The Six Wives & Many Mistresses of Henry VIII: The Women's Stories

by Amy Licence

  Trouble was brewing under the king’s nose, too. During 1517–18, Henry’s court was becoming increasingly boisterous and causing concern among his advisors. John Skelton’s Magnificence, a political satire and morality play dealing with the fall of a king from grace into poverty, was probably written during this period in an attempt to counter some of the young man’s excesses. Wolsey had become alarmed by the clique of unruly and disrespectful young men or ‘minions’ who had gathered about Henry, with their scandalous love affairs and boisterous disrespect. Skelton was well placed to comment on it, having been the king’s tutor in his youth and the author of at least one previous work aimed at his personal improvement, the now lost The Mirror for Princes. Skelton’s work depicted the king as the embodiment of magnificence, or generosity combined with grandeur and wisdom. The central eponymous character is tempted by Crafty Conveyance, Courtly Abusion and others, but is brought back to the enlightened path by the figures of Measure and Perseverance.

  Magnificence was probably staged in 1519, but it received a new lease of life in 2010 under the direction of Dr Elisabeth Dutton at Hampton Court Palace. It appears that Magnificence and other plays and interludes of the time could use the guise of drama to indulge in some poetic satire of the king without fear of reprisals. Also writing at this time were John Rastell, who printed many of these early dramas, and his son-in-law John Heywood, the author of The Play of the Weather and The Play of Love. Such works and pageants might have provided Henry with a vehicle for flirtation, but he was also not averse to giving his playwrights a similar degree of licence when it came to subtle satire.

  If Henry had exploited the element of courtly misrule in order to pursue women, such occasions had also encouraged members of his privy chamber to forget their place. The minions, a sort of private boys’ club including William Compton, Edward Neville, Francis Bryan, Nicholas Carew, Charles Brandon and Henry Courtenay, began causing trouble home and abroad, and some were berated by the conservatives at Henry’s court as being ‘all French in eating, drinking and apparel, yea, and in French vices and brags’. Their influence over the king was becoming remarked, with Brandon in particular being rumoured to ‘rule him in all things’.3 As personal attendants on the king’s body, in terms of dress, sleeping, clothing and bodily functions, they are the most likely to have known about his sexual habits and affairs, to have witnessed his amours and been his confidants. Many of them had known him since his youth, having been the ‘henchmen’ in his household prior to the death of his father. They had risen with Henry, witnessed him create his own glittering world for the pursuit of pleasure and their arrogance and rakish behaviour was something of an extension of Henry’s own unbridled ego. Undoubtedly many of them knew his secrets, just as he knew theirs.

  If Henry trusted his minions to collude in his liaisons, creating an intimate core at the heart of his court, he would have further contributed to the manner in which his favourites transgressed the boundaries of acceptable behaviour and blurred the lines of status between themselves and the king: ‘certain young gentlemen in his privy chamber, not regarding his estate or degree, were so familiar and homely with him, and played sight touches with him, that they forgot themselves’.4 If they forgot themselves, it was because Henry failed to maintain the appropriate distance and encouraged their hedonistic antics. Ultimately, though, the influence of these rowdy young men was not as strong as that of Henry’s old guard of Wolsey, Thomas Boleyn and the Duke of Norfolk, who moved against them in May 1519, and expelled many from the king’s intimate service. It is also significant that many of these young men were executed by Henry in the late 1530s, under the aegis of treason, although in the cases of Neville, Carew and Courtenay it would be little more than suspicion regarding their proximity to him and their reputed designs on his status. By then, Henry was not prepared to tolerate those who encroached upon his royal person.

  In the spring of 1518, a whole two years after the birth of Princess Mary, Catherine suspected she was pregnant again. That March she had visited the Priory of St Frideswide at Oxford, whose shrine and relics had particular associations with female health, and probably prayed and left offerings there in the hope of conceiving. Given their history, the royal pair was cautious about making the news public until they knew that Catherine’s condition was certain, but as early as April Henry’s secretary had informed Wolsey that it was being ‘secretly said’ that she had conceived again. The king himself confirmed this hope, writing about it ‘not as an ensured thing, but as a thing wherein I have great hope and likelihood’.5 Mindful of Henry’s comment following the birth of their daughter, the queen no doubt hoped that Mary’s survival was an indication that she would be able to bear a healthy child. She was now thirty-two and considered old for a mother. Hopefully this would be the son the dynasty required.

