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The Best of Husbands

In April 1509, Henry VII died, and his son, the tall and handsome young Henry VIII, ascended the throne to an outburst of popular acclaim. On May 11, Thomas Boleyn performed his last duty for the old King, serving as Esquire of the Body at his funeral in Westminster Abbey.¹ He was dubbed a Knight of the Bath at the new King’s coronation on June 23—for which occasion his wife, who was in attendance on the Queen, had a new gown²—and soon afterward was appointed a Knight of the Body to Henry VIII,³ a position that required him to serve as bodyguard to the King, sleeping on a pallet outside Henry’s door, in turn with other Knights of the Body. In July 1509, Boleyn was appointed Keeper of the Exchange at Calais—then an English possession—and of the Foreign Exchange in England,⁴ and so progressed on what was to be a successful and even glittering career at court.

In addition to the estates he had inherited, Thomas Boleyn had now acquired another important property. In a pardon roll of the first year of Henry VIII’s reign, he is referred to as “Thomas Boleyn of Blickling, Norfolk, Hever, Kent, New Inn without Temple Bar, and Hoo, Bedfordshire.”⁵ The Inns of Chancery had originally been founded to train Chancery clerks, this being the preliminary step toward becoming a barrister. New Inn, at Aldwych in the liberty of Westminster, had been founded from Our Lady Inn in 1485 as a hostel, and had more recently been purchased by Sir Thomas.⁶ Stow later called it “an inn of Chancery clerks” housed in “a common hostelry [at the] sign of Our Lady.”⁷

With a new and dynamic young king on the throne, it was an exciting time to be at court. “If you could see how all the world here is rejoicing in the possession of so great a prince, how his life is all their desire, you could not contain your tears for joy,” wrote the cultivated humanist William Blount, Lord Mountjoy, in a private letter; “the heavens laugh, the earth exults, all things are full of milk and honey, of nectar! Avarice is expelled the country, liberality scatters wealth with a bountiful hand. Our King does not desire gold or gems but virtue, glory, immortality!”

The poet laureate John Skelton was also full of praise for Henry VIII’s virtues and good looks:

Adonis of fresh colour,

Of youth, the goodly flower,

Our Prince of high honour,

Our paves,⁸ our succour,

Our King, our Emperor,

Our Priamus of Troy,

Our wealth, our worldy joy!

Upon us he doth reign,

That maketh our hearts glad,

As King most sovereign

That ever England had.

Demure, sober and sad,

And Mars’s lusty knight,

God save him in his right!

On June 11, 1509, Henry VIII, tall, slim, broad-shouldered, athletic, fair-skinned and red-haired, had at last married his brother’s widow, Katherine of Aragon, who, at twenty-three, was more than five years his senior. The marriage was at first happy. “My wife and I be in as good and perfect love as any two creatures can be,” the genial Henry told his father-in-law, while Katherine declared that she loved her new husband “so much more than myself.”⁹ Together they presided over a court that epitomized Renaissance magnificence, celebrated the cult of chivalry, and served as an academy of the arts, literature, learning, and sciences. It was also a center of sporting excellence, and the social hub of the realm, attracting visitors from far and wide.

There can be no doubt that Henry loved Katherine of Aragon. Early on, he spoke openly of the “joy and felicity” he had found with her, and how he “desired her above all women,” and he was to reiterate such sentiments over the years. Whether he was actuallyin love with her is another matter entirely, although he probably thought he was at the time of their marriage, not being experienced in affairs of the heart, for he had led an oversheltered existence under strict supervision at his father’s court. His sentiments toward her appear to have been rooted in chivalrous impulses, political expediency, and the desire to reverse Henry VII’s unpopular policies.

But there was far more to a royal marriage than love. A queen’s first duty was to ensure the succession, and Katherine happily fulfilled this by becoming pregnant immediately. Once she was beyond his reach sexually, for intercourse during pregnancy was frowned upon and considered risky, Henry began looking elsewhere for gratification, establishing a pattern of behavior that would recur during his married life.

But five of the six children born in the next eight years to the royal couple—three of them sons—died young or were born dead, and as the years passed and Katherine suffered one disastrous pregnancy after another, and consequently lost her looks and her figure, the age gap between the King and Queen became more glaringly apparent. Katherine increasingly sought refuge in excessive piety, even taking to wearing a hair shirt beneath her royal robes, and began retiring early from the court entertainments beloved by her sociable and pleasure-seeking husband. Unbearable disappointment led to the gulf between them widening, and Henry, predictably, turned more and more to other women.

In order to understand the context of Henry VIII’s affair with Mary Boleyn, it is helpful to trace his extramarital affairs during the years before it began. What we know about these and later affairs gives us clues as to how Henry conducted his liaisons with his mistresses, and to the likely duration and nature of the affair with Mary Boleyn, and we need such clues, because discretion was Henry’s watchword in his illicit dealings with women. He prided himself on being a virtuous prince and a man of conscience, and when it came to sex, he was overly discreet, and possibly even prudish. Contemporary references to his extramarital affairs are therefore sparse, which prompted J. D. Mackie to assert in 1952 that “the story of [Henry’s] promiscuous amours is a myth.”

