Henry viii and anne of cleves

On January 6th, 1540 at 8:00 AM, a miserable and surly bridegroom awaited his bride in the Queen’s Closet at Greenwich Palace. The bride, when she arrived, was “a goodly sight to behold,” dressed in silver and adorned with pearls, her long blond hair flowing from beneath a coronet of pearls and jewels.  She was Anne of Cleves, and she has gone down in history as “the ugly wife,” from among Henry VIII’s six brides, due to the King’s disparaging remarks about her.  But there is nothing documented by others who saw and knew her that supports any unattractiveness on her part.  In fact, quite the contrary.  Historians have noted that the famous portrait by Holbein, which shows a pleasant looking young woman, did not unduly flatter Anne, and those who met her on her way to England from Cleves seemed to think her agreeable enough. That she was personally rejected by Henry, ostensibly because she was “nothing so well as she was spoken of,” is, of course, fact, but why did it turn out like this?  The Anne of Cleves episode has gone down as one of history’s most awkward contretemps, almost funny in retrospect, but intensely disturbing while it was happening.  The King felt betrayed, Anne erroneously became known for centuries as the Flanders Mare(1) and Thomas Cromwell eventually lost his head over it.

There are many points that can be made about why Henry did not “like” Anne, beginning with how their first meeting went pear shaped when she failed to recognize him incognito, thereby causing  him such extreme mortification that he never got over it, to her supposedly loose bosoms or “evil smells,”   which the king found “loathsome.”    In listening to Henry’s comments regarding Anne, though, I think he rather protests too much. The real reason for the debacle, I believe, lies in the very nature of a juxtaposition for Henry at this moment in his life, between the outward reality of a “politically arranged marriage,” and his inner fanciful starring role as the handsome young lover on the path to unbounded love.    While his councilors, (mainly Thomas Cromwell) were arranging a diplomatic match for national security purposes, the king was instead going down his own personal primrose path.  The ensuing result is the emotional train wreck between fantasy and reality which occurred on January 1, 1540. 

Since this site is about the astrological symbolism of Tudor personages and events, let‘s look at the timing of Henry‘s ill fated meeting with Anne of Cleves. Astrologically, the planet that represents delusionary idealism and fanciful longing is Neptune.  The planet that represents hard cold reality and the structures of the society we live in, is Saturn.  Astrological timing (and timing is, indeed ,everything) occurs when the current position of planets intersects with one’s own natal planetary positions, especially the Sun and Moon. These intersections are called transits.   Beginning in 1538 and continuing through 1540 both Neptune and Saturn transited Henry’s Sun and Moon, and between the two they played out in the heavens what was to unfold in Henry’s psyche. It is a planetary combo that is meant to assist in the evolution of one’s “emotional maturity,” and it is an open question as to whether or not Henry passed that test.

If we lay the astrological cards on the table, we can see how this all went down.  

In his natal horoscope Henry has his Sun at 14 degrees Cancer and his Moon at 10 degrees Aries. Because Aries and Cancer are 90 degrees apart within the 360 degrees of the astrological chart,  Henry VIII‘s Sun is square his Moon.  The square relationship, or aspect,  between planets is challenging, as it causes tension and friction between two energies. The Sun symbolizes our conscious ego and self.  Because the sun always wants to shine and because it projects outward, it is considered a masculine archetype. The Moon is our emotional reservoir, describing how we respond emotionally to life, and it also points to our relationship with the Mother, women in general, and home and family.  The Moon is receptive and is therefore considered a feminine archetype. The Sun square Moon relationship in one‘s psyche is not an easy one to live with, since the head and heart are in conflict. Transits hitting the Sun and Moon exacerbate this situation.
 

Transits can be experienced as internal psychological realizations or external events, most often a combination of the two.  It is not productive to think of transiting planets as “causing” events or feelings, as cause and effect are a material phenomenon.  It is better to think of them as ‘mirroring” our experiences due to the fact that we are all a part of a larger spiritual and cosmic whole. (2) These external  events and behavioral responses occur most deeply when the  transiting outer planets (Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto) trigger one’s personal planets ( Sun, Moon, Mercury, Venus, and Mars)   So to see the entire Anne of Cleves episode fully from the astrological perspective, we need to step back and look at the transits to Henry’s Sun and Moon beginning in 1538, before the Cleves proposal, when Henry was urged to find a new wife abroad and when he commissioned the portrait of another contender, Christina of Denmark. 

Henry’s court painter, Hans Holbein, painted Christina on the 12th of March, 1538.  When Holbein returned to England shortly thereafter, Henry fell in love with the painting.  Throughout 1538 Neptune, (a very slow-moving planet,) was in Aries, and it began to conjunct (line up next to) Henry’s Aries Moon in March 1538, when it moved to 9 degrees Aries.  By April 14th  of that year, Neptune was at 10 degrees Aries, exactly on top of Henry’s Moon. 

