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

by Amy Licence

  And if ye will then leave your bourds

  And use your wit and shew it so1

  The watchwords for Mary’s relationship with the king were secrecy and discretion. Yet history has tarnished her with scandal and rumour, insults and aspersions, leaving her with a reputation worthiest of the greatest whore at Henry’s court. Just like so many of the facts of Mary’s life, her real personality and appearance elude us. Historians and novelists have deduced various things from the known dates of her service in France, particularly her comparative lack of education and the circumstances of her marriage, yet these have often raised more questions than they have answered. Mary is illuminated in history by the light that fell upon her sister and she has suffered from the comparison ever since. Sadly her light will always be dimmer, her biography more nebulous.

  Without a surviving authenticated portrait of Mary, it is impossible to draw any satisfactory conclusion about her appearance, beyond the fact that she was sufficiently attractive to engage the attention of the king. She may well have had the same colouring and proportions as her sister, but the two main candidates for her portrait, one by Lucas Horenbout and the other an anonymous image held at Hever Castle, both depict women with rounder, softer faces and perhaps lighter colouring. In fiction and on the screen, Mary has been played as alternately dark and fair, silly and serious, usually as a foil to Anne, but the only contemporary indication of any personal characteristic attributed to her is her role as Kindness, and for all we know that may have been allocated on a chance basis. While the parts of Kindness and Perseverance seem apt to the modern reader, enjoying the dancing of 1522 with a dash of hindsight, we could equally picture Mary and Anne drawing pieces of paper out of a velvet cap and laughing at their unsuitability. Perhaps these roles were even ascribed as a joke, a further disguise, with Mary refusing to be ‘kind’ to the king and Anne known for her impatience. We will never know.

  Taken at face value, the internal evidence of the Chateau Vert pageant may suggest Mary’s affair with Henry began in the spring of 1522. Again, the exact start, as well as the duration of the liaison, is unknown. It may have been the four years some historians suggest, or it may have been a single night. All we know is that he did sleep with her on at least one occasion, by his own admission. As with his other mistresses, this is the result of Henry’s intense desire for privacy. The private and public aspects of his complex role determined the experiences of his mistresses, as well as the degree of ceremony and arrangements by which he shared their beds. For Catherine, as queen, the preliminaries for sex were somewhat formalised due to the dynastic significance of the moment, marked by a degree of ceremony and the involvement of servants. It mattered to the court when Henry slept with Catherine and how often. Once the doors closed, that was another matter. For a mistress like Mary, though, the emphasis was on pleasure. This was not something Henry wanted to be recorded or observed, so a veil of courtly secrecy was woven by the few people in the know.

  Apart from the pageant, there is no evidence of Henry’s affair with Mary that dates from the early 1520s. No whisper, no rumour, no accusation or gossip survives to shine any light on their connection. It can scarcely be considered the open secret that some historians have suggested, with not a single shred of proof that it was known outside the most intimate court circles. Henry would have put his trust in a few men; as the facts show, his close relative Cardinal Pole was aware of the affair and Wolsey’s role in the birth of Henry Fitzroy suggests he would also have been Henry’s confidant. An interesting case is that of the Franciscan Friar William Peto, who mentioned Mary when he spoke out against Henry’s divorce in 1532. As both Henry and Catherine favoured the Franciscans, frequently using their church at Greenwich, there is a chance that Peto had been trusted as a confidant outside the confessional, or had known someone who was. It is interesting to ponder, though, whether he had learned this information from the king or from Catherine herself. It is not even clear whether Catherine knew that Mary was sharing her husband’s favours.

