The spring of 1517 was a hard one. It arrived in the wake of an unusually vicious winter; the court had been marooned at Greenwich for a month, trapped by the frozen River Thames.1 It was some time before the queen’s women were able to remove the fur linings from their gowns, exchanging heavy velvet for lighter-weight satins and silks, and the country was still in the grip of a long drought.2 There were worries about the state of European diplomacy and, not unrelatedly, the lack of an English male heir, but the monarchs could not afford to appear openly anxious. Lavish celebrations were often used to project a sense of airy unconcern, as well as to give the court some much-needed levity. The king ordered a May Day joust.3
For young women like Elizabeth Blount, this was an opportunity. While only men would participate in the joust itself – women did not mount horses to hit one another with sticks – there was usually some sort of accompanying theatrical entertainment where the queen’s women took the starring roles. In 1515 the May Day celebrations had taken the form of an adventure into ‘the woods’ with Robin Hood’s outlaws, at Shooter’s Hill in London. The queen’s women had played character parts, ‘Humility’, ‘Pleasance’, and Lady May herself, riding on horseback and singing to the king as they carried him off to Greenwich in front of crowds of revellers.4 These events must have been nerve-wracking. Elizabeth and her fellow maids must have shuddered at the thought of missing a step or a note in front of such an audience even while they hungered for the chance to be seen. For not all of the queen’s women could be chosen for the plum parts, and the court must always put its best face forward. Only the prettiest, the most elegant dancers, those who could memorise lines and stage directions and not freeze with fright, would be given a part.
Fortunately, Elizabeth had all of these skills in abundance. Better known to us and to her contemporaries as ‘Bessie’, she had joined the court in 1513 and had dazzled in many revels since, even dancing with the king himself at New Year in 1515.5 By now a reputed beauty, Bessie was also known for her particularly sweet singing voice and her literary interests, and was perfectly positioned to attract the attention of eligible court bachelors.6 No doubt she hoped for another starring role in the May Day celebrations of 1517.
If she hoped, she hoped in vain. May Day revelry became violently twisted when habitual xenophobia escalated into a full-blown riot in the city of London. For some time, English merchants had been complaining that foreigners were replacing them in their jobs, their trades and their position in society, and then boasting about it. As the City authorities turned a blind eye, the Venetian ambassador rode to the king on 30 April with news of impending violence. But it was too late. On the eve of May Day, all hell broke loose. Stones were thrown, clubs swung and fires started at foreigners’ lodgings in the east. Sir Thomas Parr, whose house was at Blackfriars, fled on horseback to warn the royal household, ten miles west at Richmond. A host of armed nobles was scrambled, but by the time it got there the riot had already fizzled out and hundreds of malcontents were on their way to prisons throughout the city.7
The May Day celebrations at court were cancelled. No doubt Bessie and her fellows were disappointed, but there were some in their midst who must have felt stronger emotions. María de Salinas, now Lady Willoughby, was almost certainly at court with the queen when the news arrived. María was married to an Englishman now, with an English title, anglicised name and English denization. But that did not make her less of a Spaniard, and as a Spaniard she had certainly experienced the ‘envy of the English’.8 How did she feel, hearing that the Spanish ambassador’s house had been attacked and that a Portuguese diplomat had barely escaped with his life?9 Italian merchants, too, had been particularly singled out; if she had married Francesco Grimaldi as he had wanted a decade ago, she might have been an object for the mob’s fury.10
The rioters were punished harshly, far more harshly than was usual. The king was frightened – evidence suggests he may have thought himself personally threatened by what he saw as an insurrection – and, therefore, he was furious. Foreign merchants were necessary to the English court as suppliers of luxury goods. More seriously, attacks on foreign merchants might be taken as attacks on the king’s international allies, jeopardising diplomatic relations at a sensitive time. The rioters were thus indicted on this basis before being hanged, drawn and quartered all over the city.11 What’s not usually remembered is that the king’s own wife was a foreigner, and so were a number of her household like María. The harsh reprisals could well have been intended as a statement about this too, the riots taken partly as an attack on the queen, and therefore on the king’s honour. Perhaps the many executions were designed to reassure the queen and her court as well as the king’s European allies.
