While Anne Boleyn is often portrayed as flighty and personally ambitious interested only in the power she could wield over King Henry VIII, her character becomes more complex when considering the role that she played in ushering in England’s Reformation.
Deciphering her personal views proves more difficult since Henry burned her letters so the papers of Thomas Cranmer, Thomas More, and other contemporaries become even more important although they may contain the authors’ personal agendas, sometimes favorable to Anne and other times not.
It is widely known that Henry VIII finally declared himself Supreme Head of the Church of England with the Act of Supremacy in order to hastily marry his pregnant mistress after the Pope spent years postponing the granting of an annulment of Henry’s first marriage, especially since the Pope had family ties to first wife Katherine of Aragon. Henry, being the confident and arrogant ruler that he was, kept the title “Defender of the Faith” bestowed on him by a previous Pope, seemingly unaware of the irony.
Lutheran Reformation, Anne Boleyn, and Thomas Cranmer Spur English Reformation
After Martin Luther and his adherents separated from the Catholic Church during the Reformation in central Europe, new Protestant voices or Catholic reformers began to write and preach changes in England as well. Although Henry staunchly declared his Catholicism until the end of his life, he gradually allowed more progressive views to be heard in fits and starts, keeping his subjects guessing as to when their dissent would be ignored or lead to burnings. This change in Henry’s interpretation resulted from discussions with Thomas Cranmer, Anne Boleyn and other court favorites over a period of several years.
Prescient of Henry’s decision to break from Rome, Anne gave Henry a copy of William Tyndale’s protestant work On the Obedience of a Christian Man and How Christian Rulers Ought to Govern. This said that a king was ruler of both church and the state in his realm and reminded Henry that the right of a prince to be the ruler of the church in his country was actually a common assertion just a few hundred years before and only declined with the increase in power of Rome.
To this end, Anne and her father recruited a group of theologians including Thomas Cranmer to come up with historical evidence for royal supremacy. They produced a collection of writings, the Sufficiently Copious Collection, which explained that in the earliest days of the church, each province had its own Rome-free jurisdiction. God intended kings to be rulers of churches, and be accountable only to God.
Henry said in 1530, “England cares nothing for Popes” and by 1532, Henry was declared ruler of the Church in England.
The Brief Reign of Anne Boleyn
Regarding the marriage between Henry and Anne, by 1536 his attention had turned to the meeker Jane Seymour and his need to rid himself of Anne became as urgent as his desire to leave Katherine just a few years before. Cranmer turned on Anne when Henry did, working to help find justification to end the marriage.
Since Henry was not inclined to rule that he had made a mistake in separating from Katherine (now deceased) or Rome, Anne was charged with witchcraft (for bewitching the philandering king) and incest with her brother George, leading to charges of treason justifying her execution by a French swordsman on 19 May 1536.
Result of the English Reformation
In the end, certain elements of Protestantism certainly would have infiltrated into England but possibly not to the extent in which the nation would ultimately be considered Protestant (with the advent of Edward VI, son of Henry and Jane Seymour, with a brief lapse under Mary I before Anne's daughter Elizabeth I restored the religion), bowing to no Pope, had it not been for a determined cleric, a passionate and ill-fated woman and a king who really hated to be told “no” when he was ready to change wives.
Sources:
Impact of the English Reformation: 1500 – 1640. ed. Peter Marshall. Arnold Publishing and Oxford University Press, 1997.
Diarmid McCullough, Thomas Cranmer. Yale, 1996.
Simon Schama, A History of Britain: At the Edge of the World (3500 BC – 1603 AD), Talk Miramax Books, Hyperion, NY, 2000.
Bonnye Good - Bonnye Busbice Good received an Editor's Choice award for her article on Your Historic Home's Interior Design Secrets and has also written ...
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