Cromwell had first floated the idea of a German marriage for Henry during the negotiations with the Schmalkaldic League in 1538. ‘The Lord Cromwell’, the principal ambassador wrote home after private discussions with the minister, ‘is most favourably inclined to the German nation.’ ‘[And he] wants very dearly’, the ambassador continued, ‘that the King should wed himself with the German Princes.’
Unfortunately, the ambassador could think of no suitable Protestant princess. But then he remembered the Duke of Cleves. The Duke ruled a powerful agglomeration of territories in north Germany with their capital at Dusseldorf and had two marriageable sisters, Anne and Amelia. From Cromwell’s politico-religious point of view, the Cleves alliance was not ideal, since the Duke was neither Lutheran nor a member of the Schmalkaldic League. But he was closely connected by marriage to the Lutheran leader, Duke John Frederick of Saxony, who had married the Duke of Cleves’s eldest sister, Sybilla.1
Early in 1539 the English took the first soundings in the Saxon court. The English ambassador, Christopher Mont, had two sets of instructions: his official ones from Henry, and another, secret set from Cromwell. The latter were addressed by Cromwell ‘to his friend Christopher Mont’, and ordered him to make discreet enquiries about ‘the beauty and qualities of [Anne], the eldest of the two daughters of Cleves, her shape, stature and complexion’. If his enquiries led him to think that ‘she might be likened unto his Majesty’, he was to suggest the proposed marriage to the Saxon minister Burchard, though the formal initiative would have to come, it was made clear, from Cleves.2
Anne, Mont quickly discovered, had won golden opinions all round. ‘Everyman’, he reported to Cromwell, ‘praiseth the beauty of the said Lady, as well for the face, as for the whole body, above all other ladies excellent.’ Among the superlatives one struck home particularly with Henry. ‘She excelleth’, it was reported, ‘as far the Duchess [of Milan], as the golden sun excelleth the silvern moon.’3
This was high praise indeed. Christina of Denmark, the youthful widowed Duchess of Milan, was, as we have seen, the rival candidate for Henry’s hand. She had been closely observed by John Hutton, the English agent in the Netherlands, while she was staying at the viceregal court there. ‘She is not so pure white’, Hutton reported, ‘as [Jane Seymour]. But she hath a singular good countenance, and, when she chanceth to smile, there appeareth two pits in her cheeks, and one in her chin, the which becometh her right excellently well.’ She was only sixteen years old, ‘but very high of stature for that age’. ‘She [also]’, Hutton concluded, ‘resembleth much one Mistress Shelton, that sometime waited in Court upon Queen Anne [Boleyn]’.4
‘Mistress Shelton’ was Madge Shelton, Anne’s cousin and Henry’s old flame.
Hutton was careful to deprecate his taste in women. ‘I knowledge myself of judgement herein very ignorant,’ he wrote. But, clearly, he knew exactly what Henry liked.
Fired by Hutton’s description, Henry sent Holbein to paint the Duchess of Milan. The resulting portrait confirmed all the details of her beauty, down to the dimpled cheeks and chin. It also confirmed that she was Henry’s type. He fell in love with the woman, and, when the marriage failed to proceed, remained in love with the picture, which he kept in his collection to his dying day.5
If Anne were really so superior to Christina then she was beautiful indeed.
But Henry was wise enough at this stage not to trust to mere report. He wanted the testimony of his eyes–or at least of a painter’s eyes. ‘First’, Cromwell informed Mont, ‘it is expedient that they should send her picture hither.’ Mont broached the matter directly with Duke John Frederick of Saxony. ‘He should find some occasion to send it,’ the Duke replied. But unfortunately, the Duke continued, ‘his [own] painter, Lucas, was left sick behind him at home’.6
‘Lucas’ was Lucas Cranach the Elder, the Saxon court painter. Illness continued to disable Cranach, it seems, and the English had to try for an alternative.
By March 1539 direct negotiations had begun with the Cleves court. Top of the list for the English envoys, ‘the little doctor’, Nicholas Wotton and Richard Beard of the Privy Chamber, was the question of Anne’s portrait. They had discussed the matter with the Cleves minister Olisleger, who was handling negotiations in the absence of the Duke. He offered them two recent portraits of Anne and her sister, probably by Barthel de Bruyn the Elder. But, as the ambassadors pointed out, there was no way they could vouch for the accuracy of the pictures, since they had only been able to catch a glimpse of the two ladies while they were attired in full German Court dress. And that, they said bluntly, was almost worse than useless. ‘We had not seen them’, they told Olisleger, ‘for to see but a part of their faces, and that under such monstrous habit and apparel, was no sight, neither of the faces nor of their persons.’
‘What,’ Olisleger replied tartly, ‘would you see them naked?’7
The result was stalemate. In early July another English envoy, Dr William Petre, was sent with additional instructions to try to speed things up. If Beard had not already set out with the pictures, every effort was to be made to obtain them and to send them to England as soon as possible. They were also to demand a proper sight of the ladies, ‘since one of them [was] to be their Queen’.
This last phrase has not received its proper weight. For it makes clear that already, long before he had seen any portrait, the Cleves marriage was a fait accompli for Henry. He had decided that he would marry one of the Cleves sisters, and, of the two, he much preferred Anne on grounds of her age. At twenty-four, he felt, she would make an ideal wife for a man in his late forties. Having made up his mind, he was cavalier about possible problems. He had heard that there had been previous negotiations to marry Anne to the son of the Duke of Lorraine. Did these constitute an obstacle to the proposed marriage with Henry? He hoped not, as he felt a strong preference for her rather than her younger sister. Similarly, the envoys were not to haggle about a dowry, ‘for the King prefers virtue and friendship to money’.8
Beard arrived back in England in early July. He may have brought the De Bruyn portraits with him. But there is no firm evidence one way or another. Within a week or two, however, Beard was on his way back to Cleves, taking with him Hans Holbein, ‘the King’s painter’. The two were given a generous allowance of £40 to cover the costs of their journey; while Holbein received a separate payment of £13 6s 8d ‘for such things as he is appointed to carry with him’. The wording is obscure, perhaps deliberately so. But it probably refers to the tools and materials of Holbein’s craft.9
Constantine and Barlow had heard of Holbein’s departure as the latest news. And they, too, took it as a sign that the Cleves marriage was virtually a done deal. The ensuing speed of events shows that they were right.10
Beard and Holbein reached the Castle of Düren, where the Cleves ladies were in residence, early in August. Holbein got to work immediately, and, with his usual facility, produced finished portraits of both sisters in little more than a week. ‘Hans Holbein’, Wotton wrote to Henry on 11 August, ‘hath taken the effigies of my Lady Anne and the Lady Amelia and hath expressed their images very lively.’
