In Bed with the Tudors: The Sex Lives of a Dynasty from Elizabeth of York to Elizabeth I

by Amy Licence

  Born around 1500, Bessie Blount was probably the eldest surviving daughter of John Blount and Catherine Pershall of Kinlet, Shropshire. Their marriage was arranged as children: the earliest possible date for consummation was 1495, when John may have attained his fourteenth year, although Catherine was probably younger: it is certain that she bore her first child whilst still in her teens, perhaps as early as 1498, which has been suggested as Bessie’s earliest possible birth date. An early biographer and descendant referred to her as the second daughter, suggesting the loss of an earlier child: subsequent sons were to die in infancy in 1501 and 1503. The worn names on the family tomb3 indicate that the second daughter may have been named Anne, whilst that of the first is considerably longer: in all probability, Bessie was the couple’s first-born girl. With no surviving portrait, the image carved on the Blount tomb depicts a conventional, demure-looking young woman dressed in the fashion of the day, her features barely distinguishable from those of her sisters; a funeral brass possibly portraying her is equally impersonal. She was born at Kinlet Hall, although the family soon moved into the nearby manor of Bewdley, Worcestershire. This placed them within easy distance of Ludlow, where several members of her family were to hold prominent positions in the short-lived household of Prince Arthur and Catherine of Aragon. Barely out of their teens, the young married Blounts were regular visitors to the home of the royal couple. In 1502, Arthur’s body rested for the night in the chapel at Bewdley on its way to burial, while the funeral procession was lodged in the manor house. It is not impossible that, ten years later, these connections helped place Bessie in the new queen’s service. Catherine can hardly have imagined that the small blonde child she recalled would pose any threat to her own position.

  Bessie was not the first lady in waiting to have found her way into the king’s bed. Ironically, Catherine’s household, with its high moral tone, provided a pool of beautiful, accomplished young women to tempt her husband. With sex during pregnancy considered potentially harmful to an unborn foetus and able to curdle milk in the breasts, Henry’s justification for seeking out other affairs during his queen’s unavailability, was, conveniently, her own good health and that of her child. In a typical double standard of the era, a man would not necessarily be expected to abstain from sexual activity during the months of his wife’s pregnancy and confinement. While conducting himself with discretion, Henry found it was not always possible to keep his amours secret in the closed world of the Tudor court. As early as 1510, when Catherine was sexually unavailable, his dalliance with Anne, the Duke of Buckingham’s sister, was the cause of the couple’s first argument. With all indicators suggesting Henry had little opportunity to pursue women during his father’s life time and was satisfied with Catherine during the first year of their union, Lady Anne Stafford was probably his first mistress. Certainly she received the third most expensive gift he gave at New Year 1513, either in reward for her services or as recompense for having to leave court when the affair was discovered. A mysterious French woman, Etiennette la Baume, identified from a single surviving letter, may have entertained him whilst absent from the marital bed during his campaigns of 1513–14, whilst the notorious Jane Popincourt, lover of the Duc de Longueville, may have been his companion whilst she was apart from the Duc in England until 1516. Other sources name Elizabeth Bryan – Lady Carew – as a possible early mistress, after she and Bessie were linked in a letter by Charles Brandon to Henry as the recipients of letters and tokens; she also received gifts of jewels from the king.4 Henry’s affairs may have been facilitated by his close friend Sir William Compton procuring women for the king at his private London home, yet none of these posed a real threat to the queen. Most appear to have been casual short-term liaisons. Before Bessie bore Henry a son in 1519, little real evidence, including the absence of previous illegitimate children, exists for any significant mistresses.

  During this time, Henry was a devout, traditional Catholic. The strict civil and pre-Reformation line on adultery and illegitimacy couldn’t have been clearer: fornication (sex outside marriage or purely for pleasure) was against religious teaching. Intercourse within marriage was acceptable only for the procreation of children and the penalties for transgression were harsh and public. Children born out of wedlock could be baptised and even legitimised by subsequent marriage vows but the social stigma of bastardy and the legal implications could not be so easily shaken off. Couples engaged in fornication or adultery could receive severe corporal punishment and fines: marriage was the ultimate goal for any respectable Tudor woman, even though poverty, age and the dynastically arranged unions of the nobility might make this impossible. Royals did sometimes marry for love: following her short-lived union to the aged Louis XII, Princess Mary incurred her brother’s wrath by secretly wedding Charles Brandon, while Henry himself would choose four of his queens for their personal charms. Brandon had four wives and fathered at least three illegitimate children, whilst Thomas Wolsey’s mistress Joan Larke bore him a son and daughter. At the intense, highly charged Tudor court, illicit physical attraction was inevitable. Young women coveted positions in Catherine of Aragon’s retinue in order to find a suitable husband, but often entertained themselves with love affairs in the interim. When temptation occurred, especially among unmarried courtiers, the ‘correct’ religious or moral choices were either abstinence and avoidance or submission. Of course, in practice, many gave in to temptation. The obvious exception to this was an affair with a king, the honour and financial advantage of which could outweigh any adverse social stigma; to bear a king’s child could be the making of a woman and her family. And, in terms of adultery, even with noble-born women whose dynastic imperative should have dictated their purity, Henry clearly managed to square his actions with his conscience.

