Elizabeth Blount, known as Bessie Blount, bore Henry VIII the only son he ever acknowledged: a duke who came within one illness of the throne.
In thirty-eight years on the throne, Henry VIII acknowledged exactly one child born outside marriage. The mother of that child was Elizabeth Blount, a gentleman’s daughter from the Shropshire border who came to court at about thirteen and left it some years later with a title, an income and a house in Lincolnshire.
She has usually been handled as a minor figure, and the summaries of her life tend to be short. That is partly a problem of evidence. We do not have a single letter written by Elizabeth Blount, and there is no portrait of her that anyone can identify with confidence. It is also partly a problem of assumption, because historians have tended to treat royal mistresses as incidental unless they became queens.
The record that does survive suggests something more substantial. The relationship lasted longer than three of Henry’s six marriages. The son it produced came within one Act of Parliament and one adolescent illness of becoming King Henry IX. And Elizabeth Blount herself did rather well out of a situation in which she had almost no formal power, ending her life as the wife of a man who would be made an earl.
What follows is an attempt to set out what the documents actually say, and to be clear about the places where they disagree.
Who Was Elizabeth Blount?
Elizabeth Blount, called Bessie by everyone at court, was an English gentlewoman who served as maid of honour to Katherine of Aragon and became the mistress of Henry VIII around 1514 or 1515. On 15 June 1519 she gave birth to Henry FitzRoy, the only illegitimate child that Henry VIII acknowledged publicly. She later married Gilbert Tailboys and became Lady Tailboys of Kyme, and after his death she married Edward Fiennes de Clinton and became Lady Clinton. She died in her late thirties or early forties, most probably between 1539 and 1541.
She was born at Kinlet in Shropshire, the daughter of Sir John Blount and Katherine Peshall. The family were landed gentry with a long and fairly unglamorous record of service to the crown. Elizabeth Blount held no title in her own right, and nothing she wrote has come down to us. Almost everything we know about her comes out of other people’s papers: wardrobe bills, wage warrants, royal grants, legal inquisitions and the letters of ambassadors.
The Blounts of Kinlet
The Blounts had been in Shropshire for generations. Camden wrote in his Britannia that the name was famous in those parts, and that it took its origin from fair hair, which is a detail later writers seized on with some enthusiasm when they came to describe the blonde girl who caught the king’s eye.
Her grandfather, Sir Thomas Blount of Kinlet, was knighted by Henry VII at the battle of Stoke Field in 1487, on the day the Lambert Simnel rising was broken. He was Steward of the Royal Park and Manor of Bewdley, and he attended the court of Arthur, Prince of Wales, at Ludlow Castle. When Arthur died in 1502, Sir Thomas was one of the four banner-holders at the lying in state, and he was among the knights who took the body from Ludlow towards Worcester on what the chronicler called the foulest, coldest, windiest day he had ever seen, so bad that in places they had to bring in oxen to drag the funeral chair.
This was the family Elizabeth Blount was born into: close enough to the throne to be trusted with a royal coffin, and present in the room for the great Tudor ceremonies of the previous generation.
Her father, Sir John Blount, was the eldest son of a family of some twenty children. He was married as a boy, at perhaps seven years old, to Katherine Peshall, who was herself a small heiress. The inquisition post mortem of Sir Thomas Blount dates the wedding at Kinlet to August 1491, though some genealogies put it a year later. Katherine was the only legitimate child of Sir Hugh Peshall of Knightley in Staffordshire, a soldier of real distinction who appears in the Ballad of Bosworth Field among the four good knights whom Lord Stanley gave to Henry Tudor on the eve of the battle. Sir Hugh died young, in 1488, leaving his daughter a substantial inheritance and a legal fight over it.
Katherine won that fight. After her grandfather Humphrey Peshall died in May 1502 she displaced her half-uncle Richard, established her right to the Staffordshire estates, and moved the household to her manor of Knightley. Some accounts also place the family at Bewdley in Worcestershire during these years. Either way, the childhood of Elizabeth Blount was spent in the border country between Shropshire and Staffordshire, within about three hours’ ride of Ludlow, in a house surrounded by oak woodland.
