The Six Wives & Many Mistresses of Henry VIII Read online

  for Tom, Robin and Rufus

  First published 2014

  Amberley Publishing

  The Hill, Stroud

  Gloucestershire, GL5 4EP

  www.amberley-books.com

  Copyright © Amy Licence, 2014

  The right of Amy Licence to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyrights, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the Publishers.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN 9781445633671 (PRINIT)

  ISBN 9781445633794 (eBOOK)

  Typesetting and Origination by Amberley Publishing.

  Printed in the UK.

  Contents

  Introduction: The Six Wives and Many Mistresses?

  Part One: Catherine of Aragon

  1: A Maid from Spain, 1485–1500

  2: A Royal Welcome, 1501

  3: Marrying Arthur, 1501

  4: Ludlow, 1502

  5: The Young Widow, 1502–03

  6: Betrothal Games, 1503–05

  7: The Other Spanish Princess, 1506–07

  8: Princess of Scandal, 1507–09

  9: In Henry’s Bed, June 1509

  10: Coronation, 24 June 1509

  11: Catherine’s Court, 1509

  12: Pregnancy, 1509–10

  Part Two: The Queen’s Rivals

  13: Anne, Lady Hastings, 1510

  14: The Baby Prince, 1510–11

  15: Regent, 1511–13

  16: Etiennette de la Baume, 1513

  17: Jane Popincourt, 1514

  18: Elizabeth Carew, 1514

  19: Labour and Loss, 1514–15

  Part Three: Bessie Blount

  20: Catching the King’s Eye, 1514–15

  21: Begetting a Boy, 1515–16

  22: The Quiet Queen, 1516–18

  23: The Illegitimate Son, 1519

  24: The Proud Aunt, 1520

  25: Field of Cloth of Gold, 1520

  26: Mother of the Princess, 1520–22

  Part Four: Mary Boleyn

  27: Kindness, 1520–22

  28: The King’s Mistress, 1522–25

  Part Five: Anne Boleyn

  29: The Other Boleyn Girl, 1513–22

  30: Henry Percy’s Fiancée, 1522–23

  31: Brunet, 1523–25

  32: A Vanishing World, 1525–26

  33: Love Letters, 1526–27

  34: Anticipation, 1527

  35: The King’s Darling, 1527–28

  36: Ménage à Trois, 1527–28

  37: The Blackfriars Trial, 1529

  38: The Other Women, 1525–32

  39: Rejected Queen, 1531–32

  40: Calais, 1532

  41: Rise of the Falcon, 1533

  42: A Familiar Story, 1533–34

  43: The Shelton Sisters, 1535

  Part Six: Jane Seymour

  44: Death of a Queen, January 1536

  45: A Little Neck, May 1536

  46: Queen Jane, 1536–37

  47: A Prince at Last, 1537

  Part Seven: Anne of Cleves

  48: Vacancy in the Bed, 1537–39

  49: I Like Her Not, 1539–40

  50: The Unwanted Bride, 1540

  Part Eight: Catherine Howard

  51: The King’s Infatuation, 1540

  52: The King’s Sister, 1540

  53: Rose Without a Thorn, 1540–41

  54: An Old Fool, 1541–42

  Part Nine: Catherine Parr

  55: The Learned Widow, 1542–43

  56: More than an Ornament, 1544–45

  57: Queen in Danger, 1546

  58: The Survivors, 1547

  Picture Section

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Acknowledgements

  List of Illustrations

  INTRODUCTION

  The Six Wives and Many Mistresses?

  Whoso na knoweth the strength, power, and might,

  Of Venus and me her little son Cupid;

  Thou Manhood shalt a mirrour been aright,

  By us subdued for all thy great pride,

  My fiery dart pierceth thy tender side.

  Now thou who erst dispisedst children small

  Shall wax a child again and be my thrall.1

  This is not a biography of Henry VIII. The narrative of his life is already well known. It is the story of the women who shared his bed, as his legal wives or his mistresses, and explores their relationships in the context of the sexual and cultural mores of the day. Specifically, it focuses on what is known about the circumstances under which the king wooed them: the promises he made, the gifts he gave, the sweet nothings he whispered and how their lives changed as a result. It charts their status as fiancées, wives, queens and mothers, set against wider sixteenth-century notions of duty, religion, gender and class, and the places where their behaviour conformed to, and transgressed from, the definitions of these concepts.

  In that sense, this is a collective biography overlapping a number of individual lives with that of the king. Yet while the focus is not always on Henry, he is the unavoidable common thread. His character, both as a king and a man, raises questions of power and its exercise, at the interface of his private and public roles. His relationships range from those that were opportunistic and temporary, conducted in the homes of his friends or during his absence from court; to his established mistresses, well known to his intimate circle; to the brides he led to the altar, whom he elevated to the status of queen and whose role was also a national and political one.

