Anne arrived in Rochester on New Year’s Eve 1539, as excited to meet Henry as he was to see her. The king was supposed to have waited until she came to Blackheath on January 3; instead, he decided to surprise his intended with an impetuous gesture straight out of the Legends of Chivalry playbook: a disguise game that any avid reader of Arthurian romances would instantly recognize. But as Anne had no familiarity with the literature of love, it was a stunt that was destined to backfire loudly, greatly embarrassing both the bride and groom.
Here’s what happened next, according to Eustache Chapuys, ambassador to the court of the Holy Roman Emperor and King of Spain, Charles V: And on New Years Day in the afternoon the king’s grace with five of his privy chamber, being disguised with mottled cloaks with hoods so that they should not be recognized, came secretly to Rochester, and so went up into the chamber where the said Lady Anne was looking out of a window to see the bull-baiting which was going on in the courtyard, and suddenly he embraced and kissed her, and showed her a token which the king had sent her for a New Year’s gift, and she being abashed and not knowing who it was thanked him, and so he spoke with her. But she regarded him little, but always looked out the window . . . and when the king saw that she took so little notice of his coming he went into another chamber and took off his cloak and came in again in a coat of purple velvet. And when the lords and knights saw his grace they did him reverence . . . and then her grace humbled herself lowly to the king’s majesty, and his grace saluted her again, and they talked together lovingly, and afterwards he took her by the hand and led her to another chamber where their graces amused themselves that night and on Friday until the afternoon.
Well—that’s one account. Other eyewitnesses reported that Anne, who had never seen an image of the king, gently rebuffed the inordinately tall, stout, red-bearded man who kept trying to embrace and flirt with her. To anyone other than Henry, Anne’s maidenly modesty would have served her well. After all, what sort of noblewoman flirts back with the first lusty stranger to cross her path? Besides, she was supposed to be saving herself for the king! The only problem was, the lusty swain was the king.
Although the mortified Anne realized her mistake once she saw Henry in full regalia, by then the damage had been done.
According to Henry’s herald Charles Wriothesley, whose impressions of the event were similar to those of Eustache Chapuys, the king behaved with the utmost chivalry and courtesy. But Sir Anthony Browne, a Gentleman of the Privy Chamber, came away with an entirely different sense of the circumstances. He drew the portrait of a curt and insulted sovereign who scarcely spoke another word to Anne and rushed from the room without bestowing upon her the bejeweled sables that were to be her New Year’s gift. Because of the intimate nature of Browne’s office, he was privy to Henry’s innermost thoughts and moods, and was able to get a better read on the king’s emotions. Having observed Henry’s face, Browne’s impression was that the first encounter between bride and groom had come off very poorly indeed.
Henry’s king-sized ego had been humiliated. Not only that, in his opinion, the flesh-and-blood female fell far short of the painted image. “I see nothing in this woman as men report of her,” the king lamented to Anthony Browne, “and I marvel that wise men would make such report as they have done.”
He sought a second opinion, asking Lord Russell, “How like you this woman? Do you think her so fair and of such beauty as report hath been made unto me of her? I pray you tell me the truth.”
Russell confessed that he found Anne “. . . to be of a brown complexion,” which certainly contradicts the porcelain skin that Holbein had depicted.
“Alas, whom should men trust?” Henry bemoaned—and went in search of a way out of the marriage treaty.
When he returned to Greenwich Palace he tracked down his chancellor, Thomas Cromwell, who had so vociferously promoted the match with Anne of Cleves, tersely informing the minister that he found the Lady Anne “nothing so well as she was spoken of.” If he had known before what he had just of late discovered, “she should not have come within this realm.”
“What remedy?” the king demanded of Cromwell. He wasn’t looking for a shoulder to cry on; he wanted hard and fast answers that were legally airtight.
The wedding was scheduled to take place on Sunday, January 4, 1540, but at the last minute, Henry was still searching for loopholes. At the eleventh hour he grasped at a proverbial straw: in 1527, when Anne was only twelve years old, she had been betrothed to François, the heir to the duchy of Lorraine. Several times since then, it had been broken off and reaffirmed, although the emissaries from Cleves had assured the English that the precontract with Lorraine was a dead deal. Anne was immediately questioned on the subject, and willingly signed a document averring that she had no binding precontract of marriage with François of Lorraine, or with anyone else.