Mackie’s statement itself propagated a myth: for a long time afterward, historians would assert that the King’s extramarital adventures were few. Yet it is clear that Henry did take a number of mistresses, as well as indulging in fleeting sexual encounters; indeed, the evidence suggests that, in private, he was as promiscuous as most Renaissance rulers—it may be that secrecy gave an added thrill to the forbidden. The problem with the evidence for these affairs is that, because Henry was so discreet, it is fragmentary; yet there is enough of it to show that Mackie was wrong.

Lord Herbert wrote that “one of the liberties which our King took at his spare time was to love. For, as all recommendable parts occurred in his person, and they again were exalted in his high dignity and valor, so it must seem little strange if, amid the many fair ladies which lived in his court, he both gave and received temptation.”

Unlike his contemporary, King François I of France, Henry did not, in these early years, allow any of his mistresses to wield influence that might threaten the position of the Queen; in England, the role of royal maîtresse-en-titre did not exist (it did not exist in France either until 1518), and the women who became involved in affairs with the King could expect very little reward for their favors and the potential loss of their honor. Like his Plantagenet forebears, Henry expected them to remain in the background and provide him with unencumbered sexual pleasure, and perhaps entertaining company, when he felt the need.

It has been claimed that many of the ladies with whom Henry had affairs “never washed, had wooden teeth, bad breath, and body odor.”¹⁰ Had that been the case—and there is no evidence for it—it is unlikely that he would have fancied them, for by the standards of his day, the King was one of the most fastidious of men, and would surely have expected the women with whom he became intimate to maintain certain standards of personal hygiene.¹¹

Henry’s infidelity was not limited to the periods when his wives were pregnant, although he almost invariably strayed at those times. “The King is a youngling, who thinks of nothing but hunting and girls, and wastes his father’s patrimony,” one ambassador recorded early in the reign.¹² Even when Henry was middle-aged, his physician, Dr. John Chambers, would describe him as being “overly fond of women” and “given to lustful dreams.”¹³ The Duke of Norfolk, who knew Henry well (two of his nieces married the King), observed that he was “continually inclined to amours.”¹⁴ The Emperor Charles V told his ambassador that it was well known that the King was of “an amorous complexion,”¹⁵ and in 1537 it was said of Henry that all it took to please him was “an apple and a fair wench to dally withal.”¹⁶ Even the King’s admiring apologist, William Thomas, wrote in 1546 that “he was a very fleshly man” who “fell into all riot and overmuch love of women.” Another sixteenth century commentator wrote: “King Henry gave his mind to three notorious vices: lechery, covetousness, and adultery, but the latter two issued and sprang out of the former.”¹⁷ In the reign of Elizabeth I, Sir Robert Naunton famously wrote that Henry VIII never spared a man in his anger, nor a woman in his lust. This evidence seriously undermines fashionable modern notions that the King suffered from erectile dysfunction. Clearly, being “free from every vice,” as a Venetian envoy described Henry in 1515,¹⁸ did not preclude committing adultery.

Katherine’s first child, a daughter, was born dead on January 31, 1510, but she conceived again soon afterward, and by May she was reported to be “very large.”¹⁹ Around that time, two sisters of Edward Stafford, Duke of Buckingham, the King’s cousin, were living at court. One was Elizabeth, the wife (since 1505) of Robert Ratcliffe, Lord FitzWalter, and a great favorite of the Queen; the other was Anne, who had married George, Lord Hastings, in 1507; she was “much liked by the King, who went after her.” Henry’s close friend, Sir William Compton, is known to have lived for some time in an adulterous relationship with Lady Hastings, for whom he later founded a chantry chapel at his country seat, Compton Wynyates,²⁰ but although some believed that “the love intrigues were not of the King but of his favorite, Compton,” in the opinion of the Spanish ambassador, Luis Caroz,²¹ “the more credible version” was that it was Henry VIII who was discreetly pursuing Lady Hastings at this time, while Compton was providing cover for his master’s amorous exploits by pretending to court her himself.

Thanks to Compton, Henry was able to keep the affair secret, until Lady FitzWalter became suspicious of the attention that Compton was paying to her sister. Wishing to spare her family any scandal, she summoned her brother, the duke, and Lord Hastings, Anne’s husband, and confided her concerns to them. Buckingham went at once to Anne’s lodging at court, and when he found Compton there, he used “many hard words” and “severely reproached” him. Compton sped off to the King and told him what had happened, upon which Henry, in a rage, summoned Buckingham and so vented his wrath on him that Buckingham stormed out of the court. Meanwhile, confronted by her irate husband, Anne had confessed all, and was carried off by him to a nunnery sixty miles away, out of Henry’s reach.

Furious at being deprived of the lady, Henry sought to apportion blame, having guessed that Lady FitzWalter had been the cause of his misfortune. He summarily banished her and her husband from court, but it appears that before she left, she had her revenge by revealing to the Queen what had been going on. This was the first Katherine had heard of her husband’s infidelity, and she bitterly upbraided him, provoking a heated, and very public, row, as Henry, in turn, reproached her for daring to criticize him. Both ended up “very vexed” with each other.²²

Henry clearly felt ill done by. By Renaissance standards he was fairly virtuous, in an age in which it was common for kings and nobles to take mistresses. They married for policy, profit, or dynastic reasons, did their duty by their wives, and took their pleasure elsewhere. In this case he had taken care to be discreet, and been at pains not to humiliate Katherine publicly. It was a wife’s duty to maintain a dignified silence if she discovered that her husband was playing away from the marriage bed. The onus was on her to adapt to circumstances.

