Guest Post Q&A with Martha Tatarnic
Author of 'Anne Boleyn: Reputation, Revolution, Religion, and the Queen Who Changed History'
Today I welcome Martha Tatarnic to my blog and Substack, to talk about her new book, Anne Boleyn: Reputation, Revolution, Religion, and the Queen Who Changed History. Martha is an Anglican priest and author. This is her first history book so I wanted to ask Martha what attracted her to write about Anne Boleyn, and her thoughts on Anne’s religion and changing perceptions.
Welcome to my blog and Substack, Martha! What started you out on your interest in Anne Boleyn and then to writing your book?
Thank you so much for the invitation to be part of your blog and Substack this week, Helene. It has been great connecting with you on social media and hearing of the incredible work and research you are doing!
I have been fascinated by Anne Boleyn ever since I was a child watching Anne of the Thousand Days with my mother. In my early twenties, I went to seminary to become an Anglican priest and, following nothing more than gut instinct, I gravitated to the Tudor history section of the Trinity College library in my down time. It gave me confidence and clarity on my own path to know that women like Anne Boleyn had been so important in shaping what would become the Anglican church.
I occasionally teach “Anglicanism 101” to the people of my church, and I will speak of Anne’s influence on the English Reformation. “Our church wasn’t started because King Henry wanted a divorce,” I note, “but because the woman he wanted to marry was a reformer.” This is always greeted with surprise. Anne is an important part of the church’s history, but it is so easy to succumb to the default of understanding our history through the eyes of men.
I was having a similar conversation with my brother over the Christmas vacation one year when the idea for writing this book started to form. My brother isn’t particularly interested in the church and isn’t always interested in my ideas either. But he was fascinated to know that there were other dimensions to the iconic Anne, and to the church’s origin story, than he had understood.
Of course, I realized right away that I didn’t need to write a book about the “untold history” of Anne Boleyn. Anne’s impact on the English Reformation is well documented history. What I chose to do instead was to consider what stories about Anne we have been telling and why it matters today to have a clearer picture of a queen who lived 500 years ago. As a priest, part of my job is to be in conversation with the ancient texts found in the Bible, interrogating what they might mean for our lives now. I approached Anne’s story in a similar manner, as a conversation between me and the text of Anne’s life. Why does Anne Boleyn matter to me? And why does Anne Boleyn matter to us?
Why do you think that Anne Boleyn’s reputation has undergone so many changes over the centuries?
Anne’s story is a big one. Its contours are similar to some of our best-known narrative tropes. We tell our stories of women being selected by kings as if this is the ultimate happily-ever-after: to be elevated from nothing to the one wearing the crown. Into those familiar contours, however, Anne’s story is laden with political and religious upheaval, the most complex social dynamics, and a continual seesaw of factions fighting to find favour with the king. Anne Boleyn offers a profound clapback to any notion that being chosen by the king means you get a happy ending. Instead, her life bears witness to the chilling reality of how entangled men’s desire and men’s violence can be.
Why has Anne’s reputation been so changeable across the centuries? Because she fools us into thinking her story is about one thing when it’s another, because her story always gets edited down for bite-sized consumption, but then we are left with the haunting sense that there must be more. We keep circling back to her story because every easy categorization only leaves more questions than it gives answers. So many of the most toxic labels we use for talking about women—witch, whore, seductress, manipulator, gold digger, social climber—have been slapped on Anne while the context for the religious and political reasons why these slanders were applied to her in the first place have been relegated to the cutting room floor.
We have so few of Anne’s actual words written down. She is endlessly talked about and we know tantalizingly little about the inner landscape of her life. But across the many iterations of archetype and reputation, she continues to speak, asking us to look again.
Where do you think Anne’s religious beliefs truly put her in the landscape of the 16th century Reformation?
There is no doubt that there were many voices committed to church reform in England in the 16th century, and many historians will suggest that some version of reform would likely have come to England with or without Anne Boleyn. That being said, reform would have likely come to Germany without Martin Luther too, but it would have looked different. To say that there were broad cultural factors—especially the advent of the printing press—that were creating the circumstances for change is not to minimize the impact that specific individuals had in shaping what kind of change took place.
Anne didn’t emerge out of a vacuum. She was a product of living in a time when access to the Bible was opening and this was changing everything. She was a product of receiving an education and education for elite women becoming normalized. Anne’s beliefs were formed by the other strong, principled and powerful women in whose company she grew up, especially in the courts of France. The brand of reform that we see, particularly in Marguerite d’Angouleme and Queen Claude of France, was very different from other versions of reform that were emerging across Europe in those years.
Anne’s upbringing, along with her actions and activities while in power, paint a compelling picture of her religious priorities. She wanted the general population to have access to reading the Bible in their own language, and she was committed to practical measures of addressing church corruption while providing measures to alleviate poverty and increase access to education. Along with these basic principles, Anne was an effective politician with an eye for talent, identifying and elevating key reformers into positions of power. Matthew Parker and Thomas Cranmer are named as two of the three figures who would come to shape a distinctive Anglican thought, and they were both proteges of Anne.
