by Amy Licence
A third illegitimate child reputed to the king, Ethelreda, Esther or Audrey Malte, has the most unusual story. Her mother was a Joanna or Joan Dingley, possibly a royal laundress, on whom Henry fathered a child in the late 1520s or early 1530s before asking one of the cutters in his great wardrobe, John Malte, to claim her paternity as his own. Plenty of evidence exists for the career of Malte through the previous decade and for the life of Ethelreda, who went on to marry in 1547, when she was probably in her late teens or around the age of twenty. The case for her paternity rests on a royal grant she received on 17 January that year, just eleven days before Henry’s death, by which ‘John Malte, tailor, and Awdrye his base daughter’ received a large £1,312.4 It may be that Henry made deathbed provision for his illegitimate child, or that he was rewarding a loyal servant.
Joanna Dingley is more difficult to trace. If she was working as a laundress to Henry VIII she would have been the only woman within his exclusively male household, but she certainly was not the chief napery laundress mentioned in the 1526 Eltham Ordinances, who was responsible for washing the king’s table linen. Detailed provision was made then for an Anne Harris, who was to deliver daily seven long and seven short breakfast cloths, eight towels and three dozen napkins, and to remove that which had been soiled the previous day. She was to ‘discretely’ peruse and view ‘the stuff how it hath been used and ordered and return any substandard pieces to the offices of the counting house’. She was given two standard chests, one for clean and one for dirty linen, and given allowances of wood and soap.5 No mention is made in the ordinances of any assistants of Anne’s, although these may have operated behind the scenes. It is also possible that Joanna served the queen, as Catherine’s laundress for 1526 was listed as receiving 2d a day and bouche of court. However, it is far more likely that any laundress the king would attempt to seduce would be the one washing his shirts and underclothing, who therefore had access to his privy chambers and knew the intimate secrets of his body. No record of Joanna exists in that department either.
If we reject the premise that Henry was chaste for seven years, then he had to be sleeping with someone. Given his romantic devotion to Anne and his intention to make her his wife, it is likely that he did exactly what many noblemen of his day did and sought physical relationships on a one-off basis with women of the lower classes. It is likely that he would not have wanted Anne to be aware of this, so such encounters would have taken place either while they were apart, on occasions when she was at Hever, or when he was a guest in the houses of courtiers or friends. Once she had moved into apartments close to his the opportunities would have been less, so the king may have sought out women with whom he had a reason to be in intimate contact, such as a laundress. Elements of plausibility in all these stories mean there is a fair chance that they represent the types of encounters Henry had in 1525–32, but the lack of definite evidence prevents them from being asserted as fact.
There is also the possibility that Anne and Henry deceived the world when it came to their intimate relationship, and continue to do so. After all, no one knows for certain what happened between them when the bedroom door closed. In 1528 she had her own suites at Greenwich and in London, and the following year she was granted rooms in Hampton Court, despite the fact that it was 1531 when Anne moved into lodgings adjoining the king’s, allowing a degree of access that was usually reserved for spouses. In this scenario they could either have used contraception until such a point that they felt secure in their imminent marriage or, more credibly, Anne simply may not have fallen pregnant until winter 1532, whereupon Henry married her. Given the ardour of his letters in 1526–27 and the years they lived with adjoining rooms, coupled with Anne’s premarital pregnancy, the evidence actually points towards the fact that they were lovers, whether consistently or infrequently. The early nineteenth-century historian Lingard certainly believed that they were, citing their physical proximity and living arrangements as an indicator that they were living as man and wife:
