Royal Affairs: A Lusty Romp through the Extramarital Adventures that Rocked the British Monarchy

by Leslie Carroll

  But sentimental attachment, and even sympathy, didn’t pay the kingdom’s bills. Henry had taken a huge hit in the purse by their disobedience. And he demanded restitution. So he forced Suffolk to reimburse him for the vast sum spent on Mary’s wedding to the French king as well as for the luxury items, such as jewels and plate, that Louis had promised to bestow on Mary. Then there was the matter of Mary’s dowry. That, too, had been forfeited to France.

  The pecuniary penalty for the Duke and Duchess of Suffolk was enormous. The dowry alone amounted to £200,000, worth nearly eight hundred fifty times that sum in today’s dollars. Compensation for the plate and jewels was an additional line item. And to repay Henry for the remaining expenses, Suffolk was to tender another thousand pounds per annum for the next twenty-four years.

  It was Cardinal Wolsey who had brokered this financial arrangement. When Suffolk and Mary eventually returned to court, Suffolk, nearly bankrupted by it, became the cardinal’s severest critic.

  Mary bore Suffolk three children: a son, Henry Brandon, and two daughters, Lady Frances and Lady Eleanor. But the family did not become permanent fixtures at Henry’s court, preferring the relative sanity and solitude of the duke’s estates. Now that he was the king’s brother-in-law, the duke’s power and influence remained as strong as ever.

  Suffolk was one of the diplomats present at the Field of Cloth of Gold summit between Henry and François I in 1520, where he might have first caught a glimpse of Anne Boleyn, in the train of Queen Claude. He could not have known at the time that the young lady-in-waiting with the dark eyes and sallow complexion would cause a rift with his own wife and a strained relationship between Mary and her brother.

  Mary had known Anne well enough during her brief reign as Queen of France; and she didn’t like her, though Mary’s reasons for her early antipathy have not been preserved. After Anne became Henry’s mistress, Mary came to court as infrequently as possible, and she sympathized with Katherine of Aragon during the protracted Great Matter. Because of her rank, Mary could get away with her strong opinions against Anne, although Henry didn’t have to like them. It broke his heart that his favorite sister detested his mistress, because he was bound by love to prefer Anne in such circumstances.

  In 1532, Mary was heard using “opprobrious language” about Anne that literally sparked violence between her husband’s men and those of Anne’s uncle, the Duke of Norfolk. Two of Norfolk’s men, the Southwell brothers, murdered Suffolk’s retainer, Sir William Pennington, as the knight sought sanctuary in Westminster Abbey. Suffolk then “remove[d] the assailants by force” from holy ground.

  The court went into an uproar over the incident. Suffolk and Mary retreated to their country estate, Westhorpe Hall, but the mood at Whitehall remained so tense that Henry had to intervene by riding out to speak with Suffolk directly, and fining one of the Southwells the whopping sum of £1,000 (nearly $730,000 nowadays).

  Suffolk, too, had at first not thought much of Anne. As late as May 1530, Eustache Chapuys, the ambassador from the court of Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor, reported that the duke had been banished from court for warning Henry of Anne’s unsuitability to be queen, owing to her “criminal” relations with a certain courtier “whom she loves very much and whom the king had formerly chased from court for jealousy.” The married poet Thomas Wyatt was likely the man in question, and Anne was terribly upset by the gossip, though she always denied that she and Wyatt had ever enjoyed each other carnally.

  Yet, when all was said and done, Suffolk was a loyal courtier, supporting the king in all he sought, and therefore became enough of a proponent of Anne’s to remain in Henry’s good graces. After all, a simple Act of Attainder could wipe away with one stroke of Henry’s pen all the honors and titles and accumulated wealth and property that the king had bestowed upon him. So Brandon had to clench his fists and suck it up when, upon Anne’s coronation, Henry replaced him in the office of Earl Marshal with Anne’s uncle, his archrival Norfolk.

  The Duchess of Suffolk lodged her own protest; when Anne finally became queen in 1533, Mary quite pointedly refused to come to court at all.

  She fell dangerously ill that June, and in her dying wishes sought reconciliation with her brother. In her last letter to Henry, she wrote that “the sight of Your Grace is the greatest comfort to me that may be possible.”

