The conclusion of the treaty was a triumph for Cromwell and the Protestant party in Henry’s Council; and the Commissioners who signed it reflect the fact. Cranmer, Cromwell, the Duke of Suffolk, Lord Chancellor Audley, and Lord Admiral Fitzwilliam, were all of them inclined to the reforming side, whilst Bishop Tunstal, though on the Catholic side, was a personal friend of the King; and the new man, Hertford, Jane Seymour’s brother, though not one of the Commissioners, gave emphatic approval of the match. “I am as glad,” he wrote to Cromwell, “of the good resolution (of the marriage) as ever I was of a thing since the birth of the Prince; for I think the King’s Highness could not in Christendom marry in any place meet for his Grace’s honour that should be less prejudicial to his Majesty’s succession.”[194] Henry himself was in his usual vaunting mood about the alliance. He had long desired, he said, to cement a union with the German confederation, and could now disregard both France and the Emperor; besides, his influence would suffice to prevent the Lutherans from going too far in their religious innovations. As for the lady, he had only one male child, and he was convinced that his desire for more issue could not be better fulfilled “than with the said lady, who is of convenient age, healthy temperament, elegant stature, and endowed with other graces.”
The news of the engagement was ill received by Francis and Charles. They became more ostentatiously friendly than ever; and their ambassadors in London were inseparable. When Marillac and the Emperor’s temporary envoy went together to tell Cromwell that the Emperor was so confident of the friendship of Francis that he was riding through France from Spain to Flanders, the English minister quite lost his composure. He was informed, he told the ambassadors, that this meeting of the monarchs was “merely with the view to making war on this poor King (Henry), who aimed at nothing but peace and friendship.” Ominous mutterings came, too, from Flanders at the scant courtesy Henry had shown in throwing over the match with the Duchess of Milan in the midst of the negotiation. Cromwell was therefore full of anxiety, whilst the elaborate preparations were being made in Calais and in England for the new Queen’s reception. Not only was a fresh household to be appointed, the nobility and gentry and their retinues summoned, fine clothes galore ordered or enjoined for others, the towns on the way from Dover to be warned of the welcome expected from them, and the hundred details dependent upon the arrival and installation of the King’s fourth wife, but Henry himself had to be carefully handled, to prevent the fears engendered by the attitude of his rivals causing him to turn to the party opposed to Cromwell before the Protestant marriage was effected.
In the meanwhile, Anne with a great train of guards and courtiers, three hundred horsemen strong, rode from Dusseldorf towards Calais through Cleves, Antwerp, Bruges, and Dunkirk. It was ordered that Lord Lisle, Lord Deputy of Calais, should meet the Queen on the English frontier, near Gravelines, and that at St. Pierre, Lord Admiral Fitzwilliam, who had a fleet of fifty sail in the harbour, should greet her in the name of his King, gorgeously dressed in blue velvet, smothered with gold embroidery, and faced with crimson satin, royal blue and crimson, the King’s colours, in velvet, damask, and silk, being the universal wear, even of the sailors and men-at-arms. The aged Duke of Suffolk and the Lord Warden were to receive her on her landing at Dover; and at Canterbury she was to be welcomed and entertained by Archbishop Cranmer. Norfolk and a great company of armed nobles were to greet the new Queen on the downs beyond Rochester; whilst the Queen’s household, with Lady Margaret Douglas, the King’s niece, and the Duchess of Richmond, his daughter-in-law, were to join her at Deptford, and the whole vast and glittering multitude were to convey her thence to where the King’s pavilions were erected for her reception at Blackheath.[195]
In the midwinter twilight of early morning, on the 11th December 1539, Anne’s cavalcade entered the English town of Calais, and during the long time she remained weather-bound there she was entertained as sumptuously as the nobles and townsmen could entertain her. The day she had passed through Dunkirk in the Emperor’s dominions, just before coming to Calais, a sermon was preached against her and all Lutherans; but with that exception no molestation was offered to her. The ship that was to carry her over, dressed fore and aft with silken flags, streamers, and banners, was exhibited to her admiration by Fitzwilliam, royal salutes thundered welcome to her, bands of martial music clashed in her honour, and banquets and jousts were held to delight her.[196] Good sense and modesty were shown by her in many ways at this somewhat trying time. Her principal mentor, Chancellor Olsiliger, begged Fitzwilliam to advise her as to her behaviour; and she herself asked him to teach her some game of cards that the King of England usually played. He taught her a game which he calls “Sent, which she did learn with good grace and countenance”; and she then begged him to come to sup with her, and bring some noble folk with him to sit with her in the German way. He told her that this was not the fashion in England, but he accepted her invitation.
