Anne of Cleves
Seven Surprising Facts About Henry VIII’s Fourth Wife
Everyone thinks they know the story of the fourth wife of Henry VIII. She was the German princess whom he married for diplomatic reasons, but when the 48-year-old widower first set eyes on his 24-year-old bride-to-be, he was repulsed.
With great reluctance, Henry went through with the wedding — saying darkly, “I am not well handled” — but after six months he’d managed to get an annulment and the unconsummated marriage was no more. Although Anne had behaved impeccably as queen, she accepted her new status as “sister” and lived a quiet, comfortable existence in England until 1557, when she became the last of the wives of King Henry VIII to die.
And so Anne of Cleves has either been treated as a punchline in the serio-comic saga of Henry VIII’s wives or someone who was smart enough to agree to a divorce, trading in an obese tyrant for a rich settlement. But the life of Anne of Cleves is more complex than the stereotypes would have you believe.
1.) Anne’s father was a Renaissance thinker. The assumption is that Anne grew up in a backward German duchy, too awkward and ignorant to impress a monarch who’d once moved a kingdom for the sophisticated charms of Anne Boleyn. But her father, Duke John, was a patron of Erasmus, the Dutch Renaissance scholar.
