by Alison Weir
22. L. & P.
23. Hart. For the full texts of Mary’s two letters, see pp. 216 and 219–222.
24. Barbara Harris.
25. Martienssen.
26. Wilkinson: Mary Boleyn.
27. Plowden: The Other Boleyn Girl.
28. Wilkinson states that Mary was launched at court before Anne (Mary Boleyn).
29. Ibid.
30. Denny: Anne Boleyn.
31. Manuscripts of J. Eliot Hodgkin.
32. Perry: Sisters to the King.
33. Paget: “The Youth of Anne Boleyn.”
34. Brewer, in L. & P.; Gairdner: “The Age of Anne Boleyn” and “Mary and Anne Boleyn.”
35. Hackett; Plowden: Tudor Women, corrected in The Other Boleyn Girl; Somerset: Ladies in Waiting; Lofts; Bruce; Erickson: Anne Boleyn; Chapman; Sergeant; Smith: A Tudor Tragedy.
36. L. & P.; Paget: “The Youth of Anne Boleyn.”
37. Original Letters Illustrative of English History.
38. L. & P.
39. Correspondence de l’Empereur Maximilien Ier et de Marguerite d’Autriche.
40. Ibid.
41. Calendar of State Papers and Manuscripts existing in the Archives and Collections of Milan.
42. Warnicke: The Rise and Fall of Anne Boleyn.
43. Ibid.
44. Norton: Anne Boleyn.
45. Carlton.
46. Erickson: Anne Boleyn.
47. Brysson Morrison.
48. Glenne.
49. Luke.
50. Martienssen.
51. Erickson: Bloody Mary.
52. For a discussion of the portraits said to be of Mary Boleyn, and those of her first husband, William Carey, see Appendix II.
53. Paget: “The Youth of Anne Boleyn”; Ives; Perry: Sisters to the King.
54. Paget: “The Youth of Anne Boleyn”; Ives.
55. Warnicke: The Rise and Fall of Anne Boleyn, “Anne Boleyn’s Childhood.”
56. Letter recently acquired by Lincoln Cathedral Library. I am grateful to Dr. Nicholas Bennett, Vice Chancellor and Librarian at Lincoln Cathedral, for kindly sending me a transcript.
57. For example, Brewer, in L. & P.; Meyer; Hackett; Brysson Morrison; Lindsey; Sergeant. Warnicke incorrectly asserts that it was Anne (The Rise and Fall of Anne Boleyn, “Anne Boleyn’s Childhood”).
58. L. & P.
59. Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris ms. fr.7853, f.305b; Ives.
60. Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris ms. fr.7853, f.305b; Bernard: Anne Boleyn; Lindsey.
61. Ives.
62. Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris ms. fr.7853, f.305b; cf. Denny: Anne Boleyn.
63. Ives.
64. Hall.
65. Ibid.
66. Perry: Sisters to the King.
67. Jones.
68. Hart.
69. L. & P.; Perry: Sisters to the King.
70. Erickson: Anne Boleyn; Hart; Wilkinson: Mary Boleyn.
71. Jones.
72. Ibid.
73. L. & P.
74. Ibid.
75. V. C.
76. Ibid.
77. Ibid.; Hall.
78. Hall.
79. For Mary Tudor’s sojourn in France, see chiefly Perry: Sisters to the King; Walter C. Richardson; Gainey.
80. V. C.
81. L. & P.
82. Cited by Seward.
83. L. & P.
84. Cotton ms. Vitellius; L. & P.
85. L. & P.
86. Ibid.
87. Denny: Anne Boleyn.
88. Perry: Sisters to the King.
89. L. & P.
90. Ibid.
91. Ibid.
92. Wilkinson: Mary Boleyn.
4: A VERY GREAT WHORE?
