The Children of Henry VIII

by John Guy

  The child’s everyday cradle was to have ‘four pommels of silver and gilt’ and other suitable decorations. And a ‘cradle of estate’ was to be available when ambassadors or visitors were present, covered by a quilt of ermine and a canopy of crimson cloth of gold and blazoned with the royal arms. Yeomen, grooms and a laundress were appointed to perform menial duties in the nursery at the direction of the governess. Lastly, generous supplies of mattresses, sheets, blankets and swaddling bands were to be requisitioned as well as eight large carpets to cover the floor to exclude draughts.14

  Put in charge of Mary’s nursery on the eve of her mother’s accouchement in 1516 was Elizabeth Denton, none other than Henry’s own governess when he was a boy. Appointed when he had been about 5, she was the most important figure in his childhood apart from his mother, Elizabeth of York, and he retained the fondest memories of her.15 Long in receipt of a generous pension from the king, she was brought out of retirement, but either she became ill or clashed with Katherine, since Margaret, Lady Bryan, mother of one of Henry’s cronies and the sister of Lord Berners (a distinguished translator of romances and chivalric histories including Froissart’s Chronicles), was appointed to replace her.

  Marked out by Henry as Denton’s successor even before the latter had officially vacated the post,16 Lady Bryan took up her new role in 1518 when—perhaps to strengthen her hand in dealing with Katherine—the king created her a baroness. Bryan then served as Mary’s governess until the early summer of 1519, when she moved elsewhere.

  Henry boasted that his daughter’s birth was a portent of better things to come, but it was not. Katherine was said to be pregnant again by August 1517, but no announcement was made. Her final pregnancy ended in November 1518, when she gave birth to a stillborn girl. Her difficulties encouraged Henry’s serial infidelities, which may have begun as early as 1510 when he first looked, or perhaps more than looked, at another woman. She was one of the sisters of Edward Stafford, Duke of Buckingham, Anne, Lady Hastings, to whom Henry would later offer an expensive gift.

  Katherine first heard of the scandal when Anne’s sister, Elizabeth, complained on her behalf to the duke. But when Buckingham indignantly confronted Henry, the king retaliated by rusticating Elizabeth from Court. She chiefly blamed William Compton, Henry’s ‘groom of the stool’ (chief body servant) for her banishment. A backstairs politician more infamously known as Henry’s ‘ponce’, Compton was the man who arranged the king’s sexual intrigues.17 Twenty years later, when Henry had designs on Mistress Amadas, the wife of Robert Amadas, sometime master of the jewel-house, it was Compton who organized their liaisons at his house in Thames Street, London.18

  When, in the summer of 1515, Katherine was pregnant with Mary, Henry began a clandestine liaison with Jane Popincourt. A high-spirited Frenchwoman who had come to England as a French tutor to the king’s younger sister Mary and afterwards joined Katherine’s household, Jane danced before the king in the Twelfth Night revels of 1515 at Greenwich Palace as one of ‘six ladies richly apparelled’.19 When, by the following May, Henry had grown tired of her, she was shipped off home to France with a payoff of £100.20

  By then, Henry had begun a more serious affair with Elizabeth Blount, whom he first encountered when he danced with her at a Court mummery on New Year’s Eve in 1514. Clad in blue velvet and cloth of silver, his face hidden by a masking visor, Henry was clearly enjoying himself, since the dancing lasted for ‘a great season’.

  A daughter of one of the king’s men-at-arms, Elizabeth (better known to her friends as ‘Bessie’) had become a gentlewoman to Katherine a year or so before. Already spotted by the king’s favourite jousting partner, Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, as an exceptional beauty, she was well connected, a kinswoman of at least two of the most senior officials of Katherine’s side of the household.21

  By the time the queen’s final pregnancy began early in 1518, Elizabeth was Henry’s mistress, and in or around June 1519 she gave birth to their son, christened Henry and afterwards known as ‘Henry Fitzroy’.