Wotton also supplemented Holbein’s paintings with his own vivid pen-portrait of Anne. He began with her relationship with her mother. ‘She has been brought up’, he wrote, ‘with the [widowed] lady Duchess her mother and in manner never from her elbow.’ ‘The lady Duchess being,’ he continued, ‘a wise lady and one that very straitly looketh to her children’. Anne was also, so Wotton had gathered, the Duchess’s favourite daughter: ‘All report her to be of very lowly and gentle conditions, by the which she hath so much won her mother’s favour that she is very loath to suffer her to depart from her.’
What the Duchess had not done, however, was to give her daughter any real education. Anne had become skilled ‘with the needle’, which employed most of her time. Otherwise, she had few accomplishments. ‘She can read and write [her own language]’, Wotton reported, ‘[but] French, Latin, or any other language she hath none, nor yet she cannot sing nor play upon any instrument’. ‘For’, he explained, ‘they take it here in Germany for a rebuke and an occasion of lightness that great ladies should be learned or have any knowledge of music.’
Not, Wotton hastened to point out, that Anne was stupid. ‘Her wit is so good’, he insisted, ‘that no doubt she will in a short space learn the English tongue, whenever she putteth her mind to it.’ Finally, she was free from the excessive indulgence in food and drink–‘the good cheer’–for which, even then, Germans, men and women alike, were notorious.11
Anne’s virtues, then, were of the passive, negative sort. She was gentle and obedient on the one hand, and neither stupid nor indulgent on the other. It was not an exciting list and the contrast with the learned Catherine of Aragon or the witty, accomplished Anne Boleyn was extreme. But perhaps Jane Seymour had lowered Henry’s expectations in these matters. Time would tell.
Holbein made haste back to England. And on 1 September the French ambassador reported that the ‘excellent painter, whom this King sent to Germany to bring the portrait of the sister of the Duke of Cleves, recently arrived in Court’. Soon after, there followed the news that an Embassy had set out from Cleves for England to conclude the marriage treaties.12
What we do not know, however, is Henry’s reaction to Holbein’s portrait. It cannot have been unfavourable. But there is no report of enthusiasm either. For Holbein, contrary to legend, does not appear to have flattered Anne. Instead, his painting and Wotton’s pen-portrait are all of a piece. Both highlight the woman’s gentle, passive character, which, as Mont had previously reported, ‘appeareth plainly in the gravity of her face’.13
But, in any case, by this point Henry was almost beyond putting off. For he had fallen in love, not as previously with a face but with an idea. And his feelings were fed not with images but with words. All over the summer, Cromwell and his agents had told him that Anne–the beautiful, the gentle, the good and the kind–was the woman for him. Finally he had come to believe them.
Only a sight of the woman herself might break the spell.
The joint Cleves-Saxon Embassy, headed by Burchard for Saxony and Olisleger for Cleves, arrived in England by 17 September. A few days earlier, Henry, who was drawing towards Windsor at the end of the summer Progress, had caught a chill. His physicians decided to treat it with a laxative and an enema and sent him early to bed. He slept until 2 in the morning, when, as a consequence of his medication, he ‘rose to go to the stool’ or lavatory. The stool ‘had a very fair siege’ and Henry felt much better, ‘saving his Highness saith he hath a little soreness in his body’.
These intimate details, so vital for managing the King, were reported to Cromwell by Sir Thomas Heneage, who had replaced the executed Henry Norris as the King’s chief body servant.14
With the news of the arrival of the Embassy, Henry’s lingering malaise disappeared and his spirits soared. By this time, Heneage had temporarily handed over his duties of personal attendance on the King to his colleague, Anthony Denny. And it was Denny who reported Henry’s delight to Cromwell. The task was an agreeable one, since Denny was a Reformer and an eager partisan of the Cleves marriage. ‘The King is quiet and merry,’ he wrote, ‘considering God’s goodness showed to him in his affairs, which by him and his ministers are so prudently handled as it passeth wishing.’ The smugness of this sentiment is probably Henry’s but the pious exhortation which follows is certainly Denny’s own. ‘God loving us’, he solemnly adjured Cromwell, ‘will force us or rather overcome us with heaped benefits.’15
For Denny and his like, the Cleves marriage was the answer to their prayers.
When the Embassy arrived, Cromwell was busy ‘travail[ing] after his accustomed fashion in the examination of the prisoners in the Tower’. Henry immediately ordered him to cease ‘to trouble his head’ with such trivial matters as the rack and the vile dungeon known as Little Ease. Instead he was to concentrate wholly on the ‘great weighty causes’ of the Cleves marriage.
With Cromwell in charge, the negotiations lasted less than a fortnight and the marriage treaty was signed on 4 October.16
The only matter that now remained to be decided was Anne’s route to England. There were two possibilities. One was to bring her overland to Calais. The other was to use the direct sea-route from the Cleves-ruled port of Harderwijk on the Zuiderzee to the Thames estuary. The former was much safer. But it required a safe-conduct from Charles V as the ruler of the Netherlands, through which Anne would have to pass. And this was in doubt in view of the ongoing dispute between the Emperor and Cleves over the Duchy of Guelderland.
