Mary Boleyn's Carey Children — Offspring of King Henry VIII?

Genealogical Summary



CONCLUSION
While circumstantial evidence makes a powerful case for the Careys' royal paternity, reasons for silence on this subject abound. It is clear that Henry VIII could and did keep the existence of an illegitimate child a secret until acknowledgment might suit him. Although Henry Fitzroy was born in 1519, there is no record of his existence until the king ennobled him in 1525, at a time when the king had despaired of begetting an heir by Queen Katherine.67 Henry VIII's motive for acknowledging Fitzroy was clearly inheritance. As long as the king remained without a legitimate male heir at a time of great anxiety over the succession, he was clearly intending Fitzroy be considered a sort of contingency heir to the throne.68 For this role, Fitzroy had the advantage over the Careys of being born to an unmarried woman. The Careys were of course unfit for this role, being born during Mary Boleyn's marriage to William Carey, the king's servant. The facts of the doubly adulterous births of Henry VIII's children by Mary Boleyn, had they been acknowledged, would surely later have had manifold catastrophic effects.

The justification for Henry VIII's divorce was entirely the "first degree affinity" of Henry VIII to Katherine of Aragon, his brother's widow. He had severed the English church's ties with Rome (he maintained) so that, by divorce, he could right the incestuous wrong he had committed: "And if a man shall take his brother's wife, it is an unclean thing."69 How hypocritical (not to mention depraved and ridiculous) would he have appeared had the extenuating details of his supposedly canonically sanctioned and justified marriage to Anne Boleyn been acknowledged? Most important of all: Henry VIII's legitimacy as King and Defender of the Faith would have been at least seriously compromised, very possibly destroyed.

For Queen Elizabeth I, the truth about her half-siblings/first cousins the Careys would have been, at the very least, a major domestic and European embarrassment and almost certainly a serious impediment to the full establishment and maintenance of her legitimacy, compromising her claim to the throne. Not only would acknowledgment of the Careys never have occurred, the very utterance of the Carey's royal paternity would have been absolutely proscribed.70

It may well be asked just why would the king have acknowledged the Careys, anyway? Even if secrecy regarding their paternity were not crucial, what end would have been served by their acknowledgment? Even without the extraordinary and unique circumstances rendering the Carey's acknowledgment most unlikely (if not impossible), under normal circumstances Henry VIII would have been unlikely to acknowledge illegitimate children born to a married woman.71

Finally, if as is probable, the Careys were Henry VIII's children, certain interesting genealogical observations can be made. Rather than his issue becoming extinct with the death of Elizabeth I in 1603, King Henry VIII has instead a numerous posterity in both England and America.72 Also, and most significant of all, H. M. the Queen (through her mother Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother) descends from Catherine Carey, Lady Knolly's daughter Lettice Knollys, Countess of Essex and Leicester.73 For the 350 years separating the death of Queen Elizabeth I in 1603 from the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in 1953, there had not been a single English monarch descended directly from Henry VIII. It is fascinating to observe that Queen Elizabeth I and Queen Elizabeth II are uniquely allied, not only by their names, but also by their descents from Henry VIII.

The genealogical ramifications of Catherine and Henry Carey's royal paternity are very great, but the historical significance may well be profound.74 Although proof at this stage is not conclusive, the circumstantial evidence indicates a high degree of probability that Henry VIII was the father of Catherine and Henry Carey.75

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     67 LP IV, ccxxi. N. 2; CP X, 829.
     68 Miller, Helen, Henry VIII and the English Nobility, (Oxford, 1986), pp. 20-1.
     69Leviticus XX, 21.
     70Note the fate of John Hale. Two weeks after stating Henry Carey's royal paternity in April 1535, Hale was executed at Tyburn (see Note 20).
     71Letter from Retha M. Warnicke to Anthony Hoskins, 19 January 1994.
     72For American descendants, see Note 47. English descendants include Sabine Baring-Gould, William Cowper, Charles Darwin, Lady Antonia Fraser; Admiral the Viscount Nelson, Daisy, Princess of Pless, J. Horace Round, Vita Sackville-West, Algernon Sidney, Lady Anne Somerset, Algernon Swinburne, Ralph Vaughan Williams, and P. G. Wodehouse.
     73Paget II, 1-4, 6, 9, 15, 25, 40, 60, 90-1, 129. Her Majesty's ancestress Charlotte Boyle, Baroness Clifford (1731-54), wife of William Cavendish, 4th Duke of Devonshire, was descended three times from Lettice Knollys.
     74Advances in genetic identification through comparison of DNA raise the tantalizing prospect of one day scientifically proving a case of paternity such as that of Henry VIII and the Careys. To the best of my knowledge, the tombs of Henry VIII at Windsor and Catherine, Lady Knollys and Henry, Lord Hunsdon at Westminster Abbey are intact.
     75Letter from Retha M. Warnicke to Anthony Hoskins, 3 June 1994. I would like to thank Dr. Warnicke most particularly for her suggestions and encouragement with this project. It was she who opened my eyes to the reality of Catherine Carey's approximate birth year. I would also like to thank Dr. George W. Bernard of the University of Southampton and Lady Anne Somerset, for their interest and support. Special thanks to Irina Nelidow for her encouragement and editorial suggestions.

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