Six Wives (93 page)

    By March 1539 direct negotiations had begun with the Cleves court. Top of the list for the English envoys, 'the little doctor', Nicholas Wotton and Richard Beard of the Privy Chamber, was the question of Anne's portrait. They had discussed the matter with the Cleves minister Olisleger, who was handling negotiations in the absence of the Duke. He offered them two recent portraits of Anne and her sister, probably by Barthel de Bruyn the Elder. But, as the ambassadors pointed out, there was no way they could vouch for the accuracy of the pictures, since they had only been able to catch a glimpse of the two ladies while they were attired in full German Court dress. And that, they said bluntly, was almost worse than useless. 'We had not seen them', they told Olisleger, 'for to see but a part of their faces, and that under such monstrous habit and apparel, was no sight, neither of the faces nor of their persons.'

    'What,' Olisleger replied tartly, 'would you see them naked?'
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    The result was stalemate. In early July another English envoy, Dr William Petre, was sent with additional instructions to try to speed things up. If Beard had not already set out with the pictures, every effort was to be made to obtain them and to send them to England as soon as possible. They were also to demand a proper sight of the ladies, 'since one of them [was] to be their Queen'.

    This last phrase has not received its proper weight. For it makes clear that already, long before he had seen any portrait, the Cleves marriage was a
fait accompli
for Henry. He had decided that he would marry one of the Cleves sisters, and, of the two, he much preferred Anne on grounds of her age. At twenty-four, he felt, she would make an ideal wife for a man in his late forties. Having made up his mind, he was cavalier about possible problems. He had heard that there had been previous negotiations to marry Anne to the son of the Duke of Lorraine. Did these constitute an obstacle to the proposed marriage with Henry? He hoped not, as he felt a strong preference for her rather than her younger sister. Similarly, the envoys were not to haggle about a dowry, 'for the King prefers virtue and friendship to money'.
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    Beard arrived back in England in early July. He may have brought the De Bruyn portraits with him. But there is no firm evidence one way or another. Within a week or two, however, Beard was on his way back to Cleves, taking with him Hans Holbein, 'the King's painter'. The two were given a generous allowance of £40 to cover the costs of their journey; while Holbein received a separate payment of £13 6s 8d 'for such things as he is appointed to carry with him'. The wording is obscure, perhaps deliberately so. But it probably refers to the tools and materials of Holbein's craft.
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    Constantine and Barlow had heard of Holbein's departure as the latest news. And they, too, took it as a sign that the Cleves marriage was virtually a done deal. The ensuing speed of events shows that they were right.
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* * *

Beard and Holbein reached the Castle of Düren, where the Cleves ladies were in residence, early in August. Holbein got to work immediately, and, with his usual facility, produced finished portraits of both sisters in little more than a week. 'Hans Holbein', Wotton wrote to Henry on 11 August, 'hath taken the effigies of my Lady Anne and the Lady Amelia and hath expressed their images very lively.'

    Wotton also supplemented Holbein's paintings with his own vivid pen-portrait of Anne. He began with her relationship with her mother. 'She has been brought up', he wrote, 'with the [widowed] lady Duchess her mother and in manner never from her elbow.' 'The lady Duchess being,' he continued, 'a wise lady and one that very straitly looketh to her children'. Anne was also, so Wotton had gathered, the Duchess's favourite daughter: 'All report her to be of very lowly and gentle conditions, by the which she hath so much won her mother's favour that she is very loath to suffer her to depart from her.'

    What the Duchess had
not
done, however, was to give her daughter any real education. Anne had become skilled 'with the needle', which employed most of her time. Otherwise, she had few accomplishments. 'She can read and write [her own language]', Wotton reported, '[but] French, Latin, or any other language she hath none, nor yet she cannot sing nor play upon any instrument'. 'For', he explained, 'they take it here in Germany for a rebuke and an occasion of lightness that great ladies should be learned or have any knowledge of music.'