Bessie Blount had hoped to be noticed at the May Day joust. In the event, María, instead, must have felt uncomfortably seen.
Bessie needed new clothes. Her outer gowns could be worn more loosely, the lacing adjusted as required, but her linen undergarments, her kirtle and her stomacher, would no longer stand the strain of her growing figure.12 It was 1519, and Bessie was pregnant.
She wasn’t the only one. The queen’s last pregnancy had ended tragically in another stillbirth the previous November, but in a strange juxtaposition three of her ladies-in-waiting would give birth during 1519: Bessie, but also María de Salinas, Lady Willoughby and Elizabeth Stafford, Countess of Surrey.13 Pregnancy was a source of joy and even of pride, and so pregnant women at court wore their gowns loose-laced, their condition emphasised by belts or jewelled chains.14 Display – being seen – was the raison d’être of a lady-in-waiting, as fertility was for a married woman. But Bessie wasn’t married. Her beauty and her skills as a courtier had attracted attention as planned, but her suitor was not an unmarried bachelor: it was the king of England himself.
Sleeping with the king wasn’t as common for ladies-in-waiting as we tend to think it was. Henry is thought to have pursued his wife’s women before – witness Anne Stafford, Lady Hastings, in 1510, whose brother had sent her away from court to prevent the scandal – but though in France the king’s mistress held an official position (maîtresse en titre), in England such affairs were kept relatively private, which means that evidence is thin on the ground.15 What we do know is that Henry liked to pursue, and to feel as if the lady had a choice. He liked to be chosen, not to force. In 1518 he was handsome, athletic and charming when he wanted to be – Europe’s ‘golden prince’ – so, though we don’t know how Bessie felt, there is no reason to assume that she was reluctant. Whether it was a good idea was another matter. Historically, royal mistresses might gain considerably, whether materially or in terms of political influence. Once their tenure ended and the king moved on, or – worse – once the king died, though, their position could be precarious in the extreme.16 While sometimes the king might arrange a marriage for an ex-mistress that was better than she could have managed alone, this was by no means a guarantee, and if he did not, who would touch damaged goods? In 1518 Henry had not yet had any long-standing mistresses. Nobody knew what this might do to Bessie’s future prospects.
In the short term she received very little. Any gifts were not recorded, and her male relatives were not rewarded in the way that mistresses’ families were later on in the reign.17 All that she had was the king’s attention and his child in her belly. These affairs were usually open secrets at court. If it was awkward for Bessie and Queen Catherine to continue to work together, they didn’t show it and nobody commented. But there were limits. Most pregnant courtiers continued to serve until it was time to withdraw into confinement and await the birth, usually four to six weeks before the baby was expected.18 This is probably what María, Lady Willoughby and Elizabeth, Countess of Surrey did. But Bessie’s baby was born in June 1519 and her last recorded court appearance was in October 1518, which suggests it was not considered appropriate for her to stay at court while she carried the king’s child.19
Bessie’s world pivoted around her. As the king’s mistress she had been extremely visible, but now she was hidden, treated as a shameful secret. Most likely she was sent to Blackmore Priory near Ingatestone in Essex, where she would later give birth.20 It’s possible that she, María and Elizabeth all retired into confinement in the general East Anglia area at roughly the same time, for we know that María went to Parham Hall in Suffolk, and Elizabeth’s family home outside London was Tendring Hall on the Essex-Suffolk border.
