Hi history lovers and welcome or welcome back to the channel, where I bring you new videos
every Friday on a range of historical topics. Today on History Calling we’re asking, could
Anne of Cleves have remarried after she was unceremoniously dumped by Henry VIII in 1540?
This is a query I got in the comments on my video looking at Anne’s funeral a couple
of months ago (which I’ll leave linked on screen and below) and I thought it was a really
interesting idea and worthy of a video in its own right, so here we are. To answer this
question, we’ll look at the grounds on which the annulment between Henry and Anne was granted,
which included claims of bigamy, problems in the bedroom department and a lack of consent
from one of the two parties involved. I’ll then discuss whether Anne was legally and
religiously free to remarry and more specifically, when she might have been able to do so. The
video will also cover the potential difficulties and financial pitfalls a second marriage might
have entailed and I’ll finish up by telling you not just whether I think she could have
remarried, but why I think she didn’t. Please remember to like this video, subscribe to
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box, along with links to books, documentaries, movies and TV shows about Anne’s life.
The story of Henry shortest marriage is well known. After seeing this portrait of her by
the famed artist Hans Holbein, he agreed to wed Anne of Cleves, sight unseen and she arrived
in England at the end of 1539. Their first meeting on New Year’s Day 1540 went disastrously
wrong however, after Anne failed to recognise Henry (who she’d never met and who was in
disguise) and he was mortally offended. It didn’t help that he discovered at that point
that he didn’t really fancy her either, as he didn’t feel she was as beautiful as
she’d been made out to be. He tried unsuccessfully to find a way out of marrying her, delaying
the wedding by a couple of days in order to do so but ultimately had to go through with
the ceremony on 6 January. Just six months later, Henry had fallen for one of Anne’s
ladies in waiting, the young Katherine Howard and was determined to find a way out of his
unhappy fourth marriage. This is where the famous annulment comes in, as Henry had the
marriage dissolved on three grounds.
The first was that Anne had been precontracted to marry the future Francis I, Duke of Lorraine
at the age of 11 and that this precontract had never been properly voided. This meant
that she was in a state of bigamy through her marriage to Henry. Of course it meant
little that Anne had declared herself as free as a bird before the wedding to Henry and
that the pre-contract had been looked into by his agents during the 1539 marriage negotiations
and no impediment had been found. Francis apparently didn’t think there was any issue
either. He went on to marry Christina of Denmark, dowager Duchess of Milan, in 1541, a woman
Henry himself had once wanted to wed and who supposedly made a famous remark to the effect
that she would be happy to become Queen of England, if only she had two heads, a sly
reference to the grisly fate of Anne Boleyn back in 1536.
Reason number two was that Henry said the marriage with Anne of Cleves had never been
consummated. Based on Anne’s own comments to her ladies in waiting that he merely kissed
her good night and good morning when they shared a bed, this claim would appear to be
true and on its own, would have been good enough for an annulment. Not wanting to take
any blame himself however, the ever gallant Henry insisted he was able to perform the
deed, just not with her and for good measure, he cast aspersions on her virtue and made
disparaging remarks about her body. What a prince!
Reason number three, was that Henry claimed that despite having sent for Anne and being
the King of England, someone who had previously been so determined to get his own way that
he’d broken with the Church in Rome in order to marry Anne Boleyn, he’d been pressured
into the marriage with Anne of Cleves and it was therefore illegal due to a lack of
consent on his part. This might seem pretty laughable to us, given that the whole system
of royal and aristocratic marriage in this period relied on people (usually women), being
married off to unknown candidates with little or no say in the matter, but that doesn’t
change the fact that it was true. Henry as we’ve seen, had been incredibly reluctant
to go through with the ceremony. As the wedding approached, he had declared to his top minister,
Thomas Cromwell, that he resented the fact that he would need to ‘against my will,
put my neck into the yoke’ and said that ‘if it were not to satisfy the world and
my realm, I would not do that I must do this day for none earthly thing’. He also tried
to find some loophole to get out of the marriage, having his lawyers look at Anne’s pre-contract
with the Duke of Lorraine again, but of course it was to no avail and the wedding went ahead.
