Queen of England from 1533 until her husband King Henry VIII executed her in 1536, Anne Boleyn was a central political figure in the English Reformation that marked the birth of Anglicanism. The king’s desire to annul his marriage to Catherine of Aragon to marry Anne drove him to break with the Roman Catholic Church and establish the Church of England. Yet the extent to which Anne’s religious beliefs shaped the church is not well-known, Anglican priest and author Canon Martha Tatarnic says.
Tatarnic, rector at St. George’s Anglican Church in St. Catharines, Ont., has written books on food and body image from a Christian perspective and on church gathering after the experience of the COVID-19 pandemic. As a feminist with a strong interest in history, Tatarnic has had a lifelong fascination with Anne. Boleyn represented glamour, magnetism and tragedy for the young Tatarnic, who says she felt a kindred spirit in this “bookish, opinionated, driven, principled, ambitious” woman who championed religious and social reform.
Accounts of Anne’s life, however, have consistently misrepresented the late queen, Tatarnic says, reducing her to gender stereotypes and minimizing or overlooking her formative impact on the Anglican tradition. In her new book Anne Boleyn: Reputation, Revolution, Religion, and the Queen who Changed History, Tatarnic seeks to counter such misconceptions and re-affirm Anne as a founding figure of the Anglican Church.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Where did your interest in Anne Boleyn come from?
I was introduced to Anne Boleyn’s story similarly to how many people were, which was through the movie Anne of the Thousand Days, which I watched when I was quite young. From that point on, I was haunted by Anne Boleyn, the sense of intrigue about her story, wondering what more there was. As good as that movie is and as iconic a portrayal as it is, it left me with more questions than answers.
When I was a seminary student in my early 20s, I found myself gravitating toward the Tudor history section of the Trinity College library in my downtime and found it very validating to find that Anne Boleyn was such a force in shaping the Reformation—not just the spark that lit the English Reformation, but was pretty actively involved in how that Reformation took shape. As a young woman contemplating leadership in the church, feeling like there was a long history of female leadership in the church, even if it hadn’t been named and centred, was really meaningful to me.
Then over the years as a parish leader, I get to do some Anglicanism 101 teaching in my congregations. The origin story of the Anglican Church is that King Henry VIII wanted a divorce. I’ll challenge people to think instead that maybe our origin story is that the woman that he was interested in marrying was a reformer, and that this powerful misrepresented woman is a mover and shaker in our origin story—how differently that frames the history of the Anglican Church.
The musical Six, about the six wives of Henry VIII, was the impetus for your writing a book about Anne Boleyn.
I was complaining to my brother about how Anne Boleyn was portrayed, leaning into all of the worst stereotypes of how she has been misrepresented: as a hussy, as a gold digger, as someone who behaved in sexually problematic ways—all of which is, I would argue, not borne out by the facts of historical evidence, but that is all too often how she has been cast. He was genuinely interested, which is quite remarkable because my brother isn’t particularly interested in the church or in my ideas. He literally said to me, “Where is that book? I want to read that book.”
The sentence that stands out for me is when you say, “The church I serve today would not be what it is, and perhaps would not even exist, if it weren’t for Anne Boleyn.” Can you explain what you mean by that?
We can point to a lot of ways in which she is rightfully named an architect of the English Reformation, not merely a catalyst. But I think I would point to three main things.
She was a fan of reading contraband reform material. It was a book by [William Tyndale], The Obedience of the Christian Man, that she passed along to King Henry that changed the conversation from one of convincing the pope in Rome to grant an annulment from his marriage to Catherine of Aragon to instead challenging the pope’s authority altogether. Then over the course of those six years of fighting to split the church from the pope’s authority and to finally be married, and then the three years that she was the queen of England, we can see a real sea change that she was at the heart of in two respects.
The first was the normalizing of access to the Bible in English. That had a lot to do with her influence with the king, because prior to Anne Boleyn, English Bibles were being publicly burned and people who had them or were trying to publish them were living in fear or in exile or under threat of violence. To go from that to 1535, the year before she died, [with] the publishing of the first English Bible dedicated to King Henry VIII and Queen Anne is a remarkable sea change. We know from her influences and from her behaviour how important access to the Bible in the vernacular was to her and what she thought was most central to the reform agenda.