It could have been difficult for the queen to lose three of her ladies at once, but the system of service was well oiled and their places would temporarily have been filled by ladies-in-waiting ‘in extraordinary’. By 1519 the queen’s women were still broadly set in three ranks: ladies, gentlewomen, and chamberers, plus the six maids of honour under the mother of the maids.21 In fact, the royal household had been gradually expanding since the beginning of the reign. Like most large organisations, it was by nature a place of slight administrative chaos. Some people were paid wages, some had no salary but were entitled to ‘bouche of court’, i.e. food, lodging, fuel and light, some people had both, some neither, and some were merely ‘hangers-on’.22 In the 1510s ladies-in-waiting might belong to any of these categories. Bessie, as one of the maids of honour, was entitled to full bouche of court alongside her fellow maids. María, Lady Willoughby also received bouche of court in her own right, and those of her ‘chamber’ – her servants – too.23 Elizabeth, Countess of Surrey’s situation was less clear; though she served the queen, her husband was entitled to lodging on the king’s side, so Elizabeth was accommodated with him, and her status as a peeress meant that she received no further salary.24
While the queen’s ‘side’ of the royal household had been relatively stable since the start of the reign, the king’s side had seen greater changes in the interests of keeping up with foreign rivals. Royal households elsewhere, especially in France, were bigger, glossier, with more people and greater magnificence, and Henry needed to compete. Thus in 1519 he formalised the position of ‘gentleman of the privy chamber’ to match the French gentilhomme de la chambre, thereby conveniently creating a clear role for the young noblemen floating about the court known as the king’s ‘minions’. The queen had a privy chamber too, of course, but it seems to have functioned a little differently; while the king used his as a space for display and thus for politics, only the queen’s women had access to hers without prior approval.25
Noblewomen experienced the same seclusion when they withdrew into confinement to await childbirth. María and Elizabeth would have spent considerable time and energy preparing the birthing chamber with appropriate furnishings and textiles, purchasing new linen and borrowing items from friends, as was customary. In the 1530s, Honor, Viscountess Lisle borrowed a bed from the Countess of Rutland, a counterpane, sheets and other textiles for it from the Countess of Sussex, and even sought to borrow an altar cloth from the royal wardrobe itself for the christening.26 All three women would have arranged their own confinement in imitation of royal proceedings. The room would be made dark, warm and cosy with tapestries, carpets and curtains. Confinement was meant to be a time of rest, but it was also a time of fear. Childbirth did not discriminate, and women of all social statuses were well aware that they might not survive the experience.27
The best that María, Elizabeth and Bessie could do was to secure the services of an experienced midwife, and here again they borrowed from friends, or used recommendations. Once labour started, she became the centre of their world. Other married women would have arrived for emotional, religious and sometimes practical support – childbirth was a powerfully female experience – but for María, Elizabeth and Bessie the midwife was their crutch. Only she had the skill to change the baby’s position, to ease the mother and coach her through the experience. They would each have been given caudle, a thick, hot drink of ale or wine mixed with spices and honey, thought to dull the pain and give strength, and the midwife might administer herbal remedies to help with lubrication, fatigue and pain management. At St Lawrence Priory, Tendring Hall and Parham, women prayed with and for Bessie, Elizabeth and María, calling on the Virgin Mary, St Anne and St Margaret. Our women might have clutched beads of coral, jet or amber, thought to speed labour and quell the pain of contractions. They might also have borrowed holy relics from local churches or abbeys: a birthing girdle or vellum, inscribed with prayers and images for visualisation, blessed by a priest and laid over the labouring woman’s belly. Prayer cadences circled around the room: ‘she shall hastily be delivered with joy without peril, the child to have Christendom and the mother purification of Holy Church’.28
Joy without peril. All three women came through their ordeal safely. Inside the rosy red-brick walls of Parham Hall, comfortably ensconced in the Suffolk countryside, María gave birth to a baby girl whom she named Katherine, for her mistress the queen.29 The child would have been washed by the midwife and then wrapped securely in soft linen swaddling bands so that her limbs would grow straight. She would then have been handed to the wet nurse, whom María had chosen for her good character and robust physical health, traits that would, it was thought, be passed to the child through the milk. Noblewomen did not breastfeed. Their status, in fact, meant that all three of our women would have been given plenty of time to recover, much of it spent lying in bed in the birthing chamber while others handled the domestic and estate management. After forty days they were ‘churched’ at a service of thanksgiving for their safe delivery, and thus welcomed back into society as new mothers.30
Katherine may not have been María’s first or only child. After three years of marriage, it’s possible that there was an older sibling in the nursery or, if not, that her parents might have preferred her to have been a boy.31 Elizabeth, Countess of Surrey was under less pressure. She had already had two, possibly three children, one of whom was the longed-for son and heir. Now, in 1519, she too gave birth to a baby daughter: Mary, perhaps named for the princess. Daughters of courtiers tended to become courtiers in their turn, as María, daughter of a lady-in-waiting, knew well. Perhaps Katherine and Mary would grow up to serve future queens.
