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

by Amy Licence

  In Catherine’s absence, the investigation continued for a further two months. Henry attempted to prove that Catherine and Arthur’s marriage had been consummated, but Bishop Fisher proved a formidable opponent, countering the king’s arguments with the queen’s sworn statements of virginity and corresponding passages from the Bible. As he had done by inventing the disease Catherine was reputed to be suffering from, Wolsey decided to fight with whatever weapons he could. He now drew on a number of statements he had gathered from those who had been witness to the 1501 marriage, as servants, pages and companions – those placed to repeat the worst kind of gossip that can arise out of the bawdy jokes and tone of the moment. The chief witness was Charles Brandon, who spoke of Arthur’s boast the following morning at being tired after spending the night ‘in the midst of Spain’. Wolsey also found William Thomas, who had helped Arthur to undress and accompanied him to Catherine’s chamber, although this could only prove that he passed the night there, not that the pair had actually had sex. Eventually, it was concluded that what had transpired between Catherine and Arthur could not be proven either way, especially in the light of the queen’s sworn statements. On 1 September, to Henry’s great frustration, Campeggio referred the question back to Rome.

  Henry had not stayed at Blackfriars to hear the full proceedings of the court. Through the summer months, he had seized the opportunity to be with Anne on royal progress, taking her with him in the place of Catherine. This must have provided her with some reassurance, as the clergymen and witnesses tied themselves in increasing knots about the legal rights of the case. They did not travel far, though, allowing Henry to receive news from court, spending August at Waltham, Barnet, Tittinghanger, Windsor, Reading and Woodstock and licking their wounds that September slightly further afield at King’s Langley, Grafton, Notley, Bisham Abbey and Buckingham, where they stayed with the recently widowed Mary Carey. It allowed the king a chance to see his potential illegitimate children by his former lover: Henry, who was three, and Catherine, who was aged between four and six, Anne’s niece and nephew. This itinerary also gave them some privacy in which to plan their next move. They had stayed at Waltham Abbey for nine nights from 2 August and returned from 11 to 20 September, probably to the adjoining house called Romeland, where Henry discussed the matter with the triumvirate of Cambridge clerics Thomas Cranmer, Edward Foxe and Stephen Gardiner, who suggested that he appeal to the universities of Europe about the finer points of canon law. It was a good idea that allowed Henry and Anne some hope for the future. However, they were also looking for someone to blame for the failure of the Blackfriars court and their gazes rested on Thomas Wolsey.

  Cavendish described what he ‘heard reported by them that waited upon the king at dinner’, with Anne outlining ‘what debt and danger the cardinal hath brought you in with all your subjects’ and the ‘things [he] hath wrought within this realm to your great slander and dishonour’.6 It must be remembered that his account was written as a vindication of Wolsey, but it would seem from Anne’s letters of 1529 that her relationship with the cardinal had reached an impasse after an initial period of friendship. Acknowledging that Wolsey had ‘quarrelled with the queen to favour me at the time when I was less advanced in the king’s good graces’, she proceeded to tell him he ‘cannot avoid being censured by everybody for having drawn on yourself the hatred of a king who had raised you to the degree’. Neither she nor Henry could ‘comprehend … how your reverent lordship, after having allured us by so many fine promises about divorce, can have repented of your purpose … to hinder the consummation of it’. He had ‘broken and spoiled’ their plans and betrayed Anne by pretending ‘to enter into my interests only to discover the secrets of my heart’ and only the fact that she had believed him sincere restrained her ‘in avenging myself’.

  That autumn, Wolsey was stripped of his titles, offices and properties, including Hampton Court, although he was permitted to remain Archbishop of York. The great seal was taken from him by the dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk at 6 p.m. on 17 October in the gallery of his house at Westminster, and an inventory was made of his goods.7 According the the report of the newly arrived Imperial ambassador, Eustace Chapuys, Henry ‘returned to Greenwich by water secretly, in order to see them, and found them much greater than he expected’. With him to look over Wolsey’s confiscated wealth were ‘“sa mye” [his darling, Anne Boleyn], her mother, and a gentleman of his chamber’ who might have been Sir Henry Norris.8 Henry also summoned the first sitting of what would become his Reformation parliament, which would debate his great matter and his relationship with Rome for the next six years.

