Mary Boleyn: The Great and Infamous Whore by Alison Weir
It has been claimed that many of the ladies with whom Henry had affairs “never washed, had wooden teeth, bad breath, and body odor.”10 Had that been the case—and there is no evidence for it—it is unlikely that he would have fancied them, for by the standards of his day, the King was one of the most fastidious of men, and would surely have expected the women with whom he became intimate to maintain certain standards of personal hygiene.11
Henry’s infidelity was not limited to the periods when his wives were pregnant, although he almost invariably strayed at those times. “The King is a youngling, who thinks of nothing but hunting and girls, and wastes his father’s patrimony,” one ambassador recorded early in the reign.12 Even when Henry was middle-aged, his physician, Dr. John Chambers, would describe him as being “overly fond of women” and “given to lustful dreams.”13 The Duke of Norfolk, who knew Henry well (two of his nieces married the King), observed that he was “continually inclined to amours.”14 The Emperor Charles V told his ambassador that it was well known that the King was of “an amorous complexion,”15 and in 1537 it was said of Henry that all it took to please him was “an apple and a fair wench to dally withal.”16 Even the King’s admiring apologist, William Thomas, wrote in 1546 that “he was a very fleshly man” who “fell into all riot and overmuch love of women.” Another sixteenth century commentator wrote: “King Henry gave his mind to three notorious vices: lechery, covetousness, and adultery, but the latter two issued and sprang out of the former.”17 In the reign of Elizabeth I, Sir Robert Naunton famously wrote that Henry VIII never spared a man in his anger, nor a woman in his lust. This evidence seriously undermines fashionable modern notions that the King suffered from erectile dysfunction. Clearly, being “free from every vice,” as a Venetian envoy described Henry in 1515,18 did not preclude committing adultery.
Katherine’s first child, a daughter, was born dead on January 31, 1510, but she conceived again soon afterward, and by May she was reported to be “very large.”19 Around that time, two sisters of Edward Stafford, Duke of Buckingham, the King’s cousin, were living at court. One was Elizabeth, the wife (since 1505) of Robert Ratcliffe, Lord FitzWalter, and a great favorite of the Queen; the other was Anne, who had married George, Lord Hastings, in 1507; she was “much liked by the King, who went after her.” Henry’s close friend, Sir William Compton, is known to have lived for some time in an adulterous relationship with Lady Hastings, for whom he later founded a chantry chapel at his country seat, Compton Wynyates,20 but although some believed that “the love intrigues were not of the King but of his favorite, Compton,” in the opinion of the Spanish ambassador, Luis Caroz,21 “the more credible version” was that it was Henry VIII who was discreetly pursuing Lady Hastings at this time, while Compton was providing cover for his master’s amorous exploits by pretending to court her himself.
Thanks to Compton, Henry was able to keep the affair secret, until Lady FitzWalter became suspicious of the attention that Compton was paying to her sister. Wishing to spare her family any scandal, she summoned her brother, the duke, and Lord Hastings, Anne’s husband, and confided her concerns to them. Buckingham went at once to Anne’s lodging at court, and when he found Compton there, he used “many hard words” and “severely reproached” him. Compton sped off to the King and told him what had happened, upon which Henry, in a rage, summoned Buckingham and so vented his wrath on him that Buckingham stormed out of the court. Meanwhile, confronted by her irate husband, Anne had confessed all, and was carried off by him to a nunnery sixty miles away, out of Henry’s reach.
Furious at being deprived of the lady, Henry sought to apportion blame, having guessed that Lady FitzWalter had been the cause of his misfortune. He summarily banished her and her husband from court, but it appears that before she left, she had her revenge by revealing to the Queen what had been going on. This was the first Katherine had heard of her husband’s infidelity, and she bitterly upbraided him, provoking a heated, and very public, row, as Henry, in turn, reproached her for daring to criticize him. Both ended up “very vexed” with each other.22
Henry clearly felt ill done by. By Renaissance standards he was fairly virtuous, in an age in which it was common for kings and nobles to take mistresses. They married for policy, profit, or dynastic reasons, did their duty by their wives, and took their pleasure elsewhere. In this case he had taken care to be discreet, and been at pains not to humiliate Katherine publicly. It was a wife’s duty to maintain a dignified silence if she discovered that her husband was playing away from the marriage bed. The onus was on her to adapt to circumstances.
