William Carey

William Carey was a courtier and member of Henry VIII’s household who married Mary Boleyn in 1520. During the marriage Mary became the king’s mistress, and the paternity of her two Carey children has therefore been debated, though no conclusive evidence establishes Henry as their father. Carey benefited from royal grants but died during the sweating sickness epidemic of 1528.

Carey appears in Philippa Gregory’s The Other Boleyn Girl and in Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, both of which dramatise Mary Boleyn’s position at court and the consequences for her husband. Fiction often portrays him as politically useful, humiliated or pragmatic, although the surviving evidence reveals relatively little about the private marriage.

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.