  But her illness was a mere footnote amid the weeks of festivity surrounding Anne’s coronation. Suffolk hurried to her sickbed with Henry’s written reply to her sad little letter, offering his forgiveness and reconciling Mary to the royal bosom.

  Mary died at Westhorpe Hall on June 25. First interred at the abbey at Bury St. Edmunds, her corpse was moved to St. Mary’s Church after the abbey was destroyed during the dissolution of the monasteries. You would think that Henry might have tried a little harder to protect his precious sister’s resting place.

  Suffolk wasted little time in remarrying. On September 7, 1533, the same day as the birth of Princess Elizabeth, the forty-eight -year-old duke took a fourth wife—the barely-fourteen-year -old Katherine Willoughby, daughter of Katherine of Aragon’s trusted friend and lady-in-waiting Maria de Salinas. Suffolk had desired the girl when she was betrothed to his son. Now that he was single again, the duke broke off his own son’s contract to marry Katherine himself. The scandal it created was not over the age difference between the groom and his new bride, but over the sordidness of the family dynamic. Suffolk’s son, Henry, Earl of Lincoln, who passed away on March 8, 1534, was said to have died of a broken heart over his father’s betrayal. Although the youth had been ill for some time, it didn’t stop certain tongues from wagging, particularly Anne Boleyn’s, who remarked, “My Lord of Suffolk kills one son to beget another.”

  Suffolk remained an influential and powerful courtier and a trusted military commander. In 1544, at the age of sixty, he was once more sent to the Continent to command the forces that besieged Boulogne.

  While the court was in Guilford, Suffolk died unexpectedly on August 24, 1545, at the age of sixty-one. The cause of death is unknown, but since it came quite quickly, it was possibly a heart attack or stroke, rather than an illness. However, the legacy of his love match with Mary Tudor would enter the history books for more than its aspects of passion, intrigue, and the flagrant defying of a king.

  On February 12, 1554, their granddaughter, Lady Jane Grey, known as “the Nine Days’ Queen,” would lose her head in the struggle for succession engendered by the death of Henry VIII’s teenage son, Edward VI, who left no heirs. The hapless Jane Grey would be succeeded on the English throne by Henry’s daughter Mary.

  HENRY VIII

  1491-1547 RULED 1509-1547

  ON APRIL 22, 1509, JUST TWO MONTHS SHY OF HIS EIGHTEENTH birthday, Henry VIII ascended the throne on the death of his miserly father, Henry VII, from tuberculosis. The new king was flame-haired, fair-complected, over six feet two inches tall, and well proportioned with a thirty-two-inch waist, handsome and beardless, with, according to his chroniclers, a “fine calf to his leg” of which he was “exceeding proud and vain.” His court became a shining citadel of art, culture, theology, and philosophy—in short, the embodiment of the Renaissance itself.

  Just six weeks after Henry’s accession, on June 11, 1509, he wed Katherine of Aragon, his late brother’s wife. But when Katherine failed to give him a son, and Henry fell in love with one of her ladies-in-waiting, Anne Boleyn, he sought an unprecedented divorce.

  Henry ignored the opinions of the Pope at the peril of his own excommunication, proclaimed himself head of the Church in England, and a reformed religion was born, which would eventually morph into the Church of England. During the thirty-eight years of Henry’s reign, the monasteries were dissolved and their property absorbed by the Royal Exchequer. Dissidents, including Henry’s Lord Chancellor and most trusted legal adviser, the venerated Thomas More (who so comprehensively chronicled the reigns of Edward IV and Richard III), were executed for speaking against the validity of He
nry’s marriage to Anne Boleyn.

  But when Anne also failed to give him a son, Henry sought a way to rid himself of her as well. On May 19, 1536, she was executed on trumped-up charges of adultery and treason.

  Henry married Jane Seymour just a few days after Anne’s execution, and after Jane died in October 1537, just twelve days after delivering a son (the future Edward VI), Henry waited three years before remarrying. His fourth wife was the unhygienic German princess Anne of Cleves, who physically repulsed him so much that their marriage was never consummated and was swiftly annulled.

  Wife number five was one of her ladies-in-waiting, Kathryn Howard, the teenage niece of the Duke of Norfolk. After Kathryn Howard’s execution for treason and adultery (which were perhaps not trumped-up charges) in 1542, Henry dipped his gouty toes in the marital waters for a sixth time, marrying the wealthy thirty-three-year-old widow Catherine Parr on July 12, 1543, at the age of fifty-two.

