The Six Wives & Many Mistresses of Henry VIII

by Amy Licence

  I would rather die than see what I have suffered and suffer every day from this ambassador and all my servants. I shall not believe that your Highness looks upon me as your daughter if you do not punish it, and order the ambassador to confine himself to the affairs of his embassy, and to abstain from meddling in the affairs of my household. May your Highness give me satisfaction before I die, for I fear my life will be short, owing to my troubles.22

  She begged her father to allow her to keep Diego, who was regularly threatening to leave her, in terms that speak of the extent of her emotional attachment, her ‘only consolation’ in her otherwise miserable life. She would ‘perish’ otherwise. Ferdinand must write to King Henry, she pleaded, asking for Diego to remain and be ‘well treated and humoured’. From Richmond, she wrote dramatically in code, hoping he would see her letter ‘before her life is sacrificed, as she fears it will be soon, owing to the trials she has to endure’.23 Finally, she threatened ‘to do something in her despair that neither the King of England nor her father would be able to prevent’.24 It sounded very much as if Catherine was in love and, confronted with the possibility of losing her beloved, intimated she was considering suicide. Heinous threats indeed for a Catholic princess.

  It is unclear how this desperate situation would have played out if not for the timely death of Henry VII. The king’s health had deteriorated since the spring of 1507, when he suffered from a ‘quinsy’, a complication of tonsillitis, which left him unable to eat or drink for six days. The following February he was again seriously ill with a fever or ‘disease of the joints’ that left him debilitated for three months, but again he recovered. As the scandal of Catherine’s relationship with her friar broke, in the spring of 1509, Henry was already in the grip of his final illness. Eleven days after the flurry of letters to Ferdinand, the king signed his will at Richmond Palace. He had already been shut away in his private apartments for a week, with his son at his side. Although there were reports as early as the end of March that Henry was in his death throes,25 the end did not come until 21 April. Suddenly, Catherine’s world was transformed. The young man to whom she had been betrothed, on and off, for six years had become the tall, handsome, seventeen-year old Henry VIII.

  9

  In Henry’s Bed, June 1509

  This yonge king, which peised al

  Hire beaute and hir wit withal

  As he that was with love hent

  Anon thereto yaf his assent1

  At first, it seemed that the succession of Henry VIII marked an end to Catherine’s hopes. Since hearing the news Ferdinand had been attempting to secure the marriage, even finally raising the remaining 100,000 scudos from Spanish bankers. Fuensalida did not believe that it would take place, advising the princess to resign herself to the loss, and had even begun shipping her possessions to Bruges in anticipation of leaving England. The new king could have the choice of any young princess in Christendom. Perhaps the ambassador also feared that her reputation had been damaged by the Fray Diego scandal. Three weeks of doubt followed for Catherine. Then, on 3 May, Fuensalida was summoned to a meeting with Henry’s secretary, Thomas Ruthal, and his Lord Privy Seal, Richard Fox.2 He was astonished by what they told him.

  Tradition dictated that Henry was lodged in the Tower during this time, but his council had met without him at Richmond. There they had debated the merits of the Spanish alliance and the need for the new king to father heirs. Apparently Henry had agreed with them, having been urged by his dying father to make Catherine his wife, yet the evidence suggests it was also by his own inclination. The princess was dignified, mature and gracious, a beautiful older woman whose sufferings Henry had observed and could now alleviate with one romantic gesture. She was more than a match for him in character, learning and lineage and Henry clearly recognised this. Objections were raised by the Archbishop of Canterbury, William Warham, who believed that Catherine’s marriage to Arthur prohibited her from becoming Henry’s wife and that the original papal dispensation was flawed, but he was overruled. In the end, Warham obliged the council by issuing a marriage licence on 8 June, which permitted the wedding to take place after only one reading of the banns, instead of the usual three.3

