Anne of Cleves

• 1. Introduction

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  Anne of Cleves was born in 1515. Even her birth date is disputed, with sources giving either the 28th of June or the 22nd of September. She would become queen of England for barely six months in 1540, the fourth of Henry VIII's six wives. Henry approved her portrait, agreed to the marriage, and then found reasons to regret it almost as soon as she arrived in his kingdom. What convinced a king to marry a woman he had only ever seen in paint? Why did the meeting between them go so wrong, and what became of Anne once the crown was taken from her?

• 2. A Diplomatic Bride

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  In March 1539, Henry started negotiating with Germany's Protestant princes to build an alliance against France and the Holy Roman Empire. He set his sights on Anne, sister of William, Duke of Jülich-Cleves-Berg. Her father, John III, had died the previous year. He had sided with the Schmalkaldic League and defied Emperor Charles V, a stance shaped by his admiration for Erasmus. Anne's mother, Maria of Jülich-Berg, was by contrast a strict Catholic, and the family held no single religious allegiance. William inherited the epithet "The Rich" when he became Duke of Jülich-Cleves-Berg after his father's death. Anne's elder sister Sibylle had married John Frederick, Elector of Saxony, in 1526. He was known as the "Champion of the Reformation."

  Anne had grown up at Schloss Burg, on the edge of Solingen, after being born in Düsseldorf. At the age of 11, she was betrothed to Francis, the 9-year-old heir of Antoine, Duke of Lorraine. Francis had not yet reached the age of consent, so the arrangement stayed unofficial. It was cancelled in 1535. Her father's long-running dispute with Charles V over the Duchy of Guelders left the family well positioned as allies for Henry. This mattered especially in the wake of the Truce of Nice. Thomas Cromwell, Henry's chief minister, was the one who pressed the King toward the match.

  Hans Holbein the Younger was sent to Düren to paint Anne and her younger sister Amalia. Henry demanded accuracy, not flattery, from the artist. Those portraits now hang in the Louvre Museum in Paris and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. A separate 1539 likeness, attributed to the school of Barthel Bruyn the Elder, hangs at Trinity College, Cambridge. Negotiations were in full swing by March 1539, overseen by Cromwell, and a marriage treaty was signed on the 4th of October that year. Anne had received no formal education, though she could sew, play cards, and read and write in German. She was recommended to Henry as gentle, virtuous, and docile, qualities that offered little of the wit and learning he had prized in Anne Boleyn. Once Henry saw the finished portrait, he found it flattering enough to proceed, and by December 1539 Anne had set out for England.

• 3. The King's First Impression

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  John III's death, before Anne ever set out, meant neither her brother nor her mother could travel with her to England. Officials worried about a sheltered young woman crossing the sea for the first time, especially in winter. She traveled overland from Düsseldorf to Cleves and on to Antwerp, where fifty English merchants received her. From there she crossed to Dover and made her way toward Rochester.

  On New Year's Day 1540, Henry rode to Rochester Abbey to see Anne before their official meeting, following the courtly-love custom of arriving in disguise. The chronicler Charles Wriothesley recorded that Anne was watching bull-baiting from a window. The King suddenly embraced and kissed her, presenting a New Year's gift. She barely reacted, according to Wriothesley, and kept looking out at the courtyard instead of at him. Henry left the room and changed into a coat of purple velvet. He returned so the assembled lords could pay him due reverence. It is not known whether Anne realized who the disguised visitor had been.

  By his companions' account, Henry left Rochester disappointed, feeling Anne looked nothing like what he had been told. "She is nothing so fair as she hath been reported," he complained afterward. He confided to courtiers that he feared a diplomatic incident. He worried about driving Anne's brother toward the Emperor and the King of France. Those fears, he said, were the only thing keeping him from calling off the wedding. Despite his misgivings, Henry and Anne met officially on the 3rd of January at Blackheath. The meeting took place outside the gates of Greenwich Park, where a grand reception had been arranged.

  Cromwell took much of the blame, both for commissioning Holbein's portrait and for the exaggerated reports of Anne's beauty that had reached Henry. Henry pressed him to find some legal way out of the marriage, but by then abandoning it risked the entire German alliance. His anger at Cromwell over the failed match would not be forgotten.

• 4. An Unconsummated Marriage

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  On the 6th of January 1540, Henry and Anne married at the Palace of Placentia in Greenwich, officiated by Archbishop Thomas Cranmer. Anne's wedding ring was engraved with the phrase "God send me well to keep." Chronicler Edward Hall described her gown as cloth of gold set with large pearls, made in the round Dutch fashion, with no train. Jousts followed on the Sunday after the wedding, with Anne dressed in the English style and a French hood. Immediately after her arrival, Anne had conformed to the Catholic form of worship that Henry retained after breaking with Rome.

  Henry told Cromwell, after their wedding night, "I liked her before not well, but now I like her much worse." In February 1540, Anne told the Countess of Rutland that Henry kissed her each night and bid her "Good night, sweetheart." Lady Rutland replied that a queen needed more than kisses if England was to get its Duke of York.

