What Happened to Henry VIII’s Illegitimate Children?

A wagon moves through the English countryside in the early days of August 1536. It is covered with straw. Inside, wrapped in lead, lies the body of a seventeen-year-old boy. Two attendants follow at a distance, dressed in green. They wear no livery that would identify whom they serve. They make no announcement at the villages they pass. The boy in the wagon was, six weeks earlier, the most likely heir to the throne of England. His father had publicly called him his worldly jewel. The Venetian ambassador had reported that the king loved this child like his own soul. Parliament had, in the spring of that same year, passed an act handing the king the unilateral power to name any successor he chose. Every observer at the Imperial Court understood whom the king meant to name. The wagon was the answer to that question. The wagon was also the beginning of a different story, one the king would never publicly tell.

Henry VIII had at least three other children outside the bed of any wife. One he refused to acknowledge while quietly handing her stolen monastic land. Two more he never claimed at all, and the blood of those two would, four hundred years later, walk through the doors of Westminster Abbey wearing a crown. This is what happened to all of them: the acknowledged son in the straw, the daughter raised as a tailor’s child, and the cousin born in 1524 whose descendants now sit on the British throne. These represent the pattern that the most powerful king in English history built around the children he could not openly name.

The boy in the wagon was born in a priory in Essex called Jericho. The Augustinian house at Blackmore near Chelmsford had been quietly converted by Cardinal Wolsey into a retreat for the king’s discreet pleasures. The mother was Elizabeth Blount, a Shropshire gentleman’s daughter who had served as a maid of honor to Catherine of Aragon since 1513. The chronicler Edward Hall recorded that she exceeded all others in singing, dancing, and all goodly pastimes. The confinement was managed in secret. The cardinal stood godfather. The date was June of 1519. The child was named Henry FitzRoy. FitzRoy is Anglo-Norman for “son of the king.” It was not a nickname; it was an advertisement.

Catherine of Aragon understood what the birth meant before the courtiers did. Her last pregnancy in November of 1518 had ended in a stillborn daughter. The queen was thirty-three years old. She had been pregnant six times. Only one child, the Princess Mary, had survived past infancy. The healthy boy at Jericho proved the failure was hers. Henry publicly exhibited the newborn at court. The Venetian ambassador in London wrote home that the king loved him like his own soul. Henry, in his own letters, called the child his worldly jewel. He had seventeen years to live. He would never see his sister Mary’s coronation, nor the daughter of the woman his father had not yet met.

The mother was married off the following year. Wolsey arranged a husband, Sir Gilbert Tailboys of Kyme, a Lincolnshire knight whose family was already in the cardinal’s debt. Elizabeth Blount disappeared from court into a country marriage. The king continued to favor her quietly, sending in 1532 a gilt goblet weighing over thirty-five ounces, and in 1535 a yearly grant of three tons of Gascon wine. She would die in 1539 or 1540 of suspected consumption. Her burial place is unknown.

The child stayed at court. On the 18th of June, 1525, at Bridewell Palace, Henry VIII did something no English king had done in more than a century. He raised a six-year-old illegitimate boy to the peerage in two ceremonies on a single day. In the morning, the child was created Earl of Nottingham. In the afternoon, he became Duke of Richmond and Duke of Somerset. The two titles carried specific meaning. Richmond had been Henry VII’s title before he took the throne. Somerset had been the title of the Beaufort line, the originally illegitimate branch of John of Gaunt’s family, whose legitimation by act of Parliament had made the Tudor claim to the throne possible. The king was signaling in heraldic shorthand that this child could be brought inside the line of succession by the same legal mechanism that had brought his own grandfather inside it.

At six years old, FitzRoy became the wealthiest peer in England after the crown. His lands yielded 4,845 pounds in the first year. He was made a Knight of the Garter. He was named Lord High Admiral. He was sent north as warden of the marches towards Scotland and head of the revived Council of the North, resident at Sheriff Hutton with a household of 245 servants. In 1529, he was created Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, a post accompanied by serious diplomatic discussion of crowning him king of Ireland. Wolsey, writing to the king’s secretary, called him “your entirely beloved son, the Lord Henry FitzRoy.”