1. Plowden: Tudor Women.
2. V. C.
3. Carlton; V. C.
4. L. & P.
5. Cited by Seward.
6. Brantôme.
7. Carlton.
8. L. & P.; this statement was not written by King François himself, as Jones states.
9. Denny: Anne Boleyn.
10. Powell.
11. Porter.
12. L. & P.
13. For example, Wilkinson, in Mary Boleyn.
14. Ridley, in The Love Letters of Henry VIII.
15. Warnicke: The Rise and Fall of Anne Boleyn.
16. Jones.
17. Ridley, in The Love Letters of Henry VIII.
18. Luke.
19. Erickson: Anne Boleyn.
20. Wilkinson: Mary Boleyn.
21. Denny: Anne Boleyn.
22. Rival.
23. Ibid.
24. Luke.
25. Ibid.
26. Bruce. She dates Mary’s liaison with François to the period when she was supposedly serving Queen Claude.
27. Hart.
28. Bruce.
29. Plowden: The Other Boleyn Girl.
30. Jollet; Seward.
31. Cf. Norton: Anne Boleyn; Lindsey; Losing Your Head Over Henry: Mary Boleyn.
32. Including myself in previous books.
33. Carroll.
34. Varlow: The Lady Penelope.
35. Jones.
36. Denny: Anne Boleyn.
37. Ibid.
38. Norton: Anne Boleyn.
39. Denny: Anne Boleyn.
40. Ibid.; Norton: Anne Boleyn; Wilkinson: The Early Loves of Anne Boleyn.
41. Wilkinson: The Early Loves of Anne Boleyn.
42. Ibid.
43. S. C.
44. Cf. Lofts.
45. Bruce.
46. Fraser.
47. For example, Savage, in The Love Letters of Henry VIII.
48. Erickson: Bloody Mary.
49. Hackett.
50. Sergeant.
51. Jenner.
52. Norton: Anne Boleyn.
53. Jones.
54. Loades: Henry VIII: King and Court.
55. Fraser.
56. Rivals in Power.
57. Luke.
58. Martienssen.
59. Rival.
60. Hackett.
61. Hart.
62. Varlow: The Lady Penelope.
63. Hart.
64. For Mary’s letter, see Chapter 11.
65. Glenne.
66. Denny: Anne Boleyn.
67. Ibid.
68. Norton: Anne Boleyn.
69. L. & P.
70. S. C.
71. L. & P.
72. Erickson: Anne Boleyn.
73. Seward.
74. Ibid.
75. Knecht.
76. Wilkinson: Mary Boleyn.
77. Ibid.
78. MacNalty.
79. Ridley: Henry VIII; Denny: Anne Boleyn.
80. Ridley: Henry VIII.
81. V. C.
82. Plowden: Tudor Women; Erickson: Great Harry, Anne Boleyn; Walder; Luke; Norton: Anne Boleyn; Hart; Hughes.
83. Bruce; Hackett.
84. Hackett.
85. Ibid.
86. Round, although Martienssen for one repeats this as fact.
87. Denny: Anne Boleyn; Norton: Anne Boleyn.
88. Martienssen.
89. Chapman, who states that Mary, and not Anne, had been sent to the court of the Archduchess Margaret.
90. Powell. John Walder states that Mary came home in the early 1520s, but she was married in England in February 1520.
91. Ives; Norton: She Wolves; Michael Clark; Denny: Anne Boleyn; Fraser; Loades: The Six Wives of Henry VIII; Bernard: Anne Boleyn; Jones.
92. Denny: Anne Boleyn.
93. The Chronicle of King Henry VIII of England.
94. L. & P.
95. Loades: The Tudor Queens.
96. Ridley: Henry VIII; Brysson Morrison; Fraser; Loades: The Six Wives of Henry VIII; Plowden: The Other Boleyn Girl; Luke; Powell, who states that Mary filled Elizabeth Blount’s place; and Jones, who asserts that this was how she came to Henry’s attention.
97. Luke.
98. Perry: Sisters to the King.
99. Loades: The Six Wives of Henry VIII.
100. Not Elizabeth Howard, Lady Boleyn, as Warnicke states in The Rise and Fall of Anne Boleyn.
101. Cited by Erickson in The First Elizabeth.
102. Jones.
103. Ibid.; Norton: Anne Boleyn; Wilkinson: The Early Loves of Anne Boleyn.
104. For example, Erickson in The First Elizabeth, and your author in earlier books. I can trace no contemporary source for the French King saying that Mary was “always good for a ride” (Hobden) or the claim that, “according to François, Mary ‘did service’ to male members of the court too” (Fox).
105. Jones.
106. Prévost.
107. The relation is identified elsewhere, less credibly, as William du Moulin de l’Hospital, seigneur of Fontenay-sous-Briis, a descendant of “Louis Boulen,” who is mentioned in a notarial contract of 1460; Moulin’s wife was called Catherine, and they had married in 1510; he too died in 1548.
108. www.mairie-de-briis-sous-forges.fr.
109. That of M. Marcel Mouton, a romantic poet who lived in the tower in the nineteenth century and claimed to have documents relating to Anne’s sojourn there. According to him, the facts were beyond doubt, although certain authors had contested them (Prévost).