  The majority of the Tudor aristocracy had arranged marriages in their mid- to late teens; these were primarily for political, dynastic and financial advancement; romantic love and sexual satisfaction were often sought elsewhere. Sometimes they were hard, if not impossible, to come by. Double standards allowed men to conduct relations with prostitutes or lower class women, who were considered more sexually gratifying, whilst women were expected to be above reproach. Same-sex unions and masturbation were possibly even more abhorrent than adultery, in Catholic eyes, with the wasteful spilling of seed in any context considered an abomination. Anal sex was made punishable by death for homosexual and heterosexual couples in 1533, encompassing all ‘unnatural’ acts ‘against the Will of man and God’, including bestiality: Walter, Baron Hungerford was the first to suffer death for this, in 1540. The influential twelfth-century St Hildegard of Bingen wrote that ‘men who touch their own genital organ and emit their semen seriously imperil their souls’ and ‘perverse adulterers change their virile strength into perverse weakness’; instead she counselled ‘when a person feels himself disturbed by bodily stimulation let him run to the refuge of continence and seize the shield of chastity and thus defend himself from uncleanness’.5 A more practical but probably no less successful method included placing cooked lettuce leaves on the over-active member. The fourth-century William of Pagula wrote to parish priests that ‘if someone has knowingly and wilfully emitted the seed of coitus in any other way than naturally with his wife, he sins gravely’.6 This was setting a high standard for communities where privacy and space were luxuries and many multiple households contained large numbers of young people sharing each other’s company day and night.

  The reality of sexual relations and the family unit was far more complex; with the largest proportion of young people remaining single until their late twenties, the frustrations of a decade of sexual maturity needed an outlet. It is no surprise that informal arrangements and misunderstandings arose; temporary alliances were entered into in good faith and broken when the couple moved on or found alternative partners. A verbal promise of marriage or ‘handfasting’ could be enough to licence physical relations, as proved the downfall of Catherine Howard, Henry VIII’s f
ifth queen. Less than two years after her marriage, it was discovered that she had enjoyed two lovers in her youth, which she had omitted to mention to her new husband. With one, she had exchanged promises, gifts and spent many nights together in a shared dormitory as husband and wife. Catherine might still have kept her head at this point but unfortunately for her, the revelations led to the uncovering of her later adulterous affair. Handfasting could even override later marriages in church, even if consummation had not taken place, as Henry attempted to prove in the case of Anne Boleyn’s pre-contract to Henry Percy, and successfully established to extract himself from an unwanted union with Anne of Cleves. Promises could be made any time or any place: bedrooms, kitchens and fields witnessed secret agreements: it wasn’t until 1563 that the Council of Trent declared a marriage was void if not celebrated in front of a priest, although English law did not catch up until the eighteenth century. Henry was discreet about the arrangements for his marriages, often to the extent that they were made public by hints and suggestions before his councillors were officially informed. His extramarital affairs were shrouded in even greater secrecy.

  It is not clear when Henry’s relationship with Bessie Blount began. Besides the reference to them dancing at Christmas 1514, the only certain point in the union is the birth of their son Henry Fitzroy in the summer of 1519, putting a conception date around late September or early October. His elevation to the peerage in June 1525, probably coinciding with his sixth birthday, supports a June birthday. It is possible that they were involved for the entire duration of the intervening time or that Bessie was an intermittent distraction, to whose bed Henry returned whilst Catherine was pregnant and unavailable. Whatever the truth of their relations, they were indisputably sleeping together shortly before Catherine’s final miscarriage, while the court was at Westminster. In early October, at Wolsey’s home, York Place, Bessie was again listed as a dancer in the company of Mary Tudor, Queen of France, to celebrate the signing of a treaty for the marriage of the two-year-old Princess Mary and the dauphin. After a ‘sumptuous supper’ in a hall decorated by huge vases of gold and silver, a ‘mummery’ of masked dancers in the ‘richest and most sumptuous array’ was performed, before the company were served confectioneries and delicacies, gambled at dice and danced again until midnight.7 It would prove to be Bessie’s last public appearance with the king; she was about to conceive or was in the early stages of pregnancy and would soon be sent away from court for the sake of discretion.

  Whilst Catherine’s confinements had been organised along the lines of Margaret Beaufort’s spectacular and thorough Ordinances, Bessie was not royalty. She could not be treated in the same way but her position as royal mistress made the significance and conditions of her lying-in unique; she was sufficiently important to be well provided for and honoured, whilst her adulterous union and the child’s illegitimacy ensured everything must be handled with discretion. To deal with this, Henry handed the arrangements over to his trusted and competent minister Thomas Wolsey, whose own mistress had born him two illegitimate offspring and whose prudence has ensured few details of Henry Fitzroy’s birth survive. Bessie was sent to the Augustinian Priory of St Laurence, Blackmore, near Chelmsford in Essex. There, she awaited her lying-in in the moated medieval residence of Prior Thomas Goodwyn, who had held the position since 1513. It was a location notorious for being used by Henry to conduct illicit liaisons and attracted the name ‘Jericho’, possibly after a nearby river, although little if any evidence beyond rumour survives for any other encounters he may have had there. It may have been the site of his meetings with Bessie and it allowed him to remain close that summer, as he spent part of it staying at the nearby magnificent Palace of Newhall, later renamed Beaulieu. The house still stands and is in use as a Catholic School: the king would have been lodged there in considerable comfort, in one of the twenty-nine great beds, with the use of one of four wooden-floored bathing rooms. From there, he could have ridden the short distance to visit his pregnant mistress, under the cover of hunting or riding. Alternatively he may have stayed at the thirteenth-century Havering Palace, a royal residence of queens for centuries, now demolished. During her confinement, Bessie would have certainly been made comfortable and her experience would not have been too far removed from that of other aristocratic women except in one key area. It had to be discreet.