The Venetian ambassador reported back to the doge that the queen resented the earldom and dukedom conferred on the king’s natural son and remained dissatisfied. Henry’s response was to dismiss three of Catherine’s Spanish ladies from her household that same week. By 1527, the papal legate Cardinal Campeggio was openly proposing as a way out of the divorce crisis that FitzRoy be married to his own half-sister, the Princess Mary, under a special dispensation from Pope Clement VII. Chapuys reported the idea as a means of establishing the succession. Other prospective brides were considered, including Mary of Portugal, a daughter of the French king, and a niece of the pope himself.

The boy himself was educated by John Palsgrave and Richard Croke in Latin, Greek, French, and music. The historian Beverly Murphy notes dryly that he had to be bribed to settle to his books. He killed his first buck at six. From late 1532, he lived for nearly a year at the French court, sharing King Francis I’s privy chamber with the dauphin. On the 26th of November, 1533, at Hampton Court, FitzRoy was married to Lady Mary Howard, daughter of the third Duke of Norfolk and cousin of the new queen, Anne Boleyn. He was fourteen, she was fifteen. Mary later said the marriage was made by his commandments, meaning the king’s. Henry forbade the marriage to be consummated. He convinced himself that early consummation had hastened the death of his brother Arthur thirty years earlier, and he was not going to lose another heir to the same superstition.

Two years later, his father met the woman who would change the question entirely. The spring of 1536 broke the Tudor court open. On the 2nd of May, Anne Boleyn was taken to the Tower. FitzRoy went to his father that morning as was customary for the daily blessing. Chapuys was at court and recorded what happened next. The king, he reported, said with tears that both he and his sister, meaning the Princess Mary, ought to thank God for having escaped from the hands of that woman who had planned their death by poison. FitzRoy stood on the scaffold side of his stepmother’s execution on the 19th of May.

Three weeks later, on the 8th of June, 1536, Parliament passed the second Act of Succession. The act was the most radical legal instrument of the Tudor century. It declared both princesses, Mary and Elizabeth, illegitimate. It voided the king’s first two marriages, and it gave Henry, for the first time in English constitutional history, full and plenary power and authority to name any successor by letters patent or by his will signed with his hand. An illegitimate male child of the king could now lawfully be nominated to the throne. The Earl of Sussex stood up in the Privy Council in the king’s presence and said that as the princess was a bastard as well as the Duke of Richmond, it would be right to prefer the male to the female. Henry did not contradict him. The Imperial ambassador reported back to Charles V that the king had certainly intended to make FitzRoy his successor.

The door was open for six weeks. On the 8th of July, Chapuys wrote again: “The Duke of Richmond, who in the judgment of physicians is consumptive and incurable.” The shadow planted seventeen years earlier in the priory at Jericho had arrived. The boy at Sheriff Hutton with his household of 245 servants, his Garter, his admiralty, his Welsh wardenship, his Irish lieutenancy, and the unique legal status of being the only person in England whom the king could lawfully name to the throne was dying of tuberculosis. The wagon was already being prepared. He died at St. James’s Palace on the 23rd of July, 1536. He was seventeen years old.

What Henry did next was the strangest decision of his reign. He placed the entire funeral in the hands of the Duke of Norfolk, his son’s father-in-law, and ordered the body taken secretly into Norfolk. No state procession, no public mourning, no announcement. Norfolk’s servants wrapped the boy in lead, laid him in the straw-covered wagon, and assigned two attendants in green to follow at a distance. The Duke himself did not accompany the body. Chapuys’s report to Charles V on the 3rd of August captured what the diplomatic corps in London saw and could not explain. “The Duke of Richmond, whom the king had certainly intended to succeed to the crown after being dead eight days, has been secretly carried in a wagon covered with straw without any company except two persons clothed in green who followed at a distance into Norfolk.”

