Mary Boleyn: The Great and Infamous Whore

by Alison Weir

  Between 1516 and 1523, Henry lavished £20,000 (£7.5 million) in converting New Hall into a vast and sumptuous palace with eight courtyards, which he renamed Beaulieu. Faced with red brick, it was entered via a gatehouse embellished with the King’s arms, which led into a main courtyard with a fountain; the palace boasted a great hall, a tennis court, a chapel with brilliant stained glass, and beautiful gardens. There was even hot and cold running water in the royal bathroom. By 1519 the renovations had been sufficiently far advanced for the King and Queen to entertain noble French hostages there, and by 1522, when William was made Keeper, they were almost complete. Being entrusted with the keepership of such an important palace was quite a responsibility for William, and testifies to the King’s trust and confidence in him, and to Carey’s proven ability.

  Beaulieu later came back into the hands of the Boleyns when Henry VIII, having decided that it was old-fashioned, leased it to Mary’s brother George in 1531. It is now a school, New Hall, and has been extensively rebuilt; the only remains of the house that Mary knew are the cellars, and a stained-glass window now in St. Margaret’s Church, Westminster. Beaulieu lay about twenty miles from another Boleyn property, Rochford Hall, which Mary would one day inherit.

  In June 1520, as “Mistress Carey,” Mary was one of twenty-five gentlewomen among three thousand “persons attendant on the Queen”81 when the English court decamped en masse to France for the famous Field of Cloth of Gold, the lavish summit meeting between those great rivals Henry VIII and François I, which took place in a field between Guînes and Ardres in what is now northern France; Guînes was in English hands, for Calais and the surrounding area—the Pale—was an English territory, having been taken by Edward III in 1347, in the early phases of the Hundred Years War. It then became part of the great Plantagenet empire founded through the marriage of Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine in the twelfth century. Over the centuries, successive kings of France had gradually clawed back the lands, and England’s defeat in 1453 at the end of the Hundred Years War brought about the loss of all the rest but Calais, which itself would be lost to the French in 1557 by Henry VIII’s daughter, Mary I.

  Mary would no doubt have been excited to be involved in such a great and important enterprise, and been thrown into a flurry of preparations; and she was to go in some style, for each gentlewoman was permitted to take with her “a woman, two menservants, and three horses.”82 Among the knights of Katherine’s household were Mary’s kinsmen John Shelton, Robert Clere, and Philip Calthorpe, and several of her Howard relatives, while Jane Parker, her future sister-in-law, was a fellow gentlewoman.

  Mary’s husband William also had a role to play in the proceedings; both he and Sir Thomas Boleyn, who had helped to organize the event, were attending on the King,83 William as one of the Esquires for the Body; while her mother, “the Lady Boleyn,” and her aunt, Anne Tempest, “the Lady Boleyn junior,” were with the Queen.84

  The King and Queen and their vast retinues, all clad in “noble apparel,”85 sailed from Dover in a great fleet of ships, then made their way in stately procession to Guînes, where Cardinal Wolsey had arranged for a small temporary palace of wood and canvas to be erected. Here, the Queen was lodged with her ladies and gentlewomen in rooms of unsurpassed magnificence, with most of her people being accommodated in silken tents. Katherine’s lodgings were of “unparalleled splendor,” hung with cloth of gold; the altar in her chapel “lacked neither pearls nor stones” and bore “twelve great images of gold.”86 The King’s apartments were even more sumptuous.

  The two kings met on June 7 in the Vale of Ardres. Attended by vast trains of courtiers, they made a magnificent sight, and the very ground had been leveled so that neither should appear greater than the other. Just to be on the safe side, Henry was accompanied by his guard, “five hundred in number.” Approaching “in the field,” he and François saluted each other while still on horseback, then dismounted and embraced “with courteous words, to the great rejoicing of the beholders.” The field in which they met was ringed with sumptuous tents and pavilions “imbued and batoned with rich cloths of silk like fine burned gold” and hung with “marvelous cloths of Arras.” In every chamber were imposing canopies of estate, also of gold, with “rich embroidery, with chairs covered with like cloth, with pommels of fine gold and great cushions of rich work.”87

  Gifts were exchanged, a treaty of friendship signed, and the two kings then passed the day in pleasant conversation, banqueting, and “loving devices,”88 while their courts made each other’s acquaintance.