If Henry were to worm out of the marriage now, it would have disastrous consequences for his relations with Cleves. The duke might even be tempted to ally himself with England’s long-standing Catholic enemies, France and Spain.
“Is there none other remedy but that I must needs against my will put my neck in the yoke?” Henry demanded of Cromwell.
The short answer was “no.” On the face of it, everything seemed perfectly valid.
“My Lord, if it were not to satisfy the world and My Realm, I would not do that I must do this day for none earthly thing,” the unhappy bridegroom confided to his chancellor on the morning of his wedding, Tuesday, January 6, 1540.
At eight a.m., Henry, attired in cloth of gold embroidered with flowers of silver thread, waited for his bride in the Queen’s Closet at Greenwich Palace, the same room in which he had married Jane Seymour. Anne wore a cloth of gold gown richly embroidered with flowers fashioned from hundreds of pearls and a bejeweled gold coronet decorated with sprigs of rosemary, an emblem of remembrance. Her hair, “fair, yellow and long,” cascaded down her back in the manner of virgin brides.
She curtsied low to Henry three times and he placed a ring on her finger inscribed with the words God send me well to keep, which became Anne’s queenly motto. Then Thomas Cranmer, the Archbishop of Canterbury, married them.
The ceremony must have been the highlight of the day, because the wedding night was a disaster.
On the following morning, in reply to Cromwell’s inquiry as to how he liked the queen, Henry soberly confided, “Surely as ye know, I liked her before not well, but now I like her much worse. For I have felt her belly and her breasts and thereby as I can judge, she should be no maid . . . when I felt them . . . I had neither will nor courage to proceed any further in other matters.”
What was Henry really saying? “Belly” was at the time an accepted euphemism for “vagina.” Did he poke around a bit and conclude that the twenty-four-year-old Anne wasn’t a virgin? Or did “belly” simply mean “belly,” and because Anne didn’t have a taut midsection Henry decided that she was damaged goods?
Anne had been raised in such a cloistered manner that it was extremely probable she was still intacta. So, was Henry making a lame excuse for his own physical failures?
To this day, it is believed that Anne’s body so disgusted the morbidly obese Henry that he could not get an erection in her presence, which gave rise to the accepted wisdom that she was undesirably hideous. For this, the poor woman earned the nickname “the Flanders Mare,” bestowed on her nearly 150 years later by a Stuart factor, Bishop Gilbert Burnet, who for some reason insisted that Holbein’s miniature had unduly flattered Anne. Yet Holbein’s portraits, including the one he painted of his royal patron, are considered to be impeccably accurate. It’s highly unlikely that he would jeopardize his place at court and any future commissions—to say nothing of compromising his artist’s ego—by painting a likeness that so little resembled the original. To bolster this theory, it should be noted that the king never castigated or blamed Holbein for deceiving him. There must have been more than met the eye, popular conceptions of beauty a
side, in the person of Anne of Cleves that caused Henry to be so repulsed by her.
Cromwell encouraged Henry to keep trying for the sake of the realm. So he visited Anne night after night, but could not become aroused enough to consummate the marriage, although he insisted to one of his doctors, William Butts, that he was not impotent because he’d recently had two wet dreams. Additionally, the king told Butts that he thought himself “able to do the act with other, but not with her.”
Henry was sure there was nothing wrong with his plumbing: it was simply—according to his physicians—that “he found her body in such sort disordered and indisposed to excite and provoke any lust in him.” He “could not in any wise overcome that loathsome-ness nor in her company be provoked or stirred to that act.”
Meanwhile, what was Anne thinking? Historians have traditionally depicted her as utterly clueless in matters of human biology, averring to her ladies in the Oesterse dialect—an early form of Dutch, and the only language Anne could speak well at that point—“When he comes to bed he kisses me and taketh me by the hand and biddeth me ‘Goodnight sweetheart’; and in the morning kisses me and biddeth me ‘Farewell, darling.’ Is this not enough?”