Norfolk wrote anxiously to Thomas Cromwell some weeks later that the king was displeased with him because “my Lord of Richmond was not buried honorably.” The Duke had simply followed the king’s instructions. The king had then publicly blamed him for doing so. The body was laid first at Thetford Priory, the Howard family mausoleum in Norfolk. Four years later, the dissolution of the monasteries forced its removal. Norfolk had the boy moved to the parish church at Framlingham in Suffolk, where the family was rebuilding its tombs out of the wreckage of the dissolved abbeys.

The alabaster monument that Norfolk had commissioned at Thetford in 1539, at a cost of 400 pounds, was never finished. The Duke’s own imprisonment in the Tower in 1546 halted the work. A hybrid structure was assembled at Framlingham around 1555. It stands there now on the north side of the high altar in the church of St. Michael. FitzRoy lies under a blank alabaster chest with no effigy. His widow lies beside him. The friezes carry Renaissance carvings of Eve, Cain, and Abel, Noah, Abraham, and Moses. No image of the man buried inside. His black jennet, with its specially crafted saddle, was given away within a year of his death.

Fourteen months after the wagon entered Norfolk, Jane Seymour bore Edward VI. The widow was seventeen years old when the wagon left London. Mary Howard had been married for two years and eight months to a husband she had been forbidden to touch. The marriage was, in legal terms, void for non-consummation. Henry VIII seized on the technicality to refuse her jointure. The land settlement, worth roughly 1,000 marks a year, normally automatic for the widow of a peer, was withheld. She sold her jewels. She wrote to Cromwell begging for an income. She did not receive a settled allowance above 700 pounds until 1540. She served at court through the rise and fall of her own cousin, Catherine Howard, the king’s fifth wife, who was executed in 1542.

In 1546, when Sir Thomas Seymour proposed marriage to her, she refused. That December, her brother Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, was arrested for treason. Surrey had been carving the arms of Edward the Confessor into his heraldic devices, suggesting royal pretensions. He had also, according to the testimony given at his trial, proposed that his sister Mary become Henry VIII’s mistress in the manner of Madame de Temps at the French court to advance the Howard family’s influence. Mary gave the most damaging evidence against him. The transcript records her reply to the proposal. She had told her brother, she said, that she would cut her own throat rather than consent to such villainy.

Surrey was beheaded on the 19th of January, 1547. Their father, Norfolk, was scheduled for execution nine days later. Henry VIII died in the small hours of that same morning. The execution did not happen. Mary never remarried. She took her brother’s orphan children, including the future fourth Duke of Norfolk, and raised them as Protestants. She employed the Protestant historian John Foxe as their tutor at Reigate. She died of suspected influenza on the 7th of December, 1557, and was buried beside FitzRoy under the effigyless tomb at Framlingham. Thomas Fuller, writing a century after she died, captured the counterfactual that haunted the rest of the dynasty: “Well was it for them that Henry FitzRoy, his natural son, was dead. Otherwise, had he survived King Edward VI, we might presently have heard of a King Henry IX.”

The most powerful family in England had failed to bury one of its own children with dignity. The widow they left behind had begged for her jointure for four years. The mother had died in obscurity, her grave unmarked. If you have stayed with this story so far, you already understand the shape of what the Tudor century did to the people inside it. Subscribing keeps you with the rest of the cascade, because the children whose deaths Henry VIII ordered hidden were not the only children he had. The story now moves to a marriage Henry VIII attended in person.

On the 4th of February, 1520, in the Chapel Royal at Greenwich, Mary Boleyn married William Carey. The king was present at the wedding. His book of payments records a gift of 6 shillings and 8 pence from his own purse on the day. Mary was about twenty years old. She had been a maid of honor to Queen Catherine since her return from the French court two years earlier. William Carey was a gentleman of the Privy Chamber, well-connected at court, but of modest means. The affair began within months of the wedding and lasted, according to the best reconstructions, from 1521 or 1522 until 1525 or 1526.