The second piece was personnel. Anne had a really incredible talent for identifying talent and for moving talented reformers into positions of power. In that pretty illustrious list is included Thomas Cranmer, the first archbishop of Canterbury of the reformed Church of England, and Matthew Parker, who was her personal chaplain and then archbishop of Canterbury for [Queen] Elizabeth I. They are two of the three men who are credited with developing a distinctive Anglican thought, [both] Anne Boleyn hires. When Cranmer was given his post as archbishop of Canterbury and went to thank the king, the king told him, “You have Anne to thank for this.”
When she died, there were a lot of Catholics who hoped that was the end of reform in England. But she was a little too effective with getting those pieces moved across the chess board and assuring the continuation of reform in a whole bunch of ways. It’s not just that there were reformers in all those positions of power. Cranmer was responsible for the education of [King] Edward VI, who was the first English sovereign to be raised as a Protestant. Those different people had an influence on Elizabeth and how she was raised and what her beliefs were. And of course, Cramer wrote the Book of Common Prayer, which is still used in the Anglican Church today.
You describe Anne as an intelligent, educated young woman from a family with a high regard for education. She frequented courts in Europe at a time when ideas of reform were already in the air with figures like Martin Luther and the impact of the printing press. Did that background contribute to making her a reformer?
Yeah. She spent her teenage years in the court of Queen Claude of France. Europe was a hotbed of new ideas and people agitating for versions of reform—not just Martin Luther, although he was certainly the most prominent.
Anne was raised in a circle of strong female leaders who were very invested in having access to the Scriptures and then acting in ways that addressed corruption in the church, and [who] advanced social reform alongside the reform agenda. You can see how the women that she was raised around, the beliefs that they had, the material they were all reading, impacted and influenced what was then important to Anne in her reign.
How do you interpret Anne’s relationship with Henry VIII, and how did her religious views influence their relationship?
This is a live question, which sounds incredible given that all of this happened 500 years ago. But scholars are continuing to excavate the evidence to see what we’ve missed or what we have misinterpreted.
One of the big things that is coming to light is that we have probably misinterpreted this whole idea of Anne deciding that she didn’t want to be Henry VIII’s mistress, that he had to marry her or nothing. Instead, what we are coming to understand potentially is that he was never in the market for a mistress at that time in his life. He wanted a wife. He wanted legitimate children, particularly boys. He interpreted his lack of male offspring as God’s judgement on his first marriage to Catherine of Aragon, who was his brother’s widow. So he likely in short order decided that Anne Boleyn was the woman that he was going to marry and that was going to right his relationship with God.
We can imagine that it was Anne’s intelligence, her engagement with religious ideas, her passion for her faith, her principles, that led Henry to hold her in such high esteem and to believe that she would in fact right his relationship with God. Then we can see that they became very bound together in those six years of moving that agenda from a question of divorce to a question of splitting the church in England from the power of Rome.
Then we can see how that question of religion keeps coming up in their three years of marriage, because Anne famously didn’t have any more male sons than her predecessor had, which started to lead Henry to believe that she hadn’t fixed his relationship with God, either. Not only that, but she had some strong principles about how she wanted to see the reform agenda progress, and those principles were at odds with what Henry and his top advisor [Thomas] Cromwell wanted.
That, and a whole variety of other factors that we can see in those early months of 1536 before her death, all played into the king and Cromwell moving against her and having her brought up on charges of adultery and treason. But you can see along the way how religion and her religious beliefs were a central part of the whole story of why the king was attracted to her, what the fabric of their relationship was built on, and why she died.
You point out that in England at this time, a lot of political or religious questions were expressed through personalities. In what way did the conflict between Protestant reformers and Catholic conservatives play out in terms of Anne’s relationship with Henry, her execution and her successors as queen?
