The Other Tudors (16 page)

In 1532, when Henry went on a royal visit to France, one of those attending Anne was her sister. A meeting with Francis I led to his making those unpleasant remarks about Mary’s virtue. Once back in England, with Anne firmly established as Queen, Mary became one of her ladies-in-waiting.

In 1534, Mary Boleyn remarried to William Stafford, one of the King’s Gentleman Ushers, and a soldier from the Calais garrison. Mary described him as being ‘poor, but of good family.’ The marriage was made in secret, as Mary seems to have fallen into disfavour with her family. As the Queen’s sister, she would be expected to make a far better marriage to one of the Queen’s supporters, someone with sufficient fortune to take care of her and her children and to enhance her sister’s Court.

After her marriage, Mary wrote to Cromwell, then the King’s first minister:

The King wrote to George Boleyn asking him to contact his father about helping Mary. The couple were given the manor of Rochford, in Essex, a Boleyn family holding, to add to Stafford’s land at Grafton and Chebsey, Staffordshire. Mary Boleyn retired there and seems to have stayed quietly out of the way.

Despite the sisters being at odds, the closeness of the Boleyn family was noted and utilised. When Anne miscarried in January 1536, Francis I was told the story, also reported by Chapuys to Charles V, that Anne was not really pregnant at all. She and her sister Mary had invented the story between them to keep Henry believing that Anne could give him the son he wanted.
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From her marriage in 1534 until her death on 19 July 1543, Mary Boleyn lived on the estate at Rochford. She bore William Stafford two more children, a boy and a girl; the boy’s name has not survived and he died before he reached the age of 10, while the girl, whose name was Anne, probably died in infancy. Mary found a place at Court for her daughter, Catherine Carey, as one of the maids of Anne of Cleves. Catherine caught the attention of Sir Francis Knollys, one of the King’s gentlemen, who married her around 1540.

After Mary’s death William Stafford married Dorothy Stafford, a cousin, daughter of Sir Henry, Baron Stafford, and granddaughter of the last Duke of Buckingham. They had two sons, Sir Edward and William. Dorothy Stafford was Mistress of the Robes to Queen Elizabeth, and a good friend. William Stafford and Dorothy were obliged to spend some time abroad during Queen Mary’s reign, and a third son, John, was born at Geneva in 1556; John Calvin was his godfather. William Stafford died in Geneva, and Dorothy argued with Calvin, moved to Basle, and then to England where her son John had to be naturalised.

Despite his mother’s unfortunate second marriage, Henry Carey remained in the wardship of his aunt, educated by Nicholas Bourbon. After Anne’s fall from grace and death in 1536, he may have stayed at Court in the care of another guardian or returned to his mother.

Safely married and within his majority, Henry Carey began his career in 1547 when he was returned as the MP for Buckingham. Two years later Edward VI granted him manors at Little Brickhill and Burton, Buckinghamshire. However, he lived quietly under Mary I, which was a wise idea for anyone who could claim a blood relationship with Anne Boleyn.

Elizabeth I was very fond of her Carey cousins and showed it almost as soon as she ascended to the throne. On her accession, Henry was knighted and in January 1559 was created Baron Hunsdon with a pension of £400 p.a. and the manors of Hunsdon and Eastwick in Hertfordshire and land in Kent. In October 1560 he was appointed Master of the Queen’s Hawks (his office was responsible for the purchase, breeding, housing and training of hunting birds for the Queen and her Favourites) and in May 1561 Hunsdon was made a Knight of the Garter. He was later appointed to the post of Captain of the Gentlemen Pensioners, her personal bodyguard, in 1564, a post he held until 1568.

Much of his life was spent on the northern borders, protecting England from marauding Scots. In August 1568 Hunsdon took up his post as Governor of Berwick-upon-Tweed, Northumberland, and Lord Warden of the Eastern Marches. He was a good soldier, popular with the troops, but was less polished as a courtier. He was, however, totally trustworthy and loyal to the Queen, so much so that she chose him to be one of the commissioners at the trial of Mary, Queen of Scots. In 1569 he was instrumental in putting down a rebellion against Elizabeth in the north, organised by the Duke of Norfolk and the Earls of Westmorland and Northumberland. In one engagement, Hunsdon, with about 1,500 troops, defeated an army of around 3,000 rebels.