110. Warnicke: “Anne Boleyn’s Childhood.”
111. See, for example, Bruce.
112. Prévost.
113. Norton: Anne Boleyn.
114. Denny: Anne Boleyn.
115. Sergeant.
116. Andrew Clark; Tottel’s Miscellany.
117. Stone.
118. L. & P.
119. Ives.
120. Erickson: Anne Boleyn.
121. Chapman.
122. Michael Clark.
123. L. & P.
124. Cited by Michael Clark.
125. L. & P.
5: WILLIAM CAREY, OF THE PRIVY CHAMBER
1. Denny: Katherine Howard; Powell; Wilkinson: Mary Boleyn.
2. Hart.
3. Foster; www.teachergenealogist.com.
4. Hart.
5. Warnicke: The Rise and Fall of Anne Boleyn.
6. Not a week before the wedding, as Hart states.
7. Warnicke: The Rise and Fall of Anne Boleyn.
8. Starkey says he was a Gentleman of the Privy Chamber in 1519, but he is not referred to as such until 1526 (the Eltham Ordinances, in The Antiquarian Repertory); he was Esquire of the Body in June 1524 (L. & P.). A grant to him as “esquire” in 1526, and a description of him as an esquire at the time of his death, refer to his status, not his office.
9. The Rutland Papers.
10. Jones.
11. Powell.
12. Plowden: Tudor Women, The House of Tudor.
13. Denny: Anne Boleyn.
14. Lofts.
15. Luke.
16. Hackett.
17. The Reign of Henry VIII.
18. Hall.
19. Powell.
20. Denny: Anne Boleyn; Plowden: The Other Boleyn Girl.
21. Denny: Katherine Howard.
22. Bruce.
23. Hart.
24. Jones.
25. Warnicke: “Anne Boleyn’s Childhood.”
26. Ibid.
27. Warnicke: The Rise and Fall of Anne Boleyn.
28. Wilkinson: Mary Boleyn.
29. Varlow: The Lady Penelope.
30. Hart; Wilkinson: Mary Boleyn.
31. Cf. Hart.
32. Bruce.
33. For example, Luke.
34. L. & P. Some sources incorrectly give the date as 1521, e.g., Friedmann; J. J. Scarisbrick; Fraser; Martin Hume; Erickson: Anne Boleyn; Norton: Anne Boleyn; Williams: Henry VIII and His Court; Plowden: The Other Boleyn Girl.
35. L. & P.
36. Thurley; Carroll.
37. L. & P.
38. For example, Hart.
39. By her second husband, Sir Robert Spencer.
40. Warnicke: The Rise and Fall of Anne Boleyn. Erickson incorrectly assumes that, on marriage, Mary became known as “Mary Boleyn Carey,” but that is a later American form of name unknown in Tudor En gland.
41. It is also given as Karry or Cary in early documents, and variously as Carey, Cary, Care, Caree, Carre, or Karre in Tudor sources.
42. Some genealogies give the date 1479, eight years after his father’s death!
43. Chilton had been owned by the Saxon King Harold before the Norman Conquest of 1066, and soon after that the manor became part of the Honor of Wallingford. From 1156 it was held by the Foliots, who gave it its later name (which is now spelled Foliat). The manor passed to their descendants, the Teys family, in 1289, and then, in 1367, to the Lords Lisle. In 1439 it came into the possession of Eleanor, the wife of Edmund Beaufort, Duke of Somerset, and from 1467 to her death in 1505, Chilton Foliat and the surrounding manors were held jointly by her seven daughters—among whom was William Carey’s grandmother, Eleanor Beaufort—and their husbands, and by her grandson, Henry Stafford, Duke of Buckingham, whose lands were declared forfeit after he was attaindered and executed in 1483. In 1505, Chilton Foliat and the other manors reverted to the Crown, and from 1519 they were held by the successive queens of Henry VIII. William’s father was probably allowed to remain there as a tenant of the Crown.
44. For example, Wilkinson in Mary Boleyn.
45. Foster; www.teachergenealogist.com.
46. He is sometimes styled “of Pleshey Castle”—then also spelled Plashy—but this castle was in the hands of the Crown from 1397 to the reign of Edward VI (1547–53) and, according to L. & P., John Carey was merely its constable. (Unlocking Essex’s Past).
47. L. & P.
48. Starkey, in The Renaissance at Sutton Place, gives his date of birth as c.1500 but cites no source, while Wilkinson states in Mary Boleyn that William’s date of birth is not known.
