Anne of Cleves: Henry VIII's Unwanted Wife

First published by Chronos Books, 2018

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Text copyright: Sarah-Beth Watkins 2017

ISBN: 978 1 78535 904 0

978 1 78535 905 7 (ebook)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017960374

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Contents

Introduction

Chapter One: Early Days in Cleves 1516–1536

Chapter Two: The Search for a Bride 1537–1538

Chapter Three: Journey to England 1539

Chapter Four: The Marriage 1539–1540

Chapter Five: Cromwell’s Downfall 1540

Chapter Six: A New Queen Katherine 1541

Chapter Seven: The King’s Sister 1542–1546

Chapter Eight: The King is Dead! Long Live the King! 1547–1553

Chapter Nine: Queen Mary’s Reign 1554–1556

Chapter Ten: Final Days 1557

Appendix One

Appendix Two

Appendix Three

References

Select Bibliography

Also by Sarah-Beth Watkins

Lady Katherine Knollys: The Unacknowledged Daughter of King Henry VIII

The Tudor Brandons: Mary and Charles – Henry VIII’s Nearest & Dearest

Margaret Tudor, Queen of Scots: The Life of King Henry VIII’s Sister

Catherine of Braganza: Charles II’s Restoration Queen Ireland’s Suffragettes

Books for Writers:

Telling Life’s Tales

Life Coaching for Writers

The Lifestyle Writer

The Writer’s Internet

Pastime with good company

I love and shall, until I die.

Grudge who list, but none deny!

So God be pleased, thus live will I.

Henry VIII

Be quiet and merry.

Henry VIII to Anne of Cleves

…my husband hath nevertheless taken and adopted me for his sister

Anne of Cleves to William, Duke of Cleves

Introduction

On a cold wintery day, the king rode with all haste to Rochester anxious to see the woman who would become his next queen. He had heard great reports of the Lady of Cleves and her portrait had shown her to be pleasant enough. Eager to see his bride he spurred on his horse, setting the pace for his five companions. Once he had dressed as Robin Hood to surprise his first wife. This time he was also in disguise because his true love would recognise him, however he appeared. They would fall into each other’s arms and love would blossom. He would have sons, fine healthy boys, to continue the Tudor line. The kingdom would rejoice and finally after the turmoil of the past years he would be able to live with his heart’s desire.

It seemed an age until they finally arrived. The king strode into the lady’s chamber unannounced and soundly embraced the young woman who had been watching a bull-baiting display from her window. Everyone in the room held their breath and then stifled a gasp as Lady Anne courteously removed herself from his grasp with a polite smile. Turning away from this strange man, she resumed watching the activity outside. The king stormed from the room and re-entered dressed in robes of purple velvet, now looking every inch the man he truly was. He was seething inside. His dreams shattered, his heart bereft. He liked her not.

So began Henry VIII’s relationship with his fourth wife. The stories of the king’s six wives are well-known, covered in many non-fiction books and novels. The old rhyme ‘divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived’ reminds us of the fate of each of them. Yet Anne of Cleves stands out as having received less attention than the king’s other wives. As I began researching her life – to me, she was the one who survived – a strong, resilient woman who negotiated her way through Henry’s reign, that of his son Edward VI and on into Mary I’s.

As Katherine of Aragon before her, she was a foreign bride. All of Henry’s other wives were English. Taken from her home, Anne was plunged into a world she had no concept of and had to swiftly learn its ways, its customs and even its language. My sympathy lies with the many women who were thrust in this way from their comfortable upbringings into the sphere of their husbands. Some managed to have happy relationships, but many more of them didn’t.

Katherine of Aragon had married Prince Arthur in 1501 but she was in England for eight years before she married Henry. Anne had mere days. She had very little time to acclimatise to her new surroundings, a sea of unfamiliar faces and a language she could not understand. Where Katherine had known Latin and written to Arthur for over a year before they were married, Anne had had no contact with Henry and language was a barrier. She knew little of her husband and as we have seen would upset him from their very first meeting.

Contemporary reports of Anne are mixed but time has not been kind to her memory. In a book by Sarah Tytler published in 1896, I was shocked to read Anne described as ‘a woman of entirely negative characteristics’. The author really had nothing good to say about her. She was ‘dull-witted as well as a hard-favoured young woman, possessed of a stolid sluggishness of temper’. Her writing reads as if Anne had personally upset her in some way. She was ‘plain and stupid’ and even had a ‘meaningless expanse of forehead’!¹

She hasn’t favoured much better with other authors. Hume described her as ‘large, bony and masculine’² and Burnet coined the phrase ‘Flanders mare’³ which has stuck to Anne throughout the centuries. Strickland however wrote with more sympathy that Anne ‘was a most unfortunate, ill-treated princess…who deserved a better fate than to become the wife of a king so devoid of the feelings of a gentleman as Henry VIII’.⁴

Yet Anne survived him. She was Queen of England for just over six months and after became the King’s ‘sister’ – a role she adopted and thrived on. She became the richest woman in England for a time with an astounding divorce settlement. Henry may not have wanted her for a wife but he did not blame her for the failure of their marriage – that would fall upon his chief minister. Anne would outlive the king and all of his other wives. This is her story.

Chapter One

Early Days in Cleves

1515–1536

Anna von Julich-Kleve-Berg or Anne of Cleves, as she would be known as Henry VIII’s fourth wife, was born on 22 September 1515 in the city palace at Düsseldorf on the east side of the Rhine. She was the second daughter to be born to John III, Duke of Cleves and his wife Maria of Jülich-Berg who had married in 1510 at Castle Burg, a fortified hunting lodge in Solingen, perched high on a mountainous plateau overlooking the River Wupper. A place where Anne would spend much of her childhood playing with her siblings; her elder sister Sybilla, who had been born in 1512, William who would join them in 1516 and Amelia in 1517.

