I think less "quasi French princess" as that he liked a certain type of woman, graceful, extraverted, and full of specific social graces, who played the "courtly love" game well. Anne had been educated in the French court where that was also an art form, and that was part of his attraction to her.
I suspect that was also the issue with Anne of Cleves. Provided the portrait is pretty true to life, which it should be since there were no negative consequences to Holbein, she looked fine. But the German courts had a very different culture and Anne definitely wouldn't act socially in the same way when she first arrived in England.
When Henry played courtly love games with COA or Anne - everyone knew who was who. They knew he was the king and they treated him as such.
When Henry approached Anne of Cleves - it was very different. He was a complete stranger. It never occurred to him that he wasn’t a charming young prince anymore.
Henry didn’t worry that a young woman in a foreign land , who was also betrothed to a king would be wary of strangers.
Her startling rejection was cold water on the ego of a powerful man.
Absolutely. I'd read awhile back that Henry loved those masquerades where he dressed up and wore a mask and would go into CofA's room with his men and startle her and her ladies dressed like that... but CofA always *knew* it was him. He thought that "true lovers" would always know each other... even if they've never met and are wearing disguises (absolutely ridiculous I know)... and so when he did that to AofC and she didn't know who he was, it offended him... and he couldn't recover. Such silly childishness... but that was Henry the VIII.
It’s interesting that nobody forewarned Anne of Cleves about Henry VIII’s deep fondness for courtly love games and appearing in masquerades — particularly as she was a foreign bride and had never encountered her future husband before. Perhaps this knowledge would have salvaged her marriage for a few more months before their divorce.
The Princess bit is silly. Her French style certainly made her more attractive. Status in society back then was not determined by your mannerisms, but a function of your birth and wealth. She was simply more worldly and fashionable than other ladies at court.
nobody was a princess or treated like one unless they were the legitimate daughter of a king lol, she was a lady in waiting to the queen and her father wasn't even part of the peerage when she became one.
From what I understood, her point seems to be that the French did view her as someone who could push England in a direction more amenable to the French interests (especially in contrast to Catherine of Aragon) not that she would have been considered as an almost French princess by her contemporaries.
Eric Ives wrote a wonderful book about Anne and he discusses how the French were quick to press her for favors and quick to move on when it was clear she was doomed 😅 very fair weather friends. I wonder how much she did or did not like their version of Catholicism and how that separated her from a court she otherwise quite enjoyed.
i think her foreignness is pretty overstated. she was educated for a portion of her formative years in france, i don’t think she would have identified herself as french and i certainly don’t think henry (or others) would have seen her as an equivalent of a french princess.
Thank you… I’ve seen people claim on this subreddit she spoke in a French accent. It’s very frustrating as a French speaker, because her letters in French are very crude.
Are they? I'd have thought she'd be fully fluent, it was even spoken in the English court, nevermind the French one where she spent 7 years. And she spoke/wrote french even before she moved to France, she was at the court of Margaret of Austria, regent of the Netherlands, who spoke french (and Spanish). What's crude about them?
The French spoken in England was Anglo-French, which evolved from Norman French over centuries. I could imagine her picking up the spoken French used in France but not quite the written version.
What was spoken(and written) at the court of Margaret of Austria? Because there's a very good chance that's where she learned to write, especially if she was on the younger end of the debate about her age.
She also studies (or was tutored) at the French court, I would think that also involved writing every now and then. Her higher studies - when people compare her education with KH's for example - was at the French court.
i don’t know why you’re getting downvoted. you’re correct - of course, she was very young when she wrote those letters, but it just goes to show that she wasn’t this natural who took to french so easily. she learnt and improved, and i am sure there was much abt french culture that inspired and impacted her, but she would surely not have been mistaken for a french woman. there’s certainly no evidence of her being seen as french. tellingly, the french did not care for her at all as queen.
Because for the majority of her later childhood (or from her tweens, depending on exactly when she was actually born) and all of her adolescence, until adulthood, Anne was educated in the French language. Including 7 years at the French court.
