Hi everyone and welcome or welcome back to History Calling, where I bring you new videos every Friday
looking at the events of the past. Today we’re examining the funeral of Anne of Cleves,
fourth wife of Henry VIII and the last of his spouses to die.
Anne’s funeral in August 1557 is a good example of what happened when royalty died
in Tudor England and the individual in question wasn’t in disgrace with the reigning monarch,
as so many of them were. Her burial in Westminster Abbey was a lavish affair,
details of which were recorded by a contemporary source which was later published in 1831 in a book
edited by Samuel Bentley and entitled Excerpta historica: or, Illustrations of English History.
It’s this account which I’m using as the main source for this video and I’ll leave it linked
in the description box for you as it contains far more detail than I can fit in here, right down to
things like the exact measurements of the canopy which was held over the body during the funeral.
What I’m instead going to do today, is pick out the key events during the time between Anne’s
death and her burial and bring them together into a more streamlined and easily digestible narrative
than the original, rather rambling source, provides. Let’s get to it.
I already have a video looking at Anne’s life, so I’m just going to give you a very quick
overview of it here. She was born on 22 September 1515, the daughter of Johann and Maria, Duke and
Duchess of Jülich-Kleve. On 6 January 1540, she was married to Henry VIII as his fourth spouse,
however Henry never took to her and 6 months later, the marriage was annulled so that the
King could marry one of Anne’s ladies-in-waiting, Katherine Howard. Anne wisely didn’t fight Henry
on the issue of the annulment and so he was generous to her in the financial settlement.
She was granted the title of the King’s sister, along with an income fit for a princess and
a range of houses, including Hever Castle in Kent, once home to the family of Anne Boleyn.
As part of the annulment, Anne was not allowed to leave England and so she lived out the remainder
of her days in her various homes, surviving long enough to see the fall of Katherine Howard in
1542, Henry’s sixth marriage to Catherine Parr in 1543 and the King’s death in January 1547.
She lived through the reign of Edward VI and, in her last public appearance,
attended the coronation of Mary I in September 1553, along with her other one-time stepdaughter,
Princess Elizabeth. She died, possibly of cancer according to biographer Antonia Fraser,
at around 3am on 16 July 1557 at Chelsea Manor in London. She was 41 years old.
As the third lady in the Kingdom after Mary and Elizabeth, Anne was entitled to a grand funeral
and she got one. In her last will and testament, written just a few days before she died and also
printed in the Bentley book, she asked that her body ‘be buried where it shall pleas God’,
then later in the document, added that she would like ‘our bodie buryed according to
the Quenys will and pleas[u]r[e] and that we maye have the suffrages of the holie Churche
accordyng to the Catholicke faithe wherein we ende o[u]r lief in this transitorye worlde.’
This is interesting as Anne had previously been a Lutheran. At some point however,
she had converted to Catholicism, possibly in her final years, when Mary I reintroduced that faith
as the official religion of England. Anne had already shown in her dealings with Henry during
their annulment 17 years earlier, that she was prepared to follow whatever lead the monarch set
in order to ensure a quiet and safe life for herself and converting, at least outwardly,
to Catholicism in order to please Mary, certainly follows that pattern of behaviour.
Immediately after Anne’s death, her body was embalmed and placed in a coffin which was kept
in Chelsea Manor in a chamber near the stairs, where she lay in state, covered by ‘a ryche
pawlle of clothe of golde, garnisshid with vi schoolcheons [meaning escutcheons] of her armes’
and with wax tapers burning around the coffin all day and night. Daily masses were said before the
body during this time and after Tuesday 27 July, on which day it was moved into a lower chamber,
similarly decorated. Throughout, Anne’s remains were never left alone and instead a constant vigil
was maintained by a series of ‘gentlemen, gentlewomen, & yeomen’ until it was time to be
taken for burial. This occurred at 2pm on 3 August and was a scene of great ceremony in of itself.
Anne’s coffin was covered with 5 yards of black velvet and placed on an open chariot draped
in velvet fringed with silk and decorated with her arms, which you can see a drawing of here.
The four horses which pulled this chariot from Chelsea to Charring Cross and then on
to Westminster Abbey were also draped in black cloth as were their bridles,
and had additional escutcheons showing Anne’s arms attached to headpieces they wore.
Each horse carried ‘a henchman w[i]t[h] his hoode on his heade’. The body was escorted
to the Abbey by a large number of her former servants and government and church officials,
including 30 monks, her four chaplains, her doctor, the Constable of the Tower of London,
some of Mary’s councillors, Anne’s executors, the Abbott of Westminster and the Bishop of London.
The chief mourner was the Marchioness of Winchester, formerly Elizabeth Seymour and sister
of Queen Jane Seymour. This portrait, once thought to be Katherine Howard, may in fact be Elizabeth
and even shows her in mourning clothes, though not for Anne. All of Anne’s mourners were similarly
decked out in black however and displaying the one time Queen’s coat of arms, as were their mounts.
I don’t have an image of this procession to show you, however I did find this beautiful picture
from the British Library of the funeral procession of Elizabeth I in 1603 which is remarkably similar
to what was described for Anne and which I think is a great visual reference for you to help you
understand what the written description is trying to convey. Here you can see the four horses at the
front, all decked out in black and displaying the royal coat of arms, including on their headpieces.
In this case they are riderless however. Elizabeth has an open chariot similar to
Anne’s and is surrounded by mourners wearing black, with their hoods up and carrying banners
showing her coat of arms, with a black canopy over the body. This too, as we’re about to hear,
resembled Anne’s procession. If you’d like to see more of Elizabeth’s funeral,
I’ll leave a link to this image and a few others in the description box for you.
