Some claim that Henry continued the affair with Blount even after she married; but I find this highly unlikely. In a conversation on this topic with @lucreziaborgia; she made the great point that the majority of Henry’s known mistresses whose dates we can pinpoint (Blount, Sheldon, Jane Seymour, Katherine Howard, and Anne Boleyn– although the labeling of her as ‘mistress’ is perhaps not altogether fitting, given her recognition at court and by ambassadors as the king’s betrothed) were not married (or, for that matter, widowed– although that seemed less an issue in wives in the case of the wife potential of Christina of Denmark and the eventual marriage to Katherine Parr…we all know what a fuss was eventually made over KoA being his brother’s widow) during their relationships with him. The only possible exception to this is Mary Boleyn, but it may well be that her affair with Henry occurred before the Carey marriage as well; as she was in England for at least a year (and somewhere around the marriageable age of 18/19 in that year) before that marriage. The author of The Mistresses of Henry VIII, states that, in general, “when a [king’s] mistress married a courtier, it was usually a sign that the relationship was over.”
Due to this, I am examining the veracity of this claim:
“Thefactthat Henry offered no direct financial support to his former mistress is an indication of his indifference to those who no longer contributed to his pleasure.”
…based on the deduction that Henry’s relationship with Blount ended, at the latest, by 1522 (the year of her marriage).
In TheTudors; Henry doesn’t speak to Bessie Blount after visiting her, one last time, after the birth of Henry Fitzroy. His only interest is in their son, and their son’s welfare, rather than hers. In other words, he certainly does “discard her” (in Tudors, she’s also inaccurately already married when she gives birth to Fitzroy) as soon as he no longer wants her as mistress.
Historic record, again, does not reflect this fiction as a reality. But then, their Henry is selfish to the last, and a consummate philanderer besides– the first season focuses on the ‘lecherous’ aspect of the “blood-stained lecher” (again, another narrative that is due to the AOTD effect).
The marriage, in itself, was a sort of financial support to Henry’s former mistress, which is something missing from Tudors. As the heir to a barony, Tailboys outranked Blount.
“Tailboys was a member of Wolsey’s household and the cardinal may have had a hand in arranging the match. Henry does seem to have had a hand in it, as the marriage settlement put all income and property from Bessie to remain with her if her husband died, and then go to her heirs – it did not, as it often would, go to the Tailboys family on her death.”
Again, I say– so much for a pattern of “[offering] no direct financial support to his former mistress”; or a precedent of “indifference to those who no longer contributed to his pleasure.”
Shortly after the marriage of Tailboys and Blount, in June 1522, Henry VIII issued a grant for a manor and the town of Rokeby, Warwickshire. Significantly, the grant specified that it was onlyGilbert and Bessie’s issuethat could inherit this property first, so the argument that Henry only cared for his own issue, rather than his former mistress or any of her issue by another man, can not be made in this instance.
There is no evidence that suggests Henry was “indifferent” to Blount’s children that weren’t his, or Blount herself after his romantic relationship with her was over. Given the evidence, the claim that he only cared about her welfare because of her connection to his son/maternity of Henry Fitzroy is significantly weakened by the evidence of Henry issuing a grant to Blount a year after Fitzroy’s death.
When he was 16 “and not yet into his majority, an Act of Parliament was passed to put him in possession of his estates and enable him to settle a jointure (a provision for a wife after the death of her husband) on his wife”.
Here is the evidence regarding the daughter of Gilbert and Bessie, Elizabeth Tailboys:
“Henry VIII visited Elizabeth and her husband at Nocton on his northern progress in 1541. Elizabeth inherited the Tailboys estates after her brothers George and Robert died, and she was thus the fourth Baroness Tailboys of Kyme. Her husband, a member of the gentry, petitioned to have himself be named as Lord Tailboys; however, with a bad relationship with her husband, Elizabeth wanted the title for herself and Henry VIII ruled in favour of his former mistress’s daughter. His judges agreed that as long as the marriage was childless, Thomas could not have his wife’s titles.”
And now, for the speculated-mistress– Jane Popincourt.