  A week later, in the privy chamber and Greenwich, the king formally handed the great seal to Thomas More, ‘a good servant of the queen’, who assumed the job of Lord Chancellor. Writing pitifully to Henry, Wolsey cried ‘daily to you for mercy’, and beseeched the king ‘that you will not think it proceeds from any mistrust I have in your goodness, nor that I would molest you by my importunate suit. The same comes of my ardent desire, that, next unto God, I covet nothing so much in this world as your favour and forgiveness. The remembrance of my folly, with the sharp sword of your displeasure, have so penetrated my heart.’ Cardinal Jean du Bellay visited Wolsey ‘in his troubles’ and judged him to be ‘the greatest example of fortune that one could see’. He wept and prayed, with his countenance having ‘lost half its animation’ so that even his enemies ‘could not help pitying him, yet they do not desist from persecuting him to the last’. He was prepared to ‘give up everything, to his shirt, and to go and live in a hermitage, if this king will not keep him in disfavour’.9 But it was the king’s rising favourite whom Wolsey had most offended., as he acknowledged, writing that ‘none dares speak to the king on his part for fear of Madame Anne’s displeasure’.10 Finally, on 27 October, Wolsey was ‘definitively condemned by the council, declared a rebel, and guilty of high treason for having obtained a legatine bull, whereby he had conferred many benefices in the king’s patronage. He has been deprived of his dignities, his goods confiscated, and himself sentenced to prison until the king shall decide.’11 He would die on his way to his trial the following year.

  Through the final months of 1529, the king showered his lover with gifts, making Anne increasingly look like a queen. As the first of his publicly acknowledged mistresses, she must look the part now that the eyes of the court, the country and, indeed, Europe were watching them. The Privy Purse expenses for November and December 1529 show that 12s 8d was paid to Cecil for a yard and a quarter of purple velvet for Mistress Anne, followed by Henry paying £217 9s 8d to Walter Walshe for ‘certain stuff by him prepared’ for Anne and settling the bills of his jewellers, with over £24 going to John Crepye and a similar sum to William Hoyson.12 On 29 November, a third jeweller named Morgan Fenwolf received £26 16s 3d for nine-and-three-quarter ounces of Paris work. December saw a further jeweller’s payment of £10 for a ruby and an emerald and £100 went to Cornelius Hayes, Henry’s goldsmith.13 A more substantial reward was soon to follow, though, as on 9 December Anne’s father was elevated to the status of Viscount Rochford, Earl of Wiltshire.

  In spite of this, the pretence of harmony was being maintained at court. For Catherine, at least, it was proving an impossibly difficult arrangement and, when Henry dined with her on St Andrew’s Day, 30 November, her composure snapped. Reported by Chapuys to Charles, the queen ‘said to him that she had long been suffering the pains of Purgatory on earth, and that she was very badly treated by his refusing to dine with and visit her in her apartments’. Henry replied that she had no cause to complain, as she was ‘mistress of her household’ and could ‘do as she pleased’; furthermore, that he had been busy recently cleaning up the mess that Wolsey had left. He added that ‘as to his visiting her in her apartments and partaking of her bed, she ought to know that he was not her legitimate husband, as innumerable doctors and canonists, all men of honour and probity, and even his own almoner, Doctor Lee, who had once known her in Spain,
were ready to maintain’. Catherine replied that Henry knew full well ‘that the principal cause alleged for the divorce did not really exist, as he himself had owned upon more than one occasion’.14 She went on to challenge him that ‘for each doctor or lawyer who might decide in your favour and against me, I shall find 1,000 to declare that the marriage is good and indissoluble’.15

  After a ‘good deal of talking and disputing’, Henry abruptly left Catherine at the table and headed off to sup with Anne, ‘very disconcerted and downcast’. According to Chapuys, Anne reproached him with the words,

  Did I not tell you that whenever you disputed with the queen she was sure to have the upper hand? I see that some fine morning you will succumb to her reasoning, and that you will cast me off. I have been waiting long, and might in the meanwhile have contracted some advantageous marriage, out of which I might have had issue, which is the greatest consolation in this world; but alas! farewell to my time and youth spent to no purpose at all.