To this, the Countess of Rutland, the wife of Anne’s Lord Chamberlain Thomas Manners, exclaimed, “Madam, there must be more than this, or it will be long ere we have a Duke of York [the title given to a king’s second son].”
“Nay, I am content with this, for I know no more,” Anne averred.
That’s what she said to her ladies. But soon after the wedding night, she had sought a private conversation with Cromwell. Having an inkling about the subject matter, Henry had, surprisingly, given his chancellor permission to speak to Anne, but Cromwell kept weaseling out of it. Instead he passed the baton to the Count of Rutland, who in turn drafted his wife to handle the situation. The countess encouraged Anne to go out of her way to act more pleasantly to the king when he visited her bedchamber.
Everyone may have been trying to tiptoe around the matter of the forty-eight-year-old Henry’s possible impotence. So, Anne of Cleves might in fact have been utterly unschooled in sexual matters and been far too shy to talk about it with anyone, even among her ladies. Or, she may have cleverly and diplomatically put the focus on her supposed ignorance of the birds and bees in order to deflect attention from her husband’s little problem.
Beyond the royal couple’s most intimate circle of acquaintances, everything appeared normal. The king and queen enjoyed considerable time together and seemed quite companionable. And the romantic May Day festivities in 1540 fueled speculation that Anne’s coronation would be imminent.
But as things turned out, May Day was Anne’s last official appearance as Queen of England.
By mid-June it was obvious to all, including Anne, that Henry’s head had been turned by another woman. He was spotted being rowed across the Thames to the two residences of the Dowager Duchess of Norfolk, whose vivacious redheaded teenage niece, Kathryn Howard, was one of Anne’s ladies-in-waiting. The king knew all too well that he was running out of time to beget that Duke of York and had convinced himself that the diminutive and curvaceous Kathryn was the woman of his dreams. Moreover, Kathryn’s physical charms proved that there was nothing wrong with the royal libido.
The conclusion was obvious: Anne must be put aside.
Henry’s revulsion over Anne’s body and the consummation of his infatuation with Kathryn Howard were only two reasons to seek the annulment of his fourth marriage. France and Spain had resumed their customary enmity, so the chance of their forming an alliance against England was now moot, and Henry no longer needed a Protestant ally on the Continent. He was also facing a considerable backlash of resentment from his courtiers and Catholic nobles, who felt that the common-born Cromwell had far exceeded the purview of his offices. They would be delighted to see the arrogant reformer—the architect of the Cleves marriage—out of the picture. All it took was for the king to give the nod and the chancellor’s descent was both swift and vertiginous.
Henry had created Thomas Cromwell Earl of Essex and Lord Great Chamberlain of England on April 18, 1540. But on June 10, he was arrested on charges of heresy and treason, stripped of his accoutrements of rank and office, and taken to the Tower. A week later, a Bill of Attainder was introduced in the House of Lords to dispossess the former chancellor of his properties and appurtenant titles. The bill passed on June 29.
Meanwhile, the loopholes regarding Henry’s marriage to Anne were pried open once more. When the ambassadors from Cleves could not produce concrete evidence that Anne’s precontract to François of Lorraine had ever been officially nullified, Henry believed he’d struck gold. In Tudor times, a precontract had all the validity of a marriage; therefore, Anne was technically still betrothed to François and could not have lawfully entered into a marriage contract with another.
On June 24, Anne was packed off to Richmond Palace, ostensibly for her health, as there had been an outbreak of plague. But she knew that Henry had treated Katherine of Aragon in a similar manner when he decided to cast her aside, and astutely guessed that she was being sent away from court for the same reason.
Not long after her ostracism a delegation was dispatched to inform Anne that Henry intended to submit their marriage to the judgment of an ecclesiastical inquiry called a convocation. At first Anne was hysterical; some accounts state that she fainted on the spot when she was given the bad news. According to Karl Harst, a Cleves agent based in London, “She knew nothing other than she had been granted the king as her husband, and thus she took him to be her true lord and husband.” He added, “She made such tears and bitter cries, it would break a heart of stone.”
