Royal Inheritance (34 page)

PRINCESS ELIZABETH

Elizabeth was at Ashridge in August 1543 with her half siblings, father, and new stepmother. She went with the royal progress to Ampthill but was abruptly sent back to Ashridge. The supposition is that she asked the wrong question, probably about her mother. Speaking the name Anne Boleyn in the presence of King Henry was not permitted. In 1554, when she was briefly imprisoned in the Tower of London, one of her attendants was John Harington’s wife, Audrey. Elizabeth did consider fleeing to France in 1556–57, but decided against it, remaining in England until she succeeded Queen Mary, peacefully, in 1558. She reigned until her death in 1603.

HESTER HARINGTON

Hester was the only child of Audrey Malte and John Harington. The date of her birth is uncertain, but could have been no earlier than 1548. At one time there was a portrait of her, described as showing a child holding a book. She was still living in 1568 but after that disappears from history.

JOHN HARINGTON

A gentleman of the Chapel Royal early in his career at court, Harington later entered the service of Sir Thomas Seymour, most often serving as a messenger. He helped arrange for Lady Jane Grey to join the household at Seymour Place. When Seymour was arrested for treason, Harington spent more than eleven months as a prisoner in the Tower of London. He was there once again in 1554, suspected of conspiring with the Duke of Suffolk during the uprising known as Wyatt’s Rebellion. It is not known how he met Audrey Malte, but they were married by 1548 and through her he became a considerable landowner. They had one child. By 1549, he is believed to have fallen in love with Isabella Markham, one of Princess Elizabeth’s ladies, to whom he wrote poetry. She later became his second wife. Harington died in 1582.

HENRY VIII

King of England, known for having six wives and numerous mistresses. In fact, the only two women who were certainly his mistresses were Elizabeth Blount and Mary Boleyn. Did he have a child with a laundress? We’ll never know for certain. He died in 1547 and was succeeded by Edward VI.

HENRY HOWARD, EARL OF SURREY

Known as the poet earl, Surrey was a loose cannon. He did go rioting through the streets with his friends. He did suggest, in public, that his sister would do better to become the king’s mistress than Sir Thomas Seymour’s wife. Was he guilty of treason? Probably not, but there was just enough doubt about his intentions to send him to his death in 1547.

MARY HOWARD, DUCHESS OF RICHMOND

Mary Howard was the daughter of Thomas Howard, third Duke of Norfolk. She was a maid of honor to her cousin Anne Boleyn, and was married to King Henry VIII’s illegitimate son, Henry FitzRoy, Duke of Richmond, at Hampton Court on November 26, 1533. They never consummated the marriage. Following her husband’s death in 1536, Mary lived primarily at Kenninghall when she was not at court. She was at the center of a literary circle that included her brother, Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, and Lady Margaret Douglas. She was a lady-in-waiting to Catherine Howard but was sent back to Kenninghall in November 1541 when the queen’s household was disbanded. There was talk of a marriage with Thomas Seymour, Queen Jane’s brother, as early as 1538 and the idea was broached again in 1546, but Surrey was violently opposed and Mary does not seem to have liked the plan much herself. In December 1546, when Mary’s father and brother were arrested on charges of treason, she was forced to give evidence against them but managed to say very little of use. After Surrey was executed, Mary was given charge of his daughters. She established a household at Reigate and employed John Foxe to educate them. Unlike most of the rest of the Howards, Mary adopted the New Religion, which meant she fell out of favor when Queen Mary came to the throne. She remained close to
her father and when he died in 1554 he left her five hundred pounds. Mary died in 1557.

ANNE MALTE (MAIDEN NAME UNKNOWN)

Anne Malte was the second wife of John Malte, the king’s tailor. On October 16, 1548, Anne Malte purchased the manor of Hickmans in the Hamlet of Haggerston and about one hundred acres in the northeast part of the parish of Shoreditch. Anne left this property to her daughter Elizabeth and Elizabeth’s husband, Thomas Hilton, who were also named executors of her 1549 will.

