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

by Amy Licence

  The pageant was entitled the Chateau Vert, or, most aptly, The Assault on the Castle of Virtue. Eight ladies waited inside the castle, dressed in Milan bonnets and gowns of white satin, each with their role, all abstract virtues, embroidered in gold. The part of Beauty was taken Mary Tudor, Duchess of Suffolk, and Honour was played by Gertrude Blount, the Countess of Devonshire. The daughter of Lord Morley, Jane Parker, was Constance and Mistress Browne, Mistress Dannett and the daughters of Sir Thomas Boleyn also took roles. The elder Boleyn girl, Mary, who had served Mary Tudor in France, either chose or was assigned the part of Kindness, while her sister Anne, recently returned from the court of Queen Claude, played the role of Perseverance.

  From under the castle more figures appeared, but these were a grotesque parody of the courtly women trapped within. Played by choristers of the chapel royal and attired ‘like to women of Inde’, or India, they represented the negative qualities of lovers: Danger, Disdain, Jealousy, Unkindness, Scorn, Strangeness and Malbouche, or bad (harsh) tongue. Then eight lords entered the hall, dressed in blue capes and golden caps, yet not so dazzling as their leader, who took the role of Ardent Desire in a costume of crimson satin adorned with burning flames of gold. For once, Henry was not so unsubtle as to take this role in front of his wife. It was probably played by William Cornish, who was nearing the end of a long career as an actor and musician and Master of the Children of the Chapel Royal. Accompanying him were Love, Nobleness, Youth, Devotion, Loyalty, Pleasure, Gentleness and Liberty. A mock battle followed, an allegory for the overcoming of a lover’s scruples, in which the ladies wished to yield to Ardent Desire but were dissuaded by Scorn and Disdain. In their defence, the women threw rosewater and comfits, while the men replied with dates and oranges and the suggestive ‘other fruits made for pleasure’.3 With the women surrendering and being led from the castle by their suitors, Henry was hoping that life would echo art. Indications suggest that it was around this time that his affair with Mary Boleyn began.

  Our certainty of this liaison rests on the shoulders of a nineteenth-century historian, John Lingard, as Henry ensured that very little evidence survived to establish the extent of their relationship. Others had refuted the notion before Lingard’s 1817 study, which cites Cardinal Pole’s letter of 1535 regarding the degree of affinity between Mary and Henry’s intended wife, Anne.4 However, Lingard’s evidence was swiftly rejected by his contemporaries. One reviewer of his work suggested the theory was borne out of ‘a spirit of determined hostility’ towards Anne Boleyn, ‘in order to fix a character of greater odium on her marriage with the king’5 and present his rejection of Catherine of Aragon in a less favourable light. But this was never the historian’s intention. In response to this criticism, Lingard defended his position by quoting Pole’s words to Henry regarding Anne: ‘For who is she? The sister of a woman, who you had long kept as a mistress … whose sister you have carnally known yourself … the sister of one who has been your concubine.’ As Lingard stated in his defence, Pole’s ‘language is that of a man who asserts nothing of which he is not assured, and who neither fears nor expects to meet with contradiction’.6 This leaves little doubt that Mary and Henry were lovers and that their relationship was of some duration.

  This nineteenth-century debate serves as an important reminder about attempting to reach a decisive conclusion when it comes to the king’s lovers. Trends in historical thinking, and the accidents of survival, illustrate just how far Henry’s personal reputation cannot be assumed. Mary Boleyn is now widely accepted as one of the king’s known mistresses, but if her relationship was disputed so recently, and is known on such slender evidence, the existence of other possible lovers cannot be ruled out with certainty.

  Mary was probably the eldest of the Boleyn children. Sir Thomas, an ambitious and talented man on the rise, had made a politically astute marriage to Elizabeth, daughter of Thomas Howard, 2nd Duke of Norfolk, at a time when the Howard fortunes were experiencing a dip. Having fought against Henry VII at Bosworth, Elizabeth’s father had been stripped of his title and lands and committed to the Tower for several years. After a period of being out in the cold, he was permitted to return to court around 1499 and rebuild his career, around which time he agreed to the Boleyn match. The Boleyns had risen through the social ranks two generations back, with Sir Thomas’s grandfather, Geoffrey, becoming a successful merchant and Mayor of London, with enough capital to purchase the family seats of Blickling Hall in Norfolk and Hever Castle in Kent.

