The Other Tudors (30 page)

E
theldreda Malte is one of the least well known of Henry’s children, and her mother, Joanna Dingley, is an almost total enigma. The confusion over Etheldreda can be summarised in a letter written by J. Lesley in c.1656. It reads, ‘The great King Henry the Eighth matched his darling daughter [Etheldreda] to John Harrington and, though a bastard, dowered her with the rich lands of Bath’s Priory; and Queen Elizabeth affected these faithful servants so much, as to become godmother to their son, and made him a knight for his wit and valour.’
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As will unfold in this chapter, most of the facts here are incorrect.

The story starts with a tailor. In 1527 the Wardrobe Account of Henry VIII recorded the tradesman supplying velvet and other fabrics was John Malte.
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By 1529 came mention of ‘wages to John Malte, the king’s tailor’, along with William Mortymer, the king’s ‘brouderer’ [embroiderer]. They had purchased velvet, satin and damask to a value of £319 2s 1d for the King’s wardrobe. In 1530 John Malte, Richard Gresham and William Ibgrave claimed £630 13s 4d paid for similar fabrics.
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In January 1532 came a grant of office to John Malte as the King’s tailor, with a fee of 12d a day and Malte was listed amongst the creditors to the Wardrobe Account for that year. In such a privileged position, attached to the court, Malte was able to benefit from the Crown’s need for revenue by disposing of its lands.
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In April 1544 a number of property leases were sold to ‘John Malte, the king’s servant’, for lands and manors in Somerset to a value of £1,824 16s 8d.

In September 1545, the following place was filled: ‘Richard Egilston to be joint patent with John Malte, your Majesty’s tailor in the office of cutter and botcher in your Great Wardrobe’, with the wage of 6d a day. As cutter, Malte designed the patterns for the King’s clothes, and as botcher he assembled the cut pieces – the modern term ‘botch’ means to patch over something and derives from the piecing together of various elements of the finished garment.
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Thus John Malte became one of the two principal tailors to a king famed for his wardrobe. Malte purchased fabrics, as well as designing and cutting the clothes. Lesser journeymen would have stitched the garments, and embroiderers added the distinctive patterns, but it was Henry and Malte who worked together to create Henry’s magnificent, distinctive and individual appearance.

In 1546 Henry VIII was sick, and probably realised that he was dying. He made one last request of a man who had served him faithfully for more than 20 years. He asked John Malte to take care of his bastard daughter, Etheldreda. An important point was that Malte was to pretend to the world that the girl was his own. Even with a foster father, the child would need a dowry to ensure that she married and led a comfortable and happy life and Henry VIII settled several estates on her in return for a cash payment. Should she fail to reach adulthood and marry, the lands would revert to the honest and loyal Malte and his own family.

A grant was made of land to, ‘John Malte, tailor, and Etheldreda Malte, alias Dyngley, bastard daughter of the said John Malte by Joan Dyngley alias Dobson. Grant for £1,311 2d of the lordship and manor of Kelveston, Somerset, the lordship and manor of Easton and Kateryn, Somerset, the chief messuage called Katerns courte and lands in tenure of Wm. Hereford and Alice his wife of Eston and Kateryn, 400 ewes called “le yowe flocke of Charmerdon”, in tenure of the said Wm. and Alice in Eston, Kateryn and Ford, Somerset – Bathe Priory. To hold to the said John Malte and Etheldreda and the heirs of the body of the said Etheldreda, with remainder to the right heirs of the said John.’ In January 1547 in a record of lands sold by the Crown, is the ‘Docket of purchases xv to September xv, John Malte, tailor, and Awdrye, his base daughter, £1,312 12d.’
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Ten days after the transfer of the properties, during the night between 27 and 28 January 1547, Henry VIII died. He had settled his daughter with a man he trusted, and left her well provided for. Malte would see to her education and arrange a good marriage for her. Her education would have been a mixture of formal teaching and learning housewifely duties. Officially she was Malte’s bastard child, but with her dowry and the open knowledge of her real parentage, she would marry well. Etheldreda had formal teaching in reading and writing. She probably never aspired to the dizzy intellectual heights of Lady Jane Grey or Elizabeth I, but she would have learned to translate Latin and possibly Greek, and to write a legible hand. Her reading material in her native language, thanks to her father’s religious policy, would now have included Protestant literature and the English Bible.

Why was she called Etheldreda? She could have been born in the parish served by St. Etheldreda’s Church, a Roman Catholic chapel in Ely Place, Holborn.
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More likely she was named after St Etheldreda herself, the daughter of King Anna of East Anglia. This Etheldreda married twice, but contrived to live celibate; in 672 she founded a monastery and nunnery at Ely, where she died in 679 of the plague. She is the patron saint of those with throat and neck ailments, and her festival day is 23 June; another possibility is that this was Etheldreda Malte’s birthday.
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However, as Henry Harrington recorded, ‘This Esther [sic] was a natural daughter of the King’s, to whom he gave as a dower the lands belonging to Bathe priory or a part thereof.’
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The Rev. John Collinson, in the
History of Somerset
, recorded in 1791, ‘The king’s natural daughter, begotten upon the body of Joanna Dyngley, alias Dobson, which Etheldred was committed to the care of the said Malte, who was the king’s tailor, for education; and the king, having special love and regard for her, granted these estates to her use and benefit; but she always passed for Malte’s natural daughter. She was shortly after married to John Harrington, a confidential servant of the king, who thus obtained the several estates above mentioned.’
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John Malte also settled land upon his ‘daughter’. In 1546 he gave her the manor of Watchenfield and Offynton, Berkshire, and referred to her as his illegitimate daughter in the title. The influx of lands for the girl, from both her adopted and natural fathers, coincided with a proposal for her marriage with the illegitimate son of Sir Robert Southwell, but this marriage never came about.