The Cleves envoys were strongly in favour of the land-route. The long sea-voyage, they argued, was hazardous. It also risked harming Anne’s appearance. ‘[She] is’, they pointed out, ‘young and beautiful, and if she should be transported by the seas they fear much how it might alter her complexion.’ In particular, bearing in mind the approaching winter, ‘she might…take such cold or other disease, considering she was never before upon the seas, as should be to her great peril and the King’s Majesty’s great displeasure’.
Henry’s feelings were the opposite. The sea-voyage appealed to his (vicarious) sense of derring-do. It was also an opportunity to cock a snook at the Emperor and to show off the strength of the English navy and the quality of English seamanship. Probably before the treaties were signed, the King sent off two experienced ship-masters, John Aborough and Richard Couche, to the Zuiderzee to spy out the route. They produced a written ‘rutter’ or route and a ‘plat’ or sketch-map.
Henry’s imagination immediately took fire: he would snatch his bride from under the nose of his enemy and bring her safe to his arms. On 9 October he showed the Aborough and Couche sketch-map to Fitzwilliam, who was now Lord Admiral as well as Earl of Southampton. ‘His Majesty is marvellously inflamed [with the “plat”],’ the Admiral informed Cromwell, ‘supposing many things to be done thereon.’
The Admiral and his staff got to work immediately and the King’s ideas were worked up into another, finished map. It shows how Anne was to be smuggled out of the Zuiderzee to Henry’s flagship, which is drawn proudly flying the royal standard and the pennant of St George. Meanwhile, other English ships are represented blockading the coast south of Zieriksee, enabling Anne to make her crossing in safety.17
But, alas for Henry’s romanticism, the Cleves envoys vetoed the scheme and the Emperor’s representatives proved surprisingly cooperative. By 19 October, Anne had been given a safe-conduct, and by 25 October, Henry had capitulated and agreed to the land-route.18
Meanwhile, the Cleves envoys had returned home to conduct Anne to England. She left Dusseldorf in November and made a stately progress across the Netherlands, where, according to Wotton, she rarely travelled more than five miles a day. Her entrée into Antwerp excited huge popular interest. The Count of Buren, one of the leading Flemish nobles, told the English that ‘he never saw so many people gathered in Antwerp at any entrée, even the Emperor’s’.19
Was it curiosity that drew the crowds? Or pity?
On 11 December, Anne arrived at the English stronghold of Calais. Lord Lisle, the Lord Deputy or Governor, had been instructed to make the town look its best to receive her. But it was hoped that her stay would be a short one. A detailed timetable of the state of the tides, starting on 12 December, was sent to Henry. And, before Anne even entered the walls, Admiral Fitzwilliam, who was in charge of the reception party, took her to look at the ship that would carry her to England. It was a fine sight. Just as in the Zuiderzee map, it was decked with streamers, banners and flags. Seamen were on the tops, shrouds and yard-arms and the guns fired a salute.
But adverse winds made a quick departure impossible. In the hope that the weather would change soon, experienced captains, including Aborough and Couche, were sent ‘to lie out side the walls and give immediate notice of fair weather’. They were to remain there rather a long time.20
Meanwhile, Admiral Fitzwilliam, as instructed, set himself to entertain Anne, while Anne, for her part, did her best to prepare herself for her new role. On the afternoon of the 13th, for instance, she sent Olisleger, who acted as her interpreter, to invite Fitzwilliam ‘to go to cards [with her] at some game that [the King] used’. Fitzwilliam, who was one of Henry’s oldest gaming cronies, decided that she should be taught ‘cent’, which resembled piquet. ‘I played with her at cent,’ Fitzwilliam reported to Henry, while three others, who spoke German, ‘stood by and taught her the play’. ‘And I assure your Majesty,’ Fitzwilliam concluded, ‘she played as pleasantly and with as good a grace and countenance as ever in all my life I saw any noblewoman.’21
This, if it were true, was high compliment. For Fitzwilliam had been at Court when Henry had played with Anne and Rochford.
Moreover, this was only one of a stream of letters that Fitzwilliam sent to the King. Indeed, he claimed to Cromwell, ‘his two clerks are [so] fully occupied in writing to his Majesty’ that he was scarcely able to write separately to the minister. Most of the correspondence has disappeared. But, according to Fitzwilliam himself, his comments were uniformly favourable and he did ‘much praise her and set her forth’.22
Nor was Fitzwilliam the only one to do so. Lady Lisle wrote enthusiastically to her daughter, Anne Basset, who was ear-marked for the new Queen’s Chamber. And Anne Basset, in turn, echoed her praises in her reply to her mother. ‘I humbly thank your Ladyship’, she wrote, ‘of the news you write me of her Grace, that she is so good and gentle to serve and please.’ ‘It shall be no little rejoicement to us, her Grace’s servants here’, she continued, ‘and most comfort to the King’s Majesty, whose Highness is not a little desirous to have her Grace here.’ Anne knew this because, as instructed, she had passed Lady Lisle’s comments on to Henry himself.23
Better and better, it must have seemed to the King. Previously, he had had to rely on diplomats and agents of uncertain status. Now his own familiars and courtiers had seen Anne. And, to a man and a woman, their verdicts were favourable.
How soon before the weather allowed him to add his own praise to theirs?
In fact, it was not until 27 December that the winds turned and Anne was able to sail. She landed at the Downs between 6 and 7 p.m. and was received by the Duke and Duchess of Suffolk.24
She was in her new kingdom at last. And she would never leave it.
The weather continued to be as bad on land as at sea. ‘The day’, Suffolk reported to Cromwell, ‘was foul and windy, with much hail [that blew] continually in her face.’ There were also long delays in getting her cloth of gold–covered chariot, in which she had travelled from Cleves, and her elaborate trousseau ashore.
Nevertheless, to the evident surprise of her escorts, she insisted on setting out after only a day’s rest, ‘so…desirous [was she] to make haste to the King’s Highness’. Her first halt was at Canterbury. There Cranmer made a speech; the Mayor and citizens received her with torches and a peal of guns, and fifty ladies in velvet bonnets turned up to see her in her chamber. ‘All of which’, Suffolk’s report continued, ‘she took very joyously…that she forgot all the foul weather and was very merry at supper.’
