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Historical person

Anne Basset

1521–1557

Anne Basset was an English gentlewoman from a prominent West Country family who served at the court of Henry VIII. She became a maid of honour to Jane Seymour and remained close to the royal household under Anne of Cleves and Catherine Howard. Diplomatic reports and later gossip suggested that Henry showed interest in her, but there is no firm evidence that she became his mistress; she later married Sir Walter Hungerford and survived the upheavals of the 1540s.

Basset’s court career is valuable because it shows how women from gentry families could move between successive queens’ households and remain close to the centre of Tudor politics without holding formal office. Her later marriage to Sir Walter Hungerford connected her to another politically exposed family, and surviving correspondence and diplomatic gossip illustrate how quickly female reputation could become entangled with speculation about Henry VIII’s private life.

In Alison Weir’s The Curse of the Hungerfords, Anne Basset enters the dangerous household world of the Hungerfords and later the court of Henry VIII, where family scandal can become a weapon.

Series

Historical novels and book series featuring Anne Basset (1 series)

Six Tudor Queens in Order

by Alison Weir 21 books 4.2(79,643)

The Six Tudor Queens sequence retells the lives of Henry VIII’s wives through six full-length novels. Twelve companion stories shift attention to relatives, servants, artists and courtiers affected by the same events, while Six Tudor Queens: Writing a New Story explains the project’s historical method. In the Shadow…

All books in this series