THE LADY ANNE OF CLEVES.
Anne of Cleves, the fourth queen and third wife of Henry VIII. of England, is one of the least known personages in history. Fortunately for herself, she never gained the sad celebrity of his victims, Catherine of Aragon, Anne Boleyn, and Catherine Howard. As virtuous and sedate as the former, she was less high-spirited and dangerously fearless. At the same time, her gentleness was much the same as that of her only royal predecessor, and, like her, she won the respect and love of the people. If she submitted somewhat too passively to the sentence of divorce, or rather of nullification of her marriage, as pronounced by Cranmer, it must be remembered that, unlike Catherine of Aragon, she had reason to dread the consequences of opposition to the king’s despotic will. Her husband’s brutal treatment of her during the short time they lived together, his coarse expressions of disrespect and loathing, his utter want of consideration towards her as a princess, and lack of gentlemanlike behavior towards her as a woman and a stranger in his realm, were enough to dispose her to consent to any conditions which left her alive and safe, even had she not had before her eyes the sad experience of several judicial murders committed just before and after her ill-omened wedding. Among the strange circumstances of her—in a sense—obscure life is this: that, having been brought up a Lutheran, and proposed as a wife to Henry VIII. as a means of conciliating the league of powerful Protestant princes in Germany, she died a Catholic in her adopted country. Her sister, Sibylla, had married John Frederick, the Elector of Saxony, who uniformly befriended Luther. Whether Anne’s convictions were very strong or not it is not easy to say; a terror of her future husband was enough to explain her making no demur at being married according to the Catholic form, which was done with great pomp and solemnity; but she did her best while queen to save Dr. Barnes, the Reformer, probably on account of her sympathy with his opinions. In this she was unsuccessful; indeed, she never had any influence with the king. This is perhaps the only decided evidence of her being attached to the doctrines in which she had been educated, and probably the religious impressions she received in England were all in favor of Catholicity. At this time neither court nor people had changed in doctrine, though there was a real Protestant party, quite distinct from the king’s time-serving prelates and obsequious courtiers. Still, Henry was unswervingly attached to the forms of the church of his fathers, and in many points to its doctrines, and, indeed, would have been by no means flattered by becoming the head of a “church” without outward symbolism and stately ceremony, such as the hidden body of Puritans already desired.
The portrait of Anne of Cleves—i.e., of her disposition and character—is very winning. Her mother, who, says Nicolas Wotton, was a “very wise lady, and one that very straightly looketh to her children,” had evidently brought her up, as most Flemish and German girls, in a womanly, modest, and useful fashion. She is described as “of very lowly and gentle conditions, by which she hath so much won her mother’s favor that she is very loath to suffer her to depart from her. She occupieth her time much with her needle. She can read and write her own, but French, or Latin, or other language she knoweth not; nor yet can sing or play on any instrument, for 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 musick.”
It is not surprising that they should have had such a prejudice at that time, considering how polite learning was fast becoming the all-atoning compensation for the lowest morals and most shameless intrigues in the courts of Italy, of France, and of England. Later on the English annalist Holinshed, who wrote of her after her death, praised her as “a lady of right commendable regard, courteous, gentle, a good housekeeper, and very bountiful to her servants.” Of her kind heart her will is a striking instance; for her heart seems more set on her “alms-children” than on any other of her pensioners and legatees. Herbert, the author of a short sketch of her life, gives his opinion as follows: “The truth is that Anne was a fine, tall, shapely German girl, with a good, grave, somewhat heavy, gentle, placid face”; but he goes on to add up her deficiencies in beauty, style, and accomplishments, and calls her “provincial” as compared with the “refined, volatile beauties of the French and English or the stately donnas of the Spanish courts.”