  The royal couple kept well away from London that summer, where an outbreak of the sweat raged through the capital, and travelled leisurely through their countryside properties together and separately. Henry had been staying at Penshurst Place in Kent, the seat of the Duke of Buckingham, before returning to Catherine, who had remained at Woodstock. There, she ‘did meet with His Grace at his chamber door, and showed unto him for his welcome home her belly, something great, declaring openly that she was quick with child’.6 Reports reached them of the extent of the illness in London, which, as chronicler Hall related, ‘was so cruell that it killed some within three houres, some within two houres, some merry at dinner and dead at supper’.7 Henry and Catherine learned that ‘many died in the kynges courte, the Lord Clinton, the Lord Grey of Wilton, and many knights and gentlemen and officers’.8 No doubt this reminded the queen of the terrible outbreak of 1502, which she had survived but Arthur had not. This new outbreak was so virulent that it would last from July to December, before it began to show signs of abating.

  In the meantime, Henry was negotiating a marriage for his infant daughter to the dauphin of France, the son of Francis, who bore his name and who had been born that February. Henry risked riding to London to take part in the negotiations and the banquet that followed, hosted by Wolsey at his property of Durham House. Hall’s detailed description of the disguisings that followed clearly identifies the key participants. Twelve couples were dressed in fine green satin, covered in cloth of gold, tied on with laces and wore masquing hoods. They danced before pulling off their masks to reveal Henry and his sister Mary, then Brandon and Lady Daubeney, who was possibly Elizabeth Arundell, to whom Henry had given a grant of £100 back in 1510. There was also the Lord Admiral and Lady Guildford, Edward Neville and the Lady St Leger, Henry Guildford and Elizabeth, Lady Walden, and Captain Emery with Lady Anne Carew. Sir Giles Capel partnered Elizabeth Carew, Francis Bryan danced with Bessie Blount, Henry Norris with Margaret Wotton, Francis Poyntz with Mary Fiennes, Arthur Poole with Margaret Bruges. It was clearly an occasion when married couples were encouraged to take other partners, with Brandon, Guildford, Carew and Bryan dancing separately from their wives, and with Norris not paired with Mary Fiennes, whom he would marry the following year.

  This was the last court appearance made by Bessie Blount that year. She had fallen pregnant with Henry’s child and, with the exact date of her confinement unclear, may or may not have been aware of her condition at this point. The fact that she did not appear in the pageant at Greenwich five days later suggests that her absence was due to the presence of the queen. Either Catherine already knew or, more likely, she stayed away to avoid grieving her mistress in her advanced state of pregnancy. The entertainment followed the preaching of a solemn Mass in favour of matrimony, before the king and queen removed to the great hall to watch a pageant of an artificial mountain topped with five trees. Drawing on the heraldic devices of England, France and Spain, there stood trees bearing olives, pineapples, roses, lilies and pomegranates. Fair ladies and gentlemen in crimson satin were seated around it, some who danced and some who fought. Then a figure named Report, dressed in a gown of crimson embroidered
with tongues, entered on a winged horse named Pegasus. A banquet followed, of 160 dishes, followed by 60 plates of spices alone.9 Henry conceded Tournai to the French and peace was made. It was probably the queen’s last public engagement before retiring from the public eye.

  It is not clear whether Catherine had formally entered confinement but, in November, according to the Venetian ambassador, she was ‘delivered of a daughter, to the vexation of everybody. Never had the kingdom so anxiously desired anything as it did a prince’. The baby girl either died at birth or soon after. It was a terrible blow for Catherine, not only to lose her child but to have felt herself to be the ‘vexation of everybody’.10 She would not conceive again.

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  The Illegitimate Son, 1519

  What hope is left for to redress,

  By unknown means it liked me

  My hidden burthen to express.

