Welcome to Noble Blood, a production of IHeart Radio and Grimm and Mild from Aaron Manky.

Listener discretion advised.

This is Dana Schwartz. While I'm on maternity leave, Noble Blood is revisiting the original series I did years

ago on the Six Wives of Henry VIII. Today's episode is about Anne of Cleves,

the German princess, who is best known for a painting that Henry the Eighth approved,

and then in appearance in real life that he did not. But the story might be a little more nuanced than you might have heard. I hope you

enjoy.

Anne of Cleaves had traveled over 300 miles by land and by sea to come to England to meet her

future husband to be, King Henry the 8th.

Neither had laid eyes on the other before the marriage arrangement was finalized, but Henry

had commissioned a portrait of Anne, and he liked what he saw well enough to agree to the diplomatic

match. And so, arrangements were made for the 24-year-old sister of a

prominent Duke to become wife number four. After weeks of travel, Anne and her entourage made it to

Rochester in England on New Year's Eve, the final day of 1539.

She was staying there at the Bishop's Palace.

In three days' time, she would make her way to London, where she was supposed to meet her future husband for the first time.

On New Year's Day, Anne found herself gazing out the window of her bedchamber into the courtroom below, where a celebratory bull baiting was occurring.

Anne didn't speak English, only German, and while her escorts had been nothing but polite and deferential to her, She was still in an alien country, where the

clothing, customs, even the smiles, could be sinister. They had warned her that the English

court was a dangerous place. Watching the men dance around the animals in the courtyard below,

the dog dodging in between the legs of the bull,

Anne wondered if she had come to England to be predator or prey. She had the uneasy sense that

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