Sir John and Katherine had eight surviving children: George, William, Henry, Elizabeth, Anne, Rose, Isabel and Albora. Their birth order has not been recorded. George, the heir, is usually dated to 1513, which means Elizabeth Blount was a good deal older than her brother and was probably one of the eldest of the family. Nothing survives about her education, beyond the reasonable assumption that her mother and the other women of the household taught her, and that what they taught her included the music and dancing she later became known for.
The Problem of Her Birth Date
The birth year of Elizabeth Blount is given variously as 1498, 1500 and 1502, often with equal confidence and occasionally in the same article.
These three dates come from three different lines of argument. Alison Weir prefers about 1502, which produces the arresting picture of a girl of twelve or thirteen beginning a relationship with the king. Elizabeth Norton, whose 2011 biography is still the only full-length modern study, argues for about 1498 on the basis of her work in the Blount and Peshall family records. Beverley Murphy, writing the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography entry, settles on about 1500.
The evidence that helps most here is administrative rather than genealogical. Elizabeth Blount was at court and drawing wages by the spring of 1512, and a warrant issued from Greenwich on Sunday 8 May 1513 records a hundred shillings owed to her for the previous year’s wages, ending at the Feast of the Annunciation. It is very unlikely that a child of ten held a salaried place in the queen’s chamber. A girl of thirteen or fourteen is entirely plausible. That tilts the balance towards the earlier end of the range and away from 1502.
None of this is conclusive. The honest position is a window of roughly 1498 to 1500, with 1502 possible but harder to square with the wage records.
How She Came to Court
The route to a place at court ran through family connection, as it always did. Sir John Blount was one of the King’s Spears at the coronation of Henry VIII, one of fifty men of noble birth who served as mounted bodyguard, and he went with the king to France in 1513 for the war against Louis XII. Elizabeth’s uncle, Sir Humphrey Blount, was a Knight of the Body, which is to say a personal attendant on the king. Her mother’s family had been in and around Katherine of Aragon’s orbit during the Ludlow years. William Blount, Lord Mountjoy, a kinsman, was Katherine’s Lord Chamberlain.
With that much scaffolding in place, finding a position for a presentable daughter was largely a matter of asking for one. Elizabeth Blount entered the household of Katherine of Aragon as a maid of honour, a junior post below the ladies in waiting, and she made an impression quickly. Hall’s Chronicle says that in singing, dancing and all goodly pastimes she exceeded all others. Antonia Fraser drew attention to the contemporary descriptions of her high spirits and her energy, which matched the king’s own at a time when Henry VIII was in his early twenties and running his court as something close to a permanent festival.
It is easy to underrate what that meant in practice. The court of the 1510s was competitive and physical, and reputations were made in the tiltyard, on the tennis court and in the disguisings. A young woman like Elizabeth Blount, who could sing and dance well and hold her nerve in front of a large audience, had a real asset, and she was highly visible while using it.
The Christmas Mummery of 1514
The first firm documentary sighting of Elizabeth Blount near the king comes from a bill, which is appropriate enough for a court where a great deal survives simply because somebody had to be paid.
Richard Gibson, the King’s Master of the Revels, left an account in his own hand of the costumes he supplied for the Christmas mummery of 1514 at Greenwich, together with the names of the players. Among them are Maysteres Elisabeth Blont and Maysteres Karew the yong wyff, the latter being Elizabeth Carew, who was herself later linked with the king. Four ladies were dressed identically, in gowns of white satin, hoops of white satin lined with blue, mantles of blue velvet, bonnets of blue velvet, and coifs and fillets of gold damask.
William Childe-Pemberton, her first biographer, could not resist the scene, and it is not hard to see why. A fair-haired girl in blue and white, singing and dancing before the court, in a season when the queen had recently been delivered of a stillborn son to the very great grief of the whole court.
There is a second document from that year which is more suggestive. Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, wrote to Henry VIII from Beauvais on 25 October 1514 and added a postscript asking the king to tell Mistress Blount and Mistress Carew that the next time he wrote to them or sent them tokens, they might write or send tokens back. Suffolk was the king’s closest companion, and the women he mentions casually in a private postscript are women he expects the king to place immediately. By the autumn of 1514, Elizabeth Blount was part of the vocabulary of Henry’s inner circle.
