Who was BESSIE BLOUNT? Henry VIII’s mistress Elizabeth Blount

Who was BESSIE BLOUNT? Henry VIII’s mistress | Elizabeth Blount

Buckle up for another journey back to Tudor England because today on History Calling I’m going to tell you the story of Bessie Blunt, the teenage girl who I think was Henry the Eighth’s most successful mistress and why I believe she deserves that title. Elizabeth Blunt, more commonly known as Bessie, was most likely born in around 1499 or early 1500, although biographer Elizabeth Norton plumps for a slightly earlier date of 1498. She was the daughter of John Blunt of Kinlet and his wife Catherine Pesel, and one of the older, if not the oldest, child from amongst their eight surviving offspring. Given that Kinlet is in Shropshire and Bessie’s family also held lands in Worcestershire, we can make an educated guess that she grew up in one or both of those counties. Her later correspondence, ownership of a book of Latin and English poems called Confessio Amantis by John Gower, which she signed with her first married name, and likely ownership of one of Geoffrey Chaucer’s works, signed in her maiden name, indicates that she had a good level of education for a lady of her time. She will also have been raised Catholic, having been born well before the English Reformation. Her family had had links to the household of Prince Arthur Tudor during his brief stay in Ludlow Castle with his wife Catherine of Aragon before his untimely death in 1502, and it may have been these links which helped Bessie to land a court position in 1512 when she was appointed to the household of the new Queen Catherine, who had married Arthur’s brother Henry the Eighth in 1509.

Twelve was the minimum age a girl could take up a position like this, and it is her appointment plus the knowledge of when her parents married that allows us to narrow down when Bessie was born. Incidentally, the age of Anne Boleyn, Henry’s second wife, who was born at around the same time, can be similarly ascertained in part because of her appointment to the household of Margaret of Austria in 1513, see my video all about her date of birth to learn more. At court, Bessie’s employment initially brought her a salary of 100 shillings per year. This was only half what the maids of honor earned, and Beverly A. Murphy suggests in her book on Bessie’s oldest son that the girl didn’t originally have a formal position, thus accounting for her low income. Norton, however, thinks that it means Bessie was only being paid for half a year and so came to court in September 1512 rather than March, which is the month favored by Murphy. Whatever the answer, by the autumn of 1513 she was definitely a maid of honor and was receiving the full 200 shillings. Mistress Blunt, as she would have been known, impressed with her musical and dancing abilities, further indicating that she had been well educated, and at a New Year’s mask in 1514 at which she wore a dress of blue velvet in the fashion of Savoy with a silver cloak and a bonnet of burned gold, she was partnered with the king himself.

There is speculation that at around that time she was the mistress of Charles Brandon, the new Duke of Suffolk and soon to be the king’s brother-in-law. This is because of a letter Brandon wrote to the king from France in 1514 in which he asked Henry to tell Bessie and another woman named Elizabeth Carew that the next time he wrote to them or sent them tokens they were to write or send tokens in return. We can’t discount an affair with Brandon though Bessie would have been very young at this point, but as Beverly Murphy points out, it may also have been nothing more than a piece of harmless flirtation. There is also an unsourced nineteenth-century rumor that she had a suitor called Sir Anthony Penrose, which Murphy dismisses as a later invention though Norton wonders if it might have been true. What did Bessie look like, we might wonder well she was reputedly beautiful, and even John Barlow, dean of Westbury, a favorite of Wolsey’s, would say in 1532 that Bessie was better looking than Anne. In the following century, historian Edward Herbert, Baron Herbert of Cherbury, would write that she was thought for her rare ornaments of nature and education to be the beauty and masterpiece of her time. He cites no source for this beyond the sixteenth-century chronicler Edward Hall, who I’ll be quoting for you in a minute, but perhaps he had documents now lost to time. There is no surviving portrait or drawing of Mistress Blunt to allow us to judge for ourselves, but we do have this monumental brass held in the British Museum. Elizabeth Norton argues that it was commissioned by Bessie herself after her first husband’s death in 1530 and is therefore an attempt at a real likeness, though the museum dates it to circa 1540, which is right around the time she died, so I’m not so sure. To my mind, it doesn’t look very well executed, one hand is bigger than the other, for instance, and the eyes are uneven, and I suspect it’s fairly generic and stylized and cannot be taken as a literal interpretation of her looks. Norton does point out though that it suggests that Bessie liked to wear the stylish French hoods then in fashion. There is also a little statue of her on the tomb of her parents in Kinlet Church, there are little statues of all their children in fact, but as we aren’t sure which of their daughters she was eldest or second eldest and the labels on the statues have mostly worn away, it’s not much use either.

