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 an audience with Charles V in which he mistakenly used the word ‘ingratitude’ to describe the emperor’s attitude towards Henry.30 Charles, whose letters from his servants were often addressed to ‘His Sacred Imperial and Catholic Majesty’, and whose dominions stretched from the Americas to the Alps, had been listening politely to Wyatt but ‘then stopped him, and made him repeat it, asking who it was he charged with ingratitude’.31 When Wyatt failed to take the hint and repeated his faux pas, the emperor made it very clear to Wyatt that ‘he owed his master nothing, and the term ingratitude could only be used by an equal or a superior’. His Sacred Imperial and Catholic Majesty proceeded to take several swipes at Henry’s concept of justice, which caused Wyatt to behave even more rudely.
Manners were apparently not high on the list of English diplomatic priorities that winter. On 2 February, the French ambassador visited Henry and asked him to recall his representative in Paris.32 The Bishop of London had spoken to King François in an offensive manner and the latter wanted him ‘replaced by a more prudent and wiser’ envoy.33 The French would not let the matter drop, and to appease them Henry eventually decided to appoint Sir John Wallop. In France, the outgoing ambassador, the obstreperous Bishop Bonner, reported that ‘more [honour] is now made to the queen than heretofore’.34 The French courtiers’ attention to their Hapsburg queen suggested that the alliance with the emperor was still strong, but the English also received some intelligence from other sources about cracks that were beginning to appear over the possession of Milan, which the empire had and the French wanted. Sensing an advantage, Catherine’s uncle Norfolk left London quietly on the king’s orders on 12 February, just as the weather was beginning to thaw, and reached the