Anne was informed of the annulment proceedings on 6 July and despite her initial shock and
grief, she quickly acquiesced to the end of her marriage, sending back her wedding ring
with the request that it be broken into pieces as it was a thing of ‘no force nor value’
and throwing herself on Henry’s mercy. Relieved at her speedy compliance, Henry was generous.
The annulment was granted on 9 July and as part of the deal, Anne was given a clutch
of houses, including the former Boleyn family home, Hever Castle, plenty of money and forbidden
from leaving England ever again, presumably so that she couldn’t return to mainland
Europe, slandering Henry and discussing his failures in the bedroom. Henry went on to
marry Katherine Howard, then, after that went south and he’d had her executed in 1542,
he wed Catherine Parr in 1543, who outlived him. By contrast, Anne of Cleves (who stayed
in England until her own death in July 1557 at the age of 41), never remarried. This brings
us to the crux of this video – could she have done so if she’d wished?
I think the answer to this question partly depends on what point in time we’re talking
about. Francis of Lorraine died in June 1545. Henry VIII died on 28 January 1547. I would
therefore say that from 28 January 1547 onwards, there was absolutely no legal or religious
impediment to Anne marrying again, as both of the men she had supposedly been engaged
or wed to were now dead. But what about the 5 years between her annulment and the death
of Francis and the 19 months after that prior to Henry’s death? To answer this, let’s
start by looking at the wording of the annulment, in which we see something a little strange.
It declares that:
The clergy of both provinces have received the King's commission (recited), dated Westm.,
6 July 32 [year of the reign of] Hen. VIII. After mature deliberation, they have found
the marriage null by reason of a precontract between lady Anne and the marquis of Lorraine,
that it was unwillingly entered into and never consummated, and that the King is at liberty
to marry another woman, and likewise the lady Anne free to marry. Westm., 9 July 1540.
This document makes no bones about the fact that Anne was free to marry again right away,
just as Henry was and yet at the same time it contains a serious flaw in logic. If Anne’s
marriage to Henry was invalid partly on the grounds of her pre-contract to Francis of
Lorraine, then how could she be free to marry anyone else? Surely that impediment still
stood? This reminds me of when Henry had Anne Boleyn executed in part on charges of adultery,
yet also had their marriage annulled. If she’d never been married to him, how could she have
committed adultery against him? Clearly the King was a man who liked to have his cake
and eat it. In a letter he wrote on 10 July, his own language is a little more fuzzy than
the official document. He says that ‘the said marriage neither was at the beginning
vailable, nor by any act done since is yet of that sort as doth bind us to continue the
same, but leaveth us both in our former liberty.’ This could be taken to imply that Anne was
indeed free to marry elsewhere, or that she had merely returned to her former state of
liberty, such as it was. In other words that she was back where she started, still precontracted
to Francis of Lorraine and unable to wed. The contents of this letter were not legally
binding though and it was the declaration of the clergy and Parliament that mattered
and they had clearly stated that Anne could marry again. Why though, we might wonder,
did they include the precontract at all, given that there were two other perfectly valid
excuses for the annulment?
I think there are a couple of reasons. One was so that Henry could reject any pressure
put on him in the future to remarry Anne. An undissolved precontract could not be got
around in the way that a lack of consent on his part or the issue of non-consummation
could have been. It enabled Henry to say, if he wanted to, that he would love to remarry
Anne, if only it wasn’t for that pesky issue with Francis of Lorraine. It also meant that
Anne’s legal position was conveniently vague (convenient for Henry that is). By the terms
of the annulment Henry had made Anne a very wealthy woman and her new title was that of
‘the King’s sister’. Had she remarried though, her belongings would have become the
property of her husband and might ultimately have descended to him or their children. This
would have made any future spouse a very wealthy man and technically, a member of the extended
royal family.
Henry had had some experience of his sisters marrying without his consent in the past (most
famously when Mary Tudor, Queen of France married Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk)
and he hadn’t been happy about it. By leaving Anne in this legal limbo, he kept control
of her. For as long as Francis lived, any new marriage Anne made without Henry’s consent
would be under a cloud, with the King able to say that she was still precontracted to
Francis and that the statement in the 1540 annulment that she was free to remarry was
an error. At the same time, had he wanted to marry her off for any reason, he could
have done so, because of course the annulment also said she was at liberty to wed again.
