rdinary measures taken with regard to his
one and only illegitimate son. The boy was born in 1519. His mother
was Elizabeth Blount, sister of Erasmus's friend, Lord Mountjoy; and
she is noticed as taking part in the Court revels during the early
years of Henry's reign.[521] Outwardly, at any rate, Henry's Court was
long a model of decorum; there was no parade of vice as in the days of
Charles II., and the existence of this royal bastard was so effectually
concealed that no reference to him occurs in the correspondence of the
time until 1525, when it was thought expedient to give him a position
of public importance. The necessity of providing some male successor
to Henry was considered so urgent that, two years before the divorce
is said to have occurred to him, he and his council were meditating a
scheme for entailing the succession on the King's illegitimate son. In
1525 the child was created Duke of Richmond and Somerset. These titles
were significant; Earl of Richmond had been Henry VII.'s title before
he came to the throne; Duke of Somerset had been that of his grandfather
and of his youngest son. Shortly afterwards the boy was made Lord (p. 184)
High Admiral of England, Lord Warden of the Marches, and Lord
Lieutenant of Ireland,[522] the two latter being offices which Henry
VIII. himself had held in his early youth. In January, 1527, the
Spanish ambassador reported that there was a scheme on foot to make
the Duke King of Ireland;[523] it was obviously a design to prepare
the way for his succession to the kingdom of England. The English
envoys in Spain were directed to tell the Emperor that Henry proposed
to demand some noble princess of near blood to the Emperor as a wife
for the Duke of Richmond. The Duke, they were to say, "is near of the
King's blood and of excellent qualities, and is already furnished to
keep the state of a great prince, and yet may be easily, by the King's
means, exalted to higher things".[524] The lady suggested was Charles's
niece, a daughter of the Queen of Portugal; she was already promised
to the Dauphin of France, but the envoys remarked that, if that match
were broken off, she might find "another dauphin" in the Duke of
Richmond. Another plan for settling the succession was that the Duke
should, by papal dispensation, marry his half-sister Mary! Cardinal
Campeggio saw no moral objection to this. "At first I myself," he
writes on his arrival in England in October, 1528, "had thought of
t