  Once they had permission, Catherine and Henry did not waste time. On 11 June, at Greenwich Palace, the twenty-three-year-old princess finally became a wife again, only this time she was to be a wife in more than name. Her auburn-haired husband towered over her at the altar, standing six feet and two inches tall beside her diminutive form of less than five feet. Contemporaries left little doubt regarding the attractiveness of the new young king in their accounts. Henry was a ‘perfect model of manly beauty’4 and ‘moost coomly of his parsonage’,5 ‘very fair and his whole frame admirably proportioned’, ‘affable and gracious’, ‘prudent, sage and free from every vice’.6 The French ambassador simply described him as ‘magnificent’, while his Venetian counterpart predicted, accurately, that ‘for the future, the whole world will talk of him’. Eight years after their first meeting in November 1501, when he had accompanied her on her entry into London, Catherine of Aragon and Henry VIII were finally pronounced man and wife. As he took her hand, bright with its wedding ring, a glittering future was unveiled before them. Young, beautiful, royal and rich, they were the most glamorous couple in Europe.

  It was significant that the couple rejected the gloomy confines of Richmond Palace, closely associated with Henry VII’s life and death, in favour of the privacy of Greenwich. A new reign and new wife required a new location. They gathered for the ceremony in the oratory of the Friar’s Observant church. As the candles burned before the icons of the saints, Archbishop Warham joined them as man and wife before witnesses George Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury, and William Thomas, Groom of the Privy Chamber. It was small, private and low-key. This was quite deliberate.

  Eight years earlier, Catherine’s wedding to Arthur had been celebrated with wonderful pageants and poems, tournaments and feasts, public and international spectacle, stretching for weeks. Coupled with the use of legend, allegory and dynastic symbols, this was considered an important marker of the legitimacy of a regime, an ‘external sign of princely power’7 and an authenticator of its marriages. The Tudor poet William Forrest summed it alliteratively as ‘hys power, peereles, without peere must appeere’.8 Henry VII had employed spectacle at every public ceremony of his reign, from his coronation and marriage to the unions he planned for his children. Therefore, his son’s choice, in 1509, represented a significant departure. The scale and secrecy adopted by the new king for his marriage could not help but draw comparison in the eyes of his bride. No doubt this was due, in part, to the speed at which the wedding took place, in order to allow Henry and Catherine to enjoy a joint coronation, but it was also an act of assertion. Henry had chosen Catherine for personal reasons, for her beauty, nobility and the affection that had sprung up between them; ever the romantic, he may have been drawn by her years of suffering, throwing off the repressive mantle of his father to save the damsel in distress. He may have written to Margaret of Savoy that he was fulfilling his parent’s deathbed wish, but in a letter to Ferdinand he explained that he would have chosen Catherine above all other women. The king was making the point that his choice of wife was his business.

  The news quickly spread. By nightfall, Henry’s gentlemen and Catherine’s ladies were busily preparing their bedchamber in the royal apartment block. Standing five storeys high, overlooking the river and gardens with their ornamented walkways, heraldic beasts and fruit trees, the royal apartments had been improved according to plans designed by Elizabeth of York. The king’s suite of rooms adjoined those of his new wife, forming a right angle of interconnecting chambers. The bed had been made following an elaborate ritual, the mattress checked by the Yeomen, then spread with a bed of down, followed by a fustian, with no man allowed to touch it by hand until the first sheet was laid on top of that. More sheets followed, along with ‘such pyllows as shall please the kyng’, upon a bolster. Thi
s was flattened down by Yeomen lying upon it, although they were to make the sign of the cross and kiss the bed where their fingers came into contact with it. The curtains at the sides were let down and a squire set the king’s sword at the head of the bed. A secret groom had ‘the kepynge of the sayde bedde with a light unto the tyme the kynge be disposed to goo to yt’. Then, each man was to be rewarded with a loaf of bread and pot of ale or wine, but must take care not to set any dish on the counterpane nor wipe their hands on the curtains.9