She then continued to Sittingbourne and Rochester, where she arrived on New Year’s Eve. The official programme envisaged that she would spend the New Year’s holiday at Rochester and then travel via Dartford to her formal meeting with her bridegroom-to-be at Blackheath on 3 January.25
But Henry, burning with impatience to see the woman about whom he had heard so much, decided to give her a surprise New Year’s gift.
New Year’s Day was already half over and Anne of Cleves was standing in the window of her chamber at Rochester, watching a bullfight which had been laid on for her entertainment. Then a party of six gentlemen came unannounced into the room. They were disguised in identical ‘marbled’ or multi-coloured cloaks and hoods. Suddenly, one of the group stepped forward and, without warning, kissed her and presented her with a ‘token’ or gift, which, he said, came from the King. Anne, taken by surprise, was ‘abashed [and], not knowing who he was, thanked him’. The unknown gentleman continued to try to ‘commune’ with her–that is, to make love to her. ‘But she regarded him little but always looked out of the window on the bull-baiting.’
Unused to being treated in this fashion, the gentleman lost patience and withdrew. A few moments later, he returned without his disguise and dressed in a coat of purple velvet.
It was the King.
Everyone bowed and Anne, embarrassed afresh, made him a deep courtesy.26
There are two accounts of what followed, one by the chronicler and herald Charles Wriothesley, and the other by Sir Anthony Browne, Gentleman of the Privy Chamber and Carew’s successor as Master of the Horse. Both were eye-witnesses, yet their accounts differ radically. According to Wriothesley, Henry raised Anne up, kissed her again, talked with her ‘lovingly’ and took her by the hand into another, more private chamber.
According to Browne, on the other hand, the King spoke barely twenty words to Anne and left her as quickly as possible without giving her the precious New Year’s Gift of bejewelled sables which he had brought.27
The difference between the two accounts is, of course, the result of point of view. Wriothesley wrote as one of the audience, unable to go with Henry and Anne into the more private chamber. Browne, on the other hand, had the entrée, both to the King’s private rooms and, it will become clear, to his most intimate thoughts.
And Browne knew, from the King’s face alone, that the meeting had been a disaster.
Two things had gone wrong. The first was Anne’s reaction to Henry–or rather her lack of reaction since she had failed to recognise him. This meant in turn that she had failed her first test as Henry’s loved one. For, in visiting her in disguise, Henry was re-enacting a scene from chivalric romance. In the romances, and in the Courtly entertainments based on them, ladies encountered their lovers in a variety of disguises. But, no matter how fantastic the disguise, the second-sight of passion always penetrated it and the lady recognised her lover.
Any woman with even a little experience in the ways of the world would have known this and known what she was expected to do. But Anne, utterly unprepared by her strict and cloistered upbringing for such frivolities, did not. Instead, she behaved naturally, like a peasant, rather than artificially, like a lady.
Who was this strange man? she seems to have wondered. Why was he kissing her and making love to her? Was it some strange custom of the country? Better to ignore him and pretend to be interested in the bull-baiting in the courtyard below.
Put like this, Anne’s behaviour can be interpreted as both sensible and decorous. From Henry’s perspective, on the other hand, it was an unheard-of humiliation. Not to have recognised him–he who stood head and shoulders above his courtiers and exceeded them in all qualities, mental as well as physical…!
His New Year’s romance had turned into a vulgar farce, with himself as the Fool.
It was not a part he relished.
All this was bad enough. What was worse was Henry’s reaction to Anne. Everything he had been told about her led him to expect love at first sight. Instead, he was overwhelmed with disgust.
He brooded about his feelings overnight at Rochester. Then, the following day, during the return journey by barge to Greenwich, he shared them with two of his attendants. First he called Browne to sit beside him. ‘I see nothing in this woman as men report of her,’ he said, speaking ‘very sadly and pensively’. ‘And I marvel’, he continued, ‘that wise men would make such report as they have done.’ At this point Browne fell silent, fearful for his half-brother, Admiral Fitzwilliam, who had written so enthusiastically in Anne’s praise from Calais.
Dismissing Browne, Henry spoke next to Lord Russell, as he now was. ‘How like you this woman?’ he asked. ‘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 replied ‘that he took her not for fair, but to be of a brown complexion’.
‘Alas,’ sighed Henry. ‘Whom should men trust?’28
The King had the answer to his question when he got back to Greenwich. For, on cue, Cromwell, the man whom he trusted most, appeared. Henry had told Cromwell about his intention to visit Anne secretly at Rochester ‘to nourish love’. And Cromwell was eager to know the result. ‘How ye liked the Lady Anne?’ he asked the King. ‘Nothing so well as she was spoken of,’ answered Henry, speaking ‘heavily and not pleasantly’. Then he continued: ‘if [he] had known as much before as [he] then knew, she should not have come within this realm’.
‘What remedy?’ he concluded. Cromwell took this as a ‘lamentation’. It was not. It was a question. Cromwell had got him into this marriage. How, Henry wanted to know, would he get him out of it?
But Cromwell, for once, was stumped. ‘I know none,’ he replied, adding lamely that ‘he was very sorry therefore’.29
On Saturday, 3 January, Anne and Henry met for the second time in the formal public encounter at Blackheath. Both were dressed in cloth of gold and accompanied by a great procession of servants. They greeted each other and rode to Greenwich together through lines of courtiers, who were also finely turned out in velvet with gold chains.
Henry conducted Anne to her apartments and then returned to his own. Once more he found Cromwell in his Privy Chamber. ‘My Lord,’ he said, ‘is it not as I told you? Say what they will, she is nothing as fair as she hath been reported.’ ‘Howbeit,’ he conceded, ‘she is well and seemly.’
Cromwell snatched at this straw. ‘By my faith, Sir,’ he replied, ‘ye say truth.’ ‘I thought’, he added, ‘that she had a queenly manner.’30
The wedding should have taken place the following day, Sunday the 4th. Instead, it was postponed as Henry desperately sought a way out.