49. Wilkinson: Mary Boleyn. She also suggests that William had become Courtenay’s ward on the death of Sir Thomas Carey in 1500, but—as has been shown—Thomas Carey did not die until 1536.
50. L. & P.
51. Ibid.
52. Ibid.
53. Ibid.
54. Ibid.
55. Ibid.
56. Ibid.
57. Ibid.
58. The Rutland Papers.
59. L. & P.
60. Ibid.
61. Ibid.
62. Starkey, in The Renaissance at Sutton Place.
63. Four Years at the Court of Henry VIII.
64. Wilkinson: Mary Boleyn.
65. Cited by Loades: The Tudor Queens.
66. Starkey, in The Renaissance at Sutton Place.
67. Fox says that Carey played tennis; while this is likely, for it was one of the King’s favorite sports, I can find no contemporary source to support this statement.
68. The words are quoted from his song, “Pastime with Good Company.”
69. The Eltham Ordinances, in The Antiquarian Repertory.
70. Hall.
71. Henry VIII: A European Court in England. For a discussion of William Carey’s portraits, see Appendix II.
72. The Careys’ house stood in a field southeast of the parish church, where a few mounds are all that remain to indicate its site. It was William Carey’s nephew, Sir Edward Carey of Aldenham (the son of his older brother, Sir John Carey), the Master and Treasurer of Elizabeth I’s jewels and plate, who bought the manor and the Elizabethan house from Paul Stepneth in 1589, and was buried in the parish church in 1618. His son, the colonist and politician Lucius Carey, 1st Viscount Falkland, was born at Aldenham in 1576. The house was remodeled around 1632, and ten years later it was sold by the 2nd Viscount to Sir John Harby, a staunch Royalist; in 1664 it was bought by Denzil Holles, the statesman and author who had been one of the five M.P.s whom Charles I famously had tried to arrest in 1642. The Careys’ former home was finally pulled down in 1711.
Investigating the possibility that William and Mary Carey had lived in another property in Aldenham, I discovered that
three other substantial houses had once stood there. Pennes Place, named after a local family who had held lands in the village since the thirteenth century, was demolished sometime after 1559. Later called Aldenham Hall, it had been built before 1485, when it was purchased from Ralph Penne by Humphrey Coningsby, who owned it until his death in 1535. A “fair house of brick,” orginally called Wigbournes, was owned in the sixteenth century by the Wigbourne and Wrence families. It was rebuilt in 1632, and forms the core of the present Aldenham House—the name was changed around 1769—which was remodeled in the early eighteenth century, and practically rebuilt in the nineteenth, when the magnificent gardens were laid out; its garden is on the site of the double moat of Pennes Place. Today, Aldenham House is home to Haberdashers’ Aske’s public school. Neither of these properties can have been the residence of William Carey and Mary Boleyn, nor are the couple linked to any lesser properties in the area, while their names appear nowhere in the records of the village.
The manor of Titburst and Kendals to the southeast of the parish had been left to Henry VIII in 1509 by his grandmother, Lady Margaret Beaufort, William Carey’s kinswoman; in 1530, it was granted to Henry Fitzroy, Duke of Richmond. (V. C. H.: Hertfordshire, www.british-history.ac.uk).
73. Warnicke: The Rise and Fall of Anne Boleyn.
74. Warnicke also claims that Mary was never a maid of honor to Katherine of Aragon because she was too young, having been born in 1508 (sic.).
75. Warnicke: “Anne Boleyn’s Childhood”; Barbara Harris.
76. Barbara Harris.
77. Starkey: The Reign of Henry VIII.
78. Cavendish: The Life and Death of Cardinal Wolsey.
79. The Rutland Papers.
80. L. & P.
81. The Chronicle of Calais; The Rutland Papers.
82. The Rutland Papers. For general references to the Field of Cloth of Gold quoted in the text, see this source and, principally, The Chronicle of Calais; V. C.; S. C.; L. & P., and Hall.
83. L. & P.; The Rutland Papers.
84. The Chronicle of Calais; L. & P.
85. Hall.
86. Ibid.
87. Ibid.
88. Ibid.
89. Ibid.
90. V. C.
91. Ibid.
92. L. & P.
93. Wilkinson: Mary Boleyn. He is incorrectly listed in this contemporary source as “Sir William Carey,” although he was never knighted.
94. L. & P.
95. Hall.
96. Ibid.
97. V. C.
98. Luke.
99. Denny: Anne Boleyn.