Henry VIII’s True Daughter: Catherine Carey, A Tudor Life

By Wendy J Dunn

The lives of Tudor women often offer faint but fascinating footnotes on the pages of history. The life of Catherine – or Katryn as her husband would one day pen her name – Carey, the daughter of Mary Boleyn and, as the weight of evidence suggests, Henry VIII, is one of those footnotes.

As the possible daughter of Henry VIII, the niece of Anne Boleyn and the favourite of Elizabeth I, Catherine’s life offers us a unique perspective on the reigns of Henry and his children. In this book, Wendy J. Dunn takes these brief details of Catherine’s life and turns them into a rich account of a woman who deserves her story told. Following the faint trail provided of her life from her earliest years to her death in service to Queen Elizabeth, Dunn examines the evidence of Catherine’s parentage and views her world through the lens of her relationship with the royal family she served.

This book presents an important story of a woman who saw and experienced much tragedy and political turmoil during the reigns of Henry VIII, Edward VI, and Mary I – all of which prepared her to take on the vital role of one of Elizabeth I closest and most trusted women. It also prepared her to become the wife of one of Elizabeth's privy councillors – a man also trusted and relied on by the queen. Catherine served Elizabeth during the uncertain and challenging first years of her reign, a time when there was a question mark over whether she would succeed as queen regnant after the failures of England's first crowned regnant, her sister Mary.

Through immense research and placing her in the context of her period, HENRY VIII’S TRUE DAUGHTER: CATHERINE CAREY, A TUDOR LIFE draws Catherine out of the shadows of history to take her true place as the daughter of Henry VIII and shows how vital women like Catherine were to Elizabeth and the ultimate victory of her reign.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pen and Sword
• Release date: Feb 1, 2024
• ISBN: 9781399012256

Wendy J Dunn

Wendy J. Dunn is an award-winning Australian writer fascinated by Tudor history – so much so she was not surprised to discover a family connection to the Tudors, not long after the publication of her first Anne Boleyn novel, which narrated the Anne Boleyn story through the eyes of Sir Thomas Wyatt, the elder. Her family tree reveals the intriguing fact that one of her ancestral families – possibly over three generations – had purchased land from both the Boleyn and Wyatt families to build up their holdings. It seems very likely Wendy’s ancestors knew the Wyatts and Boleyns personally. Wendy is married, the mother of four adult children and the grandmother of two amazing small boys. She gained her PhD in 2014 and loves walking in the footsteps of the historical people she gives voice to in her books. Wendy also tutors writing at Swinburne University of Technology, Australia. HENRY VIII’S TRUE DAUGHTER: CATHERINE CAREY, A TUDOR LIFE is her first full-length nonfiction work.

Book preview

Henry VIII’s True Daughter

Henry VIII’s True Daughter

Catherine Carey, A Tudor Life

Wendy J. Dunn

First published in Great Britain in 2023 by

Pen & Sword History

An imprint of Pen & Sword Books Limited

Yorkshire – Philadelphia

Copyright © Wendy J. Dunn 2023

ISBN 978 1 39901 224 9

eISBN 978 1 39901 225 6

Kindle 978 1 39901 225 6

The right of Wendy J. Dunn to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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DEDICATION

Dedicated to Daffyd who, from small boy to grown man, has always encouraged me to write. Never be afraid of following your heart, my beloved youngest son.

Contents

Foreword

Preface

Chapter 1 Setting the Scene

Chapter 2 The King’s Daughter

Chapter 3 Catherine’s Childhood

Chapter 4 The Education of a Tudor Girl-Child

Chapter 5 Witness To Anne Boleyn’s Execution?

Chapter 6 Maid of Honour

Chapter 7 Marriage to Francis Knollys

Chapter 8 A Noble Wife and Mother

Chapter 9 Who Wants a Fertile Tudor Noble Woman’s Fate?