Firstly, we have no definitive proof on the matter of whether Popincourt was actually ever Henry’s mistress. The evidence that tends to link the two is his parting gift of £100 to her.
But to play devil’s advocate against the quote; if Jane had been his mistress– well, a parting gift of 100 pounds in 1516 (equal to the pension given to Dr. Butts after Anne Boleyn recovered from the Sweat under his care, equal to the annual pension he gave Mary Boleyn after her husband died, and 70 pounds greater than the annual salary paid to Hans Holbein) certainly doesn’t suggest “indifference to those who no longer contributed to his pleasure”. Popincourt was leaving for France; so had there been an affair it certainly wasn’t going to be continued by telepathy!
To state that Henry’s“indifference to those who no longer contributed to his pleasure” was well-established and evident by 1528 is something that is easy to believe after consuming Tudor fiction. It’s a common narrative, and I think that’s why it’s so readily accepted and so easily believed. It confirms our preconceived notions about Henry VIII; and any opinions we may have given that we do have the benefit of hindsight. However, it is not a statement that holds up against the evidence available before 1528.
My hope is that, for anyone that might have read this series; my summation and analysis of the evidence might get people to question this narrative a little more. During my own research for this series, I certainly began to question not only the narrative itself, but why it used to be one I so readily believed.
I believe it is because Tudor fiction has a bigger impact on us than we may realize, but I’m curious to hear anyone’s thoughts on the matter– feel free to let me know in reblogs or replies.
Reading an article that challenges the popular view that the trial of the Duke of Buckingham in 1521 was a thinly-veiled excuse for judicial murder (which I’ve read by several historians, some of whom have a pretty clear dislike of Henry VIII anyways– Garrett Mattingly and Gareth Russell, especially).
“She is ‘her father’s daughter’. This phrase is first used about her at the age of six, and constantly thereafter. For contemporaries had only to use their eyes to see that it was true. She looked like Henry, with her father’s hair, skin-colour, nose and lips. She had much of Henry’s character as well: his intelligence, his force of personality, his eloquence, and his ineffable star-quality that made her, like him, the automatic centre of attention.
But in other respects, she is self-consciously different. When her father makes himself Supreme Head of the Church, he begins by reconsidering his coronation, much of whose ritual and language was wholly incompatible with his present claims. In particular, he revised the second part of the coronation service, the oath, which is the equivalent of a contract between monarch and people. And he alters the oath fundamentally. Obviously, the monarch’s promise, central since Magna Carta, to respect ‘the liberties of the Church’ is wholly rewritten. But that is only the beginning. The result is to transform the oath from what it had been since the Anglo-Saxon period, a compact between the king and the people, into a solipsistic promise to defend the rights of the crown. But most interesting are his alterations to the undertaking that deals with the monarch and justice. At his coronation he had sworn, like his predecessors and like all his successors, from Elizabeth I to Elizabeth II, to do justice not only in truth but in mercy. But now, in his redrafting (which happily was never used), he crosses the word ‘mercy’ out.
“[Henry VIII] had over 2,000 pieces of tapestry, the largest collection ever
recorded. Only one or two per cent remain in the royal palaces. His books have
fared better. His library at Whitehall was made up of books catalogued in two
numerical series, one going up to 910, the other to 1,450. Several of these
remain in the Old Royal Library, which is now in the British Library. The
losses from the library at Greenwich, which numbered 329 volumes, were more
severe and only twenty-seven have been identified, all in the library of
Trinity College, Oxford.
In
fact only his munitions remain occasionally intact. The string of castles and
forts he built along the south coast still stand, whereas his palaces have
vanished; his armour and weapons, lodged now as then in the Tower, survive in
prodigious quantities; even his loss of his warship, the Mary Rose, has been
our gain.
Otherwise
the losses have done incalculable harm, both to the king’s reputation and to
our understanding of him. For, by an irony of time, what Henry destroyed has
survived better than what he built. The palaces have vanished, but the ruins of
the monasteries, whose confiscated wealth built those same palaces, stand as a
mute indictment of Henry’s policies. The achievement of Henry’s victims, More
and Fisher, as it was other-worldly, survives; the king’s own glory, as it was
this-worldly, has gone.
