One of the most famous men she had executed was Henry VIII’s Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer, the major compiler of the Book of Common Prayer. With Mary’s rise to power, Cranmer was arrested and spent two years in prison before being burnt at the stake. During this period and under relentless pressure from the Roman Catholic authorities, he recanted his Protestant beliefs. However, on the day of his execution he publicly rejected his Catholicism and demonstrated this by placing his right hand in the flames; the hand that had signed his earlier recantation.
One of Cranmer’s major opponents, the Catholic Duke of Norfolk, was released from the Tower, restored to his former position on the Privy Council by a grateful queen. The last service he rendered her was to command a force of men to put down a planned rebellion by some of the country’s Protestant gentry. However, he did not enjoy his new-found power for long as he died aged 81 on 25 August 1554, just one year after Mary had come to power.
One of the chief clerics who had supported the Duke of Norfolk for many years was Stephen Gardiner, the Bishop of Winchester. Like Norfolk, he was also restored to power by a grateful queen and like Norfolk, did not live very long to enjoy his new-found power. Among his first official tasks was to crown the queen at her coronation and to open the first parliament as the new Lord Chancellor. In May 1555 he was sent to Calais to work out a peace agreement with the French but did not succeed. Five months later he died as one of the queen’s chief judges whose task was to investigate and prosecute the country’s Protestant clergy.
As for Queen Mary’s younger sister, Princess Elizabeth, despite living through a dangerous period in which she was imprisoned in the Tower and accused of treason and heresy, she managed to survive. She inherited the reins of power five years after her sister’s coronation and restored the country to the Protestant faith. Apart from this major feature of her reign, she encouraged a more liberal atmosphere in the country, an atmosphere that bred writers and poets such as Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Sir Walter Raleigh and Edmund Spenser.
One of the chief players in this story was Thomas Cromwell. It is no co-incidence that his surname reappears in English history one hundred years later. Oliver Cromwell was the great-great-grandson of Thomas Cromwell’s sister, Katherine. As the Lord Protector of England during the Civil War, Oliver Cromwell was the only man to rule England when the country was a republic. Although he died a natural death, Cromwell’s body was exhumed, decapitated and hanged in chains by Charles II following the restoration of the monarchy in 1660.
Anne of Cleves’ brother, William, Duke of Cleves, continued to rule his duchy until his death in Düsseldorf in January 1592. Having divorced Jeanne d’Albret in 1541, he married Maria of Austria five years later. They had seven children, most of whom made politically important marriages for themselves. William spent much of his reign building palaces and fortifications in Cleves, some of which may still be seen today.
Anne’s older and more beautiful sister, Sybille, married the Elector of Saxony, John Frederick I, “The Magnanimous.” She married him in 1527 and had four sons. She must have been a strong character as, during her husband’s absence during the siege of Wittenberg, she was responsible for defending his city. She died in February 1554, and he died three weeks later, aged forty-two.
Like Anne, her younger sister, Amalia, also had her portrait painted by Holbein. She is depicted as a severe young woman looking directly at the painter. She died in 1586 aged sixty-nine and was thus the longest living of the three sisters. According to an article by Retha M. Warnicke, and the book, Anne of Cleves by Mary Saaler, Amalia never married. Other sources disagree and say she may have married Herman op den Graeff van de Aldekerk. However, what we do know to be true is that she wrote a book of songs of which copies may be found in Berlin and Frankfurt. In her will, Anne of Cleves left Amelia a diamond ring.
And what of Hans Holbein the Younger, the painter whose portrait of Anne of Cleves is at the heart of this story? He continued to paint ‘likenesses’ of the rich and famous for only four more years after his famous portrait of Anne had brought her into the Tudor spotlight. He died in November 1543, but his portraits live on today in museums and art and history books, one of the best-known ones being of Anna von Jülich-Kleve-Berg, better known to us as Anne of Cleves.
The famous and fateful oil and tempera portrait itself still exists and can be seen in the Louvre, Paris.
Bibliography
Although Anne of Cleves: Henry’s Luckiest Wife is a novel, it is based on historical facts. To write this book, in addition to various Internet sites, I consulted the following sources:
Peter Brimacombe, Life in Tudor England, Pitkin/Jarrold Publishing, Andover,
Hants., 2006
J. Cannon & R.Griffiths, Oxford Illustrated History of the British Monarchy, Oxford
Univ. Press, 1988
Carolly Erickson, Great Harry: The Extravagant Life of Henry VIII, Robson Books,
London, 1998
Petronelle Cook, Queen Consorts of England: The Power Behind the Throne, Facts on
File Inc., New York, 1993
Antonia Fraser, The Wives of Henry VIII, Phoenix, London, 2002
Robert Hutchinson, Thomas Cromwell: The Rise and Fall of Henry VIII’s Most
Notorious Minister, Phoenix, London, 2007
David Loades, (Gen. ed.) Chronicles of the Tudor Kings, Bramley Books, Godalming,
Surrey, 1996,
David Loades, Henry VIII & His Queens, Amberley, Stroud, Glosc., 2010.
Elizabeth Norton, Anne of Cleves: Henry VIII’s Discarded Bride, Amberley, Stroud,
Glosc., 2010
Judith Richards, Mary Tudor, Taylor & Francis, London, 2008
Jasper Ridley, The Tudor Age, Constable & Robinson, London, 2002
Mary Saaler, Anne of Cleves: Fourth Wife of Henry VIII, Rubicon Press, London,
1997
Alison Sim, Food and Feast in Tudor England, Sutton Publishing, Stroud,
Glosc., 1997
Retha M. Warnicke, The Marrying of Anne of Cleves: Royal Protocol in Tudor
England, Cambridge Univ. Press, Cambridge, 2000
Alison Weir, The Six Wives of Henry VIII, Arrow Books, London, 1995
Alison Weir, The Children of Henry VIII, Ballantine Books, New York, 1996
I would also like to take this opportunity to thank, Marion Lupu, my faithful editor.
She has worked with me on most of my novels and can spot a missing comma at fifty paces and an errant king at five hundred.