Thomas Cromwell: The Rise And Fall Of Henry VIII's Most Notorious Minister (33 page)

His new bride meanwhile was torpidly passing the hours with her own ladies, chatting in the guttural Low German that the English had found so nasal and unattractive during those interminable stormy days of waiting in Calais. On the afternoon of New Year’s Day, she sat at the window of her lodgings, listlessly watching a bear being cruelly baited by dogs down in the courtyard below. Amid the cheers and cries of the watching crowd and the furious barking and growling of the hounds, she was startled by the appearance in her chambers of a breathless and sweating Sir Anthony Browne, the Master of the King’s Horse, fresh from his pell-mell journey from Greenwich.

Suddenly, romance flew out of the window.

The courtier, after making a low bow, stared at his new queen. His hard look, he said afterwards, left him ‘never more dismayed in all his life, lamenting in his heart … to see the lady so far and unlike that [which] was reported’.
¹⁶

Unfortunately, he had no time to prepare his royal master for the coming shock, as Henry was hard on his heels. The King, with two companions, burst into the room amid much merriment.

Anne must have wondered who this forty-eight-year-old man-mountain was. Shyly, she continued to be seemingly absorbed by the bear’s sufferings below.

Henry’s first sight of his bride left him ‘marvellously astonished and abashed’.
¹⁷

Where was the stunning beauty of Holbein’s portrait? Where was the blushing, sensual princess of Cromwell’s promises?

She looked much older than her twenty-four years. Her complexion was solemn and sallow, her nose bulbous and her face disfigured by smallpox scars. She looked bored and, what was worse, dull and frumpish. Her German ladies-in-waiting were even less eye-catching and even more unfashionably attired than their unexciting mistress.

Sir Anthony immediately saw ‘discontentment’ sweep across his king’s plump features and sensed his instant ‘disliking of her person’.
¹⁸
Henry’s desire drained away like water running out of a bathtub, his
contrived love evaporating in the warmth of the chamber. He exchanged barely twenty polite, stilted words with his future bride, sulkily grabbed his New Year’s gift of a richly garnished partlet of sable skins, chosen for Anne to wear around her neck, and stalked grumpily out of her room.
¹⁹

He left behind a sorely perplexed German princess, possibly wondering whether what she had just witnessed was some bizarre ritual of English royal courtship. The next morning, Henry’s gift was sent round to Anne with as ‘cold and single a message as might be’.

Henry’s hurried return to Greenwich was not nearly as pleasurable as the outward journey. ‘Sore troubled’, he consulted 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.’

It was a tough question for any courtier. Diffidently, Sir John said he did not believe her quite as fair as he had expected and commented that she had ‘a brown complexion’. The King cried out: ‘Alas! Whom should men trust? I promise you I see no such thing in her as has been showed me of her and [I] am ashamed that men have praised her as they have done.’ Ominously, Henry growled as an afterthought: ‘I like her not.’
²⁰

One can only speculate at the scale and clamour of the regal tirade that would have assailed Cromwell’s ears on Henry’s return to his palace at Greenwich on 2 January. The Tudors’ rages were notorious and his anger may have been expressed physically. George Paulet, one of the royal commissioners in Ireland, when gossiping about Cromwell in June 1538, related how ‘The king [calls him a knave] twice a week and sometimes knocks him well about the pate [head] and yet when he has been well pummelled about the head and shaken up, as it were a dog, he would come out into the great chamber, shaking of the bush [hair] with as merry a countenance as though he might rule all the roost.’
²¹
Perhaps the hapless Minister had his ears boxed by his enraged sovereign on this occasion. Certainly, Henry was in a tight spot and could quite easily have lashed out. He may have been disappointed, discontented and dismayed by the first sight of his new queen, but the reality was, thanks to Cromwell, that the marriage had vital diplomatic benefits for his realm. Time was also against him to resolve the problem: the wedding was planned for 6 January – Twelfth Night, traditionally a time for unbridled
merriment at his court. Jollity would be a sparse commodity in the corridors of the Palace of Placentia that year.