  And yet, by Henry’s own later admission, Mary was definitely his mistress. How exactly did he achieve this without too much comment? That is the intention that lies at the heart of this book: to challenge the assumption that Henry’s extreme desire for privacy and his active love life are incompatible. One method, which he had already established with Bessie Blount, was to remove the focus of his attentions from the gaze of the court. When Henry visited his other properties, outside the main court, physical space dictated that he often took a smaller staff. With William Carey and his wife installed at New Hall in Essex, the king might stay nearby and visit, as he had done in 1519, and entertain Mary in comparative secrecy. The presence of numerous smaller buildings on large royal estates could also provide opportunities for liaisons, as with the Tower in Greenwich Park, a short, safe distance from the main house, or one of Henry’s many hunting lodges, where a small and trusted band of companions could conduct a lady under cover of darkness. Chance references in chronicles show just how often Henry managed to escape from the gaze of his court and wife, such as Hall’s mention of his visit to Hitchin in Hertfordshire in October 1522, to ‘see his hawks fly.’2 Exactly where Mary and Henry found time to be together is uncertain but, as the case of Bessie proves without shadow of a doubt, if the king wanted to be alone with a woman, he could. And if he wanted it to remain a secret, it would.

  Developments in Tudor architecture may also have helped Henry’s bid for secrecy. It is likely that Wolsey facilitated Henry and Mary’s liaison while the pair was at court. Just as Sir William Compton is suggested to have arranged convenient encounters for the king in Thames Street, the house Wolsey had occupied at Bridewell, behind Fleet Street, from around 15103 may have been another location used by Henry. It was here that Wolsey had installed his own long-term mistress and children, setting the tone for illicit encounters that may have encouraged the king’s trust. Originally an inn called St Bride’s, part of Bridewell Palace had been taken over by Henry in around 1515, when Wolsey moved out to Hampton. From that point, the pair collaborated on a programme of redevelopment worth around £39,000.4 The cardinal chose Thomas Larke, his close friend and probably a relation of his mistress Joan Larke, to oversee the building works, which comprised two courtyards and a long gallery of two hundred feet, leading down to the Thames.

  The king’s lodgings were in the south wing of the inner court, most easily accessible from the river, but formally approached by a grand staircase in the outer courtyard. Archaeological evidence shows that Henry’s privy chamber sat beside a closet which was attached to his presence chamber. A door from this room led directly down the gallery, past a council chamber and closet, to the watergate.5 According to Stowe, the palace was further improved specifically to entertain Charles during his visit of 1522, a date which coincides with the start of his affair with Mary. Additionally, the queen’s lodgings lay to the north, completely separate from the gallery, privy garden and water access. Although Wolsey was then using the property less, the previous proximity of his household, identifying the building as the repository of secrets and location for sexual discretion, may imply that Henry saw it as a safe house for his extramarital affairs.

  There is also the location of Penshurst Place to consider. Lying a little over six miles to the east of Hever Castle and thirty miles south of Greenwich Palace, the fourteenth-century house had been owned by the Duke of Buckingham. Henry’s cousin and old friend had entertained him there on many occasions before making reckless comments about his own claim to the throne and asserting that he would physically defend himself against the king should he be arrested. He had been sent to the Tower in 1521, while Henry considered the evidence against him, before being tried before a panel of seventeen of his peers and executed on 17 May. As a result, Penshurst passed to Henry, who used it as a hunting lodge, visiting in the 1520s with Charles Brandon, providing another possible location for him to woo Mary or, at least, close enough for them to coordinate visits
to her parental home. Penshurst was a spectacular place to host a court entertainment, with its huge Baron’s Hall, sixty feet high, and its quieter withdrawing room; under the pretext of hunting, Henry and a close-knit group of friends could enjoy a degree of privacy there.

  Mary Boleyn disappears from the records again after the Chateau Vert pageant, perhaps as she left court to take up residence at Newhall or to visit her parents at Hever. This may suggest that her liaison with Henry was on an intermittent and opportunistic basis, instead of her being a more long-term established mistress. Nor does she appear to have been more than a diversion for the king, who probably took his pleasure with her when circumstances presented an opportunity. She was not established in her own lodgings at court in proximity to the king, as her sister would be, nor was she listed as playing any further role in the court ceremony of these years. As a married woman, she also had the opportunity to entertain the king in her marital home, which raises some interesting questions about the division of her favours between Henry and her husband.