We find the king attempting to seduce a young and beautiful female. To overcome her objections, he promises her marriage, as soon as he can obtain a divorce from his wife. The cause is brought into court: but the delay of the judges irritates his impatience. He expels his wife, he sends for the object of his affections from the house of her father, he allots her apartments contiguous to his own, he orders his courtiers to pay to her all the respect due to the queen, he suffers her to interfere in matters of state and to claim a share in the distribution of favours. Thus they live for three years under the same roof. We find them taking their meals together. If the king rides out, we are sure to discover her by his side, if he changes his residence, she accompanies him and when he crosses the sea, he cannot leave her behind him. Let the reader couple all this with the amorous temperament of Henry, with his impetuous disposition, with his indelicate allusions in his correspondence with her and he will not want evidence to teach him in what relation they lived.6
The true nature of Anne’s premarital relationship with Henry cannot be established, but through 1531 the Privy Purse accounts give a glimpse of their life together. The year started for her at Greenwich, with games and pleasures: over £200 was spent by Henry on gambling at dice or cards, in addition to the £450 he lost at dominos; £80 11s was paid to the milliner Christopher for 134 pearls and an emerald; 10s went to the gardener from Richmond for bringing sweet water and fruit, 50s to Charles Brandon’s minstrels; and £4 15s for hay and oats to feed the deer in the park. On 21 January, they removed to Wolsey’s old palace of York Place. There, 30s was spread among four poor people ‘whom the king healed of their diseases’; the royal horses were also healed, at a cost of £8 15s, and Henry lost over £4 at bowls. The following month, Henry incurred expenses in being rowed back and forth between Hampton Court, Greenwich, Battersea and York Place; he paid £16 4s for three tons of white wine and over £3 for six Mass books and velvet to cover them. In March, servants received small rewards for bringing him gifts of baked lampreys, fresh salmon and orange pies. Those bringing him letters were given 7s or 10s, labourers who cleaned the alleys in the park at Windsor got 10s 8d, while Hugh Latimer, soon to be Bishop of Worcester, was paid £5 for preaching ‘before the king on the second Sunday of Lent’.7
That April, the court removed to the Manor of the More in Hertfordshire, another property that had passed from Wolsey’s possession into the hands of the Crown. There George Boleyn and Francis Weston played four games of tennis, at each of which George won £4 from the king, and a servant of Anne’s was paid 3s 4d for catching a hare. Three pairs of virginals were brought to the More for £3 20s and Thom, the jester, was given £25 for his livery. In May, Catherine was feeling more confident, encouraged by support from Charles and reports that Anne was unpopular among the common people and much of the court. She may have influenced Henry’s spending that month, with 10s going to one of her servants for bringing Henry his spaniel, Cut, and 4s 8d to a servant of her gentlewoman Maud, Lady Parr, who brought the king a coat. Another dog, named Ball, got lost in Waltham Forest and was brought back, earning the man 5s. A servant of Lord Berkeley brought fresh sturgeon to York Place for 40s, establishing a further link with the family of Mary, mother of John Perrot. Jasper, the gardener of Beaulieu, once the residence of Mary and William Carey, received 6s 8d for bringing the king strawberries. Anne was not forgotten, as the bills of her tailor and skinner were paid and 23s 4d was given to a man named Scawesby for her to have bows, arrows, shafts, broadheads, bracer and a shooting glove.8 In June, she also received cherries from a servant of the Mayor of London, four bows for 13s 4d and one of her servants was given money to pass on to another at Penshurst Place.
Summer was a season of abundance and more gifts arrived for the king wherever he happened to be: cherries, lettuces, cheeses, cakes, capons, bucks, herbs, artichokes, cucumbers, carp, partridges, pears, puddings and a glass of rosewater, brought from Guildford to Windsor, for which the bearer was rewarded with 5s. Henry was at
Hampton Court on 14 August to receive philberts and damsons from the gardeners of Richmond and at Easthampstead hunting lodge in Berkshire three days later, where he received fruit from York Place. A day later he had moved on to Ashridge Priory, where a servant was rewarded 7s 6d for bringing a buck and another got 8s 4d for making dogs draw water from a well. At Ampthill in Buckinghamshire at the end of the month, the king recompensed the keeper and his wife 10s for fishing and oranges and lemons reached him at Hertford on 6 September. Anne received linen cloth costing £10 but had to pay out 10s for a cow killed by greyhounds she owned.