The clearest documentary trace appears not in any contemporary chronicle, but in a legal document from seven years later. In 1527, when Henry was applying to Rome for a dispensation to marry Anne Boleyn, he requested permission to marry a woman to whom he was related in the first degree of affinity. The Latin phrasing was specific. The dispensation was sought ex quocumque licito seu illicito coitu, meaning from any intercourse, whether lawful or unlawful. The king was asking the Pope in writing to forgive his prior sexual relationship with the sister of the woman he intended to marry.

The Carey children were born during the affair. Catherine Carey was born around 1524. Henry Carey was born on the 4th of March, 1526. The king never acknowledged either of them. That silence is the central problem of the Tudor century. There are two cases to be made. The case for royal paternity rests on weight rather than proof. The timing matches both children. The royal grants to William Carey accelerate sharply between 1522 and his death from sweating sickness in 1528. In 1535, the vicar of Isleworth, John Hale, was reported to the authorities for pointing out young master Carey at court and identifying him as the king’s son. Cardinal Reginald Pole, in his 1538 polemic against Henry, wrote that Anne was the “sister of her whom first you violated and for a long time after kept as your concubine.” Sir George Throckmorton, called before the king to answer for his loose talk, accused Henry to his face of having meddled both with the mother and the sister. The king’s recorded reply was, “Never with the mother.”

Above all, when Elizabeth I came to the throne in 1558, she treated both Carey siblings with a degree of intimacy reserved nowhere else in her court. The case against royal paternity is also serious. Henry openly acknowledged FitzRoy and would have lost nothing by claiming a healthy second son in 1526. He was a notoriously poor fertilizer. Of more than eight known partners, only four ever conceived. The Carey family itself in later generations made no claim to royal descent. When Henry Carey’s grandson George claimed the Earldom of Ormond in 1597, he traced his case through the Boleyn senior line, not through any Tudor blood. Modern Tudor historians remain divided. Alison Weir argues Catherine probably was Henry’s daughter and Henry probably was not. Anthony Hoskins argues both were. Eric Ives is skeptical of both claims. Leanda de Lisle rejects the case entirely.

What is not in dispute is what happened to the mother. After William Carey died of sweating sickness in June of 1528, Mary Boleyn lived in straitened circumstances for six years. In 1534, she scandalized her family by marrying secretly and beneath her station a soldier named William Stafford. She was banished from court. Her sister Anne, by then queen, cut off her allowance. The letter Mary wrote to Cromwell from exile contains the line that has survived best: “I had rather beg my bread with him,” she wrote, “than to be the greatest queen in Christendom. And I believe verily he would not forsake me to be a king.” She died on the 19th of July, 1543. Her burial place is not known.

If Catherine Carey was Henry’s daughter, the Tudor king’s blood would re-enter Westminster Abbey wearing a tiara in 1981. Catherine Carey married Sir Francis Knollys on the 26th of April, 1540. She was about sixteen. He was a Protestant gentleman of the Privy Chamber, educated at Oxford, ten years her senior. Between 1541 and 1564, she bore between fourteen and sixteen children. The exact count is disputed because three of the recorded births may be duplications. When Mary I came to the throne in 1553 and began the Catholic Restoration, the Knollys family went into Protestant exile in Basel and Frankfurt. Catherine remained in correspondence with Princess Elizabeth throughout the reign. When Elizabeth came to the throne in November of 1558, the family returned within weeks.

