Henry VIII and his bastard children

I was asked on Twitter the other day (by the estimable @rocio_carvajalc) how many illegitimate children Henry VIII had. It’s an interesting question and, for obvious reasons, it’s also one to which the answer isn’t altogether clear. However, I am going to write about three possible candidates. One was certainly Henry’s child; another more likely than not; and the third rumoured but, on balance, unlikely. If anyone has any other candidates, please do let me know!

Henry Fitzroy

The only bastard child acknowledged by Henry was the son named Henry Fitzroy – the given name being something of a clue – who was born to Henry’s then mistress, Elizabeth Blount in the summer of 1519. The newborn boy was, therefore, three years younger than Henry’s legitimate daughter, Mary, born in February 1516. Mary’s mother, Katherine of Aragon, had lost two baby sons by that time: one born on New Year’s Day 1511 and christened Henry, who died on February 22 the same year; and another stillborn in the closing weeks of 1514.

Henry still very much hoped to father a legitimate son, and the arrival of a healthy son to Elizabeth Blount was welcome evidence that he was capable of doing so; but there was no question of his not acknowledging paternity. Cardinal Wolsey was made the boy’s godfather, and by the time Henry Fitzroy was six, the young boy had been elected knight of the garter and awarded the earldom of Nottingham. More significantly, he had been made the premier nobleman in the country, with the dukedoms of Richmond and Somerset, and – for good measure – he had also become lord admiral of England.

It’s worth pointing out, of course, that despite the manifest recognition of his status, he was not made Prince of Wales, an honour that had been accorded his brief-lived namesake in 1511.

This paternal ambivalence continued throughout Fitzroy’s life, and it is interesting to speculate what might have happened had he lived. There had certainly been no let up in the favour which Henry showed him – something that can in no way be said about his poor legitimate sister Mary – and Wolsey’s fall in 1529 brought him under the protection of the Howard family. Fitzroy was particularly close to the poet Henry Howard, earl of Surrey, who later eulogised their friendship, and he married Mary, a younger daughter of the duke of Norfolk, in 1533. The extent to which Fitzroy was also an official surrogate for the king can be seen – among many other things – in the fact that he attended the execution of Anne Boleyn on 19 May 1536.

A little over two months later, however, Fitzroy himself was dead, aged just 17. He had been taken ill in early July, and died on the 23rd at St James’ Palace. For reasons that aren’t entirely clear, given his evident and unarguably public status as a royal child, his death was dealt with in some secrecy. His body was taken from London in a plain wooden coffin, itself obscured from sight with straw, and he was buried at Thetford Priory. After the Dissolution it was moved to its current resting place in the parish church at Framlingham, among the other tombs of the Howard dynasty.

It is certainly a fascinating exercise in counterfactual history to wonder what might have happened if Fitzroy had lived; and there were certainly many who expected him to become the legitimate heir to the throne. If one objects that his bastardy might have made that politically difficult, it’s worth pointing out that both of Henry’s legitimate daughters, Mary and Elizabeth, also experienced periods in their lives when their father’s marital problems rendered them illegitimate: Mary when Henry’s marriage to Katherine was nullified, and Elizabeth following the execution of her mother, Anne Boleyn. Indeed, for many years to come there those who considered Elizabeth to be, in the words of the Venetian ambassador to Mary’s court, ‘the illegitimate child of a criminal who was punished as a public strumpet’.

UPDATE: I wrote a longer piece about Henry Fitzroy for BBC History magazine in 2019. You can read it online here.

Katherine Knollys (née Carey)
Katherine was probably born in 1523 and was certainly the daughter of Mary Boleyn, Anne’s older sister and her predecessor as mistress of Henry VIII. Mary had married William Carey, a gentleman of the royal chamber, in 1520; but she is thought to have been Henry’s mistress between 1522 and 1525. At least, she was without doubt Henry’s mistress: on one occasion in 1535, Henry was accused of having slept with both Anne Boleyn’s sister Mary and her mother. ‘Never with the mother,’ was Henry’s curt response. The only doubt, then, is over the length of the relationship, but Katherine’s birth seems to fall well within any likely range of dates.

On her accession, Elizabeth made Katherine a lady of the bedchamber, a post which she held until her death in 1569, and she was generally considered to be favoured more greatly than her peers, although how much Katherine would have agreed with such an assessment is more open to question. Elizabeth’s relentless necessities frequently made her ‘weep for unkindness’, according to surviving correspondence.