  Henry VIII remains a controversial figure. He was also unique. Of course, he operated within the context of his times but, to state an obvious if often overlooked point, his personality was his own. Therefore it is not helpful to compare him to modern figures, or to apply modern psychological concepts or labels, or even to draw conclusions based on comparisons with his contemporary monarchs. Henry was a complex man, one of the most enigmatic and challenging to a historian, in spite of the wealth of contemporary sources documenting his life that survive. There is a mass of primary material about Henry, so much so that the question for the biographer becomes what to leave out, as well as what to include. However, this book is also composed with recognition of the multitude of crucial evidence that has been lost. And some of those silences are significant. Even when appearing at his most decisive, his most exuberant, extroverted and triumphant, Henry is also at his most elusive to the modern world, as demonstrated by the vast range of interpretations writers have placed upon his actions. Little wonder, then, that his private life continues to elude us. As always, then and now, like the inimitable signature image created by Holbein in 1537, Henry must stand alone.

  This book challenges the long-standing view of the king as a lover. It is a frequently repeated statement that Henry VIII only had two mistresses – Elizabeth Blount and Mary Boleyn – and, indeed, beside his French peer, the sybaritic and syphilitic Francis I, his track record with women makes him appear demure, even restrained. He certainly had no official mistress in the way of the Valois king, although he did offer Anne Boleyn the role, which she refused. This widely held view persists because of the paucity of material that relates to his extramarital affairs, but it may be an incorrect conclusion. While Francis paraded his conquests
with pride, Henry was a deeply private man and preferred to keep his amours known only to a small, loyal core of companions: his closest friend, his chief minister, the attendants on his bodily needs and the guards who ensured his safety.

  The popular image we have of Henry VIII, the private man, was created by default. We only know about his affair with Elizabeth Blount because she happened to become pregnant. Equally, the name of Mary Boleyn would have little significance had Henry not decided to marry her sister. As it is, the theory that Mary was Henry’s mistress was not widely accepted until the nineteenth century, and even then it was challenged and dismissed as an attempt to slur the king’s character. Without those two related facts, the image we would have of Henry today would be as an anachronistic shining example of marital fidelity, and we know this was not the case.

  There is no question that Henry was very good at covering his tracks. So good, in fact, that he continues to throw us off the scent five centuries later. What happened late at night when the king was a guest in the properties of friends, or on royal progress, or abroad, would not necessarily have become general knowledge. The modern argument that something would have been whispered at the time if Henry had slept with more women runs counter to the many occasions of Tudor scandal known to scholars today for which no contemporary rumours survived. It underestimates the nature of surviving source material. It also underestimates the king and the world he inhabited. An early scandal at his court gave Henry a dislike for having his personal linen aired in public and his subsequent encounters were conducted in privacy. Carrying his own personal lock from palace to palace and restyling his privy chamber, as well as staying at the properties of sympathetic friends, he achieved a degree of privacy that ensured information about his amours was kept to a minimum. He was not able to eradicate it all, though.

  Henry was a complex and multidimensional man, and there are many aspects of his reign and personality that do not feature in this story, except for where they have significance for a particular woman. It is beyond the scope of this book to follow him into Parliament, trace the impact of the Reformation, examine his relationships with his children or observe him as a diplomat. Consequently a one-sided account of Henry emerges, but this is a deliberate prioritisation in order to facilitate greater exploration of the man as a lover. The spotlight falls on his bedchamber, his bedclothes, on courtiers dressed in masks, on the keyholes, shadows and hidden corners of his palaces of pleasure. It exposes an unfamiliar figure lying behind the oft-repeated image of the prudish, restrained king, shedding light on an earthy, hungry, sexually voracious man who had ample resources to achieve his desires. This study also rejects the unrealistic notion that Henry abstained from sex while wooing Anne, from 1525 to the autumn of 1532. The notion of a delicate, prim and strait-laced king is belied by the cumulative weight of direct and indirect evidence about his sexual exploits. This is not an attempt to sensationalise this aspect of his life, but rather to study his wives and mistresses in the context of sixteenth-century sexuality and kingship. Henry was not quite ‘of such slight morals that he slips readily into the gardens of others and drinks from the waters of many fountains’, as Francis I was described, but he was no prude either. Perhaps the most telling comment about his extramarital activity comes from his own pen, when he offered to take Anne Boleyn as his only mistress, ‘casting off all others besides you out of my thoughts and affections, and serve you only’. Who were all these others?

  The power was almost always in Henry’s hands. As an absolute king, he could dictate the terms of his sexual affairs and the nature of his marital relations. And he dictated all of them, even the ones where he allowed his lovers the illusion of control. That control was always his gift to them. This does not preclude a romantic reading of Henry’s character, or the fact that he was capable of falling deeply in love; nor does it blame him for his actions or choices, or attempt to justify them. Henry could be tender, devoted and passionate, an ideal lover of the time, but ultimately he remained king, and that created an uneasy blend of mastery and obligation in and out of bed. Those who failed to facilitate his wishes when it came to his intimate relationships and politics were swiftly removed. Henry’s greatest personal difficulties arose when his needs came into conflict with circumstances beyond his control, such as fertility, age or mortality. He was not a king who liked to be denied. He was prepared to change the centuries-old religious practices and identity of his country, reject the Pope, challenge canon law and risk his immortal soul by excommunication in order to achieve his aims. There is no question of Henry doing anything by halves.

