The life of Henry Fitzroy, the only illegitimate son King Henry VIII ever acknowledged, ended on July 23, 1536, at St. James’s Palace, a death that sent shockwaves through the Tudor court and extinguished a flickering possibility that could have rewritten the history of the English throne. At just 17 years old, the Duke of Richmond and Somerset succumbed to a rapid and devastating case of consumption, the 16th-century term for tuberculosis, a diagnosis that had been pronounced by his physicians only weeks earlier.
The Imperial Ambassador, Eustace Chapuys, had forewarned the Spanish king on July 7 that Richmond could not live many months, and his prognosis proved tragically accurate. The young man who had been the center of so much speculation, the child who many believed might be placed in the line of succession, was gone, leaving behind a legacy of what might have been.
Henry Fitzroy was born in 1519 at the Priory of St. Lawrence at Blackmore in Essex, a birth shrouded in secrecy and 𝒔𝒄𝒂𝓃𝒹𝒶𝓁. His mother was Elizabeth Blount, known as Bessie Blount, a maid of honor to Queen Katherine of Aragon who had caught the king’s eye with her great beauty.
Though no accurate likeness of Bessie survives, contemporary accounts describe her as possessing a captivating allure that drew the monarch into a relationship that would produce the only child he ever acknowledged as his own, discounting the later annulments of his marriages to Katherine and Anne Boleyn. The boy was given the surname Fitzroy, meaning son of the king, a clear declaration of his paternity that left no doubt about his royal blood. The exact date of his birth remains uncertain, but historians approximate it to June 18, based on the timing of his later elevation to the dukedom and the travel itinerary of Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, who served as the baby’s godfather and arranged for Bessie’s discreet lying-in.
The early years of Henry Fitzroy’s life were marked by a careful balance of secrecy and privilege. His mother was quickly married off to Gilbert Tailboys, later a baron, and she bore him two younger half-siblings, while the young lord was initially cared for by Margaret Bryan, the lady mistress for all the royal children. Cardinal Wolsey oversaw the boy’s upbringing, sending him New Year’s gifts and ensuring his education began at an early age.
Fitzroy likely lived with his mother and stepfather in Lincolnshire before moving to Durham Place, one of Wolsey’s residences, where his education was entrusted to tutors. However, the quality of his early instruction was questionable. A letter from John Palsgrave, a tutor who later complained about the boy’s barbarous pronunciation of Latin, revealed that Fitzroy’s initial learning was hindered by the poor teaching he received, a situation that Palsgrave blamed on Bessie’s influence, suggesting the boy spent considerable time with his mother.
The turning point in Henry Fitzroy’s life came in June 1525, when King Henry VIII brought his son onto the national and international stage in a spectacular display of paternal ambition. On June 7, the child was elected a Knight of the Garter, and on June 18, he was brought to Bridewell Palace for a grand ceremony that would elevate him to unprecedented heights. The king began by ennobling him as the Earl of Nottingham, but the day was far from over.
Fitzroy left the chamber and returned dressed in the robes of a duke, flanked by the only two existing dukes in the country, the Dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk. His father then bestowed upon him the double dukedom of Richmond and Somerset, titles laden with significance. Richmond was the title held by his paternal grandfather, Henry VII, while Somerset was the title of his great-grandfather, Edmund Tudor.
This elevation made Fitzroy the senior noble in the land, a position that sparked immediate rumors that the king, whose only legitimate child was Princess Mary and whose wife was past childbearing age, was considering making the boy his heir.
The choice of titles was a calculated move by Henry VIII, designed to mark Fitzroy as a member of the royal family while carefully avoiding any infringement on the rights of future legitimate sons. The king resisted giving his son the titles of Duke of Cornwall, which automatically belongs to the heir to the throne, or Prince of Wales, which must be granted. He also avoided the title Duke of York, traditionally held by second sons and a title Henry himself had once held.