  Throughout his life, Henry was desperate to have a legitimate son, and there was a valid reason for his succession obsession. Although a female could by law inherit the throne of England, Henry was the product of an age when the crown had been won by arms, and not through legal succession. The Wars of the Roses provide context for this conviction, and Henry’s own father, Henry VII, had been one such usurper. It was popularly believed that only a strong male could hold the throne, and lead his army, if necessary, against all challengers— something a female (considered weak, paltry, and a second-rate gender) could not do. Queens were for begetting sons, not for ruling countries.

  The chronological catalogue of Henry’s six wives also mirrors the tenor of his time, and the shifting sands of religious upheaval and the swinging pendulum of his court’s political factions. Catholic, Reformer, Catholic, Lutheran, Catholic, Reformer.

  Toward the end of his days, Henry’s bulk was so immense that he had to be carried from place to place in purpose-built chairs. By the time he was fifty-five, his various ailments and illnesses caught up with him; he died at Whitehall on January 28, 1547. His death was kept secret for two days so that matters regarding a smooth succession could be put in order. Henry VIII was buried at Windsor beside his beloved third wife, Jane Seymour. Their nine-year-old son succeeded him, to become Edward VI.

  In 1813 the royal tomb at Windsor was opened on the directive of the Prince Regent (himself quite the ladies’ man). Henry’s rather large coffin was opened, confirming his height of six feet two. Russet hairs still clung to his skull.

  HENRY VIII and Elizabeth “Bessie” Blount c. 1500-1539/41(?)

  At the age of thirteen, the uncommonly pretty and talented Elizabeth Blount—one of Katherine of Aragon’s ladies-in-waiting—costarred with the handsome and virile Henry in a romantic court masque, a popular courtly entertainment that combined elements of allegory, song, dance, and theatre with opulent costumes and elaborate stagecraft. The very pregnant Queen Katherine was so impressed with the performance that she asked them to repeat it by torchlight in her bedchamber.

  That may have been the last time Katherine was pleased to see her husband cavorting with Bessie, that “fair damosel, who in singing, dancing, and all goodly pastimes exceeded no other,” according to a chronicler of the times. Though Katherine had been taught by her parents to anticipate marital infidelity from a king, it didn’t mean she was happy about it. Katherine loved Henry in every way, and wanted to be a good wife to him. And the more he cheated on her, the deeper she retreated into her religious devotions, finding solace in her Catholicism.

  Katherine’s reproving glances pushed Henry even further from her bed. His affair with Bessie wasn’t his first extramarital liaison, but it was certainly a seminal one, because it was Bessie who gave him the son he so passionately desired.

  Bessie’s father, Sir John Blount of Shropshire, had fought in France alongside Henry in 1513, the same year as the court masque. Five years later, in 1518, with the queen pregnant again, the vivacious Bessie distinguished herself from her ten siblings by becoming the king’s mistress, apparently offering scant resistance to the sovereign’s seductive powers. In this role, Bessie was evidently the nonpareil, “thought for her rare ornaments of nature and education to be the beauty and mistress-piece of her time,” according to her contemporaries.

  Henry felt no guilt in availing himself of Bessie’s charms because it was the custom for a king to refrain from visiting his wife’s bedroom during the better part of her pregnancy, lest their amorous coupling endanger the unborn fetus. This convention provided a great excuse for monarchs to look elsewhere for sexual satisfaction during these months of imposed “restraint.”

  And in the summer of 1519, after Henry had been married to Katherine of Aragon for a decade with only a daughter to show for it, Bessie confirmed his virility by giving him a son—the greatest gift the king could have. Actually, it was the second greatest gift, because the son she bore was illegitimate, and therefore ineligible to inherit his throne. She named the royal bastard Henry Fitzroy, the surname being Norman-French for “son of the king,” and was henceforth known as “the mother of the king’s son.”