But Katherine had no intention of being silent, and continued to berate Henry for his betrayal. She also vented her anger on Compton. The Spanish ambassador feared she might compromise her considerable influence with the King through her unreasonable behavior. In the end she had to concede defeat. She had learned a humiliating lesson, and never again would she take Henry to task for being unfaithful—at least not in public.

In 1884, Anne Boleyn’s biographer, Paul Friedmann, stated that Elizabeth Howard, Lady Boleyn, had been appointed one of the new Queen’s ladies, and several modern writers describe her as a lady-in-waiting to Katherine,²³ but all of them have confused her with her sister-in-law, Anne Tempest, the wife of Sir Edward Boleyn.²⁴ Surprisingly, given Thomas Boleyn’s standing with the King, there are no references to his wife being in the Queen’s household, aside from joining Katherine’s train for the Field of Cloth of Gold in 1520, as one of the many noble ladies attending her. Obviously, therefore, Elizabeth Howard cannot have used her influence with the Queen to further her husband’s career, as has been claimed.²⁵

It has also been suggested that her willingness to sleep with the King accounted for her husband’s rapid rise to favor.²⁶ Indeed, there have been persistent claims, from her own lifetime to the present day, that she was Henry’s mistress. This has been given as the reason why the wife of such an up-and-coming, and later prominent, courtier as Sir Thomas Boleyn was not assigned a post as a lady-in-waiting to the Queen.²⁷

There is, as we shall see, some evidence that Elizabeth Howard did have a poor reputation. After the coronation, she is not recorded at court for eleven years, and it may be that she was constrained by her husband, or chose herself, to remain at Hever, presiding over her family and household, supervising the running of the estate and the home and tenant farms—and possibly keeping out of mischief. Maybe she did not desire a place at court, except when she was obliged to go there for the most important celebrations, or in middle age as chaperone to her daughter Anne Boleyn during the King’s courtship; otherwise there is barely a mention of her in contemporary sources.

From the 1530s there were rumors—almost certainly apocryphal—that Lady Boleyn had been Henry VIII’s mistress at one time. Friar William Peto, an Observant Friar of Greenwich who had publicly denounced Henry VIII’s determination to wed Anne Boleyn in a sermon preached before the King on Easter Day 1532, warned Henry afterward that it was being said that he had meddled with both Anne’s sister and her mother.²⁸ According to Henry’s cousin, Reginald Pole, another who opposed the marriage,²⁹ Peto had confided to the Papist Sir George Throckmorton, a member of Parliament, that Henry had had affairs with both Mary Boleyn and her mother.

In a letter sent to Henry VIII in October 1537, Throckmorton recalled a conversation he had in 1533 with Sir Thomas Dingley (who was to be beheaded for treason in 1539). Throckmorton, who did not yet know that the King had secretly married Anne Boleyn, had told Dingley how he had been sent for by Henry after speaking out against the Act in Restraint of Appeals (passed in April 1533) that heralded the break with Rome, “and that he saw his Grace’s conscience was troubled about having married his brother’s wife. And I said to him [Dingley] that I told your Grace I feared if ye did marry Queen Anne your conscience would be more troubled at length, for it is thought ye have meddled both with the mother and the sister. And your Grace said ‘Never with the mother.’ And my Lord Privy Seal [Cromwell] standing by said ‘Nor never with the sister either, and therefore put that out of your mind.’ ” This was in substance all that was said. Throckmorton made it clear that he “intended no harm to the King, but only out of vainglory to show he was one that durst speak for the common wealth; otherwise he refuses the King’s pardon and will abide the most shameful death.”³⁰

Thomas Cromwell, then well established as the King’s chief minister, would have known that there were good reasons for keeping his master’s affair with Mary Boleyn a secret. If Mary had not been Henry’s mistress, then Henry himself would surely have denied it, as he had denied having relations with her mother. And that he did deny the latter there is no doubt. As Nicholas Sander’s editor points out, if this conversation had never taken place, “it is not credible that [Throckmorton] could have dared so to write to the King, nor is it credible that he invented the story.”

Also in 1533, Elizabeth Amadas, the wife of a royal goldsmith, who had herself once been pursued by Henry VIII, publicly asserted “that the King had kept both the mother and the daughter,” referring to Elizabeth Howard and either to Mary or Anne Boleyn, who was widely reputed in the years before her marriage to Henry in 1533 to have been his mistress. Mrs. Amadas also claimed that “my lord of Wiltshire [Thomas Boleyn] was bawd both to his wife and his two daughters.”³¹ However, since she made various other wild and fanciful assertions about Anne Boleyn, of whom she bitterly disapproved, it would be unwise to give too much credence to any of them.

The rumors nevertheless persisted, and spread farther afield. In March 1533 it was recorded that Thomas Jackson, a chantry priest in Chepax, Yorkshire, had claimed that Henry VIII’s marriage to Anne Boleyn was adulterous and that the King had “kept the mother and afterward the daughter, and now he hath married her whom he kept afore, and her mother also.”³² The fact that such gossip was in circulation as far away as Yorkshire shows how widespread were the salacious tales about the Boleyn ladies. Yet it appears that Father Jackson, and possibly Mrs. Adamas, were unaware of Mary Boleyn’s relations with the King; they would surely have made capital out of them if they had been.