Chapter 10 England, Catholic Again

Chapter 11 Cousin/Sister to England’s Heir

Chapter 12 Exile in a Foreign Land

Chapter 13 Sworn into Service

Chapter 14 Elizabeth’s Bedfellow

Chapter 15 Serving Elizabeth

Chapter 16 On the Move With a Queen

Chapter 17 Friendship With the Queen

Chapter 18 Becoming Gloriana

Chapter 19 A Tudor Death

Chapter 20 Catherine’s Legacy

Notes

Bibliography

Acknowledgements

Note on Dating

In the sixteenth century, something happened in England that has often caused me headaches. As a fiction writer, I try not to think too much about the Julian and Gregorian calendars – and how in 1582 England switched from using the Julian calendar for centuries to the slightly shorter Gregorian calendar. That, of course, resulted in changing the dating for everything before that date. For this work of non-fiction, it was something I could not avoid. For my sanity, I have used the Gregorian calendar for most of the dating in this book unless the dating has come from primary documents before 1582.

Foreword

Hanging today in Hever Castle, the seat of the Boleyn family in Kent, is a beautifully carved wooden plaque celebrating two of the most famous marriages of the Boleyns. On one half of the plaque can be seen the arms of Sir Thomas Boleyn, merged with those of his wife, Lady Elizabeth Howard. On the other side is the heraldry of King Henry VIII combined with that of Anne Boleyn, whom Henry controversially made his second queen consort. It is more than apt that this relic hangs in that charming, moated manor where so much of the scandalous history of Henry and Anne played out. However, it only tells us part of that story. Indeed, if you had visited Hever two hundred years ago, you would have met the plaque’s now sadly missing twin. This long-lost treasure celebrated another of the critical family marriages: Mary Boleyn’s union with William Carey.

Hever Castle was, of course, Mary Boleyn’s home too. As this exceptional and timely study argues, Mary’s children, Catherine and Henry, likely knew Hever well too. As a mistress of Henry VIII, Mary probably was the first of the Boleyn daughters to receive love letters at Hever before Henry turned his attention to her sister, Anne. In many ways, the loss of the marriage plaque of Mary and William at Hever is symbolic of how the Boleyn family’s successes and failures have been celebrated and erased over time. While Anne’s dramatic rise and fall remain at the forefront of popular discourse and culture, the story of Mary Boleyn and her colourful descendants remains more in the shade.

In truth, it was in the shadow of Anne Boleyn’s briefly worn crown that the Boleyn family truly flourished. Anne’s story ended horrifically, and those closest to her throne suffered alongside her. Her story gained a triumphant (but ultimately finite) encore with the ascendance of her daughter, Queen Elizabeth I, who died without an heir. Mary Boleyn’s legacy, however, blossomed through her children’s unique and cherished place at Elizabeth’s court and far beyond. Indeed, centuries later, another Boleyn would take England’s throne. The late Queen Elizabeth II bore the blood not of the first Elizabeth, but of Mary Boleyn, via her daughter, Catherine. This inspiring study of the life of Catherine Knollys (nee Carey) reveals a loyal and courageous woman who, among a cohort of strong women, provided sage and devoted service to ‘Gloriana’ during the precarious early years of her reign. Catherine’s care, attention, and guidance were born, as Dunn argues, from a ‘loyalty of blood, kinship, and family’. Her story is quietly inspirational, one of sacrifice and steadfast devotion.

The esteemed author of this exceptionally profound study of Catherine’s life has long been at one with the Tudor era. Her award-winning novels are meticulously rooted in the historical record, fleshed out with an unrivalled understanding of the complexities of the human spirit.This,her first non-fiction study, is every bit as compelling. Seeing this important and authoritative book develop and blossom has been a unique privilege. Fusing meticulous archival research with skilfully reasoned theory, Dunn has recovered Catherine’s story from the shadows. It is undoubtedly the most enthralling and rewarding account of Catherine’s life to date. Moreover, it also liberates the stories of other important Boleyn women from the footnotes of history. In doing so, Dunn provides a benchmark for how women in history, previously relegated to the margins, can, and must, be afforded scholarly attention. It is a triumph, and it does Catherine justice.

Dr Owen Emmerson, Historian & author of The Boleyns of Hever Castle and Becoming Anne. TV: The Boleyns (BBC); Blood, Sex & Royalty: Anne Boleyn (Netflix).

