The Six Wives & Many Mistresses of Henry VIII: The Women's Stories

by Amy Licence

  In the spring of 1515 Henry was only twenty-three, yet he had begun his attempt to father a child relatively young, at just eighteen. Five years on, he was still young enough to hope for success and consider that, by now, his seed would have been strong enough, according to the ideas of the poem. It was quite another matter for Catherine. She was approaching thirty and must have felt her gynaecological failure deeply, surrounded as she was by a household full of attractive, accomplished young women who were getting married and bearing children. Soon, one of them would find her way into Henry’s bed.

  PART THREE

  Bessie Blount

  20

  Catching the King’s Eye, 1514–15

  The inflammate desire / of your good intent

  Newes to compile / eschewing idleness

  Cometh of grace / and of wisdom excellent

  To occupy such / as haue no business

  Whiche unto of doing / much harm doth oppress

  For surely idleness / is portresse of all synne

  Every vice / ready to let in1

  Bessie Blount is the first woman who is known, with any certainty, to have been Henry’s mistress. As a young and beautiful teenager in the queen’s household, she would have been dazzled by the authority and appearance of the king, as a member of a court that was geared towards the continual celebration, even exaggeration, of Henry’s talents and person. While directly answerable to Catherine, Bessie’s role was complementary to the king: to adore, revere, flatter and serve, to participate in his masques and dances, to collude in his disguises and secrets. In short, one of her roles was to flatter his ego, for whatever rewards it may bring her.

  It is sometimes easy to overlook just how exceptional Henry was in his early years, as his reputation has been shaped more by the large, despotic ‘mouldwarp’ figure he became in later life. In his youth, Henry was the early sixteenth century’s embodiment of the ideal man – beautiful, learned, talented and rich, with his boisterous, gorgeous court a series of long parties and excess consumption. He was a fantasy figure made flesh, whose word was law, whose displeasure was a secular equivalent of excommunication. For his courtiers of both gender, his favour fell on them like the sun’s rays and its withdrawal was like its eclipse. It is small wonder that Bessie yielded to his advances.

  Bessie already had a connection to Catherine of Aragon from the days of the queen’s first marriage. Her family came from Kinlet, in Shropshire, a property associated with Arthur, Prince of Wales, which the young couple may have visited. Bessie’s grandfather was Sir Thomas Blount of Kinlet, whose wife, Anne Croft, came from a family with longstanding associations with Ludlow Castle and service to its inhabitants. Bessie had been born at Kinlet in around 1500, and Catherine may even have seen the little girl in Shropshire while she was still an infant. The Blount family already had a powerful advocate in their relation Lord Mountjoy, Henry VIII’s Master of the Mint, who was married to Catherine’s lady-in-waiting and fellow Spaniard Agnes de Venegas. Perhaps it was his intervention that brought his young relative to the notice of the Tudors again.

  It was common practice for young men and women of high rank to be placed in an aristocratic household around the age of twelve, and Bessie’s relatives placed her in the most lucrative of positions in autumn 1512, under the protection of the queen herself. She was not the only young woman there, as a Mrs Stonor had been designated the ‘mother of the maids’, overseeing their conduct and training. Bessie was linked with Elizabeth Carew in Brandon’s letter of 1514, suggesting that the pair were friends and of a similar age. It also proves that both women had come to the king’s attention, with Bessie showing up again in official records that Christmas. By the age of fourteen, she had spent enough time at Henry’s court to acclimatise to its atmosphere and rules; she had witnessed the game of courtly love being played out, taken part in dances and masques, joined Catherine in pretending to be amazed when Henry removed his disguise at the end of the evening and witnessed the queen’s recent losses. She would have added to her existing accomplishments, learning languages, playing and composing music, reading, gambling and acquiring a veneer of the polish she observed in her elders. In contemporary terms, her looks matched the early Renaissance ideal of fair skin, blue eyes and golden hair. She was young, noble, accomplished and attractive. Henry’s court was a heady place in the early years, the most exciting place to be for any young woman with social ambitions.

