Elizabeth Blount
Elizabeth Blount, better known as Bessie Blount (~1502 - 1540).
Elizabeth, better known by her nickname of "Bessie," was the daughter of a Lancashire knight living in the reign of Henry VII, the first Tudor king of England. Bessie's father was a loyal, if unremarkable, servant to the royal family and he accompanied Henry VIII to France in 1513 whenever the king waged war against Louis XII.
Little is known of Bessie, except for reputed beauty and her famous affair with Henry VIII. The young girl came to Henry's court as a maid-of-honour to his wife, Katherine of Aragon. It was there that she caught the eye of the king and quickly became his mistress, sometime around 1517.
Their relationship lasted for some length of time, compared to Henry's other affairs which were generally short-lived. In 1519, Bessie bore the king an illegitimate son who was named Henry Fitzroy. After that, the affair was basically over and soon after the king's attentions fell upon the recently-married Mary Boleyn.
Bessie was married-off to Lord Gilbert Tailboys, who (it was rumoured) was the son of a madman. After that she does not figure much in the affairs of the Tudor monarchy, coming to the fore only upon the death of her son in 1536. In 1529, a palace chaplain remarked that Bessie was better-looking than Henry's fiancée, Anne Boleyn (who, although pretty, was not judged a great beauty by Tudor standards) and Bessie is the only one Henry's mistresses, barring Mary Boleyn to be popularly remembered - although others did exist, if for a much shorter period of time.
Henry had already moved onto his fifth wife, the teenage Catherine Howard by the time Bessie died of consumption (so legend has it) in 1540. The same disease that had killed her son.