In November 1530, Catherine fell ill at Richmond and remained behind there when Henry and Anne went to York Place and then on to Hampton Court. The news also reached London of the death of Cardinal Wolsey, who had passed away at Leicester, following his arrest. It meant there would be no trial. The mingling of his loyalties and transitions of his career are glimpsed in an inventory of the goods at Cardinal College, Oxford, which included a lockable jewel in the shape of a blue heart, bearing the letters H and K in white, with two hands holding a heart and a hanging pearl, which had been given to him by the queen; garters decorated with gold castles, roses and pomegranates; a white falcon on a mount, with a crown and ruby about its neck, which was Anne’s symbol; a pomander decorated with ‘H and K’, a crimson satin bag embroidered with the same initials and one of black velvet, sewn with a pomegranate.9
That same month, Anne was given £20 to redeem a ‘jewel which my Lady Mary Rochford [Carey] had’ and almost twenty yards of crimson satin were purchased for her at 16s the yard. Anne and Henry may well have been discussing the finer points of canon law, as three separate individuals were rewarded for bringing the king’s books from York Place to Hampton and another was paid 5s for making an inventory of the titles. By this point, they had already received the learned opinions of the Universities of Orleans, Paris, Angers, Padua, Bourges, Bologna and Toulouse and Henry had commissioned treaties and studies.
In December, Anne received a payment of 20s in silver, £5 for ‘playing money’ and £13 for linen cloth, for ‘shirts and other necessaries’, while £80 went to the skinner Adyngton for the furring of her gowns. The Privy Purse records further expenses that might have contributed towards Anne’s gifts that season, with Italian jeweller John Baptist receiving an initial 1,225 crowns, followed by 1,601 for pearls and an Alart Plymmer being paid a huge 7,437 crowns for various jewels. Anne received £100 to contribute towards the purchase of gifts she would distribute at New Year.
Catherine had recovered and arrived at Greenwich in time for the Christmas celebrations and those at Twelfth Night, dining with Henry and sitting beside him in estate in the great hall, ‘where as were divers interludes, rich masks and disportes, and after that a great banquet’. Briefly, the appearance of royal harmony was resumed. However, Anne was not going to accept defeat, as Chapuys explained to Charles on 1 January 1531:
I have just heard from a well-informed man that this marriage will undoubtedly be accomplished in this Parliament, and that they expect easily to pacify your Majesty. I cannot tell upon what they rest this expectation, as I have always told them distinctly the opposite, and shall do still before the game is concluded.
The lady [Anne Boleyn] feels assured of it. She is braver than a lion. She said to one of the queen’s ladies that she wished all the Spaniards in the world were in the sea; and on the other replying, that, for the honour of the Queen, she should not say so, she said that she did not care anything for the Queen, and would rather see her hanged than acknowledge her as her mistress.10
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Rejected Queen, 1531–32
In days of old here Ampthill’s towers were seen
The mournful refuge of an injured Queen;
Here flowed her pure but unavailing tears,
Here blinded zeal sustain’d her sinking years,
Yet Freedom hence her radiant banner wav’d
And Love aveng’d a realm by priests enslaved
From Catherine’s wrongs a nation’s bliss was spread
And Luther’s light from Henry’s lawless bed.1
By the summer of 1531, the painful triangle of Catherine, Henry and Anne had reached an impasse. Something had to give and, inevitably, it was the queen. Recently her situation had appeared to improve, with Henry dining with her more frequently and visiting her chamber, in order to give the appearance that he was not separating from her through choice. Chapuys was able to report on 14 May that ‘there was nothing but courtesy and kindness on the part of the king, although the following day he refused to consent to Catherine’s request that Princess Mary visit her mother at Greenwich, saying that the pair might meet elsewhere.2 Then, late on a June evening, she had been interrupted in her chambers shortly before bedtime by a delegation of thirty noblemen, who made a final attempt to persuade her to submit to her husband’s demands. Catherine replied that she would ‘never consent to it as long as she lived’ and would continue to obey her ultimate sovereign, the Pope. By the middle of July, the court was at Windsor. Henry and Anne rose early one morning and rode away to Woodstock, ostensibly on a hunting trip. Catherine was left behind, without having had a chance to say goodbye. She would never see her husband again.