  Under Henry’s directives, Cardinal Wolsey, who acted very much as his consigliere during the early years of his reign, arranged for the new mum to be married off. The king also named Wolsey as the baby’s godfather. Bessie was wed to a commoner of “gentle” birth, Sir Gilbert Tailboys (often spelled Talboys), and little Henry was raised by Gilbert as his own son at Rokeby Manor in Warwickshire, a gift from the king as his paramour’s dowry. But the king wanted to ensure that his son would have the finest possible education, so when little Henry was just a tyke, he was sent off to Kings College, Cambridge, to be tutored by Richard Croke.

  Given his keen interest in his son’s schooling, and the boy’s lavish household with 245 liveried attendants, Henry clearly entertained the notion of legitimizing Henry Fitzroy and naming him as his successor. The king certainly contemplated arranging a marriage between his son and his legitimate daughter, the youth’s half sister, Mary. In 1525, when the boy was only six years old, Henry created him Earl of Nottingham and Duke of Richmond and Somerset. At the same time, Henry also made his son a Knight of the Garter and appointed him Lord Admiral and Warden-General of the Marches against Scotland.

  Although he held court from a throne as richly appointed as a prince’s and was addressed as though he were legitimate royalty, Henry Fitzroy didn’t get the chance to enjoy his many honors for very long. On July 22, 1536, at the age of seventeen, he died of consumption.

  After Tailboys died, Bessie remarried very well, wedding Lord Clinton, who would later be made Earl of Lincoln. Her nuptial good fortune on both counts raised some eyebrows and set some tongues wagging, accusing Cardinal Wolsey of encouraging nubile young ladies of the lower and middle ranks to indulge in fornication in order to find a wellborn spouse.

  Sometime between January 1539 and June 1541, at around the age of thirty-nine, Bessie was carried off by consumption herself. By that time, her former royal lover was in the process of changing the world as they knew it to marry his current inamorata, Anne Boleyn.

  HENRY VIII and Mary Boleyn 1499-1543

  The French monarch François I called her his “hackney,” explaining that he loved to ride her. An Italian visitor to François’s court thought her “una grandissima ribald et infame sopre tutte” (a great prostitute and more infamous than all of them). She is probably best remembered as the older sister of Anne Boleyn. What seems clear is that this daughter of Sir Thomas Boleyn and Lady Elizabeth Howard knew how to have fun in bed.

  Mary Boleyn possessed the blond, blue-eyed, curvy beauty that was the era’s belle idéale. In 1514, she was a member of the French court in the household of the queen, Henry VIII’s younger sister Mary Tudor. But after Mary’s husband, King Louis XII, died on New Year’s Day in 1515, Mary Boleyn remained at the French court, where she became a lady-in-waiting to the new queen, Claude, the wife of Louis’s son François.

  Evidentl
y, Mary Boleyn also became the paramour of the new king, François I. But after François tired of Mary, she consoled herself in the arms of enough of his courtiers to create a scandal. In 1519, at the age of twenty, Mary was ignominiously dismissed from Queen Claude’s service and packed back to England, much to the embarrassment and disgrace of her family.

  But the Boleyns were a powerful family, so Mary quickly secured a place as a lady-in-waiting to Queen Katherine, the unofficial but de facto usual incubator for a royal mistress. Sure enough, soon after Bessie Blount delivered Henry’s son in 1519, the regal eye began to rove, alighting before long on the new flavor in his wife’s retinue.

  His affair with Mary Boleyn was reputedly short but intense. And in a situation similar to Bessie Blount’s, Henry saw to it that Mary made a financially brilliant marriage. So, on February 4, 1520, at the Chapel Royal in Greenwich, Mary Boleyn wed William Carey, one of Henry’s favorite Gentlemen of the Bedchamber. His Majesty himself attended the wedding, bestowing an offering of six shillings, eightpence in the chapel. However, some believe that Mary was still Henry’s mistress at the time she was wed to William Carey.

  In any case, Henry was so immensely grateful for the gift of Mary’s favors, he enriched her father as well as her new husband. Sir Thomas Boleyn was made Viscount Rochford, and William Carey’s coffers were vastly enlarged.

  In 1525, Mary gave birth to a son, who she named Henry. The king never claimed paternity, and Mary never pressed the point, so the boy was likely her husband’s. But Mary’s motherhood had the effect of dampening Henry’s lust, just as it had more or less killed his ardor for Bessie Blount soon after she gave birth.

  Yet there was another reason Mary was supplanted: Henry had fallen madly in lust with her younger sister, Anne.