And no wonder. For it seems that Anne was certain her death warrant had just been signed. Understandably, she feared the worst—a sham trial on some trumped-up charges, imprisonment, and execution. Best case scenario, she’d be shoved into a convent somewhere. She also feared repercussions from Cleves. If Henry didn’t execute her, but sent her packing back to her homeland instead, she was convinced that her brother would do the deed himself for all the shame she had brought upon her family.
Sources differ as to Anne’s reaction once she recovered from her swoons and tears. But over the next few days, with her emotional outburst behind her, Anne began to reconsider her situation, particularly because Henry was ready to offer a deal: Anne could remain in England as the king’s “good sister,” outranking all other women in the realm except Henry’s daughters and any (future) queen. She would receive a generous annual allowance of £4,000 (over $3.25 million today) as well as two residences near the court, Bletchingley and Richmond, and an allotment of eight thousand nobles to staff her new households. The terms were excellent, but Anne was anxious to clarify that Henry would visit her there, and that she would remain welcome at court—proof to those who always wondered how Anne felt about Henry that she was indeed fond of him and enjoyed his company.
Most important, Anne had dodged an axe, and she knew it. Her consent to convocation was delivered to Henry and on Wednesday, July 7, 1540, the ecclesiastical tribunal convened. For the next three days, the convocation took the depositions of several witnesses regarding the legitimacy of a precontract with Lorraine, as well as the failure of Anne and Henry’s marriage. They read two confessions written by Cromwell containing intimate details about the problems in the royal bedchamber. There was a concordance among all parties that the marriage had never been consummated, and to further underscore that point, some of Anne’s ladies-in-waiting testified as to the queen’s complete innocence of sexual matters. On Friday, July 9, the royal marriage was deemed invalid.
Two days later, Anne sent a very cordial letter to the king, submitting to the judgment of the convocation and accepting the invalidity of their union. She had been Queen of England for less than seven months.
Anne returned to Henry “the ring delivered unto her at their pretenced marriage, desiring that it might be broken in pieces as a thin
g which she knew of no force or value.” And on July 17, she resolved to “receive no letters nor messages from her brother, her mother, nor none of her kin or friends, but she would send them to [the king].” Four days later, she wrote to the Duke of Cleves, informing him that “the king’s highness whom I cannot have as a husband is nevertheless a most kind, loving and friendly father and brother.” She added that she was being treated well, writing, “God willing, I purpose to lead my life in this realm.”
Unbeknownst to her, the king did not seem to have considered Anne’s execution an option. His chief desire was to extricate himself from their disastrous marriage as quickly and painlessly as possible, and he was delighted that she proved amiable, amicable, and amenable to his terms of settlement.
However, their matchmaker Thomas Cromwell was beheaded on July 28, 1540, the day Henry married his fifth wife, Kathryn Howard.
Years later, Sir Walter Raleigh would describe Henry as “the merciless prince,” adding, “for how many servants did he advance in haste and with the change of his fancy ruined again, no man knowing for what offence?”
In the space of five years Thomas Cromwell, acting on Henry’s behalf, had transformed England. The break with Rome accomplished much: it launched the tiny island nation as an independent world power, financed the treasury through the dissolution of the monasteries, and created a new class of gentry that resembled a meritocracy, as well as a more centralized government that resulted in a stronger, even tyrannical, monarchy. But the Reformation had become bigger than both Henry and Cromwell and soon grew beyond their control. In the end, its divisiveness, like Cromwell himself, became more of a liability than an asset.
Anne of Cleves remained a great favorite at court—admired by Henry’s elder daughter, Princess Mary, and respected by her immediate successor, Kathryn Howard. She grew to love English ale, and developed a taste for gambling. And she seems to have genuinely loved the man who had cast her aside, even hoping to remarry Henry after Kathryn’s ignominious execution for adultery. But, for all his own deficiencies of appearance, Henry remained physically unattracted to Anne. As a consolation prize, perhaps, in his last years he gave her three manors in Kent, including the Boleyns’ former demesne, Hever Castle. Anne remained something of an anomaly at court: an unmarried woman of independent means and wealth, answerable to no man for her conduct.
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