  Whereby it might appear to thee.1

  Bessie’s pregnancy marked the end of her affair with Henry and of her masked performances at his court. She had been his lover for an unknown period of time, perhaps as long as four years or as briefly as a single night, which would have been around the time of the October celebrations at Durham House. Now, still in her late teens, she had conceived the king’s child and disappeared from sight to await the birth. Church records show there was a stigma attached to unmarried mothers, with women who conceived outside wedlock being required to ask for forgiveness in public and sometimes being whipped in the marketplace for fornication. Private letters dating from the period also highlight the cases of pregnant wives whose morality was suspected, when they and their child were repudiated by the husband, although these are rare.

  For Bessie, though, the normal rules did not apply. There was no stigma attached to bearing the king’s son; in fact, it was a badge of honour. Henry’s status gave her protection from the censure of society and the Church; in fact, the Church actively colluded to facilitate her lying-in. She was sent away from court less as an act of disapproval, than as one of discretion. Henry did not want his chivalric reputation to be tarnished by the increasing belly of his mistress nor to incur the wrath of his wife or set the tongues of gossips loose. It was not so much his own prudery as the attention it would have drawn in an arena of foreign ambassadors and politics. In contrast with many of his contemporaries, the king simply did not want his private life to be the subject of gossip.

  Thomas Wolsey arranged it all. He was familiar with the need for discretion, as a cardinal and Archbishop of York, who kept his own mistress, or ‘non-canonical’ wife, contrary to the rule of clerical celibacy, and fathered two children. However, by the time of Bessie’s lying-in, Wolsey had decided to distance himself from Joan Larke, arranging a marriage for her to George Legh. Catherine is reputed to have known all about it and deplored the ‘voluptuous life’ of ‘abominable lechery’ that he led.2 Wolsey’s relationship was not a very well-kept secret, with John Skelton representing court gossip – ‘I tell you what men say’ – and making puns on her name in his poem Colin Clout:

  And hauke on hobby larkes

  And other wanton warkes

  Whan the nyght darkes3

  Bessie was taken to Essex, to the Augustinian Priory of St Laurence at Blackmore, near Chelmsford. The prior, Thomas Goodwin, who had held his position since 1513, was someone who Wolsey felt could be trusted to lodge the expectant mother in his own medieval moated house known as Jericho, close to the church. The derivation of the name is unclear, although it has been suggested that the River Wid, running alongside, also bore the name of Jordan, and the existence today of nearby ‘Jericho Place’, a cul-de-sac lined with modern housing, as well as separate houses called Little Jordan, Little Jericho and Jericho Cottage, indicate a longstanding local connection. Writing in 1768, historian Philip Morant suggested that Jericho House had been Henry VIII’s pleasure palace, used by him for secret trysts, as a ‘lascivious king … lost in the embraces of his courtesans’. The priory was dissolved in 1524 but the nave still exists as part of the church, while the house was rebuilt or redeveloped into the private property that stands beside it today.

  However, there is a chance that part of Jericho Palace, or at least the ghost of the place, remains. It has been suggested by Pevsner that, while the façade is Georgian, the layout looks more sixteenth century, so the foundations of the original priory may exist under the present house. Standing a little way off from the church, to the east, at the end of Church Lane, the back of the property can be glimpsed from the graveyard. Photographs from the early twentieth century show a redbrick, three-storey property with solid chimney stacks and a series of outbuildings. Part of the tall exterior wall also still stands. In 1766 the village was described as containing around fifty families, so it would have been a quiet, secluded place for Bessie to deliver her baby.

  What Catherine was told about her maid’s absence is not recorded. That summer, she and Henry stayed in two of their Essex properties that were close to Jericho Priory. Firstly they stayed at Catherine’s property of Havering-atte-Bower, where the queen hosted a huge banquet, for which Henry ‘thanked her hartely’ before he passed the days in shooting and hunting. The house stood less than ten miles to the south-west of Blackmore. In September, they were at the king’s new palace of Beaulieu, later called New Hall, for more masked dances and sport. Beaulieu was on the site of an old house that Henry had bought from Sir Thomas Boleyn in 1516 for £1,000; shortly afterwards he began to build a new palace on the site, which was to be known for its beautiful gardens. It was twelve miles east from Jericho, on the other side of Chelmsford. Both these properties were close enough to allow Henry to visit Bessie and his newborn child. Even if he did not go there in person, he could receive news as her labour progressed. A messenger would have been dispatched at once to inform him that Bessie had given birth to a healthy boy. He was named after his father.