Now a Neptune conjunction to your Moon via transit is a wondrous thing.  Not everyone gets to experience this particular transit, due to Neptune’s 180 year turn around the 12 signs of the zodiac, but some of us do and Henry did, beginning in 1538 and continuing through the spring of 1540.  Both planets are about feeling good: the Moon is the nurturing inner mother and emotional center while Neptune dissolves the boundaries that keep us feeling restricted and constricted by the real world. So this transit is the ultimate escape from reality, a Disneyland experience for the mind and heart. Therefore, when Neptune, the planet of idealistic delusions, connected with Henry’s Aries Moon (the Moon of “Ardent Desire” for sure) there was no turning back from the King’s pet fantasy: the  idealistic chivalric maneuverings found in the fiction of courtly love.  

The negotiations with Christina did not go anywhere, but Neptune hung around and when the Cleves deal began in the spring of 1539 Henry transferred that Neptune/ Moon euphoria onto Anne before ever meeting her. He was taken with the idea of two available nubile Cleves princesses, (Anne and her younger sister Amalia) and he decided that Anne the elder would be more appropriate. In July, like a hero setting his heart on a damsel, he already determined that she would be his Queen.   In August 1539, he sent Holbein to Cleves to paint both sisters.  In September 1539, Holbein returned to court with the painting that has gone down in history as the first blind date in more ways than one. For Henry was truly “blinded “by his own fancies, mixing up the true purpose of the marriage with his own delusions.  Tudor historian David Starkey notes that there is no documentation for what Henry thought when he was shown Holbein's portrait of Anne, but he describes exactly what a Neptune /Moon transit felt like, for the King:  
 

“... had fallen in love, not as previously, with a face, but with an idea.  And his feelings were fed not with images but with words.  All over the summer Cromwell and his agents had told him that Anne—the beautiful, the gentle, the good and the kind—was the woman for him. Finally, he had come to believe them. “  (3)

Cromwell was Neptune’s minion in this situation, stoking the potent idealism and excessive imagination that had got hold of the king. Throughout that spring and summer of 1539, Neptune was also moving closer in square aspect to Henry’s Sun at 14 degrees Cancer,  a transit as powerful in Neptunian delusionary force as the concurrent conjunction to his moon.  ( Remember, Henry has a Sun square Moon in his natal chart, so a transiting planet’s conjunction to his Moon will also square his Sun. ) Neptune gets all the way to 13 degrees Aries by July before going retrograde and then slowly moving backwards. This gave Henry a double Neptunian whammy from which it would only take the cold water of Saturn to rouse him.   
 

As arrangements were being made to bring Anne to England, Saturn, the plant of restriction and harsh reality, was making its way through the sign of Libra.  Libra is opposite Aries, and therefore also square Cancer.    So, you can see what is being set up here. It is almost as if the Universe has plans for Henry.   Neptune at this time has been retreating from its square to Henry’s Sun, having gone retrograde and losing that influence, but leaving Henry still with the conjunction to his Moon to keep the fog going.  Saturn, meanwhile. creeps further and further into Libra during the autumn of 1539, and by the end of the year, on December 31, 1539, the day before Henry will meet Anne of Cleves, Saturn is at 14 degrees 39 minutes of Libra, exactly 90 degrees square to his natal Sun at 14 degrees 33 minutes Cancer.  
  
 

Saturn squaring one’s Sun in a transit is one of the most challenging reality checks that people experience.  Saturn hard aspects happen several times throughout our lives, because Saturn spends only two and a half years in a sign, so every 7 years or so (a Biblical interlude ??) we experience a transiting Saturn  to our Sun.   It is phenomenal that this exact transit would hit Henry on the day he meets Anne of Cleves, hammering him with a dose of reality and colliding with his Neptunian stupor. Originally the king was scheduled to meet his political bride on January 3rd in a formal and official extravaganza at Blackheath,   But in order to “nourish love,” Henry decided on a surprise visit on New Year's Day, and even worse, in disguise, in order to test his lady’s true love.  The timing for this surprise meeting couldn’t have been worse, as we shall now see.  
 

1.  Henry never called Anne of Cleves a Flanders Mare.  The derogatory name stems from  the 17th century.  
2. Synchronicity  is a term coined by Carl Gustav Jung to describe simultaneous events that are meaningful.  Astrology posits the “As Above So Below “concept to explain the working of planetary transits. 
3. Starkey, Six Wives, p 
4.  The story of Henry’s meeting with Anne of Cleves is recounted by Sir Anthony Browne, the King’s companion to Rochester and his Master of the Horse, at a deposition in July 1540, to justify the King’s desire to annul his marriage. It was meant to show that the King never liked Anne to begin with and therefore could not consummate their marriage.  
5. “Abashed “is Anthony Browne’s description of how Henry reacted to Anne at their meeting.  
6. A T Square is an astrological configuration in which two planets are in opposition (180 degrees apart) and they are each making a square to a third planet.  The third planet is then representative of how the challenge of the opposition is handled.  The Moon, as an emotional energy, “handled“ the situation by giving rise, on the part of the King, to feelings of being embarrassed, mortified, disgruntled and sullen.  We don”t know how Anne felt.