  Determined to impress the French, their ancient foe, all the lords of England were decked out in cloth of gold or silver, velvets, tinsel (satin threaded with gold or silver), or crimson silk, often heavily embroidered, and, along with all the knights, gentlemen, esquires, and officers of the King, had weighed themselves down with chains, baldricks, and SS collars, all of gold.89

  In company with all the other courtiers, Mary and the rest of the ladies would have spent the seventeen days of the Field of Cloth of Gold “superbly” dressed in their “richest and costliest habits,” for “the suites of the two queens were gorgeous in the extreme,”90 although there was snide comment that “the French ones arranged theirs with more taste and elegance, so that their visitors soon began to adopt the mode of that country—by which they lost in modesty what they gained in comeliness.” Mary had spent months at the French court, and possibly years in a noble French household, so she would no doubt have been used to wearing the nimbuslike French hood that—scandalously—showed off the hair, and necklines that were cut wider, and lower, than those in England.

  She would also, no doubt, have enjoyed the endless round of extravagant festivities that attended the seventeen days of the summit, which included jousts, sporting events, feasting, banquets, dancing, and excessive drinking from fountains running with free wine. On Sundays she would have attended Katherine to Mass, celebrated by Cardinal Wolsey, and probably witnessed the touching argument between her mistress and Queen Claude as to who should take precedence in kissing the Bible first—a contest that looked like it would end in stalemate until they spontaneously kissed each other instead.

  When Queen Katherine, the Dowager French Queen Mary Tudor, and Queen Claude met on June 11 to watch a joust, Mary was one of the “handsome and well arrayed” ladies who were crowded into wagons or riding on palfreys in Katherine’s retinue,91 and who sat or stood behind her on a stage hung with tapestries or painted cloths and furnished with a costly canopy of estate “all of pearl,” which drew much comment. She would have witnessed her valiant husband—who had been provided with a pair of yellow velvet hose92—competing in the lists as one of the Earl of Devon’s men,93 jousting in the same contests as the King, winning prizes in the tournaments, and earning the acclaim of the two courts. She would have been present to watch him taking part in the revels alongside his colleagues Henry Norris, Nicholas Carew, and Francis Bryan,94 all intimates of the King’s inner circle whom Carey would probably by now have accounted his friends.

  On the following day there was another joust, in which the two kings showed off their talents in feats of skill. It is unlikely that Mary was one of the forty ladies who followed Queen Katherine on palfreys as, clad defiantly in the costume of Spain, France’s enemy, she rode in procession to the tiltyard; but she was almost certainly in the six wagons that followed. She would no doubt have thrilled to the sight of King Henry displaying his dexterity “before the ladies,” spurring his horse and “making it bound and curvet as valiantly as any man could do.” Two more days of jousting followed, with Henry and François vying to impress the two courts; the contest, most fortunately, ended in a draw.

  The following evening, Mary would have been in attendance on Katherine when—Henry having gone off to be entertained by Queen Claude at the castle of Ardres—she received King François at Guînes, where he was “right honorably served in all things needful. Then the ladies came and proffered themselves to dance, and
so did in the French king’s presence, which done, [he] took leave of the Queen and the ladies of the court.”95 We do not know if Mary Boleyn was one of the dancers, although it is possible. This cannot have been one of the easiest of social occasions, since François thought Katherine “old and deformed” (as he had called her the year before), while she was soon to refer to him as “the greatest Turk that ever was.”

  So far all had been sweetness and courtesy, but it could not be expected that the meeting between the two kings would go off without a hitch. Mary must have been watching when, a couple of days later, Henry VIII, a vain man who believed his athletic prowess was second to none, challenged his royal rival to a wrestling match. At first the fight was equal, but soon the courts were holding their collective breath as the King of France seemed to be getting the better of his opponent.

  “Have at me again!” cried a provoked Henry, whereupon the younger François threw him ingloriously to the ground. Consternation broke out among the spectators as the English king rose to his feet and made to lunge at his brother monarch. It was only the timely intervention of Queen Katherine and Queen Claude, who pulled their husbands apart, that averted a serious diplomatic incident.