That she was not beautiful, and that Henry was purposely deceived as to her personal charms by the short-sighted Cromwell, is undeniable. Henry, who had so unfeelingly discarded his once beautiful and sprightly and his still loving, stately, and queenly wife, Catherine of Aragon, as soon as his wandering fancy had fixed upon a younger beauty, could not be expected to feel less than a sheer disappointment at the sight of Anne of Cleves. So fastidious was he that he had actually asked Francis I. of France to send him twenty or thirty of the most beautiful women in France, that he might pick and choose among them; and when the hapless ambassador, Marillac, had respectfully proposed that he should send some one to the court to choose for him, he had abruptly exclaimed with an oath: “How can I depend upon any one but myself?” Cromwell, to whose political schemes the alliance of the Schmalkalden League (as the coalition of German Lutheran princes was called) was necessary, duped the king by causing Holbein to paint a flattering miniature of Anne. This was enclosed in a box of ivory delicately carved in the likeness of a white rose, which, when the lid was unscrewed, showed the miniature at the bottom. Her contemporaries vary so greatly in their reports of her appearance that an exact description of an original pencil-sketch (unfinished) among the Holbein heads in the royal collection at Windsor may be of some value. Miss Strickland, in her Lives of the Queens of England, gives it thus: “There is a moral and intellectual beauty in the expression of the face, though the nose and mouth are large and somewhat coarse in their formation. Her forehead is lofty, expansive, and serene, indicative of candor and talent. The eyes are large, dark, and reflective. They are thickly fringed, both on the upper and lower lids, with long, black lashes. Her hair, which is also black, is parted and plainly folded on either side the face in bands, extending below the ears—a style that seems peculiarly suitable to the calm and dignified composure of her countenance.” What must have been most to her disadvantage was not the brown complexion of which Southampton, the lord-admiral, so dexterously spoke when the king asked him in anger, “How like you this woman—do you think her so fair?” nor her heavy features, but the marks of the small-pox, with which she was plentifully pitted. This, in itself, may have materially contributed to the clumsiness of her features. Her “progress” from her native city of Düsseldorf to the shores of England lasted two months, partly from stress of weather, which detained her nearly three weeks at Calais, partly from the state of the roads and the necessary pageantry which her own countrymen and her future subjects tendered to her on her way. Antwerp distinguished itself, as usual, by a lavish display of bravery. The English merchants of that town came out four miles to meet her, to the number of fifty, dressed in velvet coats and chains of gold; while at her entrance into the town, at daylight, she was honorably received with twice fourscore torches. Again, we find that she arrived at Calais between seven and eight o’clock in the morning, and that in mid-December. As she is said to have travelled generally at about the rate of twenty English miles a day, and each of these places, at which she arrived so early, was made the scene of rejoicing and feasting for her and her train, it is evident that much of her journey must have been performed in the chilly hours before the dawn of a winter’s day. In the train sent to welcome Anne of Cleves were kinsmen of five out of Henry’s six queens. The time was whiled away in the then English city of Calais in the usual festivities, and she was taken to see the king’s ships Lyon and Sweepstakes, which were decked in her honor with a hundred banners of silk and gold, and furnished with “two master-gunners, mariners, thirty-one trumpets, and a double-drum that was never seen in England before; and so her grace entered into Calais, at whose entering there were one hundred and fifty rounds of ordnance let out of the said ships, which made such a smoke that not one of her train could see the other.”[108] From Dover, after a quick and prosperous passage of the proverbially churlish Channel, she went to Canterbury and thence to Rochester, where, on New Year’s eve, 1540, the king, impelled by a boyish curiosity ill-suited to his years and antecedents, told Cromwell that he intended to visit the queen privately and suddenly. So he and eight of his attendant gentlemen dressed themselves alike in coats of “marble color” (probably some kind of gray), and presented themselves in her apartments. He was taken aback at her appearance, and for once “was marvellously astonished and abashed.” It was the first time he had had a queen proposed to him whom he had not seen beforehand, and he felt that, at least in the eyes of the people, he had gone too far to be able to draw back now. He, who had never been taught self-restraint in anything, was not the man to exercise forbearance towards his luckless bride; yet, for the first and almost the only time, it was noticed that he absolutely showed her some scant civility. Either she knew him from his portraits or the evident prominence of one of her visitors indicated to her who was her future husband; for she sank on her knees at his approach, probably reading his surprise by her own instincts, and wishing to propitiate him with the meekness and deep humility of her behavior. Still, it was not Catherine of Aragon’s dignified humility and Christian majesty of demeanor, as she had pleaded for herself as a stranger no less than as a loving and faithful wife. The chronicler Hall says that the king “welcomed Anne with gracious words, and gently took her up and kissed her”—which is likely enough; yet we cannot rely on Hall’s authority as a grave historian, in after-times, as we always find him a gossiping and complacent relater of court pageantries, and a blind admirer of the king’s every word and look. No doubt he was wise in his generation—for what else could contemporary historians do to save their heads?—and after three hundred and fifty years we are glad to have his gorgeous Chronicles to dip into. Strype, Lord Herbert of Cherbury, Burnet, Lingard, and others agree that immediately after the king left Anne (with whom he had supped) he angrily called his lords together, and reproached them with having deceived him by false reports of her beauty; and, further, that he sent her the New Year’s gift, which he had intended to present to her in person, by his master of the horse, Sir Anthony Browne, with a cold, formal message, excusing himself to those about him by saying that “she was not handsome enough to be entitled to such an honor” as his personal offering.