The Length of the Affair
Most historians place the start of the relationship in 1514 or 1515. The affair between Elizabeth Blount and the king then ran for something between five and eight years, depending on how the evidence is read, which makes it longer than Henry’s marriages to Anne Boleyn, Jane Seymour, Anne of Cleves or Katherine Howard.
His other liaisons, so far as they can be traced at all, were short and deniable. Mary Boleyn, Elizabeth Carew, Anne Bassett and the rest appear in glimpses and then disappear. The relationship with Elizabeth Blount is the one we can follow over years, and the length of it is the thing that most short accounts get wrong.
It was also, by the standards of the period, reasonably discreet. Henry never created the office of official royal mistress in the French style. The position of maîtresse en titre was offered to only one woman in his life, Anne Boleyn, and she refused it in favour of the crown. Elizabeth Blount was never formally acknowledged as anything at all. She held a salaried place in the queen’s household, she was the king’s preferred dancing partner, and the court drew its own conclusions.
In 1518 she performed at the masque held to celebrate the Treaty of London, the diplomatic set piece that betrothed the two-year-old Princess Mary to the French dauphin. Philippa Jones records that Elizabeth Blount sang there to music by William Cornish, Master of the King’s Chapel, and that the words may have been her own, though that last part is uncertain. The placement is not in doubt. At the most important court entertainment of the decade, she was performing.
She became pregnant at some point in the winter of 1518 to 1519.
The Birth of Henry FitzRoy
Elizabeth Blount was sent away from court for the delivery, to the Priory of St Lawrence at Blackmore in Essex, a house known locally as Jericho. On or about 15 June 1519 she bore a son.
The boy was named Henry and given the surname FitzRoy, Norman French for son of the king. Henry VIII intended it to be read as a public statement. Cardinal Thomas Wolsey stood as his godfather at the christening, which placed him under the protection of the most powerful man in England after the king.
The timing was what mattered. Henry VIII had been married to Katherine of Aragon for ten years by then, and she had endured at least seven pregnancies. A son, Henry, Duke of Cornwall, had been born in 1511 and died at seven weeks. Only Mary, born in 1516, had survived infancy. The king was twenty-eight, with one daughter and a growing suspicion that something was badly wrong. Elizabeth Blount then produced a healthy boy at the first attempt.
The political consequence of that fact runs through the next twenty years of English history, and it is the reason Elizabeth Blount belongs in any account of the break with Rome rather than in a footnote about mistresses. The birth of Henry FitzRoy demonstrated, publicly and without much room for argument, that Henry VIII could father a living son. Whatever was preventing a male heir, the evidence now pointed away from the king. When the Great Matter opened a few years later and Henry began to argue that his marriage to his brother’s widow had been cursed from the beginning, the boy at Blackmore was one of the load-bearing facts underneath that argument.
A popular phrase attached itself to her afterwards, recorded as “Bless ‘ee, Bessie Blount.” It is the sort of thing said in taverns rather than written in state papers, but it does tell us that she was a public figure and that the public read her as having performed a service.
The relationship appears to have ended at or shortly after the birth, for reasons nobody recorded. Henry began his affair with Mary Boleyn at around this time, which may be part of the explanation. It is also possible that the pregnancy, which was very probably not planned, simply changed the calculation for both of them.
The Tailboys Marriage
Elizabeth Blount was married to Gilbert Tailboys, heir of George, Lord Tailboys of Kyme, and his wife Elizabeth Gascoigne. The date is disputed, and the dispute changes the meaning of the marriage, so it is worth setting out.
The traditional account, which is the one most short pieces follow, is that she was married off within months of the birth, by September 1519, in a hurried arrangement made for the sake of respectability. Elizabeth Norton pointed out that the marriage does not appear in the records until June 1522, when Elizabeth Blount is first described as Gilbert’s wife. Wikipedia now follows 1522. The ODNB stays cautious.
The shape of the arrangement is clear either way. Gilbert Tailboys had become a ward of the crown after his father was declared a lunatic in 1517, which put his marriage in the gift of the king and, in practice, of Wolsey. The match was made from above, and neither party chose it.
The settlement itself was a generous one. Henry granted the couple property that produced a substantial income, and Gilbert was raised to the peerage as Baron Tailboys of Kyme. They settled on the Tailboys estates at Kyme in Lincolnshire. The mother of the king’s son became a wealthy woman with a title and a household of her own, two hundred miles from court, and everybody involved understood what the transaction was for.
