by Roger Powell
Katherine Plantagenet, Countess of Huntingdon (1468/70–87)
Katherine was the illegitimate daughter of King Richard III but very little indeed is known about her. Even her date of birth and her mother’s name are unknown. All that can be stated with confidence is that she cannot have been born earlier than 1468 as her brother Richard was just 16 years old at the time. Nor is there any evidence to suggest a much later date of birth.
The earliest reference to Katherine is her marriage covenant, dated 29 February 1484, when William Herbert, Earl of Huntingdon agreed ‘to take to wife Dame Katherine Plantagenet, daughter of the King before Michaelmas of that year’. The Earl agreed to make her a jointure in lands of two hundred pounds whilst King Richard undertook to bear the whole cost of the marriage and settle lands and lordships on them to the value of one thousand marks per annum. Lands and lordships to the value of six hundred marks came from the King on the day of their marriage and a reversion of four hundred marks after the death of Lord Stanley. However, during the lifetime of the latter, they would have four hundred marks per annum from the revenues of the lordships of Newport, Brecknock and Hay. Lord Stanley’s involvement was due to his wife’s support of the Duke of Buckingham’s rebellion. Lady Stanley being none other than Margaret Beaufort, mother of Henry Tudor, subsequently Henry VII.
The marriage appears to have taken place between March and May 1484, the former date being when King Richard granted the said annuity and the latter when ‘William Erle of Huntingdon and Kateryn his wif’ received a grant of the proceeds of various manors in Devon, Cornwall and Somerset. The last reference to Katherine was in March 1485 when she and her husband received a further annuity of one hundred and fifty-two pounds ten shillings and ten pence from the King’s possessions in the counties of Carmarthen and Cardigan and his lordship of Haverfordwest
When Katherine died is again unknown, but one contemporary source, a list of the nobility present at the Coronation of Henry VII on 25 November 1487, stated that her husband was then a widower. If this can be supported by additional evidence, Katherine was clearly dead by that date. The cause may have been childbirth, the infant not surviving. Thus she passes from the pages of history.
Chapter III
The Bastards of Henry VIII (1491–1547)
Henry FitzRoy, KG, Duke of Richmond & Somerset (1519–36)
This young sprig of the House of Tudor was the illegitimate son of King Henry VIII and Elizabeth Blount, a lady of singular beauty, a maid of honour to his wife Catherine of Aragon.who ‘… in syngyng, daunsyng, and in all goodly pastimes exceded all other, by whiche … she wan the kynges harte’. Indeed her musical skills, physical charms and captivating personality made an indeliable impression on the young king whose own passion for music is well known. In his youth he had been taught to play the organ, lute and harpsichord and he even composed the words to several Court lyrics as well as several Masses.
The King’s interest in Mistress Blount occurred as his belief in Queen Catherine’s ability to produce a living son waned. Her last child, a daughter, was born in November 1518, only to die within a few hours. That he should look for a suitable distraction whilst his wife was with child, might be understandable. However, neither Mistress Blount nor her family seemed to benefit from the association and indeed it is quite possible that they may have disapproved. Nevertheless the possible opportunities that might arise from such an association would not have been lost on this worldly daughter of John Blount, of Knevet, in Shropshire. Indeed she made a very good marriage after the birth of her son to Gilbert, Lord Tailbois of Kyme, the son of Sir George Talboys, of Goltho, Lincolnshire.
Henry FitzRoy, for that is the surname the King gave him, was reputedly born in the summer of 1519 at Blackmore, Essex, an occasional retreat used by the King for his amourous escapades. Prior to the birth, his mother’s last appearance at court was in October 1518 when she participated in the celebrations at York Place, organised by Cardinal Wolsey, to mark the betrothal of the two year old Princess Mary to the Dauphin of France. If her son Henry was created Duke of Richmond and Somerset on his sixth birthday, this suggests that he was conceived at the beginning of September 1518.