Instead, he took a middle path, elevating the boy as high as possible without impinging on the rights of any future legitimate male heirs. The Venetian Ambassador noted that Queen Katherine resented the earldom and dukedom conferred on the king’s natural son, and she remained dissatisfied, leading the king to dismiss three of her Spanish ladies from court. The queen was forced to submit, but the tension between her and the king over Fitzroy’s elevation was palpable.
Fitzroy’s new rank was supported by a massive grant of lands, largely drawn from those previously held by his great-grandmother, Lady Margaret Beaufort, giving him an income of over 4,800 pounds per annum. He was also given his own coat of arms, which featured the arms of France and England, reflecting his father’s status as King of England and claimant to the French throne, but also a silver band across the image indicating his illegitimacy. His motto, “Judy binds me,” was clearly chosen by his father and signaled what the king expected from his son.
The honors continued to pile up. On June 22, Fitzroy was made Warden General of the Marches towards Scotland, a prominent office that the king himself had held as a child. On June 25, he was installed as a Knight of the Garter at St.
George’s Chapel at Windsor, and on July 16, he was made Lord Admiral of England. Of course, Fitzroy was far too young to discharge the duties of these posts, and they were largely ceremonial, but they served to treat him like the heir apparent.
Despite the political motivations behind Fitzroy’s elevation, there is evidence that Henry VIII had genuine affection for his only son. The Venetian Ambassador said the king loved the boy like his own soul, and Cardinal Wolsey referred to the child in a letter as “your entirely beloved Son.” The king and his son stayed in touch via letters, and as Fitzroy’s education continued, he was able to write to his father himself.
On January 14, 1527, at the age of seven, Fitzroy penned a missive to the king, humbly thanking him for a New Year’s gift and beseeching his grace to accept the letter as a token. The letter was signed “Your humble servant, I Richmond,” a testament to the boy’s growing literacy and his awareness of his place in the royal hierarchy.
Fitzroy’s education was a matter of great concern to his tutors and his father. John Palsgrave, who took over his instruction in 1525, wrote to Henry VIII that he was determined to make the child as learned as possible. He told the king that Fitzroy had a great furtherance in the principles of grammar, both Greek and Latin, and could read the first Eclogue of Virgil and two scenes of the Adelphie very well for a ten-year-old.
Palsgrave was also working on correcting the boy’s earlier bad pronunciation of Latin and expected to have it perfected within the year. However, the tutor also related a relatable anecdote about the child’s speech, noting that he sometimes lisped due to the changing of his teeth. Palsgrave wrote to Bessie Blount, now Lady Tailboys, that Fitzroy was of as good a nature and as much inclined to virtuous and honorable inclinations as any babe living, and he quoted the king as saying, “I deliver unto you three my worldly jewel,” referring to Fitzroy.
But Fitzroy, much like his father, enjoyed the outdoors, and his education was often disrupted by distractions. Palsgrave complained that some were trying to prevent the boy from learning, which he called a pity, for no man had ever better wit. Every day, more people called upon Fitzroy to bring his mind from learning, some to hear a cry at a hare, some to 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁 a buck with his bow, some to ride a horse, and many other devices found within the house when he could not go abroad.
Reading between the lines of Palsgrave’s letters, it sounds like Fitzroy was at best a handful and at worst a brat. Palsgrave only lasted as his tutor for about half a year, and by February 1526, he had been replaced by Richard Croke.
The problems with Fitzroy’s education were compounded by the behavior of the boys around him. He had a group of companions, including his maternal uncles George and Henry Blount, who distracted him from his lessons by encouraging him to go riding and hawking instead. They were also rude to the tutors, and Fitzroy followed their example.
On May 26, 1527, Croke wrote to Cardinal Wolsey, describing the frenzy of those men who every day endeavored to drive the hearts of the prince and his young classmates to a hatred of study and the clergy. Some household staff were also problematic, including a gentleman usher named Sir George Cotton, who cancelled the child’s lessons and took him out to practice archery and hunting. Croke said that Cotton also allowed clowns and players to be admitted to warble ditties fit for a brothel before the prince in his own private chamber.