AUDREY MALTE

Audrey Malte, also called Ethelreda and Esther in various documents, was officially the illegitimate daughter of John Malte, Henry VIII’s tailor, by Joanna Dingley or Dyngley. The late-sixteenth-century book
Nugae Antiquae,
written by John Harington’s son by his second wife, is the earliest source for the claim that she was the natural daughter of the king and this may be a complete fiction. What seems to support it is the fact that the king gave a large grant of land jointly to John Malte and Ethelreda Malte. This document is very specific in identifying Ethelreda as Malte’s bastard daughter. John Malte’s will, dated September 10, 1546, and proved June 7, 1547, is also clear on this point, leaving a generous bequest to “Awdrey Malte, my bastard daughter, begotten on the body of Joane Dingley, now wife of one Dobson.” She was to inherit most of his property in Berkshire, Hertfordshire, and Somerset. One wonders why both documents were so careful to point out both her illegitimacy and the fact that she was Malte’s child. How old she was at the time Malte died is unclear, but there were already negotiations under way for her betrothal to an
illegitimate son of Sir Richard Southwell. At some point between September 10, 1546, and November 11, 1547, however, she married John Harington of Stepney instead. There is no indication of when or where they first met. They had one child, a daughter they named Hester. In 1554, Audrey was one of Elizabeth Tudor’s attendants during the princess’s incarceration in the Tower of London. She was still living in early 1556 but had died by 1559.

BRIDGET MALTE

Bridget Malte was the daughter of John Malte, the king’s tailor, and his first wife. Most accounts call her his youngest daughter. By 1545, she had married John Scutt, a much older man, and given birth to a son, Anthony. Bridget and John Scutt were named overseers of John Malte’s will. After the family moved to Somerset, Scutt gained a reputation for mistreating his wife. When he died suddenly, there were whispers of poison. The whispers grew louder when Bridget remarried a fortnight after her husband’s death, taking as her second husband Edward St. Loe, the son of a local landowner. Later it came out that Bridget was three months pregnant with St. Loe’s child at the time of the marriage, but two months after they wed, on November 30, 1557, it was Bridget who died suddenly. Six months after that, Edward St. Loe married her stepdaughter, Margaret Scutt. All this gave rise to suspicion but no proof of murder. The inquisition postmortem was held on August 9, 1558. In the Chatsworth House Archives there is an account of a lawsuit in which Bridget is described as “a verye lustye yonge woman.”

ELIZABETH MALTE

Elizabeth Malte may not have been a Malte at all. She was certainly the daughter of Anne Malte, second wife and widow of John Malte
(d. 1547), royal tailor, because Elizabeth and her husband were executors of Anne’s will. Elizabeth is not, however, mentioned in John Malte’s will. By then, Elizabeth was probably already married to Thomas Hilton (Hylton/Hulton), usually identified as the illegitimate son of William Hilton, who served as the king’s tailor before John Malte.

JOHN MALTE

John Malte was the king’s tailor until late 1546. The Malte house was in Watling Street in the parish of St. Augustine at Paul’s Gate. In 1541, Malte’s worth was set at two thousand marks and he was assessed £33 6s 8d in the London Subsidy Roll for Bread Street Ward. John Malte wrote his will on September 10, 1546, and it was proved June 7, 1547. He left bequests to his two married daughters, his two married stepdaughters by his first wife (I reduced this to one), his unmarried bastard daughter, and the foundling child left at his gate. His second wife, Anne, survived him.

MURIEL MALTE

Muriel Malte was the daughter of John Malte, the king’s tailor, and his first wife. In 1545, she married John Horner. In 1544, his father had purchased Cloford, Somersetshire, and John Malte purchased the manor of Podimore Milton, Somersetshire. Both properties were given to the young couple on their marriage. They had three sons: William, Thomas, and Maurice. Muriel died on March 9, 1548.

KATHRYN PARR

Henry VIII’s last queen attempted to reunite all the royal children at Ashridge during the summer progress of 1543. After the king’s
death, she moved to her dower house at Chelsea Manor, where she maintained her own household. I have no evidence that she even knew Audrey Malte, but she certainly knew John Harington. As one of Thomas Seymour’s gentlemen, he would have been party to Seymour’s courtship of Kathryn and their later marriage. The queen dowager died in 1548.

