated that Mary was the elder of the two sisters.
The four year gap between Mary’s marriage and the birth of her first known child is interesting. It could indicate that she was very young when she married William Carey in 1520, perhaps just fourteen years old, and the marriage was not consummated until she was more mature. Alternatively she may have had other children prior to her daughter Catherine, who did not survive infancy. Another possibility is that her marriage was never consummated and during the whole period of her marriage she was Henry’s mistress. Six years is a long time to retain the affections of a monarch as wayward as Henry VIII, but Cardinal Pole suggests that the relationship was of some length.
Despite contemporary gossip we shall never know for certain if young Master Carey was indeed the King’s son. A DNA test might provide the answer but the chances of that happening are very slim. What is known for certain is that royal grants to Mary and her husband were spread over a number of years: 1522 to 1526, with the major grants of manors and royal estates occuring in 1524 when Catherine Carey was born and 1526 when Henry was born. However if evidence of paternity was based solely on a family resemblance, then in the case of Master Carey, not so his sister, it would not be possible to come to a firm conclusion. Portraits of the two children, as adults, have survived as indeed has one of William Carey but Master Carey does not show a marked resemblence to Henry VIII. Indeed his Boleyn ancestry is very predominant. However, it should be said that bearing a resemblance to your parents is not a pre-requisite for proof of paternity. Many children resemble their grandparents.
Of Master Carey’s character we are told that he was:
‘a fast man to his Prince, and firm to his friends and servants, downright honest and stout hearted … His custom of swearing and obscenity in speaking made him seem a worse Christian than he was, and a better knight of the carpet than he should be’.
Qualities he shared with Sir John Perrott, who is also believed to have been an illegitimate son of Henr
y VIII.
Master Carey was clearly named after his sovereign lord and master; indeed the latter may have been his godfather. William Carey’s duties as a gentleman of the privy chamber to the king and also esquire of the body required his presence at court for a number of months during the year. However in 1528 he fell a victim to the sweating sickness that ravaged London in that year and he died on 22 June without making a will. The event was duly communicated to Cardinal Wolsey by Thomas Heneage in a letter written from Hunsdon House, where the King was then residing in order to escape the sickness: ‘This night, as the King went to bed, word came of the death of William Carey’.
Young Carey’s appearance in the world occurred just nine months after the investiture of Henry FitzRoy, Henry VIII’s only recognized bastard son, as Duke of Richmond & Somerset at the royal palace of Bridewell on 18 June 1525. Henry’s decision to recognize the boy understandably caused his wife some anguish, coming as it did, just as his plans to marry the Princess Mary to her cousin the Emperor Charles V collapsed, the latter having suddenly declared his intention to marry the princess of Portugal instead. Henry’s humiliation was only partly redeemed by a subsequent treaty with the French king, Francois I, and a promise that the princess would marry the dauphin. Why he chose to acknowledge the boy at that point is unclear but many years later, in 1538, he declared to the Emperor that Richmond was ‘our only bastard son’. A statement that should, perhaps, be qualified by adding our only acknowledged bastard son.
If young Carey was indeed the King’s son, Henry’s reason for never acknowledging him as his child is obvious. Mary Carey was a married woman and Henry a married man, therefore their child would have been born as a result of double adultery. In addition Henry’s subsequent passion for Anne Boleyn and his determination to marry her, made his desire to divorce his wife Catherine on the grounds of his tender conscience at having married his brother’s widow a farce. As Cardinal Pole so clearly pointed out to him, he would simply be repeating the same mistake again with the sister of his former mistress. Undaunted Henry made certain that the dispensation to marry Anne in 1533 enabled him to marry in the first degree of affinity. This was then followed by an Act of Parliament in the same year permitting marriage with the sister of a discarded mistress. However, the Act was revoked in 1536, after Anne’s death.
A few years after William Carey’s death, the wardship of young Master Carey was granted to his aunt Anne Boleyn but after her death, it probably returned to the King. The death of William Carey at such a young age and the subsequent death of his aunt Anne Boleyn in 1536 had an unfortunate effect on Master Carey’s position. To the King’s credit he realized that the young man’s mother, Mary, was not the most suitable person to take charge of his education and upbringing – her reputation as a loose woman saw to that – therefore he arranged for him to become a member of his own household. The result was that the young man ‘was not badly educated: he wrote fluently, in a simple expressive style, full of proverbs and homely sayings much to the point’.
Young Carey’s choice of wife, Anne, the daughter of Sir Thomas Morgan, of Arkstone, Herefordshire, brought no major benefits to his purse and lifestyle. She did not come from one of the grander aristocratic families of the land, as one might have expected, but her antecedents were distinguished enough and she was also a member of the King’s household. Together they had twelve children and fifty years later, he died and was buried in St John the Baptist’s Chapel in Westminster Abbey in July 1596.
However, two years after their marriage, which took place in 1545, he inherited his father’s lands in Buckinghamshire, Essex, Hampshire and Wiltshire. At the end of that same year he took his seat in Parliament as MP for Buckingham, the first of four occasions in which he did so. During his lifetime, the King did not bestow upon him any special gifts or favours, as a result his situation and income were quite modest and entirely in keeping with that of a typical country gentleman.