Another boy, named Scrope, was equally difficult, mocking the lessons and insulting the tutor so that his pupils had no respect for him. Croke despaired of the effects of all this on Fitzroy’s character, asking what he would refrain from doing as an adult when even now he was being taught to say to his teacher, “If you beat me, I shall beat you.”
Despite these challenges, Fitzroy was academically able and impressed those who met him. In 1525, William Franklin, Archdeacon of Durham, said that the boy was a child of excellent wisdom and toward, with good and quick capacity, retentive memory, and virtuous inclination to all honor, humanity, and goodness. He said it would be hard to find any creature living of twice his age able or worthy to be compared to him.
Croke later said that it was remarkable that a boy of eight could translate any passage of Caesar into English. Still, Croke despaired of the situation and said Fitzroy would have progressed much further in his studies if he had not been obstructed by Cotton’s treachery. In the end, Croke left his post in October 1527 and was replaced by George Fery, who apparently did much better and stayed with Fitzroy until 1531.
Fitzroy’s household was as poorly managed as his education. He had been living mostly in Yorkshire, moving around between houses like Pontefract and Sheriff Hutton, with a huge household of 245 people at Sheriff Hutton in 1525, though it was down to around 150 by the time of his death. Despite his massive income, the household was prone to overspending and dogged by poor inventory and bookkeeping.
Before he left in late 1527, Richard Croke made accusations of fraud, theft, and cooking the books against some of the duke’s staff, but there doesn’t seem to have been any serious investigation, and though some improvements were made, the household continued to be poorly run for the duration of Fitzroy’s time there.
Given his bloodline and the various honors and posts he technically held, Fitzroy exchanged letters and gifts with some of the wider royal family, including his Scottish cousin James V. By 1527, he was even mooted as a potential husband for Catherine de’ Medici or Infanta Maria of Portugal, though neither match ultimately came to anything, the major stumbling block being that Fitzroy was illegitimate. During those negotiations, the rumor went about that he was to be made the King of Ireland, but it never happened.
The fact that it seems to have been considered indicates how much King Henry was prepared to invest in his son. Most shockingly of all, the idea of getting a papal dispensation and marrying Fitzroy to his own half-sister, Princess Mary, was also floated in an effort to combine their claims and provide the country with a de facto male heir. Thankfully, that too went nowhere.
At the same time that Fitzroy’s marriage prospects were being discussed, his father’s marriage to Katherine of Aragon was disintegrating as Henry sought an annulment so he could marry Anne Boleyn and hopefully sire a legitimate boy whose birth would push Fitzroy down the pecking order. It is ironic and shows the double standards that could be employed that Henry was claiming he couldn’t be legally married to his sister-in-law at around the same time that there were thoughts of marrying his son and daughter to one another. When Fitzroy’s godfather, Cardinal Wolsey, was unable to secure the annulment, he fell from favor in 1529 and ultimately died in November 1530.
In a further sign of where the king’s interests now lay, the care of the boy was given to Anne Boleyn’s uncle, the Duke of Norfolk, who sent his son, Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, to be Fitzroy’s new companion.
After the summer of 1529, Fitzroy began to spend much more time in the south of England, at Windsor, attending Parliament for the first time that summer. He was also declared Lord Lieutenant of Ireland that year, though no one expected the ten-year-old boy to actually discharge the duties of the post. He had three subordinates for that and later a lord deputy, but the appointment showed his high rank within the English aristocracy and unofficially the royal family.
He spent more time with his father too, and commentators noted their good relationship.
