The Last Days of Henry VIII Read online

  Henry was always wary of making a physically unattractive match. Consequently, he demanded to inspect personally seven or eight French princesses within a marquee pitched on the border between France and English-held Calais before making his final choice of bride. Even though they would be properly chaperoned by the French queen, the king, Francis I, was outraged at the suggestion, and Castillon was instructed to tell Henry in August 1538:

  It is not the custom of France to send damsels of noble and princely families to be passed in review as if they were hackneys [horses] for sale.8

  More accepted methods of royal selection, involving sedate diplomatic reports about suitability and appearance, were firmly rejected in London, with Henry insisting:

  By God! I trust no one but myself. The thing touches me too near. I wish to see them and know them some time before deciding.

  The audacious French ambassador archly replied, to Henry’s palpable embarrassment:

  Then maybe your grace would like to mount them one after the other and keep the one you find to be the best broken in. Is that the way the knights of the Round Table treated women in your country in times past?9

  His laddish jibe hit home at the priggish monarch’s well-known fondness for chivalry and courtly love and occasional prudery over matters moral. Castillon reported afterwards:

  I think this shamed him, for he laughed and blushed at the same time and recognised that the way he had taken was a little discourteous. After rubbing his nose a little, he said, ‘Yes, but since the king [Francis I], my brother, has already so great an amity with the [Spanish] emperor, what amity should I have with him? I ask because I am resolved not to marry again unless the emperor or king prefer my friendship to that which they have together.’10

  The ambassador adroitly ducked the question, replying tactfully that it would take a wiser man than he to answer that. Henry’s choice of partner manifestly rested not just on sexual attraction – diplomacy was an all-important consideration, too.

  Privately, some may have thought that the matter of a new wife was daily becoming increasingly unseemly – more like an ageing stallion being brought to stud with a young, prancing filly than part of a grand, sweeping diplomatic strategy and a vital means to further safeguard the crown of England for the Tudor dynasty. If anyone did think this, no one dared, at the risk of the king’s notorious and awesome rage, to mutter more than uncouth whispers amongst the swaggering courtiers in the corridors of Henry’s palaces.

  But the king was not dissuaded from pursuing the arcane process of princely courtship by his French failures in love. Perhaps, his fawning advisers murmured discreetly, a Hapsburg candidate, then? They had in their sights another prospective bride: Christina, daughter of the deposed Christian II of Denmark, niece of the Spanish Emperor Charles V and great-niece to Henry’s first wife, Catherine of Aragon.

  She was slim, also very tall and said to be ‘soft of speech and very gentle in countenance’11 with dimples appearing on her chin and cheeks when she smiled ‘which becomes her right exceeding well’.12 The sixteen-year-old widow of Francesco Sforza, Duke of Milan, was universally admired for her beauty and the portrait that the court artist Hans Holbein the Younger had frantically painted in just three hours and brought back from Brussels enchanted Henry and awakened joy and fresh romance in his cynical old heart.

  She was, however, less than enamoured with the prospect of marital bliss with the English king, even though Thomas Wriothesley, then one of Henry’s two principal secretaries, persuasively told her that his master was the ‘most gentle gentleman that lives, his nature so benign and pleasant that I think till this day, no man hath heard many angry words pass his mouth’.13 No doubt he paused expectantly for her reaction to this outrageous canard. Confronted by her silence, Wriothesley hastened on: Henry, he said, was ‘one of the most puissant and mighty princes of Christendom. If you saw him, you would [talk of ] his virtue, gentleness, wisdom, experience, goodliness of person, all … gifts and qualities meet to be in a Prince’.

  Truth was never at a premium amongst the sycophantic courtiers, and Christina knew it. She listened carefully to his saccharine words but giggled, Wriothesley reported afterwards, ‘like one, methought, that was tickled’.14

  The duchess’s doubts mounted as her advisers talked openly of the widespread rumours of the sinister demise of the king’s previous wives: ‘Her great-aunt was poisoned, that the second wife was put to death and the third lost for lack of keeping her childbed.’15 There was also the necessity (but, realistically, remote chance) of obtaining a papal dispensation to allow marriage to her great-aunt’s widower.

