Honor Grenville was born in relative obscurity in Cornwall, and wound up marrying Henry VIII’s uncle (Arthur Plantagenet, one of the illegitimate sons of Edward IV). She moved to Calais with him, and had this dream of a life for several years until he was implicated in a plot involved with the messiness around Cromwell’s fall. He was eventually released, but died immediately of a heart attack, so Honor moved back to Cornwall, and went back to her life of obscurity.
Melita Thomas of Tudor Times talked with me about Honor, why she was the Person of the Month. One way to learn more about Honor, in addition to the resources on the Tudor Times site, is to read the abridged version of the Lisle Letters, available through Amazon here.
The Lisle Letters: An Abridgement
Read the Tudor Times feature here!
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Episode Transcript:
Heather:
Hello, and welcome to the Renaissance English History Podcast. I’m your host, Heather Teysko, and I’m a storyteller who makes history accessible because I believe it’s a pathway to understanding who we are, our place in the universe, and our connection to our own humanity. This is Episode 50. Yay! It’s another joint episode with Melita Thomas of Tudor Times on Honor Lisle. And I have to say that we recorded it in the evening. And it was dinner time for my husband and three-year-old daughter, almost three. And so I was sitting outside on the porch. And you hear a lot of birds chirping in the background. And I thought about editing them out. I was going to mute them. Then a couple of people on the Facebook page said no keep them in and they do sound really nice and springtime-y and well summer-y. So there are birds chirping, I hope you enjoy that.
Just a quick note that the Renaissance English History Podcast is a proud member of the Agora Podcast Network. And the Agora podcast of the month is actually, drumroll – me! So since you’re already listening to me, why not go to Agorapodcastnetwork.com and have a look at the other great independent podcasts that you can discover. And as always, you can get show notes and more information about the Renaissance English History Podcast at www.englandcast.com where you can also sign up for my mailing list. Mailing list subscribers receive extra mini casts each month, as well as book giveaways, news, and lots of other cool stuff for this particular episode as well. You can also get lots more information on Honor at tudortimes.co.uk.
So moving on from that admin bit, let me introduce Melita Thomas. Melita is a co-founder and editor of Tudor Times a website devoted to Tudor and Stuart history in the period from 1485 to 1625. You can find it at Tudortimes.co.uk. Melita, who has always been fascinated by history ever since she saw the 1970 series Elizabeth R with Glenda Jackson, also contributes articles to BBC History Extra and Britain Magazine.
So Melita, tell me a little bit about Honor and why you chose her as the person of the month this month?
Melita:
Honor’s story is quite fascinating. She went from being a completely obscure, country gentlewoman, to being a member of the extended royal family and then back into complete obscurity again- all in the space of 10 years. She was born and brought up in Cornwall, it’s a remote place even now, and certainly in the late 15th, early 16th century. It was very, very far removed from the center of power. She was the daughter of the Sheriff of Cornwall, who had been a supporter of Henry VII. And when she was about 20, she married another Cornish gentleman who was about 30 years older than her – Sir John Bassett. Lived with him for 15, 18 years. They had seven children. And she was widowed in her late 30’s. And then a year later, she suddenly appears married to the King’s half-uncle, Sir Arthur Plantagenet, Viscount Lisle. We don’t know how she met him or how she came to marry him. He was also considerably older than her but they seem to have been extremely happily married. And they left an enormous cache of letters all about that life as the Lord Deputy and Lady Deputy in Calais. So we know a huge amount, about a seven-year period of Honor’s life – how she related to her family, her friends, the court, other people at the court, her children, her neighbors.
Then in 1540, it all went wrong when Lisle was accused of treason, locked in the Tower, and died and Honor disappeared back to Cornwall and is hardly ever heard of again. So she thought that whole life was a dream almost. It’s quite extraordinary.
Heather:
Is that partially why you chose her as the person of the month? Just because of this story is so extraordinary–
Melita:
And partly because of the letters themselves and the Lisle Letters are one of the best sources of information that we have about that period of Tudor England. We have so much information in them about the life of the family who were, as I say, related to the royal family. So they had considerable influence at court. Lisle had one of the most important offices under the crown. He was Lord Deputy of Calais. But the letters themselves cover every conceivable topic. So they talk about Honor’s fish ponds in Cornwall. They talk about ordering clothes for her children. They talk about arranging for her son’s education. Then there’s letters asking for jobs, letters from Honor herself asking for work for her friends and relatives. Letters about quail sent to Queen Jane, just a huge, huge variety. Letters from her daughters asking for money and clothes. It’s just such a snapshot of human life in the Tudor period. And it just shows how much like us they were and yet how different and otherwise.