    Not, Wotton hastened to point out, that Anne was stupid. 'Her wit is so good', he insisted, 'that no doubt she will in a short space learn the English tongue, whenever she putteth her mind to it.' Finally, she was free from the excessive indulgence in food and drink – 'the good cheer' – for which, even then, Germans, men and women alike, were notorious.
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    Anne's virtues, then, were of the passive, negative sort. She was gentle and obedient on the one hand, and neither stupid nor indulgent on the other. It was not an exciting list and the contrast with the learned Catherine of Aragon or the witty, accomplished Anne Boleyn was extreme. But perhaps Jane Seymour had lowered Henry's expectations in these matters. Time would tell.

* * *

Holbein made haste back to England. And on 1 September the French ambassador reported that the 'excellent painter, whom this King sent to Germany to bring the portrait of the sister of the Duke of Cleves, recently arrived in Court'. Soon after, there followed the news that an Embassy had set out from Cleves for England to conclude the marriage treaties.
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    What we do not know, however, is Henry's reaction to Holbein's portrait. It cannot have been unfavourable. But there is no report of enthusiasm either. For Holbein, contrary to legend, does not appear to have flattered Anne. Instead, his painting and Wotton's pen-portrait are all of a piece. Both highlight the woman's gentle, passive character, which, as Mont had previously reported, 'appeareth plainly in the gravity of her face'.
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    But, in any case, by this point Henry was almost beyond putting off. For he had fallen in love, not as previously with a face but with an idea. And his feelings were fed not with images but with words. All over the summer, Cromwell and his agents had told him that Anne – the beautiful, the gentle, the good and the kind – was the woman for him. Finally he had come to believe them.

    Only a sight of the woman herself might break the spell.

* * *

The joint Cleves-Saxon Embassy, headed by Burchard for Saxony and Olisleger for Cleves, arrived in England by 17 September. A few days earlier, Henry, who was drawing towards Windsor at the end of the summer Progress, had caught a chill. His physicians decided to treat it with a laxative and an enema and sent him early to bed. He slept until 2 in the morning, when, as a consequence of his medication, he 'rose to go to the stool' or lavatory. The stool 'had a very fair siege' and Henry felt much better, 'saving his Highness saith he hath a little soreness in his body'.

    These intimate details, so vital for managing the King, were reported to Cromwell by Sir Thomas Heneage, who had replaced the executed Henry Norris as the King's chief body servant.
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    With the news of the arrival of the Embassy, Henry's lingering malaise disappeared and his spirits soared. By this time, Heneage had temporarily handed over his duties of personal attendance on the King to his colleague, Anthony Denny. And it was Denny who reported Henry's delight to Cromwell. The task was an agreeable one, since Denny was a Reformer and an eager partisan of the Cleves marriage. 'The King is quiet and merry,' he wrote, 'considering God's goodness showed to him in his affairs, which by him and his ministers are so prudently handled as it passeth wishing.' The smugness of this sentiment is probably Henry's but the pious exhortation which follows is certainly Denny's own. 'God loving us', he solemnly adjured Cromwell, 'will force us or rather overcome us with heaped benefits.'
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    For Denny and his like, the Cleves marriage was the answer to their prayers.

* * *

When the Embassy arrived, Cromwell was busy 'travail[ing] after his accustomed fashion in the examination of the prisoners in the Tower'. Henry immediately ordered him to cease 'to trouble his head' with such trivial matters as the rack and the vile dungeon known as Little Ease. Instead he was to concentrate wholly on the 'great weighty causes' of the Cleves marriage.

    With Cromwell in charge, the negotiations lasted less than a fortnight and the marriage treaty was signed on 4 October.
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* * *

The only matter that now remained to be decided was Anne's route to England. There were two possibilities. One was to bring her overland to Calais. The other was to use the direct sea-route from the Cleves-ruled port of Harderwijk on the Zuiderzee to the Thames estuary. The former was much safer. But it required a safe-conduct from Charles V as the ruler of the Netherlands, through which Anne would have to pass. And this was in doubt in view of the ongoing dispute between the Emperor and Cleves over the Duchy of Guelderland.