The French ambassador, Marillac, preserved the record of many little details in his sprightly but gossiping correspondence with his superiors during the years 1539-40. These diplomatic gossipings seem to have been much the fashion; for the Venetian envoys also indulge in them. Courts and cabinets were more intimately connected then than the bourgeois improvements of the later domestic life in royal circles make it possible for them to be now. But if the French ambassador could be minute in his descriptions, he was not so good an adept at the mysteries of English spelling. He invariably spells Greenwich Greenwigs, and Westminster Valsemaistre. After Henry’s discourteous reception of his bride he returned to his palace at the former place, and there met the cunning contriver of the match, Cromwell, whom he upbraided coarsely for having yoked him with a “great Flanders mare.” The minister tried to shift the blame on Southampton, who had conducted the princess to England; but the latter bluntly replied that “his commission was only to bring her to England; and … as she was generally reputed for a beauty, he had only repeated the opinion of others, … and especially as he supposed she would be his queen.” Dealing with Henry VIII. involved a dangerous game, as no one knew for two days together to whom to look as the “rising sun.” The mild, gentle woman who was never to have any influence, and yet was to win all hearts save that of the brutal king, was perhaps an object of chivalrous pity to the lord high admiral, who thus prudently entrenched himself within the safe limits of his “commission.”
At length, after repeated, peevish outbursts of despotic ill-temper and such expressions as this: “Is there, then, no remedy but that I must needs put my neck into the yoke?” the king gave orders for his marriage preparations. It is curious to think of the now dense and unsavory city accumulations that cover the “fair plain” at the foot of Shooter’s Hill, on which were pitched the tent of cloth of gold and the gay pavilions where the slighted bride was publicly met and saluted by her future husband. To do him justice, he behaved with proper outward respect towards her. From Greenwich to Blackheath “the furze and bushes” were cut down and a clear road made, lined with the companies of merchants, English, Spanish, Flemish, and Italian, in coats of embroidered velvet, while “gentlemen pensioners” and knights and aldermen wore massive chains of gold. The princess and her retinue, consisting both of her English escort and her native attendants, met the king at some distance from the tent, and patiently listened to a long Latin oration delivered by the king’s almoner, and answered on her behalf by another solemn string of classical platitudes by her brother’s learned secretary, of neither of which speeches she understood one word. Anne wore a rich but somewhat tasteless dress, cut short and round, without any train, which rather shocked the fastidious eyes of the French ambassador and the English courtiers. The king, for his fourth bridal, wore a dress which, though rich, must have been unbecoming to one of his size and complexion. The chronicler Hall describes it as a sort of frock of purple velvet, “so heavily embroidered with flat gold of damask and lace that little of the ground appeared. Chains and guards of gold hung round his neck and across his shoulders. The sleeves and breast were cut and lined with cloth of gold, and clasped with great buttons of diamonds, rubies, and orient pearls, … his sword and girdle adorned with emeralds, … but his bonnet so rich of jewels that few men could value them; … besides all this, he wore a collar of such balas, rubies, and pearls that few men ever saw the like.” He was on horseback, but his “horse of state” was led behind him by a rein of gold, and wore trappings of crimson velvet and satin embroidered with gold. A multitude of gorgeously-dressed pages followed, each mounted on coursers with trappings to match. The princess was no less loaded with jewels, and her horse wore trappings which, together with the “goldsmith’s work” of the dress of her running footmen, was embroidered with the black lion of the shield of Hainaut. The king advanced and embraced her, and, to all outward appearance, did princely homage to her—all through an interpreter, however; and with more descriptions of wonderful clothes and ornaments, the old chronicler moves the whole pageant forward through the park to Greenwich palace. At one stage of the procession the princess seems to have exchanged her horse for a chariot of curious, antique fashion. A prominent place was assigned among her retinue to her three Flemish washerwomen, or, in the language of that day, her launderers. Then followed the great water-pageant on the Thames, where each city guild rivalled its fellows in display, every barge rowing up and down, proudly showing its streamers, pensiles, and targets, some painted with the king’s arms, some with her grace’s, and some with