Heather:
That’s interesting. This isn’t a question that I had sent you before, but I’m just curious, because I personally have heard so much about and read about the Paston Letters and I looked on Amazon, there’s not a recent version of the Lisle letters. And I just kind of wonder if you can talk a little bit about how the letters are used and if they’re well known? And I guess a little bit about that?
Melita:
Well, I’m actually quite surprised at how little they’re used. They’re far, far greater in scope and quantity than the Paston Letters. Well, they’re mentioned in the letters and papers of Henry VIII usually as a summary like most of the papers in that collection. But the whole series were cataloged, transcribed, described, sifted, everything you can imagine by a scholar named Muriel St. Claire Bryne. And I think she completed this absolutely mammoth task in the 1970’s. There are six volumes of these letters, six big fat volumes of these letters. And there are literally thousands. So the most commonly found version is an abridgment, which is quite a solid, solid book in itself. And that’s what’s mostly used and read. I’m not sure it’s in print at the moment, there’s a rather nice version published by the Folio Society, which is always high quality. But yes, it’s Muriel St. Claire Bryne’s scholarship that’s put these in the public domain. And they’re just six volumes, just a tremendous amount of information. But I think because there are six volumes, and you have to go to the library and get hold of these volumes, people rely very much on this single abridged version. So that’s edited highlights.
Heather:
One of the things in the letters, she talks a lot about the gifts she sent to Anne Boleyn, what was her relationship with Anne like?
Melita:
So she married Arthur Lisle in 1529, which was, of course, just about the period when Henry aiming to divorce Catherine of Aragon. And Lisle was a very, very loyal supporter of his nephew. So whatever his personal feelings and given that he was certainly in his 60’s, if not into his 70’s, he’s probably unlikely to have actually appreciated Henry’s changing outlook, shall we say? He was a supporter of Henry’s and he supported the Boleyn marriage and Honor was one of the ladies who was invited to go to Calais with Anne in 1532, which was obviously very …to Anne to have the King’s aunt with her. But it probably also suggests that she and Anne were on reasonably good personal terms.
You mentioned lots of presents. Well, that’s one of the things that when Anne’s always quoted or the Lisle letters, it all looks rather mercenary. Anne’s receiving presents from Honor and Honor’s asking for this or that. But that was how the system worked, Tudor times. Everybody gave everybody else presents and everybody promoted their friends and their relatives to each other. I mean, that was just how the system worked. This wasn’t a world in which there was a jobs market, you couldn’t look online or look in the newspaper to find a job. And so it was a whole system of obligations. So people would send presents and in due course, they’d ask you for a favor, and it works the other way around. So Honor was obviously keen to keep in with Queen Anne and she sent her birds for the table, she sent her birds to sing and even actually sent her a monkey on one occasion. Yes, but that was that, that was just how the system worked.
Heather:
I read that she had sent the dog that fell out of the window…And that nobody would tell Anne about it except Henry, because they were all afraid to tell her.
Melita:
Yes. Anne had a pet dog. I think it was it was supposed to be the French Pourquoi, because apparently that it always looked surprised, a little dog and it fell out of the window. I can’t quite imagine how a dog fell out of a window. But there you go. So it was suggested that Anne would like a new dog. So Honor was very quick. Honor actually sent a number of spaniels. So she sent one to Anne and apparently Anne was absolutely thrilled and sort of grabbed it before it had even been officially handed over to her. So that was a plus point, yeah.
Heather:
So then in 1536, how did she react to Anne’s–
Melita:
It was so dangerous in 1536 to even mention it. But it’s quite curious how the letters are very, very circumspect about this. There’s one very interesting letter from a chap called John Husee who was the Lisle’s agent in London. And he wrote to Lisle and Honor, he wrote directly to Honor, on the 13th of May, which was a few days before Anne’s trial, saying that the Queen will be executed. So it was clearly known in London that there was no possibility of a fair trial. So it’s definitely a clue that, you know, the whole thing was absolutely engineered to the end in one way. But there’s nothing, no comments on whether the trial was performed well, or badly. They’re all remarkably silent on that subject. Because who knew how letters might fall into the wrong hands? But I guess it would have been a terrible shock because although we look back now, and we see that Henry had a rather bloodthirsty career ahead of him, at the time, nobody had ever come across anything so dreadful as the king having his wife executed.