JOHN SCUTT

John Scutt or Skutt was one of the royal tailors from 1519 to 1547, making clothing for all six of Henry VIII’s wives and also for private clients. Scutt was master of the Merchant Taylors’ Company in 1536. He was a widower with a young daughter, Margaret, when he married Bridget Malte, who appears to have been his neighbor in Bread Street Ward (parish of St. Augustine at Paul’s Gate). His worth was recorded at two thousand marks in 1541 and he was assessed £33 6s 8d. Scutt was granted arms on November 12, 1546. After the death of Henry VIII he retired to the manor of Stanton Drew, Somerset. He died in 1557. There was some speculation that his wife might have poisoned him.

THOMAS SEYMOUR

It is believed that Henry VIII was aware that Thomas Seymour and Kathryn Parr had tender feelings for each other after Kathryn’s second husband, Lord Latimer, died and that the king deliberately sent Seymour out of the country on diplomatic missions. Seymour’s hasty marriage to the queen dowager, his inappropriate behavior toward Princess Elizabeth, and his clumsy attempts to influence his nephew King Edward VI, and possibly to kidnap him, led to his downfall. He was executed for treason on March 10, 1549.

MARY SHELTON

Mary Shelton was the daughter of Sir John Shelton of Shelton, Norfolk, and Anne Boleyn, the sister of Queen Anne Boleyn’s father. A number of scholars argue that Mary Shelton was the king’s mistress in 1535 and also a candidate to become Henry’s fourth wife. I find the logic of this unconvincing. The mistress of 1535, known to history as “Madge,” was more likely to have been Mary’s older sister Margaret. The single mention of Mary Shelton as one of two ladies in whom the king was interested in 1538 comes in a letter that says nothing about marriage. The comment could as easily refer to the king’s choice of one of the two as his next mistress. What we do know to be true about Mary is that she was friends with Lady Margaret Douglas, Lady Mary Howard, Duchess of Richmond, and the duchess’s brother, Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey. She contributed to and edited the “Devonshire Manuscript,” a collection of poems, some of them original, that was passed around among members of their circle. Two of the poems suggest that Sir Thomas Wyatt pursued Mary and was rejected by her. Of course, Wyatt was married at the time. Mary may have been in attendance upon Queen Catherine Howard. After Catherine’s arrest, she spent most of the next year with her friends Mary Howard and Margaret Douglas at Kenninghall in Norfolk, Mary Howard’s home. She fell in love with Thomas Clere, one of the Earl of Surrey’s close friends. They intended to marry but were prevented by Clere’s death on April 14, 1545. Clere made her his principal heir and she is mentioned in the elegy Surrey wrote to Clere. Sometime in 1546, Mary wed Sir Anthony Heveningham, by whom she had several children. It is as Lady Heveningham that Surrey wrote to her while she was staying at the house of her brother, Jerome Shelton, formerly part of the priory of St. Helen, and this letter led to the suggestion that she be questioned after Surrey was arrested for treason. After Heveningham
died, Mary wed Philip Appleyard. She was probably the Lady Heveningham at court in 1558–59. She died in 1571.

SIR RICHARD SOUTHWELL

Sir Richard Southwell is the villain of this piece. I can’t say for certain how he behaved toward Audrey Malte, although he did negotiate with John Malte for her marriage to his illegitimate son, but he did murder a man in 1532 and he did give evidence to the Privy Council that led directly to the Earl of Surrey’s arrest and execution in 1547. He also had a hand in the downfall of two other important figures at the court of Henry VIII—Sir Thomas More and Thomas Cromwell. His weak chin is immortalized in a sketch and portrait by Hans Holbein the Younger. Southwell fell out of favor at court after the death of Edward VI. No earlier than 1559, he married his longtime mistress and had one more child by her. This child, although legitimate, was a girl. Richard Darcy, alias Richard Southwell the Younger, remained his father’s principal heir. Southwell died in 1564.

RICHARD DARCY, ALIAS SOUTHWELL

Sir Richard Southwell’s illegitimate son studied at Cambridge and later entered Lincoln’s Inn. His betrothal to Audrey Malte was thwarted by her marriage to John Harington. He later married twice, the first time around 1555, and had numerous children. He died in 1600.

For more information on the women on this list, please see their entries at
http://www.KateEmersonHistoricals.com/TudorWomenIndex.htm
.