Thus Anne began betimes to prepare for what she hoped—greatly daring—would be a happy married life in England; whilst the wind and the waves thundering outside the harbour forbade all attempt to convey the bride to her now expectant bridegroom. Henry had intended to keep Christmas with unusual state at Greenwich in the company of his new wife; but week after week slipped by, with the wind still contrary, and it was the 27th December before a happy change of weather enabled Anne to set sail for her new home. She had a stout heart, for the passage was a rough though rapid one. When she landed at Deal, and thence, after a short rest, was conducted in state to Dover Castle, the wind blew blusterously, and the hail and winter sleet drove “continually in her Grace’s face”; but she would hear of no delay in her journey forward, “so desirous was her Grace of reaching the King’s presence.” At Canterbury the citizens received her with a great torchlight procession and peals of guns. “In her chamber were forty or fifty gentlewomen waiting to receive her in velvet bonnets; all of which she took very joyously, and was so glad to see the King’s subjects resorting to her so lovingly, that she forgot all the foul weather and was very merry at supper.”[197]
And so, with an evident determination to make the best of everything, Anne rode onward, accompanied by an ever-growing cavalcade of sumptuously bedizened folk, through Sittingbourne, and so to Rochester, where she was lodged at the bishop’s palace, and passed New Year’s Day 1540. News daily reached the King of his bride’s approach, whilst he remained consumed with impatience at Greenwich. At each successive stage of her journey forward supple courtiers had written to Henry glowing accounts of the beauty and elegance of the bride. Fitzwilliam from Calais had been especially emphatic, and the King’s curiosity was piqued to see the paragon he was to marry. At length, when he knew that Anne was on the way from Sittingbourne to Rochester, and would arrive there on New Year’s Eve, he told Cromwell that he himself, with an escort of eight gentlemen clad in grey, would ride to Rochester incognito to get early sight of his bride, “whom he sorely desired to see.” He went, he said, “to nourish love”; and full of hopeful anticipation, Henry on a great courser ambled over Gad’s Hill from Gravesend to Rochester soon after dawn on New Year’s Day 1540, with Sir Anthony Browne, his Master of the Horse, on one side, and Sir John Russell on the other. It was in accordance with the chivalrous tradition that this should be done, and that the lady should pretend to be extremely surprised when she was informed who her visitor was; so that Anne must have made a fair guess as to what was coming when Sir Anthony Browne, riding a few hundred yards ahead of his master, entered her presence, and, kneeling, told her that he had brought a New Year’s gift for her. When the courtier raised his eyes and looked critically upon the lady before him, experienced as he was in Henry’s tastes, “he was never more dismayed in his life to see her so far unlike that which was reported.”[198]
Anne was about twenty-four years of age, but looked older, and her frame was large, bony, and masculine, which in the facial portraits that had been sent to Henry was not indicated, and her large, low-German features, deeply pitted with the ravages of smallpox, were, as Browne knew, the very opposite of the type of beauty which would be likely to stimulate a gross, unwholesome voluptuary of nearly fifty. So, with a sinking heart, he went back to his master, not daring to prepare him for what was before him by any hint of disparagement of the bride. As soon as Henry entered with Russell and Browne and saw for himself, his countenance fell, and he made a wry face, which those who knew him understood too well; and they trembled in their shoes at what was to come of it. He nevertheless greeted the lady politely, raising her from the kneeling position she had assumed, and kissed her upon the cheek, passing a few minutes in conversation with her about her long journey. He had brought with him some rich presents of sables and other furs; but he was “so marvellously astonished and abashed” that he had not the heart to give them to her, but sent them the next morning with a cold message by Sir Anthony Browne.