  During the New Year celebrations of 1515, shortly after the time Catherine lost her fourth child, Elizabeth took part in a masque in the queen’s apartments. On 1 January, eight revellers danced in costumes of cloth of silver and blue velvet, embroidered with the letters H and K, which ‘straunge apparel pleased muche every person, and in especial the queen’, who invited them to perform in her chambers.2 The four ladies who danced in the roles of women of Savoy were Elizabeth Carew, Bessie Blount, Lady Guildford and Lady Fellinger (sic).3 They were partnered by four men disguised in Portuguese attire, who were Nicholas Carew, Henry himself, Charles Brandon and Lord Fellinger. Henry had been partnered with Bessie. Catherine ‘hartely thanked the kynges grace for her goodly pastyme and kissed hym’.4 Yet the queen’s warm response might have been masking her true feelings. She had learned to turn a blind eye to Henry’s amours, in the interests of harmony and pleasing her husband. It may be telling that, when the dance was repeated on Twelfth Night, Bessie’s place at Henry’s side had been taken by Jane Popincourt.

  A significant amount of time and preparation went into the many elaborate entertainments hosted at Henry’s court. Following an Italian tradition, he was the first king to use them as a permanent part of his court celebrations, rather than attached to specific dates in the Catholic calendar. The liberating qualities of masks had long been recognised and no doubt the king enjoyed the thrill of dancing incognito, but the carefully choreographed moves and use of moveable staging must have necessitated many rehearsals and costume fittings. These would have been conducted in secrecy, in order to preserve the concealed identities of the players. Perhaps these performances also provided the opportunity for flirtation, right at the heart of the court. It was an opportunity for the king to show favouritism by selecting those he wished to participate, with whom he would be sharing the secret preparations, a legitimate opportunity to get closer to certain women without supervision. The account books and expenses of some of these more elaborate events show that the planning process, of sewing, building, painting and rehearsing, was begun as early as a month in advance, with a string of performances or events drawn out over the intervening days. No doubt Henry enjoyed the process for its own sake, but it was also a useful tool for breaching the structure of the separate royal households and blurring the lines of intimacy. Did Catherine notice that some of her ladies had gone missing?

  The 1524 book The Education of a Christian Woman, written by Spanish Humanist Juan Luis Vives and dedicated to Catherine of Aragon, advises against young women participating in masked dances, for the immorality and licence involved: ‘Like little children, [they] take great pleasure in covering their face’ and running about where they ‘see and know everyone but are not recognised by anyone’. Vives cautioned that this was the first step towards a moral decline: ‘Under that mask, many shameful things are concealed … a woman who would be ashamed to come out and dance if she were known is not afraid to do so when she is masked, and consequently there is no respect for age, social status, fortune or reputation … not only to they hear obscenities and things unworthy of them but they say fearlessly what they would not dare to think if they were recognised.’ At Henry’s court, the masks were always removed at the end of the evening and identities revealed, but the confidence that disguise gave facilitated illicit romance – ‘a mask levels everything in the eyes of the beholder … thus little by little they become used to shamelessness so that the harm that modesty suffered under the mask is now flaunted and displayed’. In Vives’ eyes, masks related directly to the themes of carnival and
social inversion; they offered all women the ability to escape their roles and encouraged immorality. He concluded that ‘it is to be feared that these amusements may be the occasion of great misconduct’.5 Perhaps his patroness shared his concerns.

  Vives was also critical of the disruptive influence of dancing on young women at court, quoting St Ambrose’s letter to his sister:

  Is there anything more conducive to carnal lust than to reveal with crude movements those hidden regions of the body with either nature or moral discipline has concealed, to cavort with the eyes, to roll the head around, to toss back the hair? As a natural consequence this will lead to an offense against the divinity. What sense of shame can exist where there is dancing, confusion, loud noise?

