The Women Who Served the Queens of Henry VIII

Who were the ladies-in-waiting to each of Henry VIII’s six wives and what were their lives like? In The Waiting Game: The Untold Story of the Women Who Served the Tudor Queens, author Nicola Clark looks at these overlooked but influential figures serving in a royal court during a transformative period of English history. As the preface shows, excerpted below, the book takes us behind the scenes of a history we think we know but which still has new tales to tell.

On 5 June 1536, Diego Hurtado de Mendoza, Marquis of Cañete and Viceroy of Navarre, sent a letter to his friend and colleague, Spanish royal secretary Juan Vásquez de Molina. In it he said that he had recently heard some news from England. “As I am the son of a former governess of Queen Catalina,” he wrote savagely, “there is no punishment that could descend upon that King that would not make me happy.” Mendoza’s news was the alleged adultery and execution of Queen Anne Boleyn, which had happened two weeks previously, and which he thought a fitting penance for King Henry VIII. Anne Boleyn’s predecessor, Queen Catherine of Aragon–Mendoza’s “Queen Catalina”—had died five months before this in January 1536, sad, sick and alone in a damp fenland castle, ignominiously cast aside by her husband the king. Unlike most people in England, Mendoza placed the blame for her death squarely on Henry VIII’s shoulders. This was a common Spanish viewpoint, but Mendoza had extra insight beyond his people’s anger at Queen Catalina’s treatment: his mother had been Francisca de Silva, one of the women who had come to England in attendance on Princess Catherine long ago in 1501.

The loyalty of ladies-in-waiting was not to be underestimated, nor their capacity for hatred of those who wronged their mistress. We don’t know how long Francisca stayed in England with Catherine. She may not have witnessed Henry VIII’s attempts to annul their marriage and his increasingly poor treatment of his wife at first hand. But she had clearly seen enough to carry indignation back across the ocean to Spain, and to inculcate it in her children. Rage against Henry VIII became part of their family story. Mendoza himself, the oldest son, was a royal advisor whose opinions on foreign monarchs carried weight, and thus Francisca’s experience continued to affect Spanish royal policy. The reach of ladies-in-waiting was long.

Contemporaries knew this. Protestant writer John Foxe frequently sought out ex-ladies-in-waiting as sources of information for his famous Book of Martyrs during Elizabeth I’s reign. We, however, seem to have forgotten this. It’s not that we never see them at all. Ladies-in-waiting are a ubiquitous presence in fiction, in TV and in films about the Tudors, a phalanx of pretty faces and velvet dresses ranged behind the queen. You’d notice if they weren’t there, probably, but you don’t notice them especially when they are. A lot of Tudor political history perpetuates this view, focusing on male ministers and aristocrats to the exclusion of the women with whom they shared the royal court. But we know that this isn’t how power works. Opinions are swayed and decisions made as commonly in the pub after work as in the office boardroom, and ‘soft power’ is as crucial as formal hierarchical structures. A quiet word behind the scenes, an appropriately timed gift, a well-negotiated marriage alliance—the general management of the human networks so necessary in early modern society were all forms of political agency wielded expertly by women.

Every queen had ladies-in-waiting. Their role was to serve the queen in any way she required. Not servants, strictly speaking, they might nevertheless be called on to perform what we would nowadays consider to be menial tasks for women of such upperclass backgrounds. Yet even holding a bowl for the queen to spit into was a source of honour and prestige when it was done for a member of the royal family. They were her confidantes and her chaperones. Only the queen’s ladies had the right to enter her most private chambers, spending hours helping her to get dressed and undressed, caring for her clothes and jewels, listening to her secrets. Catherine of Aragon’s ladies-in-waiting spied for her during the divorce crisis, risking disgrace and even death. Anne Boleyn’s women, on the other hand, were rumoured to have brought her flirtatious behaviour into the open, ultimately causing her execution.

Ladies-in-waiting were never not there. That means that they were intimate and underused witnesses to one of the most tumultuous periods of pre-modern history. Henry VIII’s reign saw the rise and painful consolidation of a new royal dynasty as successive queens strove to produce the male heir he so desperately sought. As they failed, so their own ladies-in-waiting jostled to step into their shoes. The gossip that ensued drove the creation of more treason legislation during Henry VIII’s reign than any other. This led not only to the first and second executions in the history of queens consort, but to the legal persecution of the women around them who had enabled their alleged scandalous activities. At the same time, the king’s break with Rome and creation of the Church of England produced religious division on a previously inconceivable scale.