Three to four months after Henry’s birth, his mother appears to have conceived again. This next child, a daughter named Elizabeth, was twenty-two years old in June 1542, and therefore was born circa June 1520. Within that three to four month gap, Elizabeth is believed to have married Gilbert Talbois, although no record of the marriage has survived. Why such great haste? Had Henry taken another mistress? Mary Boleyn, perhaps?
All we know for certain, is that there is no record of Henry VIII bestowing on his ex-mistress or her husband any honours worthy of the name in 1519–21 in celebration of their marriage. Indeed what honours Gilbert did receive, were all post-1521 and the earliest date at which she is described as Gilbert’s wife is 1522. Elizabeth’s third child, a son George, was sixteen years old in March 1539, therefore born pre-March 1523, and the earliest reference to his mother being married is in June 1522 when she and her husband were granted the manor of Rokeby/Rugby, co Warwick. Was this in celebration of their recent marriage? If so it raises the possibility of Mistress Blount bearing the King not just one child but two!
The reason for the break-up of this Royal relationship may have been due to the King’s interest in Mary Boleyn, now the wife of William Carey. They had been married in 1520 and Mary bore two children, a daughter Catherine (born 1524) and son Henry (born 1525/6), whose paternity gossip attributed to the King. Although it was often said that Henry named one of his ships after Mary, it now seems that the ship in question originally belonged to her father and was subsequently bought by the king for his navy.
But what of the young Henry FitzRoy? He was according to contemporary accounts, ‘a goodly man child in beauty like to the father and the mother’and ‘well brought up, like a Prince’s child’ and was given his own establishment at Durham Place, Cardinal Wolsey’s mansion in London. As the Cardinal was his godfather, this seemed a suitable solution. In his sixth year he was created Earl of Nottingham and Duke of Richmond and Somerset, with precedence over all other dukes, save for the King’s lawful issue, (the ceremony being described in an heraldic manuscript quoted in the Calendar of State Papers of Henry VIII). He was placed by the King in the care of Master John Palsgrave, Master Parre and Master Page with the words
‘I deliver unto you three my worldly jewel; you twain to have the guiding of his body, and thou Palsgrave, to bring him up in virtue and learning’.
The following month Henry was created Lord High Admiral of England and Warden General of the Marches of Scotland, a clear indication of his intention to promote him to only the highest of offices. He was also made a Knight of the Garter and installed 25 June 1525. Eight years later in 1533 he was promoted to the Lieutenancy of the same Order.
Unfortunately the King’s acknowledgement of his bastard son and his elevation to the peerage was not welcomed by all. Queen Catherine, in particular, resented the honour shown to her husband’s bastard, a fact that was noted by a Venetian observer at the English court:
‘It seems that the Queen resents the Earldom and Dukedom conferred on the King’s natural son and remains dissatisfied, at the instigation it is said of three of her Spanish ladies her chief counsellors, so the King has dismissed them the court, a strong measure, but the Queen was obliged to submit and have patience’.
Her fears were not unreasonable and were fuelled by her own inability to produce a healthy son of her own. Moreover, she feared that the King might make his bastard son and not their daughter, heir to his kingdoms as evidenced by the many other appointments that followed, including that of King’s Lieutenant-General north of the Trent, Lord High Admiral of England, Wales, Ireland, Normandy, Gascony and Aquitaine, Warden-General of the Marches of Scotland, Chamberlain of Chester and North Wales, Receiver of Middleham and Sheriff Hutton, Yorkshire, Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, Constable of Dover Castle and f
inally Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports. It was often said that the King had in mind to make Henry the King of Ireland, for which all these appointments were a preparation. Indeed the King instructed his Ambassadors to describe the young Duke as one ‘who is near of his blood and of excellent qualities, and is already furnished to keep the state of a great prince, and yet may be easily by the King’s means exalted to higher things’.