Düsseldorf was then the principal city of Cleves and the seat of the ducal court during winter. Cleves was a small duchy in what is now northwest Germany but was then a state of the Holy Roman Empire although ruled independently. Since 1394 Cleves and the nearby county of Mark had been ruled together but when Anne’s father succeeded as Duke of Cleves on her grandfather’s death in 1521, through his marriage to her mother, Maria, the states of Jülich and Berg joined with Cleves, Mark and Ravensburgh to make up the United Duchies of Jülich–Cleves–Berg. Thus John III ruled a strategic portion of the Lower Rhine.

Anne had an impressive lineage being descended from Edward I of England and King John II of France and the dukes of Burgundy. Her grandfather John II ‘the babymaker’, rumoured to have had sixty-three illegitimate children, was the grandson of Maria of Burgundy, sister to Philip the Good and through him Anne was distantly related to the Holy Roman Emperor from 1519, Charles V. John III had a good relationship with Charles accompanying him to England on his visit in 1522 when Henry VIII met his nephew ‘with much joy and gladness’.¹

For all her background, Anne was never meant to marry a king. She was a suitable bride for a duke or a prince but her family never entertained the notion that she would be anything else. Instead she stayed close to her mother ‘never from her elbow’² and learnt from the matriarch of her family. Her devoutly Catholic mother Maria took charge of Anne’s education as she did her other children. William, their only son, would later leave her care to be educated as befit a duke’s son but the girls were not seen as needing schooling in anything other than how to be a lady. Anne’s time was mostly spent on needlework and embroidery. The only language she learnt to read and write was German. Unlike English ladies, music, singing and dance were not a feature in her education. It was reported ‘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’.³ But Anne’s life wasn’t entirely without melody. The Cleves court had an orchestra of musicians and her mother was known to enjoy harp music.

Anne’s elder sister Sybilla was betrothed in 1526 at Castle Burg and married John Frederick of Saxony in 9 February 1527 at Torgau on the banks of the Elbe in northwest Germany. Her betrothal portrait by Lucas Cranach shows a beautiful young girl with her auburn hair flowing over her shoulders, adorned with a band of flowers and a luxurious feather. Sybilla would join her husband in his interest of religious reformation in a court with one of the largest libraries in Germany which had harboured Martin Luther after the publication of his 95 Theses causing controversial religious debate and leading to his papal excommunication. Her husband’s uncle Frederick III when elector had founded the University of Wittenberg where Luther taught. When Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, declared him an outlaw on 25 May 1521, Frederick staged Luther’s disappearance and secreted him at Wartburg Castle at Eisenach where he was known only as ‘the Knight George’ to continue his controversial writings. Luther’s teachings remained influential through the next elector’s reign and passed down to Sybilla’s husband, John.

The same year as her sister married, Anne’s betrothal to the younger Francis, heir to the Duchy of Lorraine, was being negotiated. The Duke of Guelders from a neighbouring duchy had no heirs but many claimants to his lands. Anne’s father, John III, was one of them and it was agreed that he would pass his claim on to his daughter and Francis of Lorraine (son of the duke’s nephew) would become the duke’s heir. The marriage contract was signed 5 June 1527 but there was no betrothal ceremony and Anne and Francis did not even meet nor give consent to the match. Francis was only nine at the time and beneath the age of consent so the contract was de futura – a promise to marry at a future date that was only legally binding if consummated. Anne would remain with her mother until she was in her twenties but this marriage contract would be called into question at a later date.

An alliance with England was considered at the Tudor court as early as May 1530 when Sir Herman Ryngk urged Henry VIII to consider an agreement with the Duke of Cleves in case of war with France, Burgundy or Spain as he possessed ‘three most powerful duchies and two earldoms, and many towns not only strong but populous. If England were in danger he could alone raise an army sufficient to defend it; and he is descended from the same stock as the kings of England, as will be shown by a genealogy’.⁴ Although not specifically stated the negotiations must have included a marriage with William ‘fifteen years old, of middle height, brown complexion, sound in body and limbs well learned, and speaks Latin and French’⁵ to the Princess Mary as Ryngk discounts Sybilla as being married, Anne contracted and Amelia still in her minority. Ryngk lived in Cologne but was a Hanseatic merchant of the London Steelyard and paid to bring news to Henry’s court. His suggestion was followed in 1531 by a visit from Cleves ambassadors to further a marriage proposal. It was just one of several proposals for Henry VIII’s daughter that would come to nothing. Though it was raised again in 1538, Mary would not marry until 1554 and then to Philip II of Spain.

Whilst Anne followed the religion of her Catholic mother, her sister was becoming more involved in the Protestant Reformation. In 1531, the Schmalkaldic League was formed of eight Lutheran princes across eleven cities in reaction to Charles V’s insistence they return to the Catholic Church and the proposed election of Ferdinand as King of the Romans and the emperor’s heir. This defensive league was headed by Anne’s brother-in-law John Frederick and Philip, Landgrave of Hesse and commanded a military force of 10,000 foot and 2000 cavalry to protect its members from attack by Charles V and his allies. Trying to gain support from England they sent ambassadors to Henry VIII but for the time being he had no wish to become embroiled in their quarrels. Henry had no love of Luther’s teachings. His title ‘defender of the faith’ had come about from writing his Defence of the Seven Sacraments that lambasted Luther’s ideas yet the league might be an ally should England’s relationship with the Holy Roman Emperor worsen.

John Frederick became Duke of Saxony after his father’s death in August 1532 and encouraged Luther to continue his writings. Anne’s