Edouard Cibot’s Anne Boleyn in the Tower (painted in 1835). (Wikimedia Commons)

Preface

We are all footnotes, many of us will never have the chance to be read, all of us in an unrelenting and desperate struggle for our lives, for the life of a footnote, to remain on the surface before, in spite of our efforts, we are submerged. Everywhere we leave constant traces of our existence, of our struggle against vacuity. And the greater the vacuity, the more violent our struggle.

¹

It began with a painting. Years ago, a beautiful work by Edouard Cibot (painted in 1835) ignited my desire to give imaginative voice to Catherine Carey – a woman history suggests much about but confirms little. That painting ended up inspiring first a play, and then thousands and thousands of words that became my second published novel: The Light in the Labyrinth.

Edouard Cibot’s Anne Boleyn in the Tower depicts a powerful scene of despair, sorrow, and love. So much love. The love not only inspired The Light in the Labyrinth, my imagined story of a teenage Catherine Carey navigating the last months of Anne Boleyn’s life as Henry VIII’s wife, but it had also inspired my first Anne Boleyn novel, Dear Heart, How Like You This?

I have long identified Anne Boleyn as the weeping woman in the background. The artist’s decision to place Anne Boleyn in the background is brilliant. It speaks to all we do not know about her – and all we do not know about her tragic final days. Wearing the hair hiding headgear of a Tudor matron of the Anne Boleyn time period, this figure recedes into the shadows of the painting, hiding her heartbreak behind a handkerchief. She holds the hand of another woman in the foreground. Years ago, I found myself doubting that the figure in the foreground depicted an adult woman. With her long hair falling loose and unhidden over her shoulder, the female subject looks still a girl, far younger than the figure behind her. The Tudors of the 1530s would have identified her as a maiden, a virgin, for only unmarried virgins or queens wore their hair unbound at court in early Tudor times. She also has seed pearls decorating her French hood, and a hanging pearl on her bodice. For the Tudors, pearls spoke of virginity, as it had done from earlier times.

In 2009, I was part of an audience both enthralled and entertained by a selection of ten-minute plays competing for prizes in a ten-minute play competition. Inspired, I challenged myself to write a ten-minute play. Unable to arrive at a decision about what to write about, my eyes caught sight of my first novel on the coffee table close to me, with its cover of that same painting. I asked myself, ‘Who is this girl? Could she be Anne Boleyn’s teenage niece, Catherine Carey, the daughter of Mary Boleyn?’ I remembered then the many hints from history that Catherine may have witnessed her aunt’s execution. That was the moment Catherine Carey first spoke to me, and I wrote a ten-minute play about the last night of Anne Boleyn’s life. After I finished writing it, my Kate refused to leave me alone. She wanted to tell me the story of her time at the court of Henry VIII, during the last months of her aunt’s life – and commanded that I write it. This work became the Tudor novel I named The Light in the Labyrinth because it fitted the tale of a young girl making sense of life as she navigated a dark, dangerous Tudor world.

The Light in the Labyrinth was a work of historical fiction. I constructed an imagined story, drawn and informed by history, about this little-known person. I discovered then that Catherine was so little-known, historians confused her with other Catherines or only mentioned her in relation to her husband Francis Knollys, an important and trusted privy councillor of Elizabeth I. Mostly, she seemed forgotten. While this was frustrating and gave me more reason to reflect, sometimes angrily, about history’s unfairness to the stories of women, it also allowed my imagination the gaps I needed to give me the freedom to construct a fictional Catherine Carey. She stepped out for me and became of a character of true substance as I researched her mother and royal aunt. For this work, I use a similar technique to pull the Catherine who really lived and breathed out of the shadows, and back into the light where she belongs.

It is well known to lovers of Tudor history that Henry VIII may have fathered Catherine Carey. Before his relationship with Anne Boleyn, the king made her sister, Mary, his mistress, in a relationship which appeared to have lasted years.

Anne Boleyn witnessed those years and learnt well from the lessons of her sister’s life. When Henry VIII first pursued Anne Boleyn, I do not believe she desired it. Anne knew of the king’s relationship with her sister Mary. The thought of warming the king’s bed not long after it had been warmed by her sister’s body would have likely turned Anne’s blood cold. When the king’s interest refused to wane, Anne still refused to be his mistress. By then, Henry had pushed Mary from his mind to woo her sister. With Anne determined to refuse his sexual advances, it is possible it took him longer to push Mary out of his bed.