But Katherine had no intention of being silent, and continued to berate Henry for his betrayal. She also vented her anger on Compton. The Spanish ambassador feared she might compromise her considerable influence with the King through her unreasonable behavior. In the end she had to concede defeat. She had learned a humiliating lesson, and never again would she take Henry to task for being unfaithful—at least not in public.
In 1884, Anne Boleyn’s biographer, Paul Friedmann, stated that Elizabeth Howard, Lady Boleyn, had been appointed one of the new Queen’s ladies, and several modern writers describe her as a lady-in-waiting to Katherine,23 but all of them have confused her with her sister-in-law, Anne Tempest, the wife of Sir Edward Boleyn.24 Surprisingly, given Thomas Boleyn’s standing with the King, there are no references to his wife being in the Queen’s household, aside from joining Katherine’s train for the Field of Cloth of Gold in 1520, as one of the many noble ladies attending her. Obviously, therefore, Elizabeth Howard cannot have used her influence with the Queen to further her husband’s career, as has been claimed.25
It has also been suggested that her willingness to sleep with the King accounted for her husband’s rapid rise to favor.26 Indeed, there have been persistent claims, from her own lifetime to the present day, that she was Henry’s mistress. This has been given as the reason why the wife of such an up-and-coming, and later prominent, courtier as Sir Thomas Boleyn was not assigned a post as a lady-in-waiting to the Queen.27
There is, as we shall see, some evidence that Elizabeth Howard did have a poor reputation. After the coronation, she is not recorded at court for eleven years, and it may be that she was constrained by her husband, or chose herself, to remain at Hever, presiding over her family and household, supervising the running of the estate and the home and tenant farms—and possibly keeping out of mischief. Maybe she did not desire a place at court, except when she was obliged to go there for the most important celebrations, or in middle age as chaperone to her daughter Anne Boleyn during the King’s courtship; otherwise there is barely a mention of her in contemporary sources.
From the 1530s there were rumors—almost certainly apocryphal—that Lady Boleyn had been Henry VIII’s mistress at one time. Friar William Peto, an Observant Friar of Greenwich who had publicly denounced Henry VIII’s determination to wed Anne Boleyn in a sermon preached before the King on Easter Day 1532, warned Henry afterward that it was being said that he had meddled with both Anne’s sister and her mother.28 According to Henry’s cousin, Reginald Pole, another who opposed the marriage,29 Peto had confided to the Papist Sir George Throckmorton, a member of Parliament, that Henry had had affairs with both Mary Boleyn and her mother.
In a letter sent to Henry VIII in October 1537, Throckmorton recalled a conversation he had in 1533 with Sir Thomas Dingley (who was to be beheaded for treason in 1539). Throckmorton, who did not yet know that the King had secretly married Anne Boleyn, had told Dingley how he had been sent for by Henry after speaking out against the Act in Restraint of Appeals (passed in April 1533) that heralded the break with Rome, “and that he saw his Grace’s conscience was troubled about having married his brother’s wife. And I said to him [Dingley] that I told your Grace I feared if ye did marry Queen Anne your conscience would be more troubled at length, for it is thought ye have meddled both with the mother and the sister. And your Grace said ‘Never with the mother.’ And my Lord Privy Seal [Cromwe
Thomas Cromwell, then well established as the King’s chief minister, would have known that there were good reasons for keeping his master’s affair with Mary Boleyn a secret. If Mary had not been Henry’s mistress, then Henry himself would surely have denied it, as he had denied having relations with her mother. And that he did deny the latter there is no doubt. As Nicholas Sander’s editor points out, if this conversation had never taken place, “it is not credible that [Throckmorton] could have dared so to write to the King, nor is it credible that he invented the story.”