Catherine was instantly appointed Chief Lady of the Bedchamber, the highest female post in the realm. She held it for the entire eleven years of her remaining life. Her husband became Vice Chamberlain of the Household and, by the late 1560s, custodian of Mary, Queen of Scots, at Bolton Castle. The relationship between Catherine and the Queen was extraordinary in its intimacy. The Spanish ambassador noted that the Queen would tolerate from Lady Knollys what she would tolerate from no other woman. Catherine fell ill at Hampton Court in the autumn of 1568. Elizabeth called Francis back from his Scottish prisoner duty. When Catherine appeared to recover, she sent him back. The recovery did not hold. Elizabeth’s grief on her death broke the protocol of how Tudors mourned each other.

Catherine Carey died at Hampton Court on the 15th of January, 1569. She was about forty-five. Elizabeth paid 640 pounds, 2 shillings, and 11 pence from the Privy Seal for the funeral, an extraordinary sum equivalent to about a quarter of a million pounds today. The Duke of Norfolk presided as Earl Marshal. Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, served as Lord Treasurer of the funeral. Catherine was buried in St. Edmund’s Chapel in Westminster Abbey with the documents of her interment filed alongside those of monarchs. She is the only non-royal buried in that grouping. Her wall monument records her in the Queen’s chosen wording as “the right honorable Lady Catherine Knollys, chief lady of the Queen’s majesty’s bedchamber.”

The brother lived longer and rose higher. Henry Carey was created the first Baron Hunsdon on the 13th of January, 1559, twelve days into Elizabeth’s reign. He was granted Hunsdon House in Hertfordshire, manors in Kent, and an annual pension of 400 pounds. He was made a Knight of the Garter in 1561. In 1568, he was sent north as governor of Berwick and warden of the East Marches towards Scotland, the same northern command his cousin FitzRoy had held thirty-five years earlier. In February of 1570, with about 1,500 men against Leonard Dacre’s 3,000, he won a decisive engagement at Geltsdale Bridge near Naworth in Cumberland. His dispatch to the Queen described the action as “the bravest charge that ever I saw.” Elizabeth’s reply contained a handwritten postscript in her own hand congratulating her cousin on the victory.

He became a privy counselor in 1577 and Lord Chamberlain of the Household in July of 1585. In 1594, he and his son-in-law, the Lord Admiral Howard, reorganized the London theater companies. The company they sponsored, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, included William Shakespeare and Richard Burbage. After Henry’s death, the company passed to his son George and kept the name until James I took it under royal patronage in 1603. Half the surviving plays of Shakespeare were written for it.

Henry Carey died at Somerset House on the 23rd of July, 1596, sixty years to the day after the death of Henry FitzRoy. On his deathbed, Elizabeth came to him and offered the title that, in his own mind, ought to have been his by birth. She offered him the Earldom of Wiltshire, the title his Boleyn grandfather had held. The story, recorded in several near-contemporary versions, is that he refused. “Madam,” his answer ran, “as you did not count me worthy of this honor in life, then I shall account myself not worthy of it in death.” Elizabeth paid roughly 800 pounds for his funeral and his widow’s pension. He was buried on the 12th of August, 1596, in St. John the Baptist Chapel in Westminster Abbey, beneath the tallest monument in the entire Abbey, an alabaster and marble structure thirty-six feet high erected by his widow, Anne, and his son, George.

The date is the script’s central coincidence, and the question that follows is the central problem of Tudor history. Was Henry Carey Henry VIII’s son? Or wasn’t he? Drop your answer in the comments. The case is the strongest one anywhere in the Tudor record for an unacknowledged royal child, and the date of his death, exactly sixty years after FitzRoy, is either the most poetic coincidence in English history or a piece of evidence in itself.

There is one more daughter to account for. Ethelred Malte, called Audrey by the family, was born around 1527. Her mother was Joan Dingley, whom Tudor historians, following the work of Alison Weir and Amy License, identify as a royal laundress. Joan was later married off to a man named Dobson and disappears from the record. The child was raised as the bastard daughter of John Malte, the king’s principal tailor. Malte’s own will, drawn up in 1546, names her plainly as “Audrey Malte, my bastard daughter, begotten on the body of Joan Dingley, now wife of one Dobson.”