In April 1530, Fitzroy’s stepfather, Gilbert Tailboys, died, and although his mother did remarry to Edward Fiennes de Clinton, Baron Clinton, that wedding did not take place until 1532. In the meantime, there was a tantalizing opportunity that Henry VIII never seems to have considered: he could have pursued the annulment of his first marriage with the intention of wedding Elizabeth Blount, still only in her early 30s, and having Richmond retroactively legitimized. It might sound crazy, but bear in mind that the king’s ancestor, John of Gaunt, had had his children by his mistress, Katherine Swynford, legitimized after his much later marriage to her, an act that ultimately paved the way for the Tudors to take the throne.
Clearly, the king was genuinely infatuated with Anne Boleyn at this stage, though, for the option was never pursued.
In October 1532 came one of the biggest changes in Fitzroy’s young life. Having accompanied Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn to France to meet the French king, Francis I, it was decided that Fitzroy would stay on in the country at the French court. He was appointed a member of Francis’s privy chamber and lodged with the heir to the French throne, the Dauphin.
He stayed in the country until the late summer of 1533, living in Paris and going on progress with the court. It is safe to assume he therefore spoke at least passable French. With Anne pregnant, though the pope refused to recognize that the Aragon marriage was void and the French king doing nothing to help King Henry get his way, and Francis even destined to meet the pope very soon, Fitzroy was abruptly called home.
He arrived back just in time for the birth of his new little half-sister, Princess Elizabeth, and on November 26, at the age of 14, the bare minimum for a boy at that time, he was married to Lady Mary Howard. His bride, who he can only have had a passing acquaintance with, was Anne Boleyn’s first cousin, the daughter of the Duke of Norfolk and sister of Fitzroy’s friend, the Earl of Surrey. The marriage took place at Hampton Court Palace and was never consummated due to the couple’s youth, but Mary would always be known as the Duchess of Richmond and Somerset, and she was Henry VIII’s only daughter-in-law.
This union is attributed to the interference of Anne Boleyn, the idea being that her stepson would be bound to her family and not available to make a grand foreign alliance and potentially challenge her own children’s rights to the throne. As one historian points out, though, later on when Anne failed to have her own son, this policy must have seemed like folly, for it meant that her powerful uncle, Norfolk, would be more invested in his daughter’s position as the potential mother of Henry VIII’s grandchildren than in Anne herself.
Though not living with his new duchess, Fitzroy must have seen her frequently enough, as she was one of Queen Anne’s ladies, and he was often at court, where he outranked everyone save the king and queen themselves, unless Princess Elizabeth was visiting. He also continued to attend Parliament and took part in ceremonies associated with his position as a Knight of the Garter. When he wasn’t in London, he went to his estates in Dorset or Sheffield, sometimes even traveling with his father-in-law, who seems to have made efforts to have a good relationship with the young man who might, just might, be King Henry IX someday.
In his mid-teens, he began to deputize for his own father more and more, entertaining the Imperial Ambassador in 1535 and attending the execution of three monks at Tyburn in May, indicating his father’s approval of their punishment for resisting the religious changes he was then imposing on the country.
Anne Boleyn still hadn’t produced a boy who could decisively challenge Fitzroy’s position as a potential heir. While Mary had been deemed illegitimate too and Elizabeth was an infant, their half-brother’s chances of taking the throne still looked very real. It was at this time that the only portrait of Fitzroy was painted.
The inscription on it says he is 15, which dates it to between June 1534 and June 1535. It is now held by the Royal Collection Trust, and it is a miniature by Lucas Horenbout or Horenbol, which shows the duke in front of a vivid blue background, wearing what looks like a night cap and shirt. The physical resemblance between him and his father is very clear.
In January 1536, Catherine of Aragon died, and Anne Boleyn miscarried of the boy whose survival would surely have ensured her own. Afterwards, it soon became clear that the king was looking to exit his second marriage, much more quickly and decisively than he had his first. This wasn’t particularly good news for the now 16-year-old Fitzroy, for a new wife and Anne’s lady-in-waiting, Jane Seymour, was already the clear replacement that the king had in mind, meaning a fresh chance of a baby brother.