Anne became Henry VIII’s grand passion. By the end, Henry may have been Anne’s too. After the king spent six years and changed England forevermore to at last marry her, Anne proved her worth as a politician and religious reformer but failed her chief duty as Henry’s queen. She gave Henry only another daughter, Elizabeth, in 1533, followed by pregnancies that led only to disappointment and more heartache.

1536 saw Anne Boleyn miscarry a son thirteen weeks or more into her last pregnancy. Only four months later, Anne lost her life on a scaffold. The king, her husband, was merciful – he paid for a skilled French executioner whose sword, in one swift stroke, removed Anne from his life. It proved a far easier way to rid himself of a wife than his gruelling efforts to cut the ties binding him to Katherine of Aragon, his first wife.

Miniature of Anne Boleyn, attributed to John Hoskins (c.1590–1665). (From the Buccleuch Collection, via Wikimedia Commons)

Anne’s story is important if we wish to tell the story of Catherine Carey. Anne’s life was part of the shaping of Catherine’s early life. During my research for my Anne Boleyn novels, I discovered tantalising titbits of information regarding Catherine Carey. One nugget fell in my lap more than twenty years ago, when I researched my first Tudor novel, Dear Heart, How Like This?

All those years ago, I came across the speculation that Catherine Carey may have accompanied her aunt to the Tower to stay with her during her imprisonment. She may even have witnessed her aunt’s execution. This suggestion fascinated me. It glittered before me like gold – a true golden nugget to beat and turn into an imaginative story. But I soon thought otherwise. With more research, I soon discovered most historians put forward the year 1524 for Catherine’s birth. Some even claimed as late as 1527. If Catherine was born in 1524, that meant she was twelve, or close to twelve, at the time of Anne Boleyn’s execution.

Years ago, I thought the same as Alison Weir.² I believed a twelve-year-old Catherine would have been far too young to attend Anne Boleyn in the Tower of London as she waited out those desperate days in May 1536 to meet her tragic destiny.

I struggled to see Anne ever desiring the support of an untried twelve-year-old in her last moments of life. Not when sixty-seven years later a thirteen-year-old girl was ‘held too young’³ to sit by Elizabeth Tudor’s body during the nights and days of ‘Watching’ over the dead, a time ensuring the dead were well and truly bodily dead.

I also struggled to believe Anne Boleyn would ask or desire for her twelve-year-old niece to witness her death, a girl who would need to steel herself to see the skilled French executioner swing his sword and separate her aunt’s head from her body. To see her aunt’s head bounce on the scaffold as a fountain of blood gushed from her severed neck until her body toppled to follow her head. Afterwards, this twelve-year-old girl would have been expected to help deal with the remains of her aunt’s body.

Anne would have gone to her death desiring to make a good death. Her times and culture believed the innocent died well, and not the guilty. Making a good death was the last thing Anne could do for her infant daughter – or for herself. She would have chosen those who accompanied her on the scaffold with care. They were her witnesses, charged with speaking about her end. Considering their importance, Anne Boleyn choosing a twelve-year-old to be with her made little sense to me. Why ask an untried girl who might break under the strain of seeing an execution? If Catherine broke down on the scaffold it could result in undermining Anne’s fortitude to achieve a good death. My gold nugget became fool’s gold, and my interest in Catherine Carey dulled. I returned to researching the life of Katherine of Aragon in Castile for my next novel.

But, many years later, I stumbled upon and read Varlow’s ‘Sir Francis Knollys’s Latin Dictionary: new evidence for Katherine Carey’.⁴ This article – where the author opts for the K spelling for the very much Tudor interchangeable name of Catherine and Katherine – deepened the uncertainty of Catherine’s birth year and strengthened in my mind the possibility that Kate was fourteen or thirteen at the time of her aunt’s execution. If she was fourteen, or close to fourteen, she would have been considered an adult by the beliefs of her time. She would have been of an age to share the agony of her aunt’s last days, and old enough to be with her on the scaffold. That freed me to go forward with the writing of my novel.

