Elizabeth Blount Totally Explained

Everything about Elizabeth Blount totally explained

Elizabeth Blount (c. 1502 - 1540), who was better known by her nickname of "Bessie", was a mistress of King Henry VIII of England. She was the daughter of Sir John Blount and Catherine Pershall, of Kinlet, 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 King Louis XII. 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. 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 she caught the eye of the King and became his mistress, sometime around 1517.
   Their relationship lasted for some length of time, compared to King Henry's 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 created Duke of Richmond and Somerset. (He was the only illegitimate son of Henry VIII that the King recognized as his own.) After the child's birth, the affair ended for unknown reasons. For proving that King Henry wasn't infertile when it came to the production of Royal sons, Elizabeth Blount prompted a popular saying — "Bless 'ee, Bessie Blount" — often heard during and after this period, and persists today in some social quarters of England.
   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 maitresse-en-tître was only ever offered to Anne Boleyn, who rejected it.
   Bessie was conveniently married-off through an arranged marriage in 1522 to Gilbert Tailboys, 1st Baron Tailboys of Kyme, whose family was said by some to have a history of insanity. (The family name is sometimes spelt "Talboys.") After her marriage, Blount doesn't 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, who he concluded was competent belle ("quite beautiful") in her own right.
   On 18 June 1536, her son Henry FitzRoy died, probably of tuberculosis ("consumption"). Her husband, Gilbert, Lord Tailboys, also preceded her in dying, leaving her a widow of comfortable means. Through her marriage to Gilbert Tailboys, she'd three children - two sons, George and Robert and one daughter, Elizabeth. After the death of Tailboys, Elizabeth Blount married a younger man whose Lincolnshire lands adjoined hers, Edward Clinton, 1st Earl of Lincoln. 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 owing to her own health problems she left the Queen's service at around the time the royal marriage was dissolved and didn't serve Anne's successor, Catherine Howard. Blount returned to her husband's estates, where she died very shortly afterwards. It has traditionally been asserted that the cause of her death was consumption.

Reputation and importance

In comparison to Henry's first two wives, Catherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn, Blount's importance to history was negligible. However, she was certainly of far more interest and importance to her contemporaries than any of the king's other previous or subsequent mistresses - including Mary Boleyn, who is more widely-known nowadays thanks to the fame of her younger sister and the popularity of The Other Boleyn Girl, a highly fictionalized account of her life. 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. 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.

Blount's children

from her relationship with King Henry VIII:

Henry Fitzroy, duke of Richmond and Somerset, Earl of Nottingham, born 1519, died 1536.

from her first marriage, to Gilbert, Baron Tailboys:

Elizabeth, Baroness Tailboys from her second marriage to Lord Clinton:

Bridget Clinton (born c. 1536). She married Robert Dymoke of Scrivelsby, Lincolnshire, sometime around 1556 and had ten (10) children. Dymoke (sometimes spelt Dymock) was a devout Catholic and named a martyr after his death. (See (External Link

) for more information.)

Katherine Clinton (b. c. 1538 - d. August 1621) She married William Burgh, 2nd Lord Burgh (c. 1522 - September 10, 1584) and had two children by him.

Margaret Clinton (b. c. 1539.) She married Charles Willoughby (2nd. Baron Willoughby of Parham) and had five children.Further Information

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