those of their own “craft or mystery.” Then there was a barge, made like a ship, called the bachelor’s bark, decked with the same streaming banners, besides a “foyst,” or gun, “that shot great pieces of artillery.” The barges also bore companies of singers and players, some concealed, some elevated on decorated platforms. This was the fifth time that they had been decked for a bridal, if we count Catherine of Aragon’s first wedding-day, when the Prince Arthur, who might have rivalled his legendary namesake, received the acclamations of a loyal people. The loyalty must have got sadly rusty by this time, however, as the unwieldy, bloated king rode past in his ghastly finery, escorting another perspective victim to a palace which only good-luck prevented from becoming her prison. Again Henry gave Cromwell ominous hints of his distaste to Anne of Cleves, as on the evening of this holiday he asked his opinion of her beauty. Cromwell answered that she had a queenly manner; and for Henry, whose two beheaded favorites, Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard, chiefly offended him by their indiscreet and familiar behavior, this ought to have been a source of satisfaction; yet even on that last day of his liberty he called his council together, and despotically ordered them to see if he could not, by any quibble, get rid of his bargain with the despised princess. Doubtless the indignity would have seemed rather a boon to the royal Griselda; but, such as it was, it was not granted. Things had gone too far. The Schmalkalden League might resent the insult; the English people, with their rough love of “fair play,” might even rise in insurrection. Tudorism had scarcely yet advanced to absolute Mahometanism, and the council decided that the marriage must take place. Henry sullenly acquiesced, but Cromwell’s fate was sealed. “I am not well handled,” exclaimed the king more than once, and alleged that his bride had been betrothed to the Prince of Lorraine in her childhood, though Anne, when required, solemnly denied that at present she was bound by any pre-contract. This she was forced to do in public before the whole council. When the marriage was fixed for the feast of the Epiphany, 1540, Henry, ignoring the right of her own countrymen, Overstein and Hostoden, to give her away, associated one of his subjects, Lord Essex, in the office which by every right, of custom as well as feeling, belonged only to the representatives of her family. The bridal robes were a repetition of the gorgeous apparel already described; but the round dress of the bride seems ungainly. She wore her long, luxuriant yellow hair flowing down her shoulders, says Hall; but, as in her portrait her eyes and hair are dark, Miss Strickland suggests that these “golden locks” were false. The contrast must have been unfavorable. On her coronal “were set sprigs of rosemary, an herb of grace, which was used by maidens, both at weddings and funerals, for souvenance,” say some MSS. of that day.
The marriage was performed at Greenwich by Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury, according to the rites of the Catholic Church. There was a solemn Mass, at the Offertory of which the king and queen went up to the altar and offered tapers. Then, returning to the gallery, they took wine and spices (i.e., comfits and preserves), and at nine in the morning (the marriage had been at eight o’clock) dined together. There was something terribly incongruous in the schismatic king, excommunicated for adultery, and the passive Lutheran princess, being joined together in matrimony by an archbishop whose complaisant character and loose morals made many, even of that day, consider him a false shepherd. And add to this that Queen Anne died a Catholic, and had as her chaplain and confessor a Spaniard, whom it is permissible to identify with the same Tomeo who was once in the service of the holy Queen Catherine of Aragon. The wedding-ring which Henry gave to his third and last lawful wife[109] had this motto engraved on it: “God send me weel to kepe,” in Old-English letters. In the evening of the wedding-day the royal pair attended Vespers in state and then supped together. These meals must have been characterized by the same barbarous etiquette as those on the occasion of Anne Boleyn’s coronation, during which we are told: “And under the table went two gentlewomen and sat at the queen’s feet during the dinner.” Their office was to hold the queen’s handkerchief, gloves, etc. Sometimes there were as many as four of these attendants. The queen publicly washed her hands in a silver basin full of scented water, and the basin and ewer were both held by the great dignitaries of the realm. Two countesses stood one on each side, “holding a fine cloth before the queen’s face whenever she listed to spit or do otherwise at her pleasure”—a most extraordinary office, but probably so old as to be still in form indispensable in that land of precedents and of tenacity concerning all old customs.
