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ambassador, agreed that her carriage and manners were commendable, though revealingly the latter reported it in the context that ‘people who have seen the lady close say that she is neither as young as was expected, nor as pretty as she was reported to be. She is tall, and her face and carriage have a force in them which shows she is not without mind. The spirit and sense will perhaps supply the deficiency of beauty.’10

      Initially, a date in February had been mooted for Anne of Cleves’s coronation. That was then pushed back to Whitsuntide, in early summer. On 22 February, Marie de Guise was crowned queen consort in Scotland at Holyrood Abbey, an event which may have exacerbated Anne’s worry about why her own had not been arranged. She dropped heavy hints about it to some of the king’s councillors when they called on her in early spring, by which point they must have known that there would never be a coronation.11 Some of the gentlemen in the king’s privy chamber had started to criticise earlier reports from Cleves that had praised Anne’s beauty. Her later reputation as the ‘Flanders Mare’, a grotesque caricature of ugliness, is the product of imaginative histories written in the eighteenth century, but it does seem that she failed to live up to expectations.12 When she first landed in England, Henry had ridden in disguise to surprise her. Anne was the first foreign princess to arrive in the country to marry a reigning English monarch since Margaret of Anjou wed Henry’s great-uncle Henry VI, ninety-five years earlier. Henry VI had gone disguised as a messenger to Southampton to deliver a letter from himself to Margaret, who, unfortunately for the hoped-for moment of a romantic recognition, assumed he actually was a servant and kept him kneeling while she absentmindedly read his letter.13 Anne of Cleves’s first encounter with her husband was even less encouraging. She failed to pay much attention to the corpulent messenger in front of her, and when he tried to get her attention by kissing her she, naturally, recoiled.14 Henry was disappointed by her behaviour and her appearance. In a conversation with the papal nuncio, the Queen of France, Eleanor of Austria, remarked ‘that the new Queen [of England] is worthy and Catholic, old and ugly’.15 Eleanor must have received her report from the French ambassador to England because she was able to tell Cardinal Farnese about Anne’s unflattering Teutonic wardrobe, which had been described in a letter to Eleanor’s husband, along with de Marillac’s description of Anne as ‘tall and thin, and not particularly pretty’.16 Amid dripping disdain for the English court’s mimicry of her own, Queen Eleanor managed to correct the English accounts that had Anne improving herself via English fashion. The styles en vogue at Henry VIII’s court may be popular with the English nobility, but they had originated in France.

      At some point, a few of Queen Anne’s ladies took it upon themselves to find out exactly what was happening in the royal marriage. A well-aimed compliment would bring information, through the queen’s denial or acceptance of it, and one afternoon while Anne was with three of her women – the Countess of Rutland and the widowed ladies Edgecombe and Rochford – they expressed the loyal hope that she might soon be pregnant and give birth to a Duke of York, a title that had been given to second sons in the royal family since the reign of Edward IV.17 The queen took the bait by saying she was certain that she was not pregnant and stuck to it even when the women gamely pressed her on how she could be absolutely certain. Faced with the queen’s persistence, Lady Rochford joked, ‘By Our Lady, I think your Grace is a maid still indeed.’ The queen answered, ‘How can I be a maid and sleep every night with the King?’ Lady Rochford made the obvious jest of how a bit more than sleep was required to make a prince, but Anne did not seem to know how much more – ‘When he comes to bed, he kisses me and taketh me by the hand and biddeth me, “Goodnight, sweetheart”; and in the morning kisses me and biddeth me, “Farewell, darling.” Is that not enough?’ Confronted by the queen’s naïveté, Lady Rutland stopped laughing and replied, ‘Madam, there must be more than this, or it will be long ere we have a Duke of York.’18

      Queen Anne’s ignorance of sex and conception still stuns and confuses. On the one hand, it is perfectly believable that a woman who had been brought up with a limited education, no knowledge of music or dancing, who spoke and understood no language except German when she was shipped off to England, and who had spent her entire life under the watchful eye of her adoring but strict mother, could have been innocent enough to think that sharing a bed with a man constituted full marital intimacy.19 Especially since, at a later date, Henry admitted that he had gone so far as digital penetration which, to a very innocent person, might conceivably equate with consummation. On the other, there is the possibility that Anne of Cleves was playing up her simplicity to escape from embarrassing conversations. It is worth noting that despite asking, ‘Is that not enough?’ at the end of the conversation, she had insisted at the start of it that she knew that she could not be pregnant.

      In her short career as queen, Anne of Cleves elicited great praise for her public behaviour, and several sources confirm that she managed to make herself very popular with the people of London.20 Her correspondence with her family revealed how happy she was in ‘such a marriage that she could wish no better’.21 She tried to learn English as quickly as she could, and was apparently successful in her endeavours since she had mastered it by the end of 1540.22 She asked to be taught the rules of the card games her husband enjoyed, and she sought advice on how she could make herself more agreeable to him. Deciphering much of Anne’s behaviour, including the aforementioned conversation with her ladies-in-waiting, is frustrated by the same problem facing the French ambassador when he explained to his master that it was impossible to tell if Anne’s preternatural calm and good nature were the result of ‘either prudent dissimulation or stupid forgetfulness’.23 She was capable of losing her temper, and during one very mild disagreement, Henry complained that she ‘began to wax stubborn and wilful’, which suggests that she was not quite as docile as she pretended.24 There were also some indicators that she understood that she was in difficulty, without perhaps realising until the final move that she had lost before she started playing.

      After the farce of their first meeting, Henry VIII had entered into their marriage determined to dislike her, and the intention created the reality. Before Anne arrived, the Archbishop of Canterbury had tried to warn Cromwell that an arranged marriage was a risk for someone like Henry, who set such high store on his personal happiness. It would be ‘most expedient the King to marry where that he had his fantasy and love, for that would be most comfort to his Grace’, advice which Cromwell ignored.25 Henry even tried to get out of going through with it on the morning of the wedding, asking, ‘Is there no remedy but to put my neck in the yoke?’ before Cromwell reminded him that jilting Anne meant losing the alliance.26

      He was right. As long as the pact between the Hapsburgs and the French monarchy remained, England could not sacrifice its ties to Queen Anne’s family. Cleves still seemed like a valuable ally, particularly after another nosedive in relations between the English court and the emperor’s.27 The latter had chosen not to wear his insignia as a member of the English Order of the Garter on St George’s Day, as was customary, a fact not missed by the English, who complained about it later to his ambassador.28 In Spain, then part of the Hapsburg Empire, several men under the protection of the English Crown had been tossed into the gaol cells of the Inquisition.29 The English ambassador, Sir Thomas Wyatt, who suspected the men had been imprisoned in retaliation for his country’s alliance with Cleves, had

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