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Writer's picture Emma Holbrook

Nameless Mistress Parker; one of Henry’s mystery lovers?


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Now, it isn’t often that I can say that I was desperately searching for answers for days on end about an event or a person in history, but this is one of those rare occasions where I will openly admit that my desperate search for answers has not been fulfilled when it came to this mistress.


Not only did it prove difficult to even find reliable sources in order to research this mistress but the fact that history still does not have a conclusive answer for the identity of this mistress nearly six-hundred-years on is baffling to me.


It is almost as if the identity of this mistress was a close-guarded secret by not just her and Henry but the men who wrote the history books.


That has to say something doesn’t it?


Almost makes me wonder if there was some darkness behind this affair.


Anyway—Enough of my rambling and let us get onto Henry VIII’s next mistress with such an intriguing yet almost demeaning name, Mistress Parker.


. . .


Now, the reason why this mistress proved to be the most intriguing for me first started with her name, Mistress Parker.


Despite the mentioning of this mistress immediately demeaning her importance to that of just a simple mistress whose name is not even properly mentioned (as Parker would have been her family name), there is a lot of intrigue in the literary and historical world about who this lady was.


There have been so many suggestions over the years about who the identity of this mistress was because the family name of Parker was not necessarily a popular one nor was there multiple families carrying this name, even though nowadays it proves to be one of the most commonly used one besides Johns, Williams and Samuels.


And this is what has made it so difficult to properly identify this mistress because there is not even a lot of evidence to point towards who she might have been.

For those of you who are confused, this is how we can definitively say that Henry had a mistress called Mistress Parker from the late 1510s to the first two years of the 1520s – the presence of this woman and the beginning of the affair is believed to have begun around 1516 to 1522 just before the King took the scandalous ‘whore’ Mary Boleyn as his mistress (which inevitably led to him meeting his next mistress and the woman who he would savagely divorce his first wife for in order to make her his second wife, her younger sister Anne Boleyn). However, the exact year that Henry supposedly took this Mistress Parker is still a mystery with a variety of authors and historians offering their opinion on not just the year of the affair but the identity of this mystery woman also.


To save you the trouble of spending many tiring hours and days piling through the internet in search of these suggestions for the dates and identity, I have compiled a list of the suggestions brought forth by authors and historians alike.


Please be aware that this is not a complete list, and this is solely based off the research that I have found.


So, let’s begin!


. . .


One of the first suggestions for the identity of Mistress Parker comes from author, historian and teacher Kelly Hart in her 2015 book: ‘The Mistresses of Henry VIII’. In this book, she discusses many of the confirmed and alleged mistresses of Henry VIII (just like we are doing here on The Ill-Fated Wives of Henry VIII) as well as the women who could have slipped into Henry’s bed but failed to make the cut. And it is here that she offers her opinion on Mistress Parker where she states that ‘it has been suggested that this was Arabella Parker, a merchant’s wife, or Margery Parker, a member of Princess Mary’s household. It could also refer to Jane Parker who later married George Boleyn’ {1}


It is clear that there is no mention of any specific dates or a timeline, but it does draw an interesting fact behind discovering the identity of Mistress Parker. Through these three suggestions from Kelly Hart, it certainly raises a point that two out of three of these women would have been within close reach of Henry; Margery living within the Royal Palace as a part of his only daughter Mary’s household and Jane Parker, the daughter of Baron Morley, and a woman who had been introduced to court around about before 1520 as a lady-in-waiting to Catherine of Aragon (it is believed she joined the court in her early teens, certainly before she turned fifteen-years-old which was quite common for young girls in this period).


Notably, these two suggestions do not seem to be too unrealistic as Henry would have preferred to have close access to his mistresses at any given time. Obviously so when he was horny and couldn’t find it within himself to visit his devoted wife, he could sneak off to meet his mistresses or just send a servant off to bring her to his private quarters. Access would have been a big thing for a King with many mistresses at one time.


. . .


Hart’s suggestions of Margery Parker is also shared with fellow author and avid myth buster, Philippa Jones who leans more towards the suggestion of Margery Parker in her book ‘The Other Tudors: Henry VIII’s mistresses and bastards’ where she states that her position in Princess Mary’s household giving Henry easy access to her makes her a more considerate candidate for the identity of Mistress Parker but she also makes a point to say that Jane Parker was featured in the same masque as Henry’s future second wife, Anne Boleyn, (and her future sister-in-law as she marries Anne’s brother, George) so it is possible that he noticed her briefly there (even though she was in the court for quite a few years beforehand) and then decided to take her as a brief mistress before turning to the Boleyn sisters.


Interestingly, there is another suggestion regarding Jane Parker, but it is not HER that people assume was this Mistress Parker but actually her mother that fulfils this mystery role.


Jane Parker’s mother, Alice St John was born around 1489 which made her around two- or three-years Henry’s senior. Although many historians dismiss the idea that Alice might have been his mistress and instead favor the idea of her daughter, Jane, I do believe that there are some events in her life that might put her as a possible candidate for the identity of Mistress Parker.


First off, it was known that Henry preferred, at least in his early years, women of more experience and women a little older (as seen by Anne Stafford, his first public affair very early on in his marriage to Catherine of Aragon) so her being a few years older than him does not mark her out of the question. Secondly, Alice was part of the Queen’s entourage during the early 1500’s to around the mid-1520s as she accompanied the Royal court to one of the biggest events of the time, the Field of the Cloth of Gold. This might have been a time of which Henry was engaging in secret visits with the married woman and therefore showed an interest in her daughter Jane as a result, which is why historians might mistake him as having Jane as his mistress and not her mother.


. . .


A quick idea to mention before we end this post, whilst it is believed that this Mistress Parker’s affair with the King started shortly before his affair with Mary Boleyn, there is a suggestion that he might have taken her as a mistress in means of a division from his heavily pregnant, another mistress, Bessie Blount. With Bessie carrying his child and unable to carry on her sexual duties as a mistress to the King (as women were practically forbidden from sexual activities from the moment they were discovered to be pregnant as the Tudors believed that it might disturb and potentially threaten the life of the precious baby), he would have turned his attentions to other women, and this is where I believe Mistress Parker first came into play.

The affair was a brief one, I assume, from the lack of details provided throughout history but she nonetheless would have added to the constant stress and upset of Henry’s wife, Catherine. No matter how long the affair lasted or who the woman was, it would have devastated her to hear that her husband was constantly filling his bed with the women she surrounded herself with.


It’s no wonder that she is portrayed as a cold, unfeeling woman. I wouldn’t have borne such betrayal, not even if my husband was the King. But I suppose it was a different time then and cheating nowadays is a vastly different topic than it was in Tudor times.

It is no longer encouraged or even boasted about but instead used as a reason to shame someone or even break up a relationship easier. Cheating is not encouraged by anyone on The Ill-Fated Wives of Henry VIII by any means.



Wow, that took a dark turn…


If you have a suggestion of your own, please feel free to express your opinion in the comments below!



- Have a ‘Tudor-fic’ week!



References:

1. Rebecca Larson (2017). The Mistresses of Henry VIII. Tudors Dynasty [online]. Available from: https://tudorsdynasty.com/the-mistresses-of-henry-viii/

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