Anne’s short days with her ungallant husband were a sad trial to her; she never gained his affections nor acquired influence with him. She was too true to feign a love she did not feel or to use adulation to conquer power. Henry complained to Cromwell that she “waxed wilful and stubborn with him”; and her partial biographer, Miss Strickland, says of her: “Anne was no adept in the art of flattery, and, though really of ‘meek and gentle conditions,’ she did not humiliate herself meanly to the man from whom she had received so many unprovoked marks of contempt.”
The king, whether from ironical or politic motives, still called her “sweetheart” and “darling” before the ladies of her bed-chamber, but was already meditating a divorce. Their last public appearance together was at the jousts at Durham House, where a company of knights in white velvet took part in a tournament and a feast of good cheer which the king and queen honored with their presence. This was on the first of May, after they had been married but four months. The queen, whose conduct was so irreproachable that her direst enemy could find no link in this “armor of proof,” occupied her time in embroidery and needlework with her maids of honor, as the meek but dignified Catherine of Aragon had done, both in the days of her power and in those of her distress. Saving the beauty which had once been his first wife’s portion, and the majesty of character which never left her to her dying day, his third consort must have reminded him of the pure, domestic tie which had been his in his youth, of the blameless, gentle, yet stately courtesies in which his court had rejoiced under the sway of a royal mistress. But the unhappy Catherine had loved him, while the more passive Anne simply endured him. Even this was a surprise and a vexation to him, as appeared a few weeks later, when, on hearing that she gladly assented to the divorce, he wondered that she was so ready to part with him. When her ladies ventured to ask her if she had told “mother Lowe,” her confidential nurse and countrywoman, how the king neglected her, she answered truthfully, “Nay, I have not; but I receive quite as much of his majesty’s attention as I wish.” Henry meanwhile encouraged her English ladies to mimic and ridicule her in her dress, her foreign accent, her want of learning. He openly said that he had never given his inward consent to the marriage; that he feared he had wronged the Prince of Lorraine, to whom he persisted in considering her as “precontracted”; and further had the assurance to prate of his conscientious scruples as to marriage with a Lutheran![110] But the plotter whose schemes her marriage had served was doomed to fall before her. Cromwell was arrested a few days before she was dismissed from the court on the pretext of her health requiring change of air. She was banished to Richmond; he was confined in the Tower. The facile Cranmer for the third time “dissolved” a marriage he had made, and, obeying Henry’s changeful whims, pronounced both parties free to marry again. But the liberty so formally granted was by no means to be literally understood as regarded the queen. “The particulars of this transaction (the divorce),” says Miss Strickland, “show in a striking manner the artfulness and injustice of the king and the slavishness of his ministers and subjects.” A so-called convocation reviewed the case and pronounced the divorce, on the grounds already mentioned, dictated by the king, and the House of Lords cringingly passed the necessary bill. The very same Southampton who had escorted Anne of Cleves to England bore the message to her depriving her of her royal state. She swooned at first, thinking that the deputation had come to pronounce sentence of death upon her. As soon as she understood that her life was safe she showed an alacrity in stripping herself of her dangerous honors, which of itself was perhaps more dangerous. However, the king was too busy with his new toy-victim, the wretched Catherine Howard, to take notice of these symptoms of Anne’s joy at her safety. The terms were simply honorable imprisonment. She was not to leave the realm, and, in reality, was kept as a hostage for the good behavior of her relatives abroad, who might otherwise have been tempted to resent her wrongs. Here begins the uniqueness of her lot. She was adopted as the king’s “sister,” was to resign the title of queen, but to have precedence at court over every other lady, save the king’s