Anne of Cleves

1515–1557

Anne of Cleves was the fourth wife of Henry VIII and queen for only six months in 1540. The marriage formed part of Thomas Cromwell’s attempt to build a Protestant alliance, but Henry quickly sought an annulment, claiming lack of consent and non-consummation. Anne cooperated, received generous estates and the honorary status of the king’s “beloved sister,” and outlived Henry and all his other wives, dying in England in 1557.

Fiction has increasingly moved away from the old caricature of Anne as an unattractive and passive rejected bride. Philippa Gregory’s The Boleyn Inheritance presents her as a pragmatic survivor, while Alison Weir’s Anna of Kleve, Queen of Secrets gives her an independent emotional and political life. Novelists are drawn to the intelligence with which she accepted the annulment and created a secure place for herself in a dangerous royal family.

In non-fiction, Anne of Cleves is discussed in Antonia Fraser’s The Six Wives of Henry VIII and Tracy Borman’s The Private Lives of the Tudors. In Antonia Fraser’s The Six Wives of Henry VIII, this group biography studies Catherine of Aragon, Anne Boleyn, Jane Seymour, Anne of Cleves, Catherine Howard and Catherine Parr as individuals as well as wives of Henry VIII.

Series

Series featuring Anne of Cleves (4 series)

The Wolf Hall Trilogy in Order

by Hilary Mantel 3 books 4.4

The Wolf Hall Trilogy follows Thomas Cromwell from his early service to Cardinal Wolsey through his rise as Henry VIII’s most effective minister and his fall in 1540. Told largely through Cromwell’s perspective, the series reinterprets the Tudor court as a working political system shaped by patronage, law,…

All books in this series

Wolf Hall

4.2

Bring up the Bodies

4.5

The Mirror and the Light

4.6

The Shardlake Series in Order

by C. J. Sansom 7 books 4.6

The Shardlake Series follows Matthew Shardlake, a London barrister with scoliosis whose legal work repeatedly draws him into murder investigations and affairs of state between 1537 and 1549. He begins as an idealistic supporter of religious reform and an agent of Thomas Cromwell, but the violence of the…

4.5

Tombland

4.6

The Plantagenet and Tudor Novels in Order

by Philippa Gregory 16 books 4.4

The Plantagenet and Tudor novels form a chronological sequence of connected but independently readable stories about women near the English throne. They move from the Lancastrian court and the Wars of the Roses through the rise of the Tudors, Henry VIII’s marriages, the mid-Tudor religious crisis and the…

All books in this series