Indeed Henry’s impact on his contemporaries was considerable and can best be summed up in the words of William Franklyn, Archdeacon of Durham who thought he was:
‘a child of excellent wisdom and towardness; and, for his good and quick capacity, retentative memory, virtuous inclination to all honour, 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’.
His tutor, Richard Croke, agreed declaring that ‘although he is only eight years old, he can translate any passage of Caesar’.
Until the birth of the Prince of Wales in 1537, young Henry was therefore the only son of King Henry to survive childhood. It is only natural, therefore, to expect some degree of speculation at Court on whether the King intended to legitimise him and place him in the direct line of the succession. Indeed in 1536 no less a person than the Earl of Sussex raised this very issue at a meeting of the Privy Council declaring:
‘in the King’s presence, that considering that the Princess (Mary) was a bastard, as well the Duke of Richmond, it was advisable to prefer the male to the female, for the succession to the Crown.’
Certainly, it was believed by many that: ‘In case of there being no sons at all of this last marriage (to Jane Seymour), it is believed the King’s determination was, that the succession should go to his bastard son the Duke of Richmont (sic). His position at Court and in the King’s affections was therefore unique, especially since the 1536 Act of Succession had confirmed Mary and Elizabeth’s bastard status in law and gave Henry the right to choose his own successor. He was also assigned his father’s Royal Arms, although ‘within a bordure and debruised by a silver baton sinister and with a small shield in pretence’.
Despite a certain amount of gossip linking Henry’s name with a niece of Pope Clement VII, a Danish princess, a French princess and a daughter of Eleanor, Dowager Queen of Portugal, the young Duke of Richmond eventually married, in 1533, Mary, daughter of Thomas (Howard), 3rd Duke of Norfolk, but the marriage was never consummated. The match was arranged by the King, and the Duke of Norfolk had to break off a match he had arranged for Mary with Lord Bulbeck, son and heir of the Earl of Oxford. The choice was an interesting one, given that Queen Anne Boleyn was a cousin of the bride, and it is not stretching the imagination too far to suggest that she might have had some hand in the proceedings.
The Howard family’s rise to prominence under the Tudors was quite extraordinary, but the price they had to pay was in many cases tragic. It began with the marriage of Edward IV’s daughter Anne to Thomas Duke of Norfolk, a union that carried with it innate perils for any possible descendants. Fortunately all save one of their children died as infants, although a son Thomas survived until his early youth. When Henry VIII took Anne Boleyn as his wife, her uncle Thomas, Duke of Norfolk expected to benefit enormously from the relationship. However, unfortunately it never happened and the situation did not improve when it was discovered another relative, his nephew Thomas, had secretly proposed marriage to the King’s neice Margaret Douglas, whom the King looked upon as a daughter. Thomas subsequently died in the Tower for his folly. That Norfolk survived all of these mishaps speaks volumes for his skill as a courtier, especially when it was discovered that Henry’s fifth queen, Catherine Howard, another of Norfolk’s neices, was found guilty of adultery. Not surprisingly Norfolk eventually found himself incarcerated in the Tower, and it was only the king’s fortuitous death that saved him from the headsman’s axe. The poor man had lost not only two neices to the executioner, but also his eldest son, the Earl of Surrey, and in 1572 his grandson was beheaded for conspiring with Mary, Queen of Scots. Clearly a most unfortunate family.
At the beginning of that momentous year of 1536, therefore, the young Duke of Richmond entered his seventeenth year and seemed poised to step out of his father’s shadow and enter the pages of history in his own right. What happened next was completely unexpected, for within a month of the Earl of Sussex’s impromptu speech to the King and members of his Privy Council on the possibilty of Richmond taking his place in the succession, he was struck down with what was then diagnosed as a rapid consumption.