  After observing such a dance, Vives related that ‘the king, delighted with the spectacle, told the girl she could ask of him what she wished’.6 Vives’ direct correlation between dancing and sex strikes a note which is far more worthy of the accusation of prudery than the English king who loved to dance in his youth, yet the message is still pertinent: dancing and masques formed part of the courtly rituals of flirtation and courtship and provided an opportunity for greater familiarity between the sexes than when they were confined to the separate households of Henry and Catherine.

  The fact that Henry drew his lovers, including three of his later queens, from within his wives’ establishments, made for an especially difficult atmosphere for any woman married to him at the time. A queen’s position required her to educate and steer such young women in their acquisition of accomplishments and in the direction of a suitable husband. A later play composed by John Heywood during the 1530s, The Play of the Weather, represented the gentlewoman’s household as the breeding place of vice, through dancing, singing and display; all the elements that contributed towards the magnificence of Henry’s court in its early years. The bawdiness of some of these plays suggests they were conducive to flirtation and innuendo that could readily spill over into the real lives of the courtly players:

  Why have ye always kissed her behind?

  In faith good enough if it be your mind.

  And if your appetite serve you so to do,

  By our Lady, I would have kissed mine arse too…

  But by conjecture this guess I have,

  That I do speak to an old bawdy knave.

  I saw you dally with your simper de cocker;

  I rede you beware she pick not your pocket.

  Such idle housewives do now and then

  Think all well won that they pick from a man.7

  The character of ‘Merry Report’ goes on to ask the laundress who speaks these lines whether he can ‘meddle’ with her and the Devil both together. His speech raises the question of airing dirty linen; literally in this sense, but also as a thinly veiled reference to immoral behaviour:

  Thy face were sun burned and thy clothes the sweeter

  Then that the sun from shining should be smitten

  To keep thy face fair and thy smock beshitten.8

  Later referred to by William Thomas as a man of ‘fleshly’ appetites, Henry used masques and disguises to conduct his dalliances under the very nose of the court.

  While the king was planning his courtly entertainments and his illicit amours, Catherine was dealing with another kind of dishonour in her household. Having served her for eight years, her confessor, Fray Diego, was convicted of fornication by an ecclesiastical court and dismissed in disgrace. According to one historian, his amours came to light when members of the court complained about his behaviour, leading Diego to comment that if he was ‘badly used, the queen is still more badly used’. Later that year, after he had returned to Spain, Catherine added a postscript in a letter to her father, begging him to show the friar favour as he ‘has served her very faithfully all the time he was in England, and much better than certain persons pretend’.9 His loss would have been felt by the queen but, perhaps considering the bad advice he had given her, Diego’s departure represented a significant break with Catherine’s past. She remained loyal to him in spite of it, losing an important confidant and defender to whom she had been very close.

  Henry was also dealing with a scandal of his own, involving his family and one of his closest friends. On 28 December, King Louis of France had written to Henry that ‘his satisfaction with the queen his wife was such that Henry might be sure of his treating her to her own and his satisfaction’.10 Four days later Louis died in Paris, leaving the eighteen-year-old Mary a widow. When the news arrived in England, Wolsey had drafted a letter to advise her that ‘during her heaviness … among strangers’, she should not forget that Henry ‘would not forsake her’ and that she should ‘do nothing without the advice of his grace’.11 In the confinement of her mourning, while the French court waited to see whether she was pregnant, Mary had been the target of attention from the new king, Francis I. Wolsey urged her that ‘if any motions of marriage or other offers … be made unto you, in no wise give hearing to them’.12 On 14 January, Henry sent Charles Brandon to bring his sister home to England but, six weeks later, Mary capitalised on the promise she had extracted from her brother and she and Brandon were married. Henry was furious but eventually allowed the pair to return, providing they paid a large fine.