  Estimates of how long their affair lasted vary from around six months to several years. Most likely the liaison started in earnest in the summer of 1518, when Cardinal Wolsey, the king’s chief minister, was busy negotiating a landmark pan-European peace accord known as the Treaty of Universal Peace.22 At a sumptuous entertainment that Wolsey organized in October for the French ambassadors, ‘the like of which’—says one of the Venetian negotiators—‘was never given either by Cleopatra or Caligula’, Elizabeth once again took a leading role as a dancer. But by then, she was visibly pregnant. To spare Katherine’s feelings, Elizabeth was partnered in these revels not by Henry, but by Sir Francis Bryan, Lady Bryan’s son, but nobody was deceived.23

  As her lying-in approached, Henry sent Elizabeth to a secluded manor house adjacent to St Lawrence’s Priory at Blackmore, near Ingatestone in Essex. Wolsey took charge of all the details, enabling the king to keep his distance while his mistress gave birth.24 For his part, Henry pretended to know nothing of her accouchement until he knew for sure from Wolsey’s investigations that the child was his—and was a boy.

  In June, the king amused himself at Windsor Castle and Richmond. In July he hunted in Surrey and Sussex. Only at the end of August did he venture into Essex.25 Wolsey, meanwhile, handled the baby’s christening, at which he stood as the infant’s godfather.26

  Despite acknowledging her son as his own, Henry quickly ended his affair with Elizabeth once her child was delivered. Seeking to be rid of her, he married her off to Gilbert Tailboys, the young heir of George, Lord Tailboys of Kyme and his wife Elizabeth Gascoigne, the sister of Sir William Gascoigne of Gawthorpe, one of Wolsey’s most trustworthy retainers. No doubt Wolsey had first recommended Gilbert as a suitable husband. A royal ward after his father was declared insane in 1517, Gilbert could offer Elizabeth respectability and security, although she continued to receive presents from Henry for the rest of her life.27 In 1523, Wolsey even engineered a special act of Parliament in her favour, ensuring she would live as a wealthy widow should Gilbert unexpectedly die.28

  Fitzroy’s birth would present Henry with a potential opportunity, but also a stark dilemma. The king needed a son. Fitzroy was illegitimate, but bastardy need not be a bar to the succession. Henry already had a tangible example in his own family of how things could be made to play out. Had not his own Lancastrian great-great-grandfather, John Beaufort, Earl of Somerset, the eldest son of John of Gaunt by his long-standing mistress, Katherine Swynford, been retrospectively legitimized by Parliament and a papal bull? True, Henry IV had specifically barred Beaufort and his brothers from the succession in 1407, but such a bar could easily be removed by Parliament and it was mainly as a claimant through his Beaufort mother by descent from John of Gaunt that Henry VII staked his claim to the throne.29 Who was king, constitutionally, was a question of whom Parliament (or in the Middle Ages the ‘estates of the realm’) would recognize as king, a point that Thomas More could readily concede when asked the question directly.30 Could Henry therefore treat his daughter and her half-brother as equal contenders?

  Almost no one outside Italy believed that rank could trump gender in the sixteenth century. The prospect of a woman ruler was considered abhorrent and unsafe: England had never known one, since Matilda, Henry I’s daughter to whom he had tried to leave the crown in 1135, was forced to flee from London on the eve of her coronation and ended up designating her eldest son as her heir after a long civil war.

  Henry VIII from the beginning was deeply sceptical of allowing Mary to be recognized as his successor. While necessarily secretive in his early dealings with Fitzroy for fear of antagonizing Katherine, he would be careful to keep all his options open.

  Lady Bryan was replaced as Mary’s governess in the early summer of 1519 by Katherine’s confidant and close ally, Margaret Pole, Countess of Salisbury, one of Mary’s godmothers. The daughter and only surviving child of George, Duke of Clarence, a younger brother of Edward IV, she
was also the widow of Sir Richard Pole, one of the pillars of Henry VII’s regime and the man the king had chosen to be lord chamberlain to his son, Arthur, when he had first created his princely household at Ludlow. She brought the highest social status to the post of governess. To reflect her high standing, Mary’s household staff was increased to include a chamberlain, a treasurer, a chaplain, a gentlewoman and twenty or so male servants.31

  But all was not what it appeared to be. Drafted in at the highly sensitive moment when Elizabeth Blount was about to give birth to Fitzroy, Pole was placed at the centre of what was made to look like a princely establishment to enable Henry to deceive Katherine into believing that their daughter would become his heir should the couple have no more children.32

