2
Davies & Edwards, p.895. MacNalty (p.162) gives the sex of the child as male but the date as November 1513.
3
LP Henry VIII
, vol. 1, 2nd ed., p.1,486. On 4 October 1514, the Wardrobe was ordered to deliver a cradle covered with scarlet ‘for the use of a nursery, God willing’ (ibid., p.1,403).
4
CSP Venice
, vol. 2, p.285.
5
BL Harley MS 3,504, f.232.
6
Henry bought New Hall from Thomas Boleyn in 1516 at a cost of £1,000 and spent a further £17,000 on rebuilding it in 1517 – 21. It is now New Hall School.
7
Illustrated in Thurley, p.102.
8
BL Cotton MS
Vespasian F III
, f.73.
9
LP Henry VIII
, vol. 2, pt. 2, p.1,328.
10
‘Dispatches’, vol. 2, p.236.
12
Hutchinson, ‘Henry’s Reproductive Woes’.
13
See Alan Bideau, Bertrand Desjardins and Hector Pérez Brignoll,
Infant Mortality in Britain: A Survey of Current Knowledge on Historical Trends and Variations in Infant and Child Mortality in the Past
, Oxford, 1997.
14
CSP Venice
, vol. 2, p.1,287.
15
‘Sanuto Diaries’, vol. 5, xxvii, p.276.
16
Elizabeth Blount received an annual salary of 100 shillings in 1513.
17
Her copy is BL Egerton MS 1,991.
18
BL Cotton MS
Caligula D VI
, f.149.
20
BL Cotton MS
Vitellius B II
, f.183.
21
LP Henry VIII
, vol. 6, p.241.
22
See the Revd Alfred Suckling’s
Antiquities and Architecture … of the County of Essex
, London, 1845, p.27. He adds: ‘It is a very remarkable situation to have chosen for the purposes of debauchery as it not only abuts upon the churchyard but is actually within a stone’s [throw] of the residence of the monks.’
23
14/15 Henry VIII, cap. 34; Mattingly, p.123. This income was derived from Talboys’ father who was declared a lunatic in 1517. Gilbert Talboys was knighted in 1524 and was appointed Sheriff of Lincolnshire the following year. Bessie Blount had two sons and a daughter with Gilbert before his death in 1530. After 1533 she married Edward Clinton and had three daughters by him. She was a lady-in-waiting to Henry’s fourth wife Anne of Cleves and died in 1541, probably from tuberculosis.
24
LP Henry VIII
, vol. 4, p.2,558.
25
BL Add. MS 8,715, f.220v.
26
BL Cotton MS
Caligula B I
, f.232. Margaret told Henry that she knew she would ‘never get good from Scotland by fair means and will never willingly stay there with those who do not love her’.
27
Angus wrote to Henry on 19 October 1519, thanking him for sending the friar to Stirling who had ‘discharged his mission so well’ that Margaret was willing (then) to stay with him (BL Cotton MS
Caligula B I
, f.141). It took seven or eight weeks to convince her (BL Cotton MS
Caligula B II
, f.333). Henry inherited his father’s respect for the Greenwich Friar Observants. He wrote to Pope Leo X declaring his ‘deep and devoted affection’ for them and finding it impossible to ‘adequately describe their zeal, night and day, to win back sinners to God’. Many suffered during the 1530s for refusing the take the Oath of Succession.
28
Byrne, p.68. She married Stewart on 3 March 1528.
29
J. S. Brewer, vol. 2, p.161.
30
Lady Margaret Douglas was the daughter of the king’s sister Margaret by her second marriage.
31
Hutchinson,
House of Treason
, pp.77 – 9.
32
He was entitled to keep four servants and two horses at court (‘Rutland Papers’, p.101).
33
LP Henry VIII
, vol. 4, p.991.
34
Warnicke, ‘The Rise and Fall of Anne Boleyn’, pp.35, 237 – 8 and A. G. L’Estrange,
Palace and Hospital or Chronicles of Greenwich
, 2 vols., London, 1889, vol. 1, p.192.
35
Flügel, ‘On the Character …’, p.146.
37
LP Henry VIII
, vol. 8, p.215.
39
LP Henry VIII
, vol. 12, pt. 2, pp.332 – 3; Hutchinson,
Thomas Cromwell
, pp.141 – 2.
40
LP Henry VIII
, vol. 4, pp.1,932 – 3.
41
Henry later ordered Sir Thomas Boleyn to house and maintain Mary – but at least assigned her the annuity of £100 formerly enjoyed by her husband.
42
BL Cotton MS
Vespasian C III
, f.176.