  While her affair with the king lasted, Mary would have been sleeping with two men. Perhaps not equally, as Henry would have taken precedence during visits to the Carey home or occasions when they met at court or elsewhere. It is a modern sensibility to question the morality of this; it must be remembered that the Tudors took a far more pragmatic approach to bodily functions, which is how this kind of pleasure-oriented sex was viewed. Dynastic inheritance was important, and this accounts for the double standard that restricted the activities of married women, but the honours that could be accrued by sleeping with the king easily trumped this. William Carey would not have refrained from sleeping with his wife because she was having an affair with Henry. For all the theories of fiction and film, it is not even guaranteed that he knew about it, particularly if it was a single encounter or took place in an opportunistic way in his absence. Equally, he may have seen it as a chance to engage in a little extramarital sex of his own, redressing the balance by sleeping with a mistress of his own, or a woman of the lower classes, who were considered to be more sexually satisfying. Carey would have been Mary’s everyday lover, while Henry was her lover for special occasions.

  This love triangle, or rather, sex triangle, worked for Henry, Mary and Carey, as far as we know. However, it does complicate matters when it comes to the children Mary bore in the 1520s. Her first was a daughter named Catherine, possibly named out of deference to the queen, whose arrival may have taken place any time between 1522 and 1526, although the preferred date by most historians is 1524. Initially, this would place her conception in 1523 or the spring of 1524, a time which may well have corresponded with her relations with Henry. This does not mean, though, that the king’s paternity is guaranteed; in fact, it may imply that Mary herself was not certain about the identity of her child’s father, which helps explain the fact that Henry did not acknowledge this daughter as his illegitimate offspring. There are also the possibilities that Henry did know Catherine was his, but did not feel the need to own her, due to her gender, or that he knew for certain that she was not, as the affair had already ended or the dates of their encounters were decisively against it.

  Mary’s son was born on 4 March 1525, according to the date inscribed on his tomb in Westminster Abbey. This places his conception in late May or early June 1524, requiring his sister’s birth date to adjust around it. If Mary had conceived again quickly after delivering Catherine, it would push the girl’s conception interval back even earlier into 1523, which creates a timespan of around a year between Henry’s veiled declaration at the Chateau Vert and the moment of conception, which might indicate the two were not sleeping together with any sort of regularity. According to Hall, Henry was staying at New Hall at the beginning of the year, which was counted as 25 March, and was either still there, or had returned by St George’s Day, almost a month later. With the ceremony of the Knight of the Garter traditionally held at Windsor on 23 April, Henry’s prolonged stay during this time was an interesting choice. Perhaps his presence there offers a significant piece of evidence that has hitherto been overlooked.

  The boy was named Henry, a touching mark of deference that linked him with the king and with Henry Fitzroy, his potential half-brother. Only one contemporary source attributed the child’s paternity to the king. The vicar John Hale claimed that Henry Carey had been pointed out to him as the result of the liaison but, unsurprisingly, this dates from 1535, when the author used his best efforts to discredit the king as ‘mired in vice’ and enjoying ‘foul pleasures … defiling himself in any filthy place … fully given to his foul pleasure of the flesh and other voluptuousness’.6 Hale also made the claim that Henry kept his own brothel at Farnham Castle in Surrey, the property of Richard Fox, as Bishop of Winchester, through the 1520s. Situated about thirty miles to the west of Hampton Court, the place passed briefly to Wolsey in 1529, but there had already been some significant alterations made to allow easier access to the castle from the town, with the installation of a flight of steps that was staggered, in easy stages, but this is more likely to have been fashioned to accommodate clergymen’s robes than the long skirts of prostitutes.