In 1535, John Hale, Vicar of Isleworth—no friend to the Boleyns or Henry VIII, as will be seen—repeated, among other calumnies, that “the King’s Grace had meddled with the Queen’s [Anne Boleyn’s] mother.”³³ Hale, a supporter of Katherine of Aragon, was on a mission to impugn the legality of the Boleyn marriage, but if Henry had had any sexual connection with Lady Boleyn, he would surely have declared it when applying to the Pope in 1528 for a dispensation to marry the sister of a woman (Mary Boleyn) who had been his mistress; congress with the mother would also have made such a marriage incestuous, and rendered it null and void.

Nevertheless, the assertion that Elizabeth Howard and Henry VIII had been lovers was repeated later on by three hostile Catholic writers: Nicholas Harpsfield, William Rastell, who was Sir Thomas More’s nephew—More was executed in 1535 for refusing to swear the oath acknowledging the validity of the King’s marriage to Anne Boleyn—and an exiled Catholic priest, Nicholas Sander, whose treatise damning Henry and Anne was published in Rome in 1585. All three writers were staunch Catholics who viewed Anne Boleyn as a Jezebel and a heretic and blamed her for the English Reformation; none was the remotest bit likely to give her a good press.

William Camden was incorrect when he fulminated that Sander was “the first man that broached [a] damnable lie about the birth of Queen Elizabeth’s mother.”³⁴ In fact, it originated with either Nicholas Harpsfield, whose Treatise on the Pretended Divorce between King Henry VIII and Katherine of Aragon was published in the reign of Katherine’s daughter, Mary I, or William Rastell (c.1508–65), who was a contemporary of Mary Boleyn and died a recusant exile at Louvain in Elizabeth I’s reign. Harpsfield, an archdeacon of Canterbury, wrote that he “had credibly heard reported that the King knew the mother of Anne Boleyn”—in the biblical sense, of course.

Rastell, a printer and a judge, was the editor of Sir Thomas More’s works, which he published in 1557. He wrote a life of More, but it was probably never published, and certainly does not survive today. Yet Lord Herbert, whose biography of Henry VIII was published in 1649, certainly saw it, for he refers to it and states that Rastell asserted therein that Anne Boleyn was the fruit of an illicit liaison between her mother and Henry VIII, and had been conceived while Sir Thomas Boleyn was away on an embassy to France.³⁵

Nicholas Sander, who lived at Louvain from 1565 and was a zealous priest and missionary whose powerful works have largely informed Roman Catholic thinking on the English Reformation, but who has been castigated at best as credulous, and at worst as a seditious liar and slanderer, by English historians down the centuries, probably also saw Rastell’s lost life of More, as well as perhaps Harpsfield’s Pretended Divorce, for he too went so far as to assert that “Anne Boleyn was the daughter of Sir Thomas Boleyn’s wife; I say 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.” According to this version, when Boleyn returned home, he demanded to know who had sired the child, but Henry VIII ordered him to stop persecuting his wife, who admitted to him that “it was the King who had tempted her to sin, and that the child, Anne, was the daughter of no other than Henry.” The clear implication was that Anne incestuously married her own father.

The “impudent lie”³⁶ about Anne Boleyn’s paternity was repeated in 1587 by Adam Blackwood, a lawyer defending the good name of Mary, Queen of Scots, whom Elizabeth I had just had executed; he wrote as if the story were well known, and indeed the contemporary gossip referred to above would tend to corroborate that. Of course, Blackwood had an axe to grind against Elizabeth, and the calumny of her being the child of incest would have served him well.

The fact that no fewer than ten people alleged in the sixteenth century that Elizabeth Howard was Henry VIII’s mistress would, by most of the rules of historical research, suggest that there was some truth in it, but the King himself denied it, when he did not deny that he had had an affair with Elizabeth’s daughter Mary, and this at a time when either relationship would equally have prejudiced his marriage to Anne Boleyn. Moreover, all the sources are hostile, and the story told by Rastell and Sander can easily be proved nonsense. Sir Thomas Boleyn was not sent as ambassador to France until 1519, and Henry was probably less than ten years old when Anne was conceived.

But the allegations may have been believable because of Elizabeth Howard’s dubious reputation. When the poet Skelton—possibly with the benefit of hindsight—compared her to the beautiful Cressida, he may have been hinting at something far less attractive than her looks. For “False Cressida” appears in medieval literature as the woman who pledged undying love to her Troilus, but, after being captured by the Greeks, had an affair with Diomedes. By the fourteenth century, when Chaucer wrote his version of the legend, her name—as he acknowledges in his text—had become synonymous with female inconstancy. So when hearing any woman compared with Cressida, people in the Tudor period would have instantly grasped the double entendre. Maybe Skelton wasmerely praising Elizabeth’s beauty, but if so, he had chosen a strange and compromising comparison, when there were plenty of others to be drawn.

Skelton was famous for his satirical attacks on the court, and he used allegories such as this to fearlessly criticize the great and the good, even incurring the wrath of the powerful Cardinal Wolsey. If, by 1523, when she was approaching middle age, Elizabeth Howard had gained some ill fame for straying from the connubial couch, then, with her husband riding high at court, she might well have fallen foul of Skelton’s scathing wit.