Henry seems to have learned from the whole episode. The women he took up with afterwards tended either to be married already or to be married off quickly, so that any child could be absorbed quietly into an existing family. The affair with Elizabeth Blount had been conducted in the open, the boy looked exactly like his father, and there had been no husband on hand to take nominal responsibility. The king did not repeat the arrangement.
Was There a Second Royal Child?
There is a real historical puzzle in the Tailboys children, and most accounts of Elizabeth Blount pass over it.
Her eldest child by Gilbert was a daughter, also called Elizabeth. In the inquisition post mortem for her youngest son, Robert Tailboys, dated 26 June 1542, Elizabeth Tailboys is described as being then twenty-two years old. That puts her birth between July 1519 and June 1520. She cannot have been born within nine months of Henry FitzRoy, so the earliest possible date is April 1520, and even the latest possible date of June 1520 implies conception in early September 1519. That is within roughly three months of the birth of the king’s son, and quite possibly before Elizabeth Blount was married to Gilbert Tailboys at all.
Elizabeth Norton has argued from this that Elizabeth Tailboys may have been Henry VIII’s daughter. The reasoning is circumstantial, but it is not weak. The conception falls inside the window when the relationship may still have been running. The next Tailboys child does not arrive until 1522 or 1523, which leaves an odd gap. And the girl’s later career was unusual for the daughter of a Lincolnshire baron. She inherited the barony in her own right as 4th Baroness Tailboys of Kyme, and her second husband was Ambrose Dudley, 3rd Earl of Warwick, brother of Robert Dudley and one of the highest-ranking men in Elizabeth I’s England.
Norton presents it as a theory, and it should be read as one. What it demonstrates is that the documentary record around Elizabeth Blount remains thin enough that a careful historian working through Lincolnshire inquisitions can still find something new in it.
Life at Kyme
After the marriage, Elizabeth Blount largely drops out of the day-to-day record of the court. This has often been read as banishment, though the financial evidence looks more like a pension.
Royal favour continued for the rest of her life. Grants are recorded between 1522 and 1539. Elizabeth Blount received New Year’s gifts from the king year after year, and in 1532 Henry sent her a gilt goblet with a cover weighing over thirty-five ounces, which was a serious piece of plate rather than a courtesy. Whatever the relationship had become by then, it had clearly not lapsed.
Her part in her son’s upbringing has been consistently underestimated, largely because historians assumed that a royal bastard raised in a great household of his own must have been separated from his mother altogether. A letter of 1529 from John Palsgrave, Henry FitzRoy’s tutor, written to Elizabeth Blount, works against that assumption. Palsgrave wrote to her about the boy, which means she was somebody with standing in the question of how he was being educated. Beverley Murphy, FitzRoy’s biographer, concluded that her involvement was greater than had previously been believed.
She and Gilbert had three more children at Kyme: Elizabeth, then George at around 1523, then Robert. By the standards of the age she was fortunate. Four confinements produced four surviving children, and a fifth pregnancy would come many years later.
Her Son Becomes a Duke
In June 1525 the six-year-old Henry FitzRoy was brought out of the country and made, over the course of a fortnight, one of the great men of England. On 7 June he was created a Knight of the Garter at St George’s Chapel, Windsor. On 18 June, at a lavish ceremony at Bridewell, his father created him Duke of Richmond and Somerset and Earl of Nottingham.
The choice of titles was a piece of dynastic theatre that nobody at court can have missed. Richmond was the earldom held by Henry VII before he took the crown, and by Edmund Tudor before him. Somerset had last belonged to the Beauforts, the family of Margaret Beaufort. Henry VIII had reached into the Tudor dynasty’s own founding titles and handed them to the son of Elizabeth Blount.
More followed. FitzRoy was made Lord High Admiral of England, Lord President of the Council of the North and Warden of the Marches towards Scotland, which put the government of northern England in the hands of a six-year-old and his officers. From 1529 to 1534 he was Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. He spent time at Cambridge with his tutor Richard Croke. At one stage a proposal was floated, apparently in all seriousness, to seek a papal dispensation allowing FitzRoy to marry his half-sister Mary, which would have united the king’s illegitimate son with his legitimate daughter and settled the succession in a single stroke.