43
After a fire which destroyed large portions of the Palace of Westminster in 1512,
Henry took over Wolsey’s building operations at Bridewell and in 1523 completed the brick-built house with two courtyards and a long gallery leading to a water gate on the Thames. See Thurley, pp.40 – 1.
44
BL Add. MS 6,113, f.61.
45
‘State Papers’, vol. 1, p.161. Wolsey had two illegitimate children by his mistress Joan Larke: Thomas Winter, born around 1510, and Dorothy, born
c
.1512.
46
LP Henry VIII
, vol. 4, p.677.
47
Croke (
c
.1489 – 1558) was educated at Eton College and was recruited by John Fisher to teach Greek at Cambridge.
48
BL Cotton MS
Vespasian F III
, f.44.
49
LP Henry VIII
, vol. 4, pt. 2, p.1,721; Ellis, 3rd ser., vol. 2, p.117.
50
LP Henry VIII
, vol. 4, pt. 2, p.2,595.
51
‘Sanuto Diaries’, vol. 5, xxxix, p.167.
53
BL Cotton MS
Vespasian F XIII
, f.140.
54
Paul, p.59. A new translation of
The Education of a Christian Woman
, edited by Charles Fantazzi, was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2000.
55
CSP Spain
, vol. 3, pt. 1, p.1,018.
56
LP Henry VIII
, vol. 4, p.1,049.
57
‘Sanuto Diaries’, vol. 5, xi, p.613.
58
Roper (1496 – 1578) was the eldest son of John Roper (d.1524), Attorney General to Henry VIII. He was later Clerk of the Pleas to the Court of King’s Bench and a Member of Parliament. Roper wrote a biography of his father-in-law Sir Thomas More.
59
More’s first wife was Jane Colt. She died in 1511 and within a month he remarried, this time to Alice, the widow of the merchant John Middleton who had died in 1509.
61
The ladies kept their bonnets and their headdresses. One had to be repaired at the cost of two shillings.
62
LP Henry VIII
, vol. 3, p.1,559. The cost of the pageant was £20 16s 4d.
67
It may have been even earlier – in October 1525, as a French envoy, John Brinon, told Louise of Savoy of a conversation with Wolsey, the subject of which ‘I cannot write to you, as he made me promise not to mention them’ (
LP Henry VIII
, vol. 4, p.769). Whether that subject was the king’s marriage must remain a matter of conjecture.
68
Matilda, daughter of Henry I, had at that time been the only female ruler of England – and only for a few months in 1141, before a civil war broke out against her cousin Stephen, a rival claimant to the throne.
69
Hall, p.674 and MacNalty, p.73.
70
Moriarty, p.13 and Hutchinson,
Last Days
, p.127. Vicary was rewarded with a medical
appointment in the royal household at a salary of twenty shillings a year and was promoted to sergeant surgeon in 1536, a post worth £26 13s 4d. Out of this sore leg was born the widespread belief that the king suffered from syphilis – contracted whilst he was campaigning in France – and that as this venereal disease can damage foetuses, it was a factor in Katherine’s poor natal record. However, the thigh is an unusual location for a
gumma
or swelling – a symptom of tertiary syphilis – and these are not normally painful, yet Henry suffered agonies. Moreover, there is no evidence of syphilis amongst his children. Treatment of this disease consisted of six weeks of sweating the patient and the administration of doses of (poisonous) mercury which made gums red and sore and created copious flows of saliva. There are no reports of a prolonged absence of the king from public life or of these symptoms. Therefore Henry having syphilis looks like mere black propaganda.
72
MacNalty, p.57. Fear stalked the streets but this outbreak was hardly comparable to the 250,000 who died in Britain during the Spanish Influenza epidemic of March 1918 – June 1920.
73
‘Love Letters’, pp.30 – 2.
74
Ives,
The Life and Death of Anne Boleyn
, pp.100 – 1.
76
Vergil, p.324; Harpsfield, p.41.
77
CSP Spain
, vol. 3, pt. 1, p.293.
79
Richard Sylvester, ‘Cardinal Wolsey’, p.179.
81
BL Cotton MS
Vitellius B IX
, f.36.
82
LP Henry VIII
, vol. 4, p.2,588.
84
J. S. Brewer, vol. 2, pp.187 – 8 and Scarisbrick,
Henry VIII
, p.155.
85
LP Henry VIII
, vol. 4, p.1,434.
86
Ibid., vol. 4, p.1,450.
87
CSP Spain
, vol. 3, pt. 2, p.276.
88
LP Henry VIII
, vol. 4, pt. 2, p.1,504.
89
‘State Papers’, vol. 1, p.194.
91
Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticano Vat. Lat. 3731A, f.5.
92
‘Love Letters’, pp.32 – 4.