  The existence of Henry Fitzroy was unlikely to have gone unnoticed in his early years; there may have been some formal celebration to honour the boy which Catherine was forced to attend, and the banquet recorded as taking place at New Hall in August 1519 may have been occasioned by the news of his safe arrival. After his investiture as Duke of Richmond and Somerset in 1525 he frequently came to court, with his household based at his godfather Wolsey’s London property of Durham House. In addition, some of the resources employed in Princess Mary’s nursery were diverted to that of the new arrival, with the movement of staff from one child to another. The boy’s existence was a thorn in Catherine’s side, a justification of contemporary belief that her gynaecological failings were her own fault, a reminder of her pain. It also gave Henry confidence in his ability to father future sons, having proven that God would bless him with a male child. Little Fitzroy’s arrival raised the question of whether there was something about his marriage that was displeasing.

  The evidence suggests that Bessie’s relationship with Henry was over by this point, or came to an end soon after. Perhaps it never developed into a relationship at all. It is interesting that he never considered marrying her and legitimising his son, even after Catherine did not conceive another child. Perhaps another woman had already replaced Bessie in the king’s bed; an Arabella Parker, wife of a city merchant, has been cited by a late nineteenth-century historian,4 but there is no evidence to corroborate this. Margery or Margaret Parker was a rocker in Princess Mary’s household in 1516 and the Mistress Parker who danced in a court entertainment in 1522 was probably Jane, who went on to marry George Boleyn. It is not impossible that one of these women shared Henry’s bed at some point, perhaps on a handful of occasions, which history has not recorded.

  Alternatively, Henry might have been devoting his attention more exclusively to Catherine, in a final attempt to father another son now that he had been proved to be capable of it. Bessie would have had little control over the affair; she had yielded to Henry’s advances and probably sacrificed her virginity to him, borne his son and served her purpose. I
t is difficult to know, with the lack of surviving evidence, whether she regretted the loss of the relationship or what, exactly, her expectations had been. Given that Catherine was Henry’s established wife, Bessie’s role had probably been more opportunist than ambitious, as her family seem to have benefited little from the connection. It is not difficult to read a short-lived love match into their affair, a romantic interlude fuelled by the courtly dance. However, the pain caused to Catherine must have been considerable, even if she did turn a blind eye.

  Henry did take care of Bessie’s future, though. There was no stigma in marrying the mother of the king’s only son and any potential husband she might take would be in a position of strength to influence the boy in whatever direction his life might lead. Therefore, it was important that whoever was to act as his father was chosen, or at least approved, by Henry himself. Additionally, Bessie had proven her ability to bear a healthy male child, which was not an inconsiderable attraction in an era when fertility and childbirth were something of a lottery. Bessie’s husband was Gilbert Tailboys, an only son whose father had served Henry in France before being declared insane in 1517. Then aged around twenty, Gilbert had entered Wolsey’s household and his marriage was probably arranged by the cardinal too.

  However, there is an interesting question of timing regarding the birth of Bessie’s second child. The first reference to Bessie as Tailboys’ wife comes on 18 June 1522, although their marriage took place before this date, but Bessie’s daughter Elizabeth may have been born as early as 1520. If this is the case, and given that Bessie gave birth in the summer, her daughter would have been conceived in the autumn of 1519 or first three months of 1520. If she had married Tailboys that winter, she would have fallen pregnant soon after and the birth simply followed the wedding without any cause for doubt. It is unusual that the Tailboys are not referred to as a married couple until over two years later, though. While it has been suggested that Elizabeth was Henry’s daughter, and that their affair continued after the birth of Fitzroy, the king did not acknowledge Elizabeth as his own. The liaison may even have continued after Bessie’s wedding, in which case, Henry would not have been certain of his paternity, nor is he likely to have owned the child of a married woman, particularly as it was a daughter. It seems most likely, though, that the amour was over and Bessie was married around 1521, subsequently conceiving and bearing a daughter whose birthdate has been recorded imprecisely.