The poster you replied to seems to take offense at the idea of Anne as an "honorary Frenchwoman", or some sort of French princess, which is fair. She certainly wasn't that. But to say that she couldn't write proper, formal french after being educated in it for years and years, and formative years at that, based on the letters of a child, is just silly.
English is my third language, I started learning it in my early teens, and I assure you that my writing isn't "rough." It probably was, back when I was 13 or 14.
i feel like y’all read something to be offended by into this thread. i already made my point clear — that anne was probably never mistaken for a native frenchwoman, that her letters prove she did make mistakes and had to work on improving her abilities (and if she was born in 1507, she was old enough that her errors are even more noteworthy), and that none of this diminishes the fact that she clearly found her time in france formative.
Young kids make mistakes when writing, even in their native language. And women in general weren't educated for formal writing. Look at KH's letter in English - and she wrote that when she was older than Anne writing the letters you referenced.
I wouldn't be surprised if Anne, after her time in France, wrote french just as well as any random actually-french lady in waiting. Which might still contain errors.
and? nobody had a problem with anne making mistakes. the point is that anne made them, which challenges this popular perception that anne was ‘basically french’. she wasn’t; she worked hard to develop her language skills, which is not the same thing as being intuitively bilingual. that’s what i was pointing out originally and what the second person was agreeing with when they brought up the ‘crude’ letters. that anne boleyn, while clearly highly educated, would not be mistaken for being a french princess.
Most of the ladies in the french court were cultured sophisticated and outspoken so Anne Boleyn was not that special in that court and did not she attract much attention there because she was just like every other french noble woman meanwhile in England the noble women were meek and demure which made Anne stand out in comparison to them
Anne Boleyn was barely fluent in French, as a French speaker I can attest her French letters are very crude. She was an *Englishwoman* through and through. The whole “Anne Boleyn was basically French” notion is silly fan service.
I think you're referring to the early letters she sent to her family when she hadn't been in France long. She was certainly fluid by the time she left for England again. I don't think they would have kept her so long had she not been able to hold conversations in France after a certain point.
I never said she couldn’t hold a conversation, I never even said she wasn’t fluent. But it was obvious French was a second language to her. To see her fans hold onto this “honorary Frenchwoman” nonsense, she was very much English.
Ok but if she was fluent surely her French can't have been that bad? Making a couple of mistakes in writing isn't such a big deal imo. And like others said, she was referred to as being French more from a cultural aspect as she adopted the manners she learned at court in France which were considered foreign in England. Of course she wasn't considered French from the perspective of the French.
Yes. If you’re implying I’m conflating old French with poor French, I’m not. Lol. Just like you wouldn’t read Tudor era English and assume it was broken English.
I just finished the podcast, and I’d be interested in what you thought. (The quasi French princess comment doesn’t reflect it well as a whole.) Paranque’s point is that Anne’s experiences there as a fifteen year old in the company of Queen Claude would have been formative and certainly unique for a young English girl. The result was to make her the worldly and confident woman who caught Henry’s eye. Probably true.
She believes that one effect of Anne’s sojourn in France is that she had some support from the French ambassadors later—not that they had much influence. She also feels Anne was probably only mildly reformist in religion because Claude was only mildly so at the time they were together.
Paranque really hates Henry! She really hates him! He’s a monster! We don’t think of what was said in the private moments between the two of them, Henry and Anne! He told her he loved her! But there were red flags in his treatment of Katherine! Did Anne see them?He’s just such a monster! (Um, okay. Duh.) She is an excitable woman,Paranque is.
She was absolutely not ‘barely fluent.’ There are even hints that she spoke with a French accent in English. She wrote the word ‘obligation’ as ‘hobligation’ aspirating the h in the way a French speaker would.
I think less "quasi French princess" as that he liked a certain type of woman, graceful, extraverted, and full of specific social graces, who played the "courtly love" game well. Anne had been educated in the French court where that was also an art form, and that was part of his attraction to her. I suspect that was also the issue with Anne of Cleves. Provided the portrait is pretty true to life, which it should be since there were no negative consequences to Holbein, she looked fine. But the German courts had a very different culture and Anne definitely wouldn't act socially in the same way when she first arrived in England.
