It has long been known that Henry Carey, 1st Lord Hunsdon, was Elizabeth I’s closest living male relative. However, it is less widely known that he may also have been the queen’s half-brother. In this article, Dr Andrew Thrush, editor of the Elizabethan House of Lords project, re-examines some key evidence to suggest that this claim should not be lightly dismissed…

Born in the mid-1520s, seven or eight years before Elizabeth, Henry Carey was the son of Mary Boleyn, the sister of Elizabeth’s mother Queen Anne Boleyn. At the very least that made him Elizabeth’s first cousin. However, during the first half of the 1520s Mary Boleyn, though married to the courtier William Carey, was the mistress of Henry VIII. This raises the intriguing possibility that Henry Carey’s real father was not Mary’s husband William at all, but the king. If that is correct, it would mean that Carey was not simply Elizabeth’s first cousin but also her older half-brother. That would have given him a unique position, as the only other illegitimate son of Henry VIII – Henry Fitzroy, duke of Richmond and Somerset – had died in 1536. (The widely held belief that the Welsh gentleman Sir John Perrot (1528/9-1592) was also the bastard son of Henry VIII, whom he reportedly resembled, is without foundation.)

Although Henry VIII never acknowledged Henry Carey as his son, a disgruntled clergyman named John Hale claimed in 1535 that Carey was a royal bastard, which landed him in trouble with the Council. Most historians have nevertheless poured cold water on the idea of the king’s paternity, and one has argued that Mary’s sexual relationship with Henry VIII was over by the time she became pregnant with Carey. However, this conclusion is surprising as Carey’s generally accepted date of birth –  4 Mar. 1526 – is not incompatible with a terminal date for the affair of 1525, accepted by many historians. Furthermore, there are grounds for supposing that Queen Elizabeth herself may have believed or suspected that Carey was more than simply her cousin.

An important clue that this may have been the case is to be found in the title that Elizabeth conferred on Carey shortly after she ascended the throne in November 1558 – that of Baron Hunsdon. It was not, of course, surprising that Elizabeth bestowed a title of honour on one of her relatives soon after her accession; she did the same for Oliver St John, who was distantly related to her through her grandmother, Lady Margaret Beaufort. What is surprising is the territory chosen. Situated in eastern Hertfordshire, Hunsdon House and manor was both a royal residence and the centre of the royal honour of Hunsdon. It was where Elizabeth herself and her half-brother Edward VI had spent the ten years or so before the death of their father, Henry VIII. During Edward’s reign, Hunsdon went on to serve as the home of another of Henry VIII’s children, Edward and Elizabeth’s half-sister Mary. It has been suggested that Carey himself spent part of his childhood at Hunsdon – his father died of the sweating sickness in 1528, whereupon he became a ward of his aunt, Anne Boleyn  – but there is no evidence that this was the case. By allowing Carey to take ‘Hunsdon’ as his baronial title, and by granting him the Hunsdon estate a few months later, Elizabeth seems to have been tacitly acknowledging that her cousin shared her royal blood. She was certainly not emphasising his relationship to the Boleyns. Had this been her intention she would, in all likelihood, have insisted that he take a title that referred to a former Boleyn property, such as Rochford, the manor of which Carey had owned until 1552 and the hundred of which he still retained.

The choice of territory is not the only aspect of Carey’s title which raises suspicion about his paternity. At this period it was usual for newly created barons to take their family name, and for the territory chosen to serve merely as a suffix. For example, when Edward Hastings was created a baron by Queen Mary just one year earlier, in 1558, he became Baron Hastings of Loughborough; he was not created Baron Loughborough, even though many of his contemporaries regularly referred to him as Lord Loughborough to distinguish him from another peer with the title Lord Hastings. Carey, however, was created baron of Hunsdon rather than Baron Carey of Hunsdon. Taken alongside the particular territory chosen for the title, the difference between the two styles is probably significant. By allowing Carey to exclude his family name from his baronial title and to use ‘Hunsdon’ instead, the queen may have been signalling, albeit somewhat subtly, that she suspected that her cousin shared her Tudor blood.

It could, of course, be argued that if Elizabeth really believed that Carey was her half-brother she would have acknowledged him as such and conferred on him a far greater honour than a mere barony, which was, of course, the lowest rung on the aristocratic ladder. She might, for instance, have granted him an earldom, in line with the advice of Lord Burghley in 1589. Carey himself believed that he and his male heirs had a right to the Irish earldom of Ormond, as did Carey’s eldest son, George, 2nd Lord Hunsdon. However, there is no contemporary evidence that the queen ever contemplated advancing Carey further in the peerage. The story that, on his deathbed, she offered to create Carey earl of Wiltshire, the title held by their maternal grandfather, was not first recorded until the mid-seventeenth century. Elizabeth, particularly in the early years of her reign, may have been wary of elevating too far a kinsman whose claim to the throne might one day rival hers. It is, of course, easy to object that Carey, being illegitimate, posed no threat. However, the idea that a bastard might sit on the throne was hardly far-fetched as Elizabeth had herself at been declared illegitimate in 1536, when her father had disavowed the legality of his marriage to Anne Boleyn. Moreover, as Alison Weir has pointed out, acknowledgement by Elizabeth of the existence of a Carey sibling ‘could have compromised the legitimacy of her title’ (Alison Weir, Mary Boleyn, p. 316). If it would have been dangerous for Carey to have claimed publicly that he shared the same father as Elizabeth, it would have been no less dangerous for Elizabeth to admit the same.

