I’ve read they were friends afterwards in a lot of articles, just not the sources the author was using to make that claim.
She doesn’t strike me as a foolish woman, so I think Henry must have at least been friendly with her for AOC to believe he would ask her to remarry him after Howard’s arrest.
In December 1541, Chapuys wrote:
…since she [AOC] was known to have gone away [from London] in the family way from the King, and had actually been confined this last summer, the rumour of which confinement, real or supposed, has widely circulated among the people.
Of course, in Tudors this meant that Henry and AOC slept together while he was married to Katherine Howard, because, well– in Tudors, Henry sleeps with pretty much everyone, and is never faithful to any of his wives (save Anne B. during the betrothal years, and K.Parr).
Obviously this rumor of pregnancy was not true; I leave the reader free to make up their own judgement about why Chapuys would repeat the rumor in a dispatch. He tended to have a motivation behind what he chose to disclose; but I don’t think he very often repeated rumors unless he thought there was at least a grain of truth to them.
Tl; dr, while the old adage ‘where there’s smoke, there’s fire’ might not quite hold water here, perhaps ‘where there’s smoke, there’s a spark’ might be more fitting. My best guess it that they were quite friendly, even maybe borderline flirtatious, in a public setting, and that observers shared this with others. After which, by the end of the telephone game, turned into AOC’s scandalous~ pregnancy.
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