However, researching this book has caused a shift in my knowledge by deepening what I know of girls in this time. While I already knew girls could be married by twelve, I now discovered girls as young as nine serving at Elizabeth’s court. It reminded me that ‘The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there’.⁵ Now I am far more willing to accept a twelve-year-old girl being with Anne Boleyn in her final days. I am also now far more willing to believe a twelve-year-old Catherine may have witnessed Anne Boleyn’s death.

Studying one historical portrait helped me imagine Catherine Carey, and to give her voice in my novel. The painting, believed to be of Catherine Carey, show a woman smiling a Mona Lisa smile with kind, warm eyes. Intelligent and humorous eyes, too. These portraits capture such an aura of light around their subject it became easy for me to believe Anne would have wanted her niece with her until the end. But all this is part of the craft of writing history fiction – when research ignites imagination for the crafting of a story.

This book uses research in a different way. My goal was to draw Catherine Carey from the shadows to take her place as not only an important Tudor personage but also the daughter of Henry VIII. Drawing her from the shadows has often felt akin to pouring plaster of Paris into a what appears a shapeless hollow left by time – one where I attempt to make Catherine a woman of true substance by placing her in the context of her times, placing her with the people important to her own life and shaping her by placing her alongside the other women who served Elizabeth. The deeper I explored her story, the more I have felt like a detective – frustrated and saddened by the fact that Catherine’s gender erased so much of her history. I was also hindered by distance – not only historically, but by geography. An Australian stuck in Australia due to long COVID lockdowns, when overseas travel was far too expensive to consider with my limited budget, was not how I wanted to write this book. Nevertheless, fascinating discoveries were there to be found.

Let me begin by setting the scene by describing the England of Catherine’s birth.

Chapter One

Setting the Scene

They were but shadows, and like shadows they be past, like shadows they be fled away, like shadows they be vanished away from us.

¹

Catherine Knollys nee Carey who was she? Is it possible to draw this important Tudor woman out from hiding in the pages of history, to give her substance and form? We know Catherine was Mary Boleyn’s eldest child, born during her first marriage to William Carey. Mary was a Boleyn. Even after her two marriages, she would have regarded herself as a Boleyn – a family with far greater status to the men she married. Mary was Anne Boleyn’s sister, which means Catherine was the niece of the tragic second wife of Henry VIII. We can only make an educated guess as to when (and where) Catherine Carey was born. This is not unusual for the Tudor age. The difficulty of working out the birth dates for those born in the early Tudor period frustrates writers of Tudor history time after time. The births of Mary Boleyn and her siblings provide a perfect example of this challenge. Born during a time when births were recorded in memory rather than written down, all the children of Thomas Boleyn have question marks over their birth dates. These question marks only increase when the Tudor personage in question was born into the Tudor inferior female gender.²

What we know is Mary Boleyn married William Carey in 1520.³ Catherine’s birth occurred a few years after that event. The strongest arguments for her year of birth seem to lie in either 1522 or 1524 – with far more weight for us to argue 1524.

Henry VIII was born on the 28th of June 1491 and became king before his eighteenth birthday in 1509. He was only twenty-nine-years-old the year Mary Boleyn married William Carey – and in his prime. By 1520, Henry had ruled England for over a decade, with Katherine of Aragon by his side as his devoted wife, and royal consort.

The young Henry VIII was towering tall, athletic, intelligent, handsome; he was not a faithful husband. Still, he was a man outwardly faithful to the Catholic church. This was the period when he wrote The Defence of the Seven Sacraments to support the Pope, gaining for England the motto: ‘Defender of the Faith’. It is used by English monarchs even today. Ironically, considering the future events in the life of this English king, this book argued that marriage was sacred, and that the Pope was the supreme head of the church.