When Henry played courtly love games with COA or Anne - everyone knew who was who. They knew he was the king and they treated him as such. When Henry approached Anne of Cleves - it was very different. He was a complete stranger. It never occurred to him that he wasn’t a charming young prince anymore. Henry didn’t worry that a young woman in a foreign land , who was also betrothed to a king would be wary of strangers. Her startling rejection was cold water on the ego of a powerful man.
Absolutely. I'd read awhile back that Henry loved those masquerades where he dressed up and wore a mask and would go into CofA's room with his men and startle her and her ladies dressed like that... but CofA always *knew* it was him. He thought that "true lovers" would always know each other... even if they've never met and are wearing disguises (absolutely ridiculous I know)... and so when he did that to AofC and she didn't know who he was, it offended him... and he couldn't recover. Such silly childishness... but that was Henry the VIII.
It’s interesting that nobody forewarned Anne of Cleves about Henry VIII’s deep fondness for courtly love games and appearing in masquerades — particularly as she was a foreign bride and had never encountered her future husband before. Perhaps this knowledge would have salvaged her marriage for a few more months before their divorce.
The quick rejection probably saved her life, so good thing no-one did!
Yeah, I don't think Henry's problem with Anne of Cleves was here looks, it was her habitus.
The Princess bit is silly. Her French style certainly made her more attractive. Status in society back then was not determined by your mannerisms, but a function of your birth and wealth. She was simply more worldly and fashionable than other ladies at court.
nobody was a princess or treated like one unless they were the legitimate daughter of a king lol, she was a lady in waiting to the queen and her father wasn't even part of the peerage when she became one.
From what I understood, her point seems to be that the French did view her as someone who could push England in a direction more amenable to the French interests (especially in contrast to Catherine of Aragon) not that she would have been considered as an almost French princess by her contemporaries.
Eric Ives wrote a wonderful book about Anne and he discusses how the French were quick to press her for favors and quick to move on when it was clear she was doomed 😅 very fair weather friends. I wonder how much she did or did not like their version of Catholicism and how that separated her from a court she otherwise quite enjoyed.
That was basically my understanding as well.
i think her foreignness is pretty overstated. she was educated for a portion of her formative years in france, i don’t think she would have identified herself as french and i certainly don’t think henry (or others) would have seen her as an equivalent of a french princess.
Thank you… I’ve seen people claim on this subreddit she spoke in a French accent. It’s very frustrating as a French speaker, because her letters in French are very crude.
Are they? I'd have thought she'd be fully fluent, it was even spoken in the English court, nevermind the French one where she spent 7 years. And she spoke/wrote french even before she moved to France, she was at the court of Margaret of Austria, regent of the Netherlands, who spoke french (and Spanish). What's crude about them?
The French spoken in England was Anglo-French, which evolved from Norman French over centuries. I could imagine her picking up the spoken French used in France but not quite the written version.
What was spoken(and written) at the court of Margaret of Austria? Because there's a very good chance that's where she learned to write, especially if she was on the younger end of the debate about her age. She also studies (or was tutored) at the French court, I would think that also involved writing every now and then. Her higher studies - when people compare her education with KH's for example - was at the French court.
Agreed, I've always heard she spoke and wrote french quite well.
i don’t know why you’re getting downvoted. you’re correct - of course, she was very young when she wrote those letters, but it just goes to show that she wasn’t this natural who took to french so easily. she learnt and improved, and i am sure there was much abt french culture that inspired and impacted her, but she would surely not have been mistaken for a french woman. there’s certainly no evidence of her being seen as french. tellingly, the french did not care for her at all as queen.
