The Last Days of Henry VIII: Conspiracy, Treason and Heresy at the Court of the Dying Tyrant (3 page)

Henry, persuaded by the artful skills of Master Holbein and the enthusiastic reports of his ambassadors, finally assented to the marriage.
So it was that, accompanied by an entourage of fifteen ladies and a 245-strong household including thirteen trumpeters and two kettle drummers,
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Anne of Cleves arrived in English-held Calais from Düsseldorf on 11 December 1539, to face the perilous and uncertain voyage across the Channel. But gales and bad weather delayed the new queen’s departure for England and the loving embraces of her egotistical bridegroom. The Earl of Southampton, then Lord High Admiral, occupied the time whilst awaiting calmer seas teaching Anne, at her request, the game of piquet, no doubt in the happy knowledge that playing cards was an enjoyable entertainment for the king. Southampton wrote enthusiastically of her to Henry, who was celebrating Christmas at Westminster, in words and phrases he was later to regret bitterly. Afterwards, he admitted, rather ruefully, that:

Upon the first sight of her, [he] considered it was no time to dispraise her there, whom so many had by reports and paintings so much extolled, [so he] did by his letters much praise her.
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But who could blame Southampton for his eagerness to please his royal master, ‘the English Nero’?
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The bearer of bad tidings to the all-powerful has traditionally always paid an unenviable price and he saw no sensible reason to test Henry’s uncertain temper.

Eventually, the winds in the Channel abated and, accompanied by a fleet of fifty English ships, Anne and her English escorts landed at Deal in Kent at five o’clock on the cold afternoon of 27 December. The party pushed on by easy stages, via Dover and Canterbury, arriving three days later at the bishop’s palace at Rochester. There they would remain until their planned final ride to Greenwich, where Henry was due to welcome her officially on 3 January 1540.

The king, impatient and headstrong as ever and excited at the prospect of meeting his new bride, decided on a surprise visit to present Anne with a New Year’s gift ‘to nourish love’, as he told his chief minister, the Lord Privy Seal Thomas Cromwell. The delicate flower of romance had not yet died in his heart. Throwing aside rigid court protocol and the careful plans of state pageantry, Henry and five of his Gentlemen
of the Privy Chamber, wearing gay multicoloured cloaks and hoods, rode pell-mell to Rochester, arriving on the afternoon of New Year’s Day. He was more like an ardent young lover again than a forty-eight-year-old monarch long past his prime, suffering from painful, badly ulcerated legs.

A stunning disappointment awaited the merry party.

Sir Anthony Browne, Master of the King’s Horse, politely called on Anne in her lodgings at Rochester to warn her of the king’s imminent arrival. When he clapped eyes on the new queen, Sir Anthony was ‘never more dismayed in all his life, lamenting in his heart … to see the lady so far and unlike that was reported’.
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He had no time to warn Henry, as the impetuous bridegroom and two of his jolly, laughing companions were hard on his heels. There must have been an awkward and embarrassed silence, with blushes and nervous smiles on the faces of Anne and her German ladies-in-waiting, after the boisterous king burst impatiently into the room, anxious to embrace and kiss his bride.

Henry’s first glimpse of his new queen left him ‘marvellously astonished and abashed’
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as she stood at a window of the palace, shyly watching the holiday entertainment of bear-baiting noisily going on down in the courtyard outside. She looked older than her years; she certainly lacked her reported beauty – and smallpox scars disfigured her sallow face.
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Sir Anthony immediately saw ‘discontentment’ in the king’s expression, and ‘a disliking of her person’.
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Henry, who could never hide or control his emotions, stayed scarcely long enough to utter twenty polite, stilted words. He snatched up his gift to her – a richly garnished partlet of sable skins to be worn around the neck – and hastily departed amid the low bows of his friends and courtiers, leaving behind a perplexed bride. The king sent his present around the next morning with as ‘cold and single a message as might be’ before hurriedly and sulkily departing Rochester for Greenwich. On the way back, Henry angrily asked 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.