What gives the case for royal paternity its weight is the pattern of the land grants. Between May of 1541 and January of 1547, Henry VIII channeled to Malte and his daughter jointly a sequence of dissolved monastic estates that no tailor in the kingdom could have purchased for himself. In 1541 came the Berkshire manors of Watchfield and Uffington. In 1544 came Somerset properties valued at over 1,800 pounds out of the dissolved estates of Glastonbury Abbey. In September of 1546 came the manors of Kelston, Bath Easton, and St. Catherine’s Court, drawn from Bath Priory and Shaftesbury Abbey, valued together above 1,300 pounds. In January of 1547, days before the king’s death, a final tranche worth 1,312 pounds and 12 shillings was added. The grants were entailed on Ethelreda and her heirs. Malte’s legitimate sons were specifically bypassed. That is the opposite of what an English tailor would normally do with land; he would settle it on his legitimate sons. The arrangement only makes sense if the land was never really Malte’s in the first place.

The family law preserved by her stepson, Sir John Harrington, stated openly that the king, having special love and regard for her, granted these estates for her use and benefit. But she always passed for Malte’s natural daughter. A letter from 1656 by one Jonathan Leslie repeated the tradition more bluntly. “The great King Henry VIII,” it ran, “matched his darling daughter to John Harrington, and though a bastard, endowed her with the rich lands of Bath Priory.”

Around 1547, Ethelreda married John Harrington of Stepney, a courtier in the service of Thomas Seymour, the Lord Admiral. The Seymour affair the following year sent her husband to the Tower for the first time. He was released, then arrested again in February of 1554 after Wyatt’s rebellion against Mary I. From his cell in the Tower, John Harrington wrote a letter that survives in the family papers: “My wife,” he wrote, “is her servant and doth but rejoice in this our misery when we look with whom we are holden in bondage.” The mistress he meant was Princess Elizabeth, herself a prisoner in the Tower at that same moment, suspected of complicity in Wyatt’s rising. Ethelreda Malte attended Elizabeth as one of six ladies permitted to her in captivity. Henry VIII’s probable daughter, raised as a tailor’s bastard, was serving Henry VIII’s certain daughter as a fellow prisoner of the half-sister neither of them would ever publicly call kin.

Ethelreda was still alive in October of 1555 when she settled the Kelston estate on her husband. She was probably at Elizabeth’s coronation in January of 1559. She had died by the 1st of April that same year, probably at St. Catherine’s Court near Bath. Her only documented child was a daughter, Hester, last recorded in 1568. The Kelston estate continued. John Harrington remarried to Isabella Markham, a gentlewoman of the privy chamber. On the 4th of August, 1560, their son was baptized with Queen Elizabeth I as godmother. This was Sir John Harrington, the writer, courtier, and inventor of the flush toilet, which he installed for the Queen at Richmond Palace in 1592 and christened the “Ajax,” a pun on the Tudor word for a privy. He coined the epigram, “Treason doth never prosper. What’s the reason? For if it prosper, none dare call it treason.” He was Ethelreda’s stepson, not her son. He carried no Tudor blood.

Three other men in this century would be called Henry VIII’s son. None of them was. Thomas Stukley, third son of Sir Hugh Stukley of Devon, was the loudest claimant. A soldier, pirate, papal commissioner, and eventually commander of the center at the Battle of Alcazar Quivir in Morocco on the 4th of August, 1578, where he died fighting for King Sebastian of Portugal. Stukley himself spread the rumor that he was Henry’s son. He told Queen Elizabeth to her face that he would rather be sovereign of a molehill than the subject of the greatest king in Christendom. His mother, Jane Pollard, has no documented presence at Henry’s court. The pardons that protected him through three decades of misbehavior are fully explained by the patronage of the Brandons and the Dudleys. The paternity claim is a self-promoted legend.