First, he ordered Cromwell to summon the Council to see if it were possible, even at this late stage, to find a legal pretext to break off the marriage. Immediately, the Council fixed on the issue of the possible precontract between Anne and the Duke of Lorraine’s son, which Henry had dismissed so lightly a few months previously. The Cleves ambassadors, headed by Olisleger, were summoned to clarify the matter. Naturally, in view of Henry’s previous attitude, they were unprepared and had brought none of the necessary documentation. But they solemnly assured the Council that the Lorraine match had never gone beyond an engagement, which could be, and had been, properly broken off. They also offered to remain as hostages in England until the documentation to prove this was produced.
It was a reply which would have satisfied any reasonable man. But Henry was not in a reasonable mood. ‘I am not well handled,’ he said to Cromwell, after the minister had returned from the Council meeting to the Privy Chamber by ‘the privy way’. But equally he recognised the impasse he was in. ‘If it were not’, he added, ‘…for fear of making a ruffle in the world–that is, to be a mean to drive her brother into the hands of the Emperor–I would never have married her.’
The next day, he made a final attempt to escape. Anne must make a solemn, notarised declaration before the Council ‘that she was free from all contracts’. But, alas for Henry, she did so promptly.
The trap had snapped shut. ‘Is there none other remedy’, Henry asked Cromwell when he brought the news of Anne’s declaration, ‘but that I must needs, against my will, put my neck in the yoke?’
Without even trying to reply, Cromwell fled.31
Cornered at last, Henry now recognised that he had to go through with the ceremony, which was rearranged for 8 o’clock in the morning on Tuesday, 6 January, the day of the Epiphany. But he acquiesced with the worst possible grace. ‘If it were not to satisfy the world and my realm’, he told Cromwell on their way to the service, ‘I would not do that I must do this day for none earthly thing.’
But, curiously, the final delay was Anne’s. Had the two-day postponement of the ceremony and the humiliation of the declaration made her have second thoughts? Or was she simply exercising a woman’s prerogative to be late?
Whatever it was, it put Henry in an even worse mood. Like Macbeth, he had decided that ‘if ’twere done,…’twere well it were done quickly’. ‘Therewith’, Cromwell afterwards remembered, ‘one brought your Grace word that she was coming; and thereupon your Grace repaired into the gallery towards the Closet, and there paused for her coming, being nothing content that she so long tarried, as I judged then.’32
But eventually she came, arrayed magnificently like a bride. She wore a gown of cloth of gold, embroidered with flowers of pearls. Her hair, ‘which was fair, yellow and long’, hung loose, while on her head was a coronet of gold, jewelled and fashioned with sprigs of rosemary, for remembrance. When she met Henry, whose gown of cloth of gold was also embroidered with flowers of silver, she made three low curtsies. Then they entered the Queen’s Closet, where they were married by Cranmer. Henry said ‘I will’, and the wedding ring, engraved with the words, ‘GOD SEND ME WELL TO KEEP’, was set on Anne’s finger.
They were man and wife.
They dined and supped together and spent the evening with ‘Banquets, Masques and divers disports, till the time came that it pleased the King and her to take their rest’.33
What may be the bed-head made for the occasion survives. It is dated 1539 and is decorated with the royal cipher ‘HA’ and two lewd carvings that stand guard over the sleepers on either side. The one on the left shows a male cherub with an enormous erection, and the one on the right a female cherub with a fine, swollen belly.34
But, alas, the human figures below seem to have been less active.
The morning after, Cromwell came to the Privy Chamber. He saw immediately that the King was in a bad mood. Nevertheless, he persevered and asked him ‘how [he] liked the Queen’. Henry replied ‘soberly’. ‘Surely, as ye know,’ the King said, ‘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.’ ‘[The] which’, he continued, ‘struck me so to the heart when I felt them that I had neither will nor courage to proceed any further in other matters.’
‘I have left her’, he concluded, ‘as good a maid as I found her.’35
That same morning, Henry discussed his failure to consummate the marriage with his physicians, Dr John Chamber and Dr William Butts. ‘He had not that night carnally known the Queen,’ he said. Chamber, who was a wise old bird, advised the King ‘not to enforce himself, for eschewing such inconveniences as by debility ensuing in that case were to be feared’. Henry took the advice and the ‘second night he lay not with her’. But he tried again on the third and fourth nights–always with the same lack of success.
Other consultations with his doctors followed, in which Henry described the problem as he saw it. ‘He found her body in such sort disordered and indisposed to excite and provoke any lust in him,’ he explained. ‘Yea,’ he continued, ‘[it] rather minister[ed] matter of loathesomeness unto [him], that [he] could not in any wise overcome that loathesomeness, nor in her company be provoked or stirred to that act.’
On the other hand, he was not, God forbid, impotent. And he had evidence to prove it. ‘He hath had’, he confessed to Butts, ‘two wet dreams [duas pollutiones nocturnas in somno].’ He also told him that ‘[he] thought himself able to do the act with other, but not with her’.36
Nevertheless, Henry continued to go through the motions and, every other night at least, solemnly processed to the Queen’s apartments to sleep with her.
But sleep was all he did.
What, however, of Anne in all this? It is difficult to be sure of her reaction. She was still escaping from her mother’s shadow and found it hard to say what she wanted. Indeed, until she picked up some English, she found it difficult to say anything at all. But, as Wotton predicted, she proved a quick learner and, a few months after her marriage, she had a frank exchange with her ladies.
It began when ‘they [all] wished her Grace with child’. ‘She knew well’, she replied, ‘she was not with child.’ ‘How is it possible’, asked one, ‘for your Grace to know that and lie every night with the King?’ ‘I know it well I am not,’ Anne insisted.
This was too much for Lady Rochford, George Boleyn’s widow, who seems to have learned little from her late husband’s fate. ‘By Our Lady’, she said, ‘I think your Grace is a maid still indeed.’ ‘How can I be a maid’, the Queen replied, ‘and sleep every night with the King?’ ‘There must be more than that,’ said Lady Rochford, with an insolent directness.
