King of England Henry VIII - The Six Wives & Many Mistresses of Henry VIII: The Womens Stories

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.

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.

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 fiances, 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 Henrys mistress was not widely accepted until the nineteenth century, and even then it was challenged and dismissed as an attempt to slur the kings 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?