  Historians usually explain Bryan’s disappearance from Mary’s household by reference to her marriage to David Zouche after her first husband, Sir Thomas Bryan, suddenly died. But the chronology does not fit. Sir Thomas, Katherine’s vice-chamberlain, was already dead by 1 January 1518, when Elizabeth Denton was still governess. And Lady Bryan had almost certainly married Zouche before she left Mary’s household.33

  In reality, Henry had Lady Bryan earmarked for another role in the summer of 1519, sending her to take charge of Fitzroy. Most likely she looked after him at a number of royal manor houses within easy reach of London. In a letter to Thomas Cromwell, Wolsey’s successor as Henry’s chief minister, written soon after Anne Boleyn’s fall in 1536, Bryan explains, ‘When my Lady Mary’s grace was born, it pleased the king’s grace to appoint me “lady mistress” and make me a baroness, and so I have been a m[other] to the children his grace has had since.’ The original letter was partially burned in a fire in 1731, but fortunately the words ‘to the children his grace has had since’ are intact and fully legible.

  When this letter was written, Prince Edward, the child of Henry’s third wife, Jane Seymour, was not yet born. The only other child the king fathered after Mary besides Elizabeth, his daughter by Anne Boleyn, was Fitzroy. So logic dictates that when Bryan spoke of being ‘a m[other] to the children his grace has had since’, she must have been including him.34

  Before Margaret Pole took charge of Mary, the young princess had a smaller, more rudimentary household. At first, her nursery was housed in Katherine’s apartments, but as Mary became a toddler and more staff were needed, space became a problem. Protocol allocated Mary two rooms for herself—an inner one where she lived and slept in her everyday cradle, and an outer one where visitors could be received. The governess needed her own room, while the ‘rockers’ and other female servants shared a dormitory.35

  Few of Katherine’s apartments at the royal palaces could meet such requirements. Problems of space were even more acute if the royal couple were travelling around the countryside. In consequence, Mary regularly found herself traipsing around the home counties in her parents’ footsteps, staying at manor houses a few miles’ distance from them or else at other lodgings where she could conveniently be visited.36

  In December 1517, for example, her household lodged at Ditton Park, a refurbished royal manor house on the north bank of the Thames in Buckinghamshire, chosen because it was just two miles from Windsor Castle, where Henry and Katherine planned to spend Christmas. Although Windsor was on the south bank of the river, a ferry operated at Datchet nearby, and Mary and her servants were twice rowed over for 20 pence a time. Sitting up in bed on New Year’s Day, Mary received gifts of a gold cup from Wolsey, a pomander of gold from her aunt, Henry’s sister Mary, and a primer or first reading book from Agnes Howard, Duchess of Norfolk, another godmother.37

  Over the next couple of years Mary lodged at places such as Bisham Abbey in Berkshire, where many of Margaret Pole’s ancestors were buried, The More (now Moor Park) in Hertfordshire, one of Wolsey’s larger houses, and Richmond, where in June 1520—following Henry’s and Wolsey’s diplomacy with Francis I at the Field of Cloth of Gold—a party of French gentlemen came to visit her as part of an escorted tour of the sights of the metropolis organized by Wolsey.

  Under the watchful eye of her governess and half a dozen other noble ladies, Mary—rising four and a half—welcomed the Frenchmen and their official minders, who were led by Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk, and Richard Fox, the septuagenarian, almost blind bishop of Winchester. As the duke informed Henry afterwards, Mary greeted her visitors ‘with [a] most goodly countenance, proper communication and pleasant pastime in playing at the virginals’.38

  By then she had some thirty menservants in addition to her female staff, all of whom functioned within a fully fledged household with its own chamber and service departments such as the wardrobe, bakehouse, pantry, buttery and stables. Henry allocated an adequate, but not especially generous budget of £1,100 a year to Mary’s treasurer. Frequent purchases recorded in his accounts, apart from recurrent expenditure on salaries, food, drink and clothing, and special items such as New Year’s gifts, included large quantities of strawberries and cherries, which Mary particularly enjoyed, and ‘hippocras’, a cordial drink made of wine flavoured with spices, for the entertainment of guests.39 After Mary had performed on the virginals for her French visitors, she played host, offering them ‘strawberries, wafers, wine and hippocras in plenty’.40