Also in 1533, Elizabeth Amadas, the wife of a royal goldsmith, who had herself once been pursued by Henry VIII, publicly asserted “that the King had kept both the mother and the daughter,” referring to Elizabeth Howard and either to Mary or Anne Boleyn, who was widely reputed in the years before her marriage to Henry in 1533 to have been his mistress. Mrs. Amadas also claimed that “my lord of Wiltshire [Thomas Boleyn] was bawd both to his wife and his two daughters.”31 However, since she made various other wild and fanciful assertions about Anne Boleyn, of whom she bitterly disapproved, it would be unwise to give too much credence to any of them.
The rumors nevertheless persisted, and spread farther afield. In March 1533 it was recorded that Thomas Jackson, a chantry priest in Chepax, Yorkshire, had claimed that Henry VIII’s marriage to Anne Boleyn was adulterous and that the King had “kept the mother and afterward the daughter, and now he hath married her whom he kept afore, and her mother also.”32 The fact that such gossip was in circulation as far away as Yorkshire shows how widespread were the salacious tales about the Boleyn ladies. Yet it appears that Father Jackson, and possibly Mrs. Adamas, were unaware of Mary Boleyn’s relations with the King; they would surely have made capital out of them if they had been.
In 1535, John Hale, Vicar of Isleworth—no friend to the Boleyns or Henry VIII, as will be seen—repeated, among other calumnies, that “the King’s Grace had meddled with the Queen’s [Anne Boleyn’s] mother.”33 Hale, a supporter of Katherine of Aragon, was on a mission to impugn the legality of the Boleyn marriage, but if Henry had had any sexual connection with Lady Boleyn, he would surely have declared it when applying to the Pope in 1528 for a dispensation to marry the sister of a woman (Mary Boleyn) who had been his mistress; congress with the mother would also have made such a marriage incestuous, and rendered it null and void.
Nevertheless, the assertion that Elizabeth Howard and Henry VIII had been lovers was repeated later on by three hostile Catholic writers: Nicholas Harpsfield, William Rastell, who was Sir Thomas More’s nephew—More was executed in 1535 for refusing to swear the oath acknowledging the validity of the King’s marriage to Anne Boleyn—and an exiled Catholic priest, Nicholas Sander, whose treatise damning Henry and Anne was published in Rome in 1585. All three writers were staunch Catholics who viewed Anne Boleyn as a Jezebel and a heretic and blamed her for the English Reformation; none was the remotest bit likely to give her a good press.
William Camden was incorrect when he fulminated that Sander was “the first man that broached [a] damnable lie about the birth of Queen Elizabeth’s mother.”34 In fact, it originated with either Nicholas Harpsfield, whose Treatise on the Pretended Divorce between King Henry VIII and Katherine of Aragon was published in the reign of Katherine’s daughter, Mary I, or William Rastell (c.1508–65), who was a contemporary of Mary Boleyn and died a recusant exile at Louvain in Elizabeth I’s reign. Harpsfield, an archdeacon of Canterbury, wrote that he “had credibly heard reported that the King knew the mother of Anne Boleyn”—in the biblical sense, of course.
