Henry VIII Never Called Anne of Cleves a Flanders Mare. A Bishop Did, 139 Years Later.

Ask anyone what Henry VIII thought of his fourth wife and they will give you the same three words. He took one look at Anne of Cleves, the story goes, found her nothing like the portrait Holbein had painted, and complained that they had brought him a Flanders mare. It is in the school histories and the television dramas, usually inside quotation marks, as if someone in the room had written it down.

Nobody in the room wrote it down. The phrase appears in no document from Anne's lifetime: not in the sworn statements of the men who were with the king when he first saw her, not in Thomas Cromwell's letters, not in the dispatches of the French ambassador, who was cool about her looks and had no reason to spare her, not in any chronicle written under Henry or his children. Its first known appearance in print is 1679, in the first volume of Gilbert Burnet's History of the Reformation of the Church of England, a hundred and thirty-nine years after the meeting it describes. Burnet gave no source. Nobody since has found one.

I spent a book on Anne of Cleves, and the provenance of that one line turned out to be the key to the subject.

Where the phrase comes from

Burnet was a bishop and a committed Protestant, writing for a Restoration readership nervous about Catholic kings. In his account the Cleves match was a Protestant venture, Cromwell something close to a Protestant martyr, and the affair failed because the king found the bride so unlike her picture that he said the famous words. That explanation has a convenient shape. It accounts for the failure of a reformed alliance without blaming the alliance, and for the fall of a reforming minister without blaming the minister. The cost lands entirely on a German princess's face. Whether Burnet meant it that way cannot be known; what can be seen is that the line did that job for everyone who repeated it.

And it was repeated, because it was a good line: short, funny, and an answer to the puzzle of why a king who had liked the Holbein should have turned from the sitter. Agnes Strickland, whose Lives of the Queens of England in the 1840s gave Anne her first full-length English treatment, was kinder to her than most. But she took the phrase as Henry's and built around it the figure the next century inherited: the plain, placid German, content with her pension. Television drama has since put the words in the king's mouth before an audience larger than every printed life of her combined.

The puzzle, incidentally, is not much of a puzzle. Nicholas Wotton, the English envoy at Cleves, certified the Holbein as a very lively likeness. Holbein was never punished or passed over for it, and when Henry complained in January 1540 he complained about the reports that had been sent him, not the picture. The painter who tricked a king belongs to the same late story as the mare.

What the sixteenth century wrote down

So what did Henry say? The answer survives, and it was written down for a reason that has to come first.

In July 1540 the king wanted his marriage declared void. His lawyers built the case on three grounds: an old childhood betrothal of Anne's to the heir of Lorraine, the king's lack of inward consent, and non-consummation. The second needed witnesses who could swear that Henry had disliked his bride from the moment he saw her and had never wavered. So the men who had been at Rochester on New Year's Day were asked to remember that day, six months later, for a court that had already decided what it wanted to hear.

Sir Anthony Browne, who had gone into Anne's chamber ahead of the king, swore that he had never in his life been more dismayed than when he first saw her, and recalled the king saying to him in the barge on the way home that he saw nothing in this woman as men had reported of her. Lord Russell recalled the king asking him the next day whether he thought her fair, and giving his own verdict. The Earl of Southampton, who had written warmly about Anne from Calais, had to explain that once the match was concluded it had not been his place to dispraise a woman who was to be queen. Behind them all was Cromwell, writing from the Tower on 30 June at the king's command, a condemned man setting down what the only person who could spare him wished remembered. His letter carries the king's heaviest sentences: that she was nothing so well as she was spoken of, that he was not well handled, that he wondered whether there was no remedy but to put his neck in the yoke. The four words that have come down from that week are in Russell's deposition, not Cromwell's letter: I like her not.