Both María and Elizabeth could expect to return to court service. For Bessie Blount this was less certain. Royal mistresses were not automatically removed from their posts if they bore the king’s children – a little later, Mary Boleyn may have done just this and returned to court – but all depended on the whim of the king. Henry did visit Bessie at Blackmore Priory during her pregnancy. One of his favourite country houses, the palace of New Hall, was only a few miles away, and this was probably not an accident.32 No doubt he was pleased when Bessie gave birth to a healthy baby boy in early summer, more pleased than the prior, who had probably had to clear out of his house next door to the priory when it was commandeered for Bessie’s confinement.33 The child was immediately named Henry and given the traditional surname ‘Fitzroy’, a formal acknowledgement of his status as a royal bastard, but no public announcement was made and Bessie did not return to court.
Almost twenty years after her arrival on English soil, María was about to leave it for the first time. The court was at Dover, lodged in the castle, en route to France. The Treaty of London, signed by Henry VIII back in 1518, had stipulated that the French and English kings should meet in person, and finally this was going to happen. Before that, though, María was taking an arguably bigger step: she was selling her remaining property in Spain, her inheritance, to her younger sister Isabel. It made sense. There was no point in her keeping property she would never visit, or holding onto income that would be better reinvested in England. No doubt she felt a twinge of regret anyway. Spanish women inherited, owned and administered property in their own names, whether or not they were married, but in theory María couldn’t do these things as a married woman in England.34 Here she was under coverture, legally invisible, seen only as her husband’s possession. She had held onto her share of the family inheritance for four years since marrying William, Lord Willoughby, which suggests it held emotional as well as material resonance for her. Letting it go was tantamount to admitting not only that she was never going to return to Spain to live, but that she had now lost the agency that she would have had there.
What she was selling were her juros – akin to government bonds where the profit was the interest gained – inherited from her parents, to the value of 5,000 maravedis, plus 2,000 maravedis more in investments and property in their home city of Vitoria.35 There were also household goods, furniture and even jewels. A surprising number of people were involved in the transaction. A Spanish notary had come to England expressly to handle the sale. On 30 May 1520, the document acknowledging the sale and María’s receipt of the final amount, a respectable 330,000 maravedis, or c. 800 ducats, was witnessed by the queen’s trusted Spanish servant Francisco Felipez.36 A day later, the financial logistics of the sale were laid out and attested to in another document.37 María’s sister Isabel had paid the money to Martín Ibánez de Marquina in Vitoria, who was the uncle of Catherine of Aragon’s physician, Fernán López de Escoriaza. Escoriaza had then paid the money to María, exchanging maravedis for English pounds along the way.38 This document was witnessed by another of the queen’s Spanish servants, Ochoa de Salzedo, plus the Windsor herald, and a man named Henry of Dover, servant of a Spanish courtier then in Dover.39 Finances, clearly, were a man’s business, but it would appear that the money María gained from this sale remained hers alone. In 1522 she was assessed for tax as an individual, as though she were operating as a femme sole, a sole woman, not subject to the rule of coverture that rendered most married women non-existent in the eyes of the law, and it’s likely that this money was the reason for that; a small slice of financial power and visibility in a male-dominated world.40
As María signed away her Spanish past in Dover Castle, everybody who was anybody was in the town, waiting in the salt air and brisk spring breeze to cross the Channel. There was to be a seventeen-day orgy of feasting, dancing, sports and general one-upmanship between the English and the French courts near the city of Guînes, not far from Calais, a meeting that would become known as the Field of Cloth of Gold. María and the other women had probably had to overhaul their wardrobes. Queen Catherine naturally wanted her retinue to rival the French queen’s, particularly since she was not at all in favour of a French alliance. In fact, she had engineered a brief meeting between her husband and her nephew Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, on the Kent coast before the English court embarked for France, which was why there was a Spanish notary readily available to conduct María’s property transaction.
