The Boleyns (19 page)
With the death of the Countess Elizabeth in 1538 and of the Earl of Wiltshire in 1539, the direct line of the Boleyns came to an end. Thomas was constrained to surrender his earldom of Ormond in February 1538, but Piers outlived him by only a few months, and the titles of Ormond and Ossory then descended without dispute to his son James Butler.
[383]
The earldom of Wiltshire became extinct on his death, not passing to his brother James, as might have been expected. It was resurrected for William Paulet, Lord St John, in 1551 and James died childless in 1561. In the last few years of Henry’s reign the Boleyns were represented in the next generation by the Careys, Henry and his sister Catherine, and, of course, by Elizabeth. As a small child, she was left in limbo by her mother’s rejection, but seems to have been well cared for in a household the head of which was notionally her sister Mary, and in 1543 at the age of ten was reintegrated into the royal family by the efforts of her last step-mother, Catherine Parr.
[384]
It was probably at this stage that she began to share lessons with her six-year-old brother Edward, and quickly began to display that intellectual precocity and sharpness which were to characterise her for the rest of her life. In July 1544 she wrote the first of her surviving letters to Catherine, in Italian, although there is no evidence that the Queen would have been able to read it. This was schoolroom exercise, in which she lamented her separation from her parents, occasioned by Henry’s campaigning in France and by Catherine carrying out the duties of Regent in his absence.
[385]
It probably indicates no more than that Catherine was at Whitehall while Elizabeth and Edward were at St James. In spite of the Queen’s good offices, Henry showed no inclination to legitimate either of his two daughters; indeed he could not do so without repudiating many of his policies over the years. What he did do, remarkably enough, was to include them both in his final Succession Act of 1544. If his son Edward, his undoubted heir, were to die childless, then the crown was to pass to Edward’s half sister Mary, provided that she married with the consent of the council. If Mary also died childless, then the succession came to his other daughter Elizabeth, with the same condition attached. The terms of this Act were to be confirmed or altered by the terms of his last will and testament. In the event they were confirmed unchanged.
[386]
This was altogether unprecedented. Never before had an illegitimate child of the royal house been included in the succession to the Crown. Nor had any female successfully claimed the throne, although one, Matilda, had had a realistic claim in the twelfth century. It was as comprehensive an example of the new sovereignty of parliament as the Act of Supremacy, and was probably accepted only because no one thought that the hypothetical would ever happen. In fact it determined the succession to the English crown down to 1558.
Meanwhile, Elizabeth was growing up. Various marriages were suggested for her, but none came to anything because of her ambiguous status. Kate Champernowne (better known by her married name of Kate Ashley), having guided her young charge through the first steps of her learning, secured the services of Roger Ascham as her tutor, with the results which we have already noticed.
[387]
In December 1544, she presented Catherine with her own translation of Margaret of Angouleme’s
Miroir de l’ame pecheresse
as a New Year’s gift. She was eleven by this time, and one wonders whether she had any inkling of her mother’s connection with the author. Probably not, because it was a suitable gift to pass between members of the evangelical party in the court, to which Ascham and Catherine Parr both belonged.
[388]
Elizabeth was thirteen when her father died, and though she is supposed to have wept copiously at the news, no one knows her real feelings. Her father had been a formidable and rather distant figure. Her stepmother, however, was different and she was living, along with her sister Mary, on the Queen’s side of the court at the time. Catherine, however, was thirty-five and had endured three virtually sexless marriages. Consequently she was desperate for a real man, and quickly succumbed to the advances of Thomas Seymour, the brother of the Earl of Hertford. Mary, seeing which way the wind was blowing, made haste to move out of the ex-Queen’s household, but Elizabeth more innocent, or perhaps more inquisitive, did not follow suit. Seymour and Catherine were secretly married in the spring of 1547, and Elizabeth, presumably, was given a ringside view of the pleasures and hazards of married life.