Nevertheless, despite the fact that her fall was not to his own advantage, Fitzroy certainly did nothing to try to prevent Anne’s demise. He was present for some of its key moments. On the night the queen was arrested at the start of May, her stepson was at court and went to ask his father’s blessing before retiring to bed.
The king was moved to tears and told Fitzroy that he and the former Princess Mary were lucky that Anne had not been able to poison them, as he said she had wanted to do, a ludicrous accusation with no proof. One of Fitzroy’s own servants, William Brereton, was also caught up in the mess, accused of sleeping with the queen. There is no hint that Fitzroy tried to save him, and he was ultimately executed.
When the queen was beheaded at the Tower of London on May 19, Fitzroy attended, with his presence again showing his father’s approval of what was happening. In less than a fortnight, the duke had a new stepmother, Queen Jane, who Henry married on May 30. Princess Elizabeth was declared illegitimate, and Princess Mary was finally forced on June 22 to sign a document agreeing that she too was not Henry’s lawful daughter, though her father had insisted for years already that she was born out of wedlock.
This left the girl’s half-brother as the third person in the land after their father and the new consort. With all three of Henry’s children not legitimate, there was speculation about the duke’s place in the line of succession. On June 6, the Imperial Ambassador wrote to the Spanish king that no less a person than the Earl of Sussex stated in the Privy Council in the king’s presence that considering the princess was illegitimate, as well as the Duke of Richmond, it was advisable to prefer the male to the female for the succession to the crown.
This opinion, not having been contradicted by the king, might hereafter gain ground and have adherence.
Sussex’s opinion might have gained even more adherence by the passage of the 1536 Act of Succession, which allowed the king to nominate his own heirs irrespective of their legitimacy. Although it wasn’t used at this time to put anyone in line for the throne, the possibility of naming Fitzroy in lieu of a legitimate son was now very serious indeed, and the Imperial Ambassador looked upon it as almost certain. Any such plans were soon to be dashed in the most decisive way possible.
Fitzroy had just turned 17 years old. He was seen in Parliament on June 8, and there were plans afoot for him to start living with his wife. All appeared to be well.
It didn’t stay that way. A month later, on July 7, Chapuys wrote that the former Princess Mary didn’t need to worry about losing her right to the throne of England, for the king’s illegitimate son, the Duke of Richmond, could not, according to the prognostication of his physicians, live many months, having been pronounced to be in a state of rapid consumption. Consumption was 16th-century speak for tuberculosis, and there was no cure.
Fitzroy was dying, and fast. While his actual illness may not necessarily have been TB, it was terminal, and he expired on July 23 at St. James’s Palace.
We don’t know how Henry took the news, but he received it at Sittingbourne, according to the later report of the Duke of Norfolk. The king opted to have a very quiet funeral for his only son. The Duke of Richmond was encased in lead and taken into Norfolk to be buried amongst his wife’s family.
There were only two servants, his wife, and some of his in-laws accompanying the body to its grave. He was initially interred in Thetford Priory, but when his father was having that priory dissolved just three years later, the Duke of Norfolk, not the king, had the body moved to the Church of St. Michael the Archangel in Framlingham.
The incomplete tomb over him and his wife, who was buried there much later, was constructed at the expense of the Howard family and doesn’t even have effigies of the duke and duchess at the top. It so much for Henry’s paternal love for his worldly jewel. Of course, the following year, Henry VIII would get what he’d always dreamed of: a new worldly jewel in the shape of a legitimate son who survived infancy, the future Edward VI.
That boy died as a teenager, though, just like the older brother he never knew, and first Mary, then Elizabeth, took the throne, having been restored to the succession by their father in the 1540s without ever being re-legitimized. Had Henry Fitzroy lived, perhaps he would have been placed in line as well, but we’ll never know.