  At home, the festivities continued. Catherine and her ladies were present at the jousts that began on 3 February, where Henry was ‘highlie to be praised’ for exceeding all others in having broken twenty-three spears. On May Day, she took rode out from Greenwich with Henry to ‘take the open aire’ at Shooter’s Hill and, ‘as they passed by the waie’, spotted a company of two hundred men in green livery, led by one figure who called himself Robin Hood. This was another staged encounter, with roles played by members of the king’s guard, who led the royal couple into the woods to see how the outlaws lived. Further role play followed, with Henry asking Catherine if she dared ‘adventure to go into the woods’, to which she replied that ‘if it pleased him, she was content’.13 In bowers of flowers, carolled by singing birds, they dined on venison, game birds and wine, while musicians played on flutes and singers sang. Followed by a crowd of thousands, they were accompanied home by the figure of Lady May herself, personification of the day itself, and her retinue of ladies given such seasonal names as Flora, ‘pleasance’, ‘sweet odour,’ ‘humidity’ and ‘green’.14 Bessie Blount was one of twenty-five ladies who accompanied Catherine, riding white palfreys, dressed in clothes ‘slashed with gold lama and very costly trim’.15 If her affair with Henry had not already begun, it may have started that July, indicated by the unexplained advance made to her father of two years’ worth of his salary. This strongly indicates Henry’s fondness for Bessie and either her compliance or his anticipation of it.

  An Italian observer at Greenwich, Nicolas Sagudino, was more than impressed with Henry’s appearance and skill, writing that he was ‘very expert in arms, most excellent in his personal endowments, so adorned with mental accomplishments of every sort, he has few equals in the world. He speaks English, French and Latin; understands Italian; plays almost every instrument; sings and composes; and is free from all vice.’ Along with the king’s guards, Sagudino had never seen ‘finer fellows’, and he was full of praise for the ladies-in-waiting, whom he considered ‘very handsome’. Even the fool, ‘Jack Madcap’, had proved himself ‘an excellent boon companion’. It was only Catherine for whom the Italian reserved his private criticism, stating that she was ‘rather ugly than otherwise and thought to be pregnant’.16 In fact, it was around this time that Catherine conceived her fifth child, so her condition would not yet have been visible but her gynaecological history may well have taken its toll on her once-youthful appearance.

  It cannot have been easy for the queen, entering another cycle of hope with the memories of her recent disappointments. In a few short years she had lost her youthful curvaceous beauty, which had had been so praised upon her arrival in England. Just four years later, Francis I would go so far as to describe her as old
and deformed, in comparison with Henry’s youth and good looks. Worse still, she had sacrificed it in the attempt to provide Henry with a family, but did not even have the string of children to show for it, which would have been worth the pain she had experienced if it secured her position in her husband’s affections and earned the respect of the court. She had been young once, and she knew what it was to be loved by a man like Henry. To see his affections transferred elsewhere, even under the guise of honouring her through court entertainments, cannot have been easy. Catherine took refuge in the status of her position. Her marriage and appearance might have changed but she was still Henry’s wife and England’s queen, and as such she would command the respect and deference that was due to her. She was an integral part of the court, of the country, and as she continued to conceal any pain her life may have caused her, she became even more the embodiment of the role to which she had been born.

  Once Catherine’s pregnancy was confirmed, Henry may have again sought the attention of other ladies at his court. Jane Popincourt had not yet departed for France and, with possible flirtations with Elizabeth Carew and Bessie Blount established, the king did not have to look far to find attractive young ladies with whom to indulge while he awaited his wife’s confinement. He was young, attractive, accomplished and royal; his court was the most splendid in Europe, famed for its chivalry and partying. The royal coffers were still healthy, even after the expenses incurred by Henry’s victories in France and in the tilt yard, and the long summer days were filled with pleasure, as the king travelled from one of his beautiful properties to the next, adorned by jewels and cloth of gold. In the eyes of his contemporaries, Henry literally had a touch of divinity about him. He was the embodiment of magnificence. Setting aside the fact that to refuse his advances could have put an end to a promising career and the advancement of a whole family, to be the mistress, or favourite, of such a man would be an honour that few could refuse.