Mary Boleyn's career, marriage, and children are described in great detail in
Fairfax Harrison's The Devon Carys Volume I, privately printed by The De
Vinne Press, New York, 1920. Harrison's scholarship is incomparably
thorough, his writing is grandly eloquent, and his expos'es of the fictions
of earlier Cary family histories are gently devastating.
According to Harrison, Mary Boleyn was the older sister of Anne Boleyn the
second wife of Henry VIII of England. Mary was not only the firstborn of the
sisters, but the first to share Henry's bed. To quote Harrison: "The charge
was first published in 1539 by Cardinal Reginald Pole in his tract De Unitate
Ecclesiastica, but he had already referred to it in a private letter to Henry
in 1535. . . Now, after nearly four hundred years, comes German scholarship
to give the poor lady's reputation the coup de grace. Dr. Stephen Eshes,
having access to the documents of the Vatican, has published (Romische
Documente zur Geschichte der Ehescheidung Heinrichs VIII, 1893) Henry's own
admission, of which Cardinal Pole was, of course, advised, though he could
not refer to it. It seems that while Catharine of Aragon's divorce was
pending, Henry applied to and recieved from the Pope a dispensation to marry
Anne Boleyn despite the canonical objection of his admitted previous
relations with her sister Mary . . . The modern specialists on Tudor state
papers, . . . while differing on most other things, now agree, on the
evidence of dates, that the relation began after Mary Boleyn's marriage to
William Cary."
To quote Harrison: "William Cary was one of the gentlemen of the privy
chamber who was so a victim of this['sweating sickness']. He died June 22,
1528. He left two children to bear his name, Henry, born March 17, 1526, who
became the first Lord Hunsdon, and Katherine, born probably after William
Cary's death, who became the wife of Sir Francis Knollys and was chief lady
of the bedchamber to Queen Elizabeth . . .
"Neither of the inquisitions taken on the deaths of William Cary or Mary
Boleyn makes any mention of Katherine. When she died in January 1569, she
was reputed to be aged thirty-nine. This would bring her birth nearly two
years after William Cary's death, but still anterior to the time when Henry
VIII's relations with Anne Boleyn are reputed to have begun . . . Making
allowance for a lady's privilege as to her age, we may still assume that
Katherine Carey was, putatively, a posthumas child.
"Katherine Carey, Lady Knollys, was a good woman, although she had several
distinguished ladies of easy virtue among her descendants. She had attended
on her aunt Anne Boleyn in the Tower, became chief lady of the bedchamber to
Queen Elizabeth, and died at Hampton Court January 15, 1568, while her
husband was absent on duty as one of the jailers of Mary Queen of Scots at
Bolton."
It is possible that Mary Boleyn's two children were not sired by William
Carey, but by Henry VIII. They may have been Queen Elizabeth I's brother and
sister as well as her maternal first cousins. To quote Harrison: "Henry
Carey was undoubtedly named for the king, but there is no evidence that he
was the king's son. Certainly the king did not recognize him as such, as he
did Henry Fitzroy, the son of Elizabeth Blount though that ommission
[acknowledging Henry Cary as his son] was conceivably on Anne Boleyn's
account. Neverthe less the reputation of a Tudor bar sinister surrounded
Henry Carey in his youth, as appears from the confession of John Hale, one of
the monks of Sion who were hanged in 1535 for the equivalent of le'se majeste'
. This reputation and the undoubted possibility of the illegitimacy
necessarily tend to restrict one's interest in the Hunsdons, at least as
Carys."
The monument of Henry Carey, Ist Lord Hunsdon, is the tallest and
gaudiest in Westminster Abbey, consisting of full color replicas of the arms
of the dozens of noble families in his putative pedigree. One is the three
silver roses of the field on a sable bar which distinquish the Cary family
arms.
David Carey