  Henry’s reputation abroad was the real problem, however: on 2 January 1539, the Marquis de Aguilar wrote to the imperial emperor that the English king ‘is every day growing more inhumane and cruel’,16 a stark and telling accusation in the sixteenth century when life was cheap and judicial execution both uncivilised and universally practised. Henry Pole, Lord Montague, who had been caught up in Henry’s brutal and violent purge of his blood royal cousins the Courtenays and Poles (the last of the royal Plantagenet line) and executed the previous month, had prophetically told his servant: ‘Jerome, the King never made man, but he destroyed him again with displeasure or with the sword’ – a prediction that would become repeatedly true, as many were to discover at the cost of their lives or their lands. In the end, with a wit and wisdom far beyond her teenage years, Christina reportedly declared that if she had two heads, one would be at Henry’s disposal.17 She would not become his new bride.

  Despite by now being well practised in the marriage stakes and in choosing a handful of mistresses in the past, Henry was finding it difficult to make a decision on a bride. Diplomatic events abroad overtook him as he continued to cast wearily about for a new wife, surrounded by portraits of eligible Continental princesses and piles of glowing testimonials to their beauty and demeanour provided by his energetic envoys. On 18 June 1538, France and Spain agreed on a diplomatic rapprochement, signing a ten-year truce in Nice. Urged on by Pope Paul III, they planned co-ordinated action against religious heresy, beginning with a trade embargo. An invasion of England by the Catholic powers now suddenly seemed likely, sparking the frantic construction of a rash of new fortifications along her vulnerable south coast. The German Protestant princely houses began to look a more attractive option, both as a source for a bride and as Continental allies to prevent Henry’s total isolation in European politics.

  And so the king embarked on the farce, if not disaster, of his fourth marriage.

  His fumbling choice settled on twenty-four-year-old Anne of Cleves, who came from very much a ducal backwater on the Lower Rhine. She was one of two unmarried sisters of the ambitious Duke William who had succeeded to the Clevois title in February 1539. All the warning signs, however, were apparent for those with the skill to spot them. Anne did not hunt, nor could she sing or play a musical instrument – three of Henry’s favourite pastimes – but she was an accomplished needlewoman. She was unsophisticated, unworldly and unused (if not totally innocent) in the ways of both men and love. She could command only a few words of English; indeed, she could not read or write in any language aside from her own unattractive nasal and guttural Low German dialect. When Henry’s envoy, Nicholas Wotton, complained that he could not see her face beneath her voluminous headdress, her scandalised chancellor retorted, ‘What, do you want to see her naked?’ And the full-face portrait brought back to Henry generously flattered her appearance, showing her with a solemn, almost serene countenance, an oval face, a prominent, slightly bulbous long nose and heavy-lidded eyes, demurely cast down.

  Henry, persuaded by the artful skills of Master Holbein and the enthusiastic reports of his ambassadors, finally assented to the marriage. So it was that, accompanied by an entourage of fifteen ladies and a 245-strong household including thirteen trumpeters and two kettle drummers,18 Anne of Cleves arrived in English-held Calais from Düsseldorf on 11 December 1539, to face the perilous a
nd uncertain voyage across the Channel. But gales and bad weather delayed the new queen’s departure for England and the loving embraces of her egotistical bridegroom. The Earl of Southampton, then Lord High Admiral, occupied the time whilst awaiting calmer seas teaching Anne, at her request, the game of piquet, no doubt in the happy knowledge that playing cards was an enjoyable entertainment for the king. Southampton wrote enthusiastically of her to Henry, who was celebrating Christmas at Westminster, in words and phrases he was later to regret bitterly. Afterwards, he admitted, rather ruefully, that:

  Upon the first sight of her, [he] considered it was no time to dispraise her there, whom so many had by reports and paintings so much extolled, [so he] did by his letters much praise her.19

  But who could blame Southampton for his eagerness to please his royal master, ‘the English Nero’?20 The bearer of bad tidings to the all-powerful has traditionally always paid an unenviable price and he saw no sensible reason to test Henry’s uncertain temper.