In 1533 he married Lady Mary Howard, daughter of Thomas Howard, 3rd Duke of Norfolk. Anne Boleyn, who was Mary’s cousin, had a hand in arranging the match.
Then in 1536 came the Second Succession Act, which gave Henry VIII the power to name his own successor by will, legitimate or otherwise. Both his daughters had been declared illegitimate. He had no living legitimate son. For a few months in the summer of 1536, the most plausible next King of England was the son of Elizabeth Blount.
Widowhood and the Clinton Marriage
Gilbert Tailboys died in 1530, which left Elizabeth Blount a widow in her early thirties, with a title, three children and comfortable means. In the marriage market of the 1530s she was a very attractive proposition.
Lord Leonard Grey, later Viscount Grane, courted Elizabeth Blount and was turned down. The refusal tells us something. A woman in her position could have been pushed into a second arranged match without much trouble, and she was not, which suggests she had the standing and the resources to decline.
The man she did marry was younger than she was and held the Lincolnshire lands next to her own: Edward Fiennes de Clinton, 9th Baron Clinton. The wedding took place between 1533 and 1535, and it can be dated from a thoroughly unromantic source, namely a royal grant of 12 February in the twenty-sixth year of the reign, of three tuns of Gascon wine yearly from the customs of the port of Boston, to Elizabeth, late Lady Tailboys, now wife of the Lord Clinton.
It was a considerable step up. Clinton went on to serve Edward VI, Mary I and Elizabeth I in turn, became Lord High Admiral of England, and was created 1st Earl of Lincoln in 1572, dying as one of the great survivors of the Tudor century. Elizabeth Blount, born to Shropshire gentry, ended her life married to a future earl. They had three daughters together: Bridget, Katherine and Margaret.
The Year 1536
Henry FitzRoy, the only son of Elizabeth Blount by the king, was well enough on 19 May 1536 to attend the execution of Anne Boleyn. In early July he was reported ill with pains in his chest and a cough. On 8 July the imperial ambassador Eustace Chapuys wrote to Charles V that the physicians judged the Duke of Richmond to be consumptive and incurable. He died at St James’s Palace on 23 July 1536, at the age of seventeen. Some accounts give the 22nd. The diagnosis of consumption is generally taken to mean tuberculosis, though Julian Litten has suggested a genetic condition shared with Prince Arthur and Edward VI, and Philippa Jones has noted that the speed of the burial might point to pneumonic plague instead.
What happened afterwards is among the strangest episodes of the reign. There was no autopsy and no state funeral. Henry VIII, who had spent eleven years advertising this boy as a prince in all but name, left the arrangements entirely to the Duke of Norfolk. Norfolk ordered the body wrapped in lead and carried in a closed cart to Thetford Priory in Norfolk for secret burial. The servants appear to have used a straw-filled wagon instead. Two attendants followed at a distance, and they were the only mourners. Rumour had it that the body was first put into the ground in a stable yard. At the Dissolution of the Monasteries the remains were moved to the church of St Michael the Archangel at Framlingham in Suffolk, where the ornate tomb still stands and where his widow was eventually laid beside him. Mary Howard was refused a pension by the king.
No record survives of what Elizabeth Blount was told, or when, or by whom. She had lost a son whose funeral she was not invited to and whose grave was, for a time, deliberately obscured. Edward VI was born fourteen months later.
Her Last Years and Unknown Grave
The final years of Elizabeth Blount are the murkiest part of the story, and the confident dates quoted elsewhere are not really supported by the evidence.
A list of ladies appointed to the household of Anne of Cleves in January 1540 includes her name, which would mean that after twenty years in Lincolnshire she came back to court to serve Henry’s fourth wife. That list needs handling carefully. It was struck through, and it closely resembles a list drawn up for Katherine Howard, which raises the possibility that the two documents are versions of the same thing. Agnes Strickland, writing in 1854, described her as a Great Lady of the Queen’s Household to Katherine Howard.
After that the record stops. Beverley Murphy’s ODNB entry gives her death as somewhere between 1539 and 1541, which is the most defensible formulation on the available evidence. Others narrow it considerably: between 6 February 1539 and 2 January 1540, at forty or forty-one, possibly in or shortly after childbirth. Wikipedia has her dying shortly after July 1540. The traditional cause given is consumption, the same illness that killed her son, but there is no source for it.