Despite Katherine’s regular pregnancies in the first years of their marriage, Henry and Katherine had only one living child – their daughter Mary. Mary, born in 1516 from her mother’s likely fifth pregnancy, was their only child to survive beyond two months. In 1518, Katherine had given birth to what history indicates as her sixth baby – a girl who did not long survive birth. In 1520, no one knew, or dared to fear, this would be Katherine’s last child. Henry VIII still hoped Katherine of Aragon would give him a son. While the king prayed hard for a prince, and no doubt the queen too, perhaps even harder than her husband, most, from low to high, regarded Mary as her father’s rightful and undoubted heir. Unfortunately, this did not include her father. For Henry VIII, accepting Mary as his heir was far more difficult. His later actions proved he found the proposition impossible to bow to. Likely, he saw leaving a daughter as his heir as a kingly failure. Henry VIII was only the second Tudor monarch – the first, Henry VII, Henry VIII’s father, claimed the throne on a battlefield ending a long dynastic civil war, known to history as The Wars of The Roses. A queen regnant inheriting the crown risked more war – especially considering that many questioned the Tudors right to rule England.

At the end of the fifteenth century, when Henry VII placed the dead Richard III’s crown upon his own head, the country still showed the scars and ravages of the Black Death, which had killed one in three people, and England was bleeding from the wounds and upheavals of a tragic civil war. He began his reign with England’s population being somewhere between two and three million subjects. By the time his son became king, Henry VII’s good management and avoidance of involvement in European wars⁴ had resulted in a settled and prosperous country.

His son, Henry VIII, was a different type of king entirely. As well as siring a prince, his primary concern was to increase his and his country’s prestige, even if it depleted the treasury. The younger Henry built up his navy, one of his most noted achievements, and – aided by Katherine of Aragon, his intelligent and capable consort – made his court a place respected for its renaissance learning. He eagerly involved England in minor battles in France in 1513, hoping to outdo the reputation of Henry V – and placed his own kingdom in danger by doing so. In his absence, Katherine of Aragon, her husband’s pregnant regent, dealt with an invasion from Scotland. The victory she oversaw far outweighed the minor victories of her husband in France. The stress and strain caused by the event may have even caused her to lose her baby son, born far too early to survive.

Like any other Tudor child, Catherine would have been oblivious to the changes Henry VIII’s reign had already put in place during his first years as king. She would not have known he spent a king’s fortune, the fortune left to him by his father, beautifying his palaces and building new ones. Or that he rushed the completion of his new palaces in the shortest time possible, which led to many of them failing to withstand the test of time. Despite their questionable building practices, it did not mean they lacked magnificence in their heyday. Some of the Tudor palaces even had hot and cold running water.

Years before Catherine Carey’s birth, Henry VIII was beginning to question the validity of his marriage to Katherine of Aragon. Did not five dead babies mean he had displeased God by marrying the wife of his dead brother?

But his later marital misadventures, and the execution of two of his wives, were still some time away. No one, especially the king himself, would have believed in 1520 that he would one day place England on the road from a Catholic to a Protestant kingdom because of his desire for a new wife – and to sire his prince. In 1520, Henry VIII prided himself on being a good Catholic king. He died believing he was a good Catholic king.

Catherine Carey opened her eyes to a primitive world on one hand but one also reaching out for sophistication on the other. On cold days when sunlight seemed only a memory, fire was the only source of heating and necessary just to survive during winter. At night, candles and torches provided light for her homes. Royal palaces needed to be regularly vacated for cleaning and airing because of human waste and habitation.⁵ Most people in England lived a rural life, and even the few cities of the period were rustic in appearance.⁶ The milkmaid carrying her pail on her arm to sell milk was a common sight to those in London and other English cities. So well-known were these women, Elizabeth Tudor referenced them in one of her famous speeches as queen and was also believed to have once claimed, ‘That milkmaid’s lot is better than mine’.⁷

London, the home of three per cent of the 2.3 million population of England⁸ still had vast stretches of open land. While sixteenth-century Tudors would have believed London a big city in its scope, the reality was different. Westminster Abbey, Westminster Palace, The Tower of London, Whitehall, St Paul’s Cathedral, as well as all the other famous landmarks of London, were in walkable distance from each other. Indeed, the Tudors were well used in journeying by ‘shank’s pony’ – that is, by their own leg power. Sir Thomas More once walked with his friend Erasmus from his home in Chelsea to Eltham Palace so Erasmus could meet the child Henry Tudor, now heir to his father’s throne. Elizabeth Tudor loved walking so much her subjects built undercover walkways for