Anne has certainly proved one of history's most consistently controversial figures. During her life many thought of her as the "great concubine." Conservatives and pious Catholics considered her marriage to Henry illegal and herself no better than a whore. After her execution she became, if not exactly a martyr, than at least a figurehead for the nascent Protestant movement, as her predecessor Katherine of Aragon had been for the Catholics. Her good looks, and the dignity with which she faced her gruesome and certainly unjust execution, won admiration even from her enemies. In death she became a potent symbol of what is destroyed when royal greed and lust go unrestrained by a legal and constitutional framework. Henry VIII was Leviathan run amok, Anne his tragic victim. [...]

Henry's push for a papal dispensation was doomed from the beginning, if only he had known it. In 1527 the armies of Charles V had sacked Rome, forcing the Medici pope, Clement VII, to cravenly lock himself up in the Castel Sant'Angelo. From then on Clement was more or less a creature of the emperor, who certainly had no wish to disgrace his aunt by allowing her to be cast aside by the upstart English king. Cardinal Campeggio, the papal legate in England, was under strict instructions to stall for time and produce no results.

Cardinal Wolsey, who in better days had ruled the country and seemed to rule the king (he was widely known as alter rex), found himself for the first time impotent. His power had seemed real enough when he had wielded it; now it was exposed for what it had always been, a gift proffered at the king's whim and as easily taken away. Anne, many said, had hated the cardinal since he had broken up her match with Henry Percy years before. Recognizing the force of his character and his ability to rule Henry, she blocked his access to the king. When he failed to produce the desired dispensation, he was done for. In Ives' opinion "the fall of Wolsey was first and foremost Anne's success," and it is certain that the vacuum left by his absence was filled by her own men: as the French ambassador Jean du Bellay wrote, "The duke of Norfolk is made chief of the council and in his absence the duke of Suffolk, and above everyone Mademoiselle Anne."

Ives says of Henry that "The drive to marry Anne was not only to satisfy emotion and desire; it became a campaign to vindicate his kingship." Henry was, in youth, the last medieval monarch of England; in middle age, he became the national avatar of the new age of divine right, a concept which would not be amended until 1688. His whole career can be seen as an exploration of the meaning and limits of kingship. What does it mean to be a king—how far do the monarch's rights extend? Is he, or is he not, appointed by God? If he is, then why should he be subservient to the Pope? "Henry knew absolutely," writes Ives, "that the law of Christ did give him headship of the Church."

With Anne's active prompting, he set about creating a legal framework for what he "knew." Anne read Willian Tyndale's The Obedience of the Christian Man and How Christian Rulers Ought to Govern and marked passages for Henry's edification: "The king is in the person of God and his law is God's law"; for the Church to rule over the princes of Europe is "a shame above all shames and a notorious thing." Thomas Cranmer, theologian at Jesus College, Cambridge, was pressed into service. He suggested that Europe's faculties of theology should be consulted, and helped fashion their response into an argument in favor of divorce. The aged lawyer Christopher St. German drafted legislation to make Henry, as king, the supreme head of the national Church. Thomas Cromwell, Henry's brilliant new "fixer," stage-managed the events.