Henry VIII’s mistresses….

  We’re accustomed to reading about Henry VIII’s six wives, but his mistresses aren’t quite as well known. This article (by Amy Licence) is all about these ladies—at least, about the ones of whom we’re aware. I suspect that Henry was a man of huge appetites and that his little black book was much scribbled…

Three unlucky kings?

They are: Edward IV, Charles II (buried today in 1685) and William IV, all of whom had a large number of illegitimate children, but none left a legitimate heir. Edward IV (1442-83) had twelve to fifteen children by various mistresses, including Elizabeth Wydville, but none by Lady Eleanor Talbot, his only legal wife, whose probable…

Edward IV and Elizabeth Wydeville

(This letter, of which a version was published in the September 2018 Bulletin, was in response to Bryan Dunleavy’s article about Edward IV and Elizabeth Wydville.) The article in the latest Ricardian Bulletin by Bryan Dunleavy is interesting, and also provocative, given that the bulk of readers of the publication are, by definition, Ricardians. However…

BBC Radio Leicester interviews John Ashdown-Hill …

… about his book “The Private Life of Edward IV”. Here, at 45:12, he discusses Edward’s legal marriage, his bigamous marriage and his (other) mistresses. Here, at about 49:00 , he disscusses Edward’s (hitherto little known) relationship with Henry, Duke of Somerset and his visits to Leicester.

A Tale of Three Mistresses – Mangled by More

(from http://www.annettecarson.co.uk) Our primary source of gossip about Edward IV’s mistresses is attributable to the pen of Thomas More (1478–1535), knight and latterly saint. While writing about Richard III, More found space for a lengthy diversion into the career of ‘Mistress Shore’, perhaps Edward’s most notorious extra-marital concubine, about whose present and past conditions the…

JANE SHORE—TART WITH A HEART?

Medieval mistresses seem to get a raw deal from most contemporary and near-contemporary chroniclers, being seen as falling ‘outside the accepted norm’ in regards to sexual mores. Prim Victorian authors also enjoyed making moral judgments on them, and even modern historians, while less interested in the prurient details, often paint them as scheming she-wolves or…