There are other references in the poem that may be barbed allusions to Elizabeth’s conduct. Skelton tells her he is bound to be her “remembrancer,” a remembrancer being a person (or official) who caused someone to remember something, or collected debts, or brought them a warning. He describes her as not only virtuous but cunning, which by then had acquired the meaning of artful or skillfully deceitful. The word “lusty” was associated with desire, having by the sixteenth century lost its earlier, more innocent meaning of “joyful” or “merry.” Pandarus, who is mentioned in these verses, acted as go-between for Troilus and Cressida, and after Boccaccio and Chaucer wrote their versions of the story in the fourteenth century, his name gave rise to the word “pander,” which, by the 1520s, meant one who facilitated illicit sex, or supplied another with the means of gratifying lust. Skelton here refers to Pandarus’s appetite, which appears to reflect that meaning. The last three lines seem to be ironic and heavy with innuendo:

Of all your beauty I suffice not to write,

But, as I said, your flourishing tender age

Is lusty to look on, pleasant, demure and sage.

Taken together, all these references suggest that Skelton may have reworked his verses in 1523 to reflect what he now knew about the once-fair Lady Elizabeth Howard.³⁷

What we can infer about the Boleyns’ marriage from the sources does not suggest conjugal happiness. Sir Thomas stayed mostly at court or abroad, Elizabeth lived mainly in the country, visiting the court only rarely, when form demanded it. That was not especially unusual in an age of arranged marriages. But Skelton’s comparison with Cressida, Elizabeth’s absence from the Queen’s household, and the fact that all her offspring became notorious in one way or another for sexual immorality, might suggest that she herself had set them a poor example by her loose morals and by betraying her marriage vows.

If so, it is unlikely to have been with Henry VIII. Even when Henry was of an age to have sexual relations, he was supervised so strictly by the King his father that he was not permitted to leave the palace unless it was by a private door into the park, and then only in the company of specially appointed persons. His apartments could only be reached through those of Henry VII, and he spent most of his time in the tiltyard or in a bedchamber that led off his father’s, and appeared “so subjected that he does not speak a word except in response to what the King asks him.”³⁸ No one dared approach him or speak with him, and nothing escaped his ever-vigilant father’s attention. It is likely therefore that he was still a virgin when he came to the throne. Speculation that his first affair had been with Elizabeth Denton, his mother’s lady-in-waiting,³⁹ is unconvincing, and the extraordinary theory that the pious Margaret Beaufort, Henry’s grandmother, selected her for his first sexual experience⁴⁰ even less so; in fact, the evidence we have suggests that Mistress Denton was rewarded by the new King not for sexual favors, but for faithful service to his family.

Despite Henry’s denial and the other strong evidence against his having had an affair with Elizabeth Howard, a number of more recent writers still assert that she had “briefly graced the royal bed”⁴¹ and that Henry enjoyed “the sophisticated embraces” of “Lady Howard [sic.].”⁴² There have been imaginative claims that the affair took place in 1508, when Henry was seventeen;⁴³ that Elizabeth was “not averse from instructing her young master in the arts of love”;⁴⁴ that Thomas Boleyn’s advancement in the King’s service “was probably due to a liaison between his wife and Henry”;⁴⁵ that Elizabeth was “flattered by the young Prince’s attentions” and began preening herself at court;⁴⁶ and that Mary Boleyn “gaily followed her mother into the King’s bed.”⁴⁷ There is no evidence for any of this.

How did the calumny that Elizabeth Howard was Henry’s mistress come to be spread in the first place? Possibly there were rumors in the early 1520s that the King was having an affair with one of the Boleyn ladies, and the gossips conjectured that it was Elizabeth Howard, given her reputation. It has been convincingly suggested that some people at court confused Elizabeth Boleyn with Elizabeth Blount—the name Boleyn was variously spelled, and one form of it, “Boullant,” could easily have been mistaken for Blount;⁴⁸ given how discreetly Henry VIII conducted his amours, this is entirely believable.

There is sounder evidence for Henry having a brief liaison with a French lady during his triumphal sojourn at Tournai in September and October 1513, in the wake of taking the besieged town. There, he entertained Margaret of Austria, Regent of the Netherlands, before visiting her court at Lille, where he is recorded as spending “almost the whole night dancing with the damsels.”⁴⁹ The evidence for this affair is in the form of a letter dated August 17, 1514. Translated from the original French, it speaks of a bird (probably a singing bird) and some (probably medicinal) roots “of great value, belonging to this country” that the writer has sent the King, then continues:

When Madame [Margaret of Austria] went to the Emperor her father and you at Lille, you named me your page, and you called me by no other name, and you told me many beautiful things … about marriage and other things; and when we parted at Tournai, you told me, when I married, to let you know, and it should be worth to me ten thousand crowns, or rather angels. As it has now pleased my father to have me married, I send [the] bearer, an old servant of my grandfather, to remind you.

In your house at Marnay by Besançon, 17 August.

The most of your very humble servants, G. La Baume.⁵⁰

According to the seventeenth century French genealogist Père Anselme, the initial G could have been an E; and the writer could therefore be identified as Etiennette, daughter of Marc de la Baume, Seigneur of Chateauvillain and Count of Montreval; she married, on October 18, 1514, as his third wife, Ferdinand de Neufchâtel, Seigneur de Marnay and Montaigu (1452–1522).⁵¹ Her bridegroom was then sixty-two, and she bore no child during the seven years of their marriage.⁵² She died in 1521.⁵³

Her letter gives us tantalizing insights as to how Henry VIII may have conducted his love-play: the reference to Etiennette pretending to be his page and his calling her by that name reveals him as a young man who conducted his amours with humor and who enjoyed sexual role-playing and, naturally, taking the dominant part. Is there a hint of blackmail here? Did Henry pay up? We have no record of him doing so, but that is not to say that he never did. Nor is there any record of a house owned by him in Marnay. Probably it was just the one in which he had stayed during his visit.