He died in ‘the kinges place in St James’, on 23 July 1536, gossip attributing his demise to poison by the late queen (Anne Boleyn, whose execution he had attended two months earlier) and her brother Lord Rochford. As a result his widow, who never remarried, but later became a Lady in Waiting to Anne of Cleves, had some difficulty in establishing her right to her dowry, because the marriage had been unconsummated.
SECTION II
STUART
BASTARDS
1603–1714
Chapter IV
The Bastards of Charles II (1630–85)
Sir James FitzRoy, or Crofts, later Scott, KG, 1st Duke of Monmouth & 1st Duke of Buccleuch (1649-85)
Of all King Charles II’s bastards, the Duke of Monmouth was undoubtedly his favourite. ‘He was the King’s greatest delight …His face and the exterior graces of his person such, that nature has perhaps never formed anything more accomplished’, enthused a contemporary. He had also ‘A wonderful disposition for all sorts of exercise, an attractive address, an air of greatness, in fine all the personal advantages spoke in his favour; but his mind said not one word for him’.
Born in Rotterdam, the child of Lucy Walter and the eldest of Charles II’s fifteen ‘officially’ recognised bastards (by seven mothers), speculation still surrounds his birth. James II believed that he was the son of Colonel Robert Sidney and not King Charles, but James clearly had political reasons for making this claim; the evidence supporting the Sidney parentage is not convincing, quite apart from the obvious resemblance that Monmouth had to Charles II. In any case, this claim has now been refuted once and for all by the DNA results obtained. These show conclusively that the Dukes of Buccleuch descend in the male line from the same stock as do the Dukes of Grafton, St Albans and Richmond, which of course is from King Charles II.
Some believed that Charles had married Lucy, which if true, would have meant that the present Duke of Buccleuch would now be King of England. In support of this claim are statements made by Lucy’s mother, who, when admonished about the life her daughter led, retorted that her daughter was married to King Charles. Then there was a conversation which took place several centuries later between the Dukes of Abercorn and Buccleuch to the effect that the latter had discovered a marriage certificate between King Charles II and Lucy in the muniment room at Dalkeith. After considering the matter for some time, they decided to destroy it.
At the age of eight, James was taken away from his mother and placed in the care of Father Stephen Goffe, chaplain to Henrietta Maria, a service he also performed for the illegitimate sons of King James II. It was a curious choice given that Father Goffe’s brother, William, was one of the signatories to the death warrant of Charles I. The King appointed Thomas Ross as his tutor, in retrospect a very bad choice because Ross proceeded to fill the boy’s head with stories of him being the King’s legitimate son. Ross even approached Doctor Cosin asking him to sign a certificate of marriage between Charles and Lucy, which he promised to conceal during the Doctor’s lifetime. However the doctor indignantly rejected the proposal and immediately informed the King. Was this perhaps the certificate found by the Duke of Buccleuch in the early part of the twentieth century?
Shortly before his return to England, young Jamie was placed in the care of William, Lord Crofts who passed him off as a relative. Again it was a very odd choice for the King to make, as Crofts was known to be ‘a quarrelsome, pleasure-loving man, constantly enga
ged in duels and fond of dancing’.
In retrospect it can be seen that the lack of any real formal education forced Monmouth to rely on other qualities in order to make his mark in the world. His physical beauty was quite remarkable and when presented at Court in 1662 Grammont described him as ‘a dazzling astonishing beauty with his mother’s sensuous seductiveness and his father’s sweetness of nature’. Court gossip even suggested that his father’s new mistress, Barbara Villiers, of whom more anon (see page 50), took more than a passing interest in him and Charles is said to have expedited James’s marriage so as to save him from her attentions.
In 1663, aged fourteen, he was betrothed and married Anne, Countess of Buccleuch, who was described as ‘the greatest heiress and finest woman of her time’ with an annual income of ten thousand pounds. In consequence, he was created Duke of Monmouth and given precedence over all other dukes not of royal blood. After his marriage he and his wife were also created Duke and Duchess of Buccleuch.