But instead of slapping her down, the long-suffering Anne entered into a patient explanation. ‘Why,’ she said, ‘when he comes to bed, he kisses me and taketh me by the hand and biddeth me, “Goodnight, sweetheart”; and in the morning [he] kisses me and biddeth me, “Farewell, darling”. Is this not enough?’
‘Madam,’ replied the Countess of Rutland, ‘there must be more than this, or it will be long ere we have a Duke of York.’
‘Nay,’ said the Queen, ‘I am content with this, for I know no more.’37
Was Anne really as naïve as this exchange suggests? Or was she trying to keep up appearances? Was she even, perhaps, trying to protect Henry?
For there is a clear indication that she knew that something was wrong from the start. ‘The Queen [has] often desired to speak with me,’ Cromwell told Henry on 7 January, during their post-mortem discussion on the disaster of the wedding night. ‘But I durst not.’ ‘Why should [you] not?’ Henry replied. ‘Alleging’, Cromwell remembered, ‘that I might do much good in going to her, and to be plain with her in declaring my mind.’
Despite Henry’s encouragement, however, Cromwell managed to avoid having the awkward conversation himself. Instead, he shuffled off the responsibility onto the Earl of Rutland, who was Anne’s Lord Chamberlain. Cromwell had a private word with Rutland, in which he begged him ‘to find some means that the Queen might be induced to order [her] Grace pleasantly in her behaviour towards [the King], thinking thereby for to have had some faults amended’. Cromwell also spoke more generally to the Queen’s Council, ‘to counsel their mistress to use all pleasantness to [the King]’.38
We have no means of knowing whether anyone acted on this advice. The suspicion must be that they did not. If, Rutland and the rest must have reasoned, Cromwell himself was afraid to speak to the Queen directly, why should they risk their necks on his behalf?
For Cromwell was only reaping what he had sown. He had instituted a reign of terror, in which careless talk cost lives. And no talk, of course, was more careless than talk which cast doubt on the succession. But none, in the present circumstances, was more vital either.
Somehow, the circle had to be squared. Anne had to be taught the facts of life. She had even, in the face of Henry’s ‘loathesomeness’, to be taught to take the sexual initiative. But how to do this without offering the least hint of Henry’s incapacity or outright impotence? After all, it was only three years since Rochford had gone to the block after doing just that.
It was an awkward but not impossible task and Cromwell, of all men, should have been able to do it. He had the King’s direct authority to proceed. He also had the most powerful incentive, since, as he well knew, such a conversation with Anne was the best hope of rescuing the Cleves marriage. But, on his own admission, he lacked the courage even to try.
There was, of course, an alternative route. Rutland may not have spoken to the Queen, but it seems pretty clear that he spoke to his wife, the Countess. For she, as a woman, could go where a man could not. She could tackle the Queen, woman to woman, in the secrecy of her private apartments. And she could raise the dreaded topic naturally, without an overt political context or agenda. That is the background, I think, to the conversation between Anne and her ladies which has already been described.
But, equally, this conversation shows the limitations of this approach. It did not take place till June, by which time the breakdown in the marriage was irretrievable. And, even then, it quickly encountered barriers of language and of trust. But the most important obstacle was Anne’s own attitude. ‘Did not your Grace tell Mother Loew this?’ asked the Countess.
Mrs Loew was a German gentlewoman, who had accompanied Anne from Cleves. Unlike most of Anne’s German entourage, who, as was the custom, were sent home soon after the marriage, she was allowed to remain in England. And she quickly established a pre-eminent position in the Queen’s Household. She was the ‘mother’ of the German maids. She was also Anne’s chief confidante. Apply to Mrs Loew, the Countess of Rutland advised her friend Lady Lisle, for she ‘can do as much…as any woman’ to secure the appointment of Anne Basset’s younger, uglier sister, Catherine, as one of the Queen’s maids.39
In view of all this, Mrs Loew should have been Anne’s natural comforter and adviser in the problems of her marriage. She was a shoulder to weep on. She was also, as ‘mother’ of the maids, expected to be a fount of knowledge and woman’s lore.
But Anne apparently was too embarrassed to invoke her. ‘Fie, fie, for shame!’ Anne said, when the Countess of Rutland asked if she had discussed Henry’s behaviour in bed with Mrs Loew. ‘God forbid!’
Between Cromwell’s cowardice and Anne’s shamefacedness, any hope of rescuing the marriage from Henry’s initial disgust was lost.
But Henry’s cup of sorrow was not yet full. For, little more than a month after the marriage, the latent toughness of Anne’s character started to appear. The bone of contention seems to have been the treatment of Henry’s elder daughter, Mary. Mary was now fully restored to her father’s good graces and marriage negotiations were in full swing for a match between her and the Duke of Bavaria. In Lent, which began on 11 February, Henry had some discussions with Anne about his daughter. But Anne, Henry complained bitterly to Cromwell, had begun ‘to wax stubborn and wilful’.40
It was not what the King was used to after Jane Seymour.
The outside world, however, knew none of this. Nor, for that matter, did most of the King’s intimates. They could, and did, draw their conclusions from the external signs of Henry’s behaviour. But at first only Cromwell and the two doctors were in the King’s full confidence.
Thereafter, however, the circle of those in the know steadily widened. A week after the wedding, Cromwell told Admiral Fitzwilliam. He also, Fitzwilliam claimed, tried to pin the blame on him for having over-praised Anne in his letters from Calais. Heneage seems to have learned the truth at about the same time. But even Denny remained in the dark for almost a month.
In Denny’s case, it is true, it was probably a wilful blindness. As a partisan of Reform, he was desperately anxious for the marriage to succeed. So he stuck loyally to the script which Cromwell had given him, and continued to praise Anne ‘at the first arrival of the Queen and long after’. Finally, just before Lent, Henry lost patience and decided to take Denny into his confidence as well, ‘as…servant whom he used secretly about him’. Denny heard out the King’s description of Anne’s body and his own repulsion from it. Then he tried to comfort his master.