That is a long way from a horse. It is a king's private disappointment, reported by courtiers who needed it to be early, absolute and quotable. The sources that were not building a case say less. Edward Hall's chronicle, by a man who loved Henry, has Anne somewhat astonished and then welcoming the king on her knees, and records no dismay. The herald Charles Wriothesley, whose chronicle is the source for the window and the bull-baiting, records none either. The French ambassador, who liked Anne less than the English did, picked up no scandal at the first meeting. Either the king hid his feelings well, as a king who had just signed an alliance had reason to, or the unwavering distaste of the July testimony is partly a product of July. Memory serves the question it is asked.

None of this means the deponents lied; the cautious reading is that Henry was disappointed and that in July his men remembered it more sharply than they would have in February. But nothing in any of it says Anne was ugly, and nothing says she behaved badly. Browne, who had every motive to make her sound as unappealing as the law allowed, says only that the king was disappointed. The difference matters.

The game nobody told her the rules of

What actually went wrong at Rochester is better explained by the romances than by the mare.

Henry rode down from Greenwich with a handful of gentlemen of his privy chamber, all hooded and cloaked in the same mottled cloth so that the king could not be told from the rest. He sent Browne ahead to say a gentleman had brought the lady a New Year's gift from the king. Then he walked in, put his arms around her, and kissed her. This was not an eccentricity. It was the set piece of every chivalric romance the English court read: the knight comes to his lady in disguise and she knows him anyway, because love sees through appearances. Henry had played the game all his life. In the first months of his reign he and his friends had burst into Catherine of Aragon's chamber dressed as Robin Hood's outlaws, and the young queen had obligingly pretended astonishment. Recognition was the expected ending.

Anne had never seen Henry VIII. She spoke no English and he no German. She had been raised in the most correct ducal household on the Lower Rhine, by a mother who kept her daughters under close watch, in a court where, by Wotton's report, even music was thought slightly improper in a lady. A strange Englishman walked into her chamber, announced only as the bearer of a present, and embraced her. She gave him a brief courtesy and turned back to the window, where her hosts had laid on a bull-baiting for her. That is what a well-brought-up woman from Düsseldorf does with a stranger who kisses her. Henry withdrew, took off the cloak, and came back in purple velvet; the lords knelt; Anne understood and curtsied to the ground; they talked through an interpreter and sat to supper. The sables he had brought as a gift he could not bring himself to hand over. They went to her the next morning, by another man's hand, with a cold message.

Historians divide on the weight of this. Retha Warnicke has argued that the incognito was a test of exactly the kind the romances describe, that Anne failed it through no fault of her own, and that what the king disliked at Rochester was the scene at least as much as the woman. Others put more weight on the depositions' plain statement that he did not find her attractive. The evidence cannot settle it, because the evidence was written to show that the king disliked her, not why. What it does show is a woman dropped into a game whose rules she had never been told, who lost it by behaving correctly.

That is a strange shape for a story about a punchline. Anne of Cleves was queen for six months and was never crowned. She then agreed to the annulment inside a week, asked for terms, received Richmond and Hever and the title of the king's sister, and lived in England for seventeen more years. She outlived Henry by a decade, the maid of honour who replaced her by fifteen years, and the sixth wife by nine. She died at Chelsea on 16 July 1557 and was buried in Westminster Abbey, the only one of the six who is there. Burnet's line has stood in front of all of that for three centuries like a sign on a door. The record behind it says what she did, which is more than the line ever did.

*Anne of Cleves: The Queen Henry VIII Rejected, the Minister Who Died for the Match, and the Wife Who Outlived Them All* is the fourth volume of a series on the six queens of Henry VIII, each written to the same scale, and it is available now as an ebook from Apple Books, Kobo, Barnes & Noble and other retailers. Because six months of queenship will not honestly fill a book, this one spends its first part in the Rhineland duchies she came from, its middle on the diplomacy of 1539 and the fall of Thomas Cromwell, beheaded on the morning Henry married her maid of honour, and its last part on the seventeen years nobody has made a joke about. Anne is never given a thought the sources do not record. The volume before it, *Jane Seymour*, ends where this one begins.