  Eventually, the winds in the Channel abated and, accompanied by a fleet of fifty English ships, Anne and her English escorts landed at Deal in Kent at five o’clock on the cold afternoon of 27 December. The party pushed on by easy stages, via Dover and Canterbury, arriving three days later at the bishop’s palace at Rochester. There they would remain until their planned final ride to Greenwich, where Henry was due to welcome her officially on 3 January 1540.

  The king, impatient and headstrong as ever and excited at the prospect of meeting his new bride, decided on a surprise visit to present Anne with a New Year’s gift ‘to nourish love’, as he told his chief minister, the Lord Privy Seal Thomas Cromwell. The delicate flower of romance had not yet died in his heart. Throwing aside rigid court protocol and the careful plans of state pageantry, Henry and five of his Gentlemen of the Privy Chamber, wearing gay multicoloured cloaks and hoods, rode pell-mell to Rochester, arriving on the afternoon of New Year’s Day. He was more like an ardent young lover again than a forty-eight-year-old monarch long past his prime, suffering from painful, badly ulcerated legs.

  A stunning disappointment awaited the merry party.

  Sir Anthony Browne, Master of the King’s Horse, politely called on Anne in her lodgings at Rochester to warn her of the king’s imminent arrival. When he clapped eyes on the new queen, Sir Anthony was ‘never more dismayed in all his life, lamenting in his heart … to see the lady so far and unlike that was reported’.21 He had no time to warn Henry, as the impetuous bridegroom and two of his jolly, laughing companions were hard on his heels. There must have been an awkward and embarrassed silence, with blushes and nervous smiles on the faces of Anne and her German ladies-in-waiting, after the boisterous king burst impatiently into the room, anxious to embrace and kiss his bride.

  Henry’s first glimpse of his new queen left him ‘marvellously astonished and abashed’22 as she stood at a window of the palace, shyly watching the holiday entertainment of bear-baiting noisily going on down in the courtyard outside. She looked older than her years; she certainly lacked her reported beauty – and smallpox scars disfigured her sallow face.23 Sir Anthony immediately saw ‘discontentment’ in the king’s expression, and ‘a disliking of her person’.24 Henry, who could never hide or control his emotions, stayed scarcely long enough to utter twenty polite, stilted words. He snatched up his gift to her – a richly garnished partlet of sable skins to be worn around the neck – and hastily departed amid the low bows of his friends and courtiers, leaving behind a perplexed bride. The king sent his present around the next morning with as ‘cold and single a message as might be’ before hurriedly and sulkily departing Rochester for Greenwich. On the way back, Henry angrily asked his friend, Sir John Russell:

  How like you this woman? Do you think her so fair and of such beauty as has been reported to me? I pray you tell me the truth.

  Russell, no doubt hesitantly, told Henry that he did not think her fair, ‘but to be of a brown complexion’. The king, ‘sore troubled’, cried out:

  Alas! Whom should men trust? I promise you I see no such thing in her as hath been showed me of her and am ashamed that men have so praised her as they have done. I like her not.25

  There was no escape from the potential dishonour of the situation. Henry had to put a brave face on events, if only for the all-important diplomatic objectives of the match. He greeted a sumptuously dressed Anne as planned at Shooter’s Hill, Blackheath, on 3 January 1540, gallantly pulling off his jewelled bonnet ‘and with most lovely countenance and princely behaviour saluted, welcomed and embraced her, to the great rejoicing of the beholders’ – an escort of 5,000 horsemen and invited luminaries from the City of London. But beneath the smiling face of regal propriety and all that pomp and circumstance lurked a burning, resentful anger and an overwhelming desire to halt the wedding.