As the years progressed and she grew up, Bessie pops up in the records of the Tudor court in her role as one of the queen’s ladies, taking part in the May Day 1515 festivities, for example, and no doubt attending the many rounds of jousting tournaments which were so popular at the time. We don’t know when her romantic relationship with Henry the Eighth began, but Edward Hall, writing at least a decade later after her father had been created a knight, recorded that you shall understand the king in his fresh youth was in the chain of love with a fair damsel called Elizabeth Blunt, daughter to Sir John Blunt, knight, which damsel in singing, dancing, and in all goodly pastimes exceeded all other, by the which goodly pastimes she won the king’s heart, and she again showed him such favor that by him she bare a goodly manchild of beauty like to the father and mother. This child called Henry FitzRoy was almost certainly born in June 1519 for reasons which I’ve laid out in my video on him, which I’ll leave linked for you, and we know that Bessie’s last appearance at court was in October 1518. This was at an event at York Place, the home of Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, then King Henry’s top minister, to mark the engagement of Henry and Queen Catherine’s only surviving child, Princess Mary, to the Dauphin of France. I tend to think that Bessie’s relationship with the king began in 1518 or late 1517 at the earliest, as I think she would have become pregnant sooner had she been sleeping with Henry before that. I know there’s a lot of talk about his fertility issues, and in fact I have a whole video on his and his wife’s challenges in that area, but the young Henry had no problems getting Catherine of Aragon repeatedly pregnant in the 1510s, and I don’t see any reason to doubt that had he and Bessie been sleeping together for more than a few months she’d have been pregnant more quickly too. Elizabeth Norton thinks the affair might have lasted longer, but there simply isn’t any evidence to confirm it one way or the other. As it was, Bessie was expecting at about eighteen or nineteen and a mother at nineteen or at the very most twenty.

Nowadays of course we would fret at such a young girl having a relationship with a man who was not only married with a young daughter, but who was about eight or nine years older than her, for Henry was born in June 1491. In the early 1500s, however, this wouldn’t have even been blinked at, and unlike Henry’s fifth wife, another teenager called Catherine Howard, Bessie knew him when he was in his prime and generally acknowledged as being very good-looking. Once her pregnancy was known about, Wolsey was tasked with taking care of her lying-in, and she was removed to the Priory of St Lawrence at Blackmore in Essex, where her son was born and presumably christened with the cardinal as one of his godparents. Lord Henry FitzRoy, as he was initially known, was the only child born to a woman the king hadn’t married whom Henry the Eighth ever acknowledged as his, and the boy’s birth at a time when the king had no other living sons and increasingly little chance of getting one from Catherine of Aragon made him of great importance to his father. This did not translate to any enduring love for Bessie however, and she and the monarch did not resume their relationship. Henry did see to it though that she was well taken care of, for soon after delivering FitzRoy she was married off to Gilbert Talboys of Lincolnshire. Gilbert was a ward of the crown as his father was suffering from mental health problems, and so the marriage must have been signed off on by the king. Getting the monarch’s cast-off as a wife may not initially seem like much of a prize, but a later document discussing Elizabeth’s jointure, the money she would be entitled to if her husband predeceased her, hinted at how valuable an ex-royal mistress could be, for it said that Gilbert and his father had received not only great sums of money, but also many benefit to their right much comfort thanks to their connection to Bessie. This surely would have helped to compensate for the fact that socially speaking Gilbert had married down by taking her on.

There is no official record of Mistress Blunt being Mistress Talboys until the eighteenth of June 1522, when the king granted her and Gilbert the manor and town of Rugby in Warwickshire. However, Murphy argues that they were married in 1519 because their eldest daughter was recorded as being twenty-two in June 1542, placing her birth in 1520 and her conception, which we’re assuming took place within wedlock, in 1519. This isn’t a perfect chain of evidence given that people’s ages could be inaccurately remembered, so it’s still possible that the marriage took place a little later. Norton however has a different and far more scandalous explanation. This eldest Talboys daughter was called Elizabeth after Bessie herself, and she was followed by two brothers who survived infancy called George, born in 1522 or 1523, and Robert, who Murphy says was born about 1524 though Norton says only somewhere between 1524 and 1530. To explain the fact that the younger Elizabeth seems to have been born in 1520 even though there is no solid evidence of Bessie’s marriage until 1522, Norton claims that Henry the Eighth was probably the father of the little girl. I must confess though that I am unconvinced by this, not least because there’s no reason for him not to have acknowledged the child if she was really his. Henry was chronically short of children and even an illegitimate daughter could have had her uses down the line in the marriage market. The argument Norton puts forward that Henry had two illegitimate daughters, the former princesses Mary and Elizabeth, and wouldn’t have wanted to acknowledge a third who was older than Elizabeth in case she expected to be put into the line of succession also doesn’t seem logical to me, as Elizabeth Tudor wasn’t born until 1533 and she wasn’t rendered illegitimate until 1536. If little Elizabeth Talboys, born all the way back in 1520, was Henry’s daughter, she could have been recognized as such many years before it became clear what a mess his marital and parental career would become. A relationship which lasted long enough to produce two children would also I feel have attracted greater comment from contemporaries. You can probably tell from what I’m saying here that I don’t think Henry fancied Mary Boleyn’s children either, but that’s another story.