The sources do agree on one point, and it is the bleakest one. Elizabeth Blount was buried with neither of her husbands, and nobody knows where her grave is. The woman who bore Henry VIII a son, who was made a baroness twice and courted by a future viscount, has no known resting place.
The Search for Her Face
No portrait of Elizabeth Blount survives that can be securely identified, which has left illustrators free to invent her for four centuries. The stock description of a pale complexion, fair hair and a full mouth comes from later imagination working outwards from contemporary praise of her beauty, helped along by Camden’s remark about the Blount name and golden hair.
Two objects have been put forward as genuine likenesses, and both deserve more attention than they usually get. The first is a monumental brass palimpsest now in the British Museum, described as carrying a stylised likeness. Brass palimpsests are reused plates, engraved on one side and later turned over and engraved again, and they are exactly the kind of object that preserves a figure by accident.
The second is more substantial. In 2009 Elizabeth Norton published a paper in the Transactions of the Shropshire Archaeological and Historical Society titled “Elizabeth Blount of Kinlet: An Image of Henry VIII’s Mistress Identified,” arguing that a surviving image of her can be recognised among the family monuments at Kinlet. The tomb of her parents, John and Katherine Blount, stands in St John the Baptist’s Church at Kinlet with their effigies on it, and Tudor tombs of that type conventionally include small figures of the children around the base. If Norton has this right, the only face we have of the woman who nearly altered the English succession is a few inches high, carved on the side of her parents’ tomb, in a parish church on the edge of the Wyre Forest.
Her Children and Their Descendants
For a woman often remembered as a historical dead end, Elizabeth Blount left a considerable posterity, and the family tree is garbled often enough to be worth setting out properly.
Her son by Henry VIII was Henry FitzRoy, 1st Duke of Richmond and Somerset and 1st Earl of Nottingham, born 1519 and died 1536. He married Lady Mary Howard and had no children.
By Gilbert Tailboys she had three. Elizabeth Tailboys, born about 1520 and died 1563, became 4th Baroness Tailboys of Kyme in her own right when her brother died. Her first husband, Thomas Wymbish of Nocton, claimed the title in her right and lost, in a case that permanently settled the point of law: a husband could not bear his wife’s title unless he had a child by her. She married Ambrose Dudley, 3rd Earl of Warwick, at around 1552, died childless, and the barony became extinct with her. George Tailboys, born about 1523, succeeded as 2nd Baron Tailboys of Kyme and died on 6 September 1540, having married Margaret Skipwith the previous year and had no children. Robert Tailboys became 3rd Baron and died in 1541.
By Edward Fiennes de Clinton she had three daughters. Lady Bridget Clinton, born about 1536, married Robert Dymoke of Scrivelsby at around 1556 and had ten children; Dymoke was a devout Catholic and was named a martyr after his death. Lady Katherine Clinton, born about 1538 and died on 14 August 1621, married William Burgh, 2nd Baron Burgh of Gainsborough, and had six children, one of whom was Thomas Burgh, 3rd Baron Burgh. Lady Margaret Clinton, born about 1539, married Charles Willoughby, 2nd Baron Willoughby of Parham, and had five children.
All three of her sons by Tailboys died young and childless, so her line continued entirely through her daughters. That is why the descendants of Elizabeth Blount are scattered through the Dymoke, Burgh and Willoughby pedigrees rather than carrying one recognisable name down the centuries.
Books, Television and a Case of Mistaken Identity
Her first biographer was William S. Childe-Pemberton, whose Elizabeth Blount and Henry the Eighth: With Some Account of Her Surroundings appeared in 1913 and is now in the public domain. It is thoroughly Edwardian in tone and unembarrassed about romantic speculation, and it remains the source of a good deal of the atmospheric detail still in circulation.
The modern literature is short but good. Beverley A. Murphy’s Bastard Prince: Henry VIII’s Lost Son is the standard work on her son and covers her along the way. Kelly Hart’s The Mistresses of Henry VIII places her in context, and Heather Hobden’s Tudor Bastard treats mother and son together. Elizabeth Norton’s Bessie Blount: Mistress to Henry VIII, published by Amberley in 2011, is the only full-length biography, running to nearly three hundred pages of text with some fifty-five pages of notes and bibliography behind it.