Woodstock was one of the six largest royal properties at the time and could easily have accommodated the queen and her household in a way that the smaller houses could not. There were two courtyards, the great outer one measuring 3,339 metres squared,3 around a fountain of heraldic beasts. The inner courtyard was still very large, if a bit smaller than its partner, measuring 2,023 feet squared and overlooking the tennis courts and privy garden. A late sixteenth-century survey counted ninety rooms.4 It was therefore a conscious choice to leave Catherine behind, whether or not Henry had intended it to be final. The summer days passed with Anne and Henry engaged in hunting and hawking, always side by side, as Chapuys reported.
From this point onwards, Catherine was shunted along a string of increasingly smaller and more uncomfortable properties, with her household gradually scaled down. When Henry wanted to return to Windsor for hunting that October, she was asked to leave and occupy the More, in Hertfordshire, while Mary, who had been staying with her, was sent away to Richmond. A possession of the Abbot of St Albans, the More was a sizeable property, built around two courtyards, considered by the French ambassador Jean de Bellay in 1527 to be more impressive than Hampton Court. Catherine’s new home had been considerably expanded by Wolsey during his ownership, with formal gardens and new wings being added to enclose the existing inner court. The queen’s watching chamber overlooked the moat and privy gardens, with the long gallery that led down to the entrance gate.5 According to the visiting Venetian Mario Savorgnano, it was large enough for her to retain a court of around two hundred people, although she confided in Chapuys that she would rather have been locked in the Tower, as then at least everyone would have been aware of her misfortune. She wrote to Charles that her ‘tribulations are so great, my life so disturbed by the plans daily invented to further the king’s wicked intention’ and although she had offended neither ‘God nor the king’ they continued to treat her in a way that ‘is enough to shorten ten lives’.6
That month Henry’s councillors visited her again to persuade her on bended knee to resolve the matter amicably. Again, Catherine was adamant, answering with ‘sweetness and frankness’7 but repeating her previous arguments in favour of the validity of her marriage and queenship. Almost all her attendants were present and she spoke up, in order for them to hear, leaving scarcely a dry eye in the room.8 As Chapuys related, ‘on retiring they told her that the king would give her a choice either of staying where she was, or retiring to a small house of his, or to an abbey. The queen replied, it was not for her to choose, and that wherever the king commanded her, were it even to the fire, she would go.’ Catherine’s willingness to embrace martyrdom demonstrates her complete belief in her cause and her absolute refusal to relinquish her anointed position. She
was obeying a higher authority than her husband. However, his wishes still counted for something, as on 13 November an awkward situation arose when both Henry and Catherine attended a feast for the sergeants-at-arms at Ely House. The king managed to avoid his queen by insisting they dine in separate rooms and Catherine went away again without having seen him.9
Catherine was still at the More by the time Christmas arrived in 1531. Henry observed the season with Anne at Greenwich ‘but all men said there was no mirth … because the queen and the ladies were absent’.10 In the list of New Year’s gifts for 1532, Sir Thomas Boleyn and George, Lord Rochford, received gilt bowls, goblets and cups, and Bessie, Lady Tailboys, Mary Rochford and Anne’s mother were given gifts from a range that included gilt cruets, bottles, cups, salts and goblets. In return, Anne’s parents gave their future son-in-law a box of black velvet with a steel glass set in gold and a coffer of needlework containing three silver collars and three gold, while the widowed Mary Boleyn gave Henry a shirt with a black collar. In the records, a space was left by the queen’s name. For the first time this year, Henry gave Catherine no gift and had forbidden her to send him anything for Christmas. However, he had not mentioned anything about New Year, so Catherine sent him a gold cup. It was intercepted before the official presentation and therefore went unrecorded in the privy accounts. Henry returned it to her with the message that, because they were no longer married, it was not an appropriate gift for her to have sent.11 Anne gave Henry a set of rich and exotic boar spears or darts from the Pyrenees and ‘in return, he gave her a room hung with cloth of gold and silver, and crimson satin with rich embroideries. She is lodged where the queen used to be, and is accompanied by almost as many ladies as if she were queen.’12