Heather:
Yeah. And then how what was her relationship like with Jane Seymour?
Melita:
Well, just about the time that Anne died, Honor’s daughters were old enough for her to be looking for places at court for them. So shortly after Anne’s death in June of 1536, Honor wrote to Lady Salisbury and Lord Montagu Lady Salisbury’s son saying she had a very good daughter called Anne who was very accomplished, very beautiful and so forth, just right to be the Queen’s maid-of-honor. And Lady Salisbury was actually not as influential as she had once been. She was a friend of Catherine of Aragon. And so she wrote back to Honor and said this all might take quite a long time. So Honor then wrote to a couple more friends, Lady Rutland, who had been one of Anne’s chief ladies and was now serving Jane, and to her own great-niece, Mary Arundell who had a place in the royal household. And she put forward Anne, her daughter, and then she received the information that actually Anne was a bit young. So they then suggested that perhaps the oldest sister Katharine might do, but Queen Jane said she had enough ladies-in-waiting. She didn’t need any more. So it took quite a while for matters to progress. But Lady Rutland kept plugging away.
And then the breakthrough came when Jane was pregnant, and she had a craving for quails, an exotic thing to have a craving for. But apparently, she couldn’t get enough quails and they were hard to come by in England but apparently very easily come by in Calais. So Honor sent parcels of quail to the queen. They were sent live as far as Dover, then they were killed when they got to Dover, which I suppose gave them enough time to mature by the time they got to London, and she sent them in lots of two or three dozen at a time. And the first lot to arrive after a reminder letter, the king and queen were so delighted they ordered half of them to be killed immediately, to be cooked immediately, and the other half to be saved for supper. So Jane was very happy with these quails and she apparently wanted them to be very fat. And one day she was at supper with Lady Rutland and mentioned how pleased she was with the quail. So Lady Rutland immediately leapt out and said “Will you give a place to Honor’s daughter?” and Jane said “Oh you can send both of the girls over on approval” and she would give a place to the one she liked the best. So both of the girls arrived, Anne got a place and Katharine the older sister, stayed with Lady Rutland as one of her attendants.
Heather:
So then, within just a couple of years, she was under house arrest and then back in Cornwall, how did that–
Melita:
Yeah, the shock must have been absolutely unbelievable. So in 1540, this all seems to have been part of a wider plot and place-seeking at the Tudor quarters, as we all know went on all the time. Cromwell and Norfolk were daggers drawn, and Cromwell had arranged the marriage with Anne of Cleves, which Henry VIII didn’t like. The Lisles were considered to be too Catholic, and Cromwell, he didn’t have a very high opinion of Lisle’s abilities as Lord Deputy, so he overruled him in a few matters. So when Norfolk saw an opportunity to get rid of Cromwell, he brought Lisle’s complaints forward and said, “Lisle’s been having a very hard time. We need to have a royal commission into what’s going on in Calais.” So the Royal Commission was opened, and they said Lisle was doing a fabulous job, marvelous. And he was sent to court, and everybody thought he was going to leave Calais as Viscount and return as an Earl. So Honor was very excited at that thought.
But whilst he was in England, having attended the Garter Ceremonies in …court, he was suddenly arrested on suspicion of involvement in a very, very far-fetched plot that one of his chaplains had got involved in. Apparently with the view to betraying Calais to the Pope and to Cardinal Pole. There was never any evidence that Lisle was involved in it. And none of the men who admitted having had this rather harebrained scheme ever mentioned him. So he went to the Tower. He was never tried. No charges were ever formally brought against him. And he languished there for two years. Then Henry decided he was actually going to release him. So he sent a messenger with the good news. And poor Lisle who was probably 70 years by then had a heart attack more or less on the spot and died. So Honor having sent her husband thinking he was going to come back as an Earl, never saw him again. She was literally beside herself with shock and fear of course, because if the king could kill his wife, who knew what he’d do to his uncle. So she’d been put under house arrest at the time that Lisle was sent to the tower. I don’t think it was particularly onerous, it was in Calais and she and her daughters were just confined to quarters, so to speak. Then the king has them released and she went straight back to Cornwall, and yeah, more or less disappears from the record. Apart from it, few land transactions that pop up from time to time.