Norton also cites the short age gap between FitzRoy and his little sister versus the longer age gap between the girl and her next brother as evidence that FitzRoy and Elizabeth had the same father, King Henry, and that Bessie only married Gilbert later on. I think the gaps are easily enough explained though by unrecorded miscarriages, short-lived children, or simple abstinence. The tomb of Gilbert Talboys was opened in 1805 and the coffins of three young children were found buried with him who even Norton assumes were some of the otherwise unknown offspring of Bessie and her husband. Finally Norton argues that Henry took an unusual interest in the young Elizabeth Talboys, but to my mind the evidence she cites doesn’t indicate even an ounce of the interest he displayed in FitzRoy, and I don’t see any peculiar regard here that cannot be accounted for by the fact that she was his son’s half-sister. To sum up then, I think on balance that the younger Elizabeth was the daughter of Gilbert Talboys. The Talboys family lived in Lincolnshire where Gilbert was made sheriff in November 1523, and Bessie would have run their household in the manor in South Kyme where they resided. Although Margaret Bryan, who was the lady mistress to Henry the Eighth’s royal children, seems to have had the charge of Henry FitzRoy too, Bessie may have retained custody of her son for at least part of the first few years of his life, for a later tutor would complain to her of the inadequacies of the boy’s early teachers in teaching him his prayers and said that she was partly to blame for the situation. By the time he was six though, FitzRoy was living in the household of Thomas Wolsey, and in June 1525 he was created the Duke of Richmond and Somerset and the Earl of Nottingham, then given a slew of honorary appointments and sent off to the north of England to represent his father there. He certainly never lived with his mother, stepfather, or half-siblings after that, though they did benefit from their relationship with him. Gilbert was made a knight at around the same time as Richmond’s elevation, making Bessie Lady Talboys, and he was also made the bailiff and keeper of Tattershall, which was now part of the little duke’s vast landed holdings gifted to him by his father to support his new rank.

As well as her improving social standing, Bessie was well taken care of financially too, for in 1523 the act of parliament concerning her jointure, which I quoted a little bit of to you a minute ago, stipulated that she would hold for life numerous Talboys houses, manors, lands, tenements, and her rent in Yorkshire, Lincolnshire, and Somerset. In fact, her marriage was so good considering her rather middling birth by aristocratic standards and the fact that she was known to have slept with another man and born his child, that when Wolsey fell from grace in 1529 he was criticized by Richmond’s former tutor Knowles, who doesn’t seem to have liked his charge’s mother very much, for having rewarded her too well by arranging the union as quote the well-marrying of Bessie Blunt would encourage the young gentlewomen of the realm to be our concubines. The former Mistress Blunt was raised even higher that year when her husband was made a baron and she became Baroness Talboys of Kyme. It wasn’t all roses though, Gilbert and Bessie had a difficult relationship with his mother, who complained bitterly that they had acquired lands, money, and even cattle which were rightfully hers and that she and Gilbert’s unwell father were coming close to ruin largely as a result of this treatment. Meanwhile Bessie’s own father was made a knight in 1529 but died unexpectedly in 1531. Though she generally stayed away from court, Lady Talboys and the king retained a friendly relationship, Gilbert was appointed to the king’s household in 1527 so he at least must have been in the monarch’s presence often, and his wife and the king exchanged New Year’s gifts including an expensive gilt goblet sent from Henry to his one-time paramour in 1532. Interestingly she was for some reason omitted from the 1534 gift list, but perhaps Anne Boleyn had had a hand in that. Bessie also maintained a good, if by necessity distant, relationship with the Duke of Richmond, as we’ve already heard his tutors wrote to her about his progress, and we can tell from the inventories of her eldest son’s goods that she sent him gifts such as a doublet of white satin and two horses which he owned in 1531, but we have little else to give us a window into their relationship. Richmond wrote letters to his father, some of which survive, so it’s not much of a stretch to imagine his mother received some too, especially as two of Elizabeth’s little brothers were being raised alongside her son, strengthening the links between the boy and his maternal family.

