Henry VIII's solution was to give her son to her sister. She had been his mistress. Her husband died of the sweating sickness on the twenty-second of June 1528 and left her destitute with two small children, and that was what Henry was going to do about it.

The sweating sickness moved faster than news of it could. Edward Hall recorded it killing some people within two to three hours. Some merry at dinner and dead at supper. In the summer of 1528 it swept through Henry's own privy chamber, killing men the king had known personally. Henry fled to Waltham Abbey to avoid it. The court scattered.

William Carey, gentleman of the privy chamber, had visited his wife Mary at Plashey and then ridden back, intending to hunt. Brian Tuke, Henry's secretary, wrote to Cardinal Wolsey the following day noting that Carey had met him on the road saying he would not stay within doors, that he would ride and hunt, and was now dead of the sweat. He had gone from the road to the grave within the day.

Mary Boleyn had been Henry's mistress before his pursuit of her sister Anne began. The duration and terms of the arrangement are not fully documented, but during the years of the relationship William Carey had received grants of manors and estates that contemporaries understood as the going rate for the accommodation. The question of whether Mary's two children, Catherine and Henry, were the king's was never officially resolved and never officially asked. What is documented is that the machinery had arranged itself comfortably around all parties for as long as it needed to.

Carey died in debt. As a second son he had no inheritance of substance to leave. Mary was left a widow with two small children and no independent income, the court's interest in her having concluded some years before. She did not approach her father first. Thomas Boleyn's reputation for financial tightness was well established even within his own family.

She pawned her jewellery. Then she wrote directly to Henry.

Henry's response was efficient. He ordered Thomas Boleyn to take his daughter back and provide for her, and transferred a hundred pound annual annuity previously paid to Carey directly to Boleyn earmarked for Mary's maintenance. He granted the wardship of Mary's son Henry Carey to Anne. Anne provided the boy with a humanist education, appointing the French scholar Nicholas Bourbon as his tutor. The son Mary had borne, whose paternity the court had quietly declined to examine, was installed in his aunt's household and educated at her expense.

Three administrative steps and the machinery moved on.

Mary eventually married William Stafford in secret in 1534, a man of no particular rank, without the king's permission and without her family's approval. The Boleyns cut her off entirely. She wrote a letter that survives in which she said she had more joy with him than she would have had with the greatest lord in England.