Henry VIII’s ‘Reject Queen’: The Truth About Anne Of Cleves D
[Music] [Applause] Almost immediately after Henry VIII saw a portrait of the isolated, enigmatic Anne of Cleves, he made her his bride. But when they finally met, his stomach dropped. She was unthinkably ugly. Or so he claimed. Anne is now infamous as Henry’s rejected queen. But modern historians suggest a more disturbing reason for his disgust.
[Music] Henry VIII’s future wife, Anne of Cleves, came from stubborn stock. Her father, John, Duke of Cleves, was one of the bad boys of the Protestant Revolution and openly ticked off the Pope and other Catholic monarchs left, right, and center. Accordingly, he raised Anne and her sisters and brother to think deeply and to think for themselves.
Ever since he had divorced his first wife, Catherine of Aragon, Henry also despised Catholicism and the Pope. So when Anne was coming of age, his eye fell right on her. But he didn’t get the response he was hoping for. Anne was extremely close with her mother and their womanheavy household was something of a haven for the young girl.
Indeed, when Henry first began courting Anne, the matron of the family tried to prevent the union. We all know that Henry VIII was incredibly leerous during his day, but most people don’t understand just how bad it was for poor Anne of Cleves. While the 24year-old Anne was relatively mature for a royal bride, Henry was still practically double her age.
He didn’t just court Anne as his bride, he also considered her younger sister, Amalia, as his potential wife number four. Maybe if he’d actually chosen Amalia, the disaster that was his fourth marriage never would have happened. In the late 1530s, Henry sent his court painter, Hans Holine, on a creepy mission.
Still deciding between the two sisters, he told him to go paint both Anne and Amalia so he could decide which one he liked best. He also gave Holine a very specific instruction. Paint the girls accurately and don’t flatter them because he needed a beautiful queen. When it came time to paint portraits of the Cleave sisters, Hans Holine ran into one big difficulty.
Both Anne and Amalia kept their faces covered with veils as per the modest German customs of the time. The painter had to weedle his way in and gain their trust before Anne and her sister finally revealed their faces and let themselves be painted. After Holine returned and Henry saw both portraits of the women, he obviously went with Anne over Amalia.
But his motives were very far from romantic. Many historians agree that the choice probably had less to do with looks and more because as the elder daughter, Anne had more hereditary rights than her sister. Henry’s don’t flatter directive to Holine goes against the common story that the painter deceived the king and painted a beautified portrait of the actually homely Anne.
Even so, as any online dator can tell you, you can’t tell everything from a picture, especially not chemistry. And let’s just say when Anne walked into the room, Henry was not pleased. Almost as soon as he met her, he pretty much immediately complained about her looks and blamed not only Holine for glowing her up too much, but also his chief minister, Thomas Cromwell, who urged him to marry Anne and kept talking up her beauty.
Henry’s exact response after actually seeing Anne has gone down in infamy. He apparently grumbled, “She is nothing so fair as she hath been reported.” Oof. Yet, despite King Henry’s horrible reaction, the royal wedding was already in the works. There was no backing out. Now, once the unhappy couple finally married, there was still the dreaded wedding night.
And although it was a chance for Anne to rise in Henry’s estimation, it went horribly. On the morning after the wedding, the king reportedly complained, “I liked her before, not well, but now I like her much worse.” It wasn’t just about Anne’s inexperience in the bedroom. After all, Henry VIII liked his wives innocent and pliable.
Instead, Henry accused Anne of even worse sins. He claimed that in addition to how little he was attracted to her, she also had very evil smells about her that he caught a whiff of at the most inopportune times. After their disappointing meeting and wedding night, Henry was desperate to get rid of Anne.
So, he came up with an ingenious plot. In 1527, an 11-year-old Anne had been briefly betrothed to another man, Francis of Lorraine. Henry and his counselors, looking for a way to weasle their king out of his ill- fated match, tried to use Anne’s childhood pre-contract to Francis as proof that she was not free to marry.
Henry held a full-blown trial for his enulment from Anne, and it was an absolute circus. The king wanted to cut off the marriage on the grounds that they had never consummated the union, but at the same time, he didn’t want anyone to think he was impotent. So he hired a doctor to come in and defend his male desires.
According to the medic, his majesty experienced an entire two nocturnal pollutions, i.e. wet dreams, even as he slept with Anne for days without consummating the marriage. That is simply too much information. In the end, Henry got what he wanted yet again, and they officially enulled their short and ugly union on July 9th, 1540.
After just 6 months, the briefest of his many marital adventures, Anne was probably relieved to leave the marriage with her head still squarely attached to her shoulders. Yet, in reality, this was just the start of Anne and Henry’s sorted history. Even as he was married to Anne of Cleves, Henry committed a cold-hearted betrayal.
Certain that Anne wasn’t the one, he started immediately looking for his next wife, he quickly honed in on the young Catherine Howard and married the new girl within a few weeks of his enulment from Anne. In public, Anne held no hard feelings about Catherine Howard replacing her on the throne and in the royal marriage bed.
For the new year in 1541, Anne even gifted her ex-husband and his new wife two fine horses and also joined the couple for dancing. Just because Anne was free of Henry doesn’t mean she was free of controversy. And soon a dark rumor started going around the castle. In November 1541, people started whispering that Anne of Cleves had given birth to a secret child.