As for the 19 months between the death of Francis and that of Henry, I think the King
would have had more difficulty preventing or voiding any marriage Anne might have made
during this time, but fortunately for all involved, she didn’t try her luck.
So we’ve established that Anne could technically remarry in England as soon as the annulment
was through, but in reality Henry could have stopped her or annulled any union she made
up to Francis’s death in 1545 on the grounds of their precontract. Did Anne even consider
herself unmarried though and would other people, especially potential suitors, have considered
her a free agent? This comes down to an issue of personal religious beliefs. Anne never
expressed any wish to remarry except after the death of Katherine Howard when she hoped
that Henry might take her back. This might suggest that she doubted the validity of the
annulment in the eyes of God and felt that Henry was the only man to whom she was or
could be married between 1540 and his death. Others may well have felt the same, seriously
limiting her pool of potential husbands. What’s more, Anne’s annulment had been granted
according to the laws of England and many of Europe’s royal families were Catholic.
Without an annulment from the Pope, she may still have been considered married in the
eyes of the Roman Catholic Church. This is all supposition though. Anne never publicly
stated that she felt the annulment was illegal and that she was Henry’s lawful wife (she
knew better than to do that) and the legality of the annulment outside of England was never
put to the test, though it’s interesting to speculate what would have happened if it
had been.
This brings us to the issue of who on earth Anne could have married, even if she’d wanted
to take another husband and believed herself able. She was required by the terms of her
annulment to stay in England, so in reality a foreign prince was out unless Henry or one
of his successors gave her permission to leave the country, which they never did, despite
her asking. The most likely candidate would therefore have been an Englishman, but it
would have been a brave or foolish man indeed who would have risked the King’s ire by
marrying his one-time wife and quasi-sister. After all, how would Henry have reacted to
the thought that Anne might be sharing his inadequacies in the bedroom with her new husband
and even comparing the two? A lady of Anne’s rank supposedly couldn’t marry just anyone
either. When Mary Tudor married the Duke of Suffolk one of the complaints about it was
that he wasn’t good enough for her, not being of royal blood himself. Anne of Cleves
wasn’t an English princess and a dowager Queen of France, but she was no farmer’s
daughter either and there was arguably no one in the country of sufficient status to
marry her, except Henry.
Nevertheless, as Mary Tudor had shown, rank was not an insurmountable problem to the determined.
You could marry someone beneath you (as her brother Henry did on numerous occasions too)
and the marriage would still stand. So why didn’t Anne remarry at any point, not even
after the death of Henry when she was clearly free to do so? We have no evidence in the
records as to why she remained alone for the rest of her life, but I would suggest three
possible reasons. One is that this life gave her great financial independence and the ability
to live more or less as she pleased, as long as she stayed in England. Another is that
she simply didn’t meet the right man. Remember she was living a fairly quiet life at her
houses, only occasionally coming to court and possibly speaking such poor English that
it would have been difficult for anyone not fluent in German to converse with her. The
last is that she didn’t want to remarry and take the risk of dying in childbirth or
finding herself shackled to someone who turned out to be a possessive and oppressive bully.
She was that rare thing in Tudor England; a filthy rich and almost completely independent
woman. It would have been a lot to give up.
So to conclude, I believe that Anne could definitely have remarried after 28 January
1547 when both Francis of Lorraine and Henry VIII were dead and that Henry would have had
a hard time arguing that she couldn’t take another husband once Francis was dead. Her
position between 1540 and 1545 was more complicated and dependent upon Henry, but marriage wouldn’t
have been impossible if she’d had his blessing. However, she may not have believed herself
free to marry in the eyes of God before Henry’s death and in any case there were definite
legal and financial advantages to remaining single and in control of her own destiny,
household and money. What do you think however? Could Anne have remarried and if so, at what
point do you think she could have done so? Let me know your thoughts in the comments
below and if you enjoyed this video, please remember to give it a like and make sure you’re
subscribed to the channel with notifications switched on. I’ll be back next week and
until then, keep learning.