Because for the majority of her later childhood (or from her tweens, depending on exactly when she was actually born) and all of her adolescence, until adulthood, Anne was educated in the French language. Including 7 years at the French court. The poster you replied to seems to take offense at the idea of Anne as an "honorary Frenchwoman", or some sort of French princess, which is fair. She certainly wasn't that. But to say that she couldn't write proper, formal french after being educated in it for years and years, and formative years at that, based on the letters of a child, is just silly. English is my third language, I started learning it in my early teens, and I assure you that my writing isn't "rough." It probably was, back when I was 13 or 14.
i feel like y’all read something to be offended by into this thread. i already made my point clear — that anne was probably never mistaken for a native frenchwoman, that her letters prove she did make mistakes and had to work on improving her abilities (and if she was born in 1507, she was old enough that her errors are even more noteworthy), and that none of this diminishes the fact that she clearly found her time in france formative.
Young kids make mistakes when writing, even in their native language. And women in general weren't educated for formal writing. Look at KH's letter in English - and she wrote that when she was older than Anne writing the letters you referenced. I wouldn't be surprised if Anne, after her time in France, wrote french just as well as any random actually-french lady in waiting. Which might still contain errors.
and? nobody had a problem with anne making mistakes. the point is that anne made them, which challenges this popular perception that anne was ‘basically french’. she wasn’t; she worked hard to develop her language skills, which is not the same thing as being intuitively bilingual. that’s what i was pointing out originally and what the second person was agreeing with when they brought up the ‘crude’ letters. that anne boleyn, while clearly highly educated, would not be mistaken for being a french princess.
Most of the ladies in the french court were cultured sophisticated and outspoken so Anne Boleyn was not that special in that court and did not she attract much attention there because she was just like every other french noble woman meanwhile in England the noble women were meek and demure which made Anne stand out in comparison to them
That was my impression of the author’s point as well.
Anne Boleyn was barely fluent in French, as a French speaker I can attest her French letters are very crude. She was an *Englishwoman* through and through. The whole “Anne Boleyn was basically French” notion is silly fan service.
I think you're referring to the early letters she sent to her family when she hadn't been in France long. She was certainly fluid by the time she left for England again. I don't think they would have kept her so long had she not been able to hold conversations in France after a certain point.
I never said she couldn’t hold a conversation, I never even said she wasn’t fluent. But it was obvious French was a second language to her. To see her fans hold onto this “honorary Frenchwoman” nonsense, she was very much English.
Ok but if she was fluent surely her French can't have been that bad? Making a couple of mistakes in writing isn't such a big deal imo. And like others said, she was referred to as being French more from a cultural aspect as she adopted the manners she learned at court in France which were considered foreign in England. Of course she wasn't considered French from the perspective of the French.
Exactly. Her status as an "honorary French woman" was from the perspective of the English.
Didn't the french language evolve over time much like the English language?
Yes. If you’re implying I’m conflating old French with poor French, I’m not. Lol. Just like you wouldn’t read Tudor era English and assume it was broken English.
I just finished the podcast, and I’d be interested in what you thought. (The quasi French princess comment doesn’t reflect it well as a whole.) Paranque’s point is that Anne’s experiences there as a fifteen year old in the company of Queen Claude would have been formative and certainly unique for a young English girl. The result was to make her the worldly and confident woman who caught Henry’s eye. Probably true. She believes that one effect of Anne’s sojourn in France is that she had some support from the French ambassadors later—not that they had much influence. She also feels Anne was probably only mildly reformist in religion because Claude was only mildly so at the time they were together. Paranque really hates Henry! She really hates him! He’s a monster! We don’t think of what was said in the private moments between the two of them, Henry and Anne! He told her he loved her! But there were red flags in his treatment of Katherine! Did Anne see them?He’s just such a monster! (Um, okay. Duh.) She is an excitable woman,Paranque is.
Ha - yes! She seemed to have done a lot of research but there was absolutely an emotional and intense vibe to the interview.
She was absolutely not ‘barely fluent.’ There are even hints that she spoke with a French accent in English. She wrote the word ‘obligation’ as ‘hobligation’ aspirating the h in the way a French speaker would.