The Children of Henry VIII (5 page)

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