Heather:
Yeah, so what do we know? Do we know anything about her later life?
Melita:
When her first husband, Sir John Bassett died, they had seven children. He gave her life interest in his land, so Honor’s sons went to inherit all of it until Honor died. So she retired to Umberleigh in Devin first where she lived with her second son, her first son having died young. And then when her grandson reached maturity, he did a bit of a land swap, and she and her second son, retired to Tehidy in Cornwall 1558 and she died there in 1566. Her daughter though Anne Basset continued at court, and she served all of Henry’s later queens and then Queen Mary as well, before dying quite young, actually probably in childbirth. So yeah, sort of a shooting star going from Cornwall to Calais and back again in seven years.
Heather:
It’s really amazing. Yeah, things like that didn’t really happen so much then, like stories like that.
Melita:
No, I guess not. Because people tend to stay in the circles in which they were born and I very much like to know how she came to marry Lisle, but I haven’t. I haven’t got to the bottom of how they were introduced or how they met, and her brother-in-law, Sir John Arundell of Lanherne. He was the most important man in Cornwall. So she did have court connections, but she wasn’t brought up there. She wasn’t related closely to court families other than the Arundells. And it’s surprising because Lisle, he had three daughters by his first marriage, so he might have been looking to have a son, but Honor was well into her 30’s, probably, probably 37 or 38 when they married, so not the best prospect for a child. She did very sadly, her phantom pregnancy which she was very, very distressed about, not surprisingly. But the Lisle was absolutely devoted to her. So yes, it was a marriage of affection, but how they met? I don’t know.
Heather:
So where can we learn more about her? What are some sources that you would recommend to learn more about her?
Melita:
Well, really the best one is the abridged version of the Lisle Letters. That’s the most accessible. And I said the Folio Society does a nice edition. But there are no biographies that I know of. So yeah, go for the Lisle Letters, because you hear the voices of the people as well. So although most of the letters aren’t written by Honor herself, because obviously these are the letters that they received. There are so many references to what she had said or done, that you could get a very clear picture of her character. She was very close to all her children. Her younger daughter, Mary, who was put out for training in another household, this was common, she was saying how happy she was, only she misses her mother. And then there are letters where people are writing to Honor saying, “Well I’ve arranged for the children’s clothes” or “Your son, he’s taken your instructions about making sure he eats breakfast before he goes out”. Her character does come across very well.
Heather:
Thank you again to Melita Thomas for taking the time to tell us about Honor. For more information on Honor, go to Tudortimes.co.uk or see the resources available on the Englandcast site at Englandcast.com. I’ll be back in two more weeks to start the series on Tudor rebellions in an episode looking at the main themes surrounding the rebellions that Tudor monarchs had to deal with what rebels wanted, what made them rebel, and how they were handled. And then we’ll move on to more specific rebellions, spanning Cornwall, Norfolk, York, and lots of other places in between. It’ll be a tour of England based on rebellions. Actually, that would be a really cool idea for a tour now that I think about it. Okay, well, I will talk to you again in two weeks. Thanks so much. Bye, Bye!
[advertisement insert here: if you like this show, and you want to support me and my work, the best thing you can do (and it’s free!) is to leave us a rating on iTunes. It really helps others discover the podcast. Second best is to buy Tudor-themed gifts for all your loved ones at my shop, at TudorFair.com, like leggings with the Anne Boleyn portrait pattern on them, or boots with Elizabeth I portraits. Finally, you can also become a patron of this show for as little as $1/episode at Patreon.com/englandcast … And thank you!]
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Heather Teysko is the creator, writer, and producer of The Renaissance English History Podcast, one of the longest running indie history podcasts, going since 2009. She's been writing about history online for over 25 years, since her first site on Colonial American history became number one in history on Yahoo in 1998. She writes books, created the original Tudor Planner (a yearly diary filled with Tudor history) and in 2019 created the world's first Tudorcon (you can "attend" online this year!). She has been passionate about Tudor England since she first read Alison Weir's The Six Wives of Henry VIII 20 years ago, and subsequently moved to London after college to spend her time immersed in Tudor history.