Retha W. Warnicke. The Marrying of Anne of Cleves: Royal Protocol in Tudor England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. xiv + 343 pp. $27.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-521-77037-8.
Reviewed by Judith Richards (Department of History, La Trobe University)
Published on H-Albion (December, 2000)
The marrying and marring of Anne of Cleves
Professor Warnicke raises many matters of considerable significance in this book. Primarily, it is a study of diplomatic procedures for royal dynastic marriages, taking the marriage of Henry VIII and Anne of Cleves as a case study. Eschewing the individual quirks which went into the making and unmaking of each of his other marriages, she has focused upon the only one which was purely political in its motivations. For carefully expounded diplomatic reasons, the royal choice fell upon a blameless German lady who has subsequently become the object of much scorn. After a brief opening discussion of wise contemporary reservations about royal marriages across competing realms, Professor Warnicke moves to a more discursive consideration of the emergent functions of diplomats in early modern Europe. That discussion serves as introduction to those people best-placed to help in such royal searches for appropriate brides. The third chapter, "Candidate Pool," offers a fascinating survey of the whole range of women who fell, however fleetingly, under the gaze of Henry's wife-hunters. The search was, it would seem, for a good-looking brood mare, sexually innocent, with just the right political and religious associations. It was all, therefore, a very long way from Henry's chivalric attachment to Catherine of Aragon, and his destructive pursuits first of Anne Boleyn and then of Jane Seymour. The chapter headed "Cleves Selection" is where the personae of the main players begin to emerge, offering about as much as can be offered of the reasons Henry s choice finally settled on Anne of Cleves. It does also set out an effective refutation of much of the dismissive gossip which has accumulated over the centuries about Anne's looks, her education and her capacities. That gossip is well-shown to have more to do with prejudices formed in subsequent centuries than with the sixteenth century realities. The detailed marriage negotiations, and discussions about the prospective queen's household and her travel arrangements are again set in a frame which reaches well beyond the particularities of this study to explore something more like common international practice.
The second half of the book does not completely abandon the earlier interest in international protocol, but focuses much more on the emotional (but not diplomatic) disaster which was the ageing king's brief fourth marriage. Part of the explanation offered here was a common hazard in the early modern international marriage market, that of failure of the Cleves regime to refute fully suspicions that Anne had been compromised by earlier marital negotiations. Warnicke suggests that this may have been an inhibiting factor for the bridegroom. There is some fascinating material on the ways in which the rituals of the court could mask what was really happening (or nor happening) in the royal bed-chambers. Warnicke makes much of the reasons Henry gradually spread for his impotence, which reflected on his wife, leaving his own reputation intact; she is also persuasive when she returns to the diplomatic context which required him to maintain publicly for some time the role of serene husband. His rustication of his fourth wife, as he wooed his fifth, was characteristically Henrician in many ways, but qualified by a unique degree of kindness, not fully explicable by the international context.
She ventures on to much more contentious ground in the chapter entitled "King's Scapegoat," where she opens with the conventional proposition that the divorce of Anne of Cleves and Cromwell's fall were clearly linked. The prevailing scholarly view has been that a group of conservative royal advisers seized the opportunity provided by this failing marriage, which he had so strongly promoted, to topple the king's most powerful adviser. She outlines a complicated and sometimes confusing argument to challenge again the extent to which Cromwell had an evangelical party or initiated foreign policy, an argument which includes a re-evaluation of the significance of faction in the Henrician political process. Much of this is couched in terms which an inexpert reader will find difficult to assess and many will find, at best, suggestive. The question of why heresy charges were added to the treason charges against Cromwell produces an interesting, but, to this reader, tenuous, answer. It is, however, part of an admirable concern Professor Warnicke has demonstrated before to reintegrate the world of high politics and the wider mental world all the players shared.