Upon reaching the Abbey, Anne’s coffin was brought to the west door,
which had been hung with black cloth and yet more displays of her arms.
It was also filled with lighted tapers. The remains were carried in beneath a canopy which
was held up by four men with hoods on their heads who had to be of equal height so that the corners
of the canopy would sit evenly. Anytime the coffin itself had to be borne on men’s shoulders,
they too had to be about the same height, no doubt for the same reason.
Once inside, it was placed beneath a specially constructed, elaborate hearse which was situated
‘in the myddle of the square platt [which I think probably means the square plate]
between the highe awltre & the quere at Westm’. This square section of flooring,
which you can see in this photograph, is still there and is where, among other things,
Prince William and Kate Middleton stood to be married. Just a little bit of trivia for
you! Nowadays of course, we think of a hearse as being a vehicle for transporting a coffin,
but at this point in time, the word meant, to quote the Oxford English Dictionary, ‘An elaborate
framework originally intended to carry a large number of lighted tapers and other decorations
over the bier or coffin while placed in the church at the funerals of distinguished persons’.
With Anne’s remains now beneath this structure (which was decorated with
her arms and her motto 'spes meo in deo est', meaning my hope is in God),
some of the mourners, including the aged Duchess of Norfolk, sat next to it on seats covered in
black and with cushions on them to make life more comfortable. A funeral dirge was sung and when
the choir had finished, the mourners withdrew for the most part into another chamber and went home.
Four gentlemen and 8 yeoman were left to watch the corpse overnight, but no women did so, the reason
given being that ‘they were not well at ease’. Make of that what you will. Perhaps it was felt
that sitting in a draughty Abbey all night was no job for England’s female elite. Instead, 9 of
the women had to be back at the Abbey at 7am the next day, the 4 August, for the next stage of the
ceremony. They (and the rest of the mourners for that matter) duly showed up that morning, again
wearing their elaborate mourning clothes, for the grand finale of this most elaborate of funerals.
Offerings of gold were made by the chief mourner, then a mass was held and the attendees went on to
have breakfast in a nearby room. Afterwards, they came back, paid their respects to the
altar and to the corpse and a requiem mass was given by the Bishop of London.
More offerings were made and the funeral sermon was given by Dr John Feckenham,
Abbot of Westminster, who advised the assembled personages to ‘amend our lyeves while we had
tyme’ and warned them that envy and wrath were the worst of the seven deadly sins. After the sermon,
there was another mass after which the mourners, who were not involved in the actual burial, left.
The funeral had now reached its final stage. The coffin was carried, still under a canopy,
to the place of burial which is on the south side of the High Altar.
Anne’s household servants, ‘brake (on theyre owne heads) theyre staves & roddes [that means
their staves and rods of office], casting them into the sepulture with lamentacon’.
This signified that their service to their deceased mistress was now over.
Immediately afterwards, two trestles and a table were set over the top of the grave ‘cov’ed with a
ryche pawle of clothe of golde, & theron a crosse & ii whyte braunches, ther the hersse standing
hole still with a presentacon & the velvet pawle theron together with a crosse between ii whyte
braunches, wch so did stand until Monday was a fortnight, after that hit was taken downe’.
The remaining men who had assisted with the burial remained in the Abbey to enjoy
‘a sumptuous dynn’ at the coste of thexecutors, and aftre dynn’ at theyre pleasure they deptid’.
Anne’s grave was later marked by a monument which was never finished and which is hard
to see nowadays as it is obscured by some later monuments. It bears her initials,
AC and is decorated with a crown and skulls and crossed bones. You can see another instance
of her coat of arms on the right hand side of it. According to Westminster Abbey’s website,
it ‘was probably made by Theodore Haveus of Cleves’. A simple inscription was added over
400 years later which reads ‘Anne of Cleves Queen of England. Born 1515. Died 1557’.
Incidentally, if you’re wondering where Queen Mary and Princess Elizabeth were in all of this,
the answer is that they weren’t present. It was against the custom of the time for a monarch to
attend a funeral (Henry VIII didn’t attend Jane Seymour’s funeral for this reason for instance)
and while Elizabeth could have been there, it’s worth remembering the awkward situation she was
in in 1557. She was in Mary’s bad graces by this point and suspected of involvement in a plot to
oust her sister, though the Queen was publicly supporting her on the advice of her husband,
Phillip II of Spain. Elizabeth had left court early during the Christmas celebrations in 1556,
after pressure was brought to bear on her to marry a foreign prince of Philip’s choice
and she was likely trying to avoid coming to London again.
It seems unlikely therefore that she would have volunteered to do so for Anne’s funeral.
If you’d like to learn more about this, see my video on the life of Elizabeth I part 2.
Anne’s death and burial brought to an end the long and tangled tale of the six wives of Henry VIII
which had begun all the way back in 1509, before she was even born, when Henry had married his
sister-in-law, Catherine of Aragon. As I argued in my video on her life, I think Anne was overall the
luckiest of Henry’s wives. Though 41 is not old, she lived longer than Anne Boleyn, Jane Seymour,
Katherine Howard and Catherine Parr and she lived and died well respected by her adopted people.
If you enjoyed this video, please give it a thumbs up and subscribe to the channel with notifications
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username is History Calling. I’ll leave a link for that in the description box below, along with
links to some books, TV shows and movies which cover Anne’s life. For more on Henry’s wives,
check out my six wives of Henry VIII playlist, or you may also enjoy my Tudor monarchs playlist.
I’ll be back next week with a new video and until then, as always, keep learning.