  Anne was ordered to leave court on the 24th of June, and on the 6th of July she learned Henry was reconsidering the marriage entirely. Courtiers and two physicians gave witness statements describing the King's disappointment in her appearance. Henry told Thomas Heneage and Anthony Denny that he doubted Anne had even been a virgin. Anne consented when she was asked to accept an annulment. Cromwell, who had pushed hardest for the marriage, was attainted for treason around the same time. The marriage was annulled on the 12th of July 1540, on the grounds of non-consummation and Anne's earlier pre-contract to Francis of Lorraine. Henry's own physician later reported that the King had experienced, in his words, "duas pollutiones nocturnas in somno." That Latin phrase meant two nocturnal emissions in his sleep, offered as evidence he was not impotent. Freed from the marriage, Anne now had to see what kind of life England still had in store for her.

• 5. The King's Beloved Sister

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  In January 1540, before the marriage even ended, Anne had already been granted dower lands to fund her household. These included manors in Hampshire once held by Breamore Priory and Southwick Priory.

  After the annulment, Henry's settlement grew far more generous: Richmond Palace and Hever Castle, the very estate once home to the Boleyn family. Anne of Cleves House in Lewes, East Sussex, was just one of many properties granted to her, though she never actually lived there. Henry and Anne grew genuinely friendly. She became an honorary member of the King's family, known from then on as "the King's Beloved Sister." In gratitude for not contesting the annulment, Henry decreed she would rank above every woman in England except his own wife and daughters.

  Catherine Howard was beheaded in 1542, and afterward Anne and her brother William pressed Henry to take Anne back as his wife. Henry refused outright. When Henry married Catherine Parr in 1543, Anne is said to have remarked, "Madam Parr is taking a great burden on herself." Within a few years, a new King would ask Anne to give up the home she preferred for one that suited his own court better.

• 6. Rise and Retreat

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  In March 1547, Edward VI's Privy Council ordered Anne to give up Bletchingley Palace, her usual home, for Penshurst Place. The council explained that Penshurst sat closer to Hever, and that the move had been Henry VIII's wish before he died. Thomas Cawarden, the Master of Revels, took over Bletchingley in her place.

  On the 4th of August 1553, Anne wrote to the newly crowned Mary I, congratulating her on her coming marriage to Philip of Spain. Weeks later, on the 28th of September, she rode alongside Mary and her sister Elizabeth. The new Queen was moving from St James's Palace to Whitehall. Anne also joined Mary's coronation procession on the 1st of October 1553, and may have attended the ceremony itself at Westminster Abbey. These appearances marked the last time Anne featured prominently in public life. One further account places her at the Abbey in August 1554, after Mary's wedding to Philip. Because Mary was a strict Catholic, Anne changed her religious observance once again, becoming Roman Catholic.

  After Wyatt's rebellion in 1554, Anne lost the Queen's favor. The Imperial ambassador Simon Renard reported that Mary believed Anne "was of the plot" with Elizabeth. He said she had "intrigued with the Duke of Cleves to obtain help for Elizabeth," naming the King of France as "the prime mover." No evidence survives that Anne was ever invited back to court after that year. She lived quietly on her estates instead, describing herself as content in England despite occasional homesickness. She had never left the country since her arrival as Henry's bride. The chronicler Raphael Holinshed remembered her as "courteous, gentle, a good housekeeper and verie bountifull to her servants."

  In the summer of 1556, Anne's brother William complained about members of her household: Otto Wylick, and Jasper Brockhausen along with his wife Gertrude. Gertrude was accused of beguiling Anne with "impostures and incantations." Queen Mary and Philip's English council took up the matter, and by September both Brockhausen and Wylick had been expelled from Anne's service. The household drama would prove to be one of Anne's last dealings as an active mistress of her own estate.

• 7. Death and Burial

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  When Anne's health began to fail, Mary allowed her to move into Chelsea Old Manor. It was the same house where Catherine Parr had lived after her own remarriage.

  In the middle of July 1557, Anne dictated her last will there. She named her brother, sister, and sister-in-law, along with the future Queen Elizabeth, the Duchess of Suffolk, and the Countess of Arundel. She left money to her servants and asked Mary and Elizabeth to take them into their own households. Everyone who had served her remembered Anne as a generous and easygoing mistress.

  Anne died at Chelsea Old Manor on the 16th of July 1557, at the age of 41 or 42. The most likely cause of her death was cancer. She was buried at Westminster Abbey on the 3rd of August, in a tomb later described as somewhat hard to find. It sits on the opposite side of Edward the Confessor's shrine, slightly above eye level. Her epitaph states plainly that she was the last of Henry VIII's wives to die, having outlived all five of the others. Centuries later, her story would return in a very different form: on stage and screen.

• 8. Anne on Screen

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  Elsa Lanchester played Anne of Cleves in The Private Life of Henry VIII, released in 1933. Her real-life husband, Charles Laughton, played Henry VIII in the same film and won an Academy Award for the role. Elvi Hale took on Anne in the 1971 television series The Six Wives of Henry VIII. Jenny Bos played her in the 1972 British film Henry VIII and His Six Wives. Pia Girard portrayed Anne in ITV's Henry VIII in 2003. Joss Stone took the role in Showtime's The Tudors. Rebecca Dyson-Smith appeared as Anne in the BBC documentary series Six Wives with Lucy Worsley. Genesis Lynea originated the role in the stage musical Six. Dana Herfurth plays her in the BBC miniseries Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light.

  Of all the actresses who have played Anne, Genesis Lynea's turn in the musical Six stands apart. Hers was the first performance to give Anne a singing voice instead of just a painted likeness.