The final chapter moves more conventionally through an account of the processes by which Henry's marriage to Anne of Cleves was dismantled and she was transformed into the "King's Sister." What is compelling there is the unfolding of the helplessness of Anne of Cleves in the face of Henry's determination to end the marriage. The convolutions his advisers (and subjects) faced in matters of conscience are familiar, but the dismissal of yet another queen is a breathtaking marker of the extent of Henry's authority as court, church and parliament were lined up to enact his will. Warnicke teases out the contradictions and inconsistencies in the arguments he used clearly, as well as demonstrating how very selective was the subsequently published evidence. She also points out, that even Anne's divorce settlement cost Henry little, since so much of it came from the attainders of Sir Nicholas Carew and of Cromwell himself.
Within all this material -- and Warnicke has read across an impressive breadth of sources -- there is an extraordinarily potent study of the realities of dynastic political imperatives in an age of personal monarchy; the interfaces of the modern categories of public and private are shown to be permeable to an extent almost intolerable for the main players in this drama. But the intersections of public power and private desire, like so many other big issues raised in this work are sufficiently considered to tease, but not to inform the reader. The will of Henry is shown to have been paramount -- as indeed he considered it should be -- and Anne remains throughout almost a wax figure. Yet there is, in this work and elsewhere, considerable evidence of not just English male good will to her, but also considerable admiration, respect, and liking. Anne seems to have earned this in part by the outstanding dignity she consistently displayed in her potentially humiliating and reduced circumstances, and partly by her own character.
It is important to Warnicke's argument that Cromwell is seen as no more than another bit player in the marriage negotiations. It would have helped, therefore, to have had her views on the evidence that even before Henry had set out to meet Anne, he was already seriously attracted to Katherine Howard. There seems to have been a serious argument between Cranmer and Cromwell about whether the Cleves project should ever go ahead, because of the king s already manifest attraction. Warnicke does note that Katherine's name was among the maidens of honour selected for Anne's court before the new queen arrived, but prefers to date the king's fast-growing attraction to her to after the Cleves marriage was failing. We are left knowing no more of the full history of that fifth marriage, let alone of its origins, than before.
It is surprising that Warnicke pays so little attention to how atypical such a foreign and sight-unseen marital search had become in English history. Rather, she implies that foreign searches were the norm in her observation that the work is a study of Henry's "marrying behaviour and strategies for the purpose of relating them to the expected royal protocol and practices of early modern England" (p. 11). But after Henry VI, each English king who married while on the throne -- Edward IV, Henry VII and, for his first three spouses Henry VIII -- all matched themselves with brides already in England, and a majority of those marriages had a strong love component to them (two of them, at least, to the point of political foolishness). So her emphasis in the opening chapters on the normality of such a wide-ranging search for the most promising combination of strategic alliance, inheritance prospects, good looks and child-bearing potential may be misplaced in the immediate English context. Nevertheless, she does demonstrate the capacity of the English envoys to be quite as calculating as any other in this significantly heartless sphere of high politics.
The dominating presence throughout this study is Henry himself -- a tortured man seeking to uphold the sanctity of marriage in the face of many odds (intermittent impotence being only one of them) and constantly let down by everyone from Holbein to the Duke of Cleves. The strength of his commitment to "obeying divine and ecclesiastical laws concerning matrimony" (pp. 182-3) is taken more seriously by Professor Warnicke than by many of his subjects. The dissolution of the marriage of Anne of Cleves was, she agrees, an unpleasant affair; it may well be true that the relative impotence he almost certainly suffered made it, legally, the most uncontentious marriage dissolution of his career but the publicly stated grounds for it were diplomatic ineptitude. He was quick to marry again -- and much more unwisely. Perhaps the real moral of the story is indeed, as Warnicke argues, the need to reintegrate many other facets of the contemporary mental world back into the history of international alliances.
The success of that is, of course, always dependent on the evidence available. Perhaps Henry's selection of marriage partners should also be reassessed for the strains his choices reveal between the familiar world of Realpolitik marriages and the gradually emergent world of affective relationships -- which might make him even more a man of his times than has previously been recognised.
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Citation:
Judith Richards. Review of Warnicke, Retha W., The Marrying of Anne of Cleves: Royal Protocol in Tudor England.
H-Albion, H-Net Reviews.
December, 2000.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=4752
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