The fleet mustered to take the English court and its accoutrements to France must have been the biggest that María had yet seen. Estimates made in advance suggest that the queen’s retinue alone was comprised of some 1,175 people, a significant number of whom were women. Richard Wingfield, the ambassador in France, had written to reassure Henry that he could bring as many women as he could find. ‘They which shall be meet for such an assembly may frankly come without any refuse,’ he wrote, adding wryly, ‘I never saw your Highness encumbered or find fault with over-great press of ladies.’ On the other hand, though, he was also careful to tell Henry that the French intended to bring their best-looking women and urged Catherine of Aragon to do likewise, ‘that the visage of England, which hath always had the praise, shall not at this time lose the same’.41
Many people there thought the French more richly dressed and thus finer-looking than the English, who were characterised by one commentator as ‘well-dressed but ugly’.42 Nevertheless, their presence was more than simply decorative. The women, as so often, were the focus for display and magnificence, there to be seen, a crucial feature of competition. María accompanied Queen Catherine to watch the jousts and to entertain King Francis I and his gentlemen at a banquet in the queen’s hall, while Henry was likewise feted by Queen Claude of France and her women. Their job was to create an environment in which everybody could have fun, and perhaps allow diplomatic conversation to take place in a more relaxed, less formal way. They seem to have excelled, since it was noted that the Frenchmen were ‘making merry’ with the English women, and vice versa. Anne Browne, one of the English maids, danced with the French king and was described as ‘an accomplished woman, and the handsomest in the company’.43 After dinner, King Francis travelled the length of the hall on both sides ‘and kissed the ladies and gentlewomen one after another… saving four or five that were old and not fair standing together’, a lapse in chivalry that did not go unnoticed.44
While María was at Dover waiting to board a ship for France, Elizabeth Stafford, Countess of Surrey was on the other side of the country, eyeing the Irish Sea dubiously. A month previously her husband had been appointed the new Lieutenant of Ireland, and he had chosen to take his family with him to Dublin, meaning that Elizabeth temporarily left her position in the queen’s household. While we don’t know how she felt, it’s hard to imagine that she was happy about this even without the prospect of missing the biggest party of her court career. The king’s rule of Ireland existed more in theory than in practice, and Ireland, like most border regions at this time, was considered by the English to be a wild and barbaric realm, full of uncivilised peoples. Not only would the family be away from the centre of royal patronage and favour, opening the way for Surrey’s enemies to talk him down, but no Lieutenant was ever given sufficient resources to properly subdue the country.45
Quite what Elizabeth thought, or how she and her several small children found Ireland, is not documented. It was certainly an adventure. She and her family would have lodged in Dublin Castle and would probably not have ventured outside the city, the safe ‘Pale’ of Dublin. Frighteningly, in August 1520 sickness was rife. Surrey wrote that ‘There is marvellous death in all this country, which is so sore that all the people be fled out of their houses into the fields and woods, where they in like wise die wonderfully; so that the bodies lie dead, like swine, unburied.’ He requested permission to send Elizabeth and the children into Wales or Lancashire, where they could ‘remain near the seaside until this death cease’.46 It seems that the request was refused, since they were still in Dublin two months later.47 The life of a lady-in-waiting, wife and mother was not always one of glitz and glamour.