While this letter may be evidence of a sexual affair, it is not conclusive. It could as well point to the King enjoying banter with a young woman whom he much admired. She was of a noble family, and doubtless waiting for her father to find her a husband. Henry told her beautiful things about marriage, which might be thought unusual if he was committing adultery—or did he show her how beautiful the delights of the marriage bed could be? He promised her a dowry. Was that a chivalrous gesture, or was it a reward for sexual favors? Yet she was apparently still living in his house at Marnay a year later, which suggests that he had paid for it and installed her there. On balance, the evidence points to her having been his mistress, and to Henry having done—or promised to do—the “honorable” thing by her.

Katherine of Aragon was visibly pregnant for the fourth time when, in June 1514, good relations between England and Spain collapsed. Convinced that he had been insulted and betrayed by Katherine’s father, Ferdinand V of Aragon, the King “spat out his complaints against her,” and her influence accordingly diminished. That autumn there was even talk, in Rome and in England, of a divorce. At that time, Katherine’s confessor referred to Henry having “badly used” the Queen.⁵⁴

He might, just possibly, have been referring to the King’s latest affair. In October 1514 one of Henry’s closest friends and courtiers, not to mention physical double, Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, wrote to the King from France, asking him to remind “Mistress Blount and Mistress Carew that next time, I write unto them letters or send them [love?] tokens.”⁵⁵ From this we may gather that the King, like Suffolk, was on terms of familiarity with both these young women, and probably enjoying flirtations—and perhaps more—with them. Mistress Blount and Mistress Carew may well have shared their favors; the hostile Nicholas Sander, writing in 1585, frequently repeated unsubstantiated calumnies about Henry VIII, but his assertion that the King was often “living in sin, sometimes with two, sometimes with three of the Queen’s maids of honor” may not be far off the mark. Henry gave Elizabeth Bryan, the wife of the rising courtier Nicholas Carew, “many beautiful diamonds and pearls and innumerable jewels,”⁵⁶ which strongly suggests that at one time she was more to him than just a mere acquaintance, and certainly, at some stage, he enjoyed a sexual relationship with Elizabeth Blount, for she later bore him a son whom he acknowledged. Significantly, Queen Katherine was well advanced in her fourth pregnancy in October 1514, and Henry had every excuse for straying from the marital bed once more.

Elizabeth, or Bessie Blount, as she was familiarly called, was then sixteen at the most, probably younger; her exact date of birth is unknown, but her father was only thirty-six in 1519,⁵⁷ and as boys were then not considered to be capable of cohabiting with their wives before the age of fourteen, she cannot have been born much before 1498. She was one of the eleven children of Sir John Blount of Kinlet Hall, Shropshire, by Katherine Peshall of Knightley, Staffordshire, who had been a lady-in-waiting to Katherine of Aragon at Ludlow for a short spell in 1502, when Katherine had been married to Arthur, Prince of Wales. Lady Blount’s father had fought for Henry VII in 1485 at the Battle of Bosworth, which had established the Tudor dynasty on the throne.

Effigies of the five sons and six daughters of Sir John Blount survive on either side of his tomb in the church of St. John the Baptist at Kinlet. Elizabeth had probably been born in the nearby manor house of the Blounts, which was demolished in the eighteenth century (the site now being occupied by Moffat House School). Sir John, who died in 1531, was a kinsman of the Queen’s chamberlain, William Blount, Lord Mountjoy, the noted humanist scholar. Probably it was Mountjoy who, in 1512,⁵⁸ had secured for Elizabeth a post as maid of honor to the Queen.

On the evidence above, it may well have been in 1514 that Henry VIII took Elizabeth as his mistress. According to the chronicler Edward Hall, “the King, in his fresh youth, was in the chains of love with a fair damsel called Elizabeth Blount, which in singing, dancing, and in all goodly pastimes, she exceeded all other, by which she won the King’s heart.” Henry, being a gifted composer, musician, and dancer, much admired these accomplishments in women. Lord Herbert of Cherbury, writing in the seventeenth century, and in a good position to know, since he was a neighbor of the Blounts of Kinlet,⁵⁹ stated that “Mistress Elizabeth Blount was thought, for her rare ornaments of nature, and education, to be the beauty and mistress-piece of her time.” William Camden, writing in the early seventeenth century, records how the Blounts were “very famous” for their “golden locks,” so the chances are that Elizabeth was blond. Jones states that she wrote music, but does not cite her source.

Elizabeth showed Henry “so much favor” that they became lovers in the fullest sense.⁶⁰ But again, the King was discreet—so much so that very little is known about this affair; in 1519, when Elizabeth was still very much on the scene, the humanist Erasmus would even refer to the King as “the best of husbands” who set his subjects a shining example of “chaste and concordant wedlock.”

His future pursuit of Anne Boleyn aside, Henry’s affair with Elizabeth Blount was the best documented of his affairs—which is not saying much—and the way it was conducted may well throw some light on his later, poorly documented liaison with Mary Boleyn; therefore it is useful to look at the surviving evidence for that affair.