‘The state of Princes…in matters of marriage’, he said, ‘[was] far of worse sort than the condition of poor men.’ ‘For Princes’, he continued, ‘take as is brought them by others, and poor men be commonly at their own choice and liberty.’41
This was Job’s comfort indeed.
Meanwhile, the machinery of ceremony ground on obliviously. On 4 February, Anne and Henry removed from Greenwich to Whitehall in another great river pageant. The Lord Mayor and citizens gave their attendance. And the Tower shot off ‘above a thousand chambers of ordnance, which made a noise like thunder’.42
On 18 April, Cromwell, the author of the Cleves marriage, had his reward. He was created Earl of Essex and Lord Great Chamberlain of England. After the ceremony, the King went to dine with the Queen in her Chamber, while the newly created Earl dined in the Council Chamber with his fellow magnates. There Garter King of Arms proclaimed his style: ‘Earl of Essex, Vicegerent and High Chamberlain of England, Chancellor of the Exchequer, and Justice of the Forests beyond Trent’. Short of a dukedom, he could rise no higher.43
May Day, too, was celebrated with the accustomed pageantry. Henry, increasingly lame as he was, was no longer able to ride as Anne’s knight. But a new generation of coming young men, including Sir Thomas Seymour, the late Queen’s younger brother, and Richard Cromwell, the minister’s nephew, showed off their jousting skills before the new Queen in the tilt-yard at Whitehall. After the tournament, the jousters kept open house at Durham Place, ‘where they feasted the King’s Majesty [and] the Queen’s Grace and her ladies’.
Finally, there were rumours, which Anne sought eagerly to turn into reality, that she would be crowned round Whitsuntide.44
It was just like old times.
But it was all a façade. Soon, rumours were circulating of another sort of entertainment. Henry was seen crossing the Thames in a little boat, often in broad daylight and occasionally even at midnight. His destination was either the Dowager Duchess of Norfolk’s house in Lambeth or Winchester Palace in Southwark, where Gardiner was providing ‘feasts and entertainments’.
For Henry had fallen in love again, with a ‘young lady of diminutive stature’. Her name was Catherine Howard. She was one of the Queen’s ladies and, like Anne Boleyn, was niece to the Duke of Norfolk.45
However the relationship began (and its origins are unknown), it soon became as political as the Cleves marriage, to which it was the perfect counterpoise. For all year the political pendulum had swung wildly from one extreme to the other. First Reforming friends and clients of Cromwell, such as Robert Barnes, were humiliated and arrested. Then Cromwell struck back in May with the arrest of leading conservatives, including Lord Lisle, the Deputy of Calais, and Bishop Sampson of Chichester, who was also Dean of the Chapel Royal.
The moment of crisis had been reached. On 1 June the French ambassador, Marillac, reported that ‘things are brought to such a pass that either Cromwell’s party or that of the Bishop of Winchester must succumb’. And his money, he made clear, was on Cromwell to emerge as the victor.46
It is easy to see why. For Cromwell, despite his fatal lack of courage in speaking to Anne, was the bolder and better politician. But the failure of the Cleves marriage proved the chink in his armour and on 10 June he was arrested at the Council Board, insulted by his fellow-councillors, whom he had terrorised and humiliated for so long, and taken straight to the Tower.
Only Cranmer dared to speak up for him, in the sort of ambiguous phrases he had once used about Cromwell’s earlier victim, Anne Boleyn. ‘I loved him as my friend,’ the Archbishop wrote to Henry. ‘But now, if he be a traitor, I am sorry that I ever loved him or trusted him.’ ‘I am very glad his treason is discovered in time’, he continued, ‘but again I am very sorrowful. For who shall your Grace trust hereafter, if you might not trust him?’
‘Alas, whom should men trust?’ Henry had asked Russell.
Not Cromwell, he had decided at last.47
The fallen minister was not even given the dignity of a trial. Instead, he was condemned by a Parliamentary process known as an Act of Attainder. The charges were a fantastic mixture of treason, heresy and scandalum magnatum, or being rude and oppressive to nobles. Only the last had any vestige of truth. But truth, as Cromwell had fatally taught Henry, was not important.48
Only Henry’s convenience was.
With the Act of Attainder, Cromwell was legally dead. And he was kept alive for a few weeks only to facilitate the now inevitable divorce from Anne of Cleves.
His co-operation was not in doubt. He would do and say anything to avoid the full, horrible penalties for treason or heresy, which, in view of his humble birth, were likely to be his hideous fate. He also had the temperament of a bully: strong and bold when he was in the ascendant, but craven in defeat. ‘Most gracious prince, I cry for mercy, mercy, mercy!’ he wrote at the end of one of the letters in which he supplied the required circumstantial detail about the Cleves marriage and its debacle.49
Anne herself probably understood little of the political storm which raged round her and of which she was the all-too-passive cause. She was shrewd enough, however, to notice the King’s attentions to Catherine Howard, and, on 20 June, she complained vigorously about them to the Cleves agent in London, Karl Harst. Two days later, she was in better spirits, because Henry had spoken to her kindly.50
It was the last time she saw him as her husband.
On 24 June, like Catherine of Aragon before her, Anne was ordered to leave the Court. In her case, the move was to Richmond Palace, because, it was claimed, it enjoyed a better climate. Anne was not deceived. She knew about the precedent of Henry’s first Queen and feared she would share the same fate. Harst did his best to comfort her, but without much conviction.51
On 6 July, the anticipated blow fell, as, in two separate meetings, Harst and Anne were informed of the King’s intention to have the Cleves marriage reconsidered. In his meeting with the Council and his own subsequent investigations, Harst discovered the range of conservative Councillors arrayed against his mistress. Tunstall took the lead in explaining Henry’s case; Gardiner had found a German in Henry’s employ to translate, from German into Latin, the key document concerning the marriage contract between Anne and the son of the Duke of Lorraine, and Norfolk was also seeking information about the tense of a crucial word in the document.52
At the same time as Harst was seeing the Council in London, a powerful delegation of Councillors, which included Suffolk and Gardiner together with two interpreters, waited on Anne at Richmond. They handed her a paper, which gave notice that Henry intended to submit their marriage to the judgement of Convocation. Did she agree? According to the Councillors’ report to the King, Anne, ‘without alteration of countenance’ gave her immediate oral consent, saying ‘that she is content always with your Majesty’s [desires]’. According to Harst, however, Anne, far from giving her informed agreement, paid no attention to the paper.53
Was it a genuine misunderstanding? Or was the delegation simply reporting what Henry wanted to hear?