Just to thicken the plot, some sources even said it was King Henry VIII’s own son. Though the baby scandal was almost definitely a false rumor, the crown still took action. Henry launched an investigation into the Whispers and even detained two people for alleging that Anne was Henry’s true wife after all, and they had consummated the union.
In 1542, Anne found herself in hot water with Henry once more. By then, the king believed Queen Catherine Howard had been unfaithful to him, and the poor girl was awaiting execution for treason, just like Anne Bolin before her. Not content to suffer through yet another of his breakups on his own, Henry lashed out at Anne of Cleves in a cruel way.
[Music] Since they were still on friendly terms, mostly thanks to Anne’s desire to keep her head, Henry thought he could use Anne whichever way he pleased, the hurting Henry sent Anne a tier letter, ordering his ex-wife to return a royal ring that Catherine Howard had given her as a gift.
When Henry finally executed his fifth queen in 1542 for adultery, it was Anne who harbored a dark secret. She may have viewed the execution as less of a tragedy and more of an opportunity. There are more than a few hints that after Katherine Howard’s violent demise, Anne of Cleves held some hope of remarrying Henry and convincing him she could be just as good a wife as she had been a friend these past years.
But in the end, Henry went and chose Catherine Parr as his sixth wife instead. Anne had a perfectly functional education for a European princess and she was even innately clever enough to become fluent in English within a very short time. Except there was one huge thing missing. Unfortunately, growing up her conservative family discouraged Anne from frivvalities such as music, singing, and dancing.
Henry was a lifelong geek of the arts. So, even if Anne could speak to the king in English, the pair probably had very little to actually talk about. Like the cunning woman she truly was, Anne got along with all of Henry’s kids. She even sent gifts to the king’s heir, the future Edward V 6th, was close with the future Queen Mary I, and also made an impression on the future Elizabeth I, to whom she left part of her jewelry collection when she passed.
After all, Anne clearly knew where power flowed from, and it paid off. Anne’s later life was the picture of idllic living in many ways. Leveraging her friendship with Henry’s children, she enjoyed good favor in court under his daughter, Queen Mary I, and eventually retired to a quiet life away from the city.
In the end, Anne’s attention to Henry’s children didn’t just provide her with a comfortable old age. They also allowed her to do what she pleased after Henry died. Anne was so close to Queen Mary, she likely even attended the young queen’s coronation at Westminster Abbey. Henry proved to be a generous ex-husband to Anne of Cleves, even though most of his ex-wives couldn’t say the same.
After she agreed to the enulment, Henry hooked an up with a severance package that included great manners, estates, and a royal income. Not bad to keep your head and your financial independence. But that wasn’t all. After their divorce, Henry kept the random acts of kindness rolling.
He ruled that Anne would be England’s highest ranking lady with only the king’s wife and daughters ahead of her in precedence. He even adopted her in name as the king’s beloved sister. Did that make up for all the torment he must have put her through? Probably not. But the real question is, what did the legendary ugly one of Henry’s wives really look like? The truth is, she was probably just attractive enough, maybe.
Though she was tall with pretty blonde hair, she also apparently had a solemn face that aged her beyond her 24 years. Anne survived her term as Henry VIII’s fourth wife, but others suffered a much darker fate. Henry had Thomas Cromwell, the engineer behind the match in the first place, executed for treason on the same day he married his fifth wife, Katherine Howard.
The big plot hole in all of this is if Henry disliked Anne so much, why the hell didn’t he get out while he still could? He was a super powerful king of England. Surely he could snap his fingers and the wedding would be off. Well, it all goes back to the fact that Anne and Henry were a political match.
There was simply no way to call the wedding off without offending his German allies. Anne not only outlived Henry’s other queens, but also the king himself. On July 16th, 1557, just months shy of her 42nd birthday, she died in her adopted country of England, mostly likely from cancer. When the former queen passed, her family gave her a heartbreaking tribute.
As Queen Mary I’s beloved aunt, attendants buried Anne of Cleves in the legendary Westminster Abbey, albeit not in a very prominent place. But Anne had one more trick up her sleeve. Despite her enulment, her grave reads Anne of Cleves, Queen of England. On top of that, she’s the only one of Henry’s wives to be buried in Westminster Abbey.
Anne is now infamous as Henry’s rejected queen, but modern historians suggest a more disturbing reason for his disgust. Anne’s first meeting with Henry was a diplomatic blunder. Making their way to London, Anne’s party stopped on New Year’s Day 1540 at Rochester, where she took time to look at bull baiting from the window.
Suddenly, a burly stranger entered the room. This stranger was really Henry VIII in disguise. He had wanted to creep in and get a sneak peek of his new bride to be. He also expected that she would see through his costume via the power of true love or something. Depending on the account, either Henry tried to get Anne’s attention and she politely ignored him, or he outright tried to kiss and grope her, which understandably caused the young woman to ring the alarms about a strange guy harassing her. Either way, it was disastrous. Henry left the encounter angry, embarrassed, and possibly ready to take revenge. Some historians believe that this ill- fated early encounter between the two sealed Anne’s fate. According to them, her lack of enthusiasm for Henry, even in disguise, made the king put up
his defenses. If she was unimpressed with him, he may have decided to be unimpressed with her no matter what. And the rest, as they say, is history. If you enjoyed this video, please give it a like and subscribe for more videos.
