The Library › Reel III · The Pomegranate Society
Did Henry VIII call Anne of Cleves a “Flanders mare”?
VERDICTINVENTED
No contemporary source has him say it. The phrase first appears in 1679, about 140 years later, when Bishop Gilbert Burnet wrote that Henry “swore they had brought over a Flanders mare to him.” What Henry did say, after their first meeting at Rochester on 1 January 1540, was “I like her not.” Anne was not from Flanders anyway.
The receipts
- Anne of Cleves: Flanders Mare?, The Anne Boleyn Files
The comedy version
The untold story of Henry VIII’s six wives, and the secret society he never knew he’d started.
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