  Situated fifteen miles north of Norwich and just ten miles from the north Norfolk Coast, Blickling Hall was in the possession of Sir John Fastolf in the mid-fifteenth century. It had been built during the reign of Richard II and developed around two courtyards, before the knight sold it to Sir Geoffrey Boleyn in 1452.7 Some walls of the original medieval manor house still stand but the majority of the house was demolished during the Jacobean period and rebuilt as the Blickling Hall open to visitors today. Ten years later, Sir Geoffrey bought the smaller thirteenth-century property at Hever, conveniently located close to London in the Weald of Kent. His grandson Thomas would extend it considerably as befitted his rank, adding the present entrance hall and later making it a fitting location to entertain a king.

  Elizabeth Howard was a talented beauty, if the poet John Skelton is to be trusted. Before her marriage, he included a portrait of her in his poem ‘The Garland of Laurel’, which sees him walking in a garden led by the allegorical figure of Occupation, who brings him to her mother, the Countess of Surrey. The poem was probably composed when Skelton was a guest at the family property of Sheriff Hutton in the winter of 1494/95. In it, the young Elizabeth Howard is compared to Criseyde for her beauty and Irene for her artistic talents, being ‘of womanly features, whose flourishing tender age is lusty to look on, pleasant, demure and sage’. She was married to Sir Thomas Boleyn around 1498/99 and bore him several children, of whom three survived to adulthood. There has been much academic debate about the order of their arrival, but the general consensus is that Mary was the eldest, being born in 1499 or 1500, with Anne following a year later and George in 1503–04. This made Mary around twenty-two at the time she danced the role of Kindness in 1522. It is interesting that Skelton’s poem was not published until 3 October 1523, almost thirty years after it was written, which may have been a mark of respect in response to the developing affair between Henry and Mary.

  Rumours would later arise that Elizabeth had been the mistress of Henry VIII, either in his youth or as a very young king. She was significantly older than him but, in his early days, Henry does appear to have favoured older, experienced women, so this is not necessarily a barrier to them having had a relationship. However, the same reasons that rule out Elizabeth Denton as the prince’s lover also apply to her namesake, with the heir to the throne being carefully guarded and his father’s precautions regarding physical health and sex at a young age being observed. The story first arose among the king’s enemies in the 1530s, against the replacement of Catherine of Aragon with Anne Boleyn, and must be seen in this context. Princess Mary’s confessor, Friar William Peto, made the claim in 1532, followed by a letter by George Throckmorton that describes Henry being accused of meddling ‘both with the mother and sister’, to which Henry blushingly replied, ‘Never with the mother.’ It was repeated by Elizabeth Amadas, who implicated a number of men and women of the court as part of her defence against charges of treason and witchcraft fifty years later, and it must be seen in that context.

  The most damage to Elizabeth Howard Boleyn’s posthumous reputation was done by the hostile Jesuit priest Nicholas Sander, who would go as far as to suggest that Anne Boleyn was the daughter of Henry VIII, the result of an early affair he had with her mother. Writing a biography of Anne during the reign of her daughter, while exiled from England, Sander boldly claimed that ‘Anne Boleyn was the daughter of Sir Thomas Boleyn’s wife; I say of his wife, because she could not have been the daughter of Sir Thomas, for she was born during his
absence of two years in France on the king’s affairs’.8 To blacken Anne’s character further, Sander explained that Henry had sent Sir Thomas abroad to ‘conceal his own criminal conduct’ and followed this with an order to the returning Boleyn, to ‘refrain from prosecuting his wife, to forgive her and be reconciled to her’.9 The problems of this theory are manifold, not least given the purported birth dates of Anne and the fact that Henry felt no need to address this reputed paternity when removing impediments to their match. The absence of Sir Thomas for a duration of two years around the possible time that Anne arrived cannot be established either and the birth of other siblings, who did not survive, might also indicate he was not absent for such a length of time. While the rumours about Elizabeth Boleyn and Henry VIII cannot be completely ruled out, they appear to be little more than part of the later anti-Boleyn smear campaign.