Russell, no doubt hesitantly, told Henry that he did not think her fair, ‘but to be of a brown complexion’. The king, ‘sore troubled’, cried out:

Alas! Whom should men trust? I promise you I see no such thing in her as hath been showed me of her and am ashamed that men have so praised her as they have done. I like her not.
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There was no escape from the potential dishonour of the situation. Henry had to put a brave face on events, if only for the all-important diplomatic objectives of the match. He greeted a sumptuously dressed Anne as planned at Shooter’s Hill, Blackheath, on 3 January 1540, gallantly pulling off his jewelled bonnet ‘and with most lovely countenance and princely behaviour saluted, welcomed and embraced her, to the great rejoicing of the beholders’ – an escort of 5,000 horsemen and invited luminaries from the City of London. But beneath the smiling face of regal propriety and all that pomp and circumstance lurked a burning, resentful anger and an overwhelming desire to halt the wedding.

Safely within his Privy Chamber at Greenwich Palace, he snapped, ‘What remedy now?’
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to his hapless chief minister, Thomas Cromwell, adding, ‘If I had known as much before as I now know, she should not have come within this realm.’ Cromwell could only reply, rather unconvincingly, ‘I thought she had a queenly manner.’
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The Lord Privy Seal, thinking hard and fast, seized on the unresolved issue of an old pre-contract of marriage between Anne and Francis, the son of the Duke of Lorraine, mooted in 1527 when she was aged twelve and he just ten. To the future queen’s continued mystification and disappointment, the marriage was suddenly postponed for two days while Cromwell’s lawyers and the king’s Privy Council wrestled with the issue in a desperate, frenetic attempt to revoke or in some way nullify the unwanted nuptial agreement. But it was all to no avail: Duke William’s taciturn ambassadors were naturally less than helpful and ‘made a light matter of it’. Unfortunately, they said, they had brought no documents with them to clear up the matter, but they emphasized, reassuringly, that there was really no problem as the pre-contract was made in Anne’s minority and had never taken effect. They promised
to send over the requisite papers ‘as should put all out of doubt’.
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So, to Henry’s great chagrin, the wedding went ahead. Ironically, despite the lengthy diplomatic negotiations and niceties, this match ended up just like Henry’s earlier marriages, overshadowed with doubts regarding its legal validity. Archbishop Thomas Cranmer solemnized the marriage in the queen’s closet at Greenwich on 6 January 1540, Twelfth Night – traditionally a time of merriment and laughter in Henry’s court, a coincidence that could only fuel his anger and increase his despair. For the wedding, Anne was dressed in a gown in the Dutch fashion made of rich cloth of gold, embroidered with flowers and decorated with ‘great and Oriental pearls’. She wore her yellow hair long, ‘hanging down’ beneath a golden coronet ‘replenished with a great stone and set about full of branches of rosemary’.
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She must have looked rather like a Christmas tree. Her wedding ring was engraved with the motto ‘God send me well to keep’. Unbeknown to her, divine intervention would indeed be necessary to safeguard her future, as the king had lost all interest in his bride. She respectfully curtsied low, three times, as Henry came into the chapel.

The thwarted king was resentful and ‘nothing pleasantly disposed’.
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His friends and courtiers were careful in their choice of words to him. The evening before, he had asked Cromwell, ‘Is there none other remedy that I must needs, against my will, put my neck in the yoke?’
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Before he limped towards the chapel, he growled that he had been ‘ill served [by] them’ he had trusted. The king paused before entering to tell Cromwell, ‘My lord, if it were not to satisfy the world, and my realm, I would not do that [which] I must do this day for no earthly thing.’
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Never was there a more unhappy, reluctant and bad-tempered bridegroom and Henry’s words were to bode very ill for his chief minister.

Inevitably, the wedding night was an embarrassing physical disaster. The next morning, a prurient Cromwell unwisely asked the king, ‘How liked you the queen?’ One can imagine his nudge and the leer on his coarse, heavy-jowled, almost bovine features. Glowering, Henry told him brusquely, ‘I liked her before not well, but now I liked her much worse.’
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He added:

I have felt her belly and her breasts 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.
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The king then stumped grumpily off. Worse was to come: after four nights of dutiful manly effort, the king still had not consummated the marriage, and clearly now did not ever intend to.