By the time of her death, Anne had seen the printing of an English Bible embraced by the king and being normalized in the English church. And she had stacked the ranks of clerical personnel with smart, articulate reformers. These two accomplishments, in particular, would shape the future of reform in England in profoundly consequential ways. For that reason, Anne is known among church historians as one of the main “architects” of the English Reformation.
Anne’s sensibilities bear similarities to Marguerite d’Angouleme as a “reforming Catholic,” rather than embracing a fully Protestant version of reform. It is interesting that this has, in the end, become the version of the Anglican church that is best known today. It would be wildly inaccurate to suggest that there is a straight line between Anne’s influence and a church that today defines itself as the “middle way” between Catholic and Protestant. And yet, Anglicans of today would recognize in Anne Boleyn a very similar vision of the church that we now embrace.
What do you think we might have seen from Anne had she lived longer and had a longer period to embed herself as queen?
Anne haunts us with that question: what if? If Anne had a living son, I imagine her being able to continue the work that she had been doing in supporting education and bolstering the ranks of the clergy with intelligent, talented reformers. She would have been likely to have outlived Henry, and if she had managed to navigate his temperaments well enough, she could have been appointed regent until their son came of age. This would have allowed her an opportunity to rule with a similar freedom and authority that she saw Margaret of Austria and Marguerite d’Angouleme yield.
Of course, then we likely would not have had the reign of Anne’s daughter Elizabeth. I imagine Elizabeth, bearing Anne’s DNA and some of her personality traits, was able to pick up the power and leadership that was cut short in Anne.
Anne had no reason to believe that Elizabeth’s fate involved anything other than being married off to a nobleman to live a quiet life. But the monologue at the end of Anne of the Thousand Days, where Anne prophesies Elizabeth’s queenship, offers a satisfying note to a deeply troubling story. It is reassuring to imagine that Anne went to the scaffold knowing all was not lost.
Anne’s fall is hugely complex with lots of things happening in 1536 in particular. What do you think are the key elements to pull out?
Anyone who is sincerely interested in Anne Boleyn knows the litany of factors about those first four months of 1536 that culminated in her downfall, including: Catherine of Aragon’s death, Anne’s miscarriage, shifting political alliances with France and Spain, the showdown with Cromwell, Catholic factions angling to replace Anne with Jane Seymour, Henry’s jousting accident and the king’s volatile emotions.
As I spent more and more time with the current research into these final months, I became convinced that it was religion that was the thread tying these pieces together and resulting in Henry moving decisively against the woman that he almost literally moved heaven and earth to marry. Henry was convinced that God was angry with him for marrying Catherine of Aragon, his brother’s widow, and defying biblical law. He elevated Anne to a lofty pedestal, believing that marrying her would right his, and the realm’s, relationship with God. When the proof wasn’t in the procreational pudding, and once again there were no sons coming along, and when Anne became increasingly inconvenient to Henry and his aims, he became willing to believe that Anne was capable of the most debased and immoral crimes against him, his manhood, and his crown.
You are a priest in the Anglican Church – do you think this plays into how you view Anne Boleyn, particularly when it comes to her religious beliefs, which are hugely debated?
Early into this project, I read a very meaningful research paper, “The Unblemished Concubine: Representations of Anne Boleyn in the English Written Word, 2000-2012” by Laura Saxton, which looked at both historical and fictional presentations of Anne Boleyn and argued compellingly that both genres reflect personal and cultural biases of the writers. Anne, Saxton argued, is always ultimately going to be a construct. This paper was important to me in helping me see that I could write about Anne in a way that would be transparent about my own filters and personal investment, and that doing so would have merit.
That being said, understanding Anne’s religious beliefs and religious impact as integral to her story and the story of the English Reformation, is a very prevalent part of current scholarship from people who aren’t coming at the evidence from the angle of being an Anglican priest. I feel confident that I am presenting reputable research, while also being explicit about my personal investment in Anne’s story.
You put a lot of yourself and your own experiences into your work on Anne – was this a conscious choice, and why?
This was not just intentional, it was the central conceit of my book. I love studying history, but I am not a historian. I did not go to original sources attempting to find new information on Anne Boleyn. My contribution to the Anne Boleyn conversation is as a leader in the church that she had a hand in shaping, it is as a person with skin in the game. I was very interested in delving into the Anne Boleyn scholarship, but it was specifically with the lens of asking this questions: why does it matter? Why does it matter to me? And why does it matter to us?
Tied to those questions is a specific goal. I want people of faith to know that the church was not man-made. I would like the general population to know that too, but if I can take the opportunity and platform I have to start with church people, then that is a meaningful step forward. Anglicans, especially, should know that Anne Boleyn and other women were key architects of designing and building the church we have today. The idea that white men are the only main characters of our origin story is a fiction that I am committed to debunking at every turn.
Again, the significant contributions of Anne Boleyn are well known in historical circles but almost completely hidden in the popular imagination about who Anne was, not to mention in the history we have told about who shaped our church and how. I wanted to be really clear about my agenda in this writing and very much present Anne’s story as one who is personally invested in how it gets told.
