Elizabeth Tailboys

Elizabeth Blount (c. 1498[1] /c.1500[2]/c. 1502[3] – 1539/1540),[4] who was better known by her nickname of "Bessie", was a mistress of Henry VIII of England.

She was the daughter of Sir John Blount and Catherine Pershall, of Kinlet, Bridgnorth, Shropshire. Sir John Blount was a loyal, if unremarkable, servant to the Royal Family, who accompanied King Henry to France in 1513 when he waged war against Louis XII of France.

Little is known of Elizabeth Blount's early years, except for her reputation as a beauty, and for her famous affair with King Henry VIII (born 28 June 1491, he was 8-to-10 years older than Bessie). There is no known portrait of her in existence. As a young girl, she came to the King's Court as a maid-of-honour to the King's wife, Catherine of Aragon. It was there that the young teenager caught the eye of the King and became his mistress, beginning sometime around 1514 or 1515, and continuing for approximately eight years

Her relationship with Henry VIII lasted for some length of time, compared to his other affairs, which were generally short-lived and unacknowledged. On 15 June 1519, Blount bore the King an illegitimate son who was named Henry FitzRoy, and who was later made the Duke of Richmond and Somerset and Earl of Nottingham. He was the only illegitimate son of Henry VIII whom the King recognised as his own.[6] After the child's birth, the affair ended for unknown reasons. For proving that King Henry was capable of fathering healthy sons, Elizabeth Blount prompted a popular saying, "Bless 'ee, Bessie Blount", often heard during and after this period.

Soon after the birth of his son, the King began an affair with Mary Boleyn, who may have been partly the reason for Blount's dismissal. Like Blount, Boleyn was never officially recognised as the King's official mistress and the position of public maîtresse en titre was never offered by Henry to anyone but Anne Boleyn, who rejected it

Bessie had an arranged marriage in 1522 to Gilbert Tailboys, 1st Baron Tailboys of Kyme (sometimes spelt "Talboys"), whose family was said by some to have a history of insanity. After her marriage, Blount does not figure much into the day-to-day affairs of the Tudor monarchy or in the official records. A fleeting comment was made about her in 1529, when a palace chaplain remarked that she was (or had been) better-looking than Henry's then-fiancée, Anne Boleyn, whom he concluded was competent belle ("quite beautiful") in her own right.[8]

On 23 July 1536, her son Henry FitzRoy died, probably of tuberculosis ("consumption"). Her husband, Gilbert, Lord Tailboys, also preceded her by dying in 1530, leaving her a widow of comfortable means. Through her marriage to Gilbert Tailboys, she had three children – two sons, George and Robert, and one daughter, Elizabeth.

After the death of Tailboys, Elizabeth Blount was wooed in 1532, but unsuccessfully, by Lord Leonard Gray.[9] She subsequently married a younger man whose Lincolnshire lands adjoined hers, Edward Clinton or Fiennes, 9th Baron Clinton (therefore becoming Elizabeth Fiennes). They were married sometime between 1533 and 1535. This union produced three daughters. For a short while, she was a lady-in-waiting to Henry's fourth wife, Anne of Cleves, but due to her own health problems she left the Queen's service around the time the royal marriage was dissolved and did not serve Anne's successor, Catherine Howard. Blount returned to her husband's estates, where she died shortly after. It has traditionally been asserted that the cause of her death was consumption.

In comparison to Henry's first two wives, Catherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn, Blount's importance to history was negligible.[10] However, she was certainly more important than any other extra-marital relationship the king had during his first marriage. Blount was the mother of Henry's only acknowledged illegitimate child and, at one point in the 1520s, it was suggested that her son should be named the King's legal heir.[11] Although nothing came of these plans, and Blount had little to do with her son's upbringing, the fact that she was the mother of such an important child made her an object of interest to many of her contemporaries.

It is precisely because he fathered a healthy son with Elizabeth that Henry was convinced his wife's inability to bear him a son was Catherine's fault. She gave birth to at least three boys, yet only the first lived as long as seven weeks. These facts led Henry to believe there was something wrong with his marriage to Catherine, and that he needed to annul his marriage