Katherine married Francis Knollys in April 1540, and the couple had sixteen children together including Henry – who I have written about in The Favourite in his role as captain of a ship in Gilbert’s failed voyage of discovery of 1578 (Henry was a long-time patron of John Callis) – and Lettice, who secretly married Robert Dudley, earl of Leicester in September 1578. One can speculate whether Lettice’s possible royal bloodline played any part in either Dudley’s interest in her as a wife, or Elizabeth’s particular fury on discovering the marriage.

I should say that there was also a question mark at the time over the status of Katherine’s younger brother Henry Carey, born in March 1526, with the rumour of the king’s paternity being widespread enough for one man to refer to it in a speech on the scaffold awaiting execution. The current consensus, however, seems to be that Henry was William Carey’s son. Even so, he was at the very least Elizabeth I’s cousin and she rewarded him on her accession with the title of Baron Hunsdon, and he went on to serve her loyally until his death in 1596 in a wide range of capacities, although his preferred field of endeavour – military action – got scant opportunity for expression under his ever-cautious queen. Late in life he was also the patron of Shakespeare’s company of players.

Sir John Perrot
Born in 1528, Sir John Perrot was a profligate and altogether reckless man, whose life seems to have been an unending sequence of quarrels, emnities and squabbles. His family was well connected at court, but the highlight of Perrot’s first spell of service in the house of William Paulet, when Perrot was eighteen, seems to have been a fight with his peer, Henry Neville, sixth Lord Bergavenny, which ended with Perrot smashing a glass into Neville’s face. By the early 1550s he had amassed extraordinary debts of between £7,000 and £8,000, some of which was possibly accrued on foreign service, since he is said to have saved the life of the French king, Henri II, who was attacked while hunting by a wild boar.

Although he spent much of Mary’s reign in prison, either for his protestantism or for debt, the accession of Elizabeth brought him considerable rewards, and he served her for much of his career in Wales and Ireland. He had a talent for making enemies, however, and by the end of the 1580s these certainly included William Cecil, Lord Burghley, and Sir Christopher Hatton, and – in all likelihood – Sir Walter Ralegh too.

Those enemies – but principally Burghley – engineered a treason charge against Perrot; he was charged in December 1590 and spent a year in the Tower awaiting trial. He was sentenced to death on 27 April 1592, but died on 3 November the same year, while in prison still, but without the sentence having been carried out. There were rumours that Elizabeth was planning to release him and that he might therefore have been poisoned to forestall any acts of vengeance against those who had plotted against him.

The case against him seems to have been thin; but Perrot was undoubtedly his own worst enemy. (Or second worst, at any rate, after Burghley.) He certainly had spoken ill of Elizabeth, and did not deny at his trial that he had said:

Stick not so much upon Her Majesty’s letter, she may command what she will, but we will do what we list… Ah, silly woman, now she shall not curb me, she shall not rule me now… God’s wounds, this it is to serve a base bastard pissing kitchen woman, if I had served any prince in Christendom I have not been so dealt withal

Rather charmingly, he claimed he had been quoted out of context. But, on hearing rumours of a Spanish invasion, he had also publicly declared of his queen:

Lo, now she is ready to piss herself for fear of the Spaniards:  I am again one of her white boys.

Unfortunately, there isn’t a great deal of evidence, circumstantial or otherwise, to suggest that Perrot, was Henry VIII’s son. What there is, principally, is hearsay, and much of that from the late Elizabethan and early Jacobean courtier Robert Naunton, who wrote of Perrot:

on his return to the town after his trial, he said, with oaths and with fury, to the Lieutenant, Sir Owen Hopton, “What! will the Queen suffer her brother to be offered up as a sacrifice to the envy of my flattering adversaries?”  Which being made known to the Queen, and somewhat enforced, she refused to sign it, and swore he should not die, for he was an honest and faithful man.  And surely, though not altogether to set our rest and faith upon tradition and old reports, as that Sir Thomas Perrot, his father, was a gentleman of the Privy Chamber, and in the Court married to a lady of great honour, which are presumptions in some implications; but, if we go a little further and compare his pictures, his qualities, gesture, and voice, with that of the King, which memory retains yet amongst us, they will plead strongly that he was a surreptitious child of the blood royal.

Naunton was married to Perrot’s grand-daughter, so one might argue that he was in a position to know the truth of such matters. On the other hand, of course, he might have considered there to be some personal advantage in implying that his wife had royal blood.

At any rate, I think Naunton’s explanation for Perrot’s fall – that he was ‘a person that loved to stand too much alone, and on his own legs’ – is a generous, but true, assessment of a difficult but fascinating man. But I do wonder if Walsingham’s assessment, that ‘He might have lived in better season in the time of King Henry VIII… [whereas now he] must be content to conform himself as other men do’ doesn’t also discretely nod towards the issue of his paternity, which might also account for some of his self-destructive behaviour.