Sir John Perrot, Lord Deputy of Ireland from 1584, was a giant, red-bearded, choleric Welshman who looked enough like Henry VIII to fuel the rumor for the rest of his life. Convicted of treason in 1592 for calling Elizabeth a “base bastard pissing kitchen woman,” he died in the Tower in September of that year before sentence could be carried out. Sir Robert Naunton, in his Fragmenta Regalia, published in 1641, recorded Perrot’s outburst after the conviction: “What,” he cried, “will the Queen suffer her brother to be offered up as a sacrifice to the envy of my strutting adversaries?” The structural problem with Naunton’s quotation is that Naunton married Perrot’s granddaughter and never met the man. Modern scholarship treats the paternity claim as a family tradition myth. Richard Edwards, Master of the Children of the Chapel Royal under Elizabeth and author of the play Damon and Pythias, died on the 31st of October, 1566. The claim that he was Henry’s son rests entirely on a 1992 American family history book and a Tudor rose in his mother’s heraldry. No Tudor source connects him to the king.

The pattern across the documented cases is consistent. Henry VIII acknowledged FitzRoy publicly because the boy could be turned into a backup heir. He declined to claim the Carey children because their mother was married and acknowledging them would have wrecked the canonical case for marrying Anne Boleyn. He provided for Ethelreda Malte discreetly through a legal fiction, channeling roughly 4,500 pounds of monastic land through a tailor’s name. Stukley, Perrot, and Edwards fit none of those three documented patterns. They received no acknowledgement, no titles, no land grants, no household appointments. They received only the color of family law.

The cascade ends in the Spencer family. Catherine Carey had a daughter named Lettice Knollys, born in 1543. Lettice married first Walter Devereux, the first Earl of Essex. She married second, secretly and against the Queen’s furious objection, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, in 1578. Elizabeth called her the “she-wolf” and never spoke to her again. Lettice lived to ninety-one and was still walking a mile a day at the end. Her son was Robert Devereux, second Earl of Essex, the Queen’s last great favorite, executed on Tower Green on the 25th of February, 1601. Her daughter Dorothy Devereux married Henry Percy, ninth Earl of Northumberland. Their daughter Dorothy Percy married Robert Sidney, Earl of Leicester. Their daughter Dorothy Sidney, called “Saccharissa” by the poet Edmund Waller, married Henry Spencer, first Earl of Sunderland. The Spencer Earls of Sunderland produced the Earl Spencer of Althorp. The Earl Spencer of Althorp produced in 1961 Lady Diana Frances Spencer.

There is a second strand. Henry Carey’s son, Robert Carey, first Earl of Monmouth, fathered descendants who married into the Mordaunts. The Mordaunts married into the same Spencer line through Margaret Georgiana Poyntz in the 18th century. Mary Boleyn is, by genealogical fact, Diana Spencer’s thirteenth great-grandmother twice over through both her son and her daughter. She is Prince William and Prince Harry’s fourteenth great-grandmother by two lines. The Boleyn descent also reaches Sir Winston Churchill through Catherine Carey’s son Henry Knollys to the Pagets into the Spencer-Churchill Dukes of Marlborough. Churchill’s eleventh great-grandmother was Mary Boleyn. Sarah, Duchess of York, descends from the same line through her father.

For 349 years between 1603 and 1952, no English or British monarch was descended from Henry VIII. With the accession of Queen Elizabeth II in February of 1952, through the Bowes-Lyon and Cavendish-Boyle marriages that brought Mary Boleyn’s descent into her mother’s line, Henry VIII’s probable blood returned to the throne of England. It walks through Westminster Abbey today in the persons of King Charles III, the Prince of Wales, and the Duke of Sussex. The wagon in the straw left an empty space. The boy inside it would never marry, never have a child, never inherit the throne his father had spent six weeks of constitutional engineering preparing for him. The widow buried beside him at Framlingham lies under stone that carries no image of her face. The mother lies in an unknown grave. The children Henry VIII refused to name are the only ones whose blood survived.