Do you have a favourite modern source about Anne Boleyn, one that draws you back again and again, or that you find particularly compelling?
It was my mother who introduced me to Anne of the Thousand Days. The mini-series The Tudors was popular when I was just starting out in ministry. Both have taken up a lot of my mental real estate, but every depiction of Anne leaves me with questions and a sense of frustration for how much more to her story there is. I don’t find myself wanting to return to these depictions; rather they make me want to discover more.
In terms of contemporary historians, I hang on every word of Natalie Grueninger and Dr. Owen Emmerson. Their research and their conversations with other historians are deeply illuminating. And I keep hoping that Dr. Tracy Adams will bless us one of these days with an Anne Boleyn book.
When writing this book, did your opinion of Anne Boleyn change, whether it was your opinion of her as a person, or a particular aspect of her life or reign, and how?
My opinion of Anne Boleyn changes continually because amazing historians are always interrogating the evidence of her life more closely and are bringing forward new insights.
One of the biggest mic-drop moments in researching this book was around that part of Anne’s story that has long been assumed to be a core fact: Anne refused to be the king’s mistress, so he offered to marry her instead. This assumption has been used to cast Anne as a manipulator and schemer. She was angling for power all along. She wanted more than her station. At the suggestion of a British friend of mine, I read the children’s Ladybird history of Henry VIII to get a sense of how British school children were taught their history. I was shocked to read this: “When [Anne] realized that she had attracted the attention of Henry, she was determined to become Queen at any cost. Perhaps if she had known that the cost was to be her head, she might have hesitated.”
I was intent on challenging this far-too-prevalent interpretation of Anne’s motivations and the not-so-subtle victim blaming that has been baked into Anne Boleyn lore. However, I was well into writing the book when I became familiar with Tracy Adams’ important research around Henry’s letters to Anne and his use of the word “maitresse.” Adams’ work invites a complete rethinking of the Henry/Anne dynamic and evidence that strongly supports the idea that it was Henry who very rapidly went from noticing Anne to deciding he would marry her. An affair, Adams argues, was never on the table for Henry in his desire for Anne.
Many of us of a more feminist leaning have enjoyed the idea of an Anne Boleyn who saw an opportunity for power and seized it, who refused to settle, who claimed agency in a powerless situation. This more recent insight from the actual evidence instead illuminates just how little has ever been asked about women’s desires or choice in the face of a powerful man deciding that she is the target he is after.
If you could ask Anne Boleyn one question and get an honest answer, what would it be, and why?
I would want to know how she really felt about Henry. We get a little glimpse at the trial of George Boleyn where we learn the one piece of likely truth in the whole case built against Anne: she complained about Henry’s performance in bed.
What was her reaction to Henry deciding to marry her? Was she attracted to him? Repulsed by him? Were there parts of their relationship where the bond and affection between them was real? What about their marriage? How did Henry stack up in Anne’s estimation?
We spend so much time considering Henry’s desires—why the king wanted Anne and then why he so dramatically did not want her anymore. But we know little and seem to have wondered even less about Anne’s desire and Anne’s feelings.
Are you currently working on writing anything else?
I love writing books, but bringing a book into publication to be shared with the world is a bit like childbirth. It is so laborious in the moment that I swear I will never do it again. Right now, my focus is on articles and blogs about Anne Boleyn, women’s stories, and the other ways in which I see the faith I lead speaking into cultural and political events. But check back with me in a few years’ time and see if I have forgotten about the labour…😉
Author Bio:
Martha Tatarnic is a contributor to Christian Century, The Anglican Journal, and Canadian Running. Her long-time blog for the Canadian Anglican Church and Ministry Matters is available on the Medium.com platform. She is the author of Why Gather? and co-host of the Future Christian podcast. She is a priest in the Anglican Church of Canada and rector at St. George’s Anglican Church in St. Catharines, Ontario, where she lives.
Social Media:
Facebook as Martha Tatarnic – Author.
Instagram as @martha_tatarnic.
Substack: Martha Tatarnic.
You can find Martha at her website.
Martha’s Books:
I am intrigued by several of your comments especially since I too have wondered about some of them . Especially why did Henry so desperately want to get rid of Anne who he must have loved for so long before they finally married ? Was it male pride ? That although he put the blame for the lack of a male heir on both Catherine and Anne, did he realise that he must take some of that blame ? Or was he jealous of her passion for reform within the church so that more ordinary people could have their own access to the Bible ? Did he feel threatened by this ?
I am thrilled to discover that I am related to Anne via her fathers sister Amata . Amata is my 13th great grandmother on my paternal line .
I’m eager to read the book! My mother was fascinated by Anne, which made me intrigued as well from adolescence onward. As a fellow clergy woman (Non Anglican however, but British roots), I understand your point of view which makes me more eager to read your book, I only wish my mother was alive to read it as well! Oh the conversations we would have had! As a genealogist I dig for the story that lifts the person off the page, which you have done so well! Thank you for tackling Anne’s story, I can’t wait to read your book.