  In every respect, William Carey treated Catherine and Henry as his own children. Their resemblance in portraits to Elizabeth I has been frequently commented on, but this is to be expected as, even if they were not her half-siblings, they were cousins through the Boleyn line. Both made good marriages and established careers at Elizabeth’s court, with Catherine serving her cousin as chief lady of the bedchamber and Henry becoming Baron Hunsdon and Knight of the Garter. It is possible that Mary’s affair with the king ended when she became pregnant in 1523, in the same circumstances that had signalled the end of his relationship with Bessie Blount, which would have made Catherine his daughter and Henry the son of Carey. The likelihood is that Mary herself was not completely certain. Any challenge Henry might make to the legal presumption of Carey’s paternity would have required an Act of Parliament and that was a scandal the king was not prepared to shoulder.

  Did Henry love Mary Boleyn? Not in the way he had loved Catherine of Aragon, nor in the way he would love Anne Boleyn. He did not decide to replace his queen with her, with all the consequences that would entail, nor woo her for years without certainty of success or, as far as we know, barrage her with persuasive love letters. He may have loved her for what she represented to him; a pliant, pretty diversion who had provided an easy chase and conquest, in the same way as Bessie Blount. One often remembered fact about Mary is that Henry owned a ship named after her, but he had bought this from her father in 1523, already bearing the name. This might be an indication of his attachment, particularly as he would also later purchase its partner, which was named after Anne.

  There is some evidence from the 1530s that he did retain some affection for Mary, writing to intervene when Sir Thomas Boleyn refused to help his daughter in her hour of need, but she was never the king’s grande amour. However, it is impossible to know how Mary felt about him. As her affair with Henry ran its course, she would have seen his interest in her younger sister deepen into love. Perhaps she welcomed this with relief or perhaps it was difficult for her to see herself replaced. Maybe she advised Anne about how to handle her former lover, or counselled her to be cautious, or avoid his advances if she could: it is impossible now to know.

  In around 1524 or 1525, just as Queen Catherine was approaching her fortieth birthday, her ladies-in-waiting would have noticed that her erratic monthly periods had ceased. Six years had passed since she had conceived her last child and the arrival of the menopause was a significant watershed in the life of the queen and the king, signalling that there would be no more children of either gender. It has been suggested that Henry stopped frequenting her bed as a result, but this is not certain, although he may have visited her far less, and with the objective of physical satisfaction alone. Although the poet Lydgate’s Dietary advised, ‘with women agyd, flesschly have not to do’,7 canon law still ad
vised post-menopausal wives to yield up the marital debt, to prevent sin.

  The idea of the conjugal debt in canon law related to the husband as well as the wife, but by 1524 Henry wanted to free himself from this obligation. The Apostle Paul stated that ‘you must not refuse each other, except perhaps by consent, for a time, that you may give yourself to prayer, and return together again lest Satan tempt you for you lack self-control’.8 Catherine had taken her marriage vows with sincerity and had endured Henry’s humiliating infidelities. Setting aside the question of her queenship, and the rights of her daughter, she was not about to give her consent that Henry might refuse his marital obligations. Sterility or old age were not considered valid impediments to a marriage in medieval law, although the case of a king in need of a male heir was more complicated. It was around this point, as Catherine waited in vain to see if her menstruation would return, that the idea must have been implanted in Henry’s mind that he would have to upset the status quo if he were to father a legitimate son. In the meantime, his thoughts turned to his illegitimate one.

  On 18 June 1525, Henry Fitzroy was thrust from the privacy of his secluded childhood onto the political stage. He was brought to Bridewell Palace and invested as Duke of Richmond and Somerset in a public ceremony that included many members of the court and clergy. This elevation to peerage had historical significance too, as the title had been devised for Edward, the Black Prince, and had previously been bestowed on John Beaufort, Henry’s Lancastrian great-grandfather, who had been born out of wedlock but later legitimised. This was a clear indicator that Henry was considering making the boy his formal heir at some future point. Having narrowly escaped death in a jousting accident in 1524, the king was probably pondering his mortality and the condition of the realm should he die at this point, leaving only his nine-year-old daughter to sit on the throne.