The other day, I started a book about Elizabeth I. I’m always interested in a good book about Elizabeth Tudor, so I was looking forward to it. (No, I’m not going to say which one.) I ended up closing it and returning it to the library because of the author’s take on Anne Boleyn.

My disquiet began with her assertion that Anne had moles and some kind of sixth finger. This has been out there for a long time, but its original source was a man who loathed Anne and seemed willing to say anything to blacken her. So there’s reasonable skepticism about the blemishes, especially since they were considered to be the marks of a witch.

However, when she said that Anne’s motivation for getting involved with Henry yet refusing to become his mistress was that she wanted to be queen, I shut the book.

The way I see it, the situation in England in the 1520s-1530s was complicated. Given the pretenders and rebellions that had plagued his father, Henry VIII could not have taken the stability of the throne for granted, and if he was going to ensure an orderly succession after him, he had to have a legitimate son. We can’t look at this need through the prism of several successful ruling queens, including two in the last 180 years, and wonder what the fuss was all about. Prior to Henry’s lifetime, no woman had ever ruled England openly and the one attempt to put a woman on the throne (the Empress Matilda, mother of Henry II), had triggered a brutal civil war.

By the late 1520s, when Anne caught Henry’s eye, his only legitimate child was a girl in her early teens. His wife, Katherine of Aragon, had not been pregnant in some time, so it was highly unlikely she would provide the son Henry needed. (Specific information on Katherine’s pregnancies is not available.) Given all that, it seems entirely reasonable to me that Henry would have wanted to set Katherine aside and marry another, younger woman who would give him at least one son. If Anne Boleyn had never crossed his path, I think Henry would still have pursued the divorce from Katherine.

Whether he would have obtained it is another question. In 1527, the pope was taken prisoner by the Holy Roman Emperor when the Emperor’s army sacked Rome. The pope was the only one who could give Henry his divorce…and the Holy Roman Emperor was Katherine’s nephew. Would the Emperor have wanted his aunt set aside, possible for a French princess? It’s impossible to say at this remove but it seems to me possible that the Emperor would have blocked the divorce no matter who Henry wanted to marry, short of another Spanish princess (which would bring another host of problems).

So, what about Anne? Why would she refuse to become Henry’s mistress if she wasn’t out to become his queen?

Anne went to Court to accomplish two things. One was to make the most advantageous marriage she possibly could. Along with dowry and family connections, her virginity was an important part of her value as a potential bride. This would surely have been made absolutely clear to her, starting at a very young age, but if she were inclined to doubt it, she had only to look at her sister Mary. Mary had been the mistress of two kings and in the end, she could only marry a gentleman of little fortune. True, Mary had failed to take full advantage of the perks of being a royal mistress, but even if she had, would those perks have outweighed what she lost?

Anne’s other goal at Court was to obtain royal favor, not annoy the king. When Henry pressed her to become his mistress, she had to refuse him in a way that didn’t awaken his displeasure. Put simply, he sexually harassed her and in order to keep her post, she had to somehow manage him in a way that allowed her to protect her honor. (I owe this insight to Karen Lindsey’s Divorced, Beheaded, Survived: A Feminist Reinterpretation of the Wives of Henry VIII.) Becoming Henry’s wife was one way out of the bind she found herself in. So why wouldn’t she agree to it?

None of this is meant to suggest Anne wasn’t ambitious, or that she didn’t play the cards dealt to her as skillfully as possible. I think both things are true. But I don’t think she was the marriage destroying harpy she’s often portrayed to be. I think it was Henry who wanted his marriage to Katherine ended, and Anne’s worst crime was taking advantage of the situation that was presented to her.