As Henry the Eighth’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon came to an end in the late 1520s and early 1530s and he sought to have the union annulled, there were rumors that Bessie might make the ultimate jump up the social ladder and become Queen of England. Her husband died on the fifteenth of April 1530 and was buried in South Kyme Church, and had Henry succeeded in getting the papal annulment of the Aragon marriage which he sought, at least one contemporary, a member of Charles the Fifth of Spain’s household, thought that the English king would marry the mother of his only son and have Richmond retroactively legitimized. It came to nothing of course, as Henry had his heart set on Anne Boleyn. Bessie was not without her suitors however, and in 1532 the king’s cousin Lord Leonard Grey sought her hand in marriage. Having visited Bessie in Lincolnshire and reportedly found her to have quote had very good cheer, he requested the support of Thomas Cromwell and the king in his suit, but the dowager baroness Talboys refused his offer. Instead, at some point before February 1535, and Murphy states that it was in 1532, she married what we would now call, perhaps unfairly though, a toyboy. Her new husband was Edward Fiennes de Clinton, Baron Clinton and Saye, a man around twelve years her junior who would much later in life become the Earl of Lincoln. As a wealthy widowed baroness, Bessie didn’t need his money or his status, and while Murphy claims the pair were driven by a desire to combine their land holdings, Norton thinks that this wedding was more likely the result of a love match. Together the couple had three daughters, Bridget, Catherine, and Margaret. In 1533 Bessie also acquired a daughter-in-law, Lady Mary Howard, a cousin of Anne Boleyn’s, who was married to the Duke of Richmond that November, though the two were not allowed to live together given their youth. This marriage was pushed by Anne, and it is doubtful if Bessie had much if any say in the matter. In July 1536 Lady Clinton, as she now was, suffered a huge loss, her eldest son Henry FitzRoy, Duke of Richmond and Somerset, died at St James’s Palace at the age of seventeen of an illness referred to at the time as consumption. We have no record of how she responded to this, though her younger son George was allowed to inherit some of Richmond’s clothing and she may have been able to inherit some of his household goods, but as the king still had no legitimate son at that point and had delegitimized both his daughters, Richmond had looked like a possible future monarch. Without him, his mother’s position in the world was inevitably of far less interest and importance to contemporaries, though Henry still thought enough of her to grant her and her husband some former monastic land in January 1539. Still, her relative unimportance is made abundantly clear by the fact that we don’t know when she herself died.

She may well have been alive to suffer the loss of her son George in September 1539, but by June 1541 her husband was remarried to his second wife Ursula. Bessie had died somewhere in the middle, she wasn’t mentioned in her mother’s will of January 1540 suggesting that she was already deceased by then, and Norton suspects a death in childbirth. We don’t know where she was buried, but it wasn’t with either husband, nor is there any indication that she was placed with Richmond, who was interred by and with his wife’s family. She simply slipped out of history as quietly as she had slipped into it. Not long after, in 1542, her last boy Robert Talboys died as well. I promised you that I would explain why I believe Bessie to have been Henry the Eighth’s most successful mistress, and let’s finish on that note. This of course depends on your criteria for success, if it’s getting to be the Queen of England then she was a failure, but for me it has more to do with keeping Henry happy and surviving one’s encounter with him. Of all the king’s mistresses, and I include the ones he went on to marry, Bessie is the only one who definitely gave him the son he always wanted but then managed to get away from him, head on her shoulders, and live what seems to have been a fairly quiet and comfortable life, all whilst maintaining a good relationship with the king. The others either ended up married to him and dead relatively soon afterwards, within three and a half years maximum, or they were discarded and didn’t even have the kudos of having produced a boy, much less an acknowledged son who was raised to be the senior peer in the land. As they minded the steps to the scaffold of the Tower of London, Anne Boleyn and her cousin Catherine Howard could have been forgiven for thinking that they should have taken the Bessie route. I hope you’ve enjoyed hearing about the life of Elizabeth or Bessie Blunt. Unfortunately there’s relatively little evidence left of her time here on earth, especially as none of her letters survive, but perhaps that adds to the mystery around her and makes her all the more interesting. Before I go, I wanted to let you know that you can check out my website historycallingofficial.com, or you can sign up for my mailing list and receive a free download which will give you five quick and easy tips for spotting good and bad history books before you buy or start reading them. You’ll also then get my newsletter which will keep you up to date with all things history calling, including upcoming projects.