The
result is a gross imbalance. We judge Henry simply on the negative side of the
account. This is large, and I am not pretending otherwise. But so is the credit
side: if Henry destroyed and dispersed more than any other king of England, he
also built and accumulated more.”
Born in the duchy of Cleves in 1515, Anne became the fourth queen of Henry VIII of England in 1540. Despite not speaking English at her arrival at court, Anne quickly mastered the language and managed to hold her ground when Henry decided to have the marriage annulled a mere six months later. Despite her short time as queen consort, Anne was wildly popular in England and spent the rest of her life there, enjoying her properties bested upon her as the “King’s Sister” (for her agreement to the annulment). She died in 1557 of what was likely a cancer.
Anne Boleyn had strong opinions about religion. It has been suggested that her religious views were formed by her early years in France. Her brother, George Boleyn, was often sent on diplomatic missions. He used his diplomatic bag to smuggle religious books that were banned in France as well as England. Anne’s chaplain, William Latymer, also collected religious books for her from Europe. She was a supporter of William Tyndale and attempted to protect those involved in the distribution of his English translation of the Bible. (…) Anne was not backward in promoting the vernacular English Bible. A lectern Bible was available for her household to use, and she herself owned a specially illuminated copy of Tyndale’s illegal translation of the New Testament. Both before and after becoming queen, Anne protected the importers of illegal English scriptures. (source)
“The third quality that dazzled contemporaries was personality. In the desperate crisis of the summer of 1549, Henry’s erstwhile secretary implored Protector Somerset to act on behalf of the young King Edward:
Sir, for a king, do like a king. Go no further than to him who died last of noble memory, Henry VIII. Kept he not his subjects from highest to lowest in due obedience? And how? By the only maintenance of justice in due course.
Mary I faced with male counsellors ready to treat her orders as an invitation to debate, burst out on one occasion that ‘she only wished her father might come to life for a month’. Early in James I’s reign, the theatrical company ‘Prince Henry’s Men’ had a huge success at the Fortune Theatre with a play with the significant title When you see me you know me. Indeed, so successful were they that His Majesty’s Players, their rivals at the Globe, had to get Shakespeare and John Fletcher to write Henry VIII. Each play assumes that Henry’s personal foibles and mannerisms would be immediately recognized by a London audience despite the years since the King’s death. Henry was remembered as a proper king.
There is a chasm between the ways historians see Henry VIII and the way his subjects saw him. But it would be wrong to reject the latter because today we are so much better informed. Both characterizations have to be held in tension. Fallible though Henry was, modern criticism cannot destroy the reality that to his people he was a great king. A ballad written soon after his death summed him up in these words.
For if wisdom or manhood by any means could
Have saved a man’s life to ensure for ever,
The King Henry the 8th so noble and so bold
Out of this wide world he would have passed never.
Not even Henry could manage that, butit is no little achievement that 450 years after his death it remains true that ‘When you see me, you know me’.”
“[Prince] Henry did have a genuine musical talent. Seeing it, his father fostered his interest by allowing him to have his own minstrel and providing him with a lute. The result was that Henry became an expert musician with a mastery of the lute, organ, and harpsichord. In later life he demonstrated his musical attainments by the composition of hymns, ballads, and two masses. His interest continued, possibly fostered by his affection for dancing and religion, which have deeply felt musical affinities. His joyous embrace of the Christian virtues taught by his tutors can best be seen in the verse in which he declares:
My mind shall be; / Virtue to use / Vice to refuse / Thus shall I use– me.”
“Cardinal Wolsey himself allegedly referred to Anne in 1523 as a ‘foolish girl’, while Cardinal Reginald Pole described Anne as a ‘girl’ when Henry VIII fell in love with her. In 1534, a year after her marriage, Anne was described by the Imperial ambassador Eustace Chapuys as being ‘in a state of health and of an age to have many more children’.”
— Conor Byrne, author of Katherine Howard: A New History and Queenship in England
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