future “wife” and his two daughters, and to be amply provided for out of the royal treasury. With Mary and Elizabeth she was on the most friendly terms, and at the beginning of her marriage endeavored, by every means in her power, to bring the neglected Mary into notice. From Anne’s expressions in her letters to her brother it appears that any hostile demonstration on his part to revenge her would have brought evil on her. She says: “Only I require this of you: that ye so conduct yourself as for your untowardness in this matter I fare not the worse, whereunto I trust you will have regard.” She humbly returned her wedding-ring to her dictatorial husband, and wrote a letter of submission in German, which the councillors sent to him in translation. A handsome maintenance was allotted her, and she evidently took kindly to her new position, even cheerfully acquiescing in the command to receive no letters or messages from her kindred. Thus the leave to “marry again” was in her case evidently only a matter of form. The king had the boldness to allude to her “caprice” as a woman, which might make her break these promises, and the meanness to order that measures should be taken to prevent the possibility of her breaking them. These are his words—a monument of despicable tyranny: “And concerning these letters to her brother, how well soever she speaketh now, with promises, to abandon the condition [caprice] of a woman, … we think good, nevertheless, rather by good means to prevent that she should not play the woman than to depend upon her promise; nor, after she have felt at our hand all gratuity and kindness, … to leave her at liberty, to gather more stubbornness than were expedient, … she should not play the woman [i.e., change her mind] if she would.… Unless these letters be obtained, all shall [i.e., will] remain uncertain upon a woman’s promise—that she will be no woman—the accomplishment whereof, on her behalf, is as difficult in the refraining of a woman’s will, upon occasion, as in changing her womanish nature, which is impossible.”[111]
Marillac, the ambassador, says on this occasion that “the queen takes it all in good part.” But the people had evidently grown to love her, and, as far as they dared, murmured at the indignity put upon her; for he adds: “This is cause of great regret to the people, whose love she had gained, and who esteemed her as one of the most sweet, gracious, and humane queens they have had; and they greatly desired her to continue with them as their queen.” No doubt the people had a greater sense of dignity than their king, and wished the sovereign lady of so great a realm to be of royal race and breeding. It was not for them to be subjects of a subject, while foreign kingdoms, and even small principalities, had queens-consort of royal degree. They had had sad experience, too, of the desolating rivalries produced among the great lords by these intermarriages with subjects, and therefore welcomed the gentle foreigner, so quick to learn English speech and English ways, but whose kindred was little likely to embarrass them.
Anne always signed herself “Daughter of Cleves” after her dismissal from court, and her gayety seems to have revived as soon as she found her life safe. Scarcely a month after the divorce was pronounced Henry visited her at Richmond, and she entertained him so pleasantly, says Marillac, that he stayed and supped with her “right merrily, and demeaned himself with such singular graciousness that some … fancied he was going to take her for his queen again.” If his hostess had thought so, doubtless she would have abated her pleasant humor and appeared less ready to welcome him. As it was, she put on every day a rich new dress, “each more wonderful than the last,” fared sumptuously, held her little court like a noble English lady of that day, dispensing alms and bounties, and passing her time, as Marillac says, “in sports and recreations.” Her real self bloomed again in this atmosphere of safety and unrestricted mental freedom; for such this “honorable imprisonment” as a hostage certainly was when compared with the teasing, daily companionship with the treacherous king. A feint was made a little later to give her a choice as to whether she would live in England or abroad; but as the jointure was tied up in English lands and their revenue alone, and to the possessor of these residence in England was attached as a sine qua non condition, the liberty of choice was practically null.