  On June 19 and 20 there were two more tournaments, in which William Carey probably took part, as the two kings were “holding tourneys with all the partners of their challenge,” watched, as on every day, by the three queens, to whom, as they sat on their “stages,” the kings did reverence before the jousts began. On June 22, Henry and François did “battle on foot at the barriers.”96 At all these functions Queen Katherine “and all her ladies were superbly dressed.”97

  During the summit Mary may well have been united with her sister Anne,98 who was probably in the train of either Queen Claude or Marguerite of Valois. It has been suggested that, after five years, “relations between the two sisters must have been uncomfortable,” with Mary, who had been “recalled from France in disgrace,” now in attendance on Queen Katherine while “simultaneously warming King Henry’s bed”; and that King François “cannot have failed to notice that King Henry was now riding his English mare.”99 But there is no evidence for any of this.

  Even so, there may have been occasions for awkwardness. Did Mary—and her father—fear that William Carey would hear French gossip about her during the courtly social gatherings that marked the summit and would almost certainly have been attended by people who might have remembered her from the days when she had been King François’s mistress? Did she worry that the French king would recognize her in the throng and betray by some look or gesture that he knew her intimately? It is fruitless to speculate, since we know very little about the relationship between Mary and William. Given that the marriage was advantageous on both sides, we might expect Carey to have been conventional enough to have wanted an heir that he could be sure was his own; and, being a prominent man at court, he must surely have cared about his wife’s reputation. So it is possible that, for Mary, the Field of Cloth of Gold was something of an ordeal.

  The costly pageant came to an end on June 24, the day after Cardinal Wolsey had celebrated a “high and solemn” Mass in the open air, which was attended by the two courts and followed by a farewell feast and a magnificent fireworks display. Formal farewells were said, with François visiting Katherine at Guînes, and Henry taking his leave of Claude at Ardres, and the meeting broke up, with very little to show for all the ruinous expense.

  For despite the lavish display and protestations of friendship and amity on the part of Henry VIII and François I, the summit had achieved virtually nothing. “These sovereigns are not at peace,” a Venetian envoy had observed. “They hate each other cordially.” In fact, Henry had already secretly arranged to meet up with François’s great enemy, the Emperor Charles V, after the great long courtly charade was over. Only a fortnight after he had led his court back to Calais, where he and the Queen and their suites lodged in the Exchequer Palace, he rode, with Sir Thomas Boleyn among those in attendance,100 to Gravelines to meet the Emperor and escort him back to Calais, where he and Katherine hosted a great banquet in his honor. William Carey was in attendance, and Mary Boleyn would almost certainly have been present in the Queen’s train. Soon afterward, the court sailed home to England.

  Mary was no doubt able to watch her husband take part in jousts that were held to celebrate the marriage of his patron, the Earl of Devon, to Gertrude Blount, the daughter of Lord Mountjoy, which took place on October 25, 1520. The King had given orders for the making of sleeveless knee-length tunics (known as “bases”) and trappings of russet velvet and cloth of silver “lozenged and cross-lozenged with cloth of gold, every lozenge embroidered with trueloves of cloth of gold, with saddle covers and harness of the same. These were used by the King, Sir William Kingston, and Mr. William Carey at Greenwich, the 21st, 27th, and 28th October.”101

  Tragedy struck the Boleyns sometime in 1520, when the eldest son and heir, Thomas Boleyn the younger, died. The cause of his death is unknown. This must have been a terrible blow for his family, for the young man had lived well into his twenties and they had surely envisaged a brilliant future for him. Now he was at rest at Penshurst, and his surviving brother, George, was heir in his stead.

  Life, as ever, had to go on. That year, Sir Thomas Boleyn was much occupied, not only by the Field of Cloth of Gold, but in finding a husband for his younger daughter, now that the elder was satisfactorily wed. By the spring of 1520 he was negotiating to marry Anne, then still in France, to James Butler, the son of Sir Piers, who was still calling himself Earl of Ormond. Again this argues that Anne was the younger sister, whose marriage was not broached until her elder sister was settled in wedlock.