  Catherine would have been dressed modestly in a nightshift, a fairly simple garment, usually white, almost identical in design to those worn under the clothing during the day. As queen, hers might have been embroidered, or lined, or laced. She would also have worn a white linen biggin, or night-coif, to cover her hair. Increasingly, it was less common to sleep naked, for both men and women, but Catherine would have worn nothing underneath her shift, which would probably have been discarded in the act of love. In his chambers, Henry’s gentlemen undressed him to his shift, removed his hose and wrapped him in a gown for the walk between his room and that of his new wife. It was common for bawdy wedding night jokes and anecdotes to be exchanged on such occasions among the experienced men of the court and Henry may have taken wine and spices, which were thought to engender heat and encourage the libido.

  As she lay between the perfumed sheets awaiting the arrival of her lusty young husband, Catherine probably had a better idea of what to expect than she had in 1501. No doubt she was excited, and probably nervous. Arthur had been just fifteen, half a head smaller than her and thin, and his father’s concerns suggest he may already have been delicate in health. Now, striding into her bedchamber was the athletic Henry, strong, tall and long-limbed, in rude health and beautiful as a young god with his gold-red hair combed in the French fashion. He may well have been as inexperienced as her, but there is little doubt that the match was fully and enthusiastically consummated. For Catherine, the long years of virginity were over.

  We might be forgiven for assuming that sex in the past was the same as sex today, that the actual physical act does not differ. This is true only to an extent. Approaching sex with a completely different attitude, the Tudor man and woman would have been following a complex code of rules that gave their encounters a different significance. A number of sexual practices were considered sinful, in religious terms and also in the folklore that described the conception and appearance of children, which was Catherine and Henry’s ultimate aim and, as the king and queen, their morals and practices would need to have been exemplary. With gentlemen of Henry’s bedchamber on the other side of the door and Catherine’s maids or ladies in antechambers close by, there were always prying eyes or sensitive ears to consider: privacy is a modern luxury. Intercourse in the missionary position between husband and wife was considered the least of many potential evils, necessary for purposes of procreation and to prevent men from seeking satisfaction elsewhere. Other forms of sexual gratification – oral or anal sex, foreplay or masturbation, ‘carnal thoughts’ – were seen as sinful, as they did not result in pregnancy and could result in birth defects. Sin, of course, may have been a powerful aphrodisiac for some, and court records prove that these Church laws were frequently broken. Likewise, having sex on certain days of the Church calendar, or during menstruation, was supposed to produce small, unhealthy children.

  An Italian visitor to England in 1500 remarked that the nation was of a ‘licentious’ disposition but that he had not observed anyone to be ‘in love’. He concluded that English men were either ‘the most discreet lovers in the world, or that they are incapable of love’. On the other hand, he believed that the women were ‘very violent in their passions’.10 Of course, the court changed significantly with Henry’s succession, with greater emphasis on romance and chivalric displays of devotion and love; the royal marriage was echoed by a number of weddings among Catherine’s ladies and Henry’s gentlemen, which set a new ‘romantic’ tone.

  The Italian’s view of English women was in accordance with the cultural and medical beliefs regarding their sexual desire and activity. Contemporary beliefs stated that a woman’s ‘crooked instrument’ was designed to help satisfy her ‘foul lust’ and fuelled such stories of couples becoming locked together ‘fast like a dogge and a biche together’, such as that of Pers Lenard, related by Geoffrey de la Tour Landry, who suffered this humiliation after having sex on an altar. This required a public, naked penance.11 Physically, women were believed to be imperfect versions of masculinity, with the male genitalia inverted to create the womb and ovaries. According to Tudor thinking, which proposed that all of nature was in ‘sympathy’ and craved its counterpart, this meant their imperfection was always demanding to be completed, through sexual union with men. As previously explained, wombs were considered to be cold and wet, with the corresponding male seed being hot and dry, and this created a picture of women in a perpetual state of desire. The Galenic theory of the four humours could also determine levels of libido. Born in the winter, Catherine was considered to be of a phlegmatic, or cold and wet temperament, calm and unemotional. By contrast, Henry’s summer birth made him choleric, volatile and quick to lose his temper, but the hot, moist qualities of this humour would have made him Catherine’s exact opposite and complement. Once again, the newlyweds were perfectly matched by the standards of their day.