In the night the royal barge had been brought round from Gravesend to Rochester, and the King returned to Greenwich in the morning by water. He had hardly passed another word with Anne since the first meeting, though they had supped together, and it was with a sulky, frowning face that he took his place in the shelter of his galley. Turning to Russell, he asked, “Do you think this woman so fair or of such beauty as report has made her?” Russell, courtier-like, fenced with the question by feigning to misunderstand it. “I should hardly take her to be fair,” he replied, “but of brown complexion.” “Alas!” continued the King, “whom should men trust? I promise you I see no such thing in her as hath been showed unto me of her, and am ashamed that men have so praised her as they have done. I like her not.”[199] To Browne he was quite as outspoken. “I see nothing in this woman as men report of her,” he said angrily, “and I am surprised that wise men should make such reports as they have done.” Whereat Browne, who knew that his brother-in-law, Fitzwilliam, was one of the “wise men” referred to, scented danger and was silent. The English ladies, too, who had accompanied Anne on the road began to whisper in confidence to their spouses that Anne’s manners were coarse, and that she would never suit the King’s fastidious taste.
But he who had most to lose and most to fear was Cromwell. It was he who had drawn and driven his master into the Protestant friendship against the Emperor and the Pope, of which the marriage was to be the pledge, and he had repeated eagerly for months the inflated praises of Anne’s beauty sent by his agents and friends in order to pique Henry to the union. He knew that vigilant enemies of himself and his policy were around him, watching for their opportunity, Norfolk and the older nobles, the Pope’s bishops, and, above all, able, ambitious Stephen Gardiner, now sulking at Winchester, determined to supplant him if he could. When, on Friday the 2nd January, Henry entered his working closet at Greenwich after his water journey from Rochester, Cromwell asked him “how he liked the Lady Anne.” The King answered gloomily, “Nothing so well as she was spoken of,” adding that if he had known before as much as he knew then, she should never have come within his realm. In the grievous self-pity usual with him in his perplexity, he turned to Cromwell, the man hitherto so fertile in expedients, and wailed, “What is the remedy?”[200] Cromwell, for once at a loss, could only express his grief, and say he knew of none. In very truth it was too late now to stop the state reception; for preparations had been ordered for such a pageant as had rarely been seen in England. Cromwell had intended it for his own triumph, and as marking the completeness of his victory over his opponents. Once more ambition o’erleaped itself, and the day that was to establish Cromwell’s supremacy sealed his doom.
What Anne thought of the situation is not on record. She had seen little of the world, outside the coarse boorishness of a petty low-German court; she was neither educated nor naturally refined, and she probably looked upon the lumpishness of her lover as an ordinary thing. In any case, she bated none of her state and apparent contentment, as she rode gorgeously bedight with her great train towards Greenwich. At the foot of Shooter’s Hill there had been erected an imposing pavilion of cloth of gold, and divers other tents warmed with fires of perfumed wood; and here a company of ladies awaited the coming of the Queen on Saturday, 3rd January 1540. A broad way was cleared from the pavilion, across Woolwich Common and Blackheath, for over two miles, to the gates of Greenwich Park; and the merchants and Corporation of London joined with the King’s retinue in lining each side of this long lane. Cromwell had recently gained the goodwill of foreigners settled in London by granting them exemption from special taxation for a term of years, and he had claimed, as some return, that they should make the most of this day of triumph. Accordingly, the German merchants of the Steelyard, the Venetians, the Spaniards, the French, and the rest of them, donned new velvet coats and jaunty crimson caps with white feathers, each master with a smartly clad servant behind him, and so stood each side of the way to do honour to the bride at the Greenwich end of the route. Then came the English merchants, the Corporation of London, the knights and gentlemen who had been bidden from the country to do honour to their new Queen, the gentlemen pensioners, the halberdiers, and, around the tent, the nobler courtiers and Queen’s household, all brave in velvet and gold chains.[201] Behind the ranks of gentlemen and servitors there was ample room and verge enough upon the wide heath for the multitudes who came to gape and cheer King Harry’s new wife; more than a little perplexed in many cases as to the minimum amount of enthusiasm which would be accepted as seemly. Cromwell himself marshalled the ranks on either side, “running up and down with a staff in his hand, for all the world as if he had been a running postman,” as an eye-witness tells us.