  It is difficult to know how accurate these recorded speeches are, passed on second or third hand and composed for an audience hostile to Anne, but there may be something in the sentiment expressed about her age and the passage of time. At well past the age that many women were already mothers, to their ‘greatest consolation’, and with two broken engagements behind her, Anne must have been conscious that her ‘time and youth’ were passing while the great matter was being debated. By her age, Catherine had already had five pregnancies. There may well have been times when, in spite of Henry’s attentions and her position at his side, she experienced doubts about her future.

  This may have been the occasion that prompted Henry to send Catherine away from court. The queen was obliged to leave Greenwich and go to Richmond, although she was permitted to return for the Christmas season. Presiding over the usual festivities, Henry showed Catherine ‘more consideration than was his wont’, with Anne not making an appearance, although the queen had, by this time, ‘lost all hope of bringing him to a sense of right and duty’.16 ‘She never could think that her affairs would fall so low as they are at present. She always fancied that the king, after pursuing his course for some time, would turn away, and yielding to his conscience, would change his purpose as he had done at other times, and return to reason.’17 Sadly, from this point, Catherine had to face the unpalatable truth that Henry considered their marriage to be over. Through her remaining six years, life would only become more and more unhappy.

  38

  The Other Women, 1525–32

  My lyf not chast, my lyvyng bestyall

  I forced wydowes, maydens I did deflower

  All was oon to me, I spared non at all

  My appetite was all women to devoure

  My study was bothe day and hower

  My unlawful lechery, howe I might it fulfil

  Sparyng no woman to have on her my wyll1

  After the failure of the Blackfriars court, Henry and Anne would have to wait three more years before becoming man and wife. Assuming that their daughter Elizabeth arrived after a full-term pregnancy of around nine months, her conception can be dated to December 1532, pinpointing the latest moment in time when Anne could have yielded up her virginity. This would assume that she conceived straight away, as Catherine had done in 1509, but Anne was in her early thirties at this point, so may have been sharing Henry’s bed for longer before she conceived. Anne’s virginity also had a political dimension – as the future mother of an heir to the throne, she must be seen to be chaste and able to swear the effect of her own purity.

  This still leaves a stretch of seven years, from 1525 until the autumn of 1532, when a number of questions need to be asked about Henry’s sexuality. If we accept that he was not sleeping with Anne, does it then follow that he was chaste, that he abstained from intercourse completely, for the entirety of that time? Did King Henry VIII not have sex at all between the ages of thirty-four and forty-one? If we reject this as unlikely, even ludicrous, considering the medical and cultural mores of his day, then just whom was the king sleeping with?

  These are the years from which the most rumours of royal bastards seem to stem. All are worthy of investigation, even though some sound more plausible than others, but regardless of the individual details of each case it remains that not a single one of these children were publicly acknowledged by Henry. This could be taken as an indication that he was unsure of their paternity, or that they were born to lower-class women and therefore would not be a desirable liaison to admit to, or of sufficient status to provide him with an alternative heir. Equally, Henry already had a perfectly good illegitimate male heir in Henry Fitzroy, whom he anticipated making his sole inheritor in the event of Princess Mary being married abroad. The boy’s premature death in 1536 left Henry without a son for fifteen months before the birth of Prince Edward. It is possible that some of these claims to royal blood date from this period of uncertainty, when existing or imaginary bastards sought to exploit the vacancy beside the throne.