  Safely within his Privy Chamber at Greenwich Palace, he snapped, ‘What remedy now?’26 to his hapless chief minister, Thomas Cromwell, adding, ‘If I had known as much before as I now know, she should not have come within this realm.’ Cromwell could only reply, rather unconvincingly, ‘I thought she had a queenly manner.’27

  The Lord Privy Seal, thinking hard and fast, seized on the unresolved issue of an old pre-contract of marriage between Anne and Francis, the son of the Duke of Lorraine, mooted in 1527 when she was aged twelve and he just ten. To the future queen’s continued mystification and disappointment, the marriage was suddenly postponed for two days while Cromwell’s lawyers and the king’s Privy Council wrestled with the issue in a desperate, frenetic attempt to revoke or in some way nullify the unwanted nuptial agreement. But it was all to no avail: Duke William’s taciturn ambassadors were naturally less than helpful and ‘made a light matter of it’. Unfortunately, they said, they had brought no documents with them to clear up the matter, but they emphasized, reassuringly, that there was really no problem as the pre-contract was made in Anne’s minority and had never taken effect. They promised to send over the requisite papers ‘as should put all out of doubt’.28

  So, to Henry’s great chagrin, the wedding went ahead. Ironically, despite the lengthy diplomatic negotiations and niceties, this match ended up just like Henry’s earlier marriages, overshadowed with doubts regarding its legal validity. Archbishop Thomas Cranmer solemnized the marriage in the queen’s closet at Greenwich on 6 January 1540, Twelfth Night – traditionally a time of merriment and laughter in Henry’s court, a coincidence that could only fuel his anger and increase his despair. For the wedding, Anne was dressed in a gown in the Dutch fashion made of rich cloth of gold, embroidered with flowers and decorated with ‘great and Oriental pearls’. She wore her yellow hair long, ‘hanging down’ beneath a golden coronet ‘replenished with a great stone and set about full of branches of rosemary’.29 She must have looked rather like a Christmas tree. Her wedding ring was engraved with the motto ‘God send me well to keep’. Unbeknown to her, divine intervention would indeed be necessary to safeguard her future, as the king had lost all interest in his bride. She respectfully curtsied low, three times, as Henry came into the chapel.

  The thwarted king was resentful and ‘nothing pleasantly disposed’.30 His friends and courtiers were careful in their choice of words to him. The evening before, he had asked Cromwell, ‘Is there none other remedy that I must needs, against my will, put my neck in the yoke?’31 Before he limped towards the chapel, he growled that he had been ‘ill served [by] them’ he had trusted. The king paused before entering to tell Cromwell, ‘My lord, if it were not to satisfy the world, and my realm, I would not do that [which] I must do this day for no earthly thing.’32 Never was there a more unhappy, reluctant and bad-tempered bridegroom and Henry’s words were to bode very ill for his chief minister.

  Inevitably, the wedding night was an embarrassing physical disaster. The next morning, a prurient Cromwell unwisely asked the king, ‘How liked you the queen?’ One can imagine his nudge and the leer on his coarse, heavy-jowled, almost bovine features. Glowering, Henry told him brusqu
ely, ‘I liked her before not well, but now I liked her much worse.’33 He added:

  I have felt her belly and her breasts and thereby, as I can judge, she should be no maid, which struck me so to the heart when I felt them, that I had neither will nor courage to proceed further in other matters. I left her as good a maid as I found her.34

  The king then stumped grumpily off. Worse was to come: after four nights of dutiful manly effort, the king still had not consummated the marriage, and clearly now did not ever intend to.

  He confided to the Gentlemen of his Privy Chamber the very intimate problems of his marital bed. Sir Thomas Heneage, Groom of the Stool, later testified:

  In so often that his Grace went to bed to her, he ever grudged and said plainly he mistrusted her to be no maid, by reason of the looseness of her breasts and other tokens. Furthermore, he could have no appetite with her to do as a man should do with his wife, for such displeasant airs as he felt with her.35