Elizabeth was not the only Howard woman to miss out on the festivities in France, for England could not be left completely deserted. Her father-in-law, Thomas Howard, 2nd Duke of Norfolk, was made the king’s deputy, head of the council, a position of trust and honour. His wife Agnes, Elizabeth’s stepmother-in-law, had her own diplomatic role to play. With only a day’s warning, three French ambassadors came to court to visit the Princess Mary, and Duchess Agnes had to scramble to produce enough noblewomen to attend her so that the appropriate impression of magnificence was maintained. She would have been justified in feeling annoyed. The French king was busy with their own monarch in France. Why send ambassadors now, unless to try to catch the English out with their court empty, their princess neglected? In the event, Agnes’ presence saved the day; as the highest-ranking noblewoman below the royal family, three of her daughters by her side, nobody could say that the French, or indeed Princess Mary, had been slighted.48
In 1522, three years after the birth of her son – the king’s son – Bessie Blount left their home in Essex to begin a new chapter. Her affair with the king was over. Her son Henry had his own nurseries and was as well cared for as any legitimate prince of the realm could be. There were rumours that Henry was on the cusp of beginning a new dalliance, and thus it was time for Bessie to be settled. She was to marry Gilbert Tailboys, who was part of Cardinal Wolsey’s retinue, and it’s likely that Wolsey was responsible for arranging the marriage on royal orders. Tailboys was only a few years older than Bessie, and apparently perfectly happy to marry the king’s former mistress. Indeed, the two probably already knew one another. The Tailboys family were from Lincolnshire, of greater status and wealth than Bessie’s own, and the couple were given land by the king.49 Her position as a royal mistress had not damaged Bessie’s prospects. If anything, she had gained by it.
It’s not often noticed that Bessie had achieved the goal of most young women who came to court: to make a good marriage. Families went to great and sometimes impolitic lengths to secure this. Even royal women weren’t above a clandestine wedding. King Henry’s sister Mary, who had married the French king, Louis XII, in 1514, had been widowed only a few months later. Mary had carefully plotted her own future before she had even left England, extracting a promise from her brother that after Louis she might marry whom she chose. In fact she had already selected the king’s close friend Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, as her next husband, and both Wolsey and the king were aware of this. Politically astute, she played a strong game: knowing that neither would want her to marry a Frenchman, she stirred up their anxiety, so that Brandon might be seen as the better alternative. He led the embassy sent to bring her home. When he arrived, Mary dismissed her French attendants and re-engaged those English who remained in France, that she might be sure of their loyalty, and then she persuaded Brandon to do the one thing that Henry had explicitly said they were not permitted to do: they married in secret before returning to England.50
It’s likely that Mary’s English women knew about this. Among them was Lady Anne Grey, a young courtier who had come to France with Mary and married a younger son of the Earl of Dorset who was also part of the retinue. Anne returned to England with the newlyweds, and watched them ride the wave of King Henry’s anger. Royals were not allowed to marry without the king’s permission, because their marriages could affect the succession of the throne. Suffolk had to grovel mightily to allay Henry’s suspicions that his best friend might be making a bid for royal inheritance; collectively they seem to have decided it was safer to place the blame on Mary, who might more easily be forgiven.51
