Elizabeth Blount

• 1. Introduction

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  At a Christmas mummery held at Greenwich in 1514, Elizabeth Blount appeared in a gown of white satin. Her bonnet was blue velvet, her coif was damask gold. Richard Gibson, the King's Master of the Revels, noted her name in his bill for the costumes supplied that night. The court chronicler Hall wrote that this young woman "in singing, dancing, and all goodly pastimes exceeded all other."

  At that same court, Henry VIII was married to Katherine of Aragon and had yet to father a surviving male heir. How did a young woman from a Shropshire gentry family come to play a role in that crisis? And what became of her once the king's attention moved elsewhere?

• 2. A Shropshire Inheritance

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  Sir Thomas Blount of Kinlet was knighted by Henry VII at the battle of Stoke in 1487, on the day Lambert Simnel's rebellion was put down. Thomas later served as Steward of the Royal Park and Manor of Bewdley and attended the court of Prince Arthur at Ludlow Castle. Camden, in his Britannia, called the Blount family "very ancient and honourable" and noted that their name was famous in those parts.

  Sir Hugh Peshall, Elizabeth's maternal grandfather, served as Knight of the Body to Henry VII. He is named in the Ballad of Bosworth Field among "four good knights." Lord Stanley gave him and three others to Henry of Richmond on the eve of that fight. Peshall died in 1488, still a young man, when his daughter Katherine was a small child.

  Katherine Peshall married John Blount at the church at Kinlet on the 1st of August 1491. Both were children at the time. John was stated in later records to have been no more than seven years old. A document from 1524 describes him as "forty years old and more," placing his birth in the early 1480s.

  Landed gentry by status, the Blounts of Kinlet had no real national input until Elizabeth gave birth to a son bearing the king's name. That son was Henry FitzRoy.

• 3. Coming to Court

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  A record in the King's Year-book, dated the 8th of May 1513, shows that one hundred shillings was owed to Elizabeth Blount. The entry describes the sum as owed "upon a warrant signed for hir last yere's wages ended at thanuncacon of Our Lady last passed." By that date, she had been at court for at least a year. She had arrived as a maid-of-honour to Katherine of Aragon by the spring of 1512.

  Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, wrote to Henry VIII from Beauvais, France, on the 25th of October 1514. In a postscript, he asked the king to pass on a message. The next time he wrote to "Mistress Blount and Mistress Carru," he expected them to write back.

  At some point during 1514 or 1515, she became Henry's mistress. Their affair lasted longer than Henry's other liaisons of the period, which were generally brief and unacknowledged. Those who observed her described a woman of high spirits and "very good cheer." Henry, born in 1491, was roughly seven years older than Bessie. The affair that followed would last the better part of a decade. When it finally ended, the reason was not a quarrel but a birth.

• 4. A Son for the King

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  On the 15th of June 1519, Blount bore Henry VIII a son. The boy was named Henry FitzRoy, and Henry acknowledged him as his own. No other illegitimate child of the king's was ever publicly recognized. FitzRoy was later created Duke of Richmond and Somerset and Earl of Nottingham.

  The birth prompted a saying that spread through England: "Bless 'ee, Bessie Blount." Elizabeth had proved that Henry was capable of fathering a living, healthy son. That proof would have consequences far beyond any personal attachment between the king and his former mistress.

  The affair between Bessie and Henry ended soon after the birth, for reasons that remain unknown. It was thought at the time that the child's arrival was more of a happy accident than a deliberate career move. Shortly after, Henry began a new liaison, this time with Mary Boleyn. Like Blount, Boleyn was never formally recognized as the king's mistress. The position of public maitresse-en-titre was never offered by Henry to anyone except Anne Boleyn, who rejected it. The question that FitzRoy's existence now posed was not about relationships but about inheritance.

• 5. The King's Great Matter

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  Katherine of Aragon had endured at least seven pregnancies during her marriage to Henry. In 1511, she gave birth to a son named Henry, Duke of Cornwall. That boy died just seven weeks later. All subsequent pregnancies ended in miscarriage or stillbirth. Their daughter Mary was the only child of the marriage to survive infancy.

  FitzRoy's existence placed this record in a new light. Henry now had evidence that he could father a healthy, living son. The question of why his legitimate marriage had not produced one became harder to ignore. In the 1520s, some at court went further, proposing that FitzRoy be named the king's legal heir. Nothing came of the suggestion, but the fact that it was raised at all reveals how seriously the boy's birth was being weighed.

  Compared with Katherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn, Bessie Blount's importance to history has often seemed negligible. Yet as Henry FitzRoy's mother, she was an object of interest to many of her contemporaries. FitzRoy's birth stirred Henry's doubts about the validity of his first marriage. Bessie herself would not remain at court much longer. Her next appearance in the official records would be not as a royal mistress but as a baroness.

• 6. A Life After

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  In 1522, Bessie Blount married Gilbert Tailboys, 1st Baron Tailboys of Kyme, and the couple settled in Lincolnshire. Some said the Tailboys family had a history of insanity. The marriage produced three children: a daughter named Elizabeth and two sons, George and Robert. After the wedding, Bessie largely disappeared from the day-to-day records of the Tudor court.

  Lord Leonard Grey courted her after Gilbert Tailboys died in 1530, but without success. She went on to marry a younger man whose Lincolnshire lands adjoined hers: Edward Clinton, 9th Baron Clinton. The marriage took place some time between 1533 and 1535. A royal grant dated the 12th of February, in the twenty-sixth year of Henry's reign, confirms the approximate timing. It awards three tuns of Gascon wine yearly from the port of Boston, Lincoln, naming her as "Elizabeth, late Lady Taylbois, now wife of the Lord Clinton." Three daughters followed from this union: Bridget, Katherine, and Margaret.

  A letter dated 1529, sent to Bessie by FitzRoy's tutor John Palsgrave, survives. It suggests her involvement in the duke's upbringing was greater than had previously been believed. Henry VIII's attention to his son's upbringing was also described as "doting." But on the 23rd of July 1536, FitzRoy died, probably of tuberculosis, the illness then known as consumption. He was seventeen years old.

  Bessie served for a time as a lady-in-waiting to Henry's fourth wife, Anne of Cleves. Agnes Strickland records that she also served as a Great Lady of the Household to Katherine Howard. She returned to her husband's estates and died shortly after July 1540. Tradition held that consumption had taken her, as it had taken her son. She was not buried beside either of her husbands. Her daughter Katherine Clinton, born around 1538, lived until the 14th of August 1621, outliving her mother by more than eight decades.