Anne’s court at Richmond and her life of gentle charities and innocent merry-makings were suddenly startled, after sixteen months’ peace, by the news of the trial and execution of her unhappy successor, Catherine Howard. Immediately her partisan maids of honor, and indeed all her household, who were devoted to her, began to speculate as to the chances of Providence interfering to reinstate their mistress in her rights. Every one but herself wished for this restoration. One of her ladies was actually committed to prison for having said, “Is God working his own work to make the Lady Anne of Cleves queen again?” adding that it was impossible that so sweet a queen as Lady Anne could be utterly put down. But, fortunately for the queen’s peace of mind, there was no such possibility, even though her brother’s ambassadors rather inconsiderately urged her restoration to her rightful position. The Privy-Purse expenses of her step-daughter, the Princess Mary, mentions a visit made by her to Anne in the year 1543 and her largesses to the latter’s servants; also a present of Spanish silk sent by Anne to Mary. Their intercourse seems to have been pleasant and familiar; they were nearly of the same age and had many domestic tastes in common. The contact between them may have been in part the means of Anne’s becoming a Catholic, though there is but little to show at what precise time this took place. So English had the queen grown that when Henry died, in 1547, she did not care to go to her own country, but willingly cast in her lot with her adopted land. Wise in her widowhood, as she had been virtuous in her married life—no less during the seven years of her separation than the six months of her reign—she did not marry again nor in any way mix in political matters. Posterity has unjustly set her down as an ugly, ill-conditioned, unlearned woman, a person without taste and discernment, at best a mere puppet of Henry’s. But we venture to see her otherwise; though she may not have been learned like Mary Tudor or Jane Grey, she was yet sufficiently instructed in all womanly arts, and quickly learned English, adapting herself, with rare prudence and discretion, to the ways of life and even the gorgeous sports of her adopted land; a trustworthy friend to the king’s daughters, especially the spurned and ill-fated Mary; a benevolent and self-denying woman, a good mistress, a pleasant hostess, an admirable manager of her tenants, estates, and household, deft with her fingers, skilful at her needle, gentle towards all, and, though not handsome, yet so winning that her ladies—though it was the worst policy—had no other title for her than their “sweet queen,” their “dear lady,” their “sweet mistress.” She outlived her stepson, Edward VI., and assisted publicly at Mary’s coronation, sitting in the same chariot as Elizabeth. “But,” says Miss Strickland, “her happiness appears to have been in the retirement of domestic life.” Further on the same biographer adds that it has been surmised, from certain items in her list of expenses, that she sometimes made private experiments in cooking. “She spent her time at the head of her little court, which was a happy household within itself, and we may presume well governed; for we hear neither of plots, nor quarrels, tale-bearings nor mischievous intrigues, as rife in her home-circle. She was tenderly beloved by her domestics, and well attended by them in her last sickness.” She survived her husband ten years, and died calmly and happily at the age of forty-one. In her will she left almost all the money and jewels which she had at her disposal to those who had served her and to poor pensioners, besides scrupulously ordering every debt to be paid. She left marriage-portions for her maids of honor, and ended by beseeching her executors to “pray for us and to see our body buried, … that we may have the suffrages of holy church according to the Catholic faith, wherein we end our life in this transitory world.”
Accordingly, Queen Mary had her buried in Westminster Abbey with great pomp, and the procession was graced with a hundred of her servants bearing torches, many knights and gentlemen with eight banners of arms (her own) and four banners of “white taffeta wrought with gold,” then the twelve bedesmen of Westminster in new black gowns, bearing twelve burning torches and four white branches, her ladies on horseback and in black gowns, and eight heralds, with white banners of arms, riding near the hearse. At the abbey-door the abbot and other Catholic dignitaries in mitres and copes received the corpse with the usual solemn ceremonies, and, bringing her into the church, “tarried dirge, and all the night with lights burning.” This stands for the Vespers in the Office for the departed. “The next day,” says the chronicler Stow, “requiem was sung, and my lord of Westminster (the abbot) preached as goodly a sermon as ever was made, and the Bishop of London sang Mass in his mitre, … and all the gentlemen and ladies offered [alms] at Mass.… Then all her head officers brake their staves, and all her ushers brake their rods and cast them into her tomb, … and thus they went in order to a great dinner given by my lord of Winchester to all the mourners.”
There was more rest and peace in this funeral pageant than there had been in the ill-omened wedding ceremony of which she had been the object seventeen years before. Her tomb is near the high altar Westminster Abbey, at the feet of King Sebert, the original Saxon founder, before the restoration of the abbey by Edward the Confessor. It is a plain-looking slab, like a bench, placed against the wall, and on parts of the unfinished structure the curious inquirer can trace her initials, A. and C., interwoven; but, such as it is, it is more of a memorial than fell to the lot of any of Henry’s queens, not one of whom, says Stow, “had a monument, except Anne of Cleves, and hers was but half a one.”
The horror felt on the Continent for the excesses and cruelty of the Bluebeard of England was such that it was long believed that Anne had either died by unfair means or had escaped from her “cruel imprisonment.” An impostor, therefore, for a time was enabled to take her place at one of the German courts—that of Coburg, where she was treated with royal consideration—but the fraud was afterwards discovered. This is mentioned in Shobert’s History of the House of Saxony. Upon the whole, Anne of Cleves may be considered as the most fortunate among the many women whose lives were connected with that of King Henry VIII.