On screen Elizabeth Blount has been played by Ruta Gedmintas in the Showtime series The Tudors, appearing in three episodes of the first season, and by Chloe Harris in the Starz series The Spanish Princess. Both compress and reshape her considerably. The Tudors in particular invents a jealous husband and the threat of a nunnery, neither of which has any basis in the record.
One practical note for anyone searching: Elizabeth Blount is regularly confused with Bessie Blount Griffin, the American physical therapist, forensic scientist and inventor who lived from 1914 to 2009 and developed feeding devices for amputee patients. The two women share a name and nothing else.
An Assessment
Historians have generally judged the direct influence of Elizabeth Blount on events to be slight, and set against Katherine of Aragon or Anne Boleyn that is fair enough. But the judgement misses the mechanism by which she mattered.
The English Reformation was set in motion by a king who had persuaded himself that his marriage was cursed because it had produced no son. The most inconvenient fact standing against that conclusion, and the most useful fact standing for it, was a healthy boy born at Blackmore Priory in June 1519. Elizabeth Blount supplied the evidence that the fault did not lie with the king, and every argument Henry VIII subsequently made about Katherine, Leviticus and his brother’s widow rested on that evidence being available.
Her son came closer to the throne than any illegitimate child in English history since the twelfth century. Had he outlived his father by a few years, or had Jane Seymour’s pregnancy failed, the Second Succession Act was already on the statute book and the crown was arguably his. The reign of Henry IX is one of the more plausible counterfactuals in Tudor history, and it turns on the health of one seventeen-year-old in July 1536.
Then there is the woman herself, who deserves better than the role of decorative accident. Elizabeth Blount arrived at court at thirteen or fourteen. She held the attention of the most volatile monarch in Europe for the better part of a decade and came out of it with land, a title and a continuing income. She refused a suitor she did not want, married a man who would become an earl, and stayed involved in her royal son’s education from two hundred miles away. She did all of that inside a system that gave women in her position no formal power whatsoever.
We do not know when she was born, or when she died, or where she lies. What we do know is that she navigated the most dangerous court in Europe for something like thirty years and died a baroness in her own bed, which is a good deal more than two of the queens who came after her managed.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who was Elizabeth Blount? Elizabeth Blount, known as Bessie, was a maid of honour to Katherine of Aragon and a mistress of Henry VIII. She was the mother of Henry FitzRoy, Duke of Richmond and Somerset, the only illegitimate child that Henry VIII acknowledged publicly.
When was Elizabeth Blount born? The date is uncertain. Estimates run from about 1498 to about 1502, at Kinlet in Shropshire. She was already receiving wages at court by 1512, which favours the earlier end of that range.
Did Elizabeth Blount have a child with Henry VIII? Yes. Henry FitzRoy was born on 15 June 1519 at the Priory of St Lawrence in Blackmore, Essex. Cardinal Wolsey was his godfather, and he was created Duke of Richmond and Somerset in 1525 at the age of six.
How long was Elizabeth Blount Henry VIII’s mistress? Roughly five to eight years, beginning in 1514 or 1515 and ending at around the birth of her son in 1519. It was the longest of his documented relationships outside marriage.
Who did Elizabeth Blount marry? She married Gilbert Tailboys, 1st Baron Tailboys of Kyme, in an arranged match dated variously to 1519 or 1522. After his death in 1530, she married Edward Fiennes de Clinton, 9th Baron Clinton, who was later created 1st Earl of Lincoln.
How did Elizabeth Blount die, and where is she buried? Neither question can be answered with certainty. She died between 1539 and 1541, possibly in or shortly after childbirth, with consumption given as the traditional cause. She was buried with neither husband and her grave has never been identified.
Is there a portrait of Elizabeth Blount? No securely identified portrait survives. A brass palimpsest in the British Museum and, following Elizabeth Norton’s 2009 research, an image among the family monuments at Kinlet have both been proposed as likenesses.
Was Elizabeth Blount related to Bessie Blount the inventor? No. Bessie Blount Griffin, the American inventor and forensic scientist who lived from 1914 to 2009, was a different person entirely.