  In recent years, there has been much scholarly focus on the perceived changes in the king’s character. The year 1536 has been identified as a significant turning point in the transformation of the most accomplished and beautiful young monarch in Christendom into the obese despot who sent friends and enemies alike to their deaths. Some historians have sought different catalysts, comparing pivotal moments in the king’s life to find the origins of change. This provides too simple a solution to Henry’s complex and evolving character, to his reluctance to face his own mortal limitations, which not even the resources of his entire court, his entire country, could alter. The seeds of the paranoid, defensive figure of his later years were already present in the young man. In fact, it was his gradual realisation that he was no longer that golden figure that allowed his petulant, despotic self to emerge. Yet the old man could still be as tender hearted and passionate as the youth, even if his health and corpulence would not allow him to play the nimble lover. His character is decisively revealed through a study of his sexual relationships as an evolving whole, rather than as a series of steps. His amours present a more gradual change, a fluctuating juxtaposition between his true nature and his reactions to circumstances when he felt out of control, but essentially a continuity, although exaggerated, of the same elements of his character.

  Inevitably, the experience of being the wife or mistress of Henry VIII varied over time. In 1543, the husband Catherine Parr married against her better judgement and the wishes of her heart was hardly recognisable as the ardent young man who had jumped into bed with the curvaceous, auburn-haired Catherine of Aragon. At seventeen, Henry was tall, dazzlingly handsome, athletic, learned and fearless; he danced all night following long days of jousting, disguisings and banquets, capturing the attention of every woman in the room. He was used to getting what he wanted, and with age came the painful realisation that he commanded young women’s attention because of his status rather than his person. This book presents a number of Henrys, just as it looks at a series of relationships. Even when these overlapped, the king was a different lover with each woman, according to the context and nature of the encounter. It is this book’s aim to delineate the differences and highlight the similarities.

  To this end, I have identified three key phases of Henry’s intimate relationships, to better analyse the experience of his women.

  Firstly, between 1509 and 1525, we see a youthful Henry, engaged in the quest for pleasure, jousting, dancing, feasting and indulging in a number of short-term flirtations and liaisons, some of which became sexual. The young king was a dazzling figure, believing himself the embodiment of the courtly love tradition, yet he was also very much a man of his times and his chivalric romanticism did not prevent him from sowing his wild oats. This period is commensurate with his first marriage to Catherine of Aragon, whose tenure as his wife was longer than those of all his other wives put together. They were well matched. Yet it is also the story of the disintegration of their relationship, which began passionately and cooled over time, although until 1525 Catherine was still secure in her position as queen and wife. These were Henry’s ‘green years’.

  The second period, 1526 to 1537, is dominated by the king’s desire for a son. Once Catherine had gone through the menopause Henry needed to look elsewhere for a legitimate heir, placing him under increasing pressure, an escalating desperation, to achieve dynastic security and
prove his manhood. This is essentially a reactionary time for the king, as he struggled to control the unforeseen circumstances that not even his immense temporal power could alter. As the years passed and the legal separation from Catherine eluded him, he did not put his sexuality on hold. Until he married Anne Boleyn late in 1532 he continued his pursuit for physical satisfaction, although the extent to which this involved Anne is another question. Henry ultimately achieved his aim with the birth of his son by Jane Seymour in 1537, but he had turned his world upside-down in the process. These are the years of turmoil on almost every plane: religious, political and personal.

  Finally, this work presents the years 1537 to 1547 as Henry’s attempt to recreate the stability and happiness of a loving marriage, similar to that he had experienced with Catherine of Aragon in the early years. In his old age, he wanted a woman to share his bed and be at his side on public occasions; one who combined the breeding, looks and intelligence that would make her a suitable queen. However, as Henry discovered, you can’t repeat the past. By 1537, he was no longer the man he had been and the reputation he had acquired as a ‘dangerous’ lover preceded him on the international stage. Frustratingly, the women he wanted didn’t always want him, although some were still unable to refuse the proposals of the king. It might be accurate to consider this section the years of self-deception.

  It has been essential to this work to allow Henry’s women to occupy a percentage of the book that accurately reflects the duration and result of their connection with him. Therefore, the woman who features most frequently is Catherine of Aragon, his wife of over twenty years. Her life and Henry’s were entwined long before their wedding day and well after their eventual separation. From 1488, when Catherine was first proposed as a bride for an English prince, to her death in 1536, she occupied a position in relation to Henry that was rarely simple in terms of their domestic life and her impact upon English history. Following her, Anne Boleyn’s term of eleven years as the king’s love was of equal importance on the national stage.

  This triangle of Henry, Catherine and Anne has fascinated readers for centuries and will, no doubt, continue to do so. However, his other wives and mistresses have often been glossed over in traditional narratives as having less of an impact upon English history. This book rejects that approach. Instead, it seeks to understand the experiences of all the women wooed and won by Henry – or, rather, by a number of different Henrys – over the course of the years. They may have left less of a mark on national politics and shared his bed for less time but Henry was no less important to them as a result. The king may be the factor they have in common but the focus is firmly on them.