If the queen suspected that Carey was her half-brother it would go some way towards explaining why Elizabeth initially failed to bestow on him significant royal office. Though Hunsdon had served as a member of Elizabeth’s household ever since 1551, for the first ten years of the queen’s reign he was little more than an ornament at court, participating in the occasional joust and taking the Order of the Garter to the French king in 1564. His only permanent office was as custodian of the queen’s hawks. He was not granted any position of political power whereby he might pose a threat. At first this may not have been what the queen wished. One month after her accession, Elizabeth reportedly offered Carey, not yet ennobled, the lord wardenship of the Cinque Ports. However, she subsequently bestowed this office instead on Lord Cobham. Was Elizabeth, still young and inexperienced in matters of state, persuaded by members of her Council behind the scenes that it might be unwise to hand a position of key military importance, at a time when England was still at war with France, to a man who might later publicly claim to be the son of Henry VIII?

Hunsdon, of course, never showed the slightest inclination of wishing to usurp the throne, nor was he ever considered a possible successor to her by leading members of the aristocracy during the succession crisis which followed the queen’s grave illness of October 1562. On the contrary, he seems to have taken great pains to demonstrate publicly that he posed no threat to Elizabeth. Early in the reign, he adopted as his heraldic motto the phrase ‘comme je trouve’ (as I find), which hardly suggests an overly ambitious or resentful spirit. It was perhaps for these reasons that in 1568, ten years after her accession, Elizabeth bestowed on Hunsdon the governorship of Berwick and the wardenship of the East March, both positions of immense military and political importance on the Scottish border. Hunsdon soon received an opportunity to repay the queen’s trust, for in 1570 he routed the rebel forces under Leonard Dacre at Gelt Bridge, a feat which elicited a glowing letter of thanks from a delighted queen. Thereafter Elizabeth seems never to have doubted Hunsdon’s loyalty, employing the baron in a series of important negotiations with the Scottish king James VI before finally appointing him chamberlain of the royal household in 1585. Even so, it was not until 1577 that Hunsdon was admitted to membership of the Privy Council.

Hunsdon’s close kinship seems to have afforded him a certain latitude in his relations with the queen, which was perhaps just as well as he had a tendency to fly off the handle. On two occasions he flatly refused to obey an instruction from the queen. The first time was in July 1572, when he was instructed to convey the rebellious earl of Northumberland to York for execution. In a letter to Burghley, he protested that he would rather  suffer imprisonment than obey such an order that was so damaging to his honour as a nobleman. The second occasion was in December 1587, when he informed Burghley that he would not suffer the humiliation of serving as lieutenant under the earl of Huntingdon in the army that was being planned to invade Scotland, as he had far more military experience than the earl. In neither case was Hunsdon brought to heel. Whether this was because Burghley never informed the queen of the baron’s defiance or whether Elizabeth herself quietly decided to pass over her kinsman’s effrontery is unknown. On only one occasion did Hunsdon’s disobedience come close to causing his relationship with the queen to break down, and that was in the summer of 1584 when Elizabeth, tired of her kinsman’s reluctance to return to Berwick, exploded with rage. Even then, the queen eventually mended her fences with Hunsdon, spending time with him at Somerset House (of which he was the keeper) in February 1585. That summer Elizabeth not only appointed him her lord chamberlain but also allowed him to retain his lucrative position at Berwick.

Hunsdon clearly enjoyed a very special relationship with the queen. Perhaps the only other figure who could have got away with such disobedience was the royal favourite, Robert Dudley, earl of Leicester. When Hunsdon died greatly in debt in 1596, Elizabeth stepped in to pay for the funeral, which set her back more than £1,097. The monument that was subsequently erected in his memory was evidently paid for by Hunsdon’s widow. Made from alabaster and stone, it stands at 36 feet tall, and is, to this day, the tallest monument in the abbey. Its sheer size alone should give us pause to wonder whether Hunsdon really was merely the queen’s first cousin.

ADT

Further reading:

Wallace T. McCaffrey, ‘Carey, Henry, first Baron Hundson (1526-1596), courtier and administrator’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2014).

Alison Weir, Mary Boleyn: ‘The Great and Infamous Whore’ (London, 2012).