  The first of three possible offspring of Henry’s casual encounters was born in around 1530. The birthdate of Thomas Stukley is usually calculated backwards from his employment as a standard bearer in 1547, a job that was typically given to a boy in his mid- to late teens, although earlier dates have also been suggested. This timeframe would date his conception to the period of Henry’s official abstinence between Catherine and Anne, while the earliest theoretical date suggested, 1520, would place his conception between Henry’s affairs with Bessie Blount and Mary Boleyn. Officially, he was the son of Sir Hugh Stukley, a knight of the royal body of Affeton Castle in Devon, and Jane, daughter of Sir Lewis Pollard, who owned a number of local properties including the Manor of Oakford, thirteen miles away. Jane and Sir Hugh were married around 1520 and had a large family; quite how rumours of royal paternity were particularly attached to one of these children in preference to any of the others is not clear, although Thomas’ colourful past is likely to have been an influential factor. Henry is reputed to have stayed at Affeton Castle, and presumably it would be during one of these encounters that Thomas would have been conceived. The possibility of Henry receiving hospitality from Sir Hugh and then quietly bedding his wife certainly follows the interpretation of the king as an irrepressible, irresistible force. It seems unlikely that Sir Hugh did not know what was going on under his roof, or that he found out soon afterwards, if this encounter did in fact take place. Might he have been complicit in the encounter, or unable to refuse even if he opposed it? It is just as impossible to imagine what negotiations were made between host, wife and king as it is to prove the authenticity of the story.

  Rumours of his royal paternity made an appearance during Thomas Stukley’s lifetime, recorded by a James Fitzgerald who, after making his acquaintance in Rome, recorded that he was ‘said by some to be an illegitimate son of Henry VIII, King of England’, although he also recorded at least two other stories about his parentage. A ‘Sir Thomas Stucley’ is mentioned along with Lewis Pollard in the 1524 collections of the Subsidy Tax for 1524, and again his servant was rewarded 2s for the gift of a buck, but this would be far too early given his potential birthdates.2 However, the grant of livery of lands in Thorne, Devon, to ‘Thomas Stucley’ in June 1526 are more likely to relate to him. Possibly placed in the household of Sir Charles Brandon at a young age, Stukley’s subsequent life was a controversial mix of mercenary warfare, imprisonment, debt, piracy and scandal. He is reputed to have referred to Elizabeth I as his sister. Such figures attract rumour, even consciously court and create it. It is rather a chicken-and-egg scenario to question whether his life evolved as it did because of his rumoured paternity or whether his actions led to certain speculations. His claim appears to have rested on his physical likeness to the king and the poems and plays written about him after his death at the Battle of Alcazar. Setting Thomas aside, little more is known about Jane Pollard, the woman who may have been the king’s lover.

  Slightly more is known about Mary Berkeley, t
he mother of John Perrot, who was reputed to have been another of Henry’s illegitimate offspring. Having been born around 1511 to James Berkeley and Susan, née Fitzalan, Mary had been orphaned by the age of ten and went to live with her uncle at Berkeley Castle in Gloucestershire. She was married to his ward Thomas Perrot in around 1526, when she was about fifteen, and bore him three children, including a son, John, in November 1528. This would place the boy’s conception in early February of the same year, after Henry had been committed to Anne for over a year. This is not a point against the possibility of the king’s paternity; rather it would fit the scenario of a temporary liaison after Anne had been keeping a frustrated Henry at bay.

  Although there have been claims that Mary was a member of Catherine of Aragon’s household, no evidence survives to support this claim and she appears to have been mostly at the family seat in Pembrokeshire, Wales, rather than at court. On 13 February 1528 Henry was at Greenwich, from where he wrote to James V of Scotland and the Earl of Angus, but there is always the possibility that Mary travelled to court or that she and the king happened to meet at some other place, by accident or design. Sir Thomas Perrot was reputedly a great hunter and had been knighted by him in 1526, so it is possible that Henry encountered him and his wife again through their mutual passion. Mary remarried when her son was around five and her new husband bought the boy’s wardship. Again, Thomas’ secret identity turned around his resemblance to Henry and the colourful story that the king intervened to prevent him being punished for brawling within one of the royal palaces.3 John went on to have a similar series of brushes with piracy, debt, deception and scandal to that of Thomas Stukley. In later life he may have invented, embellished or resurrected the story of his birth in an attempt to prevent his execution for high treason.