Henry Percy, 6th Earl of Northumberland

1502–1537

Henry Percy, 6th Earl of Northumberland, was a northern magnate whose youthful association with Anne Boleyn later became politically sensitive. According to accounts given after Anne’s fall, the couple may have exchanged a promise of marriage before her relationship with Henry VIII, but Percy denied that a binding precontract existed. He inherited heavy responsibilities on the Scottish border, suffered poor health and died in 1537 without children, leaving the earldom temporarily forfeit.

Percy appears in Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall and in Philippa Gregory’s The Other Boleyn Girl, where the proposed marriage to Anne becomes an important lost possibility. Fiction often romanticises the relationship, although the evidence is sparse and filtered through later annulment proceedings. His inability to protect or acknowledge Anne also illustrates the dependence of aristocratic marriage on family and royal approval.