  In the early days of Henry’s reign, though, the Boleyn family were on the make. Mary’s career had seen her travel to France in the train of Mary Tudor in autumn 1514, at around the age of fourteen, remaining there to serve Queen Claude with her sister. It was probably her first official post, beginning with her journey to the court at Greenwich from her childhood home of Hever Castle to witness the proxy marriage in August 1514. It may have been the first time she saw the English king, although the fact that her parents were frequently at court might suggest she had visited before, or previously been presented to Henry if he paid a visit to her parents at Hever. As he was in the habit of staying at the homes of his courtiers while on progress, or while hunting, and given the strategic location of Hever Castle, the young girl may have glimpsed her future lover. The first time they can be put together for certain is at the proxy wedding and the subsequent journey to Dover, although the king’s attention was elsewhere at the time. For Mary, these events put her at the heart of court and international politics; she may have been forgiven for thinking the world revolved around the gorgeous, bejewelled figure of the king.

  The young Boleyn girl attended the marriage of Mary Tudor to Louis XII at Abbeville Cathedral on 9 October. She was among the retinue of English ladies who were received by Louis’ daughter Madame Claude, before she was a queen herself, and conducted to the Palace of the Hotel de Gruthuse, to splendid apartments connected to those of the king via a pleasure garden. She would have attended the ball that was thrown in Mary’s honour that evening by the dauphin Francis, ‘with dancing and music resounding to the skies’, and risen with her the following morning, an hour and a half before daybreak.10 Mary would have helped the princess dress, in a dress of gold brocade decorated with ermine and diamond clasps, and brushed out her red-gold hair, which was topped with a coronet of gems. Then, the girl formed part of the train that followed her mistress, with each lady in waiting flanked by two gentlemen holding their caps in their hands. The wedding was conducted in a room draped entirely in gold and, after the ceremony, the new French queen and her ladies retired to dine together in her chambers. It was a scene of the most dazzling opulence and ceremony, which cannot but have impressed a young girl new to court life. However, the discrepancy in age between the bride and groom would also have been a stark reminder to Mary Boleyn of the realities of marriage among the nobility.

  Mary would also have prepared her mistress for the arrival of King Louis in her bed. With the memories of the proxy match at Greenwich in mind, the beautiful young queen was anticipating quite a different encounter with the ageing French monarch, and as one of her ladies Mary would have gone about the business of making her and the room ready to receive him, before discreetly departing. Here, and later at the court of Catherine of Aragon, she learned the ritual of the bedchamber and perhaps some of the secrets of married life as the ladies whispered among themselves or imparted their accumulated wisdom. If nothing else, she would have witnessed the mixed emotions with which Queen Mary now went to the marital bed.

  The literary stereotypes of old men desiring young women are frequent in late medieval poetry, and usually result in the cuckolding or embarrassment of the older lover. Chaucer’s Januarie was sixty when he was married to his ‘fresh’ May:

  And certainly, as sooth as God is Kyng

  To take a wyf it is a glorious thing

  And namely whan a man is oold and hoor;

  Thanne is a wyf the fruyt of his tresor.

  Thanne sholde he take a yong wyf and a feir,

  On which he myghte engendren hym and heir,

  And lede his lyf in joye and in solas.11

  Louis did lead the rest of his life in joy and solace, but it proved too much for him. After his death, Mary and Anne, who had joined her from the Netherlands, found themselves well placed to witness the end of one French regime and the start of a new one. Another lesson in love followed swiftly on the first. The rapid remarriage of the dowager queen to Charles Brandon showed Mary that women could exercise a degree of control over their lives and marry for love. Matches might be made along dynastic lines, but love would always find a way.