In England for sure, the person who had the ear of the king had power in the kingdom. That was an essential way of advancing any ideas and any agenda. You can see just how true that is in how completely Henry goes from being so adamantly anti-reform. His number-one guy prior to Anne Boleyn was Cardinal [Thomas] Wolsey, who was persecuting reformers as heretics and burning [English] Bibles in the public square. Henry was putting his name to writings that were calling into question the teachings of Martin Luther. There was no breathing room for reform in England prior to Anne.
Suddenly the king is reading reform materials as well and thinking that an English Bible is a pretty good thing and is open to having people who, prior to Anne, had to be closeted about their beliefs in the highest offices of the church. That combination of personality who was in the earshot of the king and had his attention was such a big part of how reform was able to move forward in England, how that revolution was able to finally be catalyzed.
Then by the same token, the forces of Catholic counter-reformation would rally behind Jane Seymour [Henry’s third wife and mother of Edward VI] at one point, or [Queen Mary I, Henry’s only surviving child with Catherine of Aragon,] later on.
How did Anne’s downfall happen, and why did it happen so quickly?
Again, it had a lot to do with Henry having put her on such a pedestal in the first place as this woman who was going to right his relationship with God. Several miscarriages into their marriage after having Elizabeth, that belief was really shaken. Henry was also somebody who always needed somebody to blame, usually the person closest to him, when things didn’t go the way that he wanted. Catherine of Aragon had served that purpose, but she died in January of the year that Anne was put to death. Suddenly she wasn’t around to blame for all of Henry’s misfortunes.
There was a public showdown between these two visions of reform around the dissolution of the monasteries between Anne and Cromwell. About a month before she was arrested, she had Cromwell and really the king called out in a very public way about funds from the dissolution of the monasteries going right to the royal coffers. She had a different vision of how she wanted to see that money used for education and addressing poverty, and that was inconvenient to Cromwell and the king.
So you can see just this layering of insecurities and religious ideals and agendas, and all of it clashing in a very dramatic way in the first four months of 1536—resulting in Anne’s arrest on manufactured charges of adultery and incest and therefore treason, and I would say [being] unjustly put to death.
When Anne was executed, she did not admit guilt or sin, which shocked observers at the time. To what extent can we call Anne a martyr? That word is usually used in religious terms, but a consistent theme of your book is how Anne reflects society’s attitudes towards women.
It’s tricky because Anne didn’t leave us with much of her writing. We don’t have a lot of access to her inner thought processes. We try to piece that together based on her actions and based on the reports of the people around her. We don’t know that she was intentionally willing to die for the things that she believed in, in terms of reform and religion and her vision for the church. She surely would have known that calling out Cromwell and the king was dangerous, especially when she had just miscarried another child. But I think it’s a stretch for us to assume that she deliberately put herself in harm’s way for the sake of her principles and beliefs.
There definitely was a move, especially in the time of Elizabeth, to cast Anne as a saint or martyr of the Reformation. That didn’t really take in the popular consciousness beyond the time of Elizabeth because it seemed to whitewash a lot of the other aspects of Anne’s life. I’m hesitant to paint her in too saintly a light either. The word “martyr” does mean witness, and I think Anne does bear witness in very interesting ways to some of the dangers that women live with. I think she bears witness to the cost of standing up for things that we believe in. But I would be hesitant to cast her in that more traditional martyr role.
How did Anne’s influence express itself through her daughter Queen Elizabeth I, particularly her influence on the Church of England?
Certainly, we can see some personality traits that were described in Anne that we can also really see in Elizabeth, and that went a long way in how Elizabeth was a leader and how she stood her ground. Probably one of the more direct ways in which Anne’s influence got to see the light of day through Elizabeth was again in terms of personnel. There were people that Anne had elevated to positions of power, particularly Matthew Parker. But he was by no means the only one who Elizabeth then was able to reinstate into those highest offices to continue the work that had begun during Anne’s time.
Although Cranmer met his demise at the hands of Queen Mary, as most longtime Anglicans know, his influence ended up having just an incredible afterlife through the Book of Common Prayer. That was all reinstated under Elizabeth, which again gave this incredible breathing space to the pieces of reform that Anne had started to move into place during her own reign.
What parallels do you find between the transformative period for the church in the early 1500s and the challenges it’s facing today?