[389]
Then in the summer of 1548, while his wife was unavailable to him through pregnancy, Thomas Seymour began to make passes at Elizabeth. She was fourteen by this time, and very attractive. What passed between them probably amounted to no more than horseplay, but it was clearly enough to awaken the girl sexually. Catherine caught them in a compromising embrace, and she was sent away in disgrace to cool her ardour at the Dennys, Lady Denny being Kate Ashley’s sister.
[390]
In September, Catherine died in childbirth, and before the end of the year, Seymour was pursuing Elizabeth again, this time speaking of marriage. Such a proposal, without the consent of the council, was treason, and was one of the charges levelled against Thomas when he was arrested in January 1549. The other charges related to plotting against his brother the Lord Protector, and were probably more substantial, but this was the one with the highest profile. Seymour was attainted and executed in March 1549, and we really do not know what Elizabeth’s reaction may have been.
[391]
In a sense he had been a pest, but he had also contributed to the girl’s education in a manner which no tutor was free to do. She now knew that she was attractive to men, especially to older men, and that discovery was exhilarating. She also knew the hazards as well as the pleasures of sexual adventures. She had undergone a primary training in the art of flirtation, and it had been extremely enjoyable, while it had lasted. Above all, she had awakened her maternal talents for sexual encounters, showing just the same ability which Anne had displayed at a similar age in the court at Mechelen. The hazards of politics were to bring her to the throne unmarried at the age of twenty-five in 1558, and during the intervening years she had learned also the survival techniques necessary for a person in her position, including the repressing of her own sexuality.
[392]
But she also came to the throne with a well developed sense of what it meant to be a woman in the masculine dominated world of sixteenth-century politics. Unlike her sister Mary, who had been bewildered by the problems of gender, Elizabeth knew that it offered opportunities for manipulation and control which no man could enjoy. It remained to be seen how this third Boleyn girl would exploit her position.
HENRY CAREY, LORD HUNSDON – THE BERWICK YEARS
Henry Carey, Anne Boleyn’s nephew, was treated as royal kindred almost from the start. We know nothing of his early education, which would have been in the hands of his stepfather, Sir William Stafford, but he was literate, inclined to the reformed religion, and appears to have been trained as a soldier. Born on 4 March 1526, he would have been two when his father died in the summer of 1528, and eight when his mother re-married in 1534. As we have seen, she cut herself off from the court by that action, but was partly rehabilitated after Anne’s fall, and his wardship was granted to her once it had reverted to the Crown. Henry would have been about ten by that time, and Mary seems to have been content to leave his training to her husband. However, it was she who held the wardship, and when she died in 1543, Henry was still underage. His care therefore reverted to the Crown, and, probably by agreement with Sir William, he was taken into the royal household, where his presence is recorded for the first time in 1545, when he was nineteen. It was therefore the King, or someone acting for the King, who authorised his marriage on 21 May 1545 to Anne, the daughter of Sir Thomas Morgan of Arkestone, Herefordshire, a part of the world with which he had no known connection.
[393]
In spite of being arranged, this marriage was to be a long and happy one, producing six children who survived infancy, of whom the first, George, was born in 1546 or 1547. Anne outlived her husband, dying at an advanced age in 1607. In the summer of 1545, Henry also obtained his first military experience, serving as an officer of horse under John Dudley, Viscount Lisle, the Lord Admiral, in the force which Lisle raised for the defence of Portsmouth. His appointment involved no action, because the French never landed and there is no suggestion that Henry served in the fleet.
[394]
However, he must have impressed Lisle who chose him, at the age of twenty, to accompany his mission to negotiate peace with the French, which was agreed at Camp in March 1546. He received £40 in expenses for that trip, which can barely have covered the outlay.
[395]
He was therefore about five weeks short of his twenty-first birthday, and already well established in the royal service, when King Henry died on 28 January 1547.
The town of Buckingham had been a parcel of the possessions of William Carey, and came to Henry when he achieved his majority. He celebrated his acquisition by sitting for the borough in the parliament which met in November 1547, and on 5 May 1548 he was granted livery of his lands, which had come to him both from his father and his mother, having ‘attained the full age of twenty one years’.