At Christmas 1514, Elizabeth featured prominently at a pageant performed at Greenwich, in which she, Elizabeth Carew, Margaret, Lady Guildford, and Lady Fellinger, wife to the Spanish ambassador, all dressed as ladies of Savoy in blue velvet gowns, gold caps and masks, and were rescued from danger by four gallant “Portuguese” knights, played by King Henry, the Duke of Suffolk, Nicholas Carew, and the Spanish ambassador. Queen Katherine was so enamored of the “strange apparel” worn by the performers that, before they unmasked themselves, she invited them to dance for her in private in her bedchamber. Here, Henry partnered Elizabeth Blount, and there was much laughter afterward when the masks were removed and the identities of the dancers revealed. The Queen thanked the King for such “goodly pastime” and kissed him.⁶¹

The fact that Henry partnered Elizabeth Blount on these occasions suggests that they were already lovers. It has been stated that their affair began in 1518,⁶² but this fails to take account of this earlier evidence. It may be significant that, on Twelfth Night 1515, only a few weeks before the Queen gave birth to another son who died young, Elizabeth was not present when the same dancers performed in Dutch costume, her place having been taken by another lady of the court, Jane Popincourt.⁶³ Possibly the Queen had grown suspicious; or Henry had feared to upset her in her condition, or that the affair might be exposed. Instead, Elizabeth appeared in a “disguising” featuring Sir Thomas Boleyn and his son, from which the King was notably absent.⁶⁴

Elizabeth Blount appears to have been the King’s mistress for at least four years. For most of this time there is no mention of her in contemporary sources. Given the length of the affair, there must have been more to it than just sexual dalliance; maybe the pair were in love, which is possible, although it may be overstating things to claim that Elizabeth “meant everything” to Henry.⁶⁵

On October 3, 1518, on the evening after an important treaty with France was signed in St. Paul’s Cathedral, Cardinal Wolsey feasted the French ambassadors and the court at York Place (later Whitehall Palace), his London residence, in honor of the betrothal of the little Princess Mary to the Dauphin of France.⁶⁶ Afterward, the King and his sister Mary, Duchess of Suffolk, led out a troupe of twenty-four masked dancers, of whom one was Elizabeth Blount.⁶⁷ This was the last occasion on which Henry VIII and Elizabeth were recorded as appearing together in public; by this time, as Lord Herbert quaintly put it, “entire affection [had] passed between them, so that at last she bore him a son,” conceived during the Queen’s last pregnancy.

A convincing theory has been put forward that Henry and Elizabeth had been using some form of contraception;⁶⁸ after all, their affair had apparently been going on for four years before she conceived. It has also been suggested that Elizabeth deliberately got pregnant,⁶⁹ presumably in order to profit in some way from her royal lover, although, given how Henry had maintained the utmost discretion throughout, she would have been foolish indeed to court such a scandal. Henry, it is argued, may have felt betrayed by his mistress purposefully conceiving a child, and this may have sounded the death knell to the affair.⁷⁰ It seems far more likely that the pregnancy was an accident.

Elizabeth had to leave court, of course, and Henry sent her to a house called Jericho, which he had leased from St. Lawrence’s Priory at Blackmore in Essex, near Chipping Ongar. It was not given to Elizabeth, as has been asserted,⁷¹ but made available to her at this time. It may be that the Augustinian canons at the priory gave her some support, and in this we might perceive the managing hand of Cardinal Wolsey.⁷²

Jericho might have been monastic property, but it was a house that later came to gain a poor reputation. It was surrounded by a moat and screened by tall brick walls that afforded a high degree of privacy. The moat was fed by the River Can, which was known to the local people as “the River Jordan”; this was how the place had acquired its name.

Here, at Jericho, the King kept a private suite of rooms, and when he visited, he probably took with him only a few attendants—his “riding household.” Here, as at his other residences, “the King’s Highness have his privy chamber and inward lodgings reserved secret, at the pleasure of his Grace, without repair of any great multitude.”⁷³ According to Philip Morant, an eighteenth century Essex historian, “this place [was] reported to have been one of King Henry the Eighth’s houses of pleasure, and disguised by the name of Jericho, so that, when this lascivious prince had a mind to be lost in the embraces of his courtesans, the cant word among the courtiers was that he was gone to Jericho.” This account may have been somewhat embellished, but certainly no one would have been encouraged to approach the King during his stay, and the pages and grooms of his privy chamber would have been routinely warned “not to hearken or inquire where the King is or goeth, be it early or late, without grudging, mumbling, or talking of the King’s pastime or his late or early going to bed.”⁷⁴

It is not inconceivable that Jericho was used by Henry as a trysting place where he could make love to Elizabeth Blount in privacy, and perhaps other women also—possibly even Mary Boleyn herself when her time came. If so, such covert pleasures would have come to an end in 1525, when the priory was dissolved by Wolsey and Jericho was sold.⁷⁵

Elizabeth Blount certainly resided for a time at Jericho, for around June 1519—and possibly on June 18, if her child was ennobled on his sixth birthday in 1525⁷⁶—she gave birth there to a son, “a goodly man child of beauty like to the father and mother.”⁷⁷ The infant was given his father’s Christian name and the old Norman-French surname of Fitzroy, which meant “son of the King.”⁷⁸

The tragedy was that this son was born out of wedlock. By then Queen Katherine’s catastrophic obstetric career had ended in failure. Of her six pregnancies, only one daughter, the Princess Mary, born in 1516, had survived. For a king who needed a son to succeed him, this was a dynastic disaster, for there was a widespread conviction that women were not meant to wield sovereign power; that it was against all laws both natural and divine. The birth of a living son to his mistress was a triumphant vindication for Henry. It proved that he could father boys, and that the fault did not lie with him.

