Catherine Carey

Catherine Carey was the daughter of Mary Boleyn and William Carey and a first cousin of Elizabeth I, although rumours have sometimes suggested that Henry VIII was her biological father. She married the Protestant courtier Francis Knollys and spent part of Mary I’s reign in exile. Under Elizabeth she became a trusted lady of the bedchamber, while the large Knollys family occupied an important place in the queen’s political and religious circle.

Catherine appears in novels about Mary Boleyn and the early life of Elizabeth I, including Philippa Gregory’s The Other Boleyn Girl and related Tudor fiction. Because the question of her paternity cannot be settled from surviving evidence, novelists often use it to create hidden-royal-child plots. More historically grounded portrayals emphasise her long service to Elizabeth and the Protestant networks linking the Boleyn, Carey and Knollys families.

In Alison Weir’s The Boleyn Secret, Katherine Carey, daughter of Mary Boleyn, witnesses the execution of her aunt Anne and grows up close to Anne’s daughter, the future Elizabeth I. Their bond carries Katherine through the dangerous changes of the Tudor succession, religious persecution and exile.