  The reputation of the new king preceded him. At the licentious court of Francis I ‘both maids and wives do oft-times trip, indeed do so customarily’, and he was described in thinly veiled sexual metaphors as ‘drinking’ from many fountains and ‘clothed’ in women.12 Reputed to have created spyholes in his palaces in order to watch women undressing and engaging in intimate acts, Francis would have been very aware of the young women in the entourage of the dowager queen. His extramarital activities and official mistresses were in stark contrast to the modest and pious establishment of the new queen, Claude, in which Mary was now engaged. Handsome and experienced, Francis was then twenty-one and Mary was fifteen, the age at which the king himself had lost his virginity.13 It is entirely in keeping with what is known about Francis that he may have tried to seduce one of his wife’s attractive young maids and succeeded. Later, Francis referred to Mary in the disparaging terms of ‘a very great whore and infamous above all’. He also described her as ‘more dirty than queenly’.14

  However, the extent of their relationship is undocumented and recent historians have disputed whether it was of any significant duration or whether it happened at all. Francis’ comments derive from 1536, long after Mary had been Henry’s mistress, and his possibly unattainable standards for queenly comparison were the regal dignity of Catherine of Aragon and the long-suffering diligence of his own wife Claude. In addition, they formed part of the anti-Boleyn feeling that accompanied Anne’s fall and were reported in a letter written by the papal nuncio in Paris. It is not clear whether the author heard these words uttered by Francis in person or whether he was repeating court gossip. The latter seems more likely; although Francis could have a sharp tongue, he also insisted on women being treated with respect and honour. Another reference to the affair comes from a letter penned by the Bishop of Faenza, Rodolfo Pio, who described Mary as Anne’s sister ‘whom the French king knew here in France’, adding that she was ‘a great prostitute and infamous above all’. Yet this was written in January 1536 and other statements in the letter are incorrect, such as the assertion of Mary’s presence at court when she had in fact been banished to the country. The case for Mary’s liaison with the French king suddenly appears to stand on less solid ground.

  Perhaps most significantly, Mary did not contract syphilis; Francis was known to have the disease, given all the mercury cures prescribed by his doctors. It is difficult to know exactly when Francis did have the fateful encounter that infected him, but any relationship with Mary would date from the very earliest days of his reign, so the chances are he was still clear of the disease. Based on a single sexual encounter with an infected king, the chances of Mary contracting syphilis herself were between 3 and 10 per cent.15 She would have displayed symptoms of sores, rashes and swellings that would have been remarked upon at the time. No such reports exist, and there is no evidence that Mary or, by extension her children, were sufferers. It is possible that they had some short-term fling, or even a single encounter, from which
Mary emerged physically unscathed, but it is equally likely that these rumours were politically motivated. The surviving evidence is insufficient to allow for a decisive conclusion to be drawn.

  Mary remained in the household of Queen Claude for the next five years, with no contemporary comments suggesting any dishonour to her character. It is possible that she was continuing her education at one of the properties of the king, or becoming accustomed to court ritual and life. Of a similar age to Claude, she was likely employed to serve and support her mistress, keeping her company through her continual pregnancies and cheering her spirits as she recovered. Mary reached the age of twenty having eluded more formal documentation, quite late to be married by contemporary standards. Sir Thomas had been negotiating for a suitable husband and she was recalled home in 1519, soon to become the first Boleyn girl to catch the eye of the King of England.

  On 4 February 1520, Mary Boleyn married William Carey. Her husband was a gentleman of the Privy Chamber whose maternal family descended from Edward III through the Beaufort line, making him yet another cousin of the king. Henry attended the wedding, making his customary offering of 8s 6d and giving his blessing. Husband and wife had been present at the Field of Cloth of Gold, but it was shortly before the Chateau Vert pageant. On 5 February, Carey was appointed keeper of the manor of Beaulieu or New Hall in Essex and bailiff of several nearby manors. As with the sudden sizeable grant made to Elizabeth Blount’s father, this might indicate an approximate starting point for Henry’s affairs. Even more convincingly, Sir Thomas Boleyn was made treasurer of Henry’s household that April. It seems that, by the summer of 1522, Mary Boleyn had found her way into the royal bed.

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  The King’s Mistress, 1522–25

  Madam, withouten many words

  Once I am sure you will or no