  Henry approached the marriage bed as an innocent. Given his status and the careful upbringing of his father, he is unlikely to have had a mistress before 1509, or to have had sex at all. The claim made by one historian12 that his first lover had been Elizabeth Denton, née Jerningham, the woman who had been appointed mistress of his nursery in 1496, finds little support in other non-fiction works. It rests entirely upon grants made to Elizabeth for her service in 1509, and then in 1515, although this latter payment is clearly made ‘for service to the late king and queen’. In the same month, comparable payments were made to Elizabeth Saxby and Elizabeth Wolvedon, who had served members of the royal family without suggestion of impropriety. The succession of a new monarch typically saw rewards being given to those who had loyally served the previous regime or other family members, and Denton’s role in the household of Elizabeth of York and her children is consistent with this. She would later govern the future households of two of Henry VIII’s children, further suggesting her speciality and suitability in such a position of care and the unlikeliness that she would abuse this parental trust.

  There is also the question of Henry VII’s control over his growing son. Given the terrible loss and grief he had suffered with the death of Arthur, Henry VII was not prepared to take any chances with the health of his second heir. The prince was closely monitored until 1509, being forbidden from taking part in potentially dangerous activities such as jousting and having his apartments accessible through those of his father. The fears Henry VII had entertained regarding the overenthusiastic sexual behaviour of teenagers, causing him to doubt the wisdom of Arthur and Catherine cohabiting, would have redoubled after Arthur’s premature death seemed to confirm them. Not a single rumour regarding Prince Henry’s private life survives prior to his marriage. He was scarcely in a position to indulge in affairs or brief encounters, and in the interval between his succession and marriage his attitude towards Catherine was one of romantic chivalry, of eager anticipation of his wedding night with her. It seems almost incontrovertible that Henry was a virgin on his wedding day.

  Contemporary literature furnishes us with many examples of men equalling women in their sexual drive and performance. The bawdy boasts of bridegrooms seemed to have been a longstanding convention of early sixteenth-century wedding celebrations. A verse of Dunbar’s Middle Scots poem ‘In a Secret Place’ is sufficient to give a flavour of the sort of wooing humour in this tradition, even with only minimal translation:

  My bonny babe with the rich brylyoun

  My tendir gyrle, my pretty flower

  My tyrlie myrlie, my crowdie mowdie,

>   When that oure mouthes do meet at one

  My stang does stiffen with your towdie13

  In 1501 Arthur had called for a drink, being thirsty after his ‘hot work’ in the ‘middle of Spain all night’, oblivious to the future significance of his words. Now, his brother bragged about finding Catherine a virgin before a number of witnesses, scarcely imagining that his words would come back to haunt him over twenty years later. When confronted with his comments by Imperial ambassador Eustace Chapuys, in April 1533, he claimed ‘it was spoken in jest, as a man, jesting and feasting, says many things which are not true’.14 There was no suggestion in 1509 that Henry was anything less than satisfied with his new wife.

  By contrast, brides were celebrated in elaborate and beautiful poetic metaphors. Dunbar’s descriptions of Margaret Tudor in 1502 as being serenaded by birds, more bright than beryl, more precious than diamonds, emeralds, rubies and pearls, follow a more traditional literary convention. Symbolised by the Tudor union rose, Margaret was ‘the fresche ros of cullour reid and quythe’, more dainty than all other flowers, a ‘bloom of joy’ to temper the harsh spikes of the Scottish thistle, when she married James IV. Catherine, the Spanish pomegranate, with her much-admired complexion, long red-gold hair and curvy figure, fitted the ideal of early sixteenth-century beauty, and Henry’s ideal as well. In their bed, politics and passion were well married.