The turn of the 16th century is such an interesting time to study because you can see the seismic clashes as longstanding ways of understanding society and the person and God and salvation are being challenged. [Historian] Diarmaid MacCulloch says that the Reformation is really like this horrible car crash where everybody’s just looking around at the wreckage and not sure how all the pieces are going to be put back together. I think that is apt.
You can see the seeds in Anne’s own life and the things that she was wrestling with and the things that she said and did. You can see the beginnings of those seeds of individualism; of identifying the person outside of the relationships of community and the authority of the church and the monarch that had so long been assumed to rule the individual person; the centering of the individual conscience as the way that you would navigate a relationship with God, which began the path toward being able to call into question whether there even is a God and whether you need to answer to a higher power whatsoever.
All of those seeds are being planted in those early years of the 1500s. Anne is representative of that hinge time in fascinating ways.
You mention different female archetypes that have been applied to Anne such as the whore, the mother, the witch. What do you think the portrayal of Anne through these archetypes says about how society views women?
We have traditionally wanted to box up and curtail women’s stories in nice, neat categories. We haven’t had as much room for women’s stories of complex female characters who are a mix of good and bad and whose lives don’t just follow nice, neat, archetypal lines. That has a lot to do with women generally having been the supporting characters in our history books, not the main characters.
Then when they are the main characters, we want to wrap them up with a bow. Are they a virginal saint? Are they an evil whore? Are they a wicked stepmother? Are they a fairy princess? Are they the bad witch, the sorceress? The pure and good mother? Those have been comforting ways, I think, of understanding women’s stories. In different ways all those archetypes have been applied to Anne, and yet none of them quite fit, which is, I think, an opportunity for us.
One of the delicious things about her story is, because none of the archetypes quite fit, we haven’t been able to box her up so easily. She has invited this constant interrogation. We keep coming back to her story. We keep wanting to know more. We keep circling back and trying again with how she gets portrayed because she doesn’t lend herself well to those easy categorizations. I think that invites us to think about women’s stories in general and how few of our stories really fit in those nice, neat categories.
What can Anne tell us about the legacy of misogyny in the church?
She invites us to reckon with that misogyny in ways that are both challenging and hopeful. I find it enormously hopeful as a woman in leadership to know that women in leadership in our church is not a new thing. It’s not even a 50-year-old thing. Women have always had leadership and made an impact and been part of shaping what the institutional church is. Even if we haven’t recognized it, even if we haven’t told those stories well, even if we haven’t assigned the titles to women, I think knowing that there has been a long legacy of leadership is hopeful at the same time that we are really challenged to wrestle with why it is that we haven’t been able to see that or name that or claim that or honour that.
I think that wrestling is important too because we still have a long way to go. We haven’t fixed misogyny, and as any good feminist will tell you, feminism is never just about advancing the role and the visibility of women. It’s about equality for all people. It’s about addressing injustice wherever we see it. It’s about listening to voices that we have failed to hear. We still have a lot further to go in terms of women’s equality, but we definitely have work to do right across the church in calling out injustice and getting better at listening to voices from the sidelines.
To what extent do you think Anglicans can consider Anne Boleyn a founding figure of the Anglican tradition?
That is what I would really like Anglicans to consider. I would like Anglicans right across our Communion to get right up on their soapboxes alongside me and say, “Actually, our origin story has a lot to do with the leadership of Anne Boleyn.” I would like Anglicans to very proudly claim Anne Boleyn as one of our founding figures.
One takeaway I got from this book is that Anne was an intelligent woman at a time when there were very few opportunities for women, who found herself pursued by a king and didn’t have much of a choice in terms of consent to say no. So she took this opportunity to push through reforms that were important to her and had massive influence as a result.
Yep. Very reputable historians claim her as an architect of the Reformation. I think that’s a very suitable word for describing how she moved those influential pieces into place that assured not just the continuation of reform in England, but the shape that reform took. She found herself in this very unusual position. She ended up embracing that position as an opportunity to be able to advance ideas and principles that she really cared about, and it cost her. But she embraced that opportunity in some very influential and impactful ways.