And so it came to pass. By 1517, the couple were back in such favour that Queen Catherine came to visit them in Suffolk in March. Lady Anne Grey was still in Mary’s service, but she was now a widow. The queen’s visit was an opportunity for her to see her stepmother, Mary Scrope, Mistress Jerningham, who was one of the queen’s ladies. But they had more on their minds than a simple social call. Mistress Jerningham used the trip to enact an illicit betrothal between Lady Anne and royal ward John Berkeley, then in Suffolk’s household.52 Perhaps, having seen her mistress successfully marry whom she chose, Lady Anne and her stepmother thought it worth risking the king’s anger. Suffolk himself was horrified, writing to Wolsey that he would rather have lost £1,000 than that this should have happened in his house when the king trusted him with young Berkeley; but the damage was done, the ladies had won and the betrothal stood.53
Ordinarily, the king had no objection to attending and even sponsoring the weddings of ladies-in-waiting. In the spring of 1520 maid of honour Mary Boleyn, daughter of the king’s favourite diplomat Sir Thomas, was married to one of the king’s own gentlemen of the privy chamber, William Carey, with the king himself in attendance.54 At the Field of Cloth of Gold that summer, Mary and her sister Anne had both been present, but on opposite ‘sides’. Sir Thomas Boleyn’s diplomatic contacts had secured for Anne a place in Margaret of Austria’s court and then in the household of the French queen, Claude.55 By 1522, both Boleyn sisters were among Queen Catherine’s maids in England. Kinship relations within the royal household and even across European courts were common, and Anne Boleyn had been brought back to England because it looked like she might be married to the heir to the earldom of Ormond in Ireland. This came to nothing, and in the meantime she joined the queen’s household, probably thanks to her mother’s position there.56
Anne became one of several girls trying to make their mark at court during the 1520s. With King Henry around, this was not notably difficult. In March 1522 ambassadors from Flanders were in town, and Cardinal Wolsey asked the queen to help him provide entertainment for them. Together they concocted a pageant called the Château Vert, green castle, whereby eight ‘good’ feminine virtues would defend the castle, literally a castle built at the chamber’s end, against eight ‘bad’ characteristics, played by boy choristers from the chapel royal, and eight lords. Competition for the parts must have been intense, but the Boleyn sisters were equal to it. Beauty, Honour, Perseverance, Kindness, Constancy, Bounty, Mercy and Pity were played by Mary, the queen dowager of France, Gertrude Blount, Countess of Devonshire, Anne Browne, Elizabeth Danet, Jane Parker – daughter of diplomat and translator Henry, Lord Morley – both Boleyn sisters and one more unnamed, though we can’t be sure who played which role.57
The pageant was to happen at the cardinal’s palace of York Place on the night of 4 March, Shrove Tuesday. A few days earlier the king had taken the motto ‘she has wounded my heart’ at the joust.58 Whoever this referred to – and we can’t now be sure – gossip must have been running through the court like fire through a forest, fuelling the atmosphere of the evening’s entertainment. The chamber was hung with tapestries and lit by wax torches, grouped together like branches of a tree. The women were dressed in gowns of white satin with their names embroidered in gold and positioned themselves in the castle, while the eight ‘vices’, ‘dressed like to women of Inde’ – sixteenth-century western racism commonly denoted ‘badness’ by darkness of skin – prepared to attack. Eight masked lords, led by the king as ‘Ardent Desire’, marched in and the eight ladies immediately folded, offering the castle to these fine knights. ‘Ardent Desire’ decided that the women ought to be ‘won’ instead, and a sticky battle of rose water, comfits, dates and oranges began.59
It must have been fun and exciting, perhaps trying to hit the man you most liked, and trying to keep out of the way of over-excited choristers. The ‘masked’ element of the thing was useless where the king was concerned – his costume and his height alone set him clearly apart – but the women may well have been harder to identify, perhaps emboldened by their hidden faces. Masques like the Château Vert exemplify the way that we’re used to thinking of ladies-in-waiting, as a sea of nameless faces and figures on display and yet hidden. If that were the case, there would have been little need for masques at all. In fact, ladies-in-waiting were experts at negotiating being seen and unseen, but the fiction of a masque allowed them to be both at the same time. Who had wounded the king’s heart? Perhaps this was a chance to find out.