In 1577, his loyalty and honesty were rewarded when he was elected a Privy Councillor. In 1581 he was appointed Captain General of the forces controlling the English borders and in 1587 he became Lord Warden General of the Northern Marches. The following year, when England was threatened by the Spanish Armada, he came south to command the Queen’s Bodyguard of 36,000 troops based at Tilbury, as Principal Captain and Governor of the Army, ‘for the defence and surety of our own Royal Person,’
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as the Queen wrote to him. In 1590, he became joint Earl Marshall of England with Lord Burghley and Lord Howard of Effingham. Hunsdon was Chief Justice of the Royal Forces from December 1591 until his death in 1596. By a remarkable coincidence, he was also one of the commissioners at the trial of John Perrot, another one of Henry VIII’s illegitimate sons, in March 1592.

In July 1585 Hunsdon was given the post of Lord Chamberlain of the Household. One of his duties was to organise the royal entertainments, including masques and plays. Probably the best of the Elizabethan theatre companies was the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, with Hunsdon (followed by his son George) as their patron. The company included William Kemp, Philip Burbage and William Shakespeare. Between 1594, when the company came under Hunsdon’s wing, and 1603 when Elizabeth died, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men produced
Titus Andronicus
,
The Taming of the Shrew
,
Love’s Labours Lost
,
Romeo and Juliet
,
Two Gentlemen of Verona
,
The Merchant of Venice
,
Richard II
,
Henry IV
,
Henry V
,
Hamlet
,
A Comedy of Errors
,
A Midsummer’s Night Dream
and
Twelfth Night
. In 1599 Burbage, Shakespeare and others of their company built the Globe Theatre on Bankside, Southwark in south London, as a permanent home for their troupe. Their success meant that they could now cease the tours that were essential to lesser companies and which the Lord Chamberlain’s Men had done for years before.
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Hunsdon had another theatrical connection. In 1592, he took as his mistress a lady called Emilia Bassano, a member of the famous Italian family of musicians. She wrote a book of largely religious poetry and was particularly skilled in playing the virginals. When Bassano found herself pregnant, she married another Italian musician, Alphonse Lanier. Her son by Hunsdon, christened Henry, was born in early 1593 and took the surname of Lanier; Henry Lanier would later become a court musician to Charles I. Emilia went on to have several more children by her husband. She is one of the ladies tentatively identified as being Shakespeare’s Dark Lady of the Sonnets and it is believed that she had an affair with the playwright.

Hunsdon died on 23 July 1596 at Somerset House in London. He had married Anne, daughter of Sir Thomas Morgan of Athelstone, Herefordshire, and had a family of seven sons and three daughters. Elizabeth I tried to give him one last gift as he lay dying; she had never given him a noble title above baron, and now she offered to resurrect the title of Earl of Wiltshire, once held by his grandfather. Hunsdon refused, blunt as always. ‘Madam’, he is reported to have said, ‘As you did not count me worthy of this honour in life, then I shall account myself not worthy of it in death.’
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Despite this last refusal, as a token of her love, Elizabeth paid for his monument set up in Westminster Abbey. It is truly magnificent: 36 feet high, made of marble and alabaster, bearing the Carey arms, argent, on a bend sable three roses of the field (a silver background with a thick black bar diagonally with three silver roses on it). The inscription reads:

Hunsdon’s sister, Catherine, became a gentlewoman of the privy chamber; her husband, Sir Francis Knollys, was made Vice-Chamberlain of the Household. Catherine married Sir Francis in April 1540, bearing their first child a year later. If she had been born after her brother in 1526, she would have been 14 when she married and 15 when she had her first child. However, had she been born in 1524, she would have been 16 when she married and 17 when she had their first son. In her research, writer and historian Sally Varlow points out that a year before Catherine married she was chosen as one of the maids of honour to Anne of Cleves; maids were generally at least 16 years old, and in 1539 Catherine would have been only 13 if she had been born after Henry, but almost 16 if she had been born first in 1524.

One other piece of evidence is a portrait, ‘Probably Catherine, Lady Knollys’, which carries the inscription, ‘
Aetatis suae 38 An Dom 1562.
’ The lady in the portrait was 38 years old in 1562; if the sitter is Catherine Carey, this puts her birth date firmly in 1524 and makes her Henry VIII’s child rather than her younger brother. The problem is that the identity of the lady in the portrait is by no means certain. There are no incontrovertible portraits of Catherine Carey that it could be compared to as a means of confirming the identification.
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Catherine Carey was a close friend to Elizabeth I until she died in 1569. Elizabeth gave her an affectionate nickname, her dear ‘Crow’. The Queen was devastated by her death and spent the lavish sum of £640 2s 11d on a magnificent funeral and tomb for her in Westminster Abbey in London. Sir Francis was away from home, attending Mary, Queen of Scots, at Bolton and Tutbury, when Catherine became seriously ill and died. Elizabeth blamed the Scottish queen for causing Sir Francis to be away from home; believing that his absence added to his wife’s unhappiness and hastened her death.