He confided to the Gentlemen of his Privy Chamber the very intimate problems of his marital bed. Sir Thomas Heneage, Groom of the Stool, later testified:

In so often that his Grace went to bed to her, he ever grudged and said plainly he mistrusted her to be no maid, by reason of the looseness of her breasts 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.
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Henry told his Privy Chamber confidant Anthony Denny, ‘Her body was of such indisposition … that he could never in her company be provoked and stirred to know her carnally.’
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Henry, ever interested in matters medical, also diligently consulted his physicians. One of the royal doctors, John Chambre, comfortingly counselled the king not to ‘enforce himself’ for fear of causing an ‘inconvenient debility’ of his sexual organ.
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Word of the king and queen’s unhappy state of affairs was, no doubt, the secret, sniggering talk of the court. Henry’s all-consuming and dangerously inflated ego was threatened by these whispers, and he told another of his physicians, William Butts, that he had experienced ‘
duas pollutiones nocturnas in somno
’ (two nocturnal ejaculations or ‘wet dreams’) and believed ‘himself able to do the act with others but not with her’.
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Ribald suggestions that he was impotent were firmly quashed by Butts’ repeating these statements around Henry’s household, as intended.

It may be, as some have speculated, that the king was always keenly aroused by the odour of a woman’s body. The queen’s ‘displeasant airs’
could hardly have spurred his husbandly duty or stimulated his physical ability to consummate the marriage.

Poor Anne of Cleves – truly an innocent abroad. Just before midsummer, the forthright Lady Jane Rochford told her directly, ‘I think your grace is still a maid.’ The queen replied, ‘How can I be a maid … and sleep every night with the king?’ The unworldly Anne added, ingenuously:

When he comes to bed, he kisses me and takes me by the hand and bids me ‘Good night sweetheart’ and in the morning kisses me and bids me ‘Farewell darling’. Is not this enough?

Lady Eleanor Rutland said diplomatically,

Madam, there must be more than this, or it will be long [before] we have a Duke of York, which this realm most desires.

Still puzzled, the queen replied,

No, I am contented with this, for I know no more.
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Henry was now counting the days before he could end the farce of his fourth marriage. Wriothesley, ‘right sorry that his majesty should be so troubled’, urged his friend Cromwell – ‘for God’s sake’ – to quickly devise some stratagem to rid the king of his unwanted wife, ‘for if he remained in this grief and trouble they should all one day smart for it.’ Cromwell could only answer hopelessly: ‘Yes! How?’
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But time had run out for England’s chief minister. After dinner on the afternoon of Saturday 10 June 1540, Cromwell attended a routine meeting of the Privy Council at Westminster. On entering the chamber, he found the other members already seated around the table. As he walked to his chair, the Duke of Norfolk barked out, ‘Cromwell, do not sit there. That is no place for a traitor! Traitors do not sit amongst gentlemen!’ Shocked, Cromwell could only lamely retort, ‘I am not a traitor.’ Behind him, the captain of the guard had come into the Council room and he now seized Cromwell’s arm, saying, ‘I arrest you.’ Cromwell asked, ‘What for?’ The captain replied ominously, ‘That you will learn
elsewhere.’ Norfolk then stepped forward: ‘Stop, Captain! Traitors must not wear the Garter.’
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He ripped the jewelled Order of St George from around Cromwell’s neck, followed by Southampton tearing the glittering Garter insignia from his robes. Norfolk repeated: ‘You are a traitor. You shall be judged by the bloody laws you yourself have made.’
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They were like hyenas around the still-living carcass of their luckless prey. As the Councillors pounded the table with their fists and chanted, ‘Traitor, traitor, traitor,’ Cromwell, red-faced, his eyes starting out of their sockets with fury, threw his cap down on the floor in tearful frustration and was dragged away, still struggling, by the captain and his six halberdiers to a boat waiting to convey him to the Tower. Cromwell, arch-intriguer and architect of the financially fruitful Dissolution of the Monasteries, had tarried too long to save himself. Now he would pay with his life for one of his few failures in his dutiful performance of the king’s business.