Anne of Cleves and her followers finally arrived, behind schedule, at Shooters Hill, Blackheath, south-east of London, on Saturday, 3 January. A large pavilion ‘of rich cloth of gold’ had been pitched at the centre of a small town of tents, ‘in which were made fires and perfumes for her and such ladies as were appointed to receive her’.
²²
Bushes and fir trees had been specially cleared to make a brand-new roadway leading up to the palace’s park gate. Crowds were already massing on this 3-mile-long (4.83 km) open space: merchants from Venice, Genoa, Florence, Spain and Germany on one side; those of London, together with the mayor and city aldermen, on the other. The Lord Privy Seal had carefully stage-managed the event; all the foreigners, save the Germans, had agreed to be dressed in velvet riding tunics and red caps with white feathers. More than three thousand attended, and Cromwell, the master of ceremonies, ‘himself looked more like a post-runner than anything else, running up and down with his staff in his hand’.
²³

Around noon, Henry appeared, resplendent in a coat of purple velvet ‘somewhat like a frock’ with great buttons of diamonds, rubies and pearls, worn under a jacket of cloth of gold.
²⁴
Attended by a hundred horsemen, including the Dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk and the Archbishop of Canterbury and other bishops, he trotted sedately down Shooters Hill towards the tented encampment. Anne alighted from her carved and gilded coach and warmed herself in the pavilion. She emerged, to be helped up onto a ‘fair and beautiful horse, richly trapped’, and rode forth towards her bridegroom.

Normally, Henry loved such showy pageantry. Today, he had no taste for such frippery but knew he had to present a brave face to the crowds of onlookers. He swept off his cap and ‘with most loving countenance and princely behaviour, saluted, welcomed and embraced her, to the great rejoicing of the beholders … She, with most amiable aspect and womanly behaviour, received him with many apt words and thanks.’
²⁵
Henry then talked with her ‘a small while’ – no doubt a
very
small while, considering his unbending distaste for her and her inability to speak English – before, hand in hand, they rode in stately fashion to the palace
amid strident clarion calls by the trumpeters and rolling flourishes from Anne’s kettle-drummers, mounted on horseback.

Afterwards, inside the palace, Cromwell was still experiencing a torrid time as his master’s rage continued unabated. Like some spoilt child, disappointed by not receiving the Christmas present it asked for, the King railed continuously about his bride’s unfortunate appearance and demanded that his Minister quickly find a way to stop the imminent marriage.

It was all too late.

Events overseas dictated that the marriage, with all its diplomatic ramifications, must go ahead. Charles V had arrived in Paris, en route to the Netherlands to put down a rebellion in Ghent. He was warmly greeted as an old friend by Francis I and lodged in the Louvre for eight days of feasting and entertainment. A new military coalition between the great continental powers of Europe against England, backed by the Pope, now seemed almost inevitable. Cromwell no doubt pointed out the dangers of an England totally isolated: an alliance with Cleves was better than no European ally at all.

So, for all his trouble to find a fitting bride to become the mother of his ‘spare heir’, Henry was now entrapped into marrying a woman whom he allegedly (and history has unkindly) labelled the ‘Flanders Mare’. He plainly (and vociferously) believed this tribulation of a marriage was all Cromwell’s fault. The Minister had personally advanced her as a candidate queen. He had praised her beauty. He had urged an alliance with Cleves against Spain. Cromwell alone was responsible.

The King had a long memory for grudges and an insatiable appetite for vengeance.

Resentful and ‘nothing pleasantly disposed’, Henry complained to his Minister, just before the unwanted nuptials, about the ‘state of princes … in marriage’. They suffered more than the poor, he maintained, since ‘princes take as is brought to them by others, and poor men be commonly at their own choice and liberty’. Piteously, he asked Cromwell: ‘Is there no other remedy [than] that I must … against my will, put my neck in the yoke?’
²⁶
But in his heart, the King already knew the answer.

At eight o’clock on the morning of Tuesday, 6 January, the wedding took place between Henry VIII, by the grace of God King of England, France and Lord of Ireland, Defender of the Faith and of the Church of England on Earth the Supreme Head, and Princess Anne of Cleves in the first-floor Queen’s Closet, overlooking the chapel in the Palace of Placentia.
²⁷

She wore her fair hair long, as unmarried women did during that period, and a ‘rich gold coronet of [gem]stones and pearls’ set with branches of the herb rosemary, a symbol of both love and fidelity. Her gown was of cloth of silver, embroidered with ‘great oriental pearls’ and jewels, ‘made after the Dutch fashion’.