On the accession of Queen Elizabeth in 1558 young Carey’s position changed dramatically. On 13 January 1558/9 Elizabeth created him Baron Hunsdon of Hunsdon, Co. Hertford and settled an income of £4,000 per annum on him. It was not the title he wanted. All his life he yearned to be given the earldom of Wiltshire but the Queen ignored his pleas. Unfortunately the fecundity of his wife, she bore him nine sons and three daughters, and the burdens of office ensured that he never became a rich man, indeed quite the opposite.
Nevertheless he made his mark in the world and was appointed governor of Berwick-upon-Tweed in 1568, a post he held for nearly twenty years and one to which he was eminently suited. His appointment was an opportune one for the Queen, as he proved to be a reliable lieutenant during the rebellion of the northern earls a short time afterwards. Indeed with a force of only 1,500 men he defeated a much larger rebel force under the command of Sir Leonard Dacre. His reward, many years later, was to be placed in charge of the army of 36,000 men at Tilbury Fort during the Armada scare in 1588.
Despite the attentions to his wife, Carey still managed to enjoy the pleasure of keeping at least two mistresses – not at the same time, of course. The first was during his governorship of Berwick with a lady who was subsequently to become Mrs Hodson. The result was a son Valentine, who later went onto become Bishop of Exeter. In the latter’s will – he died in 1626 – he left bequests to several of Lord Hunsdon’s grandchildren and his own half brother and sisters. His second mistress was infinitely more attractive and interesting.
In his capacity as Lord Chamberlain, Hunsdon was placed in charge of the Queen’s players and it was amongst these individuals that he met Emilia Bassano – according to A.L.Rowse, the dark lady of Shakespeare’s sonnets – daughter of Baptista Bassano, Royal Musician to Henry VIII and Elizabeth I. This remarkable lady appears in the notebooks of Dr Simon Forman, the self educated doctor, astrologer and philanderer and it is from these that we learn of her affair with Hunsdon. Her first meeting with Forman was in May 1597 and from her he learnt that ‘she was paramour to old Lord Hunsdon …. and was maintained in great pride; being with child she was for colour married to a minstrel’ – the child was a boy named Henry and Hunsdon gave her an annuity of forty pounds for life.
Despite being a co-heir to the Earldoms of Wiltshire and Ormonde, Hunsdon never managed to persuade Queen Elizabeth to grant him either title. It was only on his death bed that she relented and offered to remedy the situation. During his last illness she paid him a visit, bringing with her the letters patent granting him the titles and also the robes of an earl but he declined the honour with the words: ‘Madam, seeing you counted me not worthy of this honour while I was living, I count myself unworthy of it now I am dying’.
Catherine, Lady Knollys (née Carey) (ca 1524–1568/9)
Catherine Carey, the only daughter of Mary Carey (née Boleyn) was born about 1524. She was almost certainly named in honour of Henry VIII’s first wife Catherine of Aragon, but whether the latter was her godmother is unknown. The only known portrait of Mistress Carey, painted in 1562 at the age of thirty-eight, shows her heavily pregnant with one of her younger children, either her daughter Elizabeth or daughter Catherine. Just 4 years old at the death of her legal father William Carey, little is known of her early life. Her mother’s affair with Henry VIII cast a long shadow over the question of her paternity but like her brother only a DNA test would resolve the issue.
Within a few years of her husband’s death Mary Carey had taken another husband, William Stafford, of Grafton and Chebsey, Co Stafford and by him had a son who died young. Mary died suddenly in 1543 and William, who went on to become a distinguished diplomat and was knighted, married a second time to Dorothy Stafford, the daughter of Henry, Baron Stafford and Ursula Pole.
Young Catherine Carey remained for better or worse in the care of her mother and at the age of fifteen was appointed a maid of honour to Anne of Cleves during the short time that she was Henry VIII’s fourth wife. Catherine’s future husband Sir Francis Knollys, a gentleman pension
er to the King, also attended Anne of Cleves on her arrival in England. Within a short time of their first meeting, in April/May 1540, Catherine and Francis were married but again the event appears to have passed relatively unnoticed. There were no major grants of land from the King to support them, although there was an Act of Parliament in 1540 assuring them of the Manor of Rotherfield Grey in Oxfordshire, previously held by Catherine’s father-in-law.
In the years that followed Catherine performed her wifely duties by producing children on an almost annual basis. In all she had eleven surviving children but the strain of childbearing clearly diminished her health and she died suddenly at the age of forty-three whilst in attendance on the Queen on 15 January 1568/9, although she was not buried in St Edmund’s Chapel, Westminster Abbey until the following April. The Queen of Scots laid the blame for her early demise squarely on the shoulders of Queen Elizabeth because of her husband’s enforced absence in the north of England on state affairs. Unfortunately her husband did not achieve the same prominence in public affairs as his brother-in-law, Lord Hunsdon. Nevertheless, he earned the Queen’s trust and was used by her on numerous occasions in matters of state. He first entered the House of Commons in 1542, as a member for Horsham. This was followed five years later by a knighthood from the Duke of Somerset for his services during the Scottish War of 1547.