    The Cleves envoys were strongly in favour of the land-route. The long sea-voyage, they argued, was hazardous. It also risked harming Anne's appearance. '[She] is', they pointed out, 'young and beautiful, and if she should be transported by the seas they fear much how it might alter her complexion.' In particular, bearing in mind the approaching winter, 'she might . . . take such cold or other disease, considering she was never before upon the seas, as should be to her great peril and the King's Majesty's great displeasure'.

    Henry's feelings were the opposite. The sea-voyage appealed to his (vicarious) sense of derring-do. It was also an opportunity to cock a snook at the Emperor and to show off the strength of the English navy and the quality of English seamanship. Probably before the treaties were signed, the King sent off two experienced ship-masters, John Aborough and Richard Couche, to the Zuiderzee to spy out the route. They produced a written 'rutter' or route and a 'plat' or sketch-map.

    Henry's imagination immediately took fire: he would snatch his bride from under the nose of his enemy and bring her safe to his arms. On 9 October he showed the Aborough and Couche sketch-map to Fitzwilliam, who was now Lord Admiral as well as Earl of Southampton. 'His Majesty is marvellously inflamed [with the "plat"],' the Admiral informed Cromwell, 'supposing many things to be done thereon.'

    The Admiral and his staff got to work immediately and the King's ideas were worked up into another, finished map. It shows how Anne was to be smuggled out of the Zuiderzee to Henry's flag-ship, which is drawn proudly flying the royal standard and the pennant of St George. Meanwhile, other English ships are represented blockading the coast south of Zieriksee, enabling Anne to make her crossing in safety.
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    But, alas for Henry's romanticism, the Cleves envoys vetoed the scheme and the Emperor's representatives proved surprisingly cooperative. By 19 October, Anne had been given a safe-conduct, and by 25 October, Henry had capitulated and agreed to the land-route.
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    Meanwhile, the Cleves envoys had returned home to conduct Anne to England. She left Dusseldorf in November and made a stately progress across the Netherlands, where, according to Wotton, she rarely travelled more than five miles a day. Her
entrée
into Antwerp excited huge popular interest. The Count of Buren, one of the leading Flemish nobles, told the English that 'he never saw so many people gathered in Antwerp at any
entrée
, even the Emperor's'.
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    Was it curiosity that drew the crowds? Or pity?

* * *

    But adverse winds made a quick departure impossible. In the hope that the weather would change soon, experienced captains, including Aborough and Couche, were sent 'to lie out side the walls and give immediate notice of fair weather'. They were to remain there rather a long time.
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    Meanwhile, Admiral Fitzwilliam, as instructed, set himself to entertain Anne, while Anne, for her part, did her best to prepare herself for her new role. On the afternoon of the 13th, for instance, she sent Olisleger, who acted as her interpreter, to invite Fitzwilliam 'to go to cards [with her] at some game that [the King] used'. Fitzwilliam, who was one of Henry's oldest gaming cronies, decided that she should be taught 'cent', which resembled piquet. 'I played with her at cent,' Fitzwilliam reported to Henry, while three others, who spoke German, 'stood by and taught her the play'. 'And I assure your Majesty,' Fitzwilliam concluded, 'she played as pleasantly and with as good a grace and countenance as ever in all my life I saw any noblewoman.'
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    This, if it were true, was high compliment. For Fitzwilliam had been at Court when Henry had played with Anne and Rochford.

    Moreover, this was only one of a stream of letters that Fitzwilliam sent to the King. Indeed, he claimed to Cromwell, 'his two clerks are [so] fully occupied in writing to his Majesty' that he was scarcely able to write separately to the minister. Most of the correspondence has disappeared. But, according to Fitzwilliam himself, his comments were uniformly favourable and he did 'much praise her and set her forth'.
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