Henry VIII’s penchant for marrying also meant that his court experienced the highest turnover of queens consort ever seen in a single reign. Four of his six wives were English subjects rather than foreign princesses. Each was irrevocably embedded in England’s aristocracy, weighed down and buoyed up by ties and loyalties to families that were not part of the Tudor dynasty. A new queen’s women were there to show her the ropes, but also to be her companions. How did Henry’s wives negotiate the need for experience with the desire for friendship? What did this do to the delicate balance of factions at court?

This book explains how they navigated such a dangerous tightrope. The ladies-in-waiting of Henry VIII’s six consorts have never been considered as a discrete collective, with experiences and opportunities beyond the rest of their class and gender. Part of the reason for this is the state of the surviving source material. Where a king had only a single consort, or where the reigning monarch was a queen regnant, there is often a wealth of material about the workings of their households: wage lists, account books, correspondence, wardrobe records. But since Henry VIII went through wives like a knife through butter, there was sometimes scarcely time for clerks and household officers to make such records, and little point in preserving those of his previous queens—meaning that the archive for the households of Henry’s consorts is woefully small by comparison with, for instance, Elizabeth I’s.

Simply finding the names of the six wives’ ladies-in-waiting is not a task that can ever be ‘finished’. A careful gleaning across many different kinds of sources in many different locations yields hundreds of names, but so many records have been lost or destroyed that we will never know them all. The age of digitisation has meant that we can now access many original sources with reasonable ease, but in some areas we are still reliant on “calendars,” short summaries of original documents compiled by men during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries before the study of women was considered a serious pursuit. Those men were not interested in summarising women’s letters, nor were they always interested in accurately representing women in their indexes. In this they were only following the norms of a long-standing patriarchy. Women had long been hidden in official records as a result of the legal doctrine of coverture, under which our ladies-in-waiting operated. Until the Married Women’s Property Act of 1870, married women didn’t exist in the eyes of the law: they were chattels, owned by their husbands, “covered” by his legal identity and with none of their own. Married women couldn’t file lawsuits, make wills or administer property in their own names. That makes them very difficult to find in archives. Research is done backwards, reading the archive “against the grain,” looking for the men around a woman rather than the woman herself. For women of the highest status—duchesses, countesses, baronesses—this is not so difficult. For those of more obscure gentry origins—still elite, just not topdrawer elite—it can be almost impossible to identify an individual with certainty.

It’s not all doom and gloom. Even with the restrictions of the archive, there is plenty of information about pre-modern women just waiting to be uncovered. The Waiting Game is designed partly as an example of what we might learn when we pay attention to those who spent much of their time in the background and who were never supposed to leave much trace behind. I’ve tried to preserve the sense of the queen’s women as a distinct group while teasing out the stories of certain individuals, following the course of their lives and their service and using them as a lens through which to understand their unique collective position. The book carries the reader from 1501 to 1547 in three parts. Part One follows young ladies-in-waiting María de Salinas and Elizabeth Stafford, Countess of Surrey and later Duchess of Norfolk, alongside some of their more experienced colleagues as they settled into the service of Catherine of Aragon. By 1529, though, the peaceful, quasi-medieval atmosphere of Henry’s court had begun to change, and our ladies faced a difficult situation: what did you do when one of your number was elevated above you? Part Two poses this question with greater urgency as we meet more women in the competing households of Queen Catherine of Aragon and Queen Anne Boleyn, like teenager Mary Howard, Duchess of Richmond, Gertrude Blount, Marchioness of Exeter, and Jane Parker, Viscountess Rochford. Then, a shock: the world was turned upside down with Queen Anne’s execution for high treason. Part Three documents the dizzying speed with which our ladies-in-waiting changed employer. Maid of honour Anne Basset kept her place through the last four consorts and two short periods of unemployment, and was joined by Katherine Willoughby, Duchess of Suffolk, who was the daughter of our first lady-in-waiting, María de Salinas.

While we follow the ups and downs of royal service in a chronological format, the book also explores the daily lives of ladies-in-waiting, revealing the secrets of recruitment, costume, what they ate, where (and with whom) they slept. It uncovers the advantages of court service—four ladies-in-waiting became queen of England—but also the inherent risk: two of those ladies ended up with their heads on the block. As Henry changed wives, and changed the country’s religion besides, these women had to make choices about loyalty that simply didn’t exist before and would never exist like this again. By the end of Henry’s reign, being a lady-in-waiting was far more dangerous than it had been at the beginning.

About the author

Nicola Clark has a PhD in Early Modern History from Royal Holloway and is a Senior Lecturer in Early Modern History at the University of Chichester. Her research focuses primarily on women’s dynastic and political roles across the late medieval and early modern period. Her first book, Gender, Family, and Politics: The Howard Women, 1485–1558, was published by Oxford University Press. She has spoken about her research at events for Historic Royal Palaces, the National Archives, various schools, and academic institutions. She lives in England.