Anne of Cleves Part III

Anne’s life after the divorce was comfortable if rather restricted. Although she had been brought up in the German “hausfrau” tradition, she took to English customs and settled down in her new home.  She seems to have missed Cleves but got reasonable enjoyment out of the life she had in England.  She took to dancing and card playing, wore elegant clothes and was a kindly mistress to her staff.

After Katherine Howard's death, her brother, the Duke of Cleves, seems to have suggested that Henry should re marry his sister but Henry refused. 

Probably Anne preferred being her own mistress in England to returning to Cleves where she might have been seen as a woman who had failed to maintain her marriage... or to produce a son.  As the former wife of the King, it was unlikely that she would be able to marry a nobleman in England, or that foreign royal princes would choose her as a wife... So she was not to have another marriage or children. She seems to have been a warm hearted maternal woman so this was probably a sadness to her but she accepted it.  She does not seem to have liked Katherine Parr, Henry’s last wife... and in her later years, she may have wished to go home to Cleves.

However she had a friendship with the children of her former husband and was kindly treated by them. She was invited to Court by Mary I, though Mary became suspicious of her friendship with Elizabeth, whom she regarded as a heretic.  So in later years, Anne seems not to have gone to court.  In 1557, her health was declining.  She lived in Chelsea, in Katherine Parr’s old home. Anne made her Will and asked Mary and Elizabeth to remember her servants and to take them into their households. She died in July 1557, at the age of 41.