Rastell, a printer and a judge, was the editor of Sir Thomas More’s works, which he published in 1557. He wrote a life of More, but it was probably never published, and certainly does not survive today. Yet Lord Herbert, whose biography of Henry VIII was published in 1649, certainly saw it, for he refers to it and states that Rastell asserted therein that Anne Boleyn was the fruit of an illicit liaison between her mother and Henry VIII, and had been conceived while Sir Thomas Boleyn was away on an embassy to France.35
Nicholas Sander, who lived at Louvain from 1565 and was a zealous priest and missionary whose powerful works have largely informed Roman Catholic thinking on the English Reformation, but who has been castigated at best as credulous, and at worst as a seditious liar and slanderer, by English historians down the centuries, probably also saw Rastell’s lost life of More, as well as perhaps Harpsfield’s Pretended Divorce, for he too went so far as to assert that “Anne Boleyn was the daughter of Sir Thomas Boleyn’s wife; I say his wife, because she could not have been the daughter of Sir Thomas, for she was born during his absence of two years in France on the King’s affairs.” According to this version, when Boleyn returned home, he demanded to know who had sired the child, but Henry VIII ordered him to stop persecuting his wife, who admitted to him that “it was the King who had tempted her to sin, and that the child, Anne, was the daughter of no other than Henry.” The clear implication was that Anne incestuously married her own father.
The “impudent lie”36 about Anne Boleyn’s paternity was repeated in 1587 by Adam Blackwood, a lawyer defending the good name of Mary, Queen of Scots, whom Elizabeth I had just had executed; he wrote as if the story were well known, and indeed the contemporary gossip referred to above would tend to corroborate that. Of course, Blackwood had an axe to grind against Elizabeth, and the calumny of her being the child of incest would have served him well.
The fact that no fewer than ten people alleged in the sixteenth century that Elizabeth Howard was Henry VIII’s mistress would, by most of the rules of historical research, suggest that there was some truth in it, but the King himself denied it, when he did not deny that he had had an affair with Elizabeth’s daughter Mary, and this at a time when either relationship would equally have prejudiced his marriage to Anne Boleyn. Moreover, all the sources are hostile, and the story told by Rastell and Sander can easily be proved nonsense. Sir Thomas Boleyn was not sent as ambassador to France until 1519, and Henry was probably less than ten years old when Anne was conceived.
But the allegations may have been believable because of Elizabeth Howard’s dubious reputation. When the poet Skelton—possibly with the benefit of hindsight—compared her to the beautiful Cressida, he may have been hinting at something far less attractive than her looks. For “False Cressida” appears in medieval literature as the woman who pledged undying love to her Troilus, but, after being captured by the Greeks, had an affair with Diomedes. By the fourteenth century, when Chaucer wrote his version of the legend, her name—as he acknowledges in his text—had become synonymous with female inconstancy. So when hearing any woman compared with Cressida, people in the Tudor period would have instantly grasped the double entendre. Maybe Skelton was merely praising Elizabeth’s beauty, but if so, he had chosen a strange and compromising comparison, when there were plenty of others to be drawn.
Skelton was famous for his satirical attacks on the court, and he used allegories such as this to fearlessly criticize the great and the good, even incurring the wrath of the powerful Cardinal Wolsey. If, by 1523, when she was approaching middle age, Elizabeth Howard had gained some ill fame for straying from the connubial couch, then, with her husband riding high at court, she might well have fallen foul of Skelton’s scathing wit.
There are other references in the poem that may be barbed allusions to Elizabeth’s conduct. Skelton tells her he is bound to be her “remembrancer,” a remembrancer being a person (or official) who caused someone to remember something, or collected debts, or brought them a warning. He describes her as not only virtuous but cunning, which by then had acquired th
Of all your beauty I suffice not to write,
But, as I said, your flourishing tender age
Is lusty to look on, pleasant, demure and sage.
Taken together, all these references suggest that Skelton may have reworked his verses in 1523 to reflect what he now knew about the once-fair Lady Elizabeth Howard.37
What we can infer about the Boleyns’ marriage from the sources does not suggest conjugal happiness. Sir Thomas stayed mostly at court or abroad, Elizabeth lived mainly in the country, visiting the court only rarely, when form demanded it. That was not especially unusual in an age of arranged marriages. But Skelton’s comparison with Cressida, Elizabeth’s absence from the Queen’s household, and the fact that all her offspring became notorious in one way or another for sexual immorality, might suggest that she herself had set them a poor example by her loose morals and by betraying her marriage vows.