  Mary spent Christmas 1520 with her parents at Greenwich, staying until mid February when Henry rode with Katherine into Hertfordshire and Cambridgeshire on the initial stages of another pilgrimage to Walsingham. Among the gifts offered to the princess at this New Year were a second gold cup from Wolsey; two silver-gilt flagons from the princess’s third godmother, Katherine Courtenay, Countess of Devon; a pair of candle-snuffers from the Duke of Norfolk; bags containing a variety of nuts, grapes, oranges and cakes from local well-wishers; ‘rosemary bushes with gold-painted spangles’ (presumably used as decorations) from ‘a poor woman of Greenwich’; as well as a small purse made of ‘tinsel satin’, a costly silk fabric incorporating tiny brocading wefts of gold, silver or silver-gilt metal, given by ‘Mother Margaret’, Mary’s nurse.41

  FIGURE 4 Edward Stafford, Duke of Buckingham, whom Henry VIII executed for treason in 1521, from a nineteenth-century engraving by R. Ackermann.

  Henry was now approaching 29 and Katherine 35. It was ‘to fulfil a vow’, as the Venetian ambassador reported, that the queen now headed with Henry for Walsingham—a vow plainly connected to her desire to conceive a son before she reached the menopause.42 But when Henry was within sight of Walsingham, if he even got that far, he abruptly left his wife and returned alone to Essex, perhaps to see Fitzroy.43 Then, alerted to imminent danger by Wolsey, he hastened back to Greenwich, where he planned to strike against the Duke of Buckingham, the most important and the richest nobleman in the country.

  By mid April 1521, Henry had decided to put Buckingham on trial at Westminster Hall on a charge of high treason. He accused Buckingham of plotting to depose him, claiming that the duke had listened to the prophecies of Nicholas Hopkins, a Carthusian monk. According to these, Henry ‘would have no issue male of his body’ and Buckingham ‘should get the favour of the commons and he should have [the] rule of all’. The duke also stood accused of slandering Wolsey, calling him ‘the king’s bawd’ for arranging the lying-in of Elizabeth Blount and keeping a watchful eye over Fitzroy. Making matters worse for himself, Buckingham had declared that the death of Prince Henry in 1511 was divine vengeance for Henry VII’s execution in 1499 of the Earl of Warwick, Margaret Pole’s brother, by then the only remaining direct male descendant of Edward III and the strongest Yorkist rival for the throne.

  After a show trial in which Henry selected the judges and coached the prosecution witnesses, the duke was found guilty. Sentence of death was pronounced by his fellow peer, the Duke of Norfolk, who was barely able to control his tears as the verdict was delivered. Buckingham’s end was brutal. He died in agony, beheaded on 17 May by a bungling executioner who took three strokes of the axe to sever his head.44

  No sooner was Buckingham condemned than,
to Katherine’s dismay, Henry dismissed Margaret Pole as Princess Mary’s governess. As a prominent former Yorkist, she had fallen under suspicion for several reasons: the strongest in Henry’s eyes was that, three years before, Buckingham’s heir, Henry, Lord Stafford, had married her daughter Ursula, and as part of the nuptial settlement, the duke had contracted to pay Margaret the colossal and unexplained sum of £2,000.45 Pole’s best friends were all from prominent Yorkist families such as the Courtenays (the Countess of Devon was one of Edward IV’s daughters), and with Wolsey—the duke’s avowed enemy—constantly privy to the king’s thoughts and urging him on, Henry believed he had detected the beginnings of a menacing dynastic conspiracy of the sort that had scarred his father’s reign.46

  Almost fifteen years later, when Mary was ill and at loggerheads with her father, refusing to give him the obedience that he believed to be his due, the Spanish ambassador would remind Henry that she continued to hold Margaret Pole in the greatest affection ‘as her second mother’. When the ambassador asked whether, in the interests of a reconciliation and his daughter’s health, he would consider restoring Pole to her old position, Henry called her ‘an old fool’ and a woman ‘of no experience’. If Mary ‘had been under her care during this illness’, he said, ‘she would have died.’47

  By then, the battle lines would be irrevocably drawn over Henry’s break with Rome and divorce from Katherine. But Pole’s removal as Mary’s governess was also a watershed in 1521. Besides reflecting Henry’s enmity to those noble families he suspected of plotting against him, it also signalled the beginning of his rift with his queen. From now onwards, their lives would gradually drift apart.