Anne, ‘with most demure countenance and sad behaviour’,
²⁸
curtsied low three times as she confronted Henry in the gallery on the way to the closet. He presented a majestic, if sulky, figure dressed in a black-fur-trimmed gown of cloth of gold, decorated with flowers of silver, worn beneath a cloak of crimson satin sewn with large diamonds.

Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury, dutifully married the unhappy couple, the bride being given away by the Count of Overstein. The memories of an earlier wedding, to his beloved Jane Seymour, in the same room could hardly have cheered the King. Anne’s wedding ring was engraved with her motto – ‘God send me well to keep’. She would certainly need some divine intervention to make this marriage blissful.

The couple then went hand in hand to the King’s Closet to hear mass together, before being refreshed by draughts of celebratory spiced hippocras and wine and going in to dine together. Afterwards there were further banquets and masques to entertain if not to distract Henry’s mind from what was expected of him later.

Almost inevitably, the wedding night was an embarrassing physical disaster. Anne was able to employ the skills she learnt in Calais by playing cards with the King before they both retired. The traditional public bedding ceremony at the start of royal marriages was coldly dispensed with and eventually, the couple scrambled up onto a specially made great bed, bearing the initials ‘H’ and ‘A’. Its headboard was carved with erotic figures of cherubs, one clearly pregnant.
²⁹
Now beneath these
symbols of lust and fecundity, Anne had to endure the fumbling, groping and grunting attentions of her obese bridegroom.

Henry was characteristically brutal in his displeasure when he met Cromwell the following morning: ‘I have felt her belly and her breast 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.’
³⁰

After four nights of grudgingly dutiful husbandly effort, the King still had not consummated the marriage. Moreover, he patently did not intend to, even though he continued to sleep with his wife every night, or at least every alternate night. During such visits, he apparently did not even shed his voluminous tent-like nightshirt. In sixteenth-century royal marriages of convenience, little was confidential and Henry felt free to discuss his most intimate marital problems with his confidants amongst the gentlemen of the privy chamber, chiefly Sir Thomas Heneage, who anyway looked after his very private and personal needs as Groom of the Stool. The courtier later testified: ‘In so often that his Grace went to bed with her, he ever grudged and said plainly he mistrusted her to be no maid, by reason of the looseness of her breast 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.’
³¹

Anne tried hard to look alluring. On the Sunday following the wedding, a grand tournament of jousting was staged at Greenwich and she appeared at it dressed ‘in the English manner, with a French hood [a pedimental headdress] which became her exceeding well’.
³²
A contemporary chronicler loyally reported that she ‘so set forth her beauty and good visage that every creature rejoiced to behold her’.
³³
All except Henry: her stylish dress did nothing to change his cold feelings towards her.

The Queen’s forthright English ladies-in-waiting became impatient at the delay in her conceiving. Jane, Lady Rochford, believed that directness was the only remedy and one day told her: ‘I think your grace is still a maid.’ After an embarrassed silence, Anne replied, naively: ‘How can I be a maid … and sleep every night with the king?’ and described her innocent bedtime ritual: ‘When he comes to bed, he kisses me and takes
me by the hand and bids me, “Goodnight sweetheart,” and in the morning, kisses me and bids me, “Farewell darling.” Is this not enough?’ Lady Eleanor Rutland told her pointedly: ‘Madam, there must be more than this, or it will be long ere we have a Duke of York, which this realm most desires.’

The Queen was sorely puzzled. What more could possibly be expected of her? Her mother was the Duchess Maria, a strait-laced and strict Catholic who had told her nothing of such things. Lady Rutland suggested delicately that she should have a little chat with kindly ‘Mother Lowe’ who looked after the welfare, moral and physical, of her German maids, Gertrude and Katherine. Anne was shocked, if not wholly scandalised: ‘Marry, fie, fie, for shame, God forbid,’ she cried, and said of her relations (or rather lack of them) with her husband: ‘No, I am contented with this, for I know no more.’
³⁴
With a heaving, corpulent and flatulent spouse twenty-three years her senior, perhaps we should not blame her for not wanting to explore further the pleasures of love.