Whatever the genuineness of Anne’s consent, however, it was enough for Convocation to proceed. This it did at speed. It met early on Wednesday the 7th. The morning session considered the case against the marriage. This was presented ‘in a lucid speech’ by Gardiner, who had returned post-haste from Richmond the previous night. Cranmer then adjourned the full session till the following day. Meanwhile, in the afternoon, from 1 to 6 p.m., depositions were taken from a wide range of witnesses. It is these which, together with Cromwell’s two written confessions, provide the intimate details about the failure of the marriage. On the Thursday the depositions were tabled and agreed to present a prima facie case against the marriage. Finally, on Friday the 9th, the judgement was drawn up in proper form and assented to by all present.54
From first to last the proceedings had taken three days.
Harst was taken by surprise at the speed of events and on the 9th he went to Court to complain about the lack of consultation. He was told that, because the matter concerned the validity of the King’s marriage, it was up to the bishops and clergy to decide it. He was also informed that another delegation of Councillors had already left to inform Anne of the decision of Convocation. Harst followed this delegation at speed; indeed, he seems to have overtaken it.
He arrived at Richmond at 4 o’clock on the Saturday morning and found Anne in a pitiable state. She had just received another message from Henry by Richard Beard. Beard had been Holbein’s escort to Cleves when he painted her portrait. Now he bore Henry’s demand that she should give her consent to the divorce proceedings, not orally as before, but formally in writing.
This seems to have been the moment that the reality of her situation dawned. Henry really intended divorce. And she, like two of his previous wives, would be discarded.
Anne was heartbroken. She was also in a quandary about how to reply.
She discussed the situation first with Harst. Then she summoned Rutland, who, since he claimed to understand neither the Queen nor the ambassador, turned up with an interpreter.
Seeing her distress, the Earl tried to comfort her. Henry was a good and gracious King, he said. He would proceed by law and conscience, and Anne had nothing to fear. This seems to have calmed her. At any rate, Anne heard his explanation in silence ‘and said nothing to it’.
Harst paints a more dramatic and probably more accurate picture. When her consent to the divorce proceedings was required, he wrote, she broke down. ‘She knew nothing other’, she protested, ‘than that she had been granted [by God] the King as her husband, and thus she took him to be her true lord and husband.’ Then the tears flowed. ‘Good Lord,’ Harst reported, ‘she made such tears and bitter cries, it would break a heart of stone.’
She also had the courage to refuse Henry’s demand for her written consent and instead sent Beard with a message only by word of mouth, as before.
Harst left her in this state of mingled distress and obstinacy and returned to London to send off his despatch to her brother, the Duke. But he promised to return later that day.55
Over the next twenty-four hours, however, Anne’s initial hysteria subsided. So did her resistance. Instead, she heard out the formal report from the delegation of Councillors, and considered carefully their advice. Henry, it seems, was offering a deal. She would cease to be his wife, of course. But he was willing to honour her as his ‘sister’. He would also, it was hinted, pay her as such.56
It did not take her long to weigh the alternatives. She would accept the offer.
On the Sunday, Anne wrote to Henry on the lines suggested. She began by repeating in unambiguous terms her previous oral agreement that the marriage should be tried by Convocation. Next she accepted their judgement that it was invalid. Finally, she submitted herself, ‘for her [future] state and condition’, wholly to the King ‘goodness and pleasure’, begging only that she might ‘sometimes have the fruition of your most noble presence’.
The letter was signed ‘Your Majesty’s most humble sister and servant, Anne, Dochtter the Cleyffys’.57
Henry seems to have been rather surprised by Anne’s sudden ‘conformity’. He had not expected it. And Anne, as we have seen, had given him some grounds for his fears by her initial resistance.
But, with her submission, the King set himself to be both generous and agreeable. He replied to Anne’s letter on the 12th, addressing her as ‘sister’ and outlining the terms of the financial settlement he proposed. She would have an income of £4,000 a year. She would be given Richmond and Bletchingley as her residences. And these, the King explained, were both near the Court, which she would be welcome to visit, ‘as we shall repair unto you’.58
Never, after Anne’s initial tantrum, had a divorce been more amicable.
The usual body of Councillors turned up with Henry’s letter on the 14th. Anne asked Secretary Wriothesley to read it. But, since he knew the contents of the letter to be ‘sweet and pleasant’, he felt it better to leave Anne to digest it at leisure with her own interpreter. After a while, she summoned the Councillors back and questioned them closely.
Where was Bletchingley? What men servants would she have? And what women?
They did their best to satisfy her and exhorted her to continue her ‘conformity’. She promised she would. She also let slip what may have been the over-riding motive in her behaviour. If she returned to Germany, she seems to have said, she feared that someone, presumably her brother, ‘would slay me’.59
Did she think that her humiliation had injured her family’s honour so much that she would be safe only in England?
It now remained only to tie up a few loose ends. On the 17th she undertook to ‘receive no letters nor messages from her brother, her mother, nor none of her kin or friends, but she would send them to [Henry]’. On the 21st, she wrote to her brother the Duke, to inform him of her satisfaction at her treatment and to insist that, ‘God willing, I purpose to lead my life in this realm’. Finally, on the same day, after having made a good dinner, she sent Henry ‘the ring delivered unto her at their pretenced marriage, desiring that it might be broken in pieces as a thing which she knew of no force nor value’.60
And that, it seemed, was that.