[396]
The reason for the delay lay in Chancery procedure and not in any difficulty which he may have had in getting his right recognised, because the livery was effectively back dated to March 1547. These properties included the manor and lordship of Rochford in Essex, and it appears to have been there that Henry and Anne resided when not at court. During Edward’s reign he was regarded as a useful player, but definitely of the second rank and his relationship with the Duke of Somerset, for instance, is not known. Since he was selected to accompany the Marquis of Northampton to France again in 1551, he must have made the transition to the Earl of Warwick successfully. His rights in the town of Buckingham were confirmed in November 1552, but that was related to a plan to sell the whole lot to one Robert Brown of Horton. He conveyed the package to Brown in January 1553, which would seem to indicate that his finances were in a mess.
[397]
This conveyance would also account for the fact that he did not sit for Buckingham in either of the parliaments of that year. Having come to some arrangement with Brown, however, he resumed his seat in both the parliaments of 1554 and in that of 1555. In 1554 he departed early from the November session without licence, for which he was presented in King’s Bench, although no action was taken against him or against the large number of others who had similarly defected. In 1555 he voted with Sir Anthony Kingston against the Exiles Bill, and thereby earned himself some additional black marks from the government. That may help to account for the fact that he found himself in the Fleet for debt early in 1557, although he managed to raise enough backers to be freed on recognisance on 19 May.
[398]
Throughout Mary’s reign he managed to hang on to a minor (and probably honorary) position at court, as a Carver in the Chamber, which, given the fact that he was a known Protestant sympathiser serves to demonstrate the truth of Edward Underhill’s assertion that there was no place to ‘shift the Easter time’ better than Queen Mary’s court. He was also, and more significantly, a Gentleman of the Household to Princess Elizabeth. This he must have owed to his kinship with the Princess, which would not have commended him to the Queen, but unfortunately it did not carry sufficient income to support the lifestyle to which he obviously aspired.
Elizabeth’s accession on 17 November 1558 transformed his circumstances. From being kindred to a possible heir to the throne, he was now a cousin of the reigning monarch. Before the end of November he had been knighted, and his position in the royal chamber confirmed. The Queen then set about to alleviate his poverty. On 13 January 1559, the day before she entered London for her coronation, she created him Baron Hunsdon, in which capacity he attended on her over the next few days, and on 12 March granted him the stewardships of various lucrative royal manors.
[399]
Then on 20 March she did something that was exceedingly rare for her, and endowed him lavishly with lands, allegedly worth £4,000 a year, ‘for the maintenance of his rank and station’, which if true would have placed him among the half dozen wealthiest peers in the kingdom.
[400]
On 28 June he was granted the wardship of Clement Tanfeld, and on 3 July another clutch of stewardships, including that of Leominster in Herefordshire, which carried a fee of £10 a year in addition to the rights. Finally, on 31 October 1560 he was given an office at court, which carried with it rights of access to the royal person. It was not the Mastership of the Horse, that was already spoken for, but the rather humbler position of Chief Keeper of the Hawks. Elizabeth enjoyed her hawking, and that no doubt mattered more to Hunsdon than the £40 salary which the post carried – although every little helped.
[401]
In 1561 he was given the more prestigious (and lucrative) office of Captain of the Band of Gentlemen Pensioners in recognition of his closeness to the sovereign. Not surprisingly, we find no more evidence of straightened circumstances. The new baron had received the former royal residence of Hunsdon along with the other lands conveyed to him on 20 March, and took up residence there along with his growing brood of children. George, aged thirteen in 1560, was entered in that year as a Fellow Commoner at Trinity College, Cambridge, which not only indicates a good grounding in the classics, but an enlightened attitude to education of the part of the Careys. It would be a few years yet before some time at the university was a part of every gentleman’s
cursus honorem
.
[402]
Meanwhile, Henry, whose dissident connections, or lack of substance, seem to have kept him off the Commissions of the Peace during Mary’s reign, served for Bedfordshire and Essex in 1562 and 1564, and for Hertfordshire and Kent as well in the latter year. He was also a commissioner for Gaol Delivery in Warwickshire and several contiguous counties at the same time, and for the collection of the subsidy in May 1564.