It probably signaled the end of his affair with Elizabeth Blount. In accordance with the convention that it was unsafe and ungodly to have sex during pregnancy, he had probably stopped sleeping with her months before, and there is no evidence that they resumed having relations after the birth. Almost as soon as she had recovered from her confinement, Henry enlisted the aid of Cardinal Wolsey in arranging an honorable marriage for her with one of the Cardinal’s wards, Gilbert Tailboys. This must have taken place in the latter half of 1519, no later, as the eldest daughter born to the couple, also Elizabeth, was stated to be twenty-two years old in the inquisition postmortem on her brother, Robert, Lord Tailboys, in June 1542.⁷⁹ Thus she had been born in 1520. The date of the marriage is not recorded, and Elizabeth is not referred to as Tailboys’s wife until 1522.⁸⁰

Gilbert Tailboys was the son of George Tailboys, Lord Kyme, “a lunatic” whose person and lands had been entrusted to the protective custody of Cardinal Wolsey in 1517, and whose estates were held in trust by the Crown.⁸¹ Lands in Lincolnshire and Somerset were released to Gilbert on his marriage, and Parliament, thanks to Wolsey’s influence, assigned Elizabeth Blount a handsome dowry. Wolsey was savagely criticized for his part in this, and accused of encouraging “the young gentlewomen of the realm to become concubines by the well marrying of Bessie Blount, whom we would yet by sleight have married much better than she is, and for that purpose changed her name.”⁸²

“The mother of the King’s son” continued to benefit from the King’s bounty after her marriage. On June 18, 1522, she and her husband were granted the royal manor of Rokeby in Warwickshire,⁸³ and in 1524, an Act of Parliament was passed giving her a life interest in many of her father-in-law’s estates. In 1534 she was receiving a yearly grant of three casks of Gascon wine from the port of Boston.⁸⁴ Thereafter, Elizabeth received the occasional New Year’s present from the King.⁸⁵ It is, of course, possible that some of these grants were gifted in acknowledgment of further intimate services rendered by Elizabeth to the King, or as rewards for Tailboys being an accommodating husband—yet it is much more likely that the affair had ended in 1519, and certainly by 1522, because the evidence would suggest that Henry began pursuing Mary Boleyn that year. George, Elizabeth’s third child by her husband, was sixteen in March 1539,⁸⁶ so he must have been born in 1523 at the latest, which means that her second child, Robert, had arrived in 1521–22. It is hardly likely that her affair with the King had continued through this period of successive pregnancies.

There is no evidence that Elizabeth’s father ever benefited materially from his daughter’s liaison with the King and its natural consequences. Her husband was not knighted until 1524 and thereafter held the office of Sheriff of Lincoln for two years.⁸⁷ He is also recorded as “belonging to the King’s Chamber,”⁸⁸ so he enjoyed some influence at court, possibly on his own merits. In 1525, Tailboys was appointed Keeper of Tattershall Castle,⁸⁹ and he and Elizabeth took up residence in Lincolnshire, where they lived in a house built on to the fourteenth century castle at South Kyme, his family home; the house was demolished in 1725, and all that remains today is the castle tower. Tailboys represented Lincoln as Knight of the Shire in the Parliament that met in November 1529, and it was in this Parliament that he was created Baron Tailboys,⁹⁰ possibly in consequence of his wife’s position as mother of the King’s bastard son.⁹¹ Tailboys and Elizabeth produced several children, of whom three survived into adulthood, before his death on April 15, 1530. He was buried in the twelfth century church of the Augustinian priory of St. Mary and All Saints at South Kyme, and when it was largely rebuilt in 1805 (only a Norman doorway remains), his leaden coffin was discovered, along with those of three of his children by Elizabeth Blount.⁹²

In 1532, still resident at Kyme, Elizabeth turned down a proposal of marriage from Lord Leonard Grey⁹³ in favor of marrying a royal ward, Edward Fiennes de Clinton, 9th Baron Clinton, who was fourteen years her junior, and would be created Earl of Lincoln in 1572 by Queen Elizabeth I. They had married before February 1534,⁹⁴ and Elizabeth bore Clinton four daughters. She was still living on February 6, 1539, but had died by June 15, 1541. She was buried with her first husband at Kyme, and monumental inscriptions to them both were put up in the church.⁹⁵

Henry Fitzroy was Henry VIII’s only acknowledged bastard son—“my worldly jewel,” as he called the boy. Lord Herbert makes it clear that Fitzroy was “much avowed [acknowledged]” by Henry in the years prior to the child’s ennoblement at the age of six. Cardinal Wolsey was the infant’s godfather at his baptism, and afterward the King entrusted Wolsey with overall responsibility for young Fitzroy’s care, although it would seem that the child remained with his mother during his early years. Henry provided him with the best education, and, according to William Franklyn, Archdeacon of Durham, the boy grew into “a child of excellent wisdom and towardness; and, for his good and quick capacity, retentive memory, virtuous inclination to all honor, humanity, and goodness, I think hard it would be to find any creature living twice his age, able or worthy to be compared with him.”⁹⁶

Herbert described Henry Fitzroy as “proving so equally like both his parents, that he became the best emblem of their mutual affection.” From the first, bastard though the boy was, Henry VIII would groom him for kingship.