Was Henry Carey The Illegitimate Son Of Henry VIII?

Henry Carey

Henry VIII may have cuckolded the man who had claimed to be his father. If true then his sisters were the queens of England...

Henry Carey was born on 4 March 1526. His mother was Mary Boleyn, sister to Anne Boleyn, former maid of honour to Catherine of Aragon, and the woman Henry VIII had taken as his mistress somewhere around 1522. His official father was Sir William Carey, a courtier in the king's household, a man of good standing and genuine usefulness to the crown who had the particular usefulness of being willing to marry a woman the king had been sleeping with and to ask no questions about the children she subsequently produced.

Sir William Carey died of sweating sickness in June 1528 when Henry was two years old. Henry VIII paid for his funeral. He did not acknowledge the boy.

The king had acknowledged a boy before. In June 1519, seven years earlier, Bessie Blount had given birth to Henry Fitzroy at Jericho Priory in Essex, attended by the king's own physician, in a confinement arranged and paid for by the king himself. Fitzroy was immediately and publicly acknowledged, given a ducal title at six, the Garter at six, a Howard bride at fourteen. The acknowledgement was the entire point. Fitzroy was proof that Henry VIII could father a living son, that the failure of Catherine of Aragon's pregnancies was Catherine's failure and not his, and the proof was exhibited publicly and expensively because the proof was the argument.

When Henry Carey was born in 1526, Henry VIII already had that argument. He had already won it. The proof of concept had been delivered by a different woman in a different county seven years earlier, and there was no political advantage in acknowledging a second illegitimate son at the precise moment he was attempting to persuade the most powerful institutions in Christendom that he should be permitted to set aside his wife and marry the acknowledged boy's aunt. The timing was, to put it with restraint, inconvenient.

In 1534 Mary Boleyn was banished from court after secretly marrying William Stafford, a soldier of no particular rank or fortune, without royal permission. Contemporary accounts note that the queen's grace might not suffer her son to remain at court. The queen who removed him was Anne Boleyn. His own aunt.

The boy who may have been the king's son was sent out of the queen's sight so that the queen would not have to look at him, and the irony of that arrangement, the specific cruelty of the geometry of it, does not appear to have troubled anyone in a position to prevent it. Henry Carey was eight years old.

Henry VIII died in January 1547 without having said a single word on the matter.

Six weeks after Elizabeth I came to the throne in November 1558 she knighted Henry Carey. Months later she made him Baron Hunsdon. Over the following years she gave him estates, a pension, military commands of significant responsibility, the Order of the Garter, and ultimately the office of Lord Chamberlain, one of the most senior positions in the English crown.

When the Spanish Armada threatened England in 1588 it was Henry Carey she appointed to command the forces responsible for the protection of her person. Elizabeth Tudor, who trusted almost no one completely and spent forty-five years of monarchy demonstrating exactly how well she understood the difference between people who could be trusted and people who could not, chose the man whose paternity she could not officially acknowledge to stand between her body and the greatest military threat of her reign.

He also became, in the course of his career, the patron of a playing company called the Lord Chamberlain's Men, which employed a playwright from Stratford-upon-Avon named William Shakespeare. A boy whose father was a question nobody would answer in writing grew up to be the man who kept Shakespeare working.

He was dying in July 1596 when Elizabeth came to visit him. She offered, according to the account, to make him Earl of Wiltshire. He refused. He said he had rather die a Lord Hunsdon than live an Earl of Wiltshire. He died on 23 July 1596.

Whether Henry Carey was Henry VIII's son cannot now be confirmed. Whether Elizabeth I believed he was is written in every appointment she ever made him and in the fact that when she needed someone she could trust with her life, she chose him, and he did not let her down, and she knew he would not, and the reason she knew that is the part that was never written down.