  According to Cardinal Wolsey, James Butler was “right active, discreet, and wise,” and Boleyn, spurred by the prospect of his daughter becoming Countess of Ormond, joined forces with his brother-in-law, Thomas Howard, Earl of Surrey, the King’s Lieutenant in Ireland, to lay the proposal before Henry VIII, who thought it an admirable solution to the Ormond dispute, and gave his “agreeable consent.”102 Despite this, the marriage negotiations dragged on for over a year, and in November 1521, Wolsey told Henry VIII that he would endeavor himself to bring them to a conclusion “with all effect.”103 He was to do quite the opposite, managing to drag out discussions all through the summer and autumn of 1522, after which the marriage plans were then abandoned because no agreement on the terms of the contract had been reached—thanks, no doubt, to the obstruction of the Cardinal, and to Sir Thomas perhaps deciding that he wanted the earldom of Ormond for himself after all. This left Anne no nearer to finding a husband than she had ever been.

  By then Mary Boleyn had probably become Henry VIII’s mistress.

  6

  The Assault on the Castle of Virtue

  Historically, Elizabeth Blount was by far the most prominent of Henry VIII’s mistresses, yet her fame has in recent years been eclipsed by the woman who was probably her successor in Henry’s bed, Mary Boleyn.

  We can discount an unsubstantiated claim, made in 1879, that Elizabeth was replaced in the King’s affections by a Mistress Arabella Parker, the wife of a London merchant.1 Apart from the fact that she is not mentioned in any contemporary source, Arabella (or, more correctly, Arbella) was then a Scots name and virtually unknown in England until it was given, in 1575, to the Lady Arbella Stuart, Henry VIII’s great-great-niece. Because she was perceived to be a dynastic threat to Elizabeth I and James I, the name did not gain popularity, and it was not until the late seventeenth century that it started to become fashionable.2

  Henry VIII’s affair with Mary Boleyn was conducted so discreetly that there is no record of the date it started, its duration, or when it ended.3 Early in the nineteenth century, the Catholic historian John Lingard put forward the claim that Mary had been Henry’s mistress, and backed it with striking arguments; but within thirty years it was being asserted that there was no evidence to prove “aught against the reputation of Mary Bol
eyn” and that the “malicious rumors” about her relationship with the King were invented “to blacken the fame of Henry while he was seeking to divorce Katherine of Aragon, leading the world to believe that he who could be capable of such enormities could entertain no scruples of conscience on the grounds of consanguinity.”4 Even the magisterial Froude (and after him, in 1952, Sir Arthur MacNalty) vehemently denied that the affair ever took place. Froude—who miscalled Mary’s husband “Henry Carey” and incorrectly claimed that they were married in January 1521—wrote, “The story may have been true, and if it was true it was peculiarly disgraceful, but it is not proved … The balance of probability is the other way.” He went on to castigate “respectable historians” for believing it, and concluded that “it was a legend which grew out of the temper of the time, a mere floating calumny.”

  Friedmann, citing much of the evidence that will be set out in this chapter, exploded that myth in 1884, and since then our knowledge of Henry VIII’s private life has advanced immeasurably, so there can now be no doubt that he did have an affair with Mary Boleyn. Indeed, the evidence for it is overwhelmingly conclusive.5

  Nevertheless, the first non-contemporary reference to the relationship dates only from 1527, while other primary evidence is sparse. Henry did not “flaunt” the affair;6 we only know about it from later sources, primarily a Papal dispensation granted to Henry VIII in 1528, the testimonies of George Throckmorton (1533) and John Hale (1535), several Spanish diplomatic reports of the 1530s, and a treatise written by the King’s cousin, Cardinal Reginald Pole, in 1538—all of which will be discussed in due course. Froude pointed out in 1891 that the affair was not mentioned in the first draft of “Pole’s Book,” Pro ecclesiasticae unitatis defensione (On the Unity of the Church), which took the form of an open letter to the King, written at Henry VIII’s request and sent to England in 1536, which suggests Pole did not know of it at that time. It was only mentioned in the published edition in 1538, which was sent to England the following year with Pope Paul III’s Bull of Deposition. This makes sense, as the Pope could have divulged to Pole what he knew to be the truth about Mary, which prompted Pole to castigate Henry VIII for marrying the sister of his mistress.