Mary Tudor - Anna Whitelock [52]
The twenty-four-year-old was not the beauty that Hans Holbein’s portrait, sent to England before her arrival, had portrayed. Henry immediately questioned her virginity, observing that she had the fuller figure expected of an older woman rather than the slender figure of a maid. He believed she was already married to François, heir to the Duchy of Lorraine, to whom she had been betrothed at the age of twelve.
The marriage was postponed while Cromwell investigated whether the Lorraine match had been properly broken off. Two days later, with assurances from the Cleves ambassadors, Henry reluctantly resumed preparations for the wedding. Francis I and Charles were celebrating the New Year together in Paris, and Henry needed to maintain the alliance with the German princes. As he later declared, “If it were not … for fear of making a ruffle in the world—that is, to be a means to drive her brother into the hands of the Emperor, and the French King’s hands, being now together, I would never have married her.” 4
When Anne made a solemn declaration before the Privy Council “that she was free from all contracts,” Henry urgently petitioned his chief minister. “Is there none other remedy,” he questioned, “but that I must needs, against my will, put my neck in the yoke?” Cromwell hurried away without offering a reply.5 Within a few months the cost of Cromwell’s blunder would become clear.
AT EIGHT IN the morning on Tuesday, January 6, 1540, the Feast of the Epiphany, Thomas Cranmer, archbishop of Canterbury, celebrated the marriage of Henry and Anne of Cleves in the Chapel Royal at Greenwich. Both Mary and Elizabeth attended the service.6 The next morning, Cromwell visited the king in the Privy Chamber. “How liked the Queen?” he asked, to which Henry replied, “Surely, as ye know, I liked her before not well, but now I like her much worse. For I have felt her belly and her breasts, and thereby, as I can judge, she be no maid.” The king continued, “[The] which struck me so to the heart when I felt them that I had neither will nor courage to proceed any further in matters…. I have left her as good a maid as I found her.”7
For the next six months, despite repeated efforts, the marriage remained unconsummated. As Henry explained to his physician, “He found her body in such sort disordered and indisposed to excite and provoke any lust in him. Yea, [it] rather minister[ed] matter of loathsomeness unto [him], that [he] could not in any wise overcome that loathsomeness, nor in her company be provoked or stirred to that act.”8 Now he lamented the fact that he would never have any more children for “the comfort of the realm, if he should continue in marriage with this lady.” Cromwell responded that “he would do his utmost to comfort and deliver his Grace of his affliction.”9
By the summer, Henry had decided to sever his ties with the German princes and to seek an annulment. He could afford to break the alliance. The Franco-imperial entente had become strained, and another phase in the Habsburg-Valois conflict had begun. Some weeks before, he had started an affair with one of Anne’s maids, Katherine Howard, a niece of the duke of Norfolk. “The King is,” the French ambassador reported, “so amorous of her that he knows not how to make sufficient demonstrations of his affection.” He “caresses her more than he did the others” and lavished her with jewels.10
As Henry’s infatuation with Katherine