Marriage in Tudor England did not mean what it necessarily means to us today. Children, and even babies, could be betrothed or promised in marriage; this meant that they were to consider themselves as legally married until such time as the formal ceremonies could take place when they had reached a greater age. Prince Arthur was 18 months old when plans for his marriage to the four-year-old Catherine of Aragon were set up; in 1500, when he was 14 and his bride 16, a proxy marriage service was carried out in London, and it was not until the following year that the marriage actually took place. Sometimes the marriages failed to happen when one of the parties died. Likewise, as can be imagined, if a better bargain came along, a dispensation from the church could be acquired and the young couple declared free to choose another partner. This was particularly true of royal children, who could change partners as the need for political alliances changed. Even after the betrothal, consummation of the marriage could be delayed again, until they were physically ready. A child might stay with its own parents until the marriage was ready to begin in earnest, or go to the home of the parents of their intended spouse, so that the marriage, though arranged, did not unite two strangers.

John Malte was a good person to bring up a fatherless child. He already had two daughters, both married and with children of their own. He may very well have shared a household in London with his elder daughter, Bridget, and her husband John Scutte. A licence of 5 July 1547 mentions John Scutte, citizen and tailor of London, and Bridget his wife, one of the daughters and heiresses of John Malte (deceased), and the heirs of the body of Bridget. ‘John Scutte’ was another supplier to the Wardrobe in 1532. After Anne Boleyn’s death in 1536, her unpaid debts included, ‘To Tailors John Malte and Scutte, £34 9s 8d’, so the two men, father-in-law and son-in-law, worked together as well as living together.
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Mention is also made of John Horner of Clofford, Somerset, esquire, and his wife Meriola (‘late his wife’), another of John Malte’s daughters. Although Meriola was dead by 1547, the licence mentions the heirs of her body (her children) by Horner.
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John Horner, or Sir John as he became, would have kept an eye on Etheldreda and her lands. He was not one to let property slip through his fingers. His family had been at Clofford for several generations, but during the Dissolution of the Monasteries, in 1540 John (‘Jack’) and his father Thomas picked up a ‘plum’ property at Mells, and were the inspiration for the famous nursery rhyme, ‘Little Jack Horner’. John had been the bailiff at Mells for the owners, the Abbey of Glastonbury, and was the one who surrendered the deeds to Thomas Cromwell in 1535. According to legend, the deeds were hidden under piecrust in a dish for their journey to London; John Horner was suspicious, lifted the piecrust and took out the deed to Mells, the best of the properties. In fact, it was Thomas Horner who bought the land at Mells from the Crown Commissioners, although his prior knowledge of the estate (given him by his son) may have given Horner an advantage on realising its worth. Since medieval times, Mells had grown prosperous on the woollen industry.

Malte died in 1547, and left to ‘Audrey [a corruption of the name Elthedreda] Malte, my Bastard Daughter’ a further estate at ‘Andressy otherwise called Nyland’ in his will. She was now a welldowered heiress. The will also referred to her as being ‘begotten on the body of Joane Dingley, now wife of one Dobson’. A further bequest of £20 was made, ‘to Joane Dyngley, otherwise Joane Dobson.’
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Looking for Joanna is a difficult problem. She was not a noble lady like the well-recorded mistresses. The fact that Malte, rather than a great family, was asked to foster her daughter, suggests that the mother was not of noble rank, like Bessie Blount or Mary Boleyn. There are a number of Dingleys associated with the Court, and Joanna could be a sister or daughter of almost any of them. A gentleman, Henry Dyngley, received a royal annuity; in 1511 William Dingley was granted a pension from the monastery of St Peter, Gloucester, ‘which the abbot elect is bound to give to a clerk, nominated by the king until the abbot promotes him to a competent benefice’, while he was living at Sudeley Castle and trading in wool; Thomas Dingley, preceptor of Baddysley and Mayne, was Commander of the Order of the Knights of St John in England; John Dyngley was a Groom of the Privy Chamber at Greenwich in 1510 and Sewer of the Chamber in 1524.
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At least the family of John Dyngley are well recorded at Charlton in Worcestershire. They do not, however, have a female called Jane, Joan or Joanna in the family in the reign of Henry VIII.

The identity of Joanna Dingley, Etheldreda’s mother, rests on her being in a position to have met and had an affair with Henry. He must have seen her at close quarters; indeed, most of his mistresses (and wives) were ladies-in-waiting to one or more of the queens and therefore part of his immediate circle on a day-to-day basis. Bessie Blount, Anne Hastings, Jane Popincourt, Mary and Anne Boleyn, all served Catherine of Aragon; Jane Seymour and Margaret Shelton served Queen Anne, Anne Bassett served Queen Jane, and Catherine Howard served Anne of Cleves. Mary Berkeley’s husband was a fanatical huntsman, and he entertained the King for hunting parties. Jane Pollard’s husband had connections with the Royal Household and was an influential landowner.

Since Joanna Dingley was not a noble lady, she may have been of low enough rank for her not to be a risk politically. She would, however, have had to be sufficiently well born for Henry to have her as a sexual partner and for him to feel an attachment for her child.