  For a Tudor gentlewoman, one key element of pregnancy was the setting in motion of a supportive female network by spreading her news and gathering together the group of gossips that would be her support during the coming months. Rare surviving letters include the advice, warnings and good wishes of family and friends, through to discussions concerning linen, midwives and medicines: their committal to paper suggests distance between the sender and recipient, so they must give just a brief indication of the oral exchanges that must have taken place on a regular basis during the months of pregnancy. In 1572, Lady Audrey Aleyn wrote to her brother concerning provision for his wife’s lying in, discussing wet nursing, christening and attempting to predict gender through astrology: ‘I could make you somewhat affeard of a gyrle, for that Femynine signes rule much this yere.’8 Lady Sidney’s sister wrote to her when she was pregnant abroad, wishing God would send her a ‘goodly boy’: she had confided her fears concerning foreign wet-nurses to her other sister, Lady Herbert, who offered the services of a most quiet and careful English nurse, who could be shipped over in time. Anne Newdigate received written good wishes from her kinswoman Lady Elizabeth Grey whilst suffering illness in pregnancy, while some women sent gifts along with their letters; Anne Bacon thanked her mother Mistress Dutton for sending a generous amount of linen ‘towards my lying downe’.9 However, not even privilege could guarantee the birth experience a mother had hoped for. When in 1575, the daughter-in-law of the Earl of Shrewsbury went into labour in his house, no women were available to attend and the child was delivered by a single midwife and baptised by Shrewsbury and two of his children. While men were barred from the labouring chamber, wives did not necessarily want them to be far away, offering emotional and material support: heavily pregnant Elizabeth Anthony wrote to her husband that his long absence ‘hath bread shuch discontent in my mind that I canot be reed of it. You knowe that my time of payne and sorowe is nere and I am unproved of loging and other thinges nedfull’. Sabine Johnson asked her husband to make ‘all sped home’ from Calais, which she would find a great comfort.10 No records survive of the women who supported Bessie during her confinement, particularly whether her mother Catherine travelled from Shropshire, although her three sisters were too young to have been involved and probably kept at a remove from the situation. The geographical distance from her family home may have been representative of the new social gulf that had opened between them and their eldest daughter.

  As an aristocratic woman’s delivery approached, the questions of location became more urgent, depending upon wealth and status, with preparations including the gathering of linen, the making of baby clothes and provision for the care of older children. Although her circumstances were unusual, Bessie was typical in not giving birth at home. It was common for married women to seek out more suitable spaces, perhaps in the home of a neighbour or that of their parents, especially if they were not a home-owner or other circumstances made their usual dwelling place impractical. It would be interesting but probably impossible to know the predicaments of women who chose to give birth under the roofs of their mothers rather than their husbands. Some wives were clearly neglected: when pleading to separate from her husband, Elizabeth Kynaston explained how she had attempted to ‘engage and please’ him as much as she could, ‘to serve and respect him as she always conceived it was her duty to do’11 but he had denied her the midwife of her choice, resulting in a difficult, long labour; likewise Sir Richard Greville overturned his wife’s birth room wishes, causing marital ruptions.12 In 1566, pregnant Judith Pollard was locked out of her house on a cold January night, her husband refusing to readmit her, so she was taken in
by her neighbour Margaret Jones. Anne Wilson’s husband refused to provide for her, so that she would have perished but for the charity of neighbours: other pregnant wives were beaten, kicked and attacked.13 When a woman’s virtue was called into question, threatening the line of inheritance, male reactions to pregnancy could be extreme. One case of 1537 saw an Elizabeth Burgh, of Langley Lodge, appealing to Thomas Cromwell for help after her child’s premature delivery cast doubt in the minds of her family about its conception. She had given birth whilst staying with a ‘gentleman and his wife’, Burgh’s kinsmen, who had written to assure her husband that ‘he might have no cause of jealousy against her, seeing that the child, by the proportions of his body, was born long before the time’ yet ‘my lord his father says it is none of her husband’s, and makes him absent himself from her’. Her second letter complained that her father-in-law was always ‘lying in wait’ to ‘put her to shame’. Whilst she lay recovering from a traumatic delivery, describing herself as a ‘prisoner’ and ‘comfortless’, she urged Cromwell to mediate, as ‘nothing but the power of God had preserved’ her and her child.14