[403]
Had he discharged all these duties conscientiously, he would have had little time to spend at court, but the evidence is that he placed attendance on the Queen ahead of mere administrative responsibilities. He witnessed the creation of Robert Dudley as Baron Denbigh and Earl of Leicester on 28 September 1564, and seems to have enjoyed good relations with the powerful favourite, although what his attitude had been in the critical days of his courtship of Elizabeth in 1560, the records do not reveal. If he was opposed to the prospect of their marriage, then he had the good sense to keep his opinion to himself. Since he was not a councillor, this would not have been too difficult, and his first priority had to be to please his mistress. In 1564 he was sent on an honorific embassy to France to present the Garter to the French king, a mission which he again owed to his known closeness to Elizabeth.
[404]
By 1565 he is alleged to have belonged to the ‘affinity’ of the Earl of Sussex, which was opposed to Leicester, but the evidence for that is hearsay. In whatever capacity, his services were obviously appreciated, because at the end of October 1565 he received a further grant of land in Berkshire. On this occasion he seems to have been a mere agent because the very next day he alienated his acquisitions to the Lord Treasurer, the Marquis of Winchester, who presumably felt less sure of his own favour. Since he had been one of those opposed to Dudley’s suit, that is not hard to account for, but that he should have found it desirable to use Hunsdon in this way is highly significant of their respective positions in the court.
[405]
Whether Elizabeth had a high opinion of his capabilities or not, we do not know. What we do know is that he was her kinsman, and that she appreciated his loyalty. If she resented her favour being circumvented, as it was by the Lord Treasurer, then she gave no sign. Indeed she probably appreciated his subtlety.
Between 1560 and 1568 Henry Carey was a man about the court, weaving his way carefully between the opposing factions, but without any major office. He was not a member of the Privy Council, and appears to have served on only the one diplomatic mission, although he did interest himself in the affairs of Mary of Scotland.
[406]
It was Nicholas Throgmorton and Thomas Smith who negotiated the treaty of Troyes in 1564. When remonstrating with Mary in October 1564 about the interest which the Queen of Scots was showing in Elizabeth’s marriage, the Queen wrote of ‘the talk in the French court at the signing of the peace’. ‘I will not say,’ she went on, ‘whether it were my Lord of Hunsdon or any of his company’, who had reported this talk to her. If it were he, then he must have collected the gossip at second hand.
[407]
He seems to have been a man whom the Queen found congenial. He attended the creation of Thomas Sackville as Lord Buckhurst on 8 June 1567, and shortly after was granted, along with his son George, various stewardships in Bedfordshire and Buckinghamshire, including the prestigious one of Ampthill, which was in the process of reconstruction at that time. The reconstruction was never completed and the house gradually fell into ruin, but that was not Lord Hunsdon’s fault.
[408]
His sister Catherine was also one of the Queen’s closest female friends, and that brought Sir Francis Knollys into the charmed circle of the royal kindred.
However, this comfortable situation was about to change. In May 1568 Mary Stuart, having escaped from Lochleven Castle, and failed in a bid to recover her throne, fled across the border into England, which immediately created a problem with the regency government of Scotland, acting in the name of the infant King James, which Elizabeth did not recognise. Nevertheless, the Earl of Moray was in command of the situation, and he demanded Mary’s return. Elizabeth was not prepared to concede that, and relations grew tense.
[409]
Consequently the Queen decided that she needed a man whom she could trust absolutely in the key border region. There was nothing much wrong with the Earl of Bedford, who held the governorship of Berwick, except that he was never there, and Elizabeth needed someone on the spot. On 25 August 1568 she appointed Henry Carey to this crucial office of trust, and the following day named him as Keeper of the East March, with the implicit understanding that he would live on his post. He visited the North-East in